THIS week I complete the tour of Dracula with which I have toured for the last three months.

When the curtain comes down in Brighton on Saturday night, the stakes and garlic flowers will be packed away, the coffins broken up and the pools of blood wiped up for the last time; it will be Fangs for the Memory, to employ a pun that no newspaper reviewer has been able to resist using in some form or another.

There are many actors of my age who will simply not tour, usually for the very compelling reason that they don't fancy the idea of living out of a suitcase for months.

Being still responsible for the support and education of four daughters, I have no option but to follow that old Tory rottweiler Norman Tebbit's famous advice to those in search of employment and "get on my bike", or in my case into my "G" reg Mercedes.

For me therefore it's a question of forced to tour rather than a tour de force.

But rather than stay in hotels and digs, I opt to commute where I can.

It is, in fact, cheaper to do that than it is to stay in hotels; and the old theatrical digs with their infamous landladies of legend, sadly, no longer exist.

Some weeks, like this one, I will cover a thousand miles or more.

The last two venues were Southend and Birmingham. Despite the undoubtedly manifold delights of those two places, I had more pressing business at home demanding my daily attention than sampling the delights of those far flung hot spots.

So while the younger unattached members of the company having visited the bars, nighteries and cultural attractions are still asleep in their humble lodgings, I am astride my mighty Countax mowing the Baker acre or putting our herd of grass gulping guinea pigs out to graze. (Herd? Don't ask!) Alistair Darling's proposed road-pricing plan will make touring prohibitive (there are no trains or buses to get me home from Brighton or Birmingham after the curtain comes down).

But until that latest motorist bashing initiative is enacted I will continue to strive to be both a working actor on the stage and a husband and father too.

My next engagement is as a guest in Little Britain, which I am looking forward too immensely.

Teetering permanently on the brink of appalling bad taste, it is a very funny programme indeed.