After the tour UK part of the tour ended we spent a couple of days recuperating with our friends Peter and Karen and their adorable daughter Daisy who is now Amy’s god daughter following a somewhat weird ceremony in a Catholic church the other week.
I discovered whilst trying to change our ferry reservation that the company had gone into administration. I was advised by a harassed but patient woman that I could get myself registered as an unrequited debtor or whatever, but I thought the time was more profitably spent in finding another sailing with a different company. It’s a great shame because I much preferred sailing from Boulogne as opposed to Calais which is a dump.
We were catching an early ferry so we decided to stay in a Premier Travel Inn just outside Dover. We should have a deal with the Premier hotel mob but as we haven’t I’ll tell you right now that some of them aren’t all they’re cracked up to be - our room in the Dover one had a sagging mattress. And so did the Bristol one a week or so before though to be fair they gave us our money back without any argument. In fact they were extremely apologetic, especially as we were staying for two nights and the only available room for the second night (apart from the sagging mattress room) was the disabled room. That was alright once you got used to the low level light switches and the bathroom looking like it was full of gymnastic equipment. At least the bed was firm - I think because not that many disabled people stay in Travel Inns, leastways I’ve never seen any. But whenever do you see disabled people? The only evidence I generally see of the disabled are acres of vacant disabled parking spaces. It’s as though the spaces themselves are disabled. They might as well be, they’re never used.
The ones in France have a particularly baleful look about them equipped as they each are with a notice that says: Si tu prends ma place prends aussi mon handicap - if you take my place take my handicap too. Who do they think I am, Jesus Christ? Throw down thy crutches and walk - no you silly cunt, I’ll take a parking ticket instead.

Now I’ve upset the disabled community, or more likely a load of able-bodied busybodies. Still, it’s about time I upset a few people, haven’t done it for ages. And anyway, at the Dover Travel Inn they wouldn’t let us use the disabled parking space that presumably went with the room. It would have been a nice gesture because it was late at night, very cold, the disabled space was next to the door, and we had five guitars, two laptops, Amy’s suitcase and my pitiful overnight bag to unload.
But I remember - last year I played at a Heavy Load show as part of their Stay Out Late campaign. That show was full of disabled people, people in wheelchairs. I topped the bill and played to an almost empty room because the carers had wheeled the cared for off into the night and home for a mug of Horlicks at nine thirty because it was the end of their shift and they don’t get overtime. So that’s possibly why I never see disabled people in Travel Inns - it’s past their enforced bedtime.

Anyway, because of the change of ferry we had a choice of driving through the rush hour and spending a scintillating evening in Dover or stopping off in Norwich to do a bit of last minute post tour shopping, having dinner somewhere vaguely civilised and driving down to Dover after the late evening rush. So that’s what we did because scintillating and Dover are opposite poles, if indeed they have enough to do with each other to even qualify as opposite.

Not that a late afternoon shopping trip to Norwich was that scintillating. Amy went into an art shop and I sauntered into Cash Converters watched a young assistant squeezing a spot in the one way mirrored window of the door marked Manager.
Then we went to Waterstones to buy some books to get us through the long winter evenings. Quite honestly Waterstones bookshop depressed me. There have surely been some great books written since the days of William Caxton printing press but I don’t think many have found their way into Waterstones in Norwich. Their selection struck me as pathetic. The usual suspects all lined up from Nick Hornby to Nick Hornby. The trick in the last few years is to give a book a cultured, artsy looking cover, never mind that it’s a badly written novel about a footballer, the cover art somehow makes it look valid.
We got out of there and it was time to eat. The car was conveniently parked outside Pizza Express. It’s a mark of how beaten down we were by almost four weeks in the British Island because that’s where we chose to eat. In the fucking Pizza Express. Very nice but there’s a really good Italian restaurant just a stone’s throw away.
We had a laugh though. We ordered and the waiter, a young student with an evening job, said ‘Excellent!’ I don’t see what the fuck is actually excellent about a mozzerella and genetically modified tomato salad followed by a margherita pizza and a lasagne which thankfully wasn’t described as piping hot though it looked like it was no stranger to the microwave
Still it wasn’t too bad and a bit later the student wandered over in between doing a very convincing, but presumably unintentional impersonation of a whale sucking in plankton, and asked how You Guys meaning us were getting on. When we told him, out of British politeness in my case and possibly end of tour lethargy in Amy’s, that everything was absolutely fine, he punctuated the moment with a distracted ‘Cool…’
I wondered how long it would be before we got a ‘Cheers’ out of him.
We ordered an undrinkable espresso a piece and the bill. A different, more surly version of our waiter delivered that. We sorted out the cash and our original waiter, the student prince, came over, picked it up and said ‘Yeah, cheers.’
'Cool,' I thought, ‘ totally cool.’

I don’t want to hear that stuff - a band should always strive to give the impression that they arrived in a space craft. Unless they’re a blues band, and then I want to know that they arrived in a Bedford van having spent the night in a lay-by, sleeping in ex-army sleeping bags on top of the amplifiers. The only band I've ever witnessed transgressing rule number three was a Brighton band called The Electric Soft Parade. Their frontman said yeah cheers so often I lost count. The Electric Soft Parade weren't very good. The Dykeenies were but the singer said cheers after the first three numbers so I gave up. Actually that’s not quite true - I was getting cold and I had to go and get organised for my cameo appearance.

I don't know what to say about The Proclaimers shows without sounding corny, trite or bland. Someone who isn't reading this carefully might leave under the impression that I'm using those adjectives to describe The Proclaimers but I'm not - they could never be any of those. So I have to resort to fabulous, fantastic, they went out with a bang etc...
I've probably said it all already anyway. Erika Nockalls played the violin on Sunshine On Leith wearing a green satin frock. I played my green Microfret guitar on Whole Wide World. So there was a bit of colour co-ordination - a matching his 'n' hers Eric section.
Anyway, they were talking about getting together to record a new album beginning next March. I can hardly wait.

There's loads more to talk about but if I start on that I'll get bogged down in it so I think I'll stop now and put this on the site without finishing it off...