Hey pals - I tried to keep this short and blog like - I failed. Here’s another rambling wordy account of my last two weeks. much much love to all. stay strong 

Nat 

x

1.

I arrived in Milan feeling hot and confused and hung over. 

The flight over had been nasty - really fucking nasty. Horrible turbulence kept the plane jerking about like a lunatic. It would periodically plunge and drop from the sky without warning.  I found myself idiotically gripping the seat in front of me all the way. 

By the time I got off the plane I was white as a ghost and soon sweating profusely in the mid day Italian sun. After an hour or two baking on the tarmac floor outside Milan’s Malpensa airport and desperately trying to re- string my battered little travel guitar, I caught a train and was soon drifting through incredible Swiss mountains, passing pristine deserted lakes and forests. London already seemed a long way away. 

At the other end I decided to try and hitch the ten mile journey on to the next town. I wound up lost somewhere by the side of a main road with no water and a spinning head. Everyone passing by seemed to be Swiss holiday makers in big four by fours full of bored kids and sweating dogs. They didn’t seem to keen on the idea of picking me up.

In the end I found a roadside café. I told them I’d come from London that morning and was trying to walk to Lacone. After nearly pissing them selves with laughter at the sight of me standing there confused and broken with my big tattered bag they took pity on me and drove me the remaining six or seven miles. I found the hotel pretty easily and asked at reception if The Kooks had checked in yet. They said they had but had already left for the next town an hour or two ago. I flopped down in the corner - exhausted. 

She didn’t seem to keen on me hanging around. I was just standing up to leave when out of the corner of my eye I see Hugh coming down the stairs wearing pink shorts and ray bans and carrying a book under his left arm. I am relieved to see him and he is somewhat surprized to see me. We go out and sit in the garden. In the distance, in between the jagged peaks of the seemingly never ending hills, you can just make out the slanted brick rooftops of the little town of Lacone where the festival will be taking place this evening. Hugh hands me a smoke and we sit back in silence in the big easy chairs and take it all in.    

2. 

After an evening of walking the town we head down to the piazza where the festival is happening. Paulo Nuttini plays a blinding set - which to be quite honest surprises me. His band are great - the new songs are great. It’s a great evening. We feel in hugh spirits now and after watching Duffy we go wandering drunk through town in a big pack stopping off at all sorts of weird little bars where their playing terrible Italian house music and middle aged women are gyrating on the dance floor to the joy of over excited teen DJs. We walk back to the festival enclosure where we find Duffy’s backing singers getting harranged by a weird balding Swiss man who claims he once played in an eighties rock band called ‘ Yellow’. We save them from him and along with a bunch of others take them back to the hotel with us where we sit out on the big balconyes in front of an assorted collection of over priced mini bar drinks and sing the night away on little acoustic guitars under the incredible blanket of stars. At about four everyone stumbles off to bed and I sleep on the sofa in Hugh’s room - my trusty ol’ bag as a pillow - safely enclosed by the surrounding mountains. 

3. 

The next day me and Luke take a fennicula up into the mountains. From there we get a sort of ski lift that take us ever higher up into the hills until our ears begin to pop and the air is thin with altitude. We walk through forests and hills that in winter time I guess are used ski slops but now in mid summer are deep green pastures and sunny fields. We sit look down on the vast lake below that runs all the way to Italy and was once crossed by Hemmingway on a rowing boat during the first world war. I have brought my little travel guitar with me and we play through a few new songs we have each been writing, adding harmonies here and there. We drink a few beers from a little bar by the edge of the woods and bum cigarettes of passing walkers. 

The Kooks play a great set that night as the sun dips down over the crowded piazza. Amy Mcdonald plays after and we sit with her and the band drinking the evening away in the deserted festival sight while security guards with fierce alsatain dogs prowl the grounds and rubbish collectors pick up the days discarded bottles from the ground. Everyone heads home early - each with journeys ahead the next morning. 

4. 

I got to Ventimglia about 9 that evening. I had an address scribbled on a bit of a paper - the hosue of a friend of mine who’d kindly agreed to let me stop off there for a day or two.In fact wasn’t even really an address at all. All the directions said were - ‘up mountain from Ventimiglia, go to L------ , walk half an hour on the only road there is out of town, cross the bridge, it’s the second house on the left’. 

Man... that didn’t sound too promising - and I didn’t even have a phone or anything. This whole plan seemed to be becoming increasingly crazy.

