In some ways, a comedy tour resembles a giant pub crawl masquerading as a job. When I was deciding how to pay the bills in my early twenties, there was something very appealing about a job that allowed you to get up whenever you liked, turn up to a club in the evening to do 20 minutes’ work and then be offered free drinks afterwards. And in many ways, that’s still what I do, it’s just that the 20 minutes has become two hours, and the clubs have become theatres and the free drinks are usually still available but only for half an hour after the show ends, at which point you’re politely asked to leave the dressing room as they are closing the building.

A lot of the theatres I play round the country were built in Victorian times and there is always a little pub round the corner where it’s possible to meet friends either before or after the show. After 20 years of touring round Britain, it’s been fun discovering the most atmospheric alehouses in the country – which are full of surprises.

One of my favourite venues on tour is the Apex in Bury St Edmunds as the crowd always seem to be bang up for it – and just round the corner is the holder of the Guinness World Record for Britain’s smallest pub, The Nutshell, which is just 15ft by 7ft. But this presented obvious problems with social distancing restrictions during Covid, as you would only have been able get a couple of people inside and one of those would have had to serve the drink.

The Nutshell features a 400-year-old mummified cat above the bar which was discovered behind a fireplace during renovations and supposedly placed there to ward off evil spirits. Nobody knows how the cat perished, but the worry is that somebody said that the pub was not big enough to swing a cat in then decided to find out.

I also love playing the Corn Exchange in Stamford, which has one of the steepest raked auditoriums in the country. If you ever want to run off into the auditorium to do some crowd work, you feel a bit like Rocky going up the Philadelphia steps. Round the corner is a coaching inn, The George, that can trace its origins back 1,000 years. You won’t miss it because across the entire street is a gallows beam with a sign saying “The George At Stamford”.

The sign was put up in the 18th century to ward off highwaymen such as Dick Turpin who roamed the Great North Road. The beam itself was never used to hang people but I should imagine if anybody thought of doing a runner, they might see it and decide to return to pay the tab.

This autumn I’m back out with my tour and looking forward to once again playing Nottingham, and visiting “Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem” which claims to be the oldest pub in England. It is built directly into the sandstone caves of Castle Rock beneath Nottingham Castle, and the site was supposedly established in 1189, the year Richard the Lionheart became king. The name “Ye Olde” was added in 1799 – presumably even back in the 18th century publicans were focused on attracting the passing tourist trade who might not be tempted by a pub called simply “Trip To Jerusalem”.

My tour culminates in November at the Theatre Royal in Winchester, which is always a delight to play and hence where we have to decided to film the show for a one-hour TV special. I should imagine afterwards we will trot along, as previously, to another pub that claims to be one of the oldest in Britain – the Royal Oak, a brilliant place full of little nooks and crannies, tiny doorways and low ceilings which you have to duck below, and if you fail to remember, give you a timely reminder you may well have drunk enough.

The thing is, as you travel round the country, you realise there are a massive amount of towns that claim to have one of the oldest pubs ever. For one thing, any pubs claiming to be older than 13th century are being economical with the truth as pubs as we know them didn’t exist before then – before that they were people’s houses who liked to brew their own and then occasionally sold any surplus out of a window or door.

Such claims often rely on some niche wording – perhaps the oldest inn (which provided beds), or the oldest tavern (which sold wine and food but had no beds), or the oldest premises that may or may not have been a baker’s until the 19th century, or the oldest with a licence, or the oldest where something old was once found in the olden days.

One claims to be the oldest pub in England even though it was a dovecote until the 18th century. Certainly, if you’re looking for the more venerable near to you, and the pub describes itself as being listed in the Domesday Book, you know they are telling porkies because there is not a single pub mentioned in the Domesday Book.

The truth is that the age of a pub is impossible to verify, which is why Guinness World Records no longer recognises the category. So if you fancy running one and are looking for a marketing angle, get yourself a little ammonite fossil from the Jurassic Coast, stick it in the cellar and call yourself the oldest pub in Britain – nobody can say you’re wrong.

This week I have been…

some stand-up clips on social media. At the start of the school holidays I did one about how easy it was to wind up teachers by saying: “Ooo – you’ve got long holidays,” and if you followed up with “… and you finish at 3.30” they often become livid saying things such as: “I’ve got my marking.”

I also suggested it would have been great if we’d realised at school how easy it was to wind them up. For instance, if when they asked: “What is the capital of Germany?” we had gone: “I bet you know, don’t you, Miss. I’ve bet you’ve been there – on your long holidays.” This post has got a lot of reaction – mainly from teachers it seems. They always tell you to ignore provocation and not react, but it seems they are unable to follow their own advice.

As it is the holidays, I have found myself doing a lot of this. My son has GCSEs next year and has been set various homework to be done over summer. I thought it might work as some form of bonding exercise if I tried to study a little at the same time, so I got the GCSE economics textbook as I’d never done economics, and I read the whole book.

I then found out about recent chancellors Rachel Reeves and Kwasi Kwarteng – one has a masters degree in economics and one has a PhD in economics, and given how they both have struggled, I may now find myself unnecessarily overqualified.

having a Prime Minister whose first speech in the job seemed positive rather than obliterating everybody’s hope immediately by saying things will only get worse. Maybe Andy Burnham can learn from Keir Starmer’s mistakes and not have more relaunches than the Sugababes, or use “change” as a slogan when the thing that seems most likely to change is his own mind.

For details of Andy Parsons’ UK tour “Please #@!$ Off To Mars” go to andyparsons.co.uk