I am glad that New Year's Day fell on a Monday this year because it makes for a much cleaner diary layout. You open a 2018 diary and it begins on Monday 1st January rather than the usual few days of December littering the page, which is of no use to anyone because if anything happened that needed noting down then you would have done it in your old diary.

Paper diaries, I am cutting edge and down with the kids aren't I? It's probably all done on the phones these days, although I don't like that sort of thing. We don't keep phones forever with all our things saved on them (or I don't at least), so what happens to all those notes, photos and videos? It might be trite nonsense most of the time but you should regularly empty your phone. I even save the little videos I put on Instagram, I save the pictures of breakfasts, selfies, all sorts of shit goes into my archive because I think it might be interesting to look back on at some point in the future.

Anyway, now that I have a diary I need to get some entries down. I am working backwards as usual because I am taking bookings for my Christmas shows already but am developing new shows to bring out in a month or so. I had such a good time adding 'storyteller' to my ever increasing list of strings to my bow that it would be a shame to have to contain it to Christmas. I spent December appearing at the library of Birmingham on Saturdays doing a selection of old stories, including A Christmas Carol of course (my own re-written annotated version that lasts half an hour), and Thursdays and Fridays at the Beamish Museum doing A Christmas Carol.

Beamish wasn't quite how I expected it though. Not that I didn't have a good time, but I was expecting to be performing to an audience that wanted to be there as part of a show in which I read A Christmas Carol in chapters throughout the night interspersed with music from 'The Newcastle Nightingale', an old time music hall singer. What actually happened (and I had committed myself to this and agreed a fee in June) was that I was on every hour for half an hour with Julie singing at half past, but this was part of the museum's Christmas evening and we were nothing more than exhibits. This made for a frustrating show with people walking in and out demonstrating how low the average attention span is these days, do these people not go to the cinema or theatre and teach their children some manners? It also led to people talking in the room with no regard for etiquette, have I mentioned my dislike of talking during shows before?

I started ad-libbing to see if anybody caught on, but sadly it was lost on most people:

An being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the invisible world, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, or people talking while he was trying to tell a story, much in need of repose, he went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep on the instant.

He knew no more, for the spirit neither spoke or moved. (Aside) I wish he was here!

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