It was already getting dark as I wandered through Ventimiglia trying to catch a ride. I asked for directions at a bar and they just pointed up a big fuck of mounatin and shrugged.. I spent a very blue hour by the roadside smoking my last ciagerretts and sticking up ebnthusiastically with a  big flase smile of hope at all the passing cars winding their way up the mountainside. 

By now it was nightfall and I wandered back into town wondering what the hell I would do with myself that evening. I thought I might go sleep in the station but then I remembered what Italian train stations are like with their prowling rail staff prodding at sleeping travelers and their constant ear piercing over head annoucments. 

As it happens I’d been in Ventimilgia once before many years ago. I’d had the shit beaten out of me. Me and my friends Cosmo and Bilbo had walked arragontly into a late night bar and finished off a bottle of whiskey before walking calmly out the back door without paying a penny. We’d been traveling for a month or two and picked up the obnoxious habit of eating and drinking for free in any bar or restaurant that we deemed over priced tourist rip off joints. Ten minutes later the bar tenders had tracked us down, circled us with their motor bikes in a back street and watched while their midget balding boss beat the shit out of us one by one before taking any cash he could find on us and then literally running us out of town.

I guess we probably deserved it. Anyhow - I didn’t really fancy another night on the streets of Ventimiglia. I was starting to give up hope when I saw a late night ice cream palor on the side of an otherwise deserted street. There were a gang of young dudes standing outside by their bikes and sharing a bottle of wine. They seemed pretty hostile at first but when I offered round the last of my cigarrettes we got talking. In the end this geezer  with dodgy sort of mullet and a big beer belly and asks me if Im going up there to find a girl. When I say yes - which is after all is sorta true I  guess, he agrees to drive me up there as ‘ a matter of honor’.

So we get in to his little beat up black punto. He’s heavily fucking pissed. I can see that now and I’m already wondering there and then If I should call it off get out the car - take this one on the chin and find a place to sleep a few hours till morning - but I really wanna get up that fucking mountain tonight - feels like ive come all this way and am so close.  He sees my nervousnes and slaps me on the back - ‘ don’t worry brother, I know these roads like I know my hand. 

We shoot off into the night and are soon climbing the narrow mountain roads and leaving the town below is a haze of glittering little lights . He gives me a cd to put on. Their his own terrible happy hardcore/ house tracks - says he is a ‘famous local dj’ .

The music really gets him going, he pushes his foot down to the floor and the car lurches at a terrifying pace round the increasingly narrow and ill light roads of the mounatain. Oh God, oh please, please don’t let me die to a happy hardcore re- mix of ‘ teardrop on the dancefloor’. Please - anything but that.

So know he’s leaning over to me and going ‘ you like cocaine ? you like cocaine ? I love the cocaine ? tonight I take much much cocaine’. He takes both hands of the wheel to gesture the amount he has snorted and only just corrects the trajectory of the car at the next bend as we speed upwards. 

Suddenly his mood changes ubruptly - ‘ you know my friend - he is dead’. Jesus. I don’t really know what to say. He’s looking at me with these big sad eyes and I can’t help but wish they were focused on the road instead. ‘ Shit, Im sorry to hear that man’ I sort of mumble. ‘ Yes’ he replies somberly ‘ he is fucking dead’ and with a sudden surge of anger presses his foot down again and aclerates with a rush around the next corner. 

My seat belt isn’t working so I’ve sort of tied in an improvised belt around my waste and attached one end to the door handle. I’m holding on the seat for my fucking life. He takes out a little bottle of whiskey from the glove compartment and drinks before offering it to me - which given the circumstances I gladly accept. ‘ Yes’ he continues ‘ he die on these fucking roads - fucking idiot’.      

So by now I really wanna get the fuck out of this car but my driver aint having any of it. It’s a matter of honor. He will get me there he says - to the door. There’s no way he’ll have me walk. Besides, he says, drawing on the whiskey bottle, there are many many chingali - you know ? - wild boars in these hills - is not good walk alone here at night in this places’, Right now I think i’d take my chances with a whole herd of the fuckers. 

It occurs to me now that we’ve been going for quite a while. Sure enough - we’re completely fucking lost - he pulls over to a little way by with screech of the breaks that send dust flying in our wake. He gets out of the car and squints up the dark road. ‘ Oh shit’ he says ‘ I think we are in France man. Shit.....yeh this is definately France.’ Sure enough a roadside points the way back to Italy. 

