All Roads Lead To

The Big Tesco / New Tour / Michael Fabricant / Mammoth Mice / Cannock Chase

Hello Dear Reader

Let’s get the main news out of the way, so that my agent and husband are happy for once. I’m going on tour. A big tour. A big big big tour, a tour as big as the Tesco Extra I took my husband to last week in Slough. We’d been to an important meeting in the vicinity, and at the end, when we were all doing the shaking hands and thanking each other for reaching out and then promising to circle back and keep everyone in the loop thing, they asked us our plans for the rest of the day. In the same manner one might announce that the next meeting of the day was in Whitehall to handle a spot of mediation between Starmer and Trump and to show David Lammy where Ukraine is on a map, my husband said, ‘we’re going to the Big Tesco. It’s the biggest one in Europe. I’ve never been and I’m quite excited.’

If you want the recipe for a long lasting marriage, you could do worse than marry someone who shares your enthusiasm for hypermarkets. You should have seen his little face the day the nice chap at the counter in Costco handed him his first membership card; it was up there with the day our son was born and that Christmas I gave him portraits of our dogs.

Easy to please. Who doesn’t a love a man that’s easy to please? Take my agent Steve, for example. He has has spent weeks, nay months!, booking this tour, the most comprehensive UK and Ireland tour I will have ever done. The man may well have had to barter his first born, who knows what Faustian pact he has made on my behalf. So when he sees certain cities - cities that I have visited almost as often as Prince Andrew visited Jeffrey Epstein’s jet - saying I am neglecting them, it hurts him deeply. He just wants you to love these dates. He just wants me to turn up on stage on time (unlike that time in Edinburgh when I was still in Nando’s with the band, unwittingly tucking into four medium heat thighs with Fino side when I should have been three songs into the main set), play my little songs, tell my stupid jokes, send everyone home happy and do it again the next night in a different town.

One of the main aims behind this tour was to seek out smaller venues off the beaten track, venues that are still standing after what has been the toughest period in living memory for grass-roots live music. You gotta use ‘em or lose ‘em - artists and punters alike - because if they go, then what are we left with? £250 a ticket in some enormo-dome where the chips cost a tenner.

I’ve made you all come to me of late. This time I’m coming to you.

TICKETS ARE AVAILABLE HERE

A quick little news round-up before I bid you adieu.

Scientists have used Michael Fabricant’s DNA to re-create a Woolly Mammoth to save us all, except something didn’t go according to plan and it’s less mammoth, more mouse:

Mammoth Mouse may not be the answer to Ed Miliband’s net zero prayers, but he’s ordered 50,000 of them anyway. Something has to pick up the slack while all the wind turbines are out of service being painted black, because birds.

I miss Michael Fabricant. In the toxic wasteland that is politics 2016 - Present Day, he offered brief moments of levity. ‘I’ve never gone in for the chemicals’ he once said in an interview in an effort to, what? Assure us that he was sober every time he went to the hairdressers?

I wonder if the good people of Lichfield are regretting their decision to boot him out of office last summer. Who can tell. I’ve only been there once, to sit in a tea room one damp autumn afternoon with a boyfriend I was having second thoughts about and dumped shortly afterwards. (With good reason, nobody should ask a girl out on a date to a kebab shop and then get a pen out to work out exactly what her half of the bill is at the dinner table after having told her at the pedestrian crossing on the way to the restaurant that he had enough money to live on for at least the next two years.) I can’t tell you anything about the psychology of its inhabitants, only that its tearooms played a vital part in my love life, a part for which I am very grateful because that ex was a knob.

So thank you Lichfield, for your lovely cathedral, your life-changing tearooms and for returning a Member of Parliament who made the clown show more, well, clown, and less soul destroying.

I always like to say that there are no accidents, that everything is happening for a reason in perfect synchronicity and so it is that I offer you one final and seamless transition for this newsletter. A few months ago, my son introduced me to this song by Labi Siffre. Siffre is, I think, one of the great British songwriters, but also greatly overlooked. You will know his music across many genres, but it strikes me that the covers of his incredible songs have overshadowed his own extensive and beautiful catalogue. It has been a joy to rediscover an artist I always knew about, but had never really fully explored. He’s all I’m listening to at the moment, and it’s joyous.

I have recently been informed that people get up to all sorts of ‘interesting things’ in Cannock Chase, which is a mere ten miles from Lichfield. Maybe this is to what Labi is alluding. Who can know.

Alas, I shall only be stopping at Cannock services this autumn on my Great British and Irish tour, perhaps on my way to Ludlow, where I play the Assembly Rooms on October 2nd. See what I did there? Seamless. Seamless, I tell you.

Now I truly must bid you adieu, for my next appointment of the day is to take Dave to fat camp. He is now heavier than the dog. A diet beckons. We all know how much cats love diets. If you never hear from me again, you’ll know what happened.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx