How it feels to come home.

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I had been home longer than three and a half minutes when I received a text message. Mr Douglas, do not forget your 10am dentist appointment tomorrow…

This was not the text I was expecting. My manager was due to get back to me about what days I would be working this month. She’d reeled off a few dates last time I was in, but I work there so seldom I hardly listened. As far as I knew, I was due behind a desk for a day or two in the distant future. I had asked her to text me back to remind me of exact dates. I thought she had a good week or so to get back to me.

The message from the dentist didn’t half make pretty shapes; entirely abstract by this point in the evening. It said something about the morning—something a long way away. Further application of whisky will sterilise any wounds for now (I figured), a morning panic-scrub will make all those tidy gnashers gleam like greek arches, and a quick goodnight kiss will improve my mood such that any overnight healing will be hastened by deeper sleep and a flood of health-enhancing chemicals.

Needless to say, on day one of the band’s return, my affairs were not all in order. The internal bliss and renewed intellectual peace following our experience outstripped the unwarranted self-importance of any ‘appointment’ or ‘supplemental employment’.

Later, as my weak and heavy eyes fell closed, my phone buzzed.

It was a text.

You know you’re in tomorrow?

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I woke up too early to a dark morning and shnarfed down an unhealthy breakfast from a plate nobody had washed. When it came time to leave, my face was too-dry-soapy clean (I could feel my skin crack when I smiled), I had my neat shoes on (with holes in), and my stomach had decided to take me on a 17th century sea voyage. The woman who lives in the same place as me (is she sadist? Masochist? I can’t tell which, but it must be one), who had left the house about twenty minutes before, WhatsApp’d me to say the bus stop at the end of the road would be out of service for the next hour or two, and I’d have to walk the extra distance to the next one that was working.

It’s very cold. She said.

I put one foot out of the door and a sheet of rain fell from the sky.

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

I arrived annoyingly early at the dentist’s, as I’d rushed through the rain straight onto a bus. The run was long and lurching (thanks to the sudden onset of nausea), and the bus was packed and hot and misty, so I’d sweated through my work shirt which I’d have to stay in all day.

The receptionist looked at me over her glasses and offered me a seat.

I had a long time to go until my appointment and the other person waiting was coughing through stories of grim infections she’d had. She laughed, and was good natured, but I tried hard to bury myself in internet ego death. It was no good—my stomach was churning and rolling and I held it with one hand and winced. One of the receptionists (one of them: an old person made young through that parasitical age-transfer that can happen when a lump in time so desires to steal what is not its own, the other: blending so well in to her surroundings I thought there was a strong wind moving papers about) had decided to put The Worst of Smooth Elevator Jazz on the reception stereo. The cackles of the infected woman played along to it. Since the last time I had been here, all the interesting decorations had been taken down. There was, however, a rack selling herbs in metal buckets. The walls and the surfaces and the chairs were gleaming white. Of course they were. The combination of internal biology and external ambience gave birth to the fatal combination of not only needing to fire lunch from the front, but actively wanting to.

I blindly sweated a few cog twirls down the plughole and my name was called. I followed the hygienist down the hallway into the white surgery without looking at her. I smiled at the floor and braced my abdominals. My belly had a knife in it.

‘Feel free to put your things down there and make yourself comfortable on the chair.’

So I got on the chair, and the motors ran and slowly and, like a great cannon shifting its aim, my open mouth was now directed straight at her face.

She smiled.

My stomach lurched and I rolled my eyes.

‘Is there anything in your mouth that’s bothering you?’

‘Not yet,’ I thought.

And another wave of nausea ran from the bottom of my stomach through my chest and into my face, throwing my consciousness off. Something would have to give.

‘Not really,’ I said.

She looked at me. A moment passed. She smiled a soft, motherly smile before donning a face mask and a pair of protective goggles.

-

We are not on tour.

What do I wish?

What is enlightenment?

