Alan had been in the UK for six months before he told anyone he was there.

He’d left New Zealand and had rented a remote cottage in Wales – set it up as a rehearsal space; bought a VW combi van to convert into a tour-bus… then one cold winter’s morning on the way back to the cottage, hit some ice and went off the road – over a steep bank, rolled twice and wound up in a frozen field back on its wheels again. Some sheep looked up.

Blood on snow? Nope
Right way up? Yup
Engine still running? Yup

So he drove across the field, out the gate and off down the road as though nothing had happened. Nobody saw, and if nobody saw, then in practical terms, what had actually happened may/may-not have actually been real. Objective reality still floated in some indecisive cannabinoid half-space of quantum indeterminacy. Nobody saw.

Nobody ever saw The Wild Poppies either. Very few at least, and I suspect that those few that did can actually remember it now. I certainly can’t, and I was IN the Wild Poppies. For years. No trace… but there is a corner of some Welsh field that will forever be… bits of broken wing-mirror.

Don’t bother looking for them. They’re not there.

…

There will be (I suppose) a vanishingly small number of you, to whom those words have a certain familiarity…

… if so, the reason is most likely to be that they are the sleeve-notes for the newly re-released thing. In a way, they should have been “page one” or “intro” or whatever – that was actually the first thing written in this thing I’m writing now.

A couple of points:

1) I don’t know if it’s true

a) I have vivid memories of stuff that nobody else (who was there) actually remembers.

b) Other people can remember things that I know definitely didn’t happen.

c) I have (over the years) taken enough drugs to doubt my own recollections

d) and so has everyone else.

2) Objective (ish) proof does actually exist

I wrote home to my mum in NZ, every day for 20 years… I’d keep a couple of pages of A4…. write a bit every day, and when I had enough to post (about once a week), I’d post it… she has kept all my letters in ring-binders.

I’m still too scared to read them. The past hurts. I think.

I mean I spend a lot of time there… but the actual written words of the kid writing to his mum and dad are too close to the bone for me to want to face. So I haven’t read them… but I guess I will. I guess I should.

But not today.

3) From here on in, everything goes out of order

I’m Gen-X. We were brought up to do “beginning middle end”, but then we wrote the internet (or at least the first draft), and all that went out the window, to be replaced by

“there’s not really any lesson to be learned from this – it’s just a bunch of stuff that happened”

– Homer Simpson. We’re the same age.

Anyway – the next instalment will be about Wales I guess… after that, it will be all over the place like a crazy-person’s piss.

Not sure how to deal with the end. I can remember sitting on a kid’s swing in the back-yard in Oxford… just kindof quietly crying I guess – and Rich (our manager)(gently) going “is it worth it?”

I don’t think it has ended.

We got a fairly substantial royalty cheque 30 years after we released the first record, and we’ve decided to invest it in setting up a boutique marijuana business… when the war has ended.

We’re into the Age of Atemporality anyway – nothing begins, middles, or ends the way it once did.

…

I think I’ll get into the habit of putting a random youtube video at the end of each post. I don’t know how much of this will be connected with the band… probably ought to… but then this is going to be a whole lot more subjective than it ought to be anyway… and the atemporal-factor will go up.

Anyway… I love this lot:

am listening to them on youtube as I write this. Went all the way to Sweden to see them play once… they put me on the list but I was too shy to talk to them after on account of being sober – in my 2-year abstinence period which happened on account of managing to lure 3 girls back to my room in Hong Kong and they gave me rohypnol and did a number on my credit-cards… and I was utterly convinced (in the bludgeoning aftermath) that they’d also given me AIDs.

So I did a deal with the sky… “if you get me out of this, I’ll never drink again”.

And the sky smiled.

Then about 2 years of white-knuckled sobriety later, I looked up at the sky and said “That’s not really how deals with you work is it?”

And the sky smiled.