Harpenden not at all Common

A very enjoyable few days in a new town for me.  Harpenden Common stretches from outside the town right up to the start of the High Street and it’s that way I approached it from the St Albans side.  Almost by chance after a dog walk stop in a layby just out of the town, we walked over a golf course and discovered an almost perfect spot for us to stop over for the few days before the Carnival.  It was in a small wood alongside the golf course, which I later discovered morphs into a cricket field and then the real Common before nestling naturally into the High Street. There was a natural drive in area, used normally I guess by dog walkers’ cars which now fitted us plus space for one car.  All but one of the dog walkers would have to find somewhere else to park for a few days.

We settled in to our new home.  Young and old oaks brushed the lorry roof and one tiny branch pushed its nose into my bathroom window when I opened it, as if checking out this new strange visitor’s abode.  There was a large low sweeping branch which had grown thick with age which provided the perfect seat just outside my door and the sun dappled through the leaves giving that magical lighting effect that only a wood in summer can provide.  There were plenty of passing dogs for my two to protect me from and sniff around after. It was looking good and it was good.

After an afternoon sleep and a cup of tea we walked into what I at first thought was Harpenden.  A small crossroads with a dozen or so shops including a launderette, ironmongers, car accessory shop and a co-op.  All the essential providers for a gentleman of the road. A couple of well-stocked charity shops as well which I promised myself to forage later on my first launderette trip.  The initial good feeling just went on growing.

On our return to the lorry I gathered my whites together for the first washing and left the dogs for a long sleep.  It was a very hot day and the shade offered by the oaks was welcomed by them and me.  I found a shortcut into town and went to the launderette where the very friendly, underemployed, chatty assistant told me that what I had thought to be Harpenden was actually Southdown but that it was a much nicer place. Harpenden was only a ten minute walk away. She also showed me pictures of her dogs and garden and exchanged family news.  She didn’t have enough to do. I had a quick skip round the charity shops then set off into the real Harpenden.  She was right about Southdown, but only just, as Harpenden itself was essentially one long High Street with all the usual shops and was luckily wide enough to allow the extremely busy road to pass through it without being too intrusive. It was the road though that made the place seem frenetic compared to Southdown.  What are we doing to our High Streets? The town was charming and well-endowed with the indies that make a High Street interesting, a plethora of Charity Shops and a big Sainsbury’s.  What made particularly pleasant was the Common which had not been encroached on and bumped dramatically into one end of the High Street.

As I returned to collect my whites I saw two people marking the ground on the Common and found where my Saturday spot was to be.  Luckily, as originally they would have placed me with the afternoon sun behind the stage shining straight into the eyes of the audience. Not a good idea. A bit of careful negotiation allowed a 180 degree turn to the other side of the Common.  Perfect.

I pulled onto the Common on the Thursday night which meant I would have Friday to do a leisurely set up and be even nearer town.  I bought a ticket for Peggy Seeger who was appearing there that night as part of her eightieth birthday UK tour and enjoyed her witty and wry octogenarian sung and spoken observations on humankind.

My shows went brilliantly on the Saturday and apart from being put alongside a noisy and unattractive eighties fairground ride, the whole visit was lovely from start to finish.  The people of Harpenden, without exception, made me feel welcome and appreciated. That’s almost all that anyone can hope for in life.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Vintage Nostalgia

This weekend finds me down in the heart of Wiltshire after a sunny week at the National Tramway Museum. 

The four-day stand in Derbyshire was very successful and the crowds turned up in abundance.  I love the place.  It is run almost entirely by volunteer staff, and, like the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, their passion and dedication make the place come alive. The audiences however are quiet.  I don’t think they altogether understand my brand of humour or the style of the show.  Maybe they are more used to the type of entertainer who rushes out at the start of his show shouting ‘Hi kids’.  Maybe it’s just that there are fewer theatres in the area, but they are definitely quieter.  They seem to enjoy the show but just didn’t let anyone, least of all me, know. Typical of the response was a man who I observed in the audience with his hands stoically folded with an ‘Entertain me, I dare you’ look on his face.  Of course I picked on him and managed to elicit a half smile, but he looked around nervously as if he was checking that it was ok to do so.

