June 14, 2008. George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Houston, TX.

"ESCUSE CART PLEASE!" (The charming call of another altogether individual airport buggy driver).

So, here I am again. I sit, swallowed whole, inside the belly of another monstrous airport. Once more, a seemingly unnecessarily long connection.

And here it is again. The slow dawning realisation that I've done it. I'm away from home and things could turn out differently to the way I half-considered them, briefly, on the eve of my departure.

We're not in Camden anymore…

I'm sure it's true of everyone but somehow I never really consider the big things I do until they are already upon me. I mean, I think about them. But I suppose I never really believe that a thing like flying to Austin, Texas and then visiting my best friends in New York, under the feeble pretence of essential "work" business, will ever really happen to me.

I should be getting used to it by now. I have had a quite extraordinary year.

Still no record label interest, though. That also seems quite extraordinary to me. But it's not as if we've tried that hard. We've had far too much work to be getting on with.

The record is, at least, written and comprehensibly demoed. If we had to mix it and release it now, I wouldn't be disappointed. It's the music we love, played the way we want to play it. What can be wrong with that?

The best thing about this trip is going to be the perspective that only this amount of distance can bring. Feeling a bit out of my depth always brings me into focus. It makes me realise how much I drive myself crazy with tiny details and my obsessions: neat and tidiness; other people perceptions; the unjustness of the small world I inhabit.

But music makes me happy. Or at least it has the power to. And a lasting happiness too. A feeling of worth that nothing else is capable of. Ironically, the feeling which the music industry has the power to strip you of altogether. But only if you let it.

Only if you let it.

So, I will write in this space when I can over the next 12 days. And I will use it to tell you (and remind me) of how I got my shit together again.

Bye 4 now. Ox