‘Where does Bus 16 go?’ asked the bus driver, nonchalantly munching an apple-core. The route, admittedly, was not one of his, but I was hoping for a more reassuring response from a staff member.

Inside Perth Bus Station, two adjacent offices offered conflicting information, both encouraging me to secure a timetable from the other. Marvellous, eh? So I walked aimlessly along the “stances”, fruitlessly looking for a bus to Errol. The times, as it turned out, were posted at an unmarked stand – a forlorn area, noticeably absent of passengers, at the far end. I’d missed a bus by two minutes.

The afternoon’s destination was Cairn O’Mohr, a winery unlike any other. ‘We’re the only UK company that makes wine out of tree leaves,’ boasted Linzey when I finally arrived. ‘Others use sap, but it’s just not the same.’

Also on offer was an array of berry wines, raspberry being particularly good with venison and game meats. I tried a thimbleful in a paper cup. It was remarkably drinkable, strong (13.5%), but perhaps a little cold.

Optimum red wine temperature

 

Room temperature red wine has become misunderstood, however. Those heady days of stone buildings without central heating would have yielded considerably lower room temperatures, I was told. I wondered how the principle worked, then, when opening a Chateau Neuf du Pape in northern Europe during winter. Or, indeed, at lunchtime during a fierce summer. And aren’t wine-producing regions generally a scintilla warmer than Perthshire, The Heart of Scotland?

Linzey offered me a brambly drink next, a little acrid and tasting distinctly of hedgerows. Clocking my wrinkled nose, she said, ‘oh, you won’t like Musting, then.’ She was right – I didn’t. ‘Musting fruit wine is everything just thrown into the tank,’ she explained. ‘All the others have recipes.’

Food and wine

 

The plastic cups mounted higher as we progressed to gooseberry wine. It is, Linzey prompted, just the poison to accompany tagliatelle carbonara. And astonishingly, as she had confidently predicted, the first and second sips tasted utterly different. ‘What are you writing?’ she asked, as we moved onto Spring Oak Leaf Wine. ‘Linzey talks crap?’

I bought seven different bottles in the end – and a special yellow bag to carry them – forgetting entirely about the thirty-minute walk back to Errol. Perhaps there would be a nice bus back? No, I’d missed it again. ‘Wait twenty minutes and I’ll give you a lift,’ she said charitably. ‘Oh, and your gay yellow bag can be re-used for shoes and hair straighteners.’ Funny thing to say to a man..

(Photos courtesy of chatirygirl)

Dutch Marco, predictably enough, was in the Sonisphere Crew Catering Tent, gazing gloomily at the leaden sky through an open flap. The only chink of sunlight lay in the form of two Red Bull promotional girls, one of whom had extraordinarily orange legs.

‘Red Bull has a positive influence on cognitive performance,’ read their little pamphlet, ‘and improves vigilance.’ Tssk, a spurious claim if ever I heard one. Skewed research statistics, I reckon, and I can’t believe Red Bull actually gives you wings. No, they can keep their foul, shiny tins of chemicals; the kettle was boiling nearby and there were plenty of teabags at hand.

Animal Instinct

 

‘Whatho Dutch Marco,’ I chirped affably, joining him at the urn. ‘Hello Mr. English Barnaby,’ he replied. ‘Nothing to do in this rain except go back to the trucks and watch porn again…’ – I smiled decorously – ‘…with dogs.’ Now, you know when an actor does a double-take in films? Well, imagine I’ve just done one. ‘Or horses,’ he gushed hurriedly, not wishing to cause offence. We call this, in English, digging yourself deeper into a hole. 

‘Yes, it’s legal in Holland,’ he revealed. ‘80% of animal porn films are shot in the Netherlands.’ How I get myself into these conversations I don’t know, but once I’ve started, I’m always curious to get to the bottom of things. And no, I don’t mean bottom, literally.

He wrinkled his nose at this point, indicating his disgust at the nefarious practice of bestiality. But I persisted with the impromptu interview. ‘You’re allowed to fuck a dog, isn’t it,’ he explained, reddening a little as the Red Bull girls glanced over, ‘or any animal, actually – it makes no difference – but you absolutely may not hurt them. For example, with a dildo on a stick.’ Good grief, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Furthermore, who actually passes these laws? Rabelaisian rascals in The Dutch House of Lords? Coo, the place must be brimming with rampant rogues, unstintingly devoted to savagery.