The folk down south are very different.  The Vintage Nostalgia Show pulls a cognoscenti audience well used to the style, humour and detail that I try to work into the show.  Their warmth and appreciation is welcome and it leaves me feeling comfortable and easy.  Even the dogs were more relaxed with Mimi, not one to usually deign herself to play with Blue, racing around chasing and having a lovely time in the sun as I finished setting up yesterday morning.

Then it happened. A huge explosion. Closely followed by another. I jumped out of my skin, looked over to the direction they had come from and saw a puff of smoke rising from the vintage army display area. I immediately sought out Blue.  She becomes terrified when there are bangs.  Mimi is not so bad.  She doesn’t like them but Blue is what I later discovered is called ‘gun shy’.  She shakes and whimpers and has to be held.  Of course I did my best to comfort her and put both dogs into the lorry as the bangs were continuing to shake the ground.  When they seemed to have finished, I stormed off to talk to the organisers.  There had been nothing about the bangs in the programme and no tannoy warning.  As I stalked up the field to the organisers’ tent I saw several other dog owners comforting dogs.

I was very angry by this time and told them so.  The reaction of Mimi and Blue meant that they wouldn’t work for the rest of the day. They lose confidence, they stop being relaxed and don’t focus on performing at those little moments when I bring them out.  I learned that there was to be another volley of gunfire timetabled for the same time as the start of my last show.  After a little heated negotiation they agreed to postpone for an hour ‘so I could take them for a walk away from the field’.

Well that’s it for here.  I don’t believe that firing guns at events is either fun or necessary and I don’t return to events that do.  There are enough real guns in the world making hell of people’s lives without having to endure them as entertainment.  Especially when they stop Mimi and Blue enjoying their lives. I have told the organisers that they will have a choice for next year.  Me or the bangs.  I think they thought I was just upset and would change my mind.  They were right about one thing. I was upset.

So twice today we shall have to take a mile and a half trek away from the field, leaving all the stuff out and breaking the continuity of the day.  Yesterday for their second fusillade we walked into the village and hid behind the church and the bangs were still loud even from there.  Blue still shook for five minutes and needed to be held, but I think she knew that I had taken them away from the place for her benefit.

Coincidentally on the way back we passed a man with two superbly-behaved Labradors walking alongside.  He had ‘Dog Trainer’ embroidered on his top. I stopped him and we had a great conversation about ‘gun shy’ dogs.  He said the only way to train one was to deliberately expose the dog to gunfire and explosions until it was used to them.  The other method was to repeat play a cd of explosions every night and tweak up the volume.  Maybe we could just move to Syria.  And it only worked for one dog in three, he said. He guessed (correctly) that I would not be doing that to Blue.

I just won’t come here again. I know it sounds like blackmail, but it’s their choice.  There are always other events.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Old friends

The first tour of the year is now underway and it was great to be back at the Hertfordshire County Show, if only to meet up again with my colleague performer Professor Crump.  Paul wouldn’t mind if I said we were both of a similar generation, although actually I think he is considerably younger than me.  What I mean is that we have similar attitudes and views of the world we work in; the British Outdoor Entertainment Industry.  His view is certainly higher than mine as he performs on stilts with a wonderful array of handmade props; amongst other, a tall bicycle, a huge padded horse on wheels and two rollalong dogs on a stick.  His ascerbic witty comments as the Professor are much loved by parents as he engages children with his height and accompanying large persona.