Is it a state of bliss, or a state of ignorance? Or a state of bliss in ignorance? Or is it knowledge of the bliss of ignorance and the acceptance of bliss as bliss? Enlightenment is nothing more than enlightenment. Is that what it is?

What is the opposite of enlightenment? What of the heaviness of a thought? Is enlightenment the freeing of the mind from the weightiness of thought—a state where you are able to see the valuation of thought as an illusion? What is the value of that illusion?

Of what value is consciousness?

Thus, a quiet day at work passes. Another drop in the bucket. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Fluorescent lights kill.

Nausea passes.

Teeth get cleaned.

As I walked home past the gyms with large windows, I watched the women on the treadmills with their bouncing ponytails. I stood still and watched them run and we both failed to change in size or shape.

I wish we were on tour.

Tim

Fwd: Re: 2018 phoria tour & message to all ye who enter here

07/11/18 Freizeitzentrum West (FZW), Dortmund, Germany

08/11/18 Urban Spree, Berlin, Germany

09/11/18 Heppel & Ettlich, Munich, Germany

11/11/18 Kulturbetrieb Royal, Baden, Switzerland

12/11/18 Salzhaus, Winterthur, Switzerland

15/11/18 Oslo, Hackney, UK

16/11/18 Rough Trade, Bristol, UK

 

Ticket links and details on our website.

 

Lets keep this one light and industry friendly.

As passionate go-getters, we are so excited and thrilled that we are going on this exciting and thrilling mini-tour. The music we are going to play will be very exciting, and we are excited to share it with you and with each other, as we excite each other so. We are so excited about it we have yet to recognise the yawning chasm of death that awaits all animals. We are so excited about it that the mysterious forces of the universe no longer have any meaning for us, and instead of contemplating the mysteries of existence we can just float like dead ants on a colourless sea of distraction and wasted potential. We are so excited about presenting literally anything to do with ourselves that this decadencium of 21st century reality no longer contains enough conceptual bread to sustain us, and we have had to construct a new reality – named ‘&&2’ – in which to live (part of persisting in ‘&&2’ is maintaining ones own parallel existence in the world in which you (you) have lived your entire life, or as we call it ‘The Village of Small Potatoes’).

We are very excited to have become gods and can’t wait to withhold the secrets of the universe from you in order to maintain a wholly manufactured sense of intrigue fuelled mainly by your own negative self-perception. 

 

There we go!

Put that on a t-shirt.

 

Tim

P.S. Great joy and abundance to all ye who enter here.

A rebuttal.

“Look again at Trewin's room. That's here. That's home. That's us. In it: everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every worthwhile human being who ever was, lived out their career. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident riffs, choruses, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every bassist and coward, every creator and destroyer of music, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, bewildered child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt A&R rep, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our band lived there - in a room filled with dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

Trewin's room is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this room on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner; how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of booze spilled by all those musicians and drummers so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a room.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the music industry, are challenged by this cube of pale light. Trewin's room is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Trewin's room is the only room known so far to harbor Phoria. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our band could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment Trewin's room is where we make our stand.

It has been said that studio-hunting is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of Phoria's conceits than this distant image of our tiny room. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish Trewin's room, the only home we've ever known.”

from Pale Shit Boys, by Carg Salan

The oft overlooked Carg “NASA dustbin lid champion” Salan could not have forseen how wrong he would be when he first wrote this on a Cornell toilet wall in 1994. At this time, the members of Phoria were still seven years old, and only three of the wet-kneed band had met (also in a toilet). In some ways, of course, Carl was prescient (who could forget his prediction that you'd remember him?), but of course in one way, the most important way, the only way that matters (what will henceforth be referred to as the curdsand way), he was wrong.

Even a cursory application of the curdsand way now dictates that the band are moving out of Trewin's room in Brighton and into a studio in a little town just along the South coast.

We're going to be right by the sea, in a little cul-de-sac, in a wood-type panelled room with no windows that smells like musical equipment. It reminds me of the places I used to play in years ago. It was comforting to be back in that kind of situation. When we went to look around I really did feel like I'd gone “home”.