A Breath of Fresh Air

 

Marco paused and offered me a Mentos mint. ‘Sorry, my breath is like a dead bird this morning,’ he admitted. More like a vulture’s crutch, I’d say, but his choice of words set me wondering what he might have been up to overnight – in the grounds of Knebworth House, home to the Lytton family since 1490.

Frolics with a tethered goat, perhaps? He is Dutch, after all. A tussle with a lifeless deer? Ooh, I could branch into necrophilia, too, at this juncture.. No, maybe not. And anyway, another driver called Paul had just joined us at the table, unfazed by our topic. ‘The best place to shag a sheep,’ he said emphatically, ‘is on the edge of a cliff.’

Tourism in the Netherlands

 

Over a second cup of tea, I had a watershed moment; my entrepreneurial mind whirred, feverishly working through a marketing angle for travel. Yes, I could top those “Smokers’ Weekends” in Amsterdam, by offering excursions deep into the countryside. “Experiencing local Fauna” would be an innocuous euphemism for “Frolicking with Flossy, your four-legged friend”. Or how about, simply, “Dutch Grandslam. Ring for details”?

Crikey, I could be on to something here, you know. There could be pheasants on offer for the poorly-endowed male; cows in diaphanous frocks for those with a lingerie fetish; a foppishly cloaked bull for gays; and panthers flown in for dangerous, back-ripping sex. The sky is the limit. And why not round matters off with a barbecue, marinating that submissive pheasant in Calvados? I could even ask Pervy Ray, the ex-pornstar to be Stage Manager. Yes, I’ll text him when we’re up and running.

No, you’re right, perhaps it is slightly too intrepid a travel tour for 2011. Very quickly, though, just in case you think these conversations of mine are fictitious, check out this short article..

 

 

 

 

 

Did anybody come to Sonisphere this year? Yes? Well, if you’d stopped snorting MDMA at the Jagermeister tent for five minutes, we could have said hello. I was backstage, on tour with “The Big Four”..

The Big Four? No, not Boyzone, Bieber, Bros and The Backdoor Boys. Or is it Backstreet. Memory eludes me.. I was, in fact, at Sonisphere Festival with Metallica, Friday night’s headline act. The other Big Three, naturally, were Anthrax, Slayer and Megadeath. Coo, what jolly sounding groups, eh? Almost guaranteed to plunge one into a heady dysphoria.

Of course, “The Big Four” to me means a tantalising concoction of Alpen, Fruit and Fibre, Honey Clusters and Weetabix. With that lot to start the day – and a cup of tea – the world is indeed your oyster; no feat insurmountable. In fact, after mopping out my bowl, I was just about ready to face some seriously heavy metal. Which was lucky, because there was one hell of a riotous racket on the stage that night.

Heavy Metal

 

‘You want heavy,’ yelled James Hetfield, the undisputed titan of metal. The crowd, bedecked in tattoos, piercings and a miasma of suicidal proclivities, roared their approval. They certainly didn’t look like the sort of people who are content with the simple joys in life: a bracing afternoon walk and a game of Poohsticks; a stolen kiss beneath a riverbank willow; nibbling a knickerless damsel’s thighs, supine in the long grass on a summer’s day.. I digress.

The camera panned the front row, the screens filling with rubicund, studded faces, each fan leering more maniacally than the last. Crumbs, there wasn’t a girl in sight that you could take home to meet the parents. ‘Raaaa,’ sang James, whipping them further into a tectonic frenzy.

Singing in the Rain

 

As he launched into All Nightmare Long, I stifled a large yawn and wondered whether these chaps wouldn’t be better off playing a nice tune. Perhaps a gentle waltz at a sensible volume? The lyric, ‘Hunt you down without mercy,’ wafted over the PA stacks… and I thought dreamily of dancing with an umbrella, gaily singing in the rain. Actually, that is a bit gay. You want heavy instead? Well, you asked for it..

Backstage at Sonisphere, earlier in the day, we’d been living it up like nobody’s business. Oh yes, no stopping us. Gentleman Steve even abandoned a gripping article in Model Rail to inspect the moribund condition of Knebworth’s chestnut trees. ‘Canker,’ he said, pointing sorrowfully at the browning foliage. ‘You can tell by the leaves.’

