The band visited the Bath and Bristol area.

Thursday 14th

  10am, Coach leaves Cambridge from the pull-in outside Queens College.
  7.30pm, Concert at Hayesfield Technology College

Friday 15th

  Free time in Bath
  Evening concert with Bath Spa Band

Saturday 16th

  Free time in Bristol, including laser quest.
  Concert with Cheltenham Silver Band

Sunday 17th

  Annual band football match.
  Return to Cambridge, Curry, Sleep.

I find it hard to believe that I've just returned from my last ever CUBB tour, but I suppose all good things must come to an end… Anyway, in order that I never forget all the comedy moments, the bonnetings, the defenestrations, the spawn sack races and the 4:23ams, I have decided to commit it all to paper (well, hard drive) in the form of a diary. I hope that reading it will cause some amusement to some people, or at least be a better way to spend an afternoon than getting your fingers trapped in a car door. It'll probably be quite long if the last diary I wrote is anything to go by, but at least it will be thorough. If I've missed out anything of importance or comedy value then let me know and I might even get round to updating it. OK, here goes nothing…

Disclaimer: Diary is unsuitable for children under 18 months; contains small parts which may present a choking hazard. The events, story, and all names, characters and incidents depicted in this diary are fictitious. No identification with or similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is intended or should be inferred. All animals used in writing the diary were trained with care and concern for their safety and well being. Harmful if swallowed. In case of contact with eyes, rinse immediately. Do not induce vomiting. Discontinue use if rash develops. May help slimming or weight control only as part of a calorie controlled diet. Contents will be hot after heating. Diary may contain traces of nuts.

A quick piece of advice: attending an Engineers' Annual Dinner with large amounts of free alcohol and getting hardly any sleep is not a good way to spend the night before the brass band tour. No matter how much fun it may seem at the time, you will regret it later. As you may have guessed, I ignored this advice and went to the Emmanuel College Engineers' Annual Dinner on Wednesday 13th March 2002, the day before tour. Despite the fact that I knew the coach had been booked for 10:00am I decided to attempt to reach the meeting point at 9:30am as we had been instructed to, and even after having left my room once without my trombone (d'oh!) I wasn't too late. So, it was in a very tired and slightly hung-over state that I waited in the cold opposite Queens' for the bus to arrive, knowing that for every minute we stood around I could have had another minute of sleep. Luckily for Steve Houghton, the culprit who had booked the coach to arrive half an hour after he told people it would be leaving in order that even late people would still be early, as he returned from dropping off the minibus that had been used to ferry people to the pick-up point the coach appeared to save him from the murderous rabble. Bob the driver decided that almost knocking my head off with his wing-mirror would make a good start to the trip, but other than that the loading of the coach was pretty uneventful.

We set off at around 10:30am I think, although I wasn't paying much attention so it could have been any time really. After an hour or so with no bonneting action at all (I had forgotten my antimacassar and Tim Styles had packed his in the luggage compartment under the coach), Paul Davis and I discovered that the hoods of our coats could be used as very effective bonnets. For those of you who were bemused by the whole idea of bonneting (e.g. Andrew Mosedale, who confiscated my hood when I got him with an over-bonnet), it involves putting a piece of material over somebody's head and it is really very funny indeed. The hoods we were using must have been the most high-tech bonnets ever used, being constructed from triple-layer Gore-Tex !

A lunch stop was made in a random service station somewhere, and the Peking duck wraps were especially palatable, if a little on the expensive side. The service station chain's TV channel provided moderate amusement, advertising “any 4 Cadbury's Creme Eggs for 99p”. One wonders how many different types of Cadbury's Creme Eggs this encompassed…

As we were on course to arrive at our destination rather early (presumably), Bob decided to take us on a scenic tour of the roads around Bristol to pass the time. I'm sure we passed the park-and-ride at least three times, but then again a lot of that part of the journey gave me feelings of déjà-vu. Eventually we managed to find our way through to Bath, but the part of the journey from Bristol to the school in Bath seemed to take as long as getting from Cambridge to Bristol. Anyway, when we arrived, the tour T-shirts were handed out. They bore the slogans “CUBB Tour 2002: A West-Country Fantasy” and “Somerset for Playing” along with an apple playing a left-handed Euphonium. Pure genius.

