I don't even know if there's anybody there. This could be like A Town Called Alice by Nevil Shute - I might well be the last person on the internet. Actually that's not quite right, I'm more likely the last person who isn't signed up to a blog or operating through Facebook. My aunt asked me the other day why I wasn't on Facebook, and she's about seventy . I felt so square I was almost hip but then again I'm nearer to hip replacement these days having just celebrated my fifty fifth birthday. Pardon the inane joke, when you get to my age it's part of the job.
What I mean is: though I'm sure the internet is bustling with all kinds of groovy people doing all sorts of wonderful things, plus a smattering (what and awful word, won't use that again) of coal merchants and pharmacists trying to drum up business, most people don't hang around this corner anymore. My site is like a forgotten and semi-derelict house, the brambles and ivy are taking over and I somehow like it like that. I have to because I haven't got time to do anything much about it.
It must be weird for the few who do still come and look to find that since their previous visit someone's been here, doing things, leaving saucers of milk and cheap cat food...

What can I say - we've been busy. We're making a new album, we've been touring. We had the plumber in fixing us up with a hot water tank so that we don't have to run the vast, barn-sized, oil-fueled heating system in order to have a shower. The oil producing countries of the world are going to feel the pinch. The cellar is no longer full of rotting fire wood and broken bottles. Neither is the barn full of empty cardboard boxes and tree branches. We've got a fully functioning ambulance, the best tape echo and plate reverb in France, and a new 45 rpm 7" coming out on the FDH record label from Philadelphia. Amy's writing a book and somehow she finds time to write a blog too, and that's how I keep up to date with at least some of what I've been up to.

I wrote a load of stuff while we were in Spain but never put it on the site because it wasn't finished. Nothing's ever finished, that's the big frustration of my life. It's like an endless round of cleaning, tidying, washing up and dealing with old paperwork - it just keeps coming back and piling up. I can't go on like this, but just like the sun that kept on shining at the beginning of that Samuel Beckett book, I have no choice. here's the now completely out of date Spanish saga:

