I wonder why it continues to amaze me how some people draw an example from their own extremely limited experience and present it as a universal truth that couldn't possibly exist in a variant or contradictory form.

Take venues: they know the one in their immediate vicinity which they perhaps help run, and another a few miles down the road where their second cousin does the door - and that's it. They know thus every aspect of event management and pronouce that they're all the same: well-run and squeaky clean. Bad experiences and rippings off just never happen. They couldn't, could they? Not among 'f*lkies' (yuk how I despise that condescending term). They're all 'nice'. No, they're not. In this thread alone, they range from those who want to marry me to those who order me to go and fuck myself.

If these 'know-it-alls' would just take themselves off for a change (I wish) and travel the length and breadth of the land (as I have though always rapidly through Lincolnshire), they'd discover that venues actually range from the civilised country hotel where you're given a room maybe even with a shower if you're really lucky, to the extremely nasty inner city pub where you're mistaken upon arrival for the strip act booked for the other bar. (I'm assuming that's what happened when the Witches got told to get changed behind the bar).

Where you sleep (if offered at all) might be OK but can be (and usually is) horrendous, and not much option about who with. As for getting paid, once in a blue moon it might be handed over willingly and exceed the contract fee, though I cannot recall such a happening. Far more often, a lot of wrangling, shouting and threats have to occur before often not all of it materialises.

Then you could get stuck in the beer-soaked, smelly, gloomy bar with the tedious, slimy sound engineer (not that they all are but this one was) who insists on describing every last detail of his boring working life, Then someone overhears you telling him to plug his things in the wrong way round (please, just DO it and disappear in a puff of smoke) and repeats what you said entirely out of context. They don't, of course, remember all the shit that's been hurled at you first . . .

Oh yes, life on the road is ever so jolly and such a doddle. Why, you only work for two hours a day and not every day at that. And of course you don't have living expenses like the smug, stay-at-home citizens who hand over their hard-earned . . . ooh £3, £4 or even FIVE pounds at the door. Be bloody grateful and shut the fuck up. You're only the hired employee paid to entertain. So do it.