Tim Dowling: bad wine, rain and daytime TV – I must be back on the road

The band I’m in has a run of dates, our first shows since summer: Exeter, Bristol, Cardiff. I am eager to play again, but I’m not looking forward to the first five songs of the very first gig, which is about how long it takes me to find my feet on stage. Up until that point it feels as if I’ve invited a bunch of people to come and watch me lose a tennis match.

“How was that for you?” says the guitarist afterward.

“The sound was good,” I say. “I heard all my mistakes clearly.”

The show in Bristol goes better, because we have rejigged the order of songs in a way that addresses my frailties as a musician. My biggest mistake comes well before the gig, when I copy out the setlists inaccurately, so the drummer’s list is not quite the same as the bassist’s, or indeed mine.

It takes a long time to find our hotel that night, which is buried deep in an industrial estate near the nexus of the M4 and the M5, apparently with access to neither. The hotel’s all-night lounge is the sort of facility you might expect to find on an oil rig – plastic chairs under bright lights. When I arrive, the accordion player is already at the bar.

“You’re not doing the setlist tomorrow,” he says.

“Fine,” I say.

“What d’you want?” he says. The woman behind the bar looks up and smiles at me expectantly.

I want to say: your least worst wine. But we are spending two nights in this hotel, so it seems wise to be diplomatic.

“How about that one?” I say, pointing to the shelf behind her. The woman turns and reaches for a bottle of white with a picture of a hummingbird approaching a flower on it.

“Not that one,” I say, a little too quickly. “The one next to it.”

But the one next to it is four inches back from the edge of the shelf, just beyond the woman’s grasp. She stands on tiptoe, but her fingers only brush the label. She stretches, to no avail.

“I’ll just see if we’ve got any out back,” she says, and disappears, seemingly for good. We stare at the bottle on the shelf for a while.

“I could reach that,” I say.

The next morning I open my curtains to a rain-sodden view of a giant food distribution depot with a roundabout in front of it, a scene that replicates itself into the distance in every direction. We don’t have to be in Cardiff until the afternoon, but there do not appear to be any local points of interest to visit.

Instead I lie on the hotel bed watching Ainsley’s Good Mood Food on ITV. In this episode Ainsley Harriott is visiting an award-winning beach cafe. “I’m looking forward to tasting one of your famous crab sandwiches!” he says, doing a weird thing with his hands like he’s wiping two imaginary windows. During the ad break I try this move out in the mirror, but my version lacks insouciance.

We reach Cardiff by 3pm, and at 8pm we take the stage for the final gig of the weekend. The audience is in high spirits, but they are also attentive, which I find unnerving. Between songs four and five they listen to me retuning my banjo in rapt silence. I think: I must try to engage them.

“Did anyone else see Ainsley’s Good Mood Food this morning?” I say. This elicits no response beyond mild bewilderment. Perhaps the TV schedules are different in Wales.

It is past midnight by the time we reach the hotel on the roundabout in the giant industrial park. The atmosphere in the brightly lit bar is just as soulless. We sit and discuss mistakes we made, musical and otherwise.

“Would we drink more red if I paid?” I say.

“I think we probably would,” says the fiddle player.

I go up to the bar alone. The woman smiles at me.

“Could I have that bottle of red, please?” I say.

“Certainly,” she says. It is, I realise, the same bottle from the night before. It is a different woman, but alas she is even shorter than the previous incumbent. On tiptoe her fingers are not even close to making contact. I am ready to try the wine with the hummingbird on it.

But the woman picks up a bottle of rosé and, holding it by the neck, attempts to bat my bottle from the shelf. She knocks it into some other bottles which teeter off the edge, but she hammers them back in place with her rosé. The sound alone is hugely alarming. Finally, she succeeds in bouncing my bottle against the back wall. It falls off the shelf, and she catches it.

“There you go!” she says, beaming. “How many glasses?”