Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here
Our final gig in Australia turned out to actually not be our final gig, because we’ve been asked to appear at the final concert. This is apparently when four of the highlight acts finish off the festival with a concluding concert. So basically, our reward for being brilliant is to play for an extra thirty minutes for no extra money, while all the other less brilliant performers get to have the night off and drink the free beer that’s been laid on by the festival. I am of course being facetious, and we are really thirilled to have been chosen to feature as one of the four acts. It’s incredible that to observe how well the Australian audiences’ have taken to us. Of course, playing this final concert means that we have been given another opportunity to bugger everything up. I might accidentally insult the audience with a joke, and get booed off stage, undoing all of our work over the last three weeks, and never be allowed back into Australia again.
Tomorrow might pose yet another challenge to this 366 consecutive daily blogging project. So far I have managed 88 days in a row, and have blogged everyday that I’ve been in Australia, even though one of them had to be recorded and uploaded from the airport. Our outward flight took 22 hours. Our return flight is 26 hours.
Our transport to the airport leaves the hotel by 10am tomorrow, which will be 12am British time, so I might be able to hurriedly publish the blog post bang on 10am, just as the bus pulls away from the hotel, and out of WIFI range. Although this would mean writing another Dollop when I got back to the hotel tonight, and then having to record it before 10am the next day, which is doable, but I’d be writing two Dollops within just a few hours of each other. Also, I’m not even sure when I’ll get a chance to record this Dollop. It might not be until I get back from the hotel later tonight. I don’t really want to have to record and publish today’s Dollop, then immediately start writing the next one during the night, and then get up early the next day to record and publish tomorrow’s in time for when we leave for the airport, but this might be the safest option to ensure that the challenge remains intact.
We’ve got quite a lot of time to kill in Canberra Airport, so I’d probably have a few hours to write it there, and providing there’s free WIFI then I could release it from the airport. I’ll be back home by about 7pm on the Wednesday, and I could publish Wednesday’s Dollop then, which I’d have had loads of time to write on the excruciatingly long plane journey.
I appreciate that this isn’t particularly entertaining to read, but this challenge is just as much a logistical one as it is creative. Plus, there’s bound to be someone reading who is turned on whenever I write about the logistical aspect of these Dollops, and they just grin and bare all the nonsense in between the occasional bit of logistical talk, impatiently wading through all the tedious blabber about kettles and vegan porn stars and women dressed as dogs, in the hope that a bit of logistics will be around the corner. So that last two paragraphs was for them.
Apparently there’s a national airport strike on Wednesday, meaning that the airports of Australia will be understaffed. I don’t know which elements of the airport staff are going to be striking. I hope it’s not the pilot. The strike doesn’t commence until Wednesday, meaning that he’ll still be working on the Tuesday, when our flight takes off. It would be more than a little harrowing to be thousands of feet above the Indian ocean and suddenly hear the pilot’s voice over the plane saying: “Hello ladies and gentleman, this is your captain speaking. Just to let you know that it’s now 12am on Wednesday, Australian time, which means I am now technically on strike. Therefore, unless I hear from my union that there has been a settlement reached, I shall be relinquishing control of this plane. I’d like to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” He then sings “you won’t get me I’m part of the union, til the day I die,” as our plane begins to spiral out of control and rapidly descend, making the “til the day I die” line of the song especially pertinent.
Let’s just hope it’s those useless people at the entrance to the plane who are striking, with their random, pointless, arbitrary questions about whether we have anything dangerous in our bags, as if someone is going to get to the door of the plane and suddenly say, “do you know what, you’ve just reminded me that I actually do have an AK47 in my bag. I can’t believe I forgot about that, and goodness knows how it got through security. Thank goodness you’re here and you said something, otherwise I might have had one of my funny turns and killed some people.”
There’s been warnings that due to the strike, our journey time may be increased.
I’m a folk singer, so naturally I support people’s right to strike, but if they dare increase my journey time to the point that I don’t get Wednesday’s Dollop released, then my sympathy for them will be destroyed. I just hope that everyone can come to some sort of agreement, so that this 366 consecutive daily blogs project doesn’t come to an end because of striking airport staff, or death-inducing pilots.