It was nice. I haven't had that feeling in a while. It reminded me of why I'm in this business in the first place.

In the “vibrant” (read: overpriced and moribund) city of Brighton it's mainly rooms that double as living areas that double as offices that serve as creative spaces where you sit and figure out music. If you're doing this (frankly: idiotic) thing properly in this day and age, then your worldly possessions amount to a computer, a guitar, a bed, and an ashtray. You lock your door when your landlord knocks and you ignore the inevitable rise and fall of the sun. You're desperately seeking some new “thing” and trying to figure out the new way of getting to it. Admirable, I'm sure. Another middle-class martyr all too late for the scrapheap.

That's how it is. It's a tale as old as time.

After four or five years, there's something about this place in our career that still feels new (because it's fucking bonkers), but to step back in time and get back to stage one is refreshing and reinvigorating. Suddenly there's an emotion that's known that you can mould easily into something you can use, rather than having to deal with developing a perverse creative stamina on top of the panic and existential fear that is everything else you're doing.

So we're moving all the gear out next week into a sun-kissed, white-walled enclave along the blue-skied Sussex coast. We're right down on the beach. There's something in the air. We're going to finish stuff up and get it ready for the road.

It's going to be our little haven where we can get things done.

Oh, yeah...yeah of course...of course we'll invite you to the studio warming party. I was just going to...I was just going to say that.

Just...just let me reach for the invite over...over here...

Oh. Oh, my phone's ringing. No, you won't hear it because it's on silent yeah.

One second.

“Hello?”

“Yes.”

“Oh dear! Oh no, and it has all gone wrong has it? Oh dear and I'm the only one who can help.”

You'll have to please forgive me someone's stolen medicine from the fire brigade I'll have to sort this out by

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

There's a joke in this title.

What is a typical day like, at the moment?

We're in the gritty midst of a million different things, being snatched at and strangled by so many clammy hands that none of them can yet get a tight enough grip on our necks to pull us down.

Much of our work is fueled by bananas, coffee, and fatty snacks.

First thing is communication. There are always little bits of housekeeping to be done at the beginning of the day, be that replying to an email or putting a little package together or replying to your nice messages or checking this or that with whomever is sorting what.

I put things together sometimes, like little splashes of promo. Maybe a blog post, here or there, where I make things up entirely to put to bed the pretence that a musician's life is one of excitement and glamour. I often complete these tasks under a sheet, listening to Brian Eno and wondering if 11 a.m. is too early to finish yesterday's crisps.

It's not too early.

I've usually got about ten other windows open too, with some other stuff that I've been working on for a bit, so it ain't all sleep and cake.

Usually on a day like today the band will get together around 2 p.m. It's a time that suits everyone. Jeb's usually been up late, hallucinating into a computer screen until his clicking finger looks like one of Schwarzennegger's legs. Sez usually joins us around five or six, depending on what he's done with his day. Meanwhile Jeb, Trewin, Ed and I have a little jam, or just a noodle on some instruments, or edit some stuff for the new album, or have a session of ideas or just a cup of tea and a chat to warm up for the evening. Chat and a laugh.

Then we practice and problem solve. I think there's a new track where I'm going to be playing keys, and drums, and probably a harp with one of my feet. It's a bit like planning a war and sending your medic out on his/her/its/bear's own to plant explosives deep behind enemy lines.

And that goes on into the night. Getting the new songs done and choosing synths and putting the new live set together alongside the album. That's where we are. And we have little chats where we brainstorm and go off into flights of fancy about the future and what we could do with it, little ball of decorative marzipan that it is. And we look at potential artwork and trash it while drinking brandy with our little fingers sticking out and debating whether the ancient Egyptians predicted the Libor rigging scandal.

And then we say goodnight to each other and disappear into our respective hidey holes and drink Horlicks and cuddle our teddy bears and play old vinyls of our mothers singing us lullabys. And we do our homework and stay in school in play in the local sports team and eat healthily, just like Jamie Oliver has rigorously instructed us to under penalty of televised death for the last ten years of relentless commercial dictatorship on a show called The Non-Running Man.

