The Uncommon Cold

Grassroots Venues and Catching a Cold From a Queen

I’ve had a cold for about ten days. I think I caught it at a new art-based soft play thing I went to with my daughter and granddaughter. It had only just opened. Camilla Parker Bowles had cut the ribbon two days before we were there. It is possible that I caught the cold from her. The more I think about it, it is definitely where it came from. It just doesn’t feel like a common cold. It’s got Royal Family written all over it. The snot is blue.

When we went to the art-based soft play, just like at other soft plays I’ve been to – the one hidden at the back of a deserted shopping mall in Sutton, the soft play in a Wallington garden centre, or the one we built in our house using cushions and imagination – the rules were always the same: shoes off, socks on. At the new art-based place, the children also had to remove their socks. I think it was because the floor was a bit slippery. It was a great place. And as it was so new, it wasn’t scuff-marked or tarnished by toilet accidents yet. But I did have the same feeling I’ve had on some of the newer London buses. That they were designed on paper or on a computer screen and then built without anyone finding out whether there would be enough room for passengers with legs. I’m not convinced this new soft play had been tried out using actual children. But it was too late now. They’d built the thing and a member of the royal family had opened it. So, it was decided that the adults could keep their socks on, but the children had to take theirs off. Better to risk a verruca outbreak than a small child slipping and breaking a bone.

Hey. I’ve just announced some live shows for next March. You can buy tickets now

I think all these venues fall under the umbrella term of ‘grassroots’. The Music Venue Trust define a grassroots music venue in a number of ways.

https://www.musicvenuetrust.com/resources/grassroots-music-venue-gmvs-definition/

I don’t understand the elephant thing.

Grassroots venues are often described – usually in news items somewhere on the BBC – as rungs on a ladder to six nights at Wembley Stadium. They’re the journey but rarely the destination. ‘Grassroots music venues, which offer a vital launchpad for fledgling acts, risk closure, new research warns’, BBC News has just informed me.

I’m not a fledgling act. I did all my fledgling ages ago. And I don’t think of any of these venues I’m playing next March as launchpads. Unless they’re launchpads to a great night out or something. The whole grassroots venues as stepping stones to somewhere bigger nonsense is as irritating as referring to any gig bigger than the ones that I’m playing next March as ‘intimate’. I was going to write a lot more about all this, but I’ve bored myself, so I’m going to just abandon it here and go and make some dinner.

One last thing before I go, though. If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s true that there’s ‘one rule for us and another rule for them’, take a look at this picture of Queen Camilla opening the art-based soft play place.

She’s wearing shoes!

What the actual F.