I was away this week, travelling up to the Northeast of Sweden with GEST and Offline, the show we devised. A proper tour of the provinces, playing in a pair of small towns around the Västerås region. Hence the nerdy Game of Thrones reference - yes, I've been touring Westeross. Geek pride.
Arboga is even a medieval town (actually medieaval, according to the tourist guide. The extra vowel makes it extra authentic). The bridge in the middle of town has a huge bronze telescope fixed on the brutally jagged rock in the river nearby, on which merchants wrecked their ship and were obliged to found a town in order to survive. They did a good job of it, at least. Six hundred or so years later, it's all still there. Narrow streets full of little crooked houses, crumbling brickwork and imposing wooden doors, a church with a witch's hat steeple and a strange surfeit of podiatry shops.
We were performing in a downstairs room at the library, a nice concrete 70s building full of distressed wood and violent orange and brown fixtures. Our show is a short detective thriller about a missing boy (we play police), and the room we were in felt like a 70s police station briefing room. It just lacked a greasy haze of cigarette smoke and masculine corruption.
The town felt empty. Not that Gothenburg is massive or anything, it's about the size of Coventry I think, but Arboga's streets seemed perpetually deserted and eerily quiet. The massive Konditories on the main square stretched on through two or three buildings each, one like a Georgian mansion, the other like a 1940s tea room in the Lake District. Possibly the entire Lake District, it really was massive. Locals stared at us surreptitiously, presumably wondering if we were about to order the finest wines known to humanity in plummy tones. Miss Blennerhasset would have been alarmed.
Strange being away on tour again, living out of a suitcase in the latest in a long series of adequate hotels. My colleague B had no running water in hers. I had a bed as soft as a damp victoria sponge, from which I watched the sun rise after a sleepless night. I sing the night-night songs to the girls over Skype, I watch Netflix over patchy wifi, I eat too much breakfast at the buffet to compensate for the lack of sleep. I forget to pack the shampoo I bought to replace the shampoo I should have taken with me from home. Touring is tiring. It feels like it ought to be fun, a working holiday almost, and instead there is the conflict between laziness and protestant work guilt, that although I should be pleased to be doing my job, I'd perhaps rather be at home with comfortable pillows and less cash.
Lots of picturesque woods around Arboga. I was looking forward to walking through them in our afternoon off. It hailed heavily, enough to hurt even under the cover of the pines, and I retreated to the featureless safety of the hotel.
Three more days until home.
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