Bzzzzzz.

You have to take your time, in life.

You cannot rush things.

You cannot constantly race the clock.

You have to take the time you are given, and more, if you need it.

You cannot run the risk of the bee you just resuscitated being trapped in the van with the five of you, should he not get out on time.

That's why I wrote the rulebook.

But Trewin didn't have time to read the rulebook.

So he picked the bee up from the tarmac at the ferryport and let it rest in the van as we waited to board, slowly nursing the little dot back to health with the caramel from a Mars bar.

I could have had that.

The bee came to life as we tumbled across the bridge thing, into the belly of the ship. We hadn't let the little thing out to rest when the call came for us to board.

We are not the types to give up on ill bees. You should know this by now.

So as it rose like a tiny sharp zombie, we all started shouting and panicking and flailing our arms. Because it's a bee. And it was flying around in the van. And real men don't cry. They flail.

We fanned it out through the open side-door (Trewin was hanging from the van – encouraging the thing out like it was a nervous fawn) just before we disappeared into the hole. We watched it buzz its way through the various criss-crosses of metal and the ship's rigging. A dot of the sky was being redacted by a pissed-up censor.

We would not have got so panicked were we not so rushed.

We needed more time to feed the bee.

We didn't have more time to feed the bee.

We didn't have time to do anything – we were due in Norway in two days.

–

Evidently, we had not had the time to read the booking arrangements for the hostel, either, as after a sixteen hour drive along the dizzying and never-ending tongue of the Autobahn we discovered we had not fulfilled the criteria for a late check-in.

Never mind. Laugh.

Death laugh.

Where's open?

Where will have us?

The clock hands start spinning.

There's a place. It's big.

We have to go to bed now. We have to be up in four hours.

Oh, we've already slept. Where next?

Tick tock.

Gothenburg.

Drive.

What's this now where's this?

Nice people, and a nice flat down by the river. Have a brisk walk. Flick through Swedish television. Nothing's good. Give nothing a chance. Flip, flip, flip. Down your beer, don't sip it.

We have to be in Oslo tomorrow, and I don't know where I am.

–

Get up and get out.

What's outside the window?

Trees.

“What's the scenery like driving through Scandanavia?”

Trees.

Where are we?

Oslo.

Get in. Set up. Good. Soundcheck. Nice. Everyone's nice. Hello, yes. Yes, thank you. OK, great.

Soundcheck finishedNO TIMEget onstage whoops no time sorry good luck.

Blast it. Every beat played punctually and every applause coming no more than 1.7 seconds after the end of each song. Good. We've got a schedule. Thanks to everyone for being so kind.

Where are we going? Bar. Downtown. How long? Twenty-minutes.

One hour later. Still walking.

And Norway doesn't sell alcohol on a Sunday. Did you know this? I didn't have time to read up on it before I left. I drank mine too fast.

Dry. Sobering.

So we have to get there quicker.

Jeez, get on with it, right, drink it up and laugh and spend and get into the hotel in 3 a.m. Norwegian perfect daylight. No bedsheets. They cost extra. You pay for their quality, no doubt.

So now morning and your brain's a needle on a scratched record and sprint back up to the festival site in the hot sun.

“You drive to Norway for one gig? Are you crazy?”

Don't answer him, Seryn – we've got to go. We're on a very tight schedule and if we break it we will die.

Crash, bang, wallop through to late nights in Copenhagen and Cologne (I don't have time to find the o with the umlaut) to very efficiently let good generous friends catch up with us on our race to a grim and abandoned finishing post that doesn't exist.

Quick. Up and out, again.

The ferries are on strike. The roads are clogged. Quick we have to make it.

We have to get there.

There's no time.

The sun stands still and the people walk around their dead cars, gesturing. The queues span around you in a circle and a police car slips by every second.

Time is passing us.

Our lives are bleeding out.

I can feel it.

I can feel it.

We're being crushed by a million still tyres.

Our fuel is burning.

I can feel it.

–

So, you have to take your time, and not rush things.

