The Travel Disruption Tour: The Monochrome Set in Germany, October 2019

Arriving into Frankfurt

Well, I said in my last post that I would write about the recent German tour of The Monochrome Set 'very shortly', and to do so in under ten days definitely counts as that, given the current, languid pace of my blogging. I could take to calling it 'slow blogging', but I am not sure that that would be seen as a good thing. It is not as though I am producing an unctuous beef stew at the end of it that has been simmering for six hours, or a coat that will last you for ten years instead of a couple of wearings. Oh I say, look how many slow things there are as part of the 'slow movement'! There's also 'slow travel', which the relentless pace of this latest trip most certainly was not, though arguably the many train delays we incurred might perhaps be described as 'enforced slow travel'. No, we should have stayed in one spot really to qualify as slow travellers, rather than zigzagging hither and thither as the gig schedule dictated. As has become the pattern for my travel posts, I shall approach this one thematically rather than chronologically, starting with:

Stop-and-Go statt Rock 'n' Roll 

Check out the advert below for the German railways, aka the Deutsche Bahn: 'Time at last for Rock 'n' Roll instead of Stop-and-Go'. Oh, the irony...the exact reverse is the case! To be fair, Easyjet should take some of the blame for making us arrive into Munich two hours late on Day 1, so that we missed our specified train and were obliged to buy fresh tickets for the next one. I had run on ahead to the travel centre to see what could be done, while the band collected their luggage. By a horrible quirk of fate, had they not hoved into view (no really, that is the past participle) within the next four minutes, we would have missed that train, forked out over 50% extra for the one after that, and got to our destination later still. As it was, we thought we might miss our onward connection to Nuremberg at Munich, as there didn't seem to be any carriage No 23 on the train standing at the platform stated on our itinerary. Now there were just two minutes to work out where the correct train was: it turned out to be joined to the back of the one we were puzzling over. Well, actually we had 20 minutes in hindsight, as the blasted thing was delayed by a technical fault. I rang ahead to the promoter to explain about the hold ups and revise our ETA. Thus it was that the band walked on stage - not having eaten or sound checked or changed, and half an hour later than their nominal stage time - but as cool, calm and collected as though nothing had happened. Delighted that they had made it, the audience gave them a rapturous welcome, and called for several encores at the end of the set.

Source: Horizont.net

Overly elaborate hotel instructions

This next topic only relates to me, as on the first night I opted to stay in a different, cheaper hotel from the band. When I realised how late I was going to be - with no time to check in before the gig - I thought to ask how I would in fact get in, as there isn't always someone on reception 24/7, and so it proved. Instead, whilst I was still on the train, I was sent an email from the hotel with instructions:

'We will deposit the room key in our key safe at the night entrance at [street address] (white box). The night entrance is located on the right hand side round the corner from the main entrance, in [street address], under the illuminated advert for the [hotel name] (opposite [name of] hair salon).

You will find your key, together with additional information, in locker No 1. Your personal opening code is xxxx. If the door of the locker doesn't open within 5 seconds, please repeat the process again.

Please hold the chip on your key on the reading field to the left of the door until the green light comes on. (Watch out: the door opens outwards!) The white chip card opens the entrance door and also the door of your room. Your room is located on the 4th floor (Room number 455B.)'

And just in case I wondered...

'Room 455A is not occupied.

You are welcome to take the lift up to the fourth floor. When you step out of the lift, please go left towards the rooms.'

They haven't quite finished thinking of all eventualities...

'If the doors of our hotel or your overnight room do not open with your room chip, or if you have lost your chip, we kindly request you to contact: The emergency key service of Company x on tel no y.'

Readers, I managed everything okay! NB This is NOT the entrance I used...;)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

An ornamental sink

At the Hamburg venue on the last night, each individual cubicle in the ladies toilets was equipped with its own miniature sink. However, Jane, the other female member of our party, had gone in before me and warned me that the sink was purely ornamental, and that I should wash my hands in one of bigger basins beyond. Have you ever come across such a futile fixture before? Maybe they just haven't got round to plumbing them in, but it didn't look that way. The mirror was handy, to be fair.

Neither use nor ornament?

Serial meetings with people from Stoke

During a smoking interlude outside the venue in Frankfurt, Bid the singer got chatting to a member of the audience, who turned out to be a guitar player - from Stoke-on-Trent. 'Oh', he replied, 'I know someone from Stafford'. Indeed the Stafford person in question was yards away at the time. A couple of days later and we had reached Hamburg. During the band's sound check, I got chatting to the tall blond guitarist in the support group, who were local. Ah, local they may have been, but it didn't take too many steps in our conversation before he revealed that he had spent a year in Stoke(!), studying Engineering Management, and taking a lively interest in the Potteries music scene. He suggested a few venues there that might be suitable for The Monochrome Set. We segued into neighbouring Newcastle-under-Lyme and the conversation rapidly descended into the realms of the surreal.

