The band I’m in is on the road again, heading north. The van picks me up at lunchtime, and we reach Birmingham by 5pm. By midnight, we are loaded up again and heading for a stop partway to the next gig.

At 7am, I wake up in a Travelodge bed, half expecting, as always, to find a Muppet version of myself snoring beside me. I can’t get back to sleep, so I get up and wander off in search of outside.

The Travelodge is perched on top of a Lidl, on the outskirts, it seems, of nothing. On the other side of a busy roundabout is a cinema complex. A few people are walking down the road towards another roundabout. I follow them.

Twenty minutes later, I find myself in a pedestrianised shopping district. I send a group text to the rest of the band that says, “Where am I?” No one answers. Eventually, it becomes apparent that I am in Tamworth.

“There’s a huge castle,” I say, as the van pulls away later that morning. “But you can’t see it from anywhere, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

“Did you get a newspaper?” the bass player asks.

“They don’t sell them here,” I reply with some authority.

By mid-afternoon, we reach Barton-upon-Humber, which is in Lincolnshire, a fact that will never desert you once you’ve shouted, “Hello Yorkshire!” in front of a capacity crowd at the Ropery Hall. From the collective chastening that followed, you might assume that Yorkshire was miles away, when it’s only the other side of the bridge.

The next morning, I ring my wife from a different Travelodge.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “Near Doncaster, I think.”

It turns out I’m at a motorway services on the M18. I find the rest of the band taking up three tables outside the Costa, lounging with the relaxed air of long-term residents. A hen party files past in personalised T-shirts.

“What a weird way to find out that your friends think of you as Dizzy Donna,” I say.

We settle into the van for the long ride to Bristol. The conversation turns toward health matters, but in a band containing so many men of a certain age, it’s hard to own an illness; someone else will have had it worse than you. I have to my abandon my lecture on the trials of labyrinthitis when it becomes apparent that I am only the latest of three people in the van to suffer from it – the bass player’s symptoms persisted for a year. I can’t compete with that.

The Bristol venue is a sticky-floored club that chiefly plays host to heavy metal tribute acts: Dep Leppard, Hi-On Maiden, Motörheadache. Their posters are plastered across the wall outside. In the middle of these is a photograph of eight seated figures in suits, instruments in laps, smiling, with today’s date on the bottom.

“Our poster might lack edge,” the fiddle player says.

“Did we pose for that?” I ask.

In the dressing room before the show, we coach our exhausted singer. “Don’t mention the county,” I say. “Counties are a minefield.”

“If you’d like to do all the talking tonight, be my guest,” the singer replies.

“Under no circumstances should you attempt the local accent,” the accordion player says.

Below us, the low thrum of the warm-up band suddenly ceases. I pick up my banjo and think about a time three hours hence, when I will be back in the van heading for home, secure in the knowledge that Bristol is a unitary authority area and a county all to itself.