THE DEEP POOL

In the Brewery Bar, Allan the landlord was fretting with a mate over the installing of a new air-conditioning unit. It was a clear blue frosty morning outside, my first Saturday off work since the beginning of October. I took my newspapers through to the smaller public bar - a shy youth entered holding a new framed colour photograph of Botley Village Football Club who meet regularly in the bar. He gave it to Tess the landlady who then discussed with Sian the barmaid where best to put the picture. One or two bleary geezers stood around with first pints of beer watching all this industry with moderate interest.

I read the sports pages then finished my drink and went over the road to get the dogs and take them up to the frosted field by the railway line. We approached the gypsy smallholding and i saw that the farrier was getting ready to shoe the coloured ponies there. As he assembled his tools he was talking to the owner of the smallholding, a reserved but forceful man who has never moved beyond the most curt of greetings whenever i pass him with the dogs. He also has hens and is therefore extremely watchful of Basil and Harry (the dogs) as they sniff the air for the chance of running amok and savaging a hen or two. The two men were engaged in a timeless exchange that embodied none of the inflections of the modern world, just straight talk about the state of the horses' feet, other men's horses, and the possibility of snow in January.

Once down the field Basil discovered a decomposing crow in which i knew he was going to roll on his back (clumsy sentence - can't make it any better just now). As he shaped to do so i shouted 'NO!' in a voice so loud that you could hear the echo all the way to Bishop's Waltham, four miles east. In the baker's shop there, people in the queue instinctively ducked as the echoing 'no' pulsated through the cheaper cakes and rattled the pie microwave. That's what happens when your voice has been conditioned by singing your brains out for a couple of months on tour - you forget your own strength. I looked back to see the farrier and gypsy man looking anxiously toward me, clearly wondering what the hell could be so wrong. Meanwhile Basil, a very small white dog indeed, and Harry, the slightly larger white dog, were cowering in terror, waiting for me to moderate my tone to let them know everything was okay again. The dead-crow-crisis had passed, i told them everything was all right and off they hurtled, kicking up a white frost haze, looking for another dead crow...

I'm still recovering from playing 25 shows in a row, half in Europe with the Small World Orchestra, and half solo in the UK with a lovely girl called Hayley Hutchinson supporting. Some of the travelling in Germany was through snow blizzards, very beautiful, but also worrying from time to time, like the journey from Zurich to Ingolstadt. Our tour manager for this leg was a delightful sparrow of a girl called Antje. At one point we became concerned that the entire autobahn was going to be snowed in and instead of playing a show we would be sharing two cheese rolls in growing snowdrifts all through the night. As the tour bus struggled on, i stole a glance at Antje who was driving and peering into the white night - it was like being driven by a young Edith Piaf.

The Small World Orchestra is myself, bass player Kevin Foster, keyboard player Michael Cosgrave and viola player Mixalis Kataxanis. Mixalis is a player of some genius from Corfu - he's half Greek, half Egyptian, and i was concerned for him on his first tour of this nature, with English as his second language, having to deal with the rigours of this kind of work, and having to quickly aquire the discipline necessary to survive the touring routine. If you don't aquire this discipline, you end up isolated, paranoid and twitchy on your own at the back of the bus, with people occasionally turning round to ask you meaningfully if you're 'okay'. You then start to plan when you're going to escape from the tour - this escape will entail being left at the next hotel with a further plane fare subtracted from your fee, waiting for a taxi to the airport where you will sit alone for five hours with a horrible sense of failure and a lot of explaining to do when you get home...

My concerns were unfounded, and Mixalis added a whole new dimension to the show, and apart from the hardships of fatigue and being locked up with the same bastards for two weeks, he had a great time and made us cry our knees off (a tour expression - don't worry about it).

I'm looking back through my diary at the year gone by - it feels like another century since i was on tour with HEM and The Earlies in the UK - was it really this year that Ian Rankin and me had shows in London, Kirkcaldy and Perth? Like many folk, i feel that as you get older time speeds up, but this last year suddenly feels like a bloody decade of activity. I'm going to spend January laying plans for another studio album - my first instinct is to go and record in the Outer Hebrides, the islands off the west coast of Scotland. I think i will always come back to mix my albums in Bryn Derwen studio in Wales - all the people there at the studio (and Tess the studio dog) and all the local people in Bethesda are important touchstone figures for me in this terrible world, but it was great to record the mainstay of Elegy For Johnny Cash in Beirut and i may want to continue this principle and process of starting recording somewhere else.

My engineer and co-producer on Elegy, David Wrench, loves the Hebrides, and holidays there every year, so it may be time to go there with him to work. Maybe somewhere like Barra, where there is bugger all - just three pubs and a plane that lands on the silver beach, surely one of the most romantic landings anywhere in the world - the departure lounge, in fact the airport, is a hut on the machair - that's the Gaelic name for the coastal strip of tough grasses and beach that borders these islands on the west coast, although, in a unique land configuration Barra manages to have an east coast machair too.