Source: geograph.co.uk

Excessively dark venues

It is customary on the music circuit - well, indie and rock, say - to expect dark, grungy, often subterranean interiors, but one venue on this trip took the cake. Not only was the green room plunged into almost total darkness, but the stage was pretty gloomy, and at several points Bid the singer was unable to see his own guitar to play. I seriously need to work on my nocturnal knitting skills, and it was also difficult to check the fillings of the rolls that constituted our 'arrival snacks'. Given the presence of two vegans and a vegetarian in our party of seven, being able to accurately ID what's in the food is pretty key. The walls of the green room were not unlike the Santa's grottos in department stores of my childhood, only black rather than snow white. I guess there was a clue in the name of the club - The Cave.

Lederhosen and Dirndl frenzy

This latest tour coincided with Oktoberfest, and we shared quite a few of our troubled train journeys with large groups of both sexes sporting the traditional Bavarian costume of Lederhosen and Dirndl. The latter being those corseted Nell Gwynn-type dresses that give women supernatural amounts of uplift. We couldn't help but be distracted by bouncing bosoms at every turn as the trains juddered along the tracks. I failed to capture any of these gaily got up festival goers on camera, though later spotted outfits for sale in a vintage shop on my final day in Hamburg.

With bonus building reflection!

Lightning quick hotel turnarounds

Speaking of outfits, one notable feature of this trip - linked to the train bother - was the fact that we had next to no downtime in our hotels before heading out to the venue. We would reach our hotels around four or five (if at all!), after being on the go all day. Then half an hour later at most - or as little as ten minutes, even - we would meet in the foyer and embark on the next leg of what always ended up being a very long day and night. Sometimes my brain went into meltdown trying to decide what were the most important things to accomplish in that short window of time after checking in, and whatever I did manage to do I invariably laid complete waste to my hotel room in the process! This photo was taken the following morning, but as you can see I haven't tidied up in between. ;) NB I was to lose those bed socks in the sheet chaos the very next night.

The big swizz that is "the world's narrowest street": Spreuerhofstrasse in Reutlingen

I did not make a detour to visit it, but Mike the drummer was curious to check out this Guinness record-holding street in Reutlingen after their gig. It measures only 31cm (a foot to you and me) at its narrowest point, and was constructed after most of the town was destroyed in the great fire of 1726. Mike has devoted a whole post to it on his blog, Urban75. He dismissed it as most disappointing, and 'a passageway at best'. ;) Check out his amusing piece here.

Source: Wikipedia (via kathrin_glaisser)

Fizzy in-flight fun

As is often the way in pressurised cabins, on the return flight home my sparkling water sprayed over the man in the seat next to me. "It will prepare you for Manchester?", I volunteered lamely, after first 'showering' him with apologies. Then I resumed my knitting, whereupon the man inquired:

"What are you making?"

"A scarf."

"Oh, I thought it might have been a towel."

Source: hamburg-airport.de

Graffiti galore

I have included pictures of graffiti-strewn venues on the blog before (see, for example, this post from 2012), but I will add one of the finer examples of the genre I spotted in Hamburg on my final walkabout. And believe me, there are lots of awful ones on inappropriate walls and fixtures, that amount to plain vandalism in my view. But here and there there are colourful splurges - and splodges - of genuine whimsy and creativity.

Perfumes worn

To close, here is a note of the perfumes I wore over the course of the week (if I can remember!):

• DSH Foxy edp
• Diptyque Volutes edt
• Chanel Cuir de Russie
• Papillon Perfumery Bengale Rouge (twice!)
• Elizabeth and James Nirvana Amethyst

How real is that doggy in the window?

A Twilight zone Tom Ford encounter, meeting the Undinas, extreme burritos, and pancake urges: Part One

Somewhere in Oregon

I will be 60 soon. A milestone age that focuses the mind wonderfully, and one to which I am wholeheartedly looking forward, in a way I never did with my 50th. For the big Six-O will usher in an era of free bus travel, free prescriptions (except I get those anyway), and penalty-free pension access, as well as an end to nearly thirty years of payments on an income protection policy on which I have never claimed. My bad for not breaking my neck while the going was good.

