Music festival season is under way and the band I'm in is suddenly in demand. If I'm not at a 50th birthday party on a given weekend, then I'm out there on the road, travelling from gig to gig or, as my wife puts it, "ruining summer".
Everywhere we play, word of our branded tea towels precedes us. It's one thing to be appreciated for your innovative merchandising, and another to be upstaged by it. Supergrass, I'm told, used to do ironing board covers, but they didn't let it define them.
On an overcast afternoon at Bearded Theory in Derby, the fiddle player and I are examining the schedule taped to the tent flap. We're on after a skiffle band. And before a skiffle band. The band presently on stage, we learn, is called Wall Of Skiffle. A man in a?high-visibility vest approaches us.
"You have a lot of skiffle bands playing," the fiddle player says.
"It's Skiffle Saturday," the man?says.
"Is it?" the fiddle player asks. "But?we're not a skiffle band." During the intervening silence, the man's walkie-talkie exhales fuzzily.
"Are you the ones with the tea?towels?" he asks.
The next weekend at the Lechlade festival, strangers are tweeting me before we go on, asking if we've brought tea towels. Afterwards, people buy them two at a time. They even ask us to sign them, as if we'd invented drying up.
"I think the ink might come off on?the dishes," I say.
"I don't care!" says a man with a?pen.
The next weekend holds both a?festival and a 50th birthday party. On the morning between them, I?drive alone from one to the other, exhausted and harried. The satnav voice and I do not agree about the best way to get to the M5, and I feel he is taking advantage of my frailty in order to push his agenda.
"Take the second exit," he says.
"Fine," I say. "It's going to make us late, but whatever."
Wychwood festival is in the grounds of Cheltenham racecourse, and after a few wrong turns I find myself at the box office, having a?wristband attached. The pass for my car says "main stage". As I am guided round the edge of the car park by a series of stewards, I see the stage looming above a line of trees. It's enormous. A man I will later discover to be CBeebies Mr Bloom is?a tiny dot at its centre.
One last turn takes me into the heart of the festival, down a fenced track running along the rail of the course. Ahead of me I can see the back of the main stage, and an enclosure parked up with huge tour buses and sleek black lorries.
"You have arrived," the satnav says.
"You're telling me," I say.
I pull up alongside a final pair of stewards, a?man and a woman, and roll down my window.
"Hi," the woman says. "I?know?you!"
"Hi," I say.
"Why do I know you?" she asks, wringing her hands with excitement.
"I don't know," I say.
"It's your face!" she says.
"Is it?" I glance at myself in the rear-view mirror: red eyes behind smudged glasses, ashen cheeks, scrubby beard. I look like a recently released hostage.
"Are you on the telly?" she says.
"No," I say.
"Yes, you are!" she says. "I?recognise you!"
"Honestly," I say. "I'm not."
"What's your name?" she says.
I?tell her.
"Oh," she says. Her face goes slack with disappointment as she extends one arm. "It's just that gate there."
"Sorry," I say.
The tea towels, meanwhile, have gone to a second printing.
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