A Letter From Canada 

I’m sitting in the children’s congregation room of a United Church in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, picking the strawberries out of a plate of dressing room fare and cunningly secreting a glass of wine in an anonymous looking styrofoam cup. I’m thinking of saying “I drink it [pause] Jesus drank it,” if anyone comes in and questions what I am doing knocking back booze while seated a plastic kiddy play table in a room full of bibles.

As regular readers of these notes from the singer-songwriter front line will know, this is par for the 21st Century Troubadour’s course. In fact, the fruit and wine is perfect luxury. As is the full church next door listening to Stephen Fearing, with whom I am touring. The Tall Man from ... err ... Halifax is singing about driving and playing guitars, so it’s all fitting together quite nicely thanks. It’s the last but one night of the tour and all that’s left is one of my solo show in Calgary. Where people think I am someone I am not, but I can’t bear to tell them since everyone is kind of happy as they are, and it makes no difference anyway. I’ll explain later.

I have just discovered a tray of six fancy pastries so I am digging into a date slice with hazelnut icing, as Stephen coasts into his third song. The two of us have written songs for a few years now, some of them appearing on his group’s albums (they’re called Blackie and the Rodeo Kings) and some on mine (‘Trying To See God’ and ‘If I Catch You Crying’ on Boy 40 and ‘Turn Up The Temperature’ and ‘Faithful Heart’ on Songwriter.

After a couple of days rehearsing the songs and filling up with vast quantities of brown-coloured liquid, hotter than the earth’s core, which they call ‘coffee’, the tour opened in a Calgary church. 250 people in a still atmosphere comes when the musicians are literally playing at the altar, and it hasn’t looked back since.

As a side thought (I nearly wrote “sidebar” but so far I haven’t been able to force myself to say it in conversation. Yes, people do the inverted comma thing and smile ironically while saying “sidebar” when they want to tell you additional, related, information about something.

Anyhow, as a sidebar I have lately found that the Canadian urge to call someone ‘Canadian’ if he/she is successful is even stronger than the Australian urge to do the same. At the Oscars, James Cameron was “The Canadian James Cameron” and I read a two page article in the paper yesterday explaining why Jimi Hendrix was, in fact, Canadian.

Jimi Hendrix, Canadian guitar greatest guitarist who ever lived. Hmm… does it really matter?

It’s coming up to the half time break. I start the show and he joins me for a few songs, then I leave the stage and sit in the dressing room typing or talking with Suzy from Worldvision. There’s a stall at every concert which is dedicated to enabling you to sign up and promising to fund a child’s education in a troubled or poverty-stricken part of the world such as Africa or parts of Asia.

This has been the Star of David tour, with a town called Red Deer at its centre. I’ve been riding shotgun on the right hand side of the road, watching grey trees and faraway horizons. Usually it’s just the prairie stretching into the distance with the Rocky Mountains stretching across the hoirzon, snow-peaked and tiny in the distance (they are literally hundreds of miles away). I’ve been writing in a little black book given to me by a sister, drinking aforementioned hot brown liquid and munching cheese sandwiches.

We’ve covered a lot of miles in the Impala (don’t get excited, it’s like a Mondeo without a sense oh humour). My guitar has changed shape in the dry snowy air, strings tightening as the wood stretches. Here are some highlights I remember, caught between coffee stops and bottles of beer, scribbled setlists and signed CDs:

CALGARY – GLENBOW, AL GREEN AND CONCERT #1

After going round the Blackfoot exhibition, sitting in a teepee and reading up on some First Nations history (the usual story – extreme prejudice from the British colonialists, widespread massacres and exploitation, broken ‘treaties’) I meet my ‘Indian sister’ Heather who introduces me to Agar, an Indian elder who works part time at the museum showing people round, explaining things to visiting schools.