 

What a Total Canker

 

Now, Steve’s anodyne tirades are something I look forward to, generally. But he’s been a trifle disapproving of my flip-flops recently – or “safety flops”, as I like to call them when unloading lorries. He lumped them in with a disparaging attack on contemporary women’s clothing the other evening in Sweden. And in the same breath, no less, as a diatribe on declining standards. I’m dashed if I’m standing for it, frankly.

‘The trouble with modern youth today,’ he ranted, grinning inanely as usual, ‘is that everything has to have hundreds of people making an incredible din.’ His hauteur precluded any further discussion, so I nodded curtly. ‘Very boring,’ I said, and collected my brolly from the hatstand. Steve was last seen talking contentedly to himself whilst approaching the toilets. ‘Ah, must remember to wash my hands before I Canker myself,’ he was saying..

Down on the Somerset Levels, in a hamlet named Stathe, lives a paragon of virtue; a man regarding his peerless body as a temple. ‘They’ve got a brilliant new machine down the gym,’ he says languorously. ‘It does everything – chocolate, crisps…’

What am I doing here in the West Country? Well, I had an engagement in Bath and decided to drive the extra mileage to see Big Steve. Well, if I’m brutally honest, it saved me forking out for a hotel. Still, it’s awfully nice to see him. ‘Fancy a cider?’ he asks at 9am, leaning heavily on a kitchen surface and clutching a Budweiser bottle.

‘I’d prefer tea, my old kidney stone,’ I groan, brushing sleep from the corner of my eyes. Yet, surprisingly, in laying out the accoutrements of tea making, I’m faced with Pure Skimmed milk in the fridge. Eh? An injured glance at Big Steve soon explains the anomaly. ‘I’m not this shape naturally, you know,’ he boasts. ‘Takes a bit of discipline.’ Ah, I see.

Well, this is certainly the spot for keeping trim – the leafy lanes, a similar topography to The Netherlands, are perfectly suited to cycling. Once upon a time this area was seabed; the adjoining medieval village of Langport, as you might guess from its name, was formerly a port.

Paradise Personified

 

And Glastonbury, on the ancient Isle of Avalon, is but a stone’s throw away. The festival? Ah, that’s actually in a little village called Pilton, approximately twelve miles from Glastonbury itself. It’s known as Battle of Sedgemoor territory round here and simply glorious on a warm, sunny day.

So what does Big Steve think about gently peddling a two-wheeler in the sunshine through topography similar to the Netherlands? ‘Bane of my life, cyclists are,’ he says charitably. ‘I told one I’d wrap a scaffolding bar round his head and chuck his bike in the stream if he threw any more stones at me. And do you know what he said? He said, “Are you threatening me?” Bloody idiot. I said, “No, what that actually means is I live at Number Eight, why don’t you pop round for a cup of tea sometime.”’

He puts his feet up for a minute after this heated recollection. And contortedly takes a telephone call – his muscles don’t seem to fit if he holds a mobile in the normal fashion – before reminding me of a funny evening in Switzerland some years ago. Heaven knows what we were doing in an Alpine bar but the point is that I was approached by a handful of Scandinavian teenage girls. When I say “teenage”, I mean late teens, as in old enough.

 

Formula One?

‘Are you Mika Hakkinen?’ they cooed, blonde shocks of magnificent hair beguiling me. Well, having more front than Brighton, I nodded and in a nanosecond launched into a disingenuous spiel. You see, beneath this polished veneer lies a fool. ‘Wanker, you mean,’ corrects Steve. He’s got a point.

Anyway, I took a gamble and assumed this Mika lad that I’d never heard of was part of a boy band. So I tested the water with talk of working on my latest LP release. As Big Steve so rightly discerned earlier, what a wanker. The girls walked away, disheartened. Undoubtedly lesbians, of course..

Big Steve mops rivulets of sweat from his brow – the kitchen towel is never far away – after the exertion of retelling yet another story. Well, that and the mammoth five-yard dash to the fridge for a tin of Strongbow. And he sighs breathlessly. Now, on first appearances, one might erroneously infer that he’s out of condition. But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, his latest medical report indicates athletic cholesterol.

Everything in Moderation..

 

Star jumps have been scaled down a little, though, over the last fifteen years or so. The trick, he maintains, is to do one leg at a time, preferably whilst sitting down enjoying a cigarette and a drink. Alternate arms, too, are occasionally outstretched in sequence but experience has proved it’s better to rest the lower limbs at this point. Overtaxing oneself through exercise can lead to dangerous overload levels of serotonin, apparently.

