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Our last week in Germany before we go to England for a few weeks. We decided not to fly so we are taking the train all the way. We will travel through Germany into Belgium and then through the channel tunnel to London before moving on a couple of days later. I read this story last week about a woman having her seat punched because she reclined and that the rule is you have to ask permission to recline? I have never heard of that rule before. Cattle flying in crunched up seats where the airlines try to cram in as many as they can. Next time we go to the States we’re going with Greta.

Gazing out of the window today at a smokey grey sky, it seems like days like this get away from you, fall through your fingers. They make you think they are not valuable with the dark hues and their drab demeanour. Damp, uninviting, forcing you inside, but outside in this empty stillness there’s real action! The weeping willow in the garden is budding in February. The tree thinks it’s spring. Gerd told us yesterday that at this point every year he has been shovelling snow away from the driveway, but this year, nothing. That deadly stillness speaks volumes about change and an unknown future. What I always thought about climate change deniers is what I thought about the occasional paid doctor that the tobacco companies used to wheel out to deny that smoking damaged your health, that is, why not err on the side of caution? You get the feeling that something might not be quite right, you look at the toxicity of smoke and the damage that chemicals cause and you think it would probably be better to ease up on that stuff, don’t you?

I remember in the seventies when we used to go on holiday that the windscreen used to be covered in dead insects, smashed against the windscreen of our grey Rover 2000 TC (MDM 3D), red seats inside and outside a mess of green blood. Here in the garden I’m missing the birds. Even when there’s food out for them in the cold, they don’t come. I saw a blackbird this week bathing wildly in a metal tray full of water, perhaps this garden is the bathroom and the kitchen is with one of the neighbours, but when the wildlife is disappearing, it makes you worry.

Suddenly, in contrast to the fading light and encroaching darkness, the clouds dissipate and a bright dying sky appears, a last hurrah for the day. A small breeze moves the bushes in the garden and the bull skull looks out from the front wall as if commanding the darkness to recover its dominance. The bare branches of the black barked trees stand out like skeleton fingers against the backdrop of light. It’s fading fast and soon we’ll be wondering about domestic reality, dinner time, cutting vegetables and satisfying the gnawing in the stomach.

More football tonight in the Europa League, it’s nice to relax into writing here, watching some football, the passion of sportsmen and women. Watching some Sci-Fi, by tomorrow we’ll have two Picard’s to watch. I’ve been watching season 3 of The Expanse and carrying my Tony Visconti book from room to room, threatening to open it. I was thinking today about breaking out my guitar, taking advantage of my road-trained fingers before we leave for England and write something musical. The day is never long enough for all the passions, all the responsibilities, and fulfilling all the needs and desires, but we’ll give it a go balancing happiness and success, security and risk, work ethic and inspiration.

Last but not least, I was sent a video this week, filmed by our friend Derek Timbrell at the Banbury Mill on the 8th August 2001. It was of course the concert by Julianne Regan and Anna Ryder and friends.

 

I was asked to play guitar and as with many things these days I can’t believe it was 19 years ago. You’ll notice on the first song I am playing my Hagström 6 string acoustic, otherwise known as my ‘other’ stolen guitar. I wonder if that and my stolen Rickenbacker 12 string will ever find their way back to me?

It’s Beethoven’s birthday, but because he’s a whole 250 years old he gets to celebrate for the whole year. His birthday is actually on December 17th and although his reputation was built in Vienna he was born in Bonn and that is where we went today. Right now I’m listening to the Cello Sonatas.

With no car we had to walk down the hill and through the forest again. It was a little wetter, a little more slippy and trying to avoid the squelching mud at speed to make sure we made the train made it all a little more precarious. Also Olivia was wearing her stunning Texan boots, but they have no grip. She was also carrying a violin, her bag and a 13th century crystal vase (ok, there was no vase). We made it to the train with ten minutes to spare. Two stops on the train and then change for the tram. It takes about 40 minutes on the tram from Rhöndorf (Drachenfels, more later) to the central station in Bonn. Apparently Bonn central used to be a dump, but they’ve done it up and Olivia could hardly believe how much it has changed. I had a tasty Thai yellow curry in a trendy looking cafe for 8 Euros, seemed cheap considering the sandwich across the way was 4 Euros. I can never figure out how things are priced. How could the Died Pretty album I bought today be 5 Euros and the measly prepackaged sandwich I didn’t buy be 4 Euros?

It’s also Carnival season around here and today there’s lots of cute kids around in colourful costumes. Next week is Rose Monday when the parade happens. I went to see it once, rowdy doesn’t quite cover it, but if you like floats, street festivals, dressing up and drinking beer, this is certainly for you. But we were in Bonn to look at the two newish record stores, meet Olivia’s friend Sophia and to give Beethoven his present (we got him a hearing aid). Seriously though, a couple of years ago we went and visited the house where he was born and I think they even had the crib that he gurgled and gargled in as a baby. To think that he would write the Smoke On The Water of classical music (The Fifth Symphony) and be such a prodigious talent and then go through the torture of losing his hearing, it’s such a tragic story (Tip: Gary Oldman in The Immortal Beloved is a must see film). At his house you can listen on headphones to how his hearing presumably deteriorated. I’m not sure how they worked it out, but if this was accurate then the man surely suffered.