Madrid, Sunday, April 26 and several dates on from there...
The other afternoon I almost lost the will to live because I achieved what had become my life’s ambition which was to have a proper meal in Spain. Everyone here seems to live on snacks that they eat standing around in smoke filled bars and call tapas. As far as I can see this consists of little bits of pastry and toast type of things loaded with dubious, paprika laced tuna. I’m sure tapas is very nice when you get the real thing but we haven’t so far, unless it isn’t very nice and we have, if you can follow that.
I don’t do snacks. I have breakfast, though not that heart attack inducing British thing they call The Full English, I like cups of tea or the odd espresso or two and meusli which I always call Switched On in honour of my mum - she worked at Sussex University during the seventies and picked up many a groovy idiom. The other day she showed me her new Winsor & Newton oil paints – ‘These colours really turn me on’ she said. It’s quite disconcerting when a person of her age uses expressions like that. Anyway, in the glory days of the early seventies when meusli was in its infancy and most of England was not quite sure what an avocado was, my mother thought that switched on people had meusli for breakfast. She thought I was switched on though how she knew that I don’t know.
England is bad enough – Amy, being the slightly nieve American tourist of the outfit, is just learning not to rush down to breakfast in hotels where the pattern on the curtains matches the bedspread - usually shades of pale blue and lemon yellow on grubby white polyester. You crawl into the breakfast room which is normally down in the basement, in the bowels of the building. A withered old man comes out from behind a cream painted hardboard partition where he’s been busy diluting pineapple juice and asks you if you want tea or coffee. The stench of frying and overheated baked beans is so fundementally horrible that you don’t want anything.
‘Could you direct me to a sink or a bucket’ you say, ‘I’m feeling a little queasy. I think I’ll pass on breakfast and go straight on to the first cigarette of the day - not that I smoke, I gave up, but your dining room has inspired me to start again.’
We’ve been in Madrid now for three days, the promoter has very kindly paid for us to stay in a luxury hotel out in Croydon, or possibly Queens. We’ve only just found out that breakfast is not only available but also included in the price. It was pretty hard going this morning trying to get down three lots of breakfast at one go to make up for what we’d missed. If my writing seems a little jittery it’s because I’ve had four double espressos.
I could murder a cup of tea.
I could murder the cunt who broke into the ambulance in Bilbao and stole the satelite navigation and my mobile phone. It was a professional job though, I’ll give him that. He forced the lock on the drivers door rendering it useless. Now we have to lock and unlock the car from the passenger side just like we do our old Escort Estate. We’ve got a matching car and van.
The Tom Tom sat nav thing was fairly hopelessly out of date and prone to losing contact with the mothership from time to time. The loss of yet another phone was a bit of a blow though I never really liked that particular one and no one ever called me on it.
Satelite Navigation is probably the best thing that ever happened to touring. In the seventies you had to stop a passing hunchback and experience a very entertaining regional accent – ‘Yi dawnt teern rayit, yi dawnt teern left, yi curry street on til yi reach the twitten…’ and off you’d go, none the wiser. I don’t know how we ever found the places we played in.
Our tour manager used to adopt an approximation of the accent and sentence construction of whatever country we happened to be in. This was very entertaining, especially as he seemed completely unaware that he was doing it. ‘Can you plis tell it to me the where of…’ It never worked. Except in America where they loved him. He eventually moved to America, fell in love with an American girl, enjoyed a disastrous but short-lived marriage and got a job with the Bruce Springsteen organisation. I haven’t heard from him since 1983.
In the late eighties someone had the bright idea of getting local promoters to send a map of their town together with a set of clear, concise (that’s a laugh) directions. Then some idiot invented the fax machine so instead of sending a nearly illegible photocopy of an out of date map from the local library, they’d fax the photocopy to save time and to show how modern they were. A faxed photocopy of a worn out map is absolutely useless except for writing set lists and girls telephone numbers on. And so it came to pass that by the end of the eighties every contract contained a short clause: NB: NO FAXED MAPS.
Promoters continued to fax the maps until the dawning of the internet age. Then you’d go on to some route finding site like theaa.com or viamichelin and get a ridiculously detailed print out of the route including every MacDonalds, Esso petrol station and public toilet along the route. I used to hurtle round motorway roundabouts clutching these things, trying to figure out if I needed the A613M Eastbound or the M642 Northbound. The floor of the car was litterd with discarded print outs covered in dusty footprints. My carbon footprint must have been about size fifteen. I used to empty the car into the recycled paper bin.
Then along came the Sat Nav – the comforting Listen With Mother voice of Jane: 'At the end of the road turn right then go-straight-on…’
No you silly cow – we’ll end up in the river. She used to come in for a lot of abuse but I feel bad for her, she’s probably still enunciating directions in a clear, bossy tone interspersed with the odd plea for her personal safety: ‘At the traffic lights go-straight-on (if anyone can hear me I’m being held agaist my will)’
We’re going to miss Jane. We bought a new one which has Jane in it but also Tim. We thought we could do with a change and quite honestly Jane was beginning to get on our nerves – she was so fucking bossy. So we’ve gone with Tim. I think Tim is an out-of-work actor. You know how it is, how you get to speculating on peoples private lives. After half an hour of Tim’s reassuring, gentle yet masterful voice: 'In four hundred metres turn left then stay in the right hand lane', I turned to Amy - ‘Do you think Tim’s gay?’
Not that it’s any of our business but you know how it is.

Spain is an odd country. Or at least I’m at odds with Spain. I can’t get the hang of this place. The food is by and large pretty awful and the people don’t smile much. Just when I thought it was going to get hot here in Madrid the wind turned round and blew in a cold spell from the snow capped mountains you can see in the distance just past Redhill or Coney Island or wherever.
They’re having a bad time with the recession, prices have been cut in half so it’s a shoppers paradise at the moment, not that there was anything we wanted to buy. I used to love going to new places, now I find it rather depressing. Ask me if I want to see the town and I’ll probably say no, not that anyone ever asks. It’s as if they know too that all we’ll find are shops, and the shops are all going to be the same as the shops everywhere else – H&M, M&S, Top Shop (they’ve got one in Bilbao, Madrid too but not yet in Valencia though I’m assured it’s on its way), Porcelanosa, Habiat, Carphone Warehouse. No Woolworths though (ha ha). And don’t get me started on the er… eateries – MacDonalds, Burger King, and for the sophisticates the odd Pizza Hut. Sadly not The Wok That Shat Itself because I’ve just made that up. But it’s coming, you’ll see.
When I lived in Norwich they opened a new shopping centre in the middle of the city. It was promoted as a matter of great civic pride. I went for a walk round it soon after the opening and immediately forgot which town I was in – Borders, SpecSavers, WH Smiths, Debenhams… they were all there. My pride in being a citizen of Norwich was well fucking churned up. Sometimes I think the only way you can tell which town you’re in is if you can remember the order of the shops. The new Norwich shopping centre was just like the old one except that half the shops in the old one were closed down because they’d moved to the new one. It was probably a marketing strategy like when they move everything round in the supermarket and this prompts you to buy a jar of Branston Pickle on a sudden consumer impulse.
Even the diseases are all the same these days, like this new Pig Fever that’s sweeping the globe. A couple of days ago I was all set to be Spain’s third reported case, a bit of a bummer for me but fabulous publicity. Sadly it turned out to be a common cold but for a few moments as I lay delirious in the middle of the night, overdosed on paracetamol, I was almost proud that such an esteemed demise could well ensure that Amy would not be left penniless.
The festival in Madrid was great fun – we were top of the bill. Before us they had The Elastic Band who are supposed to be the next big thing in Spain, Suzy & Los Quatros – our agent plays bass with them, they’re almost Blondie with one less guitar and minus a keyboard (they endeared themselves to me with a version of Fox On The Run), and before us The Zodiacs who used to be Spain’s next big thing and gained in credibility by not being anymore. I really liked The Zodiacs. They sing in Spanish so I don’t know what they’re on about most of the time but they’ve got a song called Rocky Erikson. They suffered the same as us with power cuts.
It was a Stiff Records themed evening so we were doing some of the hits including a strange version of A Popsong and Amy singing Broken Doll. We were just striding into the second verse of Hit ‘n’ Miss Judy when a great commotion broke out in the audience. There was cheering and shouting and people clapping their hands above the heads and we thought we were doing really well. In fact they were just trying to let us know that the PA wasn’t working anymore. We should have known because most of the lights had gone out too. It took us until the beginning of the middle eight to realise what was going on.
Apparently the PA, some of the lighting rig, the merchandising concessions and the dressing room lights were all on the same circuit as the overhead light in the red hut by the back gate. Every time the security woman went in there and switched the light on it tripped the circuit. By the time we were on she was probably doing it out of vicious intent. In any other country they would have locked the door to the hut to prevent this from happening, but not here.
Still, it gave rise to lots of shouting in Spanish and people running hither and thither and bumping into each other. They probably did it for our benefit, us being tourists.
I’m making it sound completely disorganised but it wasn’t. It was one of the few European festivals I’ve played that actually ran to time. The promoter, Jose Luis, is our new hero – he looked after us better than I can ever remember being looked after. He gave us a great hotel for five days and arranged for us to leave the van parked in a security guarded area for the duration of our stay. We did a secret Madrid show on Sunday night in a club, La Quena Bety. Our other hero, Pablo, who works with Jose Luis took us and all our equipment to the club so that we wouldn’t have to drive the van and find a place to park.
The secret Madrid show was worth the entire trip. It was packed and we played for two hours. Afterwards Jose Luis came into the backstage, embraced us both and said it had been the best night of his life. I could have cried because he obviously meant it.

Later that same month or possibly the next one...
Now it’s a week or two later and we’re back home. Valencia and Tarragona are turning into distant memories. Sometimes I wonder what I do with my time and where the time goes. It all just seems to pass me by and, thanks to the onset of middle-age (fifty-five next week) I can’t remember what I’ve done with the time or even where I’ve put it. I walk into rooms and wonder what I’m doing there – I’ve always been a bit vague in a forthright sort of way, and usually when I make a decision, a choice between two courses of action, I immediately forget which course I’ve chosen.
The day before Valencia we stayed on a campsite between holiday shacks owned by real Spaniards. Amy thought we were in a trailer park ghetto inhabited by poor orange picking gangs.
‘ They’re living so close together’ she said, gazing piteously at a row of delapidated caravans in winter storage.
We headed for the toilet block through the balmy southern spring night, the Mediterranean sea rumbling gently in the background and palm trees rustling overhead. ‘I’m not cut out for camping’ she said. I was about to tell her to stop being a wimp but the stench eminating from the blocked urinals rendered me unable to speak.
‘ Neither am I’ I thought. But I didn’t say anything.
The next morning it was like waking up in a holiday brochure. The urinals had been unblocked and the feral cats that had been prowling around the site the night before scattering odious rubbish in their wake had turned into sweet domestic pussy cats, We drank tea in the shade of our vastly superior ambulance we watched a Swiss couple pack their vastly inferior van with everything plus the kitchen sink. It took them two hours to fold and pack and dismantle and knock the mud off and finally remove the front wheels from both bicycles and put them in a dedicated bicycle front wheel handy carrying pouch and then disaster – they’d forgotten to pack the mats so hubby had to hold the bicycle laden back door of the van up while wifey slipped them in as best she could.

************************************************************************************************************************************

So now it's June 2nd and we're holed-up in a hotel called the Hirondelle in Dunkerque because the alternator died last night. The repair is going to cost what we earned last night in Leffinge but I suppose that's why you have to earn money in this world, so that the Peugeot dealership that you get towed into can take it off you. The insurance are paying for the hotel though.

I've got a lot to say right now on a variety of subjects but it'll have to wait because I'm tired and the bright lights of Dunkerque are calling...