He motions us to join him for a cup of Persian tea. I have tried to learn some of the sign language. ‘Hello’, ‘Want to make a deal?’, ‘Come and let’s drink tea’, ‘That’s a good price’. Hearing my accent, he starts talking about playing football. Driving on the wrong side of the road. First Nations language and customs. Sign language and his family. Heather. History. A particuar design on a teepee of a horse. The markings which his tribe put on a horse so as you could see what kind of work it was used to. A joke involving buying and selling horses, and a blind mare. His stories are circular with one leading seamlessly into another. He holds us in his calm level gaze, with a mixture of seriousness and eyes glinting with delight and humour. I feel honoured to be in this man’s presence. I like the way time really doesn’t exist for him. We must wait for the story to work its way around to the beginning again, or to its conclusion (which lies in the beginning anyway). I feel hassled by the outside world’s schedules. Eventually we say our goodbyes and I meet Heather’s kids who have all grown up. She leaves me back to a house immersed in schedules and tour organization.

Walking into the church a chap approaches me and welcomes me. He’s one of the organizers of the show and comes from Saskatchewan. Talks to me for so long and in such a friendly fashion people think we are related. Not for the first time I am pinned to a pew by the friendliness and kindness of a Canadian folk person, and escape by the skin of my fleece. (I have brought a lot of winter clothes with me, but it’s sunny and warm outside the whole time).

I am nervous playing songs for the first time. And playing a whole string of them for the first time is even more nerve-racking. With two people singing pretty much the whole way through, and an ‘opposite-of-ALT’ wish to get the lyrics right each night, I have a lot of them written in black ink stuck to the ground by the monitor. Except that this is a church, so they are stuck to the altar. It’s the first church I have been in since the Rev. Al Green’s at Folk Alliance in Memphis a couple of weeks ago.

Al’s church was filled with testifying and prophesying, bursting with love and enthusiasm. The glory. The Rev. John White (sadly, Al had toothache and couldn’t be there) welcomed each one of us into the congregation and asked where we had come from. He gave each of us a scripture to remember (a quotation from the Bible). The subject of mine was ‘joy’. When I told him this is my mother’s name, the good Reverend stopped, first cast his eyes to the floor and then turned his whole head up to the ceiling and praised the Lord. Everyone responded “Praise the Lord” and the choir’s lead vocalist started singing. It was quite a moment.

I wanted to voice the question, turning around the heads of all Europeans in the congregation – if church had been as exciting as this, would we have enjoyed it more. If University Road had had bass, drums and a guitarist playing solos through a Fender black face amp would we have been waiting at the car on Sunday morning to set off for the service. And the Big One – would we all believe a little more.

CAMROSE

Albertan roads are gritty and grey in the winter sunlight and freezing wind. Most of the tour we spend travelling up and down the same stretch of highway, passing and re-passing Camrose and Red Deer. It’s exciting, but after five or six times I forget which way we are driving. I have to keep reminding myself that if the Rockies are on the right, we’re heading for Calgary. If they’re on the left, we’re bound for Edmonton.

Today the tour is yet young, and the Impala grinds through the grit into Gasoline Alley, a marvellous oasis sprinkled with seventeen different types of filling station an enough fast food outlets to turn a pole-faster into the Michelin Man. After filling up, it’s a case of heading east to Camrose along smaller highways where the snow comes to the very edge of the road.

The show is in a bar called Scallywag’s. Another dubious-looking apostrophe, and I must admit I feel something of a pirate theme to the establishment. There are bookshelves filled with half books. What I mean is that if you look closely, the shelves are very shallow – too shallow for normal-sized books. I take a closer look and discover that the (genuinely) antique books have been sawn vertically in half, so it’s really a collection of spines.

I look around and find some of Charles’ finest work: Bleak. Nicholas. Oliver. Leaning up against the shelf is a volume which thankfully has escaped the circular saw’s attentions. It’s called ‘There’s A Wide World Out There’ and is by uncelebrated American author H. G. Mungen.

