Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

You might be thinking that, given today’s Dollop title, and the fact that I’ve been intimating life-threatening dangers ahead, that you’re in for a gripping tale about how we narrowly escaped death. But this is not the case. The reason why I shouldn’t be writing today’s Dollop and why you shouldn’t be reading this is because I’ve already done today’s Dollop.

Dollop 208 was meant to be a Dollop from a canoe. Me, Michael, and Michael’s girlfriend Hannah went canoeing on the beautiful Lake Louise – that’s the name of the lake, in case you thought that I’d just decided to specifically address one Dollop listener, and you were getting a bit jealous. We spent most of the trip chatting to you, the invisible fourth person, who turned out to be even more invisible than we thought, given that you will never hear it. The reason for this is because a minute after getting in the boat, the recording stopped.

It seems as if my digital recorder has the same philosophy as American chain coffee shops such as Starbucks. In such establishments, The notion of small does not exist, your options begin at medium, or with Starbucks, “tall” or “grande.” Similarly, my digital recorder apparently doesn’t have the facility to tell you that the battery is low, but seems to choose instead to keep telling you that the battery level is medium until it completely runs out. It goes from high, to medium, to dead. Ah, so there was a death, but it was just a couple of AA batteries.

Goodness knows what people on the other boats thought, because we weren’t talking to each other as such, but constantly to someone else who they couldn’t see. And I wasn’t holding any equipment such as a phone or camera, because the tiny microphones were in my ears, unable to be seen. At one point we engineered a race between us and some Japanese tourists, which involved a lot of drama with much clashing of ores. Our race rivals seemed rather bemused and entertained by the fact that the three of us were commentating on the race with great enthusiasm, shouting rather loudly to be heard over the sounds of the water, the ore clashing, and the strange rhythmic chanting noise that our opponents were making, presumably so as to keep in time with each other and maximise speed. Unfortunately for them, they were unable to forgo the stereotype of Japanese tourists, otherwise they’d have probably won the race, but one of them kept putting down his ore in order to take photos. Therefore, we won the race, and I then tried to conduct an interview with the losing team, which seemed to amuse them quite a lot, although they might have also been a bit concerned by our mental stability, and were perhaps just humouring us out of politeness or fear.

It’s a shame that the thing wasn’t recorded because I think it would have made for a good audition tape for the BBC, resulting in us being snapped up to host top gear, such was the brilliance of the recording and our presenting style. I even threw in some slightly dubious lines about the Japanese in order to curry favour with the Clarkson fans. But alas, it wasn’t to be. I guess we’ll just have to continue with this bloody folk music lark instead. Oh well.

On the positive side though, I suppose the fact that we thought we were recording meant that we ended up having a very different experience to the one that we’d probably have had if we weren’t hamming up things for the Dollop. We might have just had a relaxing boat trip, but because of the Dollop, we did things like racing Japanese tourists in order to spice things up a bit. So although the thing didn’t record, we probably had a more interesting and exciting time in the canoe than we would have had otherwise.

Perhaps there is a good moral in that last paragraph. Because, my faithful congregation, you should live your life as if you were trying to entertain a few hundred people online, and then it will take you to places and give you experiences that you otherwise would eschew. Bless you. You see what I did there. That vicar’s sermon bit with the eschew bless you joke wouldn’t have happened if the recording had worked. So what you lost in exhilarating top gear style boat-based drama, you gained in hilarious wordplay.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

So, we survived the storm, we survived the Spanish hitch hikers, but once again, our lives potentially hang in the balance. I am writing this in the car, on a five hour drive to Jasper, which is a place in Canada; we’re not travelling all that way just to meet one random bloke, all though I’m sure he’s very nice. Jasper has been in the news recently for the fact that there have been a few people killed and injured by bears. Don’t worry though, because we’ve been armed with some important advice about what to do in case of a bear attack. Apparently the trick is just to lie down and play dead. If you’re having problems trying to be a convincing dead person, fear not, the bears will give you a helping hand (or a helping paw I suppose) by killing you. We’ve also been instructed to buy some bear spray which you spray at the bear in an attempt to ward it off.

I assume though that you have to make a choice between using the spray or employing the play dead tactic. If you see a bear and you spray it, then presumably it knows that you’re alive, and so, if the spray doesn’t work, you can’t really then resort to pretending to be dead, as the bears will no you’re alive. Unless the bears are just really stupid.

We went into town earlier today to get some bear spray. Michael saw what seemed like the Canadian equivalent of a pound shop, and decided that we should get the spray there, because it was much cheaper than in the other stores, but I wasn’t sure if it was a particularly good idea to scrimp on something that is potentially going to save your life.