I should say that by and large I have been backwards in coming forwards about celebrating big birthdays. I spent my 21st on a solo moped trip in the South of France, my 30th getting lost and ripped to shreds by brambles in the New Forest, my 40th on my tod at a health spa, before downing a whole bottle of Bollinger and provoking a richly deserved hangover before the day was out. Then my 50th was marked by a quiet gathering down the pub to which I was oddly fearful that no one would come. And so for my 60th I decided to do something a bit more memorable and 'out there', not least because it wasn't even my birthday at the time.

For I have just returned from a band tour of the USA, largely funded by an unexpected legacy from my much missed friend who died last year. I knew that had she been less ill towards the end, M had planned to spend her money on a busking trip in Spain, so I felt sure she would have approved of my putting it towards another music-related travel experience.

In the past I have taken to calling these tours 'gruelling fun', and this one took gruelling to a whole new level. On three occasions we were all up for 24 hours, and normal days were very, very long and almost entirely lacking in downtime, or any demarcation between day and night. The clocks going forward the other Sunday robbed us of another precious hour of sleep(!). But despite the physical toll of our punishing schedule, the trip was a truly extraordinary experience, and I don't regret going one bit. One of its main satisfactions was the fact I survived, showed up on time each day, and didn't fall ill and become a liability to everyone else. That said, I might not rush to go back again, even if cost was not a barrier, as it ordinarily would be. Or not to the exact same places, say. There wouldn't be the same novelty factor second time round, plus I would go in knowing how ridiculously knackering the whole thing was!

My set list fail - "I had one (small) job!"

On tours to Germany and France I feel I add value in terms of translation and interpreting, but clearly in The States there was no such need for language services, and I was without obvious 'portfolio'. That said, on Day 1 I was assigned the small yet important role of copying out each night's set list. Apart from neat, accurate writing without any smudges or spotting, and the requisite spatial awareness to ensure you can fit all 17 tracks on one sheet of A4, I had to have my wits about me as the set changed from time to time - songs were left off or added, or played in a different order. I dutifully performed this task for the first seven gigs until we got to San Diego. By this late stage in the tour we were all dropping with tiredness, and I forgot to put in the extra track from the day before. I cannot even pretend it was a Freudian slip - it was not a song I particularly cared for - as it was a simple oversight on my part. When the band discovered the error mid-set, the singer announced the fact to the audience, while the bass player screened his eyes with one hand and peered pointedly into the crowd, as if searching for the miscreant. I apologised profusely afterwards, but it was all okay in the end, as they had in fact decided to take it out for good anyway after that gig. It seems I was merely ahead of the game...

As the tour wore on, I did acquire other (very minor!) roles. A smorgasbord of little ad hoc tasks that I was free to execute, being the spare person in the party. These included cutting pizza, finding entrances, dispensing essential items I happened to have on my person (moisturiser, tissues, bandage, scissors, sleeping aids and sweets (not a euphemism) ), holding things, carrying things, guarding things, muling cigarettes through Customs, waking people up on planes when their food arrived, scurrying ahead to recce eateries, fixing wobbly tables (a surprisingly common occurrence), executing a clean sweep of remaining green room snacks at the end of the night, and flushing overly sociable band members out of venues while I was about it. There was one task I didn't manage, however, as I didn't have time to go back to the hotel between the meal and the gig to carry it out, namely to 'squeeze' someone's wet laundry. I was flattered to be asked, mind.

Not being challenged for our ID

On arrival into Seattle, having been up already for more hours than we cared to calculate, we were pretty peckish, and several of us were craving something all-American like pancakes. In my disorientated state, I was still vaguely aware that 5th March was Shrove Tuesday, which seemed to seal our choice, and I promptly steered the party towards a nearby I-Hop. A cursory appraisal of the menu revealed a whole section devoted to dishes for the over-55s, to which the qualifying members of our party (all but one) instantly gravitated, thanks to the twin appeal of the meals being tailored to our demographic, and a bit cheaper. Which didn't stop us feeling distinctly crestfallen that the waitress didn't ask any of us for our ID...

Source: Pinterest

Napkin-intensive 'fist food'

Early on in the trip I had an embarrassing incident with an oversized wrap from Subway. It was absolutely stuffed to the gunwales with filling, and was the size and weight of a small infant. I only managed half of it in the end, and that very messily. T S Eliot's Prufrock famously wondered whether he dared eat a peach. He clearly hasn't tried one of these greasy torpedoes if that is the most undignified foodstuff he can think of. I ended up wiping my mouth after every bite, which led to the coinage of a term to which we had much recourse during the trip - 'napkin-intensive'. And yes, 'finger food' doesn't cut it either, as you needed both hands to get purchase on these squelchy zeppelins.

