Never pre-judge an audience. I think I was expecting the Henley Crowd to be a bit arts centre-ish and stuffy - a bunch of telegraph reading middle-class sorts whose idea of heckling might be to go "well, really!". This, of course, was nothing like the lovely mini-mob who assembled to see what my show was about tonight.

In truth, maybe only some of them came for my show, coming instead, for whatever happened to be on. Still, they were lovely and that's what matters. We even had an 11 year old boy in the crowd, and I discovered that I'm less embarrassed doing some of the ruder bits of my show in front of an 11 year old than I am doing it in front of my grandparents.

Moreover, it seems I've run out of previews. That's it. I now have only stand-up gigs between now and the Fringe. Any sense of familiarity with the show will now start to fade, though I'm fairly sure I'll remember it all even with a 3 or 4 week break. In the next few weeks, I'm going to finish recording the CD of the show and I'm going to review some recordings and work out how to tighten the show up. There's some core source material that's core because it's either very funny or very important to share with an audience. The secret is going to be to throw away some of the supporting stuff, or find an isotope or allotrope of it which better suits what's around it.

Making the CD will definitely help, and I made reasonably good progress on that last week, even though there were aeroplanes flying over my house for most of Saturday.

Tired, so Tired
I have been a bit down on energy. I think I'm going to be perking back up, but the Wed-Sat gig night run pretty much knocked me out. We went to see a preview in Witney on Wednesday, I had Cradley Heath on Thursday, London on Friday, Southampton (well, Hythe) on Saturday and an earlier-than-sleeping-in wake up on Sunday.

We made Sunday lunch on Sunday, which is how it gets its name. We saw plenty of Italian foods for sale in Shipston-on-stour, and so they finalised the grand plan to make a risotto fit for, well, at least human consumption. It worked out rather pleasingly, but the post-prandial slump hit hard and I lost an hour or so.

I think I'm getting old.

Switcheroo
The gig on Friday involved watching a preview which would have gone down better with a filthier and less cerebral audience. My preview on Thursday turned out to be less filthy and more cerebral than my audience were expecting. If only we'd known... the old switcheroo would really have helped.

Twit storms
Hmmmm. Social networking sites are suddenly showing what would happen if everyone knew what everyone else was thinking. There's been the Gillian McKeith debacle, the Jemima Khan vs Jon Snow spat and even Keith Chegwin and his collection of jokes has caused a ruckus. I don't even know how to spell 'ruckus'. Perhaps everyone needs to get into the collective playground, line up neatly and say sorry to each other.

Training
I'm presently on a training course. This involves being talked at by a trainer. He is pretty good and has a good way of explaining to the uninitiated about the things we need to know on the course. As I'm doing the course to fill in gaps in my knowledge, this can be frustrating. There was one discussion today which was somewhat irksome.

Him: What is a null value?
Me: One that's missing.
Others: Erm? A blank? or An absent one?
Him: "Missing" is the closest, it's one that's "unknown".

Forgive me for being a semantic pedant, but there's no difference between missing, absent and unknown in terms of a data value. The only one that is "wrong" is "blank", which suggest that the answer IS "blank" as opposed to the answer being "NO ANSWER" - i.e. a missing or absent or unknown.... but apart from that it's all coffee breaks and lunch, which is what training is all about? right?

Next few days
Looking forward to some time at home.