Well, that's all that Christmas shit out of the way for another year. Now we can get back to the credit crunch. Actually we had quite a nice time with both daughters and one boyfriend - my daughter Luci's that is, not one of mine or Amy's. God I'm so fucking pedantic - I wonder if I ought to make a New Year's Resolution. No, that really would be pedantic. I'll try for a new colour scheme instead...
I always end up going for the grey options. It's probably because I'm an inherently dull person though I'd like to think it's an inate and inborn (or should that be stillborn?) honesty. It's a grey time so grey is appropriate. Sorry to be depressing but it's what the British, and particularly the English do best. We think we can be gaily coloured Latin lovers, full of joie de vivre and all that, but when it comes down to it our speciality is recession.
I've always said that the UK is a world leader in it, or at least a European leader in recession. Christ, I can hardly remember a time when we weren't lurching around in some economic deep freeze. I remember back in the deep recesses of my childhood, Harold MacMillan addressed the nation from the greeny-grey gleam of the veneer boxed black and white TV set - he told us that we'd never had it so good. And the next thing I was thirteen, there was a three day week, power cuts, little Union Jack badges that said I'm Backing Britain, and my dad who was one of the managers was helping man the production line because they'd laid off the workforce. I suppose that makes him a scab, but I sort of knew that anyway.
I remember too when the cost of reunification hit the West German economy - my German agent, a nice Bavarian man called Herbert, said he'd never known anything like this, he didn't know what to do. I told him we'd been in recession in the UK for most of my life. He asked me what he should do - I told him work twice as hard for half the money and get used to it. He couldn't do that, he had a nervous breakdown. I haven't seen him since. Somebody told me a few years ago that they'd heard he was working as a hospital porter.
I feel sad thinking about Herbert. I hope things worked out for him in the end. I spent part of the last great recession in a mental hospital and I think it was a fairly sensible place to be, cushioned from the cruel outside world. At least I think it was a recession - it might just be my tawdry view of things having spent the last thirty one years as a self-employed musician which is another way of saying broke. It was 1988. As soon as I got better, and having got evicted from a housing association flat for not being the official tenant even though I'd paid off all the back rent owed by the official tenant who was a hopeless junkie come dealer who'd snorted the profits and had to leave in a hurry, I left and started a new life, rebuilding my battered self and self esteem in rural France. If I get round to writing the follow up to A Dysfunctional Success it'll all be in there - should be a good read...
So it's back to Germany in February for what someone might be sure to term the next round of touring. Actually it's off to Austria if you want to be pedantic about it which I probably do. I wonder if anyone's actually going to read this shit. I used to have an avid reading public but since every coal merchant, folk group and half-arsed cunt got themselves a website things have sort of fallen off a bit. Well, quite a lot actually. And before anyone else points it out, it's my own fault for not regularly updating things like a good little er... blogger.
Still, never mind - I'm blogging like a good'un now. Fabulous sentence, practically bereft of any meaning, sense, import...
We've bought an old ambulance (just to carry on the morbid hospital theme). It's the new Eric & Amy mobile. You can stand up in the back of it which is something you can't do in a Ford Escort estate. We have visions of making cups of tea and laybys, changing our clothes in it, plugging the soldering iron into the 12volt/220 converter and repairing the equipment in it, even sleeping in it at idyllic summer festivals. It's going to be fun. The siren and the flashing lights have been taken off it for legal reasons but the buttons are still there inside the cab, one red, the other blue. When you push them in they light up though nothing actually happens on the outside of the vehicle. But we won't know that as we hurtle from mission to mission along the open road.
Parp parp! (Which is a quote from The Wind In The Willows.)