Watching the rehearsal of the school wind band (with some guest stars from CUBB) reminded me of my school wind band days; they played a couple of fantastic rock medleys that I'm sure Kieren would love to get his hands on for the band. We had a couple of hours to kill before the concert that evening, so the baguettes and cakes provided by the school were followed by a quick “walk into town”. I can't believe Katie and Kieren thought that we were really going for a walk around Bath when it was pissing it down with rain, but anyway we'll have to come clean eventually: we went to the pub. In fact, three independent groups managed to find themselves in the same pub, as it was the first one you got to when you walked down the hill that the school was on. A few frames of pool later (me and Steve Hardiman won by the way, despite what Andrew Pick might have you believe…), it was time to get changed for the concert so we made our way back.

The concert was quite good, with a reasonable audience. Kieren's attempts to make us play quietly and with restraint were futile, however. The start of the second half was delayed slightly by Ben Russell forgetting his music to Kalinka (the encore), and we slaughtered the piece “Slaughter on 10th Avenue”, but other than that things went well. We made a quick exit and travelled to the scout camp in which we were based, and after a successful operation Sac (don't ask), the drinking started. It was about this time when we first investigated the shower situation: the gents' toilets had one shower that was crawling with ants, and the ladies' had two showers that faced each other and had clear glass doors. Hmmmmmmm. It was decided to switch the genders round as there are many times more males than females in the band, so the ladies had to use the ant-infested shower and the gents were forced into a shower-buddy system.

The drinking on the first evening started off very quickly indeed. Andrew Brennan downed his first can in what seemed like a matter of seconds, and we had polished off two crates of Tetley's in under an hour. A tower of cans seemed the obvious thing to make with all the empties, so the Engineers got to work. Thanks must go to Tim Styles for drinking a can of whatever foul substance we required (i.e. lager and cider) to complete layers of the same height. It was during the construction of the tower of cans that the concept of defenestration was born: Big J.C. (Jonathan Cameron) warned Becky that if she threw things at the tower and knocked it down as she was threatening to then she would be thrown out of the window. She did knock it down, and she was thrown out of the window. Luckily for her the sitting room was on the ground floor and there was a fairly easy route from the window at the back of the hostel to the front door, but she must have got quite muddy. Of course once it had been discovered that defenestration was relatively harmless, several other people decided to knock the tower down when it had been reconstructed. Pete Massey and even Big J.C. himself had been defenestrated by the end of the evening.

As we had not had a big meal all day, we decided to make ourselves some cheese on toast to satisfy our hunger. We located the cheese, the bread and the toaster, but a grill was nowhere to be found! Fortunately we had some high calibre Engineers in the group, so we set to work perfecting the art of making cheese on toast in the microwave. The trick was to heat the cheese almost to melting point in the microwave whilst toasting the bread, then put the warm cheese on the toast and finish it off in the microwave for a few seconds. This prevented the toast from getting soggy and the results were very tasty! I think we managed to finish off most of the bread and cheese that had been meant to last the whole weekend, but it was well worth it.

When sufficiently wasted I decided that it was a good time to get out my flashing juggling balls. These proved to be very popular, and I ended up trying to teach lots of people how to juggle. Jason Morley's efforts were particularly notable for the danger they caused to other band members! I think he was getting the hang of it in the end though. The water-resistance of my juggling balls was later tested by people accidentally throwing two of them on separate occasions into two of only three pint glasses in the room – quite a coincidence. They seemed to survive their ordeal relatively unscathed, so I wasn't too distressed.

By about 3am it was only the serious drinkers/insomniacs who were still up. There had been a fair amount of beer spillage on the floor, so Chris Kemp decided that instead of leaving it to be cleared up by the people who got up early the next morning he would get a mop out and clean the room then. We left him to it, and sat around drinking and taking photos of him. Shortly after 4am I retrieved my talking alarm clock for the re-enactment of the 4:23am incident of tour 1999; much to the relief of the people trying to sleep in my room we decided to make the clock announce “it's four twenty-three a.m.” in the sitting room instead of the bedroom as had been traditional in previous years.

It seemed like a fantastic idea at this point to climb out of the window and attempt to do the assault course. Unfortunately we couldn't find the assault course, and it was too dark even to try out the children's adventure playground. We did come up with the fantastic idea of using my digital camera to take photos of things with the flash in order to see them in the dark, but no-one was brave enough to risk life and limb trying to climb on things that we weren't even sure were meant for climbing on. Rob Richards had some trouble getting back in through the window (oh, by the way, the reason we had to use the window was because the front door had been locked by this time) so I think someone threw a chair out for him to use. Tiredness began to set in, and we finally called it a night at around 5am.

