Wulfrun Hall, Wolverhampton
I was on holiday the other week - no please, I don't need your sympathy - and early one morning as I lounged by the pool in the Caribbean sunshine, I noticed that one of the arms had fallen off my glasses. Now, I don't tend to wear my glasses very much because I've got this condition (vanity) that means that I have to wear contact lenses. The lenses I use are rigid gas-permeable ones which you wear every day after a thorough cleansing (and for this reason I carry a substance with me called 'All in one Solution'. Would that there were such a thing for the World...). I can't have throw-away soft ones because my eyeballs are all squishy and bulge out into irregular shapes, making that whole thing about light rays focussing on the optic nerve a bit of a lottery. So every night I need to take my lenses out and wash them with the All in one Solution (would that I could wash away my Cares with such a liquid...) and put them in a little case, whereupon I unfold my trusty old glasses that ward off at least some of the enfolding blindness and go about my bedtime business. This ideally requires a stationary, hygienic area with clean running water and perhaps a mirror, and a pair of glasses to slip into. This is not easy to find when you're on tour. I have taken my lenses out in all manner of unlovely places, like vomit-flecked venue toilets, vomit-flecked service-station toilets, vomit-flecked car ferry toilets en route to Denmark. Why, just yesterday I dropped one of them into the washing up water on the bus and had to gently fish it out from among the soggy crumbs, cigarette ash and flecks of vomit at the bottom of the sink. I suppose we all have our crosses to bear. But now to add indignity to inconvenience, I have to put on glasses bound with electrical tape. You should see me when I stumble out of the bus in the morning with my special bed hair, looking for the shower. It's not pretty. But my worst fear is that it looks deliberate, like the bit of tape is the final touch of a 'look' I'm going for. I'd like to think that when I wash my hair and put in my lenses, it's like the Nutty Professor. But I'm still shunned by society.
Apparently the art lies not in any one object,
but in the lines of energy that pass from you,
the user, through the organ, to the devices.
My thanks to the Duke of Special for informing
me of its existence. Without his contribution,
you would never have seen this small picture.
Today we welcome Kashmir, from Denmark, to our tour. As promised they unload a prodigious amount of gear. When Bell X1 arrive the place looks like one of those music conventions they have at Wembley Arena where pretty ladies drape themselves over acres of guitar amps, keyboards, mixing desks, drum kits, glockenspiels, indestructible flight cases, semi-destroyed flight cases, guitars of all shapes and sexinesses, Tibetan prayer bowls, log drums, Pig-nosed psalterys. And lights. Thousands of heavy lights. And lots of grim-faced men with bulging biceps and a musty tang. And, in the case of Kashmir, regulation Scandibeards. Except there are no pretty ladies.
I miss my girl.
The gig was, of course, woohoo
