I leave my wife and the youngest one sitting in the sun at the Larmer Tree festival. “See you in a minute,” says my wife.
I plod across a field, very much against the run of human traffic, in search of the location of a Q&A I agreed to do some months ago. I’ve been to this festival in previous years, but I’ve never navigated the layout in anything other than driving rain. The good weather is disorienting.
Outside the venue, I find my friend Martin, who lives locally and has agreed to do the Q portion of the Q&A. We did it once before, about a year ago, and it seemed to go well.
“Is there anything you would like to be different from last time?” he asks.
“Not really,” I say. “Though maybe this time you shouldn’t ask me how much I drink in front of everyone.”
“Fine,” he says. “Although I think your refusal to engage with that question is a story in itself.”
“No,” I say. “I just don’t have a funny answer.”
“This time,” he says, “when I ask you something, your answer must be at least as long as my question. You can’t just say, ‘Yeah’, to everything.”
“OK,” I say. I think: maybe it didn’t go that well last time.
The room fills up as we wait behind the stage; through the curtain, I can see the youngest one loitering by the doors.
On stage, two microphones have been set up, along with two chairs and a table with a jug with some water in it. It’s just like last time, except this time the microphones don’t work. We end up having to shout.
The Q&A proceeds much in the manner of the previous one: Martin repeatedly attempts to paint me as a man who is secretly competent, self-assured and content – a fraud, basically – and I deny everything for 35 minutes. He doesn’t ask me how much I drink, unlike last time, when I didn’t have a funny answer and ended up staring at my feet, briefly leading 100 people to wonder if they’d accidentally bought tickets to an intervention.
The time comes to take questions from the floor. It’s a tense moment. Up until that point, we don’t even know why these people have come – they might have just misread the programme. The first question might be, “Why aren’t you Bill Bailey?”
It turns out that most people just want some loose ends tied up. “How did you get out of the van?” asks one man, referring to last week’s column. I explain that another band member eventually showed up and let me out, well before I had cause to swallow my tongue.
“How is the old dog?” asks someone else.
I explain that the old dog’s life has been transformed by some expensive medicine, and it has gone back to following me wherever I go, even up the stairs.
“Will your wife reveal herself today?” asks a woman at the back of the room. It sounds like something you’d ask at a seance.
I explain that my wife would probably refuse to make her presence known under the current conditions, trying not to catch my wife’s eye as I do so, which is difficult because she’s sitting directly behind the woman who asked the question, and glaring at me.
Afterwards, the youngest one tells me that at the end, a woman came out of the venue waving a pointy metal water bottle she’d found under a seat, shouting, “Did anyone leave this in Tim Dowling?”
“I was, like, I really hope not,” he says. “That would be painful.”
We stare at each other for a moment.
“Nice,” I say.