Before I can say anything he’s back in the car and hurtling up another road. Im starting to have a serious failure of sense of humor when all of a sudden exactly what I have been waiting to happen, happens. He misses a turn on a particualy black part of the road and looses control of the car- a cliff face seems to appear out of nowhere. There is a massive screeching of brakes and my head slams down on the dash board. Then for a moment all is sillence, 

I pick myself up. I think I must have very briefly blacked out. There is a throbbing pain in my head and an aching in my back. Other than that I’m suprized to find that I’m absolutly alright. I look over at my companion and he is white as a ghsot and quiet for the first time all night just staring straight a head. The headlights light up the rock face and I kid you not - all bullshit aside - we are about two feet from this fucking cliff - two fucking feet. That would have been it - bang - simple as that. Considering I didn’t have any seat belt I was lucky to get off as it was with a bruised head - a little bit faster and I would have been through that fucking window - a little slower on the brakes and we would both have been crushed to fucking jelly. I decide to walk. 

This time the dude doesn’t try to stop me. I sit with him awhile while he calms down and give him the last of my water from bag. I advise he maybe rings a friend to pick him up and leaves his car for the night but he insists on driving back. He doesn’t even say goodbye he just zooms back off down the mountain with a screech of car wheels.

So I head off through the mountain back towards Italy from France - singing loudly to keep those fucking boars at bay - freaking out every slight movement in the shrubs. I’m feeling pretty good though all things considered - having just been in a minor car crash and totally fucking lost. Im just glad to be out of that fucking car. Besides there is a road sign or two along the way and after awhil I am back over the border and can see a little town shimmering away below me. It feels good to be up this high, alone again and finally in reach of my destination. 

However as I make the final descent down into the village I see my techno dj driver come rearing back up the road towards me. He brings the car to a halt about an inch from my feet and leans out the window spitting at me in a hurl of Italian abuse. Turns out I have his phone in my pocket. Id borrowed it to try to ring those girls and forgotten to give it back. I hand it over. He calls me thief, liar, English scum, pig of madonna. I try to explain but he’s fucking livid and unbuckling his belt to come talk to me in the street. At this point I decide it’s time to put and end to our brief aquataince and leg it down a little alleyway.

3. 

At this point I think it would be fair to say that there are probably those amongst you who think this story is a load of shit. I think that’s probably also what the two girls I was staying with thought when they came to meet me at the bar at about midnight and found me there - a worn out wreck jibbering into my half drunk beer about a coke fuelled dj threatening to run me over in a black punto. They were only half expecting me to show up anyway and certainly not late at night in a state of nervous exhaustion.

It certainly had been a strange evening and  certainly not the glorious arrival that I had boyishly envisioned in which I appeared heroically and mysteriously out of the wilderness with only my pack on my back and my guitar in my hand having climbed the mountain alone. 

That night they took me back to their beautiful house - which was indeed in THE middle of fucking nowhere - and set me up with a fold up bed on the kitchen floor. There I stayed for a week in the idyliic countryside, swimming with fish in mountain rivers, eating fresh fruit and vegetables, writing songs lazily in the midafternoon heat and taking evening walks to the local town for beers and a little light chat with the local bar keeper. By the time the week was up I was rested and ready to get going again. Itching in fact. Itching - I thought I might give hitching a miss for awhile though. I booked myself on a train to Paris.  

Alma - if by any chance you are reading this thank you so much for taking me in and putting up with me and my weirdness for a whole week. I had the best time and you are a true pal. 

4.

I love riding night trains perhaps more than anything else in the world - partly for the weird weird assortment of people you get on them - suspicious families in couchettes nervously eyeing the drunken backpackers eyeing up their young daughters. Young kids full of excitement on the road for the first time and taking pictures of everyone and everything. Seasoned hippies on some weird and obscure festival trail, twirling their girl friend’s dreads and cooly eyeing the straighter travelers as they board and depart with their encumbersome suitcases. Bums and drifters without tickets crouched for hours in the tiny toilets while angry inspectors bang and bang on locked doors. 

I remember doing the same thing many times before on these trains and enjoy sitting on my bag by the wide windows and reminicing to myself about all the many other times I have ridden this exact train - all the friends I used to travel with and the people we met. Especially my dear friend Cosmo with whom I would ride these trains with a lot in my teens, sharing bottles of cheap cider, smoking joints out of half opened windows and listening to Bob Dyaln songs out of one speaker on a broken walkman. Cosmo sadly passes away last year and I have been missing very much throughout the course of this trip - as I always do - and remembering our silly and always comical adventures together on these rails. 