Source: Chew Boom

Pick up trucks with nothing on them

In all the miles we travelled by road - over 2000 at a guess - we passed a lot of pick up trucks. We have them over here, but they are an even more common sight on roads across the pond. And nary a one had anything on it, not even a dog or a pot of paint. What's that about?

Passive spliffing in venues

I mentioned in my last post that you only have to stand at certain points along my road to catch a whiff of waccy baccy. To my surprise I learnt that weed is legal in a number of states, mainly on the West Coast, such that venues in the second half of the tour were routinely fragrant in that - to my nose - still louchely 'erbal way, and there was some talk of skunk varieties in the green rooms. Largely amongst the indigenous support bands, to be fair.

Source: Portland Marijuana

My unprecedented hotel toiletry haul

Anyone who has stayed in chain hotels in Europe lately may have noticed the steady switch to wall mounted soap-cum-shower gel dispensers. It is a sad trend in my view, as one of the few perks of paying over the odds these days for a quite ordinary hotel pretty much anywhere is to nick the stuff in the room...from hotel pens and pads you really don't need (though that is not the point) to tea bags, sugar sachets, vanity kits, shoe polish sponges, and little bars of soap and bottles of shampoo. I always leave a token bottle of conditioner behind, not because I am ashamed of my minesweeping abandon, but because I can't be bothered to embrace a two-step hair washing process. You can imagine my delight in the US when every hotel without exception had 'takeaway toiletries'. Check out my haul below, insofar as Truffle's photo bombing permits. It is not even the definitive set, as I found six more bars of soap and a couple of shower caps since this shot was taken.

The leftover eating - and drinking - imperative

Living at such close quarters with seven other people means you get to know their little quirks.  I am mindful that I have a fair few idiosyncrasies myself, notably a phobia of lukewarm or cold food that is meant to be hot. Plus an aversion to gratuitously added value teas that purport to be 'something recognisably Breakfast', but do in fact have a surprise slug of caramel and spices in them. And one of our party happened to be most particular about not leaving waste food or drink, and I tried very hard to accommodate his strong line on this, finishing anyone's plate as needed, and swigging entire bottles of water on the very point of going through airport security. I got into the habit of getting a box to take my own leftovers back to the hotel, where we had increasingly started to find both fridges and microwaves. By the last day, I had stockpiled several pancakes the size of plates and a mound of quesadilla quarters, which sadly I didn't manage to dispatch before our flight home, though I had valiantly eaten reheated quesadilla for breakfast the previous morning. You may be wondering at this point why it says 'extreme burritos' in the title, when I appear to have been mostly eating quesadillas. In fact it was a bit of both, as Mexican cuisine proved to be the happy intersection of all our respective food requirements (carnivorous, vegetarian, vegan), such that we had floury wrappy things quite a lot. The burritos were as big as the aforementioned Subway wrap, which is why I moved onto the more manageably flat quesadilla in the end. And I borrowed the term 'extreme' from a menu option in Jack in the Box, which tantalisingly offered 'Extreme sausage'. If you absolutely have to eat there, please at all costs avoid the vile grey slime masquerading as hash browns.

Doomed attempts not to lose stuff

Following a distressing lost rucksack incident in Barcelona last year, I was determined to have nothing stolen and leave nothing behind anywhere on this trip. Well, that went well. From the very first day my long and ripply scarf kept falling off and winding up on the floor, and various members of our party repeatedly drew my attention to its dangerous trailing proclivities. I also left my wallet on the floor of a toilet that must have just flirted out of my handbag somehow - have you noticed how valuable items have innate leaping abilities? Luckily I realised the mistake at the bar a moment later before anyone else went in there! Then I also managed to leave an Urban Decay eyeshadow palette in some hotel or other (I console myself with the thought that it was rather long in the tooth already). I thought I had additionally lost a blusher, scissors, and eyelash curlers, but they all turned up in odd places by and by. Luckily, I was not alone in my carelessness. Three other members of our group left rucksacks behind in hotels and restaurants, but were quickly reunited with them by thoughtful staff, while the keyboard player left his laptop in one venue, without which his instrument would not have produced a single note at subsequent gigs! The following morning, after finally getting hold of the promoter as he emerged from a dental appointment, and making two eye-wateringly expensive cab trips into town and back, the keyboard player recovered his laptop, and the show could go on. Oh, and the drummer left a beloved jacket behind in San Diego. So glad it's not just me then.  ;)

Dunce cap of light

Perfume aspects of the trip coming up in Part Two!

