04/04/05 Bonnie London

I spent the morning strolling about Manchester city centre. I had a ticket for the 2.15pm train to London.
In the end I became slightly lost and just managed to catch the train by a veritable "ba' hair" (the smallest unit of measurement used in Scotland).
Arriving in London, I headed to Camden and had a couple of drinks with Sandy Grom who I knew in my time at Stirling University.
I did the show and got a great reaction. However I was concerned that I had been shown the red light which signified I'd run over the 5 minute slot.
(I had been told at the start not to wait for the light, and that ideally I should wind up before its introduction was necessary)
Anyway, I failed to qualify. I'm not too bothered about it. If it was just a normal non-competitive gig, I would have been really chuffed with how I delivered my set and with the audience reaction. So there's no point in beating myself up about not qualifying, and it was going to become more than a little extravagant (given my current perilous financial state), to continue to pop down to London for heats.
I'm not sure how many you have to do in the end to get through to the final.
Pete, who I knew from doing a stand-up course at the Edinburgh Festival in 2003, came along to the gig. He reckoned that I "was robbed", but maybe he was just being sympathetic. :-)
I feel that it is time to get a lot of new material into my set. I've got a load of new stuff that just needs honed and tried out. I very quickly tire of repeating myself with material, and I think it can sometimes show in the performance. It's really refreshing when you try something new and it comes off. It's just like starting over, as John Lennon used to say before somebody shot him.