My UK touring ended in the UK city of Leicester - i once asked Chris Conway, a fine musician and the man who masters many of my records, what the weather was like in Leicester on the day in question.

'We don't have weather in Leicester' he dryly noted. I don't know why, but this made me laugh for days.

As it was my last day on tour i awarded myself a night at the city centre Holiday Inn. Holiday Inns are extremely variable, but this is a great one - the staff engage you in cheerful open-hearted conversation from the start, and when i return from work in the late evening there is always madness in the bar or at 'functions' within the building. This night was no exception and as my taxi deposited me at reception, some young, super-fit commando style coppers arrived and removed a couple of aggressively plastered drunks in no uncertain fashion, then favoured the rest of us with a 'fuckin-behave-yourself-or-you'll-be-next look'. This was resented by a large bunch of lads sitting in the bar, clearly out of their minds on an immense round of electric blue drinks, and they indulged in a kind of group hostile mutter in the direction of the crack unit of filth. But this stopped immediately when two of the coppers strode further towards the bar and were seen to have handguns on their belts. When the beginnings of genuine fear began to reverberate through the smashed hordes, the coppers became satisfied without speaking a word to anyone or each other, and they departed swiftly and sleekly into the freezing night.

'Ooh, THEY were sexy!' i said with a simpering smile to the big table of big blokes. They gave me a look of silent disbelieving total disgust - they were still too deep in the trauma of having been successfully faced off by the boys in blue to work up a response to my sheer horribleness - i picked up my guitar case and pottered off to the lift whistling tunelessly without looking back. I don't know why i do these things. I got to my room and lay on the bed feeling very tired and very happy. Next morning i went to the spa and had a sauna, swim and steamroom. The guy who checks you in here really pisses me off, i suddenly remembered from when i was here earlier in the year playing at the festival Summer Sundae. He takes your room number as you sign the book to get in, and then says in a deliberately fake-friendly tone 'you're checking out today?' as a half question, half statement of fact. I don't get this - what's it got to do with him?

I was checking out that day, but i said 'no'. He stopped his smile and looked at his computer screen again, where it would be saying yes i was checking out. 'Mmm' he said, without further comment, inviting me to say more, which i did.

'I WAS going to check out, but i've changed my mind and i'm staying for a couple of days' i said. 'Maybe have a midday curry and a sleep in the afternoon'. He nodded slowly without looking at me, clearly considering his next move. I got to the changing room door where he had to push a buzzer to let me through. 'Could you let me in please?' i asked sweetly. He looked at his watch and pressed the buzzer - i entered the changing room which was full of affable old Indian gents deep in happy small talk.

Later that day my youngish Indian taxi driver was telling me that he was the representative of all hansom cab drivers in Leicester and that he'd recently had a conversation with the chief constable about the problem of 'soil-and-run'. This means people being sick in the back of your cab, then when you demand a soiling fee, which it clearly says in the cab you will have to pay (£50), doing a runner, or simply point blank refusing to pay. He was describing this problem as being of epidemic proportions - how when someone was sick, then ran off without paying the fine, you had to stop your night's work and go and clean out your taxi, and just how thorough that cleaning job had to be to get rid of the smell.

"Then you go out the next night, having lost a night's fares and some bastard is sick AGAIN! - we've really had enough, so when i told this to the chief constable he said - 'let me think about this', and a week later he came back to me and said why don't we consider getting sick bags, like in planes - not a bad idea - i mean some people are just too far gone to be able to use a sick bag, but i reckon, well it would make a 30% difference - but you'd have to work out when someone got IN the cab if you thought there was even a chance they were going to be sick, THEN, you'd have to say upfront - 'i don't wanna sound rude mate, but if you think you're gonna be sick, here's a sick bag' - then hand the guy a sick bag, cos if you just left ALL the bags in the back people would nick 'em for a laugh. Also, some people might use the sick bag, but still be so out of it that they dropped the sick all over the floor anyway, but at least the chief constable THOUGHT about it - it's a start, but all the other fuckin drivers on the rank, when i told them about it, just laughed at the whole idea - fuckin wankers - excuse my language, but they really piss me off, complaining about the sick problem but then LAUGHING when anybody has an idea that might or might not work'.

'Well it interests me, because i actually collect airline sickbags, so to get a Leicester black cab sickbag would be great' i said.

My taxi driver half turned his head as i said this, but decided to say nothing more. When we got to Leicester station i gave him five pounds tip and said ' Merry Christmas - i hope it works out with the sick bags'.

He gave me a cheery smile - 'i hope you never need one'.

jl