‘This is where my route falls down,’ admits my father. ‘I don’t know how to get back.’ Taking a sanguine view, he pours our well-deserved tonic – a flask of tea – and consults the map again. His finger traces the disused railway line we’re cycling along, and he absent-mindedly eats my last apple and

‘I’m still looking for a bit of rope,’ said Princess, interrupting my chapter. He picked his nose for a moment, stood at my truck door and waited for a response. Frankly, I wasn’t really in the mood for bothersome interlopers – Jules Verne’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth was just hotting up. ‘Yes,

‘Yo, where’s all the nasty girls at!’ It’s a rhetorical question in American English, I’m told. Grammatical hokum, of course, but this is me integrating with a broader class of reader. Esoteric prose is all very well but… What do you mean, you aren’t familiar with the words rhetorical, hokum and esoteric? Oh, it’s hopeless;

We’ve had some monstrous drives on this Prince Tour, you know. One of them – Dublin to Oslo – required five drivers to get the truck there without stopping. Now, I never know whether this sort of information is as dull as dishwater and you’d rather I shut up. Or mildly fascinating because I’m taking

As you’ve no doubt discerned, the rock and roll industry attracts some oddballs. Well, let me introduce an effeminate young fish to rival even the most peculiar. Meet “Princess” Rob. Cripes, he’s strange – maybe even cuckoo – and I do wish he’d stop scratching his willy in public. ‘Must be the soap I use,’

‘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,

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

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

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