He told me he had been talking to one family about the entertainers at the Hertfordshire Show. The man had said that he thought they very good, but seemed disappointed that all of them were rather old. I guess I must have been included in that observation.  I don’t think there’s anything much that can be said about that, but it seems to reflect our society’s attitude to older people.  I think though it’s a more of an interesting observation about our business.  There seem to be much fewer younger people in this business than there were at one time.  Perhaps the natural performers are being called to the more televisual, cinematic and celebrity-culture professions.  Perhaps the young don’t see it as a viable profession. Maybe soon discovering a Punch and Judy man, a stilt walking Professor or a Travelling Show at the local gala will be a thing of the past.  My DVD title is perhaps hiding a deeper truth.

Over the years Paul and I have met at various annual events and usually spend half an hour or so at the beginning or end of a day swapping thoughts and observations on the bizarre branch of Britain we inhabit.  Over the last year he has shared with me an idea he has to write an illustrated history of stilt walking.  It hasn’t been done and he is the person to write it.  I think it should be very successful and he has just found a publisher after a year of writing letters and receiving polite refusals.  As part of the deal he has to buy a number of them and sell them personally.  We shared experiences of selling things at the side of shows, a long tradition in our business.

Paul told me he had recently heard of an old guy who lived locally who had written a book about the History of British Railways and could often be seen at the large railway stations selling his book.  Paul had decided to seek him out to see what experiences of personal bookselling he might have to offer.  He was also quite curious about the character who had something of a reputation for the urgency with which he buttonholed passers-by.

He called at the guy’s house only to discover that he had been recently taken into a hospice, also locally.  He called round to visit the man, now declining with dementia.  And there on his bedside table was a pile of his railway books.  He had obviously brought them in with him, determined to carry on selling to the very end.

Perhaps Paul and I will have beds beside each other in the Old Entertainers’ Hospice.  He with a pile of stilt walking history books, me with a pile of DVDs, the British Outdoor Entertainment business as much a part of history as British Railways.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Mr Alexander lite

Thank you to those who have sent messages of kindness over the last few days.  It means a lot to hear you’re out there and giving me the occasional thought. It’s been a funny time.  Funny Peculiar of course.  Not without the occasional Funny Haha, but mostly Peculiar. 

To pick up more or less where I left off, I had failed (sorry was unsuccessful at) the C1+E driving test which would have allowed me to be legal above 8.25 tons train weight. I have been driving around for at least ten years above this weight, but I only realised as a result of the Weight Prohibition story that there was a weight limitation on what is, slightly patronisingly, called the Granny license for those of us still alive who passed their test before 1833.  Knowing that I was taking the lorry and trailer out illegally started to make me paranoid and I started imagining a VOSA conspiracy.  I know that just because I’m paranoid does not mean they’re not out to get me, but I had some very odd dreams and a few even odder waking moments.  It didn’t help that the guy at Llay during the weight prohibition fiasco told me he’d seen a man in a VOSA van slowing down and looking into the yard where I stayed for a couple of weeks.  Who knows even if that was true, but it didn’t help.

So, in my head, I had to deal with the possibility that the next phase of performing work, right through June and early July would mean me dodging the Man from VOSA or alternatively finding some other way through the maze.  Lots of possibilities emerged and I explored all of them, from finding a driver to drive my rig while I followed in the car with the dogs, to stripping every possible thing from the lorry and trailer to try to bring them below 8.25 tons.

It was this latter option that I have pursued over the last few days.  There was a large lump of gubbins, part of the old wheelchair lift that was bolted to the chassis under the floor of the workshop/store so I started with that.  It took all day and lots of shoving, banging, swearing and cutting but it gave steel gave way to iron will and the thing came out.  It was reassuringly heavy, I was unable to lift it single-handed so it was an excellent start. 

I then took everything that was not entirely essential for the show from the trailer.  The awning has gone into storage, several cases which I only use from time to time, including the prizes case and my close-up magic case.  The onstage speakers which I can manage without I think but which are quite heavy and the newly renovated but scarcely ridden giraffe unicycle.  Lots of odd bits of timber I like to have around in case and two fire extinguishers (never used). I furtled underneath the trailer and took off the old trailer mover which hasn’t worked since I had the new axles fitted so that was quite a chunky lump gone. 