Just as soon as we hit our stride in the journey, it was time to come home.

Just as soon as we started making stories, ours was over.

So take your time with it. Rest a little, or get up and do something in the blackness.

We have nothing ahead of us, now.

One festival, close to home. And Europe...later. Much later.

The album is roasting. Slow roasting. We've covered up the timer with our pants and are drowning out the ticking by screaming.

We're doing nothing but peeping through the little window with our thumbs over our heads, pressing the button for the little yellow light.

We're taking the necessary time.

We're not rushing.

I'm going to lie motionless on the floor, hoping somebody feeds me a Mars bar.

Have we got everything?

Wake up.

These grunting, mucky bastards are your family, now. It's time for a family outing to Basel. Love your family, immediately and forever. Family delights. Family cares.

Shut up.

It's early morning and everyone's forgotten something. Grandad's forgotten his drum pads. Mum got too involved in something and left the immersion on. You aren't wearing any underwear, but you don't tell anyone.

Locked up.

Put a scrunched up bit of paper in a shoebox and shake it around. Shake it around for hours in joyless monotony. Shake the travel maraca.

Cheer up.

The hours pass like a dripping tap filling a swimming pool, but at least you're all here now. It's the Phoria-Smythington's family outing to Basel, and your first stop is some French place called Mulhouse, where you stumble out of the van and into a chrome and neon karaoke bar with a live performance of “A Whole New World”, inspiring you into wellbeing again along with a “beer”, which is a device you attach to your arm with a mechanical tongue that licks a little patch until it turns raw, which in turn tells your brain to release a new album of endorphins so your body and stuff can enjoy it all and the family can have something in common: a raw, bleeding patch on their arms that makes them feel great.

Roll up.

What's that? It might be a new day in a new country, but this family hotel has stars outside.Mum is happy she'll have a clean floor on which to do her ironing. Dad is happy he can put his slippered feet up and watch TV and pipe up intermittently about the state of the road. Little brother James has a soldering iron, two kilograms of semtex, and a behavioural problem. Grandad needs somewhere to settle in, and your room isn't ready yet. It's Room 101. This makes you happy and apprehensive, as you wonder what they're preparing for you in there. Turns out life in there is the same as life out here. Go figure.

Set up.

Out for a family meal. A day and a half of travel with sweating, grubby skin. Set-up, thunderstorms, bad packets of meaty euro-tubes and weirdness. The enveloping, soapy bubble of family in a totally new place (a whole new world), now made fine by clean and smiling hosts and a truffle dinner in one of the twisting gullets of the town. A smiling waiter who's had ones-just-like-you in all day, and sniffing clientèle who make haste soon after your arrival. Is that the ricotta, or those boys? Either way, it's blue. Eat your boeuf and let's get out of here. They're tickling each other and doing things with the breadsticks.

Mess up.

Manson had a family.

Yours barely know where they are. A square, somewhere. A growing crowd of people. You're setting up equipment that looks like a telephone exchange and one link in the chain keeps stuttering. Not now. Even the sound technicians have a nervous smile on their faces. The heat and the tiredness. You're not on edge so much as standing on the fronts of your ankles. This is new. Why do it new, now, Equipment? It can work. It will work. Do an interview with mum - moments before you get onstage - in a daze, being asked to comment on the state of inequality in Switzerland with a fresh mic and a big glass eye in your face, going out to people in their armchairs who have the option to change the channel; to change their immediate company.

You say you could do more about the issues, but right now, in this state, you don't know if that's true.You look like a hayfever-stricken frog.

You start playing – the family sings its Christmas songs – and you demand a Red Bull and chug it onstage. Your vision spins. The crowd gathers. The cameras are on and running you out of town in thick wires. Everything works, but instead of tiny keys and skinny strings there are bell-ropes and pulley systems and old mechanical workings that you have to heave and push and grind and wade through. Your performance hangs by a single thread string in a knife-throwing practice room.

Pack up.

