Thanks to the person at Stockport Gig Guide who on Monday morning very kindly took it upon themselves to urge people to get tickets for our gig in Manchester. Unfortunately, this advert was no help to us whatsoever because the gig had been sold out for weeks. All it meant was that people saw the advert, went to buy tickets and then tweeted us asking why they couldn’t get tickets. But hey, it was a nice gesture all the same. Apart from the fact that they announced the gig as occurring that night, when it was in fact the following night, resulting in yet more confused tweets to us from people concerned that they’d got the wrong date and that they’d have to reorganise babysitters, cancel other plans, or saying that they wouldn’t be able to make the gig after all.

So we spent the entire train journey frantically fielding panicked tweets both from people who hadn’t got tickets and people who had. Someone at Stockport Gig Guide had logged onto their computer at 9am Monday morning, and had impressively managed to plunge a band’s Twitter feed into an absolute pointless chaos of confusion before the kettle had finished boiling for their first morning coffee.

But I don’t want to have too much of a go at Stockport Gig Guide. In fairness, it was just one mistake, and I’m sure that usually they are completely on-the-ball. Although, I have just checked their twitter feed and their tweet from this morning is announcing that Jeremy Hardy is starting his tour tomorrow.

I never had the privilege of seeing Jeremy Hardy live, although I always loved his various BBC Radio 4 appearances on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and the News Quiz, as well as his own standup shows. I’ve seen a few tweets from him over the last few years where he’s referenced his love for various folk groups including Bellowhead, and our friend, the singer songwriter Grace Petrie has worked with him on various projects. I’d like to think he would have appreciated what we do, but to the best of my knowledge, he never attended a Young’uns gig. Maybe we should have got in touch to invite him to a gig, under the proviso of course that he didn’t join in with any of the choruses; I’ve heard his singing on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A clue, and we’ve already got enough out of tune singing to contend with at our gigs, but in fairness to Michael, he drives the van and does the accounts.

When we woke up in Manchester on Wednesday morning, snow had both settled and unsettled. Manchester airport had cancelled all their morning flights, putting our journey to Dublin in jeopardy. Our flight wasn’t until the afternoon and the website was still stating that our plane was going ahead, but the uncertainty immediately had Michael concocting other potential ways to get there. Michael, who loves making a plan, and loves devising a plan B even more, suggested we go to Manchester airport, get a hire car, drive to Birmingham airport, where flights were still running from, and fly to Dublin from there. This would have only cost us an extra £600.

I’ve already written in these blogs about The Young’uns’ propensity to pay for train and plane tickets for journeys that, for all sorts of circumstances, we don’t take, resulting in us buying another set of tickets for another journey instead. The amount of money we’ve already spent this year on unused tickets is ridiculous, so I wasn’t particularly keen to wrack up even more money on a hire car and a new set of plane tickets on the off-chance that our currently none-delayed plane gets delayed. And it wasn’t as if this alternative plan was watertight, as it would rely on us getting a hire car and driving to Birmingham to check in on a flight that was due to depart in three hours. It would take us two hours to get to Birmingham, but almost certainly longer in the snow. So this plan was dismissed and everyone agreed that we shouldn’t embark on what Michael was ebulliently branding, “Operation Brum Brum to brum.”.

We were staying in the closest hotel to the airport, just three miles away, but all the shuttle services were massively delayed and there was a throng of panicked people in the hotel lobby struggling to hire taxis. We were informed by the hotel receptionist that it might be two hours before we could get picked up to be taken to the airport. Upon seeing our worried faces, the hotel receptionist then unzipped his jacket to reveal a Stockport Gig Guide T-Shirt and cackled maniacally.

We were about to embark on the fifty-minute walk through the snow to the airport, but then someone in our group suggested trying for an Uber. I am rather sceptical about Uber and have only ever been in one when other people have booked it. Everyone bangs on about how simple and brilliant it is, but every time I’ve been with someone who has booked an Uber, the fare seems to suddenly double upon booking, as does the estimated arrival time. I expressed these concerns to the others, but some of the people in our group weren’t sporting footwear suited to snow-trudging, and so the Uber was booked, with reassurances from the app that it would be there in five minutes.

