The last hours of living in this flat in Porto. Carolina came over in the car without Pedro who is at home nursing a scratched cornea, he is in less pain but struggling to open his eye – sleeping and time are the only possible cures. We ordered a large Bolt and we took the last two loads down to The Archive, leaving only what we are taking to England tomorrow sitting in the flat, these are the remaining possessions that now qualify as luggage. It’s sad and exciting but I’ve spent my life being uprooted, living in different places and despite it being my 65th year on the planet, I suppose it’s going to continue to be this way.

In town, I dropped by Tubitek, the record store and Garage & Stage, the guitar shop. I told Rui at Tubitek we were away for a month and they will be saving any records I ordered till I come back, Carlos at the music store will be helping me find someone to insure my guitars. But first, we are off to London. There, we’ll get Mohamad to look at my computer issues, pick up a guitar from sessioneer Noel and stay with Biggles and Colleen – a reminder, it was Biggles and his boss Freddy Cannon who signed the ex-band to Carrere in the early eighties. He’d been a mate through my ex Lucy and didn’t know I was in the band until I arrived back in the UK, small world.

I struggled to get the Archive gate open again but can’t do anything about it until the electricity is on because they need all kinds of drills to remove the old gate and install a new one. Nuno the landlord arrives back from Madrid Arts Fair the day we leave for England. The builder Julio hasn’t been in touch since Nuno has been gone so we are just hoping that some kind of progress can be made while we are away. Nothing is easy.

We came back to clean the flat and found dirt on surfaces that I didn’t even know were surfaces. We have photographs of how the flat was before we moved in (where everything was) and that’s been helpful although it looks like the photos weren’t that up to date and contain a couple of anomalies, but most of all, the photos look like a crime scene.

Now we have to hope that we got the bag weight right for the plane because it’s not like we can leave anything behind. One issue is that something I ordered, a dimmer for a lamp, hasn’t arrived. I ordered it in plenty of time and they even stipulated on the site that it would only be around 3-4 days and it is coming from Portugal, not outside the country. So, I don’t know, the piece is seemingly hard to find in a shop, I’ve tried. Maybe a note to our neighbour to look out for it and we’ll give her a call when we get back to see if it ever showed up. Truly, nothing is easy.

Music today has been Mott the Hoople – All The Young Dudes (1972), their fifth album. On the verge of breaking up due to lack of success, Bowie, who was a fan of the band, offered them Suffragette City from the unreleased Ziggy album, they turned it down. He then offered them All The Young Dudes and the rest is history.

Music Of The Daze