Any UK readers will immediately understand when I say that this literary colossus occupies the same place in the world of books as the legendarily famous author J. R. Hartley, star of a leaden-paced Yellow Pages advert where he asks in a secondhand book shop for a book on fly fishing and it turns out it’s his own. This is exactly how I picture Mungen. A doddery old gent wearing a deerstalker, bumbling round the streets of small twon America with no idea of the outside world, haunting Salvation Army stores looking for his forgotten tomes.

Mungen writes in a chapter about Australia that it “has no real cities outside Canberra”, and under the heading ‘Odd Animals’ states that the kangaroo is “a peculiar beast” before describing the koala bear as “not merely odd, but extremely odd”. Is that all he can say about one of the cutest creatures on earth? Would the koalas really come to see H.G. Mungen sitting in a diner eating a drooping burger with as much fascination as we stand in awe watching koalas munching gum leaves.

Mungen also devotes a sub-heading (sidebar?) to ‘Methods of travelling to Australia’, stating that there are two main ways you can get to the ‘land-continent’ from America. One is to head east via Europe, the other to sail west from California. He advises that one method is shorter (the second) – a fact that a four years old child looking at a globe could have told him.

Perhaps globes were hard to find in Mungen’s hometown. Perhaps he hasn’t worked out yet that you can get to anywhere from anywhere else by either going east or west. It’s just a question of time, and distance.

After the show, I head to the Windsor Hotel with a bunch of Camrose students who are planning on staying up until a student-style early morning breakfast of beer cans and Coco Pops. The walls of the Windsor Hotel bar are lined with the heads of stuffed animals, and more different styles of wood-finish wall than you will ever see outside a wood-finish wall showroom. The wood panels in the wood finish go in every direction of the compass and they are weird shades of orange.

I feel sorry for the animals who have unwittingly provided the decorations for this garish room. There’s an enormous moose’s head dominating the room. A couple of antelopes. A goat looks sheepish, mounted between an ibis and a lynx. As the evening progresses, I imagine the animals are alive, sticking their heads through the wall and staring down at us poor humans. Waiting until we are too inebriated or tired to fight back and then attacking us, wreaking a terrible and justified revenge.

In the meantime, guys talk about hockey and a rapper gives me a hard time about not wanting to trade a CD with him. His tone is hectoring and I can’t face the thought of listening to it on record. I have brought my albums too far for them to end up like this. He does however, get the point of ‘If You Want It’. He tells me things about that song which, looking back, are wiser than anyone else has done. It’s his story about going onto a bus in a wheelchair (he’s not disabled) and forgetting to put the brakes on, the bus coming to a sudden stop, falling out of the wheelchair and having to lie there until someone came and lifted him back in, which lets me know things are getting out of hand.

It’s even later and I am playing pool with a young guy at his place near the Norsemen hotel. It’s a mini pool table with tiny cues, and for some unfathomable reason I am beating the student. Perhaps he is not drunk enough to play with abandon. I imagine myself potting every ball and right now it’s working. Perhaps this young chap works too hard and has not spent the amount of time I did in a bar with my friend Jon shooting pool. The angles. The cur technique. The bravado. It’s all coming back to me, with a strange power I imagine invested in me by the mighty moose on the Windsor Hotel wall.

A veil comes down upon the evening, as I stumble back to the Norsemen (an inexplicable plural to match Scalliwag’s roaming apostrophe) walking as the crow flies across newly-fallen snow, six inches deep.


MEDICINE HAT

Next show is in Medicine Hat. If nothing else, it’s got such a great name that I try to write as many emails as possible from the hotel room that night entitled ‘Greetings from Medicine Hat’ or ‘Hi from Medicine Hat AB’. Something about the voodoo, the spititual thing, the First Nations, the poetry of the name really gets me. It’s like Salvation City or Los Angeles.