“Raaaaaar! Raaaaar!” We’re entering the mind of a bear now – just so you know what’s going on. “Raaar! Raaaar! I see humans. Nice juicy humans. Raaaar! I’m going to eat them. Raaar! Oh no, what’s that? Damn, they’ve got a spray. Nooooooooo! They’re spraying me. Retreat, retreat! Raaaaaar! Hang on? What the hell is that? They’ve gone for the cheep dollar store spray. Pathetic. As if that’s going to do anything. How stupid can you get? These humans really can be so incredibly naive and astoundingly unintelligent. Haha. It’s my lucky day. Oh, hang on, what’s happening. They’re lying down. Oh no, they must be dead. They must have all somehow mysteriously died at exactly the same time. Damn, well I don’t want to eat dead meat. Ah, damn, that’s a real shame. Oh well, better luck next time. Raaar!”

Yesterday, I took you into the mind of a compulsive dog kisser, and today we enter the mind of a bear. These Dollops are truly pioneering.

There is a weird part of me that would really love us to be attacked by a bear, so long as it happened when I was recording an audio Dollop. Imagine how dramatic it would be for you listening, as I attempt to play dead, while a bear prowled around me. Obviously I’d be in a bit of a quandary, because I’d feel obliged to keep you informed of what was happening, but the commentating might arouse the bear’s suspicions as to the veracity of my deadness. I think that this might even prove a more exciting Dollop than the one from a bumper boat, having a water fight with children.

We’ve passed loads of hitch hikers on this journey. Unfortunately we can’t pick him up because our car is completely full, as Michael’s girlfriend has joined us for the rest of the trip. While she is lovely and it’s great to have her with us, it does mean that we now won’t be able to pick up any interesting people that I can dollop about. So there’ll be no more stories about hitch hikers to entertain you with, which is why I’m having to resort to imagining a hungry bear’s inner-monologue.

Hopefully we shall survive this next bit of our adventure, although, ominously, we’ve just parked up somewhere to get something to eat, and it turns out the place is called Dead Man’s Flats. Is it a harbinger of our pending death as a result of a hungry bear? Stay tuned to find out.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

The Canadian town of Calgary is a place clearly on the up. Never has there been so much excitement in this town. Not only does this weekend feature a massive folk festival with incredible international performers, but there is also a dog festival happening. In case you are unsure, we are playing the folk festival, not the dog festival, although if we’d have known, we could have built up a repertoire of dog-related songs and then offered our services to the dog festival, thus making our trip to Calgary even more lucrative.

There are loads of dog-related stalls, including a one selling dog hot tubs. I’m not sure how a dog hot tub differs from a human one. Surely there is no need for a different kind of hot tub, but perhaps I am wrong. There’s also the opportunity to pay five dollars to kiss a dog. This is apparently an endeavour to raise money for charity.

“so we just want to say thanks for agreeing to support our charity with your festival.”

“Oh it’s a pleasure, and we’ve got some very exciting news about what we’re going to do to raise you as much money as possible.”

“Oh great, go on.”

“Five dollars to kiss a dog.”

“What?! Are you joking?!”

“OK, I take your point. Maybe 5 dollars is a bit low for such an amazing prize. Maybe we should raise it to ten dollars.”

“Do you really seriously think that people will be scrambling to kiss a dog? I mean, normally people just do a raffle or a tombola.”

“She’s a very attractive dog. And I’m telling you from experience, she’s an incredible kisser. Seriously, you haven’t lived until you’ve taken a smooch with that pooch.”

At our gig, I asked the audience whether they had paid to kiss the dog, and no one said yes. So who are these people who are doing it?
I mean, everyone in the audience might be lying; it might be their guilty secret.

“Sit down dear, I’ve got some terrible news?”

“What is it dear?”

“This marriage has survived a lot, but what I’m about to tell you is pretty bad. I’m afraid we’re broke, completely broke.”

“How?! What have you done?!”

“Well, the finer details aren’t really important.”

“Have you been gambling again. You promised me you’d given it up?!”

“It’s not gambling dear.”

“Then what is it?”

“Well, it’s rather awkward. I don’t know what came over me.”

“What?! Is it the drink? Are you back on the drink? You’ve spent all the money on alcohol?!”

“No no, it’s not the drink. It’s hard to explain.”

“Tell me!”

“Well, er … well, you know that dog festival we went to?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know they had the opportunity to kiss a dog for five dollars.”

“Yes?”

“Well, I kind of got a bit carried away.”

“What?!”

“I snook off when you were looking at the hot tubs, and I had a kiss with the dog. And then another. And another. Before I knew it I was paying on my credit card. And I just couldn’t stop.”

“I wondered where you went. So you’ve put us in a financial quagmire because you’ve been paying to get off with a dog? What are we going to tell the children. We’ll have to tell them you’ve blown it all on drugs. We can’t have them knowing the awful truth.”

The festival also has a hot dog stall. I know that hot dogs aren’t actually made from dog – well there’s a dodgy takeaway place in Hartlepool where they actually might be – but it seems a little odd to have all these dog friendly stalls, and then sell hot dogs.