And we fall asleep and suffer nightmares. Nightmares of the invasion by giant babies that swim through space as if it's water. Their scalp appears first, over the horizon, glowing like a torch shone from close proximity against a peach, before suddenly the big blue eyes appear and the smiling, toothless mouth that promises peace, at last, from all human suffering.

And then I wake up in a cold sweat to the sound of ethereal noise, and I realise that I never left my bed at all, but in fact fell asleep while writing this very note.

Then how did these words appear? I must don my cloak and jump the first carriage that will take me to the seminary. Surely Lord Pheethenstaph will want to know about this.

That's a typical day in the life of the band Phoria of which I am a part.

Tim

P.S. Probably mention Cargo album preview 10^th March as that's something we're doing.

I bet you thought I was full of surprises?

In a data driven world where it is possible to so comprehensively think and feel so many different things in an ever diminishing span of time, it's increasingly difficult to pick one idea for which it's worth getting out of bed in the morning. This might be caused by a childish loss of the ability to concentrate (which is easy enough to blame on 'the internet' just as it was on 'the television', 'the radio' and 'the paintings on the wall', rather than seeking the cause in our own personal failings and primitive need for quick slaps of quasi-cerebral occupation), or it might be that, in general, ideas are so diffuse and large swathes of the culture so homogenised that distinct ideas no longer possess the laser-like ability to energise in the way that they once did. So, one may wake up, have, achieve, do fun, and then sleep, perchance to dream, with little source of lobo-motive energy but pre-packaged plastic packeted slates of creatively perverted carbohydrate. There is as much negative to be said about this cycle as there as positive. There is as little left to preach of it as there is vitamin D currently being pressed through my veins. (So many people cared and feared for me and my paper white skin, eighteen months ago, when overloading yourself with as much vitamin D as you could possibly take became a strange source of Great British Pride until kale turned up at the bottom of an aeropress and ruined things for everybody who'd got it all so right, so far.)

And I guess that's kind of what I'm talking about. The world I see that runs rampant in screens and speakers is a flat plate of boring ideas, executed largely by pretenders, mainly for people whose primary interest is themselves and how selfless and nu-new-age they can appear to be to others while buying clothes made by slaves and paid for, with quivering and fearful hands, over a counter attended to by either a tax-dodger or a pseudo-socialist so pierced that they whistle when it's windy.

But perhaps that satirically emphasised point of view is just my own, if that makes it more easy to discard.

Hurrah, then, for a new energy in the Phoria camp, so we might at least attempt to avoid this fate of cookie-cutter drudge and despair and perhaps break through to something a bit different.

New shit. New shit. New people and things and ideas. New music. New directions. We're having discussions where we bash our heads against each other more hard than before to try and come up with something that'll work. We're all sensitive folk, and we're all finding our way, but we all see that we've been sucked into this particular breadth of the temporal vacuum where relevance is more relative than it ever has been before; where age and work can be more easily packaged and sold; where the ability to energise others with whatever you're doing can be achieved more succinctly, through a million different channels all at once, and in a million new ways.

Whether it will all amount to water and ash is something we will have to deal with as it comes, but for now the mere promise of doing something new, whatever it might be, is getting us going, and giving us a little glint in our eyes, and making us look forward to the future.

Let's see what will happen today.

I'll probably fall asleep in an hour. All this energy is tiring me out.

Tim

There are way too many sentences in the world.

What are we, if not present?

It's not like there's anywhere for us to go, anyway. We're always in here, somewhere. What are you doing? Streaming us? Clicking on a file front and having us blast through speakers that weren't made for us? Having a big black needle-scratched lozenge dance around in the corner of your place on a turntable that your parents would turn their noses at if they cared enough about this century to talk to one of its victims every now and then? They don't care, do they? They don't want anything to do with you. They never have. I've got a theory that every parent, when their child leaves home, joins a secret club and they all get together and bitch about their kids and how much they know that their kids will never know until their kid leaves home. I've always had this feeling that there's some secret to life that gets revealed to you at some point along the way – probably when you least suspect it and hopefully whenever my bloody phone stops ringing.