Take it down and put it away. You did it and it all ends with a raucous cheer. Now the sun starts to set and you need that tongue-comforting thing to start licking your arm again. Head out into the cereal bowl to see what's happening and who's dancing. Another band finishes. “Thank you so much, everyone! We'd love to stay and party, but we have to go and catch our flight.” You recognise them. They're that family from down the road who puts the cover over their car and has a rotation of doormats. Their front door is spotless.

Your front door is a length of tin foil hanging from the ceiling.

Some people in the crowd suggest you're famous in this place; that Dad has taken you by the hand and dragged you onto the rollercoaster. You don't know about that. People are nice, though. Meet people and make them feel uncomfortable.

Walk across the city to a club. You don't go underground, but you regret that in the morning. Stroll back through to the hotel and watch everybody do like they do everywhere else. It's Friday, and the family takes a break from one another. The kids are in the crèche; the adults are in the lounge.

Fuck off.

Fuck off to the family home in the morning because you've all had enough. Sing a song or two and whistle up your own arse to enjoy the echo and put a plaster on your arm and on others' arms with a Nightingale smile. Sit in a chair and waggle your legs and get a boat.

Do it again.

Get some new equipment and get ready for Piknik festival in Oslo.

It's a long, long way away and there'll be other things to do.

How are we getting there, Dad?

Preservatives.

Well.

Well, well, well.

Well, well, well, well, well.

Right.

As it were.

Worst Christmas ever.

We were so enthralled, that, even if we wanted to, we couldn't sleep. We stayed up all night waiting for Santa to come and put a little gift-wrapped box of hope under our second-hand tree.

Turns out we didn't even get a lump of coal. They didn't want to bring that old chestnut up again.

So yesterday we had our final practice before a trip to Belgium tomorrow. Tired and out at the studio 'til midnight. That saw us well. Dough-eyed, as usual, and with tails as low as the Lib Dem vote. New material? Che e eck. Playing the songs? Ch e e ck. Everything working? Ch e e e ee cck.

Enthusiasm trickling. Put it all back together like we haven't in a surprising while. We've all been holed up in our respective caverns, working on music and movies. Trying to balance the creation of the new with the return to the standard is a funny old see-saw of satisfaction. Tweak this and tweak that. More coffee. Keep it up. We descended a few times into lazy jams. The songs stumbled a little under our collective psyche.

BUT don't let that worry you. We're still attempting to keep our pride intact, and we don't take this stuff lightly, and we always look forward to it and try and do everything the best we can.

It's like when you've bought that new loaf of super-seeded incredi-bread, but you've got to use up the loaf you bought the other day. So long as the jam (hey!) is right, you're still having breakfast, but you kind of can't wait to open that other loaf. You fall asleep dreaming of unwrapping it, of reaching in past the end piece and running your finger along the strongly seeded top. Mmm. And a whiff of fresh. And you take the slices out, only two, and squeeze the little plump sponge canvasses and see the air pockets bulge and give way, gleefully.

Oh, bready bready bootsy.

And while it slowly cooks in a little box, and the room takes on the scent of history - of a million little repertoires performed throughout the ages and still, to this day, in most households with a heart and a Hovis - you pick up the bag and spin it, and it twists in the air like a ballerina, and you swing it around and it hovers delicately until you stop it with a thud, and this delicate and beautiful parcel gives you a noetic sensation of power and authority – the very thing that makes that well-baked coquette so restlessly enchanting – and to save the thing and keep its definition you tack the little label on the neck that runs to the bunched up bag like the stem of a rose, and you seal it. A little yellow leaf. And the sell-by-date is still days from now. There will be mornings more than this sweet sunrise. So you smile, and as you do two warm, golden brown hands pop up and wave hello, and they fall onto a plate and say how happy they are to see you.

And then you take the butter from the fridge. Butter so soft. Ripples so enveloping, she could churn heads (...). And then you take your knife from the drawer that rings like a treasure chest of an Emperor's silver, and you...

...you...

...the knife...

...the butter...

...it all...

...spread about and messy and...and...

