Emptying My Camera:

So before I close the book on this year's touring I found these photo's on the Camera.

These are the Christmas lights in Barcelona.



Hmm, yes, I know. After London and Paris they seem a little, Leeds-esque don't they?

And this the Christmas Tree in the centre of Madrid. I think it sits on Km 0, the point from which all distances in Spain are measured and I think, with the Ayuntamiento in the background, the administrative centre of Spain. Unfortunately there was a ton of construction so it was hard to go look properly. Oh yeah, and I was supposed to be working too...





These are the lights in one of the shopping precincts in Madrid. Note the mental-busy crowds at the bottom. I ate by myself at the top of this street in a sandwich shop in a break between soundcheck and the show. As I chewed on bread so crunchy it cut my mouth I saw a sign for a FunFurter. They looked dreadful but I wished I'd ordered one of those instead. I would have looked a lot more exciting hunched over a FunFurter instead of the not-very-spicey chicken thingy I was fish-hooking my soft-palatte with.

It seemed an anticlimatic way to spend the last night in Europe. I felt sad to be leaving. Much as I want to go home and not be on tour I do love the travel and romance that comes with it (unlikely as that sounds for a tour bus; but there's something to be said for going to sleep after leaving Paris, waking up in Milan, and watching the Swiss Alps rise in silhouette in the night as you fall asleep). I'll miss the people I'm traveling with too-they're warm and funny and bright and good friends. I've spent much of the past year with some of them so there's a kind of shorthand, I think, that exists between us that feels like home. A certain critical mass of shared experience. If only we could get weekends off so one could have a life too...





This is a friend (pictured on top of our gear at JFK when we got home) that someone acquired on the way to Italy, late at night, at a truck stop. To be honest it makes a change from the usual giant water pistols and monster truck videos everyone normally ends up buying. It's the size of a small child and has one leg sewn on backwards so it was instantly easy to warm to. His owner grew very attached to it and who could blame them? We all secretly wanted one and to compensate we discussed ways to vilify our little green friend. One idea was for everyone else on the bus to be photographed one at a time in a different compromising position with our furry friend and the photo's emailed to the owner after the tour. Another idea was to buy an oversized sex-toy for the little green loveball and leave it inappropriately dressed in its owner's bunk. In Barcelona I went as far as to go look at oversized sex-toys in a shop on The Ramblas. The girl in the sex-shop was very helpful. She looked like a Lit. Major and her breath smelled of garlic. She showed me a full range of strap-ons. In the end I didn't buy a strap-on. Buying a strap-on is a commitment, especially for a joke. They cost a lot of money, even the cheap ones. You've really got to want a strap-on, I reckon. And I didn't.

In the sex-shop I felt another piece of rusted tin crumble from the wall of my heart. Exactly a year ago I'd learned I'd passed my exam in Basic Mandarin from the Chinese Government. Now I'm looking at strap-on's in a naff sex shop in a touristy part of Barcelona. It's not even that funny a joke. Time to get off the road for a while. At least until my knuckles are no longer dragging on the ground.