The Hat show is in a sports hall, all excellent PA and friendly people everywhere. CKUA is a great Albertan radio station which not only actually plays my records but which people listen to. The perfect storm of radio. This airplay helps every show on the tour. It’s difficult touring without radio support and everything changes when you have it. At one show someone knows the lyrics of ‘James Joyce’s Grave’ so well that I have to keep from looking at her. She knows the words better than I do –  the legacy of Andy Donnelly’s Celtic show.

IN the Medicine Hat morning, I perform a long-observed tradition which involves visting the local vintage guitar store (that’s secondhand instrument shop if you’re in the UK) and sit playing old guitars while drinking the second coffee of the day through the oldest amplifiers we can find.

This store is called Lucky Dave’s, I think, and it’s  full of ancient axes which used to be sold in department stores in the 50s and 60s and are now prized specimens. Stephen plays a couple of these weird-angled machines and after a while the guy pulls out a few battered cases from a back room, opens one and hands over the guitar inside. It’s an old acoustic with an arch top and ‘f’ holes. It sounds like from a Django Reinhardt scratchy record – instant atmosphe and kind of rough and plinketty. It’s beautifully made, and while Stephen plays, I try to read the pricetag as it swings around. There’s a scribble at the start which looks like a ‘2’ and then the figure 2295. Must be a ‘$’ dollar sign. $2295. That’s expensive.

As the price tag swings and the store owner taps his foot and smiles and  Stephen’s fingers dance up and down the fretboard, right arm crossing and recrossing the ‘f’ holes, I come to the realisation that, yes, it’s a ‘2’ and this guitar is for sale at $22, 295.

I should have known it all along. I should have taken it as a warning. I take down an Italian shaped Epiphone mandolin. Old and battered, with a cool pick-up. Sit playing it. Plug it in (always a fatal move – if it sounds good plugged in then you’re really hooked).

Traditionally, how you should leave a guitar store is most definitely guitar-less. The 21st Century Troubadour can’t be buying guitars. It messes with your mind. It strains the excess baggage limit beyond breaking point. But sometimes you just have to – for there it is, hanging on the wall of the guitar store, just singing to you.

Seeing a guitar/mandoin/amplifier in a guitar store which you want to buy gives you a dull ache. Less than a yearning than a nagging thought that there’s some unfinished business in the air, and something sweet which should be in your life forever. You walk away from the shop, cash intact, and buy a coffee from the local espresso store. Eat a sad muffin and glumly look into the cup thinking about the guitar/mandolin/amplifier (delete where appropriate).

I felt this feeling in Medicine Hat. The greyness of the town with its straight quiet streets and lazy traffic lights intensifying my mood. People huddling at traffic lights as monster pick-up trucks covered in mud patrol the town. I hurry across the road shielding my burning coffee from the icy wind and regain the Impala. Close escape – no mandolin.

We regain the highway. Desultorily scanning the bland foreign pages of a newspaper. News pages full up with post-Olympic articles and opinion pieces about the Oscars. Instrumentless, I flick through the pages glumly.

The drive to Lethbridge is short and we swing into an industrial estate mid-afternoon. The GPS chick tells us we’re playing beside a tractor factory. It turns out that we are in fact playing beside a tractor factory on the second floor of a surveyor’s office.

In the distance there’s a mountain. And another mountain. We’ve just passed the biggest mountain I’ve seen since Alaska. Man, it’s huge.

In the gig there are pictures of Allison, posters and guitars and geological surveys. It’s all a blur but the Geomatic Attic is where it’s at tonight. The static is tangible. The Comfort Inn comforts. I drift to sleep thinking about the mandolin.

I am still thinking about it four days later. I am still thinking about it six days later.

Eventually I call Lucky Dave’s. Over the past week I have convinced myself that the mandolin costs $219. I have looked it up on the internet and it is definitely worth more. I have tried to trick myself into believing I could buy it at this bargain price and then sell it when I get home. This, of course, is delusional. Never buy guitars for profit – buy them because you love them. Who am I kidding?

Nevertheless, the strange hormonal activity which acompanies buying a guitar has kicked in and even though everything in the store is over-priced, by the time I call the store I have convinced myself that a bargain is to be had and the swinging pricetag said ‘$219’.