We’re having a great time at Calgary festival. I’m referring to the dog festival; to be honest we’ve been enjoying the dog festival so much that we’ve not really managed to get to the folk festival. But our spots at the folk festival have been really enjoyable. People have been laughing a lot at what we’re saying, although I’m not sure whether this is because they find what we’re saying funny, or are just amused by our voices, because people keep coming up to us and saying things like: “you guys, your accents are hilarious. Everything you say just cracks me up.” If there are any standup comedians reading (probably to steal all my amazing jokes; if I get wind of anyone doing dog kissing material then I’ll be very angry) I’d suggest a good place to play is Calgary. It doesn’t matter how bad your jokes are, you’ll still get them laughing hysterically just at your English accent.

Anyway, must dash, we’re about to do a gig.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

On Wednesday night we stayed in a youth hostel, but I’m not going to tell you about that because nothing interesting happened there. Our last youth hostel stay, however, was in Bath, and was a rather interesting experience, due to the people we were sharing a room with.

We arrived at the hostel early evening just to quickly check in, before heading to the arts centre to do our gig. When we entered our bedroom, the lights were off and the curtains were closed. We were about to turn the light on when a towering figure stepped into view.

“It’s best to leave the light off,” he whispered in a French accent. I assume that this was because he was French, as opposed to just being eccentric and choosing to adopt a French accent just for the hell of it. Although, his first sentence had been rather strange, so maybe he was just very eccentric, and enjoyed confusing people with an array of accents and peculiar whispered statements.

“He’s meditating,” whispered the man, still with a French accent. We looked around the room. There was another figure perched on top of one of the bunk beds, motionless.

“He sits there for hours, not moving. But He doesn’t like it if the light goes on. He gets angry.”

“When you say, he gets angry,” I whispered, “what do you mean?”

“He just shouts,” replied the man.

Surely the whole point of meditating is to become a calmer and more centred person? Unless the meditation is working, but it’s just that he was an exceptionally angry man before he tried it. Maybe if someone had disturbed his meditation a few weeks ago, he’d have punched them in the face, but now, thanks to this man’s hours of meditation, he’s managed to control his reaction to merely shouting. If he can keep the meditation going, in another month he might have reached the stage where he just writes the person who disturbs him a strongly worded letter.

The four of us were all heading out of the hostel, and as we walked through the corridor, we chatted to the whispering French man, who, now that we were out of the room with the meditating man, had stopped whispering, although he still chose to keep the French accent. I was beginning to suspect that he might actually be French.

He said that he was going out drinking with some friends who’d moved to England from his home town of France. He hadn’t seen them for a long while, so it was going to be a big night, lots of drink and lots of food. He’d probably not get back til late. “But I’ll try not to disturb you when I get back in,” he said.

“So long as you don’t turn the light on, we should all be fine,” I replied.

He asked us what we were up to tonight, and we told him that we were doing a gig. He asked us what kind of songs we sing, and we mentioned the fact that we sing a French song. He asked us what it was called, and we told him. “Pique La Baleine.” He looked confused and concerned.

“Ah, OK. Kill the whale,” he said, sounding worried. “I’m a vegetarian,” he added, sounding angry. And then he briskly walked out of the hostel.

The song isn’t a song glorifying whale killing, nor does it describe the whale killing in great and brutal detail. It’s a song about a whaleman who is longing to go home and be in the arms of his love, but instead has to plough through the sea hunting whales to make money. The verses are all about his thoughts of despair and longing, which is countered by the chorus, a cry of “Pique La Baleine!” Kill the whale, which brings us back sharply into the reality of his immediate situation. But this French man hadn’t waited around for an explanation. He seemed to have immediately jumped to the conclusion that we were passionate whale haters, who loved whale death so much that we even learnt how to sing about it in other languages. Maybe his racing brain had gone to imagine that hour entire repertoire consisted of songs about animal cruelty from all over the world: a jovial Icelandic song about abattoirs, a Polish song celebrating vivisection. What a night it was going to be, sharing a room with an angry meditator who hates light, and a French vegetarian who thinks that we’re on a par with Hitler, except Hitler was a vegetarian, so even worse than Hitler.

When we got back to the hostel that night, the meditating man was asleep in the dark. The French vegetarian had not yet returned. We crept into our beds in the dark and tried to get to sleep, which wasn’t at all easy due to the grumpy meditating man snoring at an impressive volume. It was even worse for Michael, who was in the bunk bed below him, and the mattress, being very thin, was vibrating and pulsating with the rumble of the snores, causing the bed springs to resonate and vibrate along with the snoring.

But Michael wasn’t the most unfortunate one that night; I was about to get a much worse deal. I lay awake for hours, unable to sleep due to the noise from the snoring old man. Then I heard the door open, and in came the French vegetarian. He tried his best to quietly creep through the room in the darkness, but he completely failed to pull this off, crashing into each bed several times. He was clearly right about the night involving lots of drink, as there was a very strong smell of alcohol which appeared as soon as he’d entered the room. He blindly and drunkenly crashed into my bed for the third time, and then angrily whispered some words in French, which I assume were swear words fuelled by his crashing into the bed, but I couldn’t be sure that they weren’t something like, “and now it’s time to kill the evil animal hating British bastards!” I braced myself, in case I needed to defend myself from an attack. But there was no attack, at least not a physical one, although I was about to get a very unnerving attack of the senses.