Friday morning for me got off to a false start at about 9:15am when I woke up needing a drink (no, water – I know what you were thinking!). I was half contemplating staying up and having breakfast, but I was having difficulty standing up in the kitchen so I went back to bed. Those who hadn't woken up before 9:30am were summoned into the land of the living by a Reveille from Andrew Mosedale, who was surely looking to get himself defenestrated. Rumour has it that he was asked to play it by Heather Barber, who we had kept awake the previous night with our juggling and drinking antics (sorry Heather!).

When I had failed to get back to sleep by about 10am I remembered that there were some earplugs in my wash bag from ages ago so I dug them out and finally drifted back into the world of dreams. I awoke slightly more refreshed shortly before midday, just in time to have a shower and be ready for the curry that was being prepared for lunch. In case anyone is interested in what happened while I was catching up on sleep, I have surveyed the rest of the band and apparently they had a go on the pedal go-karts that the scout camp had available. Comedy moments included Robert Townrow forgetting where the brake was, losing control and falling off, and Ramsey Farragher souping-up his kart by moving the seat forward and paying the price.

Fully fired up with curry we left for Bath to do a little sight-seeing. Apparently someone got off the bus with a map of Bristol and started trying to follow that, but luckily most of us actually had maps of Bath (I think – I didn't actually use mine so it could have been a map of Bristol for all I knew). My group paid a quick visit to the Roman Baths, decided it was too expensive (£7 for students!), and went to the Abbey instead. However, 4 hours walking around the town with nothing to do became less appealing and we went back to the Baths to do the tour. I'm glad we did because it was quite fun, especially playing with the audio guides that we were given. The commentaries for various parts of the Baths were accessed by dialling a two-digit number that appeared on the wall next to the thing of interest, and Paul Davis discovered that if you dialled 99 on the handset you got a rather amusing message. The comedy highlights were as follows (you'll have to imagine the posh and rather camp voice):

“I'm sorry to bother you, but you seem to have forgotten to return your handset… There's an alarm you see, and if you take it much further the handset will emit an ear-splitting sound and attract the attention of the security guards. So just put the handset down. Thank you so much.”

(It was slightly longer than that, but I can't remember it exactly and I'm sure you get the gist.) Other highlights of the tour included the tour guide completely losing her train of thought in the middle of a sentence, and the pool in which most people had thrown coins but some American tourists (presumably) had assumed that the Roman Goddess Minerva would take Visa and thrown in their credit cards.

Next on the agenda was a cream tea, so we got out our scone-searching antennae to find ourselves a tea shop. Being a group of brass players we managed to find one within minutes, much to the annoyance of the other customers in the shop – it was a nice quiet place until we arrived! They eventually managed to find 14 scones for us, and we enjoyed a delicious cream tea with real clotted cream. Mmmmmmmm, lovely.

With another hour or so left to kill we decided to visit the Royal Crescent, a very large crescent-shaped terrace that overlooks the city and is generally very impressive and expensive. Big J.C. Leeded (sic) the way in Y2K+2, so we ended up at the Royal Circus instead. They must have swapped the two over since he was last in Bath. Anyway, the Royal Circus was quite cool too, being a circular square of terraces. Eventually we found our way to the Royal Crescent and a few photos later we set off back to the coach park.

Next stop was the church in which we were due to play our concert that evening, and after some expert manoeuvring through the backstreets of Bath and a little comedy reversing we got there. Unfortunately the pub in which we were planning to get changed and leave our instrument cases was shut so we stood outside it in the rain for half an hour. We eventually decided to get changed on the coach; by the time we had done this of course the pub opened immediately. Paul Bushby (the librarian) was quite annoyed when Chris Howlett announced that the second Baritone music had disappeared, along with Helen the second Baritone player, but Helen was located during the first half of the concert. It wasn't until the interval that the music was found; someone had hidden it in the second Baritone pad – what a stupid place to put it! Other interval amusements included Andrew Brennan's encounter with an audience member while they queued for the toilets: the old man suggested that the sink was the perfect height for urinating into. Nice thought, eh?

