Back down to earth then. Back to normality, and I would like to ask – am I alone in the world from suffering from what I’d call “Post-excitement blues”? i.e. you have a massive high about something that you’ve done, or somewhere where you’ve been and when it’s all over – and you realise it’s all over – it sinks in that you’re not having fun anymore at which point you go on a massive low for a day or two before you recover, and start looking forward to the next thing.

This is what happens to me … and what’s weird is that it hasn’t hit me yet, but I’ve known the feeling happen so often that I know that at somepoint this week I’m going to have a wobbly day. Arse. But already i’m looking forward to “Geoff’s next project” – i.e. Charity Tube Runs, to the point that that maybe, just maybe, I’ll get into the swing of that ‘project’ now, and i’ll get away with it.

So I was in Newcastle for four days, a day off inbetween, and then it was Leicester for three days.

I’ve been going to bed about 2am each night anyway from going out with the the team, and then with my plane home being diverted to Manchester and having to drive home instead throughout the early hours of the morning, I’m severely not getting a lot of sleep … but the adrenalin of the event is keeping me pumped and keeping me going.

I got about 4 hours sleep on Thursday morning between 6 and 10am, and then got up – put some washing on, checked my emails, before then packing up again and hot footing it up to Leicester for the rig setup, and two more days of meeting the public.

The days are fun. People come in .. the kids are the most fun. I pop over over to Woolworths and buy (out of my own pocket!) big tubs of pick ‘n’ mix and hand them out to them as we do their news story. (The 8 to 15 years olds get to have a go of the CBBC Newsround Presspack site incidentaly). I fix a few techinical problems, I sprint down to WHSmiths at one one point to buy a colour ink-cartridge as we’d run out and hadn’t realised, and streaky colour printouts where all the green is used up doesn’t look good and make for unhappy punters!

I chip in the with leaflet distribution, and recruitement – “So how did you get your job at the BBC?” I get asked for the Nth time, end up chatting to a cool teenage guy with advice on how to setup his own website. I even manage to fix a problem on a Mac (Kristina would be so proud of me) when Photoshop on the News Graphics stand throws a little wobbly.

But generally, I’m chipping in with the website team, and helping create fun, dummy news website stories for punters.

Being a weekday, the only people about (generally speaking) are mothers will children, old people, school kids on holiday, and … the nutters. And – oh – how they came out. In their bad fitting clothes, anoraks, geeky walks and general body odour problems. They came back more than once, they tried to do the same thing twice and on one occasion security had to eject one of the guys when he kept going up to hassle one of the news presenters (more on that in a mo).

My worst was a guy, who absolutely stunk – no exaggeration – and I had to sit with him for a looooong 10 minutes as we typed out a fake news story for him and everytime I turned to speak to him to ask him what his name was, where he was from etc.. (to insert into the template) I would notice his dirty finger nails, his brown rotting teeth, where he hasn’t washed his neck for weeks, and my nose screamed at me “What are you subjecting me to you bastard?”. But you just smile, talk politely, and get on with it. You see how dedicated we are to the license paying public? Not that he probably owned a TV or maybe paid for it.

There was also a truly weird guy who started talking to us about the advantages of dent-resistant bodywork metal, and how car manufacturers should be producing cars using this technique. He insisted on showing me a car forum website where he’d made some postings about it, and asked me “Why the BBC hadn’t replied to him when he’s asked them if they would make a documentary about it”. He then said he was going to ask Dermot if he would mention it on TV as “It was a very important issue that he felt wasn’t being address proplerly.” Oh god. Help!

The ‘big name celeb’ news presenter that we had at Leicester on Friday was Dermot Murnaghan, and obviously as BBC staff you have to obey that unwritten rule of “Thou shalst not get excited when you see a TV presenter in the flesh because you’re staff and you’re not meant to act like a twat in their presence”. (Note: The only time I broke this was at work one day when I got into the lift to see Garth Crooks, who – yes – is a BBC sport presenter, but is also actually an ex-Tottenham player and used to be in pictures of posters of Tottenham on my wall when I was a kid, and so I got slightly overwhelmed from a sporting hero point of view, and not a TV celeb point of view.) Anyway – I digress, for I then had a truly beautifully emotional moment which will be my most lasting memory of the week.

I’m standing around talking to people, when a lady came up to me and said “Excuse me .. hello .. aren’t you that Geoff Marshall that goes round the tube?”. And I looked at her – and I didn’t know her – and I looked down at my name badge to check that it just said ‘Geoff‘ and not my surname, and thought “Oh my god, I now get spotted outside of London and in Leicester too”.

I won’t say her name (I’ll call her ‘B’), but I ended up doing a news story for her as per other punters and as we did so she told me her life story as we went. She suffered from Multiple Sclerosis, and she told me her terrible story of how she’d become slowly ill over the past few years, and now couldn’t see out of one eye, couldn’t get up and down stairs anymore, and how her whole nervous system was generally slowly deteriorating and that and when she said “I can’t even go on the tube anymore like you do because of all those stairs and escalators, mind you .. i’ll probably be in a wheelchair soon”, I could feel the tears flooding to the back of my eyes just waiting to pop out … so I pretended to cough/sneeze and wipe my eyes/nose as I did, and printed out her story meaning that I had to get up and move over to the printer meaning that I could recover.

One printed / laminated story in her hand moments later, I started to say “Bye” to her, when the aforemention breakfast presenter Dermot walked right past on his way out to the back, presumably to go to the loo or get a drink.

“Ooh” said B, “Do you think it would be possible to get my photo taken with him?” she asked … and I mean – how could I refuse? He’d actually gone out the back to be interviewed by someone, so I had to loiter in a “I’m not trying to stalk him” way, waited until he finished and then went up to him to ask him politely if he would make the day of the delightful B back inside the tent. “Of course!” he said and beamed with those shiny-white teeth of his and he posed brilliantly for a photo, spoke to B for a few seconds, and then got back to his duties.

B came up to me. “Thank you” she said “Really, thank you, that was brilliant!” and before I could do anything she was giving me a big hug, said ‘Goodbye’ and off she went.

Well that did it, didn’t it? This time I did have to go out the back, and get a drink of water myself and have a little emotional moment to recover and wipe a tear from my eye.

So it was a good week. I implore you to go along and visit if you’re anywhere near Edinburgh or Anglesey for the final two dates next week, and have a ‘go’ at doing something – even if it’s just the caption competition where some cute little kids had gone up and written on a post-it note “I like the BBC”. Bless.

I really loved it. I really loved talking to complete strangers (which I’m starting to realise now is something that is becoming a habit) and getting the buzz back of people who love the BBC. And it makes you realise what a lucky bastard I am for having a job with them, and a job which I really love.

Blimey. Right. I’d better stop and quickly mention one quick non blubby-beeb thing.

In relation to ‘Tube Relief’ taking place in a few weeks time, I got a plug/interview in on a podcast broadcast last week but forget to mention it. It’s still there though, so if you hop over to PocketPlanetRadio right now, you’ll find a MP3/podcast of littl’ old me talking about the whole thing … so go have a listen, or perhaps subscribe to PPR on a permanent basis, and get with the Podcasting craze … ?

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