To that end, he regards the short walk this morning up nearby Murrow Bump as unnecessary. ‘I’ll stay down the bottom and look after the cars or something,’ he says, selflessly forsaking his daily routine. And he has a nice sit down, listening out for an infrequent passing tractor. Lovely spot, the Somerset Levels, but they do talk a bit funny..

“Leopard back that way,” yelled a safari driver. He gesticulated wildly, and Nelson wrestled with the stick, struggling to engage any gear in his 40-year-old Jeep.

Grinding and clunking abominably – second gear was painfully absent from the box – we turned around noisily, enveloping Yala National Park in a cloud of acrid, noxious exhaust. This vehicle was exactly the fauna-disturbing rust bucket I’d hoped to avoid.

We’d taken the bus to Tissamarama. The lemonade bottle had been unfastened from the rear bumper, our precariously wedged rucksacks falling unceremoniously from the luggage compartment. That’s when I saw Nelson’s Jeep – a shell of a vehicle, utterly bereft of functioning gauges. As if on cue, it slid backwards into a tree.

The jeep’s rear axle was kaput. Nelson frowned and began knotting together two bicycle inner tubes. Ah, a makeshift tow rope! And so our safari began, flouting all my eco-friendly intentions.

“Leopard won’t care about noise,” shouted Nelson above the din. Much as I hate to admit it, he was proven right.

Wildlife Galore

Axle fixed, we approached the National Park gate, passing rice paddies peppered with fan palms. Sri Lanka’s lush expanse looked freshly painted. “Leopard footprints,” exclaimed Nelson, as a land monitor changed its mind about crossing in front of us.

A regal peacock sat sentinel; water buffalo, surrounded by hopping cattle egrets, gazed listlessly from a drinking pool; hoopoe birds – like mini zebras wearing skull caps – went about their morning business. All seemed unperturbed by the engine’s roar.

“Careful – branches,” warned Nelson, driving us deeper into the Park. Foliage brushed our cheeks as we spotted samba deer, monkeys and mongoose, purple swamphens with their ravishing red legs, and a Malabar Pied Hornbill in a leafless tree.

Pelicans flew in formation above; huge painted storks barely glanced at our dilapidated chassis on wheels. A middle-aged elephant swirled his trunk, coiling and uncoiling it lazily. But by lunchtime the fabled leopard – the big draw – had remained elusive.

A Lucky Afternoon..

We relaxed, taking time to contemplate a plaque to the tsunami victims of 2004, a harrowing reminder of the death toll here.

The Indian Ocean crashed seductively nearby; we grew soporific from the tropical heat and mountain of curry. Suddenly all hell broke loose. Radios crackled, engines gunned. Leopards were to feature on the programme after all.

Its tail twitched. Its legs hung insouciantly either side of a branch, head lolling and yawning. We each jostled for optimum viewing position, necks craned. Remarkably, however, this wasn’t the piece de resistance. Twenty minutes later, driving pell-mell along dirt tracks, we found what the other safari driver had been yelling about.

There, a few yards away, was a bobbing yellow head, her spots all but hidden in the bush. She walked purposefully and powerfully, seemingly unfazed by the Jeep’s pernicious emissions. We snapped away, hearts soaring at this magical beast.

Let’s hope a leopard can change its spots, though: Nelson certainly needs a greener Jeep..

There’s been a complete breakdown in communication since the advent of the mobile phone. Would you agree? It seems we’re now at the stage where we can’t survive without them. Well, cave-dwellers in Papua New Guinea probably manage. And perhaps the odd pensioner venturing no further than the paper shop. Coo, just imagine having to rely on that archaic device, the landline telephone.

 

In the late nineties, I regularly drove trucks down to Italy…without a phone. No, surely not? You rebel. How did you cope? Well, it’s perfectly simple: we planned, in those days. When I left a truck yard, I was incommunicado – not indefinitely, but maybe for three days until the goods were delivered. (Or four days if I found a particularly nice river and invented a breakdown).

 

Pinot Grigio?

 

I would ring from a factory and a fax would then be sent with instructions for the next job. All I needed was an address for the return load – twenty tons of wine out of the Dolomites region, for example, or umpteen collections of tiles from the Bologna area.

 

Nowadays, in this hopelessly inefficient modern era – in which we are contactable “24/7” – organisation no longer features so highly on the programme. Transport managers know that they can get hold of drivers, and so they don’t necessarily disseminate all the information required.

