Doughy Diversion.


Today’s been a strange mix of organising the ticketing situation for this month’s once-cancelled, now reinstated Mostly Comedy with Jack Dee and making pizza dough from scratch; I wonder if you can guess which was more therapeutic?

It’s fair to say the former of the two was the most complicated; while we’ve known the show was going ahead for a day or so, we had to sit on it until we’d spoken to our ticketing provider (the excellent WeGotTickets) to work out the best way to ensure everyone who’d originally booked would have a chance to reclaim their tickets (minus any booking fee) before they were returned to general sale; this was by no means as easy as it sounds, as I had to set up forty-eight individual ticket links (one for every original transaction) and send them our manually to the people who nabbed them in the first place, making sure each individual punter would only be able to buy the same amount of seats or fewer than they bought originally; not to mention the links for our mailing list pre-sale on Sunday and general sale on Monday. It wasn’t a fun job, but thankfully my wife helped me cross each ticketholder off the list with 99.99% accuracy.

Making the dough was fun, not least because it gave me the chance to have a break from thinking about gigs and tickets and just enjoy doing something for the sake of it (and for the sake of having dinner tonight). I followed a Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe (which my wife had admittedly laid out the ingredients for) and came out the other side with a very tasty bread, both in pizza-base and dough-ball fashion. It was a welcome diversion from an otherwise frustrating day; I’d make a pun-based joke about really kneading it if I didn’t think it was crass.

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