...dripping...gold...

And then you wake up. It was a dream. And your real life kicks in. And the loaf is sat on top of the microwave, bulging at you. Plump, like a cat.

But you know you have to use up what you already had open; the loaf you bought on your way home the other day and you only had 50p in your pocket and didn't need enough stuff to spend on your card.

And the butter's all hard and unworkable and there are no clean knives, so you just find one sticking out the side of a pizza box and you wipe it on your pants and figure you're going to die one day, anyway.

And then you eat this weird biscuit that smells like pants and stare into the middle distance, thinking about the emptiness of the pain of thinking about nothing.

That's what it's like.

That's what it is.

That's where we are.

See you in Belgium.

I swear it's going to be fine.

Tim

Number nine.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. - Jubkins Lossletops.

[That is, of course, a rationale that if taken seriously can just as easily be used to defend the worst kinds of violent fascism.]

We didn't dream at all, actually, managing to nab about twelve hours of sleep over three days, despite this being one of the better organised of our trips across that stretch of tarmac and furrowed field so flummoxing to island minds such as ours: Europe.

The street and shop signs may well have been in English. We have no idea.

The way we were it's entirely possible that we just drove to the end of the road and started hanging out the doors of the van in fits of jelly-bodied childishness, imagining entirely our exploits; taking the blue sky below us inverted as the sea of the ferry crossing and the pressing faces and queries as standard side-effects of being over there where things are upside down.

No, we went to Zurich.

Fifteen hours only evented (events must happen on a fifteen hour journey, lest the minutes and their tiny drills with which they bore into every imperfection in your powdering skull finally take hold and turn you into an ant farm; hollow chronological threads extended through only bad memories and becoming the very mercurial substance of every grim reflection upon reality that such sojourns in cold and leaky vans allow) by a couple of stops at which we dealt with some surprisingly friendly faces of authority. The police stops are always more fun than the customs stops, which are, of course, customary.

Looks like I got a wink or two last night, doesn't it?

Oh yes, I'm refreshed.

'Pop a few more like that in, Tim, and I might start to enjoy myself!'

And you might think it takes thought to take a tangential turn such as that (and this), but the fact is, as I'm sure you've anticipated, those words have been so aurally scarred into the upper corners of the room in which I'm flopping this log out that their inclusion is actually a concession to the world's impetuousness in forcing its collectively unsatisfied will on my ever frowning frame.

They look at you different when you say you are a musician, and I am not sure if it is pity or a kind of orgasmic awestruck effect at the kind of being they are presented with.

The officers of the law, I mean.

Despite the long hair, despite the eyes that looked like engorged flies dead on top of the poisonous strawberries that inspired their gluttonous passing into the great family picnic or dog shit in the sky, we made our preparations, for a great lol.

'Sunglasses off, lads.'

'Just look friendly.'

'Be quiet, Tim.'

And they took a quick check and let us pass, peering into my little porthole at the rear and judging that everything was alright, as I smiled and waved along with Seryn.

Me and Seryn waving at you through a grubby window in a shaky van.

You wave us on, unwilling to face your fear that the actions of the world upon itself may be far more broad than you ever dared imagine.

The world must be knowable, else all is lost.

-

I mean, everything was quite nice. We had rooms with beds in and a bit of booze here and there and a couple of friendly faces and smiles and helpful people and clean streets...

But the main thrust of the journey, for me at least, was the inducement of a static-caravan of sanity that parked somewhere on our collective neural carriageways but was kept at bay from the town centre of our actual minds.

The road – in particular the sheer length of it – transforms you from debonair fellow-about-the-scenes into a kind of travelling circus animal; locked away until it's time to piss or go and forage for food. And there is no food, because you have no money. So it's always the worst of the world's cuisine. Food as an additive to vehicle fuel; sold alongside it as an afterthought, to trick you into thinking you're hungry for cheese behind that wheel.