 

Partly out of forgetfulness; partly to hold onto a morsel of power, perhaps. Nebulous arrangements are often made, backed up by ‘I’ll text you further details.’ Grrrr. How are you supposed to plan unsavoury evenings off route if you don’t know what your route is?

Another disadvantage is listening to boorish oafs babbling into mobile phones on trains. You know the chaps. They’ll talk ostentatiously of acquisitions and slutty secretaries – ‘yah, we’re looking at half a mill or so, Bill. Christ, lovely rack on that little filly, by the way. Yah, yah’ – and affect a peculiar sniff that grown-ups make when they’re pretending to be important.

 

And then there’s the dull prat announcing to his wife that he’ll be home shortly. ‘Train’s a bit late darling, but I’ll be home in ten minutes,’ he may begin. And that ought to be where he finishes; surely in ten minutes’ time the conversation can flourish face to face? But no. It always continues with something like: ‘Really? Uncle Alfie’s in bed with his leg? Ooh, I know. Hospitals, yes. Course my aunt’s still got the scar…’ Jesus, will you shut up!

Flirting and Dating

 

The issue I actually wanted to address, though, is that the mobile phone has replaced the “little black book”. I mean, who actually writes down a phone number any more? You know in smoky bars – oh, even those are gone now, as health and safety prosper – when we used to exchange numbers on a beer mat or paper napkin?

 

Well, now it’s all just a few punches of the right thumb – or left, if you’re homosexual – and ‘Bob is your uncle’ as they say. Well, Bob is no longer your uncle if you lose your phone. Nor, indeed, is Fanny your aunt if the sim card self-destructs.

Blast! Is that a One or a Seven?

 

Granted, that napkin/beer mat may have been smudged in the rain, but if it survived the journey back to your hotel, and on sobering up you vaguely remembered who Natasha was – or was it Vernonica? I’m terrible with names – you backed it up, didn’t you? Not in the crude sense of capricious external hard drives, but on actual paper. Or, if you’re a cad, a little black book.

 

So imagine how doomed you’d be if all your juicy sim card numbers evaporated up a radiowave… Yes, obviously I’ve no idea how cell phones work, but are our lives any better than they were twenty years ago, before the advent of the mobile phone? Anyway, I must dash – I’ve just had a text message from a young filly with a splendid rack..

Ever been to Munich’s Olympia Park? Built for the 1972 games, it has a multitude of attractions.

 

Adrenalin-junkies can abseil forty metres down the stadium pylons, or take an ‘expedition on the roof’, climbing to the very top of the Olympic Stadium. And footie fans can take an ‘exciting’ tour of the stadium – yawn. No, to be fair, there are people that think football is a game worth playing, and I’m sure that the tour would be of some value to them.

 

But I don’t know why fans get quite so cross – or rather, vitriolic – when they lose. What is it about the game that rouses a normal sort of chap into a fury, wanting to bop a rival fan on the nose? Maybe it’s that odd seventeen pints of lager. You have perceived my disinterest in football by now?

 

So, if none of these attractions arouses a twinge of enthusiasm, then tag along with me, for free, along the Olympic Walk Of Stars. Here, one can feed the ducks whilst looking at palm prints of Tom Jones, Bryan Adams and Lenny Kravitz. Also dull, I would have said, but the nation – certainly in the UK – is obsessed with celebrities.

Celebrities

 

Why are we so obsessed with the famous? Goodness knows. I, for one, am fogged to the core. Celebrities are just people, so what is the fuss all about? That said, my heartbeat did quicken, years ago, when I walked down Australia’s Ramsay Street – keep up please, it’s the infamous cul-de-sac in TV’s Neighbours – and who should be walking in the other direction? Oh my god, it was, like, Madge and Harold.

 

So there you go; I’m not entirely immune to the presence of celebrities. And I doubt you are either. So check out the highest rock museum in the world right here in Munich’s Olympic Park. It houses “…a large number of autographed guitars, original stage outfits and rare tickets, all at an altitude of approximately 200 metres…” Now, phlegmatic pedant that I am, I ought to mention that the height is in fact only 185 metres.

Still, it’s worth ascending the 40,000-ton tower. In the small rock museum, to name but a few items, there are: Madonna’s combat fatigues from a video shoot; a piano used in 1973 by Sir Elton John; and black and white photographs of The Rolling Stones. And there’s a revolving restaurant serving tea. Obviously order coffee, though – this is Germany, after all..