The man began removing his clothes right next to where I was lying. He removed his shirt and dumped it on the floor. Then he removed his trousers, and my nose was assaulted by an acrid fart smell. He’d clearly also predicted correctly when he said that it was going to be a night with lots of food. He’d presumably stocked up on his lentils supply, and as he bent down to remove his socks, his backside pretty much in my face, he let out a really slow fart. It was so slow that he might have not even noticed. I could hear its low buzzing right next to my face, and then the smell came. I wanted to turn around and face the other way, but for some stupid reason I felt too awkward to do so. How terribly British is that? I would rather endure a man farting in my face, than risk embarrassing him by doing something that might make him feel self-conscious. So I just lay there, facing his backside, holding my breath, and praying that he would move away soon. Maybe this was a deliberate attack, to get me back for my animal hating ways. Maybe this was an animal rights protest. If it was a protest then it certainly fell under the category of a dirty protest.

The man eventually straightened himself and began to attempt the journey up the ladder and into bed. This man was very well-built, and this, along with his inebriation, meant that every step on the ladder caused the whole bed to shake. I was convinced he was going to fall off and land with his fart-ridden backside smack bang on my face. I turned on to my other side. Eventually af a lot more shaking, he made it into bed. But the “fun” wasn’t over yet. While Michael’s bed was shaking to the sounds of an angry old man snoring, mine was pulsating to the sounds of a drunk French Vegetarian man farting. As I mentioned earlier, the mattresses were very thin, meaning that I was treated to both the smell, the sound and the vibration of this man’s farts.

I tried to fall asleep, but it was impossible with all of this going on. The drunken French vegetarian methane machine on the other hand had absolutely no problem with getting to sleep, as in mere minutes of him getting into bed, he began to snore, perhaps even louder than the grumpy old man in the bunk bed adjacent. The sound that was filling my ears was like some really odd experimental piece of music, as if John Cage had taken a record number of mushrooms, and had decided to compose a piece involving arhythmic sequences of snores and farts.

Eventually sleep came, but it didn’t last long, as at about 530 in the morning, I woke to hear an even stranger sequence of sounds. The man above me was still farting and snoring, but above that was another sound. It was chanting. The grumpy old man was once again perched on the top of his bunk, holding a book and chanting in Latin. The weird incongruity of everything was just too much. Farting, snoring and Latin chanting. It was clearly too much for Sean and Michael too, because I heard them both trying desperately to stifle their laughter. I was doing the same. We quickly whispered to each other, all agreeing that we should get out of there. Five minutes later we were back in the car heading home.

Well, I suggested yesterday that, now that I’m thirty-one, my Dollops would take on a more erudite tone. It turns out I was wrong, given that I’ve spent most of today’s Dollop talking about farts. Oh well.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

Today is my first Dollop at the age of thirty-one. From now on these Dollops will possess a marked increase in maturity, erudition and wisdom. Tomorrow I intend to write about stocks and shares, but for now, here’s part 3 of my account of Tuesday. You can read the first part here, and part 2 here. But don’t worry if you haven’t got time to read all that, as it’s not dependant on you understanding today’s Dollop.

Our gig in the industrial Canadian town of Trail was a surreal affair. I’d cut myself just half an hour before going on stage. Not deliberately. I mean, hanging around with Michael for days on end can be a bit gruelling, but it’s not that bad. I cut my lip while shaving.

I’d decided, half an hour before setting off for the gig, that I would have a shave. I thought I’d have plenty of time, but the razors I bought were just so blunt. I think the mistake was choosing to buy disposable razors in the airport. They probably blunt them deliberately for safety reasons. I’d seemingly chosen the worst place ever to buy a razor. I hadn’t had a shave for months, and after fifteen minutes, the razor had barely scratched the surface. Well, actually, that’s probably not the best phrase to choose, given that all this razor seemed to be capable of doing was somehow cutting the face beneath all the hair, while leaving the hair more or less fully in tact. These razors weren’t a deliberately ineffective terrorist weapon; they were just crap.

There was now just fifteen minutes before we had to leave. I would have to pick up the pace. I grabbed another disposable razor, and began to frenziedly shave. This razor seemed to be more effective than the previous one. I \plied my face with shaving foam and began to wildly take swipes at the beard, and I mean that in both senses of the term, as I was both shaving it and shouting profanities at it, because it still just wasn’t shifting anywhere near fast enough. Twenty minutes later, the beard was off, but I’d made a gash in the top of my lip which was pouring with blood.

There wasn’t time to do anything about it, except hold a tissue against it. Half an hour later, we were on stage, and my mouth was still pouring with blood. If this had been back at home in Britain in a folk club, a festival or an arts centre, where most of the audience know who we were, then this could have been really funny. If I’d come on stage with my face pouring with blood in front of a late night festival crowd, then it would be hilarious. We could make something of it. But when an audience have no idea who you are, have never seen you before, and you’re in a park at a council-run family event, then the reception you get is very different.