“Hi. Lucky Dave’s? Dave! Irish guy here, I was in last week. You know the mandolin which I was playing in the store? Yes, that one. The old one. Can you remind me of the price? Ah, yes. OK. Oh well. Alright. It was great visiting. Sure we’ll be back. Click.”

$2195.


MURPHYIA EDMONTONIA

Spruce Grove is outside Edmonton, and everywhere is covered in snow. Not fluffy puffy touchy-feely snow, but grey stuff like mounds of sleet. There are housing estates stretching into the disance and an inexplicable street system. It’s a gritty tough cool-feeling place. The theatre we are playing is just that – a theatre. With stage guys, proper lighting, raked seats and sound.

Andy Donnelly arrives, my DJ friend. The two of us have driven the roads of Alberta in the summer sunshine. Hung out at South Country Fair, eaten bananas and listened to Leonard Cohen together. We have met up in winter where he’s held my hand in a guitar shop as I did buy the Fender XII I used on Garageband (it was singing to me from the walls). He has played ‘James Joyce’s Grave’ so many times on the radio that people know the lyrics better than I do.

Andy had a heart attack recently. He’s a big guy and he and his wife have adopted their grandson who’s five or six. It’s made him young again but it’s definitely not an easy thing to do at his time of life.

At half time he comes in the dressing room all hugs and smiles. Proud that I am playing to a lot of people. I’m teary to see him again. Don’t want him to check out early. Bill from the folk club is there. Terry too. Terry’s a real Dub who has found a home here and looks after the biggest folk festival in Canada. We are definitely building towards a meeting of minds. A gathering of the Murphyia in the land of the dinosaurs.


I SEE DEAD PEOPLE

Forestburg is the greyet of flat grey areas. We eat grey sandwiches in the local café. There’s a grey mist in the air and the eyes of the people are grey. We arrive at the show for soundcheck. I sit sidestage and taps keys. I tune my guitar, fighting against the anti-humidity. I check the vibe of the Community Centre. Dig the minister who’s in charge. Dig his ponytail. Sample his sermon, suck in his  scriptures, check his urgings to clap and sing. The lights are bright, cut through they grey. Two kids in the front row dance during ‘Turn Up The Temperature’. Two teenagers groove to the recordings on iPods.

I look at the crowd. I do not see the mnister. I do not see the kids or the lady who made the meal, the sound guys. I see dead people.

Drive back to Calgary listening to Joni. Travelogue.

COLEMAN

Mustard. I am thinking about mustard. The bit on the side of the plate which made them millions. Driving past Canada’s biggest water storage cooler, Canada’s most popular tractor museum, Canada’s biggest rock slide. It happened in 1905 I think – early last century, whatever. Buried a town and a whole lot of people died. Today the road goes through the rockslide, enormous boulders on both sides. The stones are bright washed grey. Not worn at all, as if the mountain side crashed down last week.

There’s a blasted tree stands at the entrance to Crow’s Nest Pass on this road. Silhouetted against the sunset it looks like it is guarding the Pass. Bare branches sticking spider-fingers into the reds and orange. When we drive past there’s a trucker has stopped his truck in a lay-by and he’s photographing the tree. Taking his time, trying to get the right angle. Only in Canada.

The tree has one long branch sticking out at 90 degrees horizontal, parallel to the ground. It is so old it is held up by a support, like a crutch. It looks just like the devices Dali paints which hold up branches of trees in the desert, clocks dripping in the heat. Saw a whole lot of them in Melbourne last autumn, beautiful in their size and craziness. The exhibition commentary said that the branch supports stand for something sexual but right now I can’t remember what. Seems the opposite right here – barren, bleak, wind-blasted. More King Lear than Antony and Cleopatra.

