Download the audio version of today’s Dollop here
We’ve had quite a few days off on this tour. This is because most of our bookings are at festivals which take place on the weekends, with the occasional gig in between. Obviously it doesn’t really make sense to keep popping home, given that home is 5000 miles away. I think the only band that might do something as crazy as that are the Proclaimers, who seem to have a different perspective on making crazy long distance journeys for odd and spurious reasons.
So, he’s going to walk 1000 miles, and the only reason is seemingly so that he can fall down at someone’s door. If he’s managed to walk all that way, you’d have thought that he might give the door bell a ring, rather than just slumping down by the door, waiting for the person to open it and get the shock of their life when they see a Delirious man lying on the ground, staring back up at them. This man has clearly got a mental illness and needs help. He’s walked 1000 miles just to lie down at a person’s door, and then, when the door is opened, he declares that he’s going to constantly be with this person, waking up with them, getting drunk with them, growing old with them. This poor person has only just woken up, and only opened the door to see if the milkman had been, and now this was happening: a man declaring that he’s going to spend the rest of his life with this person, in between making a series of weird noises: “Da lat da (Da lat da), da lat da (Da lat da)
Da-da-da dun-diddle un-diddle un-diddle uh da-da.” This person clearly has issues and needs medical help.
Yesterday’s day off consisted of us going on what was described as a wildlife tour and hike. Our original plan was to drive somewhere and go for a walk , but we were informed by someone working for a tourism company, that there wouldn’t be anywhere to park the car and so we would have to go on an organised outing. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that this person was just trying to sell us something in order to make money, because when we got to the place, there wwere loads of parking spaces. But instead, we paid a tour company to take us and a load of other people on a bus, which spent the first forty minutes ambling through the town, picking up various passengers. We then dawdled down the road, stopping every couple of minutes to look at wildlife. Jasper apparently has bears, elks, deer and caribou. We stopped three times in fifteen minutes to look at some sheep, and another couple of times to see some squirrels.
Everyone else on the bus was seventy or older and didn’t look cut out for hiking. One minute into the walk, and it was clear that the word hike had been very missleading, and had probably been deliberately used by the tour company to make it sound more appealing and sellable to us. Unless it was going to be a hike, in which case, we’d probably be killing off a load of unfit pensioners. We lolloped around a park for about half an hour. We stopped to look at the lake, not that we needed to really stop because the speed that we were walking was practically akin to stopping anyway. Then we started again. Then, a couple of minutes later we stopped again and looked at the lake from about 50 metres from where we’d looked at it previously. We did this for half an hour. Then we got back on the bus and began the slow journey home, while the tour guide told us stories of bears, elk and deer, in between us periodically stopping to look at another sheep, squirrel or stretch of lake.
The whole thing took six hours; if we’d have done that journey by ourselves, we could have done it in one hour. One of the other reasons for the length of time the journey took, in addition to the fact that we spent 90 minutes of it picking-up and dropping-off people, half an hour to look at sheep, squirrels and stretches of lake, and then walking at a painfully slow speed, was because we also made toilet stops every half an hour. /The day was quite fun though, if not for the intended reasons. The people we were with were very friendly and interesting and we had a good time chatting and joking with them. Being in folk music we are used to hanging around with pensioners. And then, right at the end of the tour, a bear came out onto the road side.
“We shouldn’t stop for too long because we’re running a bit late,” said the tour guide when everyone had got all excited about seeing the bear and naturally wanted to stop. The reason we were running a bit late was because we’d stopped for half an hour to look at sheep. We stopped for a few minutes while people took photos. Even I managed to see the bear through the bus window, although, to be honest, I couldn’t realy tell much of a difference between it and the sheep; obviously that’s because I’m blind, in case you were starting to question my level of basic intelligence.
Today is the gig I talked about in Dollop 197, which describes our music as Celtic Country. I’ve been in this band for eleven years, since it started, and I’m pretty sure it’s not Celtic Country, in fact I have no idea what Celtic Country even is. Here is the write-up for our gig:.
“Celtic or country? Which one to choose? Well this week you don’t have to choose, because we’ve got both, with The Young’uns.”
Alas we never managed to procure a harp or slide guitar and learn a whole new repertoire based on this strange unknown genre which we’re apparently part of. There is a chance though that we might be saved the awkwardness of performing English folk music to an expectant crowd of Celtic Country aficionados, because it’s an outdoor gig and currently there is a massive thunder storm happening, and the metrological Office have issued severe storm warnings. We might just get away with this yet.
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