Some of the arrangements that the Bath Spa Band played in their half of the concert were slightly dubious to say the least, but it was all good clean fun I suppose. The comedy really started in our second half… Some of the audience had been bussed in from an old people's home somewhere and they had been singing along for some of the first half – fair enough, at least they were enjoying themselves – but at the start of the second half their carers decided that it would be a fantastic idea to give them all packets of crisps. They must also have fitted these crisp packets with microphones and amplifiers judging by the racket they were making while we were trying to play our programme. Oh, what fun I had attempting to play my solo (Londonderry Air) with people in the front row singing along (“Oh, Danny Boy”, etc, etc.) and crinkling crisp packets all the way through. Surely that must have been the most off-putting audience ever. I certainly needed a stiff drink afterwards.

So, after a couple of pints and some scampi fries in the pub across the road from the church, we returned to the Lovell Centre where we were staying for some more drinks. The evening was much more restrained than the first night had been as everyone was fairly knackered. I'm sure there was a lot of juggling, some cheese on toast manufacture and probably a fair amount of defenestration, but other than that I can't think of anything exciting that happened. After the obligatory pressing of my alarm clock at 4:23am, most people went to bed but I stayed up to check my e-mail with Tim Styles' Psion. It was at this point that I noticed Steve Hardiman nodding off to sleep holding one of my flashing juggling balls, so I took some comedy photos of him. Incidentally he didn't believe me the next morning when I told him he had fallen asleep in the sitting room holding a juggling ball, but the photos proved it beyond reasonable doubt and were time-stamped 4:51am.

By this time I think everyone needed a lie-in, so we had some brunch at about 11am then left for Bristol. Some Laser Quest action was on the cards for most of the band, so Big J.C. led the way again. The route was scenic to say the least (they must have re-designed the road system since J.C. was last there) but we made it in the end. The game was quite fun despite the sensors having to be shot about 15 times before they would register and the major over-crowding of the playing area. My team (the Greens) won by 2 points (we got 3963, the Reds got 3961): a well-deserved victory. I'm sure Rob Richards will want me to mention that he got the top score and even made the high score table for the day. Maybe his gun was working properly or something…

After the post-match analysis had been completed we headed for the town centre and I left the group for an hour or so to catch up with an old school friend of mine who was demonstrating candyfloss making at a National Science Week exhibition in the shopping centre. I think most people went for a coffee then sampled the delights of the ”@Bristol” complex where the coach was parked. There was also a very amusing Morris Dancing festival going on next to the river, with a mad bloke shouting, smashing a big stick on the floor and kissing all the women in the audience. I think it was Paul Davis who had a lucky escape from him, but Heather Barber was not so fortunate. I hear the IMAX cinema was very good too.

Back at the hostel there was spaghetti bolognaise waiting for us so we tucked in ravenously. All of us that is except those with a hatred of mushrooms, because there were a very large number of mushrooms in the bolognaise sauce. Apparently the chefs were going to put them all in one half of the sauce so that people who didn't like them could have their sauce mushroom-free, but there were simply too many mushrooms to go in half of the sauce. I can't remember who it was, but someone explained to us all why some people hate mushrooms: they contain a chemical that only a small percentage of people can taste, and those who can taste it find it disgusting. It's genetic apparently. I'm glad I don't have this gene!

Oh, and I almost forgot, at the beginning of the meal everyone on my table (except Jon Thwaite) discovered that they were wearing tour T-shirts, and we almost had the complete set. Paul Bushby made sure that we did have the complete set (from 1998 to 2002) by changing into his Wales (“Here We Cwm”) shirt, and commemoration photographs were taken. Jon Thwaite even went and changed into his tour T-shirt so that he wouldn't feel left out. The even more surprising thing was that no-one else in the whole room was wearing a tour T-shirt (at least not as their outside layer); awful puns must attract each other with some strange new force that physicists have yet to discover.

Next stop was Cheltenham for our joint concert with the Cheltenham Silver Band. There was a great deal of craziness with the “massed bands” pieces – there must have been more than 50 of us altogether. We finished the joint rehearsal about 5 minutes before the concert was due to start, and most of the audience had already arrived by the time we started to rehearse the opening piece. I don't know quite how we managed to get an audience of only five people, but we did. Luckily the Cheltenham players sat in the audience for our first half and we sat in the audience for their second half so the concert wasn't quite as ridiculous as it could have been! CUBB played about as badly as they have ever played, with a whole new level of rankness being reached in the middle of Music for a Festival. No-one was concentrating, everyone's lips had gone, and most of the audience weren't interested in hearing us play. All the ingredients of a fantastic concert. I quite enjoyed the second half though, as the other band played much better than we did. The finale was “Backdraft” played by both bands together; to give you an idea of what it sounded like, the dynamic markings start at “f” and increase throughout. Having said that, I didn't think it sounded too bad.