I had no idea at any point whether I was hungry or not, but the 'eat or else maybe die' aspect of being alive kicked in to full gear. And that's what I'm talking about. That's what driving on threadbare gets you: a complete change in psyche. The world mauls at the window like car wash brushes while your world consists of 32GB of music and another book, and watching that little real life television bring trees to a kind of psychedelic life while you, again, look back on every poor decision you made when you were twenty-three; why you thought you were right then, and why you are right now in a way you weren't then, and why you will be wrong in the future, but how you will also be right because of being wrong now, and how right that is.

But

but

but

then you

have the pleasure of complete arrival at your destination. When you have arrived at the venue and you have completed your sound-check and packed and unpacked and been shown around and shown the fridge and the backstage and given the codes and told all and wherewithal and whom then then then you have the pick of the place, and every luxury afforded you. Your status is entirely reversed from forager to one whom people will forage for in order to attend to. And suddenly you are brokered a million cigarettes and freshly iced beer cans and little molten gems of amber whisky in exclusive surroundings. And friendly smiling faces that stay static, and don't just brush by with the ferns. And suddenly, after being spun around in your office chair with your tie wrapped around your head, it is whipped off, and you make your way to your big birthday cake that someone balanced on top of the photocopier, next to the gin and pornography.

But this happens over the course of days, and is eked out in slow motion.

And you spend the last few dulling moments of it at the hotel breakfast, still dizzy, still sleepless, shovelling more pig meat and cheese into your now rotten gullet because you know what's ahead.

And then from the warm hotel lights and dizzy swim of every party, the van door slides shut again and SLAM. The world by accident becomes a little greyer and caged again and you start to smell the seats that smell like seats and you are locked in tupperware again.

And in the ride on the way home the weather is bad. So at the back end of the great white elephant you're travelling in you feel like a rubber raft on the back of a speedboat; your stomach lurching over every change in direction to correct for crosswinds, water leaking in through the roof, brain crunching into an emergency filtered state and then relaxing again, all through the fog of a hangover quilted only by a layer of alien-magic Burger King milkshake that had you laughing four minutes after first drinking it. Full of something not from here. Full of the thing that holds the air together, I'm sure. A baffling drink that could only make me think of Milhouse and Bart and their all syrup Squishy, or the millions of people who currently use amphetamines recreationally.

And then its dark.

It was night.

And I got sleep.

And now I'm doing this.

And now we'll keep doing the album, until the next one.

And I'll buy a cushion.

Have fun,

Tim

P.S. It's Trewin's birthday.

Trewin: setting fire to your computer screen.

 

Just come to the gig tomorrow.

There are glitches on some video games that have gained relative internetty fame where the characters appear not with faces and freshly rendered, plump fake flesh, but merely as eyes on stalks, sometimes with wide, toothy, lipless grins.

"I do."

Cheery elements of facial features suspended in mid-air.

That's pretty much how we are right now.

It's been a ring-around-the-rosie of various illnesses and viruses in the band, culminating in my laying on my stomach in the middle of the practice room yesterday trying not to sing a symphony onto the floor while Sez handled his sneezed out snot like the sands of time; forever trickling through hands, flowing like Italian dough, the others looking on through braeburn apple eyes regretting every decision they'd ever made.

We've all had something or other over the last few weeks. I can only hope we're over it, now. I certainly feel better. I give it an hour. I found a pecan slice under the fridge but I'm being sensible and trying not to eat it too fast.

So, after how-many-days?-I-have-forgotten of wall-to-wall rehearsals, we're on the last day of them today. We are getting it together, of course, for this show at Cargo...tomorrow. New material, and all that. Always worth a mention. Album songs that you wouldn't have heard before. Just a couple. Just a couple of newbies thrown in there being heard for the first time tomorrow night. With a string quartet. Just a couple of new songs. From the album. Just a couple.

Shit. Is it tomorrow? It totally is.

Don't worry – we're ready – it's just that it's been so long since we played in the UK that the whole idea of playing has become a little alien. 

It's too early.

But then 

Tim

We are doughnuts, all of us.

