Come on board my tour bus, have a wee drink and share the journey.

The tour actually took place last year, but is now available in the new 'deluxe' tour edition of Gillan's Inn.

Driven by impecuniosity, or Les as he was more familiarly known – our bus hurtled through N. America to deliver us almost nightly to the stage door of some venue or another. Occasionally we had the luxury of a hotel – I'll never forget The Dream Land Motel – in Moose Jaw strangely enough, and that's in Saskatchewan. I was hoping to meet Percy Schmeiser there (DF 20 at http://www.gillan.com/friends20.html) much to the intrigue of our drummer Randy Cooke - but it was not to be, as our gig in Saskatoon was cancelled due to lack of interest.

If I may plagiarize myself – is that a form of literary self-abuse? And I've heard that the hyphen is becoming an endangered spelling, particularly in the dictionary, and that's due to lazy-text, but I digress. Drawing from DF 1, because life on the road is always the same once you step on the bus, and excitingly different when you get off; a bit like a time machine really.

We ride the bus and, cocooned in our own surreal world, we hurtle along the endless roads in a vehicle so heavy it is possessed by its own momentum. There is no cruising, no comfort zone between acceleration and its equally frightening opposite. We just hurtle. We rattle too, and bump and swerve. Occasionally we let down our suspension by an inch or two, so we can negotiate a lower bridge. It is, of course, necessary to spot the 'low bridge' signs well in advance in order to cease hurtling; 'else we'd be hurtling al fresco, which would deprive us of that sense of containment which is so essential to the mood of modern hurtling.

There is also a greater degree of friction than is generally associated with hurtling through, say, outer space. Gravity accounts for only a portion of this as 'our' hurtle is more of a grinding, crunching, non-lubricated avalanche of granite slabs along the neither smooth nor level tar macadam. Hurtling along crumbling roads; ger-dunk, ger-dunk, ger-dunk, ger-dunk, or down narrow avenues of plane trees, requires wide-eyed commitment and white-knuckled resolve.

For a mile or two at a time you can observe that nobody is breathing. Even the cows and the sheep pause in their ruminations, look at each other and with, De Niro like slow nodding acknowledgements they mumble, 'Wow, that was some hurtle' before going back to their provender.

There is probably some law of science which states that anything contained within the body of a hurtle will hurtle at the same rate as the mother hurtle. Not so in our bus, oh no, with its bunks and lounges, galley and toilet, tables and TVs, fridges and crates; musicians and a drummer and a singer, a delightful Moronica, two roadies and a Caramban. Not forgetting – although I nearly did - the pots and kettles and bottles and cans and glasses.......etc. each hurtling at marginally separate rates, depending upon the state of recovery from their last spastic lurch.

You can share this and other delights, because we filmed it.

But not the 'Rivers of Chocolate' story, I'll tell you about that another time.

A paregoric elixir and a whisky chaser?

Cheers, ig