Unsupple Serpent.


Frustratingly, I’ve had to pull out of a gig I was doing in Winchester tomorrow night, due to an evil engineering work / rail replacement bus service situation on the line back to London.

This is annoying on three counts: firstly, I could do with the stage time so I can cement some new material; secondly, I don’t like to be unreliable; thirdly – and most importantly – I was looking forward to exorcising the demons of my last visit to the city, back in 2004, when I slipped a disc in my back whilst doing a one-man Chinese Dragon dance.

My oriental undulations had a point. They weren’t just for recreation. I was rehearsing for a pantomime at the Theatre Royal Winchester at the time, and was loving every minute until my spine threw a spanner in the works; so much so that for a while I fooled myself into thinking I could still do the show, despite the fact I could barely walk, let alone give anything approaching a performance. If only I'd had more experience in one-man Chinese Dragon dancing before that fateful day, but no amount of drama school training prepares you for that eventuality.

It’s a shame to not be going back tomorrow. Gigs are so few and far between at the moment that any taken out of the diary are really felt. Still, at least it might halt my nightly flashbacks. I haven't been able to look an outsized dragon’s head in its big blinky eyes since.

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