Dear Berlin, this is for you:

Fifteen hours. Fifteen hours in the van.

[Don't start with this, Tim, for god's sake.]

Hard seats and road noise and debates about the link between influential statements and criminal actions. Where does the buck stop? Long, long roads and Europe's flat and open fields. A 5am start, blind eyes punctured by text messages from one person or another:

Be safe!

This screen is too bright.

Don't forget to bring x!

I already packed, in a fit of excitement, three days ago.

Make sure you drive on the right side of the road! Not the right side, I mean, but the right side. Drive on the right side.

Destroy me. Take me to the place they make the glue.

6am: cigarettes and no breakfast.

Music, language, geography, and little leak of diesel.

[Skip to the end]

That evening, on arrival, we literally dripped into our apartment, funneled out of the cool Berlin air in what was apparently the 'interesting' part of town. It looked perfectly friendly to we naïve little children, wandering about in the dark with suitcases, grins, and hopeful eyes, like Pinocchio in the circus, or a cute, blonde, country girl taking her first steps onto the streets of LA, going to her first audition glad that there's that tarpaulin on the casting couch, lest she spill her drink. Oh, hello. With those huge arms, you must be a writer? No?

I was asked to go out and get some beers and, in a linguistic tangle, ended up buying shandy and not nearly enough of it. I was a fool. A damn fool.

Not for long, however, as after a quick dinner we hit the hay. Or at least I, my short straw being eternally long, so to speak, hit the sofa. The scratchy sofa.

Still, the road, used responsibly, is a powerful sedative.

First stop: First thing: a meeting in Potsdamerplatz. We all hopped on the U-Bahn, still confused and muddled and not quite ready for twenty-letter-long words, alien proclamations, or complex navigation around a city that seems to have de-marked its rail lines along the labels mauve, purple, magenta, off-blue-red, and dark lilac.

Even in the meeting, I rejected coffee as five other heads around me bobbed at the offer of water. I did the thing where you walk into a bar with someone and they offer to buy you a drink, and as a warm-hearted offer of gratitude you say 'Whatever you're having!', like a little Christmas cracker expression of companionship. No sooner, however, had I said 'Yes, water would be lovely, thanks.' than two other people grunted '...coffee.', and I immediately regretted my decision...but also in the spirit of what I'd already done felt uncomfortable contemplating my going 'Oh...actually...yeah, I'll have coffee.' Because I didn't want to be a pain in asking for a coffee that had already been offered to me.

We were all tired, is what I'm saying.

But we had a lovely time, up there on the somethingth floor, looking out of the big glass windows onto the city below. We began by talking about the weather. That made us feel at home.

That, then, and then after a little stroll and coordination we hit a café for a couple of interviews and a photo-shoot. There was an ashtray on the table. The British mind boggles. You can smoke inside. In a café. You know, in comfort. You can do something that you enjoy, in comfort. After being slightly underwhelmed by what I'd seen that morning (the city has something of a reputation for a slightly more Epicurean, rather than George Bestian hedonism - something I was looking forward to having thrust, Arthurially, in my puffy face, but something which had not yet occured), suddenly, with sensible Health and Safety legislation based on the practical apportionment of separate rooms and acknowledgement that perhaps life is not a mere exercise in sanitisation [pardon me, History, I really didn't mean to, though you may indeed wish to poke your head around a corner or two on this one], this place was starting to speak to me, albeit with yellowed teeth and sooty breath.

Another coffee offered to us, another one rejected. Two of them rejected on the grounds (grounds) that 'we've already had one.'

Damn.

Two really nice interviews, and a painful but honestly awkward photo-shoot in and around the place. I ended up with the one bit of sofa that had turned into a sink-hole, so as everyone else tried to look their coolest I was left just hoping I didn't look like a man with legs only up to my knees, waddling around and hunched over.

Me, only more gremlinised.

Move towards gig-time. Our first gig in Berlin and our first city gig in Europe; the only other European date being in Croatia more than twelve months ago.