The journey back to the hostel was fairly surreal, with Kieren at the front of the coach conducting the band as we “played” various pieces from our repertoire. We started off whistling (Londonderry Air was especially good in my opinion), and when we were fed up of everyone starting in their own key we changed to singing; we all sang our parts to such classics as West Side Story. Andy Houghton sang the Euphonium solo particularly beautifully… Unfortunately (?) there weren't enough people there who knew their parts to the Floral Dance to get that going.

Back at the hostel everyone was fairly subdued after the exertion on the coach but we soon perked up when the Band Quiz got going. The quizmasters this year were Paul Davis, Ben Russell and Aidan Sproat, and the comedy highlight was definitely the spawn sack race at the end to decide the winning team. Other notable rounds included the first “Strongest Link” round (where each team had to vote off the strongest link from the opposing team after each set of questions), in which one team was quickly whittled down to people who had not been in the band before this year; in fact before Bob the driver was voted off, he was the longest serving band member in the team! (He was our also driver for tour two years ago, so he was the only one on the team who knew the answer to the question “Who murdered Dave Read's hamster during tour 2000?”) There was a disappointing lack of Keema Naan in the Blankety Band round, but that's probably a good thing. Jason Morley and Claire Sutcliffe excelled themselves in the Air Guitar round, with Jason even using the teeth-plucking and behind-the-head moves, and throwing a chair across the room. When John Bichard was blindfolded for “Feel the Bandsman”, he did the natural thing: wandered around the room bumping into things, picking up chairs, etc. Once the quizmasters had managed to get him to stand still and play the game, he decided to go for someone on his own team when asked who it was he was feeling, despite the fact that they were all still sitting in their chairs cheering him on. When told that he wasn't allowed to choose someone on his own team he went for the person on the opposite team who was also attempting to identify the mystery band member – he obviously thought the organisers were trying to trick him! The spawn sack race at the end of the quiz was eventually won by the Cornet 1 team in spite of some blatant cheating by the other team on the second leg of the relay. All in all a very enjoyable evening.

Sadly, about half way through the quiz, the beer ran out. By the end of the quiz we had also drunk all the lager and cider in the building, and we were forced to scavenge through the empties looking for the last drops of alcohol by about 1:30am. So, what does a band do when it runs out of alcohol on a scout camp in the middle of nowhere just north of Bristol? It walks to Wales, of course! Paul Davis, Tim Styles and I had always been planning to do this, but we had no idea we would be able to convince a group of 11 people to come. We all donned our beer jackets and climbed in our beer taxis, and set off down the road towards the Severn Bridge. So that we could be sure we hadn't lost anyone, a numbering scheme was set up whereby we all called out our numbers in order and if we got to 12 we were all present and correct. Yes, there were only 11 of us, but Paul Davis decided to be “Pi”, “6” and “12”.

We reached the start of the bridge very quickly with the whole group managing to keep together despite the fast walking pace. The alcohol in our systems was beginning to disappear however, and walking over the 3-mile long bridge definitely took the enthusiasm out of a few of the group. Some people decided to express their views on the River Severn by pissing off the side of the bridge (it was very refreshing apparently). A “strike two” across what we thought must be the border between England and Wales seemed the only sensible thing to do. We had passed a “Welcome to England” sign near the toll booths on the English side of the bridge, so we were looking for the equivalent “Welcome to Wales” sign on the Welsh side to have a group photo taken under, but there was no sign to be found. We settled for one that said “Services / Gwasanaethau 2m & 26m” to prove that we had been to Wales. A picnic was definitely called for at that point, so we stopped for 20 minutes to rehydrate and refuel. Rob Richards came out with the quote “When I'm 50 I'll look back on this fondly. Only 30 years to wait!” which summed up the situation quite well for most of the people who had come along for the lack of anything better to do. Rob also decided to start pissing on every sign he found at this point (actually he could have been doing it for the whole trip but I only noticed when we stopped for our picnic).

When we set off back to England it was shortly after 4am so I got out my alarm clock (yes, of course I had brought it with me, you didn't think I was going to miss a 4:23am did you?) ready for action. At 4:21am we stopped for a group photo with the clock balanced on a post at the side of the motorway somewhere in the middle of the bridge, and the 4:23am announcement was caught on video with my digital camera. Someone pointed out that we might have just witnessed the last ever 4:23am on a band tour, as I am leaving at the end of the year and I might take my alarm clock with me… I'll have to leave it to the band so that future members don't miss out on the tradition.