As soon as our sound engineer’s finger pressed the button to book, the price doubled. It was as if someone was looking right at him and adjusting the price at the very moment that his finger had made contact with the phone. Just then we heard a crazed cackle from behind us, and upon turning around we saw the hotel receptionist showing us the back of his T-Shirt emblazoned with the words, “Stockport Gig Guide, Proudly Sponsored By Uber. Muahahaha!” I assume that the last word was an exclamation of evil laughter, although it could easily be the name of our driver; I mean, they’re all bloody foreigners with weird unpronounceable names these days, aren’t they?

Still, at least the taxi was only five minutes away, and it would save us a walk in the snow. Except within a minute of making the booking, the time shot up from five minutes to fifteen minutes, where it stayed for thirty minutes. People who think that Uber provide a good service are, in my opinion, living on a different planet, probably Jupiter, hence why they are happy to accept the ridiculously slow time it takes for one single minute to elapse. It was looking increasingly unlikely that we were going to make it to the airport on time if we waited for the Uber. We would have to walk.

Fifty minutes later we arrived at the airport on foot. The walk cost us £5, as Uber charge a cancellation fee; yet another example of The Young’uns being charged for a journey we never made. It seems a bit rich of Uber to charge a cancellation fee when it was essentially Uber who forced us to cancel because the taxi got stuck in a time vortex for half an hour. The bugger was probably just lying in bed, accepting fairs, knowing that they could make a pretty penny on cancellation fees alone. This is the kind of tip that Martin Lewis won’t tell you, but if you want a get-rich-quick scheme, sign up to Uber, indiscriminately accept bookings, spend the day in bed, and watch the money roll in as people are forced to cancel the taxi that doesn’t even exist because you don’t actually own a taxi; in fact, you haven’t even passed your driving test; although, in fairness, neither have most genuine Uber drivers.

When I ask friends why they use Uber they cite that it is useful to know that wherever they are in the world, they know they have access to a taxi service, and they know what they’re getting. But what they’re getting is a taxi company that seemingly arbitrarily charges you double on a whim, has a similarly arbitrary approach to estimating the time the taxi will take to arrive, and then they charge you a fee for cancelling the damn thing, despite the fact that you’ve moved house twice, got divorced, remarried, had children who have gone onto have children of their own, and are now an old man on your death bed and the app is still telling you the taxi is fifteen minutes away.

People are seemingly happy to sacrifice standards for standardisation. This is a reason people go to McDonald’s, because wherever they are on the planet they know what they’re getting; it might be shit, but at least it’s reliable, predictable, standardised shit designed for the completely risk averse, so long as you don’t count the risk of heart failure and cancer. At least in France you can buy beer at McDonald’s, meaning you can always give yourself liver failure to take your mind off the cancer and heart disease.

Fortunately we made the airport just in time for us to check in and then wait two hours for the delayed flight.

This current show we’re presenting is a theatre piece called The Ballad Of Johnny Long staff. It’s the story of one man’s adventure from begging on the streets in the north of England to fighting fascism in the Spanish Civil War, taking in the Hunger Marches and the Battle of Cable Street.

We’ve brought our own sound and lighting engineers, as well as someone who is responsible for the various visual elements of the show. This means that there’s very little for the venue’s own tech people to do during the performance. At every other venue the staff are perfectly content to just put their feet up, maybe even watch the show, but presumably one of the tech guys last night got a bit bored with sitting around doing nothing and so decided to spice up the tales of hunger marches and antifascist campaigns by engaging the venue’s smoke machine. The show ends with a rather emotional story from Johnny, his voice cracking as he sings a refrain of a song about the people from all over the world who stood up to fascism in Spain. Often the audience find themselves in tears, usually due to the emotion of what they’re hearing, but on this occasion also due to plumes of smoke filling the theatre. There was nothing we could do about it. This is a serious show. We can’t really break the mood and start bantering about the absurdity of the situation, so instead we had to stand there, trying not to cough while someone at the venue sent smoke billowing around the room to accompany a dead man’s plaintive singing. As we left the stage I could have sworn I heard an all-too-familiar evil cackle.

I’ll impart further Young’uns touring adventures in next week’s blog post.

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