tour diary part 9 – LOUD WOMEN

Preface

I haven’t written one of these in a long time, since writing about the European tour in October. I have a full draft for the second half of October when we were in America. But that never got typed. Maybe one day it will. 

Since then, I went through the typical life cycle of a musician it seems. (I have learnt this through watching other people’s instagram stories). Too busy, then nothing in December and January, and then emergence from hibernation.

On the 6th of December I arrived back from Tokyo, pulling up to my front door just before 7am. At the change over in Beijing airport 13 hours before, I felt the cogs in my brain start to separate. Like when you push the clutch down, things no longer moving in relation to themselves. 

The pattern of the ceiling tiles didn’t make sense. None of the shops were open and my phone didn’t work. I was walking up and down and up and wrote some random things in a note pad that I then forgot. There was nothing to stare at

Yet back in East Croydon, getting a cab home, we sit down and the driver is playing CapitalFM. The music is ‘It’s Christmas’, and it’s cold outside, the fog is still sitting on the trees.

Sometimes when you are very tired, it’s good to have a landscape that you know. The overused British analogy of wood pigeons sounding like childhood. 

In the cab home, I tie up the last few months into a satisfying story. Something that roughly lines up with ‘Driving home for Christmas’. There is a collective sense of success, all three of us crammed into the back seat. Everything is instantly locked off and in memory form now that it’s done, even though I still haven’t slept since 26 hours ago in Shibuya. Mince pies and radio, driving down a motorway for Christmas.

And then the rest, and then the reemergence.

And now it is March and I sit here wondering if I forgot how to notice things. I thought I would write about America and Asia but they never left the notes app, and the purposeful lethargy of Christmas became less intentional and more a new state of being. Not to say I haven’t been doing things, I just may not have fully noticed.

It is time to write full sentences again. Something in the body clock, the yearly cycle resetting. 

UK Tour

There is a period between New Years, after resolutions have been set, and Valentines day, when Hinge downloads must be highest of the year.  

I did my part. Deleting it every few days, re-downloading it every other few when I had nothing to do. And after the Hinge time ended, and I’d met my own array of strangers who I didn’t like, the UK tour started. 

On the first night we have an interview. We all sit in the support band’s dressing room and speak into a microphone. I pretend not to be reading the questions ahead on the A4 sheet of paper on the floor. 

One of the questions is ‘So what’s the story behind Morgan’s medical mystery that meant she almost pulled out of an event?’ 

And, when questioned, the muscle memory from a month of mediocre dates kicks in. Except this is not that. This is not trying to show a bit of true honesty in an attempt for human connection. 

I’d do well to remember that. 

You can say, ‘I’d rather not answer that’. 

It feels weird in my mouth and doesn’t come naturally yet. Not a sentence I’d usually whip out with friends.

Stone Henge and the road that follows 

I wake up from a van-sleep still clutching my Parma Violets, pleased that my hand didn’t relax and drop them. No one else likes them because they taste like soap, so there’s no stinginess in eating them all myself. I will buy them again.

I look out the window, and instantly know that grey-brown hedge. Decades of it being drilled into my head. We are about to pass Stone Henge. I poke everyone and say ‘We are about to pass Stone Henge’. 

We are driving to Exeter. This is the road from my grandparents’ house in Winchester to my family home in Devon. I’ve done this drive every Christmas, Easter, and school holiday growing up. 

Over the last few years I’ve gotten used to longer and longer travel. The journey back from Tokyo was about 24 hours door to door. Yet as we drive past Stone Henge, I look at google maps on the dashboard and see we have two hours left.

The Nana and Grandad road is 3 hours long, and the 7-year-old in me reads that we are not even half way home. 

This was the longest drive that I would ever do. And part of me knows we are not even half way through the longest possible drive in the world.

These two hours sit heavier than on an unknown road where I would go back to sleep, blink, and be at a service station. Here the unknown takes on a mystical quality like it did when you were a child. I look out the window at my strange no-mans-land hills that are not at the start or the finish, but somewhere in between. 

The trees are taller and passing more slowly. Little cottages sit on the main road, yet you couldn’t imagine the old woman really living in them next to this roar. They are gone in a blink anyway.

And when we get to Exeter I know we have come a long way.

Follow the birds

Me and Jacqui are walking along Brighton Pier. It’s Valentines day; no days off. We’ve gone to see the murmuration. In this gap between soundcheck and stage time everyone is calling their girlfriend. It’s failing slightly because the birds are un-ignorable. Phone calls becoming absent minded for the split  second when you can’t help but look out to sea.

I look out to sea. There is a moment when the birds go totally invisible as they twist to the side, three-dimensionalising again with the next turn. They fade light to dark, as they let more of their body weight face you. ‘They just do it because they love it’, Jacqui says reading a plaque on the pier. 

I try and pinpoint one, but my eyes blur, and refocus. Look up, look down. I watch one bird drop lower than the rest. There is more wind here, and I am running down the hill now, me and Dillon trying to catch up with Jacqui and Jed in front.

These are more than in Brighton the week before. This murmuration in Aberystwyth would make the news.