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I know the popular image of rock’n’roll road crew is that they’re a hard-drinking bunch of ne’er-do-wells, chock full of drugs and nonsense, which is why it may come as a surprise to hear that last night’s conversation on the tour bus was about relativity, and how that affects time. Why does a clock sent into space for a month show a different time when it returns from one which stayed on earth?
From this conversation I’ve learned the following: that riggers don’t age as fast because they work high up in the arena roof, further from the centre of the earth.* That a crew who work from stage left to stage right (where left is in the east) will end up slightly younger than a crew who work from right to left. That if a tour is planned so that the dates run sequentially westwards round the world, it’s entirely possible to live forever.
Now I may have got some of that wrong – I was hopelessly out of my depth during the discussion, and did keep trying to steer the chat back to knob gags – but you get the gist. Tonight’s topic is the legacy of the Hundred Years War, followed by a debate about the future of public transport infrastructure in the UK.
I’m not entirely sure this is what I signed up for when I got into the business. What ever happened to the drugs and nonsense??? *sigh*
*this advantage is more than outweighed by the lifestyle of the traditional rigger.