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there then but had vainly promised that next time I would be. A similar storm had now hit
and I hadn't kept my promise.
Natalie had been out in that storm having to muck about with shutters and whatever else
had come loose, and if, like me, you'd been on the road for ten days working every night to
drunken Christmas audiences and were feeling a bit strung out anyway, your mind runs away
with you. What if she'd been hit? What if she'd been picked up by the tornado? At this point
I was a gibbering wreck. According to the news the storms in France would blow themselves
out by that night but, and this happens at this time every year when fatigue and the weather
conspire to make me paranoid, I couldn't think of anything else but getting home.
'Are you OK?' she asked. 'You'll be home soon.'
I didn't need reminding. My remaining gig in Oxford was unlikely to go ahead and even if
it did I wasn't prepared to battle my way there and end up not being able to get out again.
I told the organisers in Oxford that I wouldn't be able to make it and that I didn't think the
other three acts on the bill would make it either. The gig was cancelled and I began to make
plans. It wasn't just a case of getting back to France; there was the logistical problem of just
getting out of Crawley. As things stood, even trains from Sussex to London were problematic
- going further than that looked nigh on impossible. This tends to happen every year. I try
and make it back home for 21 December so that I can spend my birthday with Natalie and the
boys, but it doesn't always work out like that. I had spent the previous year, my thirty-ninth
birthday, sitting in a room at the Radisson Hotel in Stansted Airport and from my vantage
point morosely watching heavy snow fall onto the runway, listening to radio reports of 'un-
precedented' weather and travel 'chaos'. I was watching this unpleasant wintry scene while
sipping from a warm bottle of champagne kindly donated by a comedy club for my birthday
and chewing angrily on cheap, shop-bought sandwiches from Spar. I eventually got home on
the evening of the twenty-third, but it was a low ebb.
This year I had made contingency plans. I had a flight booked from Stansted to Poitiers,
a seat on a Eurostar to Paris and, just in case, a foot passenger ticket from Dover to Calais.
The only thing I hadn't done was provisionally hire my own boat. It was the kind of jour-
ney that Ranulph Fiennes would write a book about. I got the last train out of Crawley go-
ing to London Bridge, then walked across London to King's Cross which was in chaos. The
Eurostar trains had been frozen by the 'wrong kind of ice' and no-one could see them moving
for a couple of days. I made a decision and managed to get a train from Liverpool Street to
Stansted and camped down in the airport hoping that the airline's desire to avoid cancella-
tions and recompense would mean that safety concerns would be loosened and my flight to
Poitiers would leave early the following morning. It did, powered not so much by the air-
craft's engines but by the sighs of relief from everyone on board. The aircrew, whose main
job it seems is to sell stuff on the flight, had a field day on that flight as, despite the early
hour, the bar was emptied and weary travellers dared to dream that they might actually make