And it happened yet again. We were introduced as an Irish band. The first thing I planned to do was to come on the stage and make a joke about this, but when I opened my mouth, blood came out, which kind of changed everything. Whether we were Irish or not was neither here nor there to the audience, who were more interested and distracted by the man standing on the stage, dripping with blood.

It was a strange setup anyway, regardless of the blood bath element. It was an outdoor event, and the audience had all brought deck chairs to sit on and food to eat. There were meant to be nearly a thousand people in attendance, but the crazy storm earlier, and the storms that were currently happening just a couple of miles away, had apparently put a lot of people off. The 200 people that did make it were interspersed all over the park, and no one was sitting very close to us. This kind of gig is especially difficult for me, because the distance of the audience to the stage, along with the fact that it’s outdoors, means that I can’t really hear the audience responding. And unlike the other two, I’m not able to get any visual feedback about how the gig is going. Add all this to the fact that my mouth was pouring with blood, and you can maybe understand why I felt pretty uncomfortable with things.

On top of that, the sound wasn’t very good at all. We came onto the stage, having just been introduced as Irish, to the sound of deafening feedback. This probably added to the audience’s confusion even more. They thought they were getting an Irish folk band, but then they got deafening feedback and an Englishman spitting blood at them, and they maybe started to wonder whether the organisers had booked the wrong group, and had accidentally got an English death metal band instead.

The gig was by no means a disaster though. People were clearly enjoying the music, and there were many who were laughing at my bloody mouth saga. Someone threw some plasters onto the stage. I tried wearing a plaster, but it proved almost impossible to sing, as it clung to my face and the blood congealed underneath, meaning that I could hardly move my lips. You can hear parts of that gig on a forthcoming Young’uns Podcast.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

So, yesterday I left you on a bit of a cliffhanger. Well, I suppose it wasn’t really that much of a cliffhanger. I ended by saying that we had cause to fear for our lives, however< I assume that you've already realised that we clearly aren't dead, given that I'm writing this Dollop. Unless of course I've found some way to Dollop from beyond this physical realm, and am blogging from the afterlife. Yes, I may be in paradise, reunited with all my deceased loved ones, but I've told them they'll have to wait to show me around heaven and that we'll have to have a catchup later, because I've got a daily blogging challenge to maintain, and death is quite frankly no excuse for shirking. In fairness, my dead relatives won't have to wait all that long; I mean, what does a few minutes matter when you've got all eternity to play with? Or perhaps I have died and my laptop has been recovered. Someone has then managed to guess my laptop password, find that day's unpublished dollop that I wrote just before my death, then guess the password for my website, and publish the Dollop. But if that is the case, then how am I writing this? Unless I realised that death was imminent and hurriedly managed to type this before death came. I could have written my last will and testament, or a final message to my friends and family, but instead I chose to write just one more Dollop before I died. But I think you know that this isn't the case, and that, at the time of writing, I am still alive. So yesterday's cliffhanger wasn't really that dramatic, because I am clearly not dead. So, when we parted company yesterday, there were five of us in a car heading to the industrial Canadian town of Trail. There was me, and the other two Young'uns, as well as a couple of hitch hikers who we'd just picked up. As soon as they got in our car, a rather severe storm began; maybe not severe by Canadian standards, but certainly bigger and more dramatic than British storms. The whole place went dark, the car lights came on, and we cautiously crept forwards. Our car was probably moving more in a side-to-side direction, what with the wind shaking us, than it was going forwards. Our two hitch hikers began to murmur to each other in Spanish. They then both laughed in what I'd describe as a sinister manner, but perhaps it was just the foreboding atmosphere outside that was making me feel like the situation inside was also circumspect. There was more unintelligible whispering, another laugh, and then ... “We know a short cut,” said the girl. She said this in English, just in case you were thinking that, even though my Spanish isn't good enough to know the majority of words, I just so happen to know the Spanish for “we know a short cut.” “It's probably just easier to follow the Satnav,” countered Michael, not wanting to start going off the beaten track. There was more Spanish murmurings, and then … “It'll be easier in the storm,” said the girl. This time, she did say this in Spanish. It just so happens that the one Spanish phrase I know is, “it'll be easier in the storm.” No, I am just being hilarious; she said it in English, but I had you fooled for a moment there didn't I? Go on, admit it, I did, you gullible idiot. “Continue straight,” said the satnav, as if trying to warn us against trusting these two new passengers. “The satnav is saying to go straight. This route seems pretty simple,” Michael responded., which seems a fairly logical argument, as what could be easier than simply travelling in a straight line. The Spanish mutterings recommenced. They sounded a little bit more urgent now. There was a flurry of words, and then they seemed to come to an agreement on something. Then there was some shuffling around, while the girl tried to get something from her bag. Just then, there was a massive clap of thunder, and the car jolted. Oh my god, it's clear what's happening, I thought. These people are trying to kill us. They have invaded our car with the sole purpose of killing us, conquering our vehicle and taking our possessions. It's the Spanish Carmada. They'd tried their best to get us off the beaten track, so as to kill us without drawing attention to what was going on, but there plan hadn't worked, due to Michael's opinion that we should continue following the satnav's literally straight forward directions. And so They'd just had another conversation with each other along the lines of, “it's very foggy and dark. We could probably get away with killing them here and now, and no one would see.” The two of them had agreed to this plan, and the girl was now rummaging in her bag for … what? A gun? A knife? An Axe? The other two were too busy trying to concentrate on the road ahead to notice what was going on. It was down to me to restrain our two assailants and thus save our lives. My life, and the life of Sean and Michael, lay in my hands. I braced myself, ready to act. Her hand came out of her bag, and she was holding … a map. Upon consulting the map, it suggested that the girl was correct, and that there was an easier and shorter way after all, and so we changed our route, which took us out of the storm and onto a better road. Now that the danger, both real and imaginary, had passed, we all fell into conversation. Alexandra was from Mexico, Erin was from Spain. They were both in their early thirties. They'd only known each other for three months. Erin was in Mexico with work, and on a night out he met Alexandra. They spent the night talking, drinking and dancing. Afterwards, Erin went home with Alexandra, and what they spent the rest of the night doing is none of our business, although by the morning they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Erin spent the rest of his time in Mexico with Alexandra, staying in her house. A week later, it was time for him to return to Spain, except he wasn't keen on going, and she wasn't keen on letting him. Two weeks later, he had quit his job and was back in Mexico with Alexandra. Two weeks after that, Alexandra had quit her job, and she and Erin were in Canada. And they've been in Canada for the last two months, sleeping in a tent, hitch hiking from place to place, looking for manual work such as cherry picking. They don't know what the future will hold, how long this will last, or whether they'll stay together or go their separate ways, choosing to live by the philosophy of living purely in the present. But for the last two months they've spent all their time in each other's company, living together, sleeping together, travelling together and working together, just the two of them. Three months ago they didn't know of each other's existence. The original plan had been to drop them off just outside of trail, where they would continue hitch hiking to their final destination, a further hundred miles down the road. But when they heard we were musicians and that we'd be doing a free concert tonight in Trail, they decided to change their plans and come into Trail with us to watch our gig. At the gig, we mentioned to the audience that there were some hitch hikers wanting to travel into Creston, in case there was anyone who might be able to help them. There are other things to tell you about Tuesday night's concert, as it was rather surreal. But I shall save that for tomorrow, as this Dollop has already gone over 1300 words. Today's Dollop is my last Dollop at the age of thirty. But will I make it to 31? That's another cliffhanger. You'll have to come back tomorrow to find out. I am a master atcreating dramatic tension.

Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here

After leaving the hot tub in Kelowna (well, it was too big to take with us) we got in the hire car and began the first leg of our five hour journey, which was to stop off at Wentworth music shop, wherein worked a man we were rather excited about meeting. The man is called Don, and he is the drummer in a band called The Young’uns – Canada’s The Young’uns.

As mentioned in yesterday’s hot tub based Dollop, people have frequently got our two groups mixed up. The Young’uns from Canada are a covers band that primarily play weddings, so I think it’s fair to say, without sounding arrogant, that our reach and audience is quite bigger than there’s, given that we’ve been played on national radio and have won one of the biggest awards in our genre. OK, that probably did sound a bit arrogant, but you know what I mean. Basically, what I’m getting at is that The Young’uns from Canada seem to spend most of their Twitter activity telling people, who’ve attempted to tweet us, that they’ve got the wrong Young’uns.

We weren’t sure if they loathed our existence. After all, they’ve been going a lot longer than us, since 1989 in fact, which suggests that the daily Hive website, who reported that we’d been going since 1989, had just done some very lack-lustre Internet research and conflated the two bands. And then we turn up, a band with the same name. At first it presumably wasn’t a problem. We were way down the Google search pages. But then, as we got more popular, our Google search ranking increased, and eventually we were top, and then more and more articles and websites were mentioning our band, propelling the Canadian Young’uns further down the search results table. Then the Youtube videos came, then we signed up to Twitter, and now the Canadian Young’uns have to spend all their time on Twitter talking to our fans, because they’ve tweeted the wrong band.

UP until a few days ago, the only contact we’d had with the Canadian Young’uns was them tagging us in hundreds of tweets in order to direct someone to the correct Young’uns. But then we discovered that we were in the town that one of The Young’uns works in, and so we began to arrange a meeting. And today we fina lly met a member of the Young’uns from Canada,. The result of that meeting will be featured on a Young’uns Podcast at some point soon – yes, I’ll definitely get around to releasing one in August, I promise.

