I’m on a train on the way back from a show in Birmingham, another top effort. I’m wondering when we’ll play a real stinker. Only four more left in the tour, so fingers crossed.

I’ve been rather pathetically baling out of life on the sleeper bus over the last 48 hours, in favour of spending my own hard-earned per diems on getting Virgin train services backwards and forwards across the country and sleeping in my own bed at night. The aim is to shift this strange cold / virus thing that’s making me feel somewhat woozy and short of appetite. However, I’m currently feeling somewhat woozy and short of appetite. Oh well, it’s worth a try, and I don’t get to sleep in a Birmingham car park tonight, which is a bonus, although it might be more comfortable than my flat, which is in a right state, it has to be said.

Newcastle was fun on Thursday. I played a lot of great gigs in Newcastle with The Keatons in the early 1990s – although we did make the classic mistake of noticing that we were going down really well, playing there far too often over the subsequent months, and observing the phenomena of ever-dwindling audiences who got bored with what we were doing. We ended up playing to about 10 people at the Dog & Parrot. (This same phenomena was also observed in Bedford circa 1991-2.) But however many there were, the Geordies were always very enthusiastic. Last night was no exception, with two mad women hanging around in the cold for an hour after the gig in the hope of getting a photo of them hugging Green, which they got, although one of them seemed to be pretending that the camera was broken in order to make the hug last longer than it really should have done. Nice trick.

Birmingham, by contrast, is a city where I’ve never played a decent gig, until this evening. The Keatons played Birmingham Hummingbird in 1990 to 1 paying customer, the promoter having scarpered with the promised £50 guarantee very early in the evening. Oh, and we supported Blur at Burberries twice; the first time our bass player’s dad had died the night before and the event was suffused with melancholy; the second time we laughed openly at the 3rd act – 0nionhead – during their ponderously pompous set, got physically threatened by their manager, and responded by “borrowing” their bass when ours broke (Alex James handed it to us) and subsequently trashing it. Nasty. Tonight, by contrast, was utterly pleasant, except an extremely burly Brummie was rather overkeen to have his picture taken with Green, and, rather than wait patiently in the cold like the Geordie lasses above, ended up in a physical altercation with our tour manager. Still, never mind. Home soon. And Shepherd’s Bush Empire tomorrow, provided I haven’t been totally consumed by this hacking cough.