Small pink knitting: a mini-tour with The Monochrome Set, including a meet up with Val the Cookie Queen

Val the Cookie Queen of APJ, and husband Chris

Some three and a half months on from their last tour - of which Weikersheim was the most southerly point - The Monochrome Set went back to Germany at the end of March to play two more gigs down south: in Stuttgart and Augsburg, which are in Swabia and Bavaria respectively. I did toy with putting 'a mini-tour of Swavaria' in the title line, but decided against it a) because it might annoy the inhabitants of each province to be conflated in this way, and b) because it would cause consternation among the Google bots, whose only reference point hitherto for Swavaria is a rather sweet YouTube video of an Indian baby smiling beatifically in his fleecy cocoon. Worth ten seconds of anyone's time!

The journey out: aka 'not doing the Time Warp'

Thus it was that on Friday 31st I took the train to the airport. By 9am (thanks to a prolonged tea stop at Crewe), my latest scarf project was already off the ground.

I was flying from Manchester, with a plane full of noisy youths in too tight T-shirts, and orange-faced girls with scowling Scouse brows and jeans so comprehensively ripped as to barely deserve the name of 'garment' ('barely' being the operative word). Since I last flew with Ryanair, they seem to have relaxed both their 'one bag' and their 'no drinking your own booze on the plane' rules, for the girls were knocking back baby bottles of rosé with abandon even as they flashed their boarding cards (and everything else!) at gate staff. Ryanair had also ditched the irritating music, though as happens with monotonous regularity, I was seated directly in front of a small child, who proceeded to thump his tray table in a series of exuberant outbursts throughout the flight, apparently prompted by a winning streak in serial games of Snap.

It seems it wasn't just me that was a bit cross...these 'Air Fury' hand driers in the ladies' toilets in Terminal 3 had got themselves so hot and bothered that two of them were out of order.

I met the band at Stuttgart airport - they had flown from Gatwick with a crowd of similarly vocal young people... We all piled onto the S-Bahn, heading for the Hauptbahnhof, and it rapidly became apparent that the majority of passengers on both our flights were headed for an event in Mannheim - my money is on a rave called Time Warp. It was equally apparent that they were assuming Mannheim was a suburb of Stuttgart, and were crestfallen not to see it listed on the S-Bahn map, like expecting Manchester to be the stop before Cockfosters on the Piccadilly line.

Stuttgart

And soon we were facing some navigational challenges of our own, to wit the perennial game of 'spot the venue', the German music scene being noted for its arrestingly novel selection of repurposed buildings, from lost property offices to bakeries, hospitals, Art Nouveau villas, and the occasional punk squat. Though as I note in this post from 2012, most of the venues look like a punk squat.

A gig in a box

That night's gig was held in a shipping container - or to be strictly accurate about it, a couple of containers knocked through - on a 'residential container park' in the north of the city. As soon as I saw the abandoned bus I figured we must be getting warm.

The surreal sanitary ware statuary was another surefire giveaway, along with the sign pointing out that the whole area was designated a cultural protection zone.

Seemingly of the banana...and why not?

The backstage area turned out to be another shipping container or several, positioned a stone's throw away. This has to be the first time a green room has ever been larger than the actual venue. The band were greeted by the reassuring sight of the 'satsuma rider', despite Easter being nearly upon us.

Note the partially pink table...

I did a bit more knitting during the sound check, determined to knit enough over the course of the weekend to justify all the time I had expended in the run up to the trip, trying to bottom out the security restrictions on needles at each of the airports in question.





The gig itself was fashionably late - the band didn't play a note till 11.45pm - and the atmosphere took the phrase 'smoke filled room' (or 'smoke filled container', that would be) to a whole new level. Smoke of all kinds, indeed. Personally, I am not averse to a bit of 'passive spliffing' - I just have to walk the length of my own street to get a similar effect - but this was such an intimate venue that the line between passive and active smoking became academic. Notions of personal space also went out the window (and yes, the containers did have windows!). Consequently one woman, whose serpentine dance moves were suggestive of a transcendental state, over the precise cause of which it is perhaps best to draw a veil, persisted in inadvertently slapping my backside with every uninhibited flail of her arms. There was a twist too to the recurring problem at gigs of  'tall man' syndrome, namely 'two tall men bobbing sideways every five seconds' syndrome. I can confirm that despite the metronomic regularity of the manoeuvre, it was as irritating as Chinese water torture, as well as making photos of more than random body parts of the band nigh on impossible. Though I did get a lucky break when the 'bobber twins' went to the bar...or was it the loo?! For as someone who has done a market research project on public lighting in Germany, I was most impressed at the well lit signage to the WC (in another shipping container, obvs).

Augsburg

After a hearty breakfast the next morning - so filling in fact that I ended up lobbing pellets of leftover bread roll into the path of an opportunistic robin -  we took the train back to the Hauptbahnhof and