Luxury Coach-Class Travel:

Trying to do everything in a tiny space sums up really one of the greatest stresses of touring. Even though we're traveling on a luxury coach (and yes, they come nicer than ours, but really, once you're on a half-decent tour bus it's all much of a muchness) we still all exist inside coach-class spatial confines. For example, this is my bunk and the only private space I (or any of us have). And by private I mean you're separated from everyone else by a curtain. A curtain that, say, Brian can yank open at any time and say, "Hullo Dicky. Are you havin' a wee polish in there, are ye'?" This is most annoying when you are having a polish; not because of the interruption but because it's Brian.

This is bedtime.




This is the back-lounge. In every back-lounge on every tour bus in the world exists red-eyed roadies watching something marginally crappy or very funny in perpetuity. And it smells of man. And cigarettes. And dead air. That said, look at Brian, Vicente and Jamie having fun. This is what it looks like to have fun. On every tour bus there is usually a tour-video/DVD that everyone watches and then quotes relentlessly. On this tour it was every episode of the British TV show Still Game.




None of it so terrible, just terribly small.

The best thing about this bus are the windows in the bunks - a rare feature. And they open too, which is a Godsend when you wake up in the baking heat inside a metal tube that 8 other men have been sleeping in.

A room with a view.



The first few days on the bus are okay. You get your little space sorted. You're hanging out with people you like and the tour stretches ahead of you full of promise for the excitement and romance of places you'll visit (Paris! Lisbon! Copenhagen! Reading....) but after a while something strange happens on every tour.

At some point you become tired of dressing and hopping around in a narrow aisle traveling at 60 miles an hour; and of watching people brush their teeth; and of trying to contort yourself to take a leak while being jostled around city centres; and of having to be with people around the clock (even people you like a lot and despite the fact that it's nobody's fault). This is when the bus starts to attack you. Suddenly every sharp corner jabs at you; every full cup is spilled at every short stop; every bump and lurch happens as you're just about to sleep; everything you need is packed in a bag you can't reach; everyone gets in each other's way and every time you want cereal there's no milk and every time you want a cold soda there's only warm beer. I've never been on a tour where this doesn't happen. Never.



When I first became obsessed with music it used to sustain me through the tedium and the desperation of living somewhere that life avoided. Time dragged in my home town, and the worst time of all was on Bank Holidays when the stores wouldn't open for Sunday and Monday. Time crawled for two whole endless days while I waited impatiently for my life to kick into gear and begin. Music was the one way I thought I could escape a dull life and get out to see the world. And I was lucky.

So it wasn't without some irony that at the end of this last tour that I was deposited in a village 12 miles away from my mum's house at 1:30pm on a bank holiday Monday. I felt like i was in an episode of The Prisoner, the series where Patrick McGoohan can't ever escape from The Village.




Cheery Bye.