While waiting in the barbers a couple of days ago I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise.
“Hello David Eagle, before you say anything, please do not swear, you are on loud speaker and there is a class of college students listening.”
I was rather taken aback. Firstly I had no idea why I’d be on loud speaker with a class of college students listening. Secondly, I was a bit freaked out by the timing of this phone call, as I’d just been thinking about ideas for that day’s Dollop and had literally just come up with my idea to get Hartlepool back to top of the teenage pregnancy league by having sex with as many legal aged teenage girls as I could. And no sooner had I had this thought, I was receiving a phone call from a voice I didn’t recognise, telling me that I was now on the phone to a class full of college students, which would contain the exact demographic I’d just been thinking about having sex with. Could this be a sign from the beyond? An instance of divine intervention? God really does work in mysterious ways.
As the person on the phone continued to talk, I realised who it was. It was my friend Matthew from school, who I’ve not spoken to for about a year. He works as a music teacher in a college in Teesside. He went on to explain that the class were talking about having a career in music, and he’d decided on a whim, with no prior warning given to me, that he would call me up to talk to his class over the phone.
He asked me if I was free to say a few words to his class. There were still quite a few people before me to get their hair cut, so I had the time, although I had no idea what I was meant to say. My mind wasn’t really focused on talking to students, given that only seconds earlier I’d been musing about having sex with the very kind of people I was now about to talk to in an educational capacity. This now made such thoughts seem improper, as I would be abusing my position as a teacher, even though I’d never asked to be put in this position and had no idea that this was going to occur.
I spent about ten minutes on the phone, answering questions about being a professional musician, while I sat in the barbers. Goodness knows what the other people in the barbers must have thought. I probably sounded very pretentious, especially when one of them asked me what it was like to be famous. She seemed to sound genuine, but I couldn’t believe that she actually was. Rather than answering the question in a slightly self-deprecating manner, correcting her about the notion that I was in anyway famous, which I am not, I asked her if she had heard of me and if she really knew who I was. I asked this because I was surprised that she seemed to view me as someone who was famous, but to anyone else overhearing me in the barbers, it must have made me sound even more pretentious and up myself, asking, “do you know who I am? Have you heard of me?” The girl said that she had heard of me, and that she’d been at our sage gig last year. I was intrigued to know how many of the other students I was talking to had heard of me, and was just about to ask. “Give me a cheer if you’ve heard of me.” But then I came to my senses and realised how arrogant and pompous that would sound, both to the students and the other customers in the barbers. So I refrained from letting my curiosity get the better of me.
After about ten minutes, my old school friend who I very rarely speak to and haven’t seen for about five years, thanked me for my time and I got a thank you and a round of applause from the students. A few minutes later I got a message from him thanking me again for chatting to his students without advanced warning. “I owe you one,” he said. I thought about messaging him back and explaining my teenage pregnancy campaign, and to enquire whether his “one” that he owed me could possibly come in the form of a teenage girl from Hartlepool, as there was bound to be one of them in his class. But I stopped myself. I hope that God or whatever divine power is wanting me to do this isn’t too angry with me.
I’m writing this Dollop in the Young’uns van. Our UK tour starts today. We’ve just been to BBC Radio Lincolnshire to do a show, before we head to Grantham to do our first gig of the tour. If you haven’t got tickets yet for one of the gigs then there are still a few left for most of the gigs on the tour. It would be good to be able to sell all the venues out, both to satisfy my ego and also to get me a bit more money which I’ll be needing in order to pay my exorbitant child maintenance fees.
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