The church we’re playing in this evening is dedicated to coffee, cakes, cooking and music. All the pews, the altar and eveything taken out and changed into the Blackbird. Where dreamy people sit around tapping laptops and talking about hippy fashion. Incense burning, candles on the tables and every shelf on every bookshelf wardrobe and chest of drawers scattered around the room covered in tasteful things. Toys, shirts, figures, calendars. On the desk stickers badges and signs. In the middle of what was the church is the kitchen. The stove the cooker the toaster pots pans saucers and fridges.

This evening the gentle Coleman girls are having one of their first concerts and it’s time to use my European tour PA knowledge for the first time since coming to North America. It’s a breeze. The most fun concert yet, and stay up really late talking about … who knows what. Taking photos and eating. Always eating.
I drive to Calgary in the morning with Suzy. Going through Nanton we stop in a couple of thrift stores. Western shirts are beautiful in this part of the world, and Suzy is buying.

It’s time to draw in a deep breath in preparation for the St Patrick’s Day show. Because it exists in another dimension, far beyond the reach of the Hadron collider or the influence of Higson’s boson, I’m going to skip over this wormhole in space until the drive to Fernie, British Columbia, The only tour date outside Alberta.


FERNIE WELL MY LOVELY

Fernie’s like a gold town. Prospecting streets, old houses and fabcy cafés. Bars open late at night and people who know who Split Enz are. An Italian neighbourhood (North Fernie) and more Australians than I have met in the whole of the rest of the tour.

It’s snowing when I walk into the Arts Station. It used to be a station, and now it presents Arts. That’s it. The guy with the Bg Beard in thc soundcheck is the guy who runs the show and he’s switched on and plugged into indie music. Ukulele and brass band music. His own band features a stage show in which a confetti blower throws industrial amounts of confetti “sixty feet into the air” while they pound along on noise guitars. There’s a plug-in robot with flashing lights and rotating testicles which flash as they spin, like the giant eyeball in the Bunuel film which gets slashed in the first scene.

Every piece of gear the band has is painted bright pink. Amps, pedal boards, guitars. The confetti blower too. The two guys we meet from the band dress like they’re in The Band so it’s an interesting combination. I get the feeling this is my kind of gig. Aliens or not, this crowd is going to work for me. They are open and poetic. The room is most like somewhere I have been before.

It’s a great night. Afterwards we stay up late in the classiest latenight venue so far. All around a table with $5 Guinness arriving like clockwork. Turns out the band guys love the Finn brothers and we talk about them for a while. Their songwriting seems like a perfect place, flying through the air compared to all this road driving. Artistic and beautiful, high above the ground.

When I get back to the hotel it’s  too late to try the water chute. It’s too late to enjoy all the TV channels or variety of soaps. All I have to concentrate on doing is getting up in time to not be late for meeting Stephen in the lobby. It’s my new job – being on time. So far it’s going OK. I was late once but think I got away with it.


ELK HALL, HORN STREET, RED DEER

I wonder what the theme of tonight’s concert is. What was the person who named town, street and hall thinking. The Elk Hall is full of balck and white framed photographs of people sitting in rows, staring at the camera. Some are in funny hats, so I am getting a masonic vibe. However, the ‘Elk’ part is supposed to stand for “Equality and Loving Kindness” so perhaps things are not as they look.

Tonight’s show is the surprise of the tour. Pre-concert everything is quiet and restrained. There’s nothing really going on – no vibe at all until a crazy photographer with a Dennis Hopper look in his eye comes in and starts showing us his shots in a portfolio. Then he grabs a camera and starts swinging around the room firing off digital photos.

Lights go down and the sedate crawd of people goes nuts. Nuts for James Joyce’s Grave nuts for If You Want It nuts for the whole thing. Standing ovations when Stephen and I do our songs. and we play as many of the new ones as we can for an encore. Nearly go into Get Back. “Jo jo was a man who thought he was a woman …” Moments from the second line, I pull in my head then it’s finishing in dropped D and the place goes crazy.