I suppose that's all good and fine. I'm sure you're loved, really.

New material's at the bottom of the just-boiling pan. To add to my legendary failure to poach an egg the other day (my close friends, at least, know that it turned into an 'underwater frying'), I also failed to boil an egg just twenty-four hours ago. I have no clue what I'm doing wrong. I was standing in my kitchen in my underwear next to the netless windows, stirring the water well with my fly swatter, keeping time by sniffing my herbaceous pits at measurable intervals (being a musician I, of course, have an impeccable internal metronome), and yet when the egg dropped onto the plate it collapsed faster than my dream of being the thing that pings the ball up at the beginning of a pinball session. I just never had the hips.

I mean, that's what brought the vision of the little bubbles that start at the bottom of the pan to mind when thinking about new material. It's born of heat and chemical and structural change, which makes it exciting and indicative of forward thinking, which is important. You have to get this right. There's no point in giving this kind of line to you, a line direct to us (or at least, one of us and perhaps the one most least qualified to conjure images in anybody's head likely to result in our success), if we don't get it right, you know? Everything has to be correct so that the whole music/image/personality of the brand can form a cohesive whole.

I mean, so long as the album cover is a .gif of me scratching my balls and the music consists mainly of my sampled farts and belly slaps, I think it's as cohesive as Nicky Minaj's strategy, and, when you really think about it, inclusive of almost identical content.

Unless the pictures match the music, there's just no point in any of it.

I guess we've all started to assume that the current government is mainly a post-modern performance art experiment, yes? Yes.

This is the last day of idleness and political obsession before hardcore rehearsals (I can't use the word 'practice' any more, as I literally cannot get to grip with each incarnation of it, so 'rehearsal' is now the word) in preparation for our supporting James Vincent McMorrow around Europe next week.

The sense of being and time in this band can be bizarre. Display came out in June and seems to have been really good for us, and enjoyed by lots of people. That's good. But on this side, you want more. You want to make more, do more, experience more, be more, in a kind of childish not only wanting to play with the toy but almost wanting to be the toy and eat the toy and play with the toy, all at the same time. So, whatever you're doing, or not doing, it's not enough, so you get kind of paralysed with movement – not only wanting but needing to go down every road at the same time. We've been here before, but the roads were smoother before and they and led to less. This one is different. It's like choosing which minefield to cross to get to the place where naked people smother themselves in whipped-cream champagne. Last time it was like choosing which country road to walk down to get to a hug from a warm, roadside-hedge-bearded vicar who smelled like lavender and fed you with sticky Murray mints.

Jeb's been in Italy, the git. That's one road you can go down, I suppose. Trewin's been working at the farmhouse. Ed's been trundling around in his new 198...3? I think it's a 1983 Citroen BX. I might have remembered his registration wrong. 'Two lady owners', is the standard description, I think. 'Only drove it to the carvery and back on Sundays.' Suits Ed, then.

Seryn's been indoors, I think, much like myself. It's pretty good. The main thing about spending a lot of time in isolation is that you don't consider how your hair looks, even for a second.

I'll let you think about what kind of paradise that might be when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

We'll see you on tour.

Dates and ticket here. We're with 'The McMorrow' from Hamburg to Cologne.

Don't let us put you off.

And don't forget to pick the news out of this ramble like one of those bogeys that makes you wonder how your funny bone got stuck up your nose.

News: a couple of new tunes, taking shape.

We're gonna kick each others' asses on this one. We want to get this stuff out.

Now, it's Friday, so care must be taken – but be sure, this weekend, to throw your personality at people like monkeys fling their shit at paying customers.

Otherwise, there's no point.

We're nothing, if not present.

Have fun, and don't forget that if you do what needs doing now, then it doesn't need doing, so don't do it.

Tim

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