Tim Dowling: I tell the audience I’m leaving the band – they don’t get the joke

The band has barely played live in 27 months, and I have forgotten what it's like to address a crowd

In the spring of 2019, the band I'm in decided to take a 12-month break from playing live. A year later we were preparing for a small tour when the pandemic hit - our year off suddenly became two. We played one of a pair of socially distanced gigs in December, before the other one was cancelled after restrictions were reimposed.

All our spring 2021 gigs were postponed, some of them twice. In June we were rehearsing for the Black Deer festival when we heard it would not go ahead for the second year running.