Later on, watching yet another great Canadian young blues player playing yet another beautiful vintage guitar (a red Harmony Rocket, since you ask) a lady is telling me she’ll paint the aura of my songs when she listens to the CD. There’s a rocking beat going on and several of the people who have followed us into the bar from the show get up to dance.

It’s a wild rocking night. We’ve passed and re-passed Red Deer twenty times on this tour and now it’s taking charge. The night takes over as we hang for an hour or so. It’s great when you’ve done a good show and everyone else takes over. You can let things slide until it’s time to get to the hotel.

I can’t believe I have started to leave my guitar in the car. OK. I haven’t started to leave my guitar in the car. It’s over there by the other cases in the corner. Beyond the dancers and the red Harmony guitar,  the folk club people and the tie-dyed T shirts and aura photographer. Digging the blues music, everyone else is going to a club and I’m not. I am goingt to the hotel where there is a line of five white pillows (I counted) on the bed.


BRAGG CREEK

It’s hard to leave the five pillows, crumpled and tossed around as they might be. A pillow fight on your own isn’t much fun, even if you put on Fox News and turn it up then fling the pillows at the right waing commentators trying to convince you that the health bill which Obama just got passed is a red-flag green-light for communists and socialists and terrorists the world over to immediately infiltrate invade and overthrow America and all that Fox News stands for.

Fox News is appalling. It is pro-Church during the sexual abuse scandals rocking the Catholic leadership. It portrays Chicago as a town of murders and extortion – that’s where Obama comes from. It is opinionated garbage and you should be made to watch an hour or so just to try to grasp the pro-bank anti-abortion anti-Obama pro-life slant it puts on everything. Right now there’s a mute nun being held up as an example of the tremendosity of the Church hierarchy.

The bed and breakfast in Bragg Creek is a beautiful castle made of wood. Incredible cathedral ceiling like an enormous pine church. Every room an example of European good taste. The owner is Polish and doesn’t stop talking once the whole 24 hours we are there. He speaks with a superb accent and swears in Polish between every other sentence. His wife is quiet, smiling, and listens to opera loudly. The music reverberates around the cathedral walls. Arias and swelling orchestras, me sitting outside at a wooden table in the unseasonal sun. There’s wi-fi (there always is in Canada) and all is right with the world. Our Polish host introduces me to his daughter for the third time. He talks of this and of that. He invites me for a Polish beer and makes me a Polish coffee.

I feel I am on my way home today. There are over 300 people at the concert and it’s the classiest of the tour. Controlled. There are a lot of English people in this place, and later on we gather round a table in the local saloon. Peter from Australia and a crowd of folks, some of whom witnessed the great St Patrick’s Day massacre. Things are different this evening, it’s one of the ones which work and make some of the others bearable.

Far off the moose are munching through the undergrowth. Pine forests everywhere and snow on the roads. There’s a full moon and it lights up the pines through cloudless night skies.

Moon and stars. Stars and moon. Upside down now. Nearly home.

HINTON

Last concert and driving into Hinton I stop off in a bank. The local branch and I feel they’re watching me and listening to my accent. Sure enough, later on at the concert someone comes up and tells me they saw me there.

It’s far away, this church. Right up north through miles of forest and grey grey roads. A five hour mountain drive the likes of which I have rarely seen. It’s scale is different from Switzerland. It’s less crowded, it feels more remote. Milan isn’t on the other side of the mountains, the Po Valley and civilization. Here the mountains go on for ever, stretching towards the North Pole. Vast landscapes, snowy peaks, glaciers and ice-covered lakes. First and, doubtless, discovery. All this and a tiny tin car rattling up the road trying to get to a folk gig. Sure puts you in your place.

So that’s where I am now – backstage at the folk gig, in the children’s playroom of the United Church in Hinton. Tomorrow’s solo show in Calgary I will pull out the old songs and re-enter that world. Turn my amp up past 2 and tomorrow morning take the plane to Atlanta, Georgia.

I’ll be in touch.