Touring Lowlights.


Twelve years ago, I toured the UK with a show called ‘Rock and Roll Heaven’. One week, we found ourselves stranded at Grimsby Auditorium.

There are a few downsides to touring. One of them is having Grimsby on your itinerary. The town has very little to speak of, except for the Auditorium which isn’t; it’s a sports hall, caught adrift in the midst of a deserted residential area. You could put together a strong case suing the venue for Trade Descriptions; a theatre, it’s not.

Another problem with touring is finding somewhere to eat. You can spend hours wandering a city, trying to find a decent meal before you need to be at the theatre. The only options in Grimsby were chips, chips or chips (with optional fish).

One day, we visited the neighbouring town of Cleethorpes. The streets literally smelt of gravy. It was as ominous as it was savoury.

Whilst sitting in a café tucking into a round of fried breakfasts (which wasn’t much different from eating chips), we looked out of the window to see a parade of shops opposite with their windows boarded up.

“Must be hard to run a business in this area” one of our entourage piped up. Unless you work in gravy, I thought to myself.
 “I wonder what they used to be?” said another.

We leant forward collectively to squint at the sign. There, next to a childlike drawing of a windmill, a pair of clogs and a couple of slices of holey cheese, was the legend “MADE IN HOLLAND”.

If you can’t sell top-quality Dutch merchandise on a backstreet in Cleethorpes, there’s no hope for modern enterprise.

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