In my younger, more paranoid days, I was loath to talk about more than the very next Stan’s Cafe project for fear somehow the idea would be ‘stolen’. Then I started to realize that the more people you share your ideas with the greater the chance you have of finding someone who wants to join you playing with them.

With this theory of ‘share and play’ in mind David Edmunds from DEP Arts and I have just visited the good people of the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Hull Truck.

Whilst I am not good at selling Stan’s Cafe shows I can talk about them and the ideas until someone puts their hand in my face. So for me the trips were good fun. I suspect for those in the firing line the meetings were merely a disorientating blitz of barely connected thoughts.

These meetings, like those in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and Stockton-on-Tees before them are not expected to bare fruit immediately, but who knows what may happen a couple of years down the line. What I do now know is that there are a hell of a lot of power stations between Leeds and Hull – stunning in their own right – and that the River Humber is stunning.