After our meeting with Don, we began our drive to our next port of call, an industrial town named Trail, where we were playing a free council-run outdoor gig that night. About two hours from Trail we saw a couple of hitch hiker’s. The last time we saw a hitch hiker was when we were driving through Australia (see this Dollop). We travel around Britain all the time, but I don’t think we’ve ever really seen a hitch hiker, yet whenever we’re in another continent we seem to see them. Given that we’ve been at the mercy of drivers ourselves, having stood at roadsides for hours, desperate for vehicular liberation (see this Dollop for a story about Sean and I hitch hiking in 2005) we are very sympathetic to the plight of the hitch hiker. And so we pulled over and asked them where they were going.

It transpired that they were trying to head in the same direction as us, and their intended destination was not far from our destination. We didn’t really have room for them, at least not in a conventional sense of the notion of “room,” but by piling bags and cases high on top of us, and with Michael’s reassurance that he could still just about see where he was going despite the magnitude of bags obscuring the view, we drove off, with our two new hitch hiker friends in the back..

Our two new friends thanked us profusely, as it was evident that we’d just rescued them from a terrible fate. There were large looming clouds ahead. A storm was coming, and the place they’d previously been standing, at the side of the road, with nothing else around for a couple of miles, would have offered them no protection against it. And Canadian storms are not something you want to be standing in the middle of.

We drove through a Canadian storm a couple of days ago, and it’s a harrowing experience. These storms are nothing akin to anything we’ve experienced in England. They are on a much larger scale. The fog is crazily intense and the rain beats down with a ferocity and volume that sounds like cascading rocks.

This storm wasn’t quite as big as the first one we experienced in Canada a couple of days ago. That was a memorable storm. The car was shaking violently and the visibility was practically non-existent. We had a hurried discussion in which we weighed up our choices. If we continued driving, then it was likely that we wouldn’t survive. The three of us decided that we weren’t particularly keen on the idea of dying. After all, we had so much to live for: Michael and Sean have long-term partners, and I have a daily blog to maintain. Our lives were clearly too important to others to risk a reckless trip through the wildest storm of our lives, so we did the sensible thing and pulled over.

Even with the car now stationary, it still aggressively shook with the wind, and the fog meant that we had no idea where we’d pulled over, except that it was off the road, which was the important thing. And so we sat there, while the wind swirled and whistled, the rain pelted, the lightning flashed and the thunder roared, and the fog utterly shrouded us. Eventually, the storm subsided, with an alarming quickness: ten seconds earlier the car was shaking and the rain/rocks were pelting, and then, the fog lifted, the rain stopped and the fog lifted to reveal gloriously bright sun. The lifting of the fog also revealed where we’d stopped and pulled over, and it wasn’t as sensible a choice as we thought. Directly above our car was a massive tree, now gently creaking and swaying in the breeze, although it presumably hadn’t been swaying and creaking so gently mere seconds before. We did hear a lot of unnerving creaking during the storm, but we just assumed it was the car. That tree could have easily fallen and Emily and Hannah would loose their partners, and even more tragically, a few hundred people online would be left eternally Dollopless. Fortunately, such unthinkable disaster was avoided, and we continued our journey.

But now, here we were, a couple of days later, in a car with two complete strangers who we’d just met seconds earlier, and who were giving us cause to once again fear for our lives. But I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Download today’s audio Dollop from a hot tub in Kelowna, Canada, here

Download the audio version here

I lead a very strange life. On Saturday we were in Vancouver, being encouraged to sing a swear-laden song in front of children and their seemingly unconcerned parents at 10 in the morning (see Dollop 198). Then immediately after coming off stage, we were in someone’s car, driving at speed to Harrison, in order to make our 2pm harmony workshop. We arrived at 5 minutes past, were dropped off at the front doors of the venue with no time to check in or exchange pleasantries, and began to teach a room full of strangers, in a town we’d literally just entered, a song about pigs, which involved people oinking and snorting. What did you do last Saturday?

If you read about our adventures in Australia in March, and the accounts of our April UK tour, then you’ll know that our travels are always beset by unusual logistical issues. This tour has not proved an exception.

This morning we left Harrison to drive to Vancouver airport where we were picking up the hire car for our next leg of the journey. Vancouver is about two hours from Harrison. I know this because we drove to Harrison from Vancouver only a couple of days before. You might be wondering why we’re driving back to the same place that we left only a couple of days before. Presumably Vancouver is closer to the next place you’re gigging in? You might be thinking. No, it’s not. Harrison is only two hours away from Kelowna, our next port of call. Vancouver is four hours away from Kelowna. In fact, if you were to drive from Vancouver to Kelowna you would pass through Harrison. So we are heading two hours in the opposite direction to where we want to be going, so that we can pick up a hire car,and then driving two hours back in the same direction, taking us back into Harrison, and then passing through Harrison and travelling for a further two hours to get to Kelowna. We’re going to travel for four hours and essentially end up back in the same place we left when we started. We’ve turned a two hour journey into a six hour journey, which doesn’t account for the fact that by the time we get close to our destination, it will be rush hour, meaning more traffic, probably adding another hour onto the journey.