The record stores were both great because they were friendly and the first (Mr. Music) had a selection of new stuff and the other (mirrorball) had a great selection of secondhand stuff. I asked Anton at Mr. Music what he thought of The Slow Rush, the new Tame Impala album, he reacted as I hoped anyone might who had bought the first two albums and then bought the third, “I tried hating it, but didn’t”. Ha ha, positive review then. I won’t go into the albums I bought in either store as we’d be here till dawn but I found a lot of interesting records between the two shops. I found a copy of Heyday for 25 Euros (Yikes!) at Mirrorball. Roger, the boss, told me he had a few of the early albums. I autographed it for him and pondered the thought that it was 35 years old.

Olivia was supposed to meet Sophia whilst I rummaged but she also had to take her cellolin to the luthier for some adjustments. The ‘cellolin’ is her name for one of her violins that has lower octave strings. You can hear it on certain songs in our live set (Chromium, Time Is Imaginary). Sophia couldn’t make it in the afternoon, she is a med student so she is studying all day everyday, and has been for years so she wasn’t around till around 5.30PM. We went to meet her together at the ramen place. It was supposed to be those two catching up whilst I looked for Gentle Giant bootlegs, but Sophia came to the Düsseldorf livestream gig and is super cool and smart and we ended up talking the three of us for a couple of hours about health, food, diseases, homeopathy, cancer, training to become a doctor and the magic of words and music. It was really fascinating and the time flew by.

We got on the train back and realized we didn’t have any cash for the machine to buy a ticket. It’s so dumb, it only takes coins, you can’t use your card and if an inspector gets on it’s a 60 Euro fine if you have no ticket. I’d hate to try and figure it out if you didn’t speak German. In the end we found an app online (or Olivia did) and paid just in case, inspectors don’t usually like excuses. Gerd picked us up at the station and we got back to the house just in time for Spurs/Leipzig, like Liverpool/Atlético yesterday, Spurs lost by a goal to nil.

Last but not least on the tram to Bonn we rode along the Rhine and past the ruin of Burg Drachenfels (Dragon Rock Castle), a 12th century castle that overlooks the river from high on one of the hills in this region that is called Siebengebirge (Seven Hills). Everytime I go past it I think, Drachenfels? Did George R.R. Martin holiday around here?

PS – There’s a lot of construction going on in Bonn at the moment. I’ll let you choose which language to read this in:

I saw a hearse today, oh boy. Olivia’s parents’ house is close to a graveyard, but I rarely see hearses. When I do I feel confronted with death, whether there is a coffin inside or not. When the hearse has passed its passenger on to the afterlife and drives back to base empty, it seems even sadder than when it’s on the way to the graveyard. Its job is done, the morticians are still dressed for the burial, but it’s all over, just a stray petal left forlorn on the flat metal bed of the vehicle. The ritual of death doesn’t get any easier for the West, even though so many people believe in God and in heaven. You’d think that faith in God and belief in the afterlife would be enough to quell the tears. Religion allows an opt out clause in death, it’s the atheists that really lose someone when they die, there is no reprieve, no clouds with angels, no pearly gates, no reincarnations.

Olivia went to Düsseldorf today to pick up her Swedish passport, she left at some ungodly hour and was done before midday. Siv was gone to Frankfurt sometime after 5AM and Olivia hitched a lift to the station with Gerd. There is no public transport in this small village, no shops, a restaurant yes and a very noisy church, but that’s it. So when she was ready to return, she planned to take the train as far as she could and hitchhike the rest of the way. So I decided to go meet here, walk down the hill through the forest and back with her along a windy path over streams and past fallen trees with all the leaves of the autumn scattered and still collected as a brown covering over the pathway. Between the house and the forest there was a cold snap in the air, it was essential to wrap up, but by the time you were descending down the hill in the thick of the trees, the chill had gone, the wind subsided and a warm silence ensued.

There wasn’t much sign of life on the way down, a blackbird, a blue tit, just the creaking of the occasional branch, the whirr of the cars on the nearby road and the trickle of the stream heading down to the small waterfall at the foot of the hill. It took me half an hour to get down there, avoiding some muddy sections and taking pictures of knotted tree trunks and bright green moss. I got down to the road and after a couple of minutes I saw Olivia walking up the hill. I turned around and we walked back up through the forest together, this time climbing, exerting some energy making our way back to the house. More creaking, an invisible bird flying out of a bush, but mainly only the sound of our feet on the leaves and the squishing of mud, the trees bemused by our presence and our conversation. I undid my coat until the top of the hill, where the wind was up and suddenly a shrieking hawk was flapping above the trees, fighting the wind. We arrived at the house just satisfied with the idea of a walk in the forest. In the coming months we might not get too much of a chance for something so serene.

Although the tour is over, there’s so much to do, not just reading and writing, buying records and watching the Champions League. I just listened to Anekdoten’s Nucleus album, that we will be performing live in Canada. Phew! These days everything is about preparation, planning things way in advance, otherwise nothing happens. When you think of what it takes from the writing of an album to the release, or the writing of the songs to performing them live, it’s a rather long and detailed process beyond the actual inspiration. Revisiting songs from the past is also a challenge. So, next is lots of listening and rehearsals for Anekdoten, changing the FB headers and booking the travel, whilst playing and writing new songs in the studio with the Noctorum project, MOAT and Space Summit. Without Olivia behind the scenes this would be nigh on impossible – and then there’s her musicianship. There’s Stephen at the label, Shauna the promo queen and all those other people around us that help so much with fan pages (Judy) and spreading the word. We are entering another phase. Here we go.