The return journey was a little slower than the outward one, and the group began to diverge significantly. Our beer taxis had definitely run out of fuel at this point. After numerous stops to allow everyone to catch up, we made it back just before 6:30am when it was well on the way to being light. A quick survivors photo was taken before we went back into the hostel; our fears that the rest of the band would have locked us out and we would have to break in turned out to be unfounded as Ramsey and Andrew Mosedale had already got up to watch the Grand Prix. I made myself some cheese on toast then crawled into bed at about 7am, but Steve Hardiman decided to stay up all night.

A few short hours later it was time for the band football match. Kieren decided to get us back for waking him up at 6:45am when we went to bed by coming into the room every 5 minutes and turning the light on, so we didn't really have much chance of a lie-in. Kick-off was at about 11am, but most of the people who had walked to Wales that night decided to give the football a miss this year. I went over and took some photos of the action, managing to keep my distance and look tired enough that they didn't make me join in. It was “Cornets & Conductor” vs. “Others” this year and the cornets won 3-0. Goal-scorers were Tim Styles (from Ben Russell), Kieren Hollingsworth and Andrew Brennan. All very exciting stuff I'm sure.

The preparation of lunch (bangers and mash) was going on at the same time as the football match. While the raw potatoes were being put on to cook, someone asked why they hadn't been mashed yet when we were planning to have mashed potatoes; I think the response they got was something like “OK, you try mashing the raw potatoes…”. He declined, and the potatoes were mashed at the more traditional after-cooking stage. The food was gobbled up by the hungry bandsmen, and then the cleaning of the hostel began. Bob did more than his fair share of mopping; in fact he probably did almost all of the mopping that there was to be done. Maybe he enjoys it, perhaps even as much as Chris Kemp seemed to on the first night. No amusing turd incidents were to occur, and even the lost property announcements didn't contain any embarrassing underwear.

When the Lovell Centre was as clean as it had been when we arrived (well almost), we left for Stratford-upon-Avon. On the way there Chris Howlett and Andrew Mosedale decided to entertain us all (?) with their whistling, and very nearly got themselves deventilated (i.e. thrown out of the ventilation hatches in the roof of the coach). We just about managed to stay calm and collected though, and they did stop whistling eventually.

In Stratford the coach parked opposite another coach that said “Laver Holidays Limited” on the side so we took the obligatory photo (don't ask – if you don't know why that's amusing then you probably don't want to know). Despite the rain we made our way to an excellent cream tea shop, the band's cream tea antennae working overtime again. Three separate groups all managed to find their way to the same shop, but they couldn't seat the last group that arrived so they were turned away disappointed. Luckily I was in the first group that arrived, and we were glad that we had managed to get a table because the cream tea was gorgeous! It arrived beautifully presented on a large plate, with four spoons sticking out of the huge pile of freshly whipped cream in the centre pointing towards the four ravenous consumers. We even got a cake thrown into the bargain, and our second batch of eight cups of tea was put down on the bill as a 50p refill! I'm definitely going there again next time I'm in Stratford, if only to experience again the comedy milk jugs that poured the milk everywhere except into the cup and the waterproof napkins.

As we boarded the bus for the last time, tour was drawing to a close so we arranged to meet up after we had all taken our stuff back to our rooms for a pint and a curry. Great plan methinks. After the coach had completed the drop-offs around Cambridge the County Arms was the proposed meeting place, and we descended upon it feeling fully refreshed from nice hot showers. The staff and other customers there were suitably amused/baffled by our tour T-shirts; I don't think they knew what the picture was supposed to be. A very nice curry in the Maharajah made a great ending to a marvellous tour, especially as they got our order right first time, the bill was reasonable, and everybody threw in so we easily had enough money to pay! Maybe we were all so tired that we were hallucinating…

“Entertain us with your sleight of hand” - Steve Arnold to Tom Price “And if you can't do that entertain us with your body” - Mike Tildesley to Tom (20/06/01)

“I'm surprised they don't ache playing with such a big instrument between their legs” - Kieren Hollingsworth (20/06/01)

“A man knows when to stop and this is the time. Oh f*** it, I'll have another” - Rob Richards (20/06/01)

“I'd like to see the look on the bar staff's faces when they came round the corner and found us all naked” - Kieren Hollingsworth (20/06/01)