But in fairness, as frustrating as all this is, we did need to pick up a hire car, didn’t we? So what other option was there? It’s annoying but it’s necessary. Except, there’s a car hire place only half an hour from Harrison, in the direction of travel that we actually want to go in. Ah, the benefit of hindsight.

On the way to Vancouver airport, our driver made a slight detour to an electrical shop, because Michael wanted to pick up a cable for his camera, having forgotten to bring it with him from England. . Michael wasn’t sure on the name of the cable he needed, which led to him trying to explain the make and model of the camera to the man in the shop. The man said that he was confident he knew which cable he needed, but reassured Michael that if he got it home and he discovered it was the wrong one, then he could always bring it back to the store. As kind as this was, I’m not sure how worthwhile it would be to travel all the way back to this store, given that we were going to be two hours away by the time we got to where we were staying today. Desperate to avoid yet another ridiculous Young’uns excursion, I suggested that Michael got his camera from his suitcase and bring it into the shop in order to make sure that the cable definitely fits. The slight hassle of having to get a camera out of a suitcase would be nothing in comparison to a two hour journey there and two hours back in order to replace it upon discovering it’s not the right one. Michael went to fetch his camera from his suitcase, and it transpired that the cable was the wrong one. We then located the correct cable and we were back on our way, having avoided another future crazy detour.

We were dropped off by our driver (thank you Zoe if you’re reading. perhaps she enjoyed our company so much that she wants to know what happened after we parted, and is now addicted to following our lives, drawn into our world like an avid soap fan). Half an hour later, Michael realised that he’d left his newly purchased camera cable in her car. After all that.

Eventually we sorted out all the paperwork for the hire car, and it was time to be on our way again. In just two hours, traffic permitting, we’d be back where we started. Then we’d do another half an hour detour in order to pick up Michael’s camera cable from Zoe’s house. Then we’d drive the half an hour back into Harrison again. And then, we’d be on our way.

Except. We were having difficulties with the satnav, which was set to Spanish. Michael then had to connect to the airport’s WIFI network in order to translate the various words on the satnav’s screen into English. Eventually we managed to make sense of the Spanish menus and deduced how to change the language to English. Now it was time to get under way!

Except. Sean and Michael were having a hard time working out how to fasten the rather complex looking satnav holder onto the car window. Michael suggested that maybe it needed to be licked, which to be honest is something that Michael suggests quite a lot, and has resulted in Sean and I frequently having to slap him; although, I think Michael also gets a weird thrill from us slapping him so I’m not really sure if it’s an effective deterent. After giving the strange rubbery surface a lick, Michael established two things: firstly that he was feeling like he was going to vomit due to the acrid taste of the rubbery thing, and secondly that it definitely wasn’t meant to be licked. I made a mental note to wear a horribly disgusting rubbery thing on me whenever I’m in Michael’s company, which would hopefully prove a more effective deterrent when it came to Michael’s weird licking antics.

Sean and Michael tried pulling at bits of the satnav holder, hoping that there might be a bit that locks onto the front of the car, but ten minutes of pulling and twisting yielded nothing. Eventually, Michael traipsed back into the car hire place to ask how the complex looking satnav holder worked. The confused person in the car hire place responded simply by informing him that it was just meant to be placed on top of the dashboard. That was it, there was no need for licking, pulling or twisting anything, you just put the horribly tasting rubbery thing on the dashboard and it stayed there. Anyway, at least we’d figured that out, and now finally we could be on our way!!

Except. It became clear, as we made our way onto the highway, that the satnav wasn’t working. We’d programmed in where we were going and it had accepted our destination, albeit after a further ten minutes of fruitlessly grappling with it before we realised it was set to the wrong state, but now it was going crazy, whizzing through the various towns that we were meant to pass on our journey. According to the satnav we were now in Harrison. We found a place to pull over and tried to work out what was going on. Eventually we realised that we had it set to the rout simulation setting. We located the option for online real-time navigation, and finally we were off. Finally, we were on our way!!!

Except. Well, actually there isn’t an Except, or at least not yet anyway. We’ve been travelling absolutely fine for the last hour. We’re still an hour away from Harrison, and at least another three hours from getting to Kelowna, and so there’s plenty of time for many more things to go wrong.

I’d like to say we’ve learnt some valuable lessons today about logistics and travel, but I’m pretty sure there’ll be many more Young’uns logistical disasters still to come on this tour and on future tours. Still, on the plus side it gives me something to write about.

Voilà, I’ve made the 200th David’s daily digital Dollop. I’m sure many of you are having Dollop-themed parties tonight, celebrating this milestone, perhaps coming in fancy dress. Oh yes, there’s bound to be a lot of people in kettle costumes tonight. Feel free to send me your pictures.

My Canadian adventure continues, as I attempt to Dollop whilst driving a jet ski. This is the result.

Download today’s audio Dollop here