For now I also removed the generator and the trolley jack, the mini motorbike, my socket set, tools and spares carried just in case. All my books have gone and just about anything that I only use occasionally. I even emptied the water tank.

So it was with some trepidation therefore I took the rig to the weighbridge this morning, and even more as I waited for the weight certificate. To my absolute amazement and considerable relief the lorry came in at 5820Kg and the trailer at 2260, making a chinese auspicious 8080Kg and a whole 170Kg below the maximum legal weight.

Now all I have to do is to work out what I really cannot do without from the rejected pile and add my own weight.  My feeling is to keep the generator (55Kg ) and the trolley jack (28Kg) and crash diet for four days so I get down to the remaining 13 stone and 10 pounds (87Kg).  Mr Alexander lite. Cue Land of Hope and Glory as the season begins.

All the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander

Failure is on the road to success

When I taught circus to young disaffected people during my years as a teacher I used juggling as a means of teaching some key life skills.  Developing a good attitude to failure was and is a really important key life skill.  Learning to accept that you are bound to drop a great deal before you can start to keep the beanbags in the air is a great way to develop a positive attitude to failure in the bigger things of life. It is a shame that I am still very bad at learning my own lessons.  Perhaps you can guess what is coming.  I made three small but important mistakes during my driving test today and am now reeling with the ignominy of failure. And other painful things happened today. 

Just before the test on the way to the station a pigeon committed suicide on the windscreen of the vehicle I was sitting the test in.  If you have ever killed something on the road, you will understand something of what this did to me.  It was definitely an omen.  Not that I believe in them.  Not really.  But it certainly unnerved me.  I had no idea it was about to happen.  It came from the side and even if I had seen it coming I couldn’t have done anything about it.  I was under the speed limit at the time. For ages one of the poor victim’s feathers was stuck in the windscreen wiper.  I had decided if it was still there by the time I reached the test station I would remove and keep it as a memento.  A memento mori.  But the feather blew off after about five minutes, only leaving me with the memory.

That was not an auspicious start.  I managed to calm myself for the first part of the test - the difficult part with the reversing a trailer into a bay and the uncoupling (easy-ish) and the coupling (hard without a reversing camera).  I felt that I had done well up to then.  I then took the rig onto the road and it went well until very early on I slowed behind a cyclist on a double white line up a hill.  Instead of passing him when convenient by crossing the double white lines, for some stupid reason I stuck behind him all the way up the hill.  Wrong.  From that point on despite focusing on the road I had that first fault going round in my head and made two others.  I took the wrong lane round a roundabout and on another occasion I didn’t cancel my indicators.

So that’s that.  The next available test is July and until then I have to be think about the train weight of my lorry and trailer.  It's not supposed to be more than 8.25 tons. I think the new lorry weight is now 6.25 tons so that allows me no more than 2 tons on the trailer until I have passed the test.  Something has to come off it or I have to do what I have been doing unwittingly for the last 10 years and chance it.  What would you do?  What I shall do is to think about it for the next few days.  I’m not working again until the end of next week.

The previous few days have not been good either.  In fact I have to say I’ve had a really difficult time behind the scenes recently what with one thing and another and I’m feeling very low as a result.  Not that I’m complaining about my lot.  I am very healthy, love my work, gain real satisfaction from it but for a while now I’ve had the feeling I’ve gone up a cul de sac with my lorry and trailer and there’s no turning round.

I’ve made some cracking mistakes, some of which I’m not going into and I shall have to accept the consequences.  As you do. And as I will.

And while all that’s going on, I shall take a break from writing this blog, but I shall write again when I feel the time is right and in the meantime, nevertheless, all the best from a road near you,

Mr Alexander