See the venue. It's nice, in a cool 'under the tracks' kind of way. We were literally under the tracks, though – I don't mean that just to describe the type. Sorry to rail on at you, but I haven't been a good sleeper lately and it's tricky to stay on track.

Balb.

See the backstage area. There is coffee. There is coffee and you can smoke inside and there is beer in glass bottles and vodka and giant pretzels and chocolate. This is heaven.

Confusion. No sound-check? No pre-gig line-check?

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH, DEAR FRIENDS!

It's a blur until before the gig. People came! People were there! You lovely people! Who could ask for more? They came and they applauded and they cheered and they even sympathised with a little synthesised mayhem as a tiny glitch on the computer thought that Atomic wasn't avant-garde enough, so rather than ending in that big prog-euro-trance way that it does, it ended with a fart on the bass and a distinct sense of disappointment, like those brioche rolls that come in opaque packages and aren't really brioche and contain chocolatey liquid instead of chocolate chunks but you bought it thinking it was real brioche and you won't make that mistake again, because you're no sweetbread fool.

But, apart from that, we did ourselves proud [pats self on back with flapping bum]

Oh, good lord. 

So, I mean, I'm still getting over it.

Because then the evening happened, and Berlin in all of its glory came out to shine.

What's that? The hotel bar is closing and we're not allowed in? But...our friends said they were here. Yes, we are English. The bar is definitely closing? Yes!? Oh...there's our friend. Oh he's made eye contact with you and given you a little nod. Oh, we're allowed in now, are weyeswefuckingarebecausewe'refuckingPhoria. 

The good people at Humming Records know how to show their bands the city. They could not have been more welcoming or friendly and we heartily appreciate them and the work they're doing for us over there.

We all sat around then, drank, almost accidentally ordered shandy again, and slipped gradually down the cushions in the comfortable hotel bar.

Where are we going next?

Clubbing?

Sigh.

OK, but I don't dance. There won't be dancing, will there? I don't dance. I hate dancing. OK, I'll go and see how it is but if there's dancing then I might head back. Yeah, I know it's Berlin, but I hate dancing and just because I'm in Berlin it doesn't mean that if you're all dancing and I'm on my own in some club that I'm suddenly going to like dancing.

7am, then, and after dancing all night we're getting the train home from, like, omg the coolest club, like, ever. I had to text my England-stationed-bastion-of-hope-in-the-world to tell her that I was in a place that felt like:

...a mix between the house from Resident Evil and the club where Neo meets Trinity in The Matrix. Also don't be jealous and you're a total bitch who smells.

It was just one long roller-coaster of action that doesn't fit into much of a driving story. We hit another bar the next night and found it difficult to leave 'early' at 2am (we had to leave because we had to drive home the next day), because yet again the party was just getting started. That city just keeps going.

We, along with some of the German people we met, lamented a little the UK drinking culture and how, for us, its relative paucity of imagination was highlighted by this little trip. Not just little things that you get on the continent like, you know, being trusted as an adult to take a glass outside every now and then, but just the way in which the evening/morning is approached. I come from a small town in South Devon, and, on a Saturday night, the vomit stings your eyes and blue lights stink up the place. In Berlin, the capital city of Germany, this just...wasn't there. Not a hint of it.

Then again, we met a man outside the train station one night and he said, and I quote:

'...if Thom Yorke was in the same room as me, right now, I'd rape him so hard with a plastic dick that his arse would break into a hundred pieces.'

So I guess the civilised times are just where you find them.

That said, we want to go back, and hope that Germany can offer the same when we head to Hamburg in just another couple of days.

More road, more fun, more gigs, and we're going to try and bring Thom Yorke.

We hope you're well.

I'm going to spend the day tidying my little flat because I have an 'inspection' tomorrow.

It's good to be home.

I believe that's the Officially Sanctioned Motto of National Solidarity, anyway. That and 'Call Centre Positions Are Real Jobs', which we should repeat to ourselves over and over again, lest anybody begin to feel disenfranchised.

Heaven forfend.

Cheers,

Tim