Tonight I have a bed booked in a compartment - a luxury compared to previous trips. I go to dump by bag in there. There are two unbelievably beautiful French girls in the top bunks and one very snooty looking French kid in the bunk below opposite mine. I think he must be the boyfriend of one of the girls. He doesn’t look very pleased to see me. The girls however seems very sweet and friendly. I dump my pack down and take out a bottle of wine I have been keeping and offer it around. One of the girls takes a swig and the boy in the bunk leans up on his elbow and spits something at her in ricatto French and she hands it back moodily. He says ‘ we do not drink wine tonight’ and fixes me with a mean glare. 

Well that’s that I think to myslef. I’m not too fussed. I’m in a good mood tonight and don’t wanna bullshit with anyone. I bid them good evening and head off down the train with my guitar looking for some more welcoming people. There are plenty. I go from carriage ti carriage sharing out my wine with people and being offered drinks in return. I play songs in the corridors and happily take requests of cheesy classic busker tunes until the guard comes and tells me to stop playing or get off the train. When he’s gone we carry on accapella and smoke hastily puffed ciagrettes whenevecver the train stops at a station then leap back on as the automatic doors stubornly clang shut. Once or twoce we almost starnded in little stations after slightlly misjudging the timing. 

I meet a Korean kid travelling Europe for the first time who is about to go back to do two years national army service and is having a final blow out first. He’s the smiliest guy I’ve ever seen. Although he does an enthusiastic impression of shooting people with a machine gun, he doesn’t look like the most suitable soilder in the world and I kinda worry about him a little bit. In the end I end up seeing the rest of the night out in a little cabin with a Tunisian factory worker living in Paris and a Parisian bicycle repair boy with a falsetto voice and ambitions to be an engineer. We end up drunkenly and very badly singing acapella Simon and Garfunkle songs at the Tunsian’s adamant insistence. Then I stumble of to sleep a few hours in my little bunk much to the tutting and huffing and puffing of my Parisian room mate and the nervous giggles of his French girlfriends. 

5.      

I wake up the next morning with my face mysteriously swollen and what’s looks like some kinda monstrous eye infection on the go. I see myself in the reflection of the stained toilet mirror and know it’s gonna be a bad day. 

Sure enough one thing follows another. I go to a bank machine to take out a little money for breakfast  ( I had not eaten since the previous morning) and the ATM tells me very courteously that I have reached my limit. Well that’s for sure. I decide it’s gotta be a mistake and check another and another and another - all to the same effect. I had banked on having at least 300 left and can’t work out what the fuck must have happened. Unless of course I spent a whole fucking lot on those nights out with The Kooks in those expensive little Swiss bars. I wouldn’t put it pass me. Three am rounds of drinks go all too easily drifting by im a merry drunken haze. 

Well this puts a whole new spin on things. I spend the last of my money on a phone card and - maybe a little foolishly - on a last packet of tobacco. I figure whatever happens im gonna need that. I had an assortment of names and numbers of people I had met in bars and at gigs I had played around Paris of the course of the last year - all written on a little scrap of paper. I found a phone box and dialed up every number. Every one went to answer phone.

I walked across town and into St. Germaine. It was about 8.00 am by now. I found my  

my friend’s apartment and spent about an hour shouting up to his window from the street and another sitting patiently on my bag by his door hoping he might show up. By midday I was starving and very dehydrated. I did my old trick of wandering to and from restaurant and pretending to study the menu while I filled my pockets up with table bread. Eventually I got kicked out of a riverside café by a waitress after she found me eating leftovers off a plate on the counter. I sat awhile by the river and though I might try to busk but broke the third string on my guitar leaving me with only a high e, b and a string. I was going to make any money with that. 

It was then I started getting really fucking sick. I lay under the bridge in a sort of trance and kept thinking that I saw people I knew passing by - a sure sign of exhaustion and lonliness. Some of these visions were almost hallucinagenic in their clarity and I even called out to one or two people. 

I was just reconciling myself to a night under a bridge when my luck changed. Daphne - a friend of a friend I had met once at a gig of mine - came through, picked up and agreed to take me in for a night or two. I could almost have cried with relief when she agreed to have me stay. She has an unbelivable apartment right by the Louvre and a pretty pink scooter that we went whizzing around town on together. She is also the sweetest and best girl in the world. It is here that I have been staying for the last week - busking by day for a bit of food money on the bridges and drinking by night on the point des art or  the monte marte or else scooting around little night bars in st. germaine with strangers met in the course of bright evenings by the seine. With the exception of a nasty bottle fight on the river - which is a whole other story - my stay has been gloriously uneventful and happy. 

To be continued. 

p.s Daphne if you are reading this also massive massive thanks to you for rescuing me from Parisian streets and being such a good pal and companion. 

x