Diary here.

On encouragement from others, I kept a diary of our journey through Europe. 

There’s an awful lot in there, as the trip took us up and down, through highs and lows, through frowns that broke our teeth and cheers that changed the direction of oncoming ships.

For now, I have here decided only to hint at portions of it. Still, that gives you all another reason to look forward to my eventual demise. The fully published diary will no doubt be offered as a free gift on the front of the Sunday Sport (by that time a well respected literary journal) on the day of my death, or at least mentioned in my obituary as some kind of lost treasure - the whereabouts of which will then be left to rumour and perhaps the subject of a new Indiana Jones adventure. (Hint: I’m going to protect the diary with a five headed AI double-cyborg Wolf-man, which can only be defeated by being buggered. That ought to teach Harrison Ford a lesson.)

It’s difficult to even try and fit those ten days (is that all they were?) into any self-contained…thing. There’s just so much there: not being listed here. I won’t do that. Instead I’ll take them as they come. Like a sexual health nurse.

Before that: the news. Three gigs this week: Tuesday, St. Wednesday, Thursday. Prince Albert, Old Blue Last, The Hope. Brighton, London, Brighton. Fun, Fun, Fun. We’re well up for it.

All relevant info, and the new shop, is all on www.phoriamusic.com, in case you weren’t aware. You are now, so there’s no excuse not to bookmark it and visit it every day, like a postman.

Day 2

Tuesday 6/7/13

Location: A small rest area beside the German Autobahn.

8:07 am

We have woken up to the sound of grasshoppers trying to drown out the rumble of the road. We stopped last night somewhere South of Frankfurt, the night-time’s driving becoming nothing more than a rolling screen, like a repetitious background from an old Scooby-Doo cartoon. I drove for about four hours – successfully resisting the right-hand urge to pull off into oncoming traffic…

Jeb and Rory have set-up camp outside. Jeb approached the van last night with a look of distilled fear in his eyes. A strange man sat watching he and Rory pitch their tents; one hand holding a cigarette, and Jeb insisting: ‘I know what his other hand was doing.’

8:36 am

It cannot be uncommon for people to wonder if certain public conveniences are more or less sanitary than having a member of the public defecate directly onto your face.

22:16 pm

Achingly tired. This may not make much sense. We’re in the van, in a campsite beside Lake Bled in Slovenia, drinking beer bought from the most perfectly situated branch of LIDL in the world. [photos will surface].

Slovenia so far has been…[the word ‘beautiful’ has been removed here] Mountains border your view at every turn. They vary from lush and green to sheer rock cliff faces, cold and cracked and aged. We drove through Austria to get here. This is so difficult to describe – partly because of fatigue.

I watched the landscape fold itself up like paper. The mountains, near and far, traverse each other as you pass them. The awe at each turn is the sense of creation on an industrial scale. The bridges rest on the legs of giants. Earth, above and below, shows off like an attention seeking child: petulant and resourceful. Grand, but nothing more than crude, quarried bumps. I felt as though I had been thrown into nature’s bosom.

We held our breath for 2km through a tunnel that burrowed underneath one of the mountains, gasping only briefly in a five second flash of light - as we returned to the vacuous caverns, lit through slits in the omnipresent green of the fir trees - to scream ‘WOAH!’ and then plunge back into a tube of sensory deprivation.

It was grand, and so inhuman. I do not know how to take it all in.

I feel like a bag with a hole in the bottom.

And that’s your lot for now.

Have a great day, whichever mountains you travel through in a van.

Tim