A week in the life

I know how much people like to see what we’ve been up to, so here’s a glimpse into a week in the life of the Division on tour.

We started the week in the beautiful city of Bath.

Bath has a long and beautiful history involving Romans and spa water, and it holds much personal nostalgia for me because it is where my parents come from and I spent long sunny summers there staying with my Grandmother.

Actually I was able to spend much of the week reliving that rose-tinted past, as the very same Grandmother is still alive and well and living in Bath and dealt with our accommodation. Here is a picture she once painted.

I include it here because it is a picture of the playgroup that used to meet in the very church hall we stayed in. The girl in the middle pushing a pram is actually my cousin, who turned up to see the first of our shows in Bath. Who’d have thought that, over twenty years after the painting of this picture, the Uncertainty Division would be in the very same hall playing netball? Or that during a singsong of Disney classics, James Aylett would emerge from a tiny door to do a tear-jerking impersonation of the bird woman from Mary Poppins?

We weren’t sleeping in this particular room of the building, but we did once eat in it (and for some reason half the cast dressed as Hobbits for the occasion).

Front right of the picture is Chris Mundy, by the way, who was playing the part of Andrew Pontzen for this leg of the tour.

Another nostalgic trip for me was a visit to Sally Lunn’s tearoom, which is the oldest house in Bath and somewhere I haven’t been since I was a lad. Apparently Tom Baker likes the buns.

Our venue was a lovely place called The Mission, whose website currently sports a couple of rather fetching photos of us which they took themselves. James Aylett, motorway virgin, drove all the way to Bath and did the get-in on the same day, which possibly explains why he continued to grasp steering wheel-shaped objects to drive himself about the room.

Oh, and here’s Amelia, who continually complains that I put unflattering pictures of her on the website. Can’t imagine why.

For those of you who are interested, I would point out that whilst the sonic screwdriver was much scoffed at initially, by about halfway through the tour everybody wanted one. Andrew Ormerod was particularly covetous.

From Bath we went to London and our old hunting ground The Space.

Andrew Pontzen rejoined us, along with Uncertainty Division veteran and technical wiz Catherine Stevenson, who we call Cathy Steve.

Our get-in was hampered by a film crew from the improbable-sounding Footballers’ Wives Extra, which is apparently an additional programme for watchers of Footballers’ Wives with more of the salacious details left in. (Is that possible? Is that even desirable?)

Here’s some camping around during the rehearsal.

And that’s pretty much all there is to show and tell, except to say that the shows went well, we got a good notice from the Bath Chronicle and we’re off again on Tuesday. Is it any wonder we’re all so tired?