Three Halls, One Tank of Fuel: Notes From a Tour That Never Left the County

I have a spreadsheet called TOUR, which is a grand name for a document with three rows in it. Three venues. A village hall with a stage that squeaks, a small arts centre with proper blackout and a slightly temperamental boiler, and a church with an acoustic that makes even my voice sound like it knows what it's doing. Fourteen miles from my door to the furthest one. If I leave at the right time, I can be home before the radio news has finished.

For a while I thought that was a failure of nerve. Then I did the sums, and then I did the shows, and I've changed my mind about what a tour is actually for.

The spreadsheet that refused to grow

Every time I opened TOUR, I felt I ought to add a city. Bristol, maybe. Or a little run up north with a night in a Travelodge and a sandwich eaten over a steering wheel. That's the shape ambition is supposed to take, isn't it? More miles, bigger rooms, an itinerary you can post a photo of.

What I did instead was phone three people I already knew and ask if they'd have me. Two said yes immediately. One said yes but asked whether the second week of November was too close to the school fair, which turned out to be exactly the right question.

The budget was almost funny. No accommodation. No van hire — my neighbour's estate car, seats down, with a bag of cables wedged against the door. One tank of fuel for the whole run, and I didn't quite empty it. The money that would have gone on petrol, service station coffee and the small fortune you spend when you're tired and away from home went instead into paying my collaborator properly and into a better class of biscuit at the interval. Both of those, I'd argue, are artistic decisions.

What it actually cost

I don't want to pretend this was free, because it wasn't. It cost me in asking.

Promoting three dates in your own patch is a grind of a very specific kind. Parish newsletters with copy deadlines three weeks before you've finished writing the show. The chip shop window. Two library noticeboards and a slightly passive-aggressive conversation about drawing pins. Three separate Facebook groups where the same post has to be reworded because the admins are lovely but particular. And the school gate, which is the most efficient distribution network in the country if you can get the timing right.

The harder thing is the familiarity discount. When you're local, people assume they'll catch it next time. There is no urgency in a venue you could walk to. So I had to work much harder on saying what the evening actually was, rather than just that it existed. The posters had to do more than announce. They had to persuade somebody that a Tuesday in a hall they've been to for jumble sales might be worth an evening of their life.

The carbon bit, without the lectern

I'm wary of making this sound like a moral position, because a person driving fourteen miles to a village hall isn't saving the planet. But the numbers are still worth saying out loud.

For the whole run, the car did the work of what would have been several hundred miles plus a night away. That's a real reduction, and it's not nothing. What I noticed, though, is that my travel was never the big slice. The audience's travel is. Three venues drawing from three sets of surrounding villages means most people drove ten minutes to get to me. Which is fine, and also means the honest thing to say is: I shortened my journey, and the more useful question is whether the venues are near enough to the people who'd want to come. In this case, they were. That's the whole argument.

The energy ledger

This is the bit nobody puts in the funding report.

Sleeping in your own bed between shows means you arrive at the third night still able to do the thing. No 5am coffee from a machine that hates you. No hour spent staring at a hotel ceiling replaying the bit that went wrong. I had a full day between each date to fix the small problems — a lighting cue, a line that wasn't landing, a running order that needed one more breath in the middle — instead of fixing them in a car park.

By the last night I was tired in the good way. The way that means you did the work rather than survived the logistics.

People are the infrastructure

A local run runs on favours, and I mean that as a compliment to everybody involved.

Hazel had the key to the village hall and also, it turned out, a spare urn. The arts centre lent me a lamp stand and didn't make me sign anything. Someone's dad brought a gazebo in case the queue formed outside. The vicar put the heating on two hours early because he'd been to a cold concert once and had never forgotten it.

What that asks of you in return is honesty and reciprocity. I put every one of them in the programme by name. I sent photographs afterwards without being asked. I bought raffle tickets I had no interest in winning. When Hazel's choir needed a hand with their poster, I did their poster. That's not networking. That's being a neighbour who also happens to make things.

Ambition, measured badly

Here's what I've landed on. Ambition is not a distance. It's a standard.

A room of fifty in a hall with a bad stage and a queue for the loo can be more ambitious than two hundred in a city where half the audience came because it was raining and the tickets were cheap. What I wanted from these three nights was for the work to be better at the end of the run than at the start, and for the people who came to feel they'd been told something true. That happened. It happened partly because I wasn't knackered.

One woman came to all three. She sat in a different seat each time, which I only noticed on the last night, and afterwards she told me which version she'd liked best and why. That is worth more to me than a venue I'd have needed a train and a taxi to reach.

I still want to go further. That's not a rejection of distance — it's just a decision about this particular autumn, made with a spreadsheet that has three rows and a tank of fuel that got me home in time for the ten o'clock news.

If you're planning something similar, my advice is unglamorous: start the local press earlier than feels sensible, make one poster template and reuse it shamelessly, and ask each venue to swap a line on their mailing list. And when you drive home in ten minutes, use the time you've saved to wash up properly. The kettle doesn't fill itself.