The American University at Richmond, who knew?

For the show at the American University at Richmond I am not feeling at all well. I am convinced thisn is due to a choking incident three days ago. On Monday night I choked on my antidepressants. When I told her, Em laughed like a drain, pointing out that this was clearly my body's declaration that it wants to live. Funny Em, or would have been had I not been feeling so virusy since it happened.

Anyone who has had an endoscopy will be familiar with this: I did the whole-body-convulstion-choke move. If you've not had an endoscopy, count yourself lucky. An endoscopy taught me that the gag mechanism is not located in the throat/neck area. No, no, no, no, no! It is a total-body manoeuvre, and if we got a farm full of people choking properly we could power the whole of the national grid off them, I swear.

As my body was trying to eject the offending tablet on Monday night, which procedure I was trying to perform quietly enough so's not to wake the lodger, I was reflecting that it would be a great story if I actually knocked my front teeth out on the sink due to doubling up like a prawn against my will. I also had time to consider that if I did knock my teeth out, no matter what strength of antidepressant I was taking, it would surely depress me.

So I spent the wek feeling really rather ill, horrible. Bad throat, out-of-body, tired: off-colour and without energy. I really do not fancy doing a show, to be honest, I'm not sure I can manage it.

What is more, I was not aware there was a Richmond University, but we are having the easiest trip to a show, like, ever – it's just Brixton to High Street Kensington, although it also turns out I have to sit down all the time as we travel. And there really IS a Richmond University, it's an American university.

We have played an American university before, one in Lugano, Switzerland. We had a most enjoyable couple of shows, with a very interesting Q&A after one of the shows. As I recall it ws the first time we had shared a bedroom and what a discovery it was that we can share a room and work together and, now, tour together: makes everything a whole lot cheaper.

Lugano was booked because a member of the university's staff came to the first show we did in Switzerland and hers was the first in the extraordinary line of stories we have been told over the life of the show.

She had been standing in the queue for the Rocky Horror Picture Show in San Franisco in 1979 with a friend. Out of nowhere a guy appeared and stabbed her friend in the back, killing him. She told us how the show made her feel that maybe her reactions at the time, including trying to get her dying friend into her car to take him to hospital, were not deranged but, in fact, within the normal distribution for how one reacts in extreme circumstances. We were... amazed. Amazed that this show could do that but also amazed that somone had carried these feelings of being, well, deeply odd, for 30 years. On the way to our aftershow party of pizza for him and salad for me, I joked that I had done what I'd set out to achieve, and that we could now stop doing the show.

Well, it was a a half-joke: just because we had got away with the show once didn't mean we would the next time. All along I had said that if we made a difference to one person's life then we had done all we needed to do with this show. It seemed like a huge ask of us, of the material... of the universe, that we might change anything for anyone, but here we were, the first preview, and something had radically shifted for a woman we had never met before. Little did we know how this extraordinary experince, this privilege, would repeat itself time after time throughout Switzerland, Edinburgh... and now on into this tour.

So we arrive at Richmond University. We're a bit early and no one is about, so I have a sit on a chair, with my eyes shut: a potential doze. Lovely. And Bartelt, my pet lizard, stands outside sunning himself. This beautiful weather is holding. It's crazy and fantastic. Alex, the lecturer who booked the show, turns up. He can't actually stay for the show but he lets us into the lecture theatre and we shift some tables around.

Then I go for a long lie down in the lecture theatre. Normally my warm-up is hurtling around and singing, but I feel like death. How on earth am I going to be able to do this show? Curse my gag mechanism!