The Toury Party.

 So here we are, then. Another attempt to balance the honesty of five idiots in a van with the need to publicly defend ourselves from any accusations that might come our way, or inadvertently create some sense that we are nothing more than a bunch of slobby losers who aren't right for your company.

'Hello? Bob? Fire those Phoria boys. What's that? No, I've never heard of them either.
What? We never hired them? You're a good man, Bob.'

We've just come home to Brighton. In an echo of our trip home from Nottingham after the first leg of our tour, we played the gig and then immediately left Manchester. Another multi-hour slog through Britain's midnight oil. Again I sat in the front, cajoling the drivers and making them question their own existence, all the while celebrating the end of the tour proper by drinking lots of rum and clouding the issue of my bronchus.

I can't say I didn't have a good time.

This was the set-up for most of the tour. Windows open in the sunshine, expressing ourselves through t-shirt tan lines and supermarket lunches. Dusty petrol stations and driving songs and catchphrases and the relentless rumble of Binky's diesel engine and the stench of cheese and dripped, fishy brine. Take your shoes off, put a smile on your face, and watch the frames of every chain store change before your eyes. Sometimes tall, sometimes old, sometimes sterile and worthless to visit but sometimes unusual and archetypal. It's a funny old country.

We lived mainly on kindness. Parents and friends of friends and family and strangers at gigs who'd put us up and leave us with a key as they went to work in the morning, leaving a note on the counter saying 'Help yourselves.'

Kettles were very important.

The business was good, too. Promoters varying wildly from those who don't arrive to those who do and dote on you. Ain't no food nowhere, to big pub-grub burgers that gave us reason to lick our ever more bonying fingers in public.

Man cannot live on carrots alone.

Sometimes smiles, sometimes grunts and a lift of the head. Who's the sound engineer? He's the friendly one, the quiet genius or the too-talkative fallabout who knows as much about what he's doing here as you do.

People are people. Ain't nobody perfect and this ain't no attack, but this is how a life like this be, if you're not aware.

So, resisting the urge to list every town and describe every drink and force every night into one hundred words of unreadably shuffled little letters; that's your lot. Maybe you got a sense of it.

Thanks to all those who came to the shows and deep thanks to all those who helped us on our way around the country.

I didn't think I missed Brighton as much as I did.

We're still moving – down to Farm Festival on Saturday. For some reason I don't see it as part of the tour, but some people say it is. I don't care. This is here, now.

Then it might be a little time off.

We might lock ourselves away; studiobound and writing. Who knows.

Maybe we'll put our feet up on the rocks of Brighton beach, and look at the sea for a while, waiting desperately for someone to recognise us.

Who knows.

Have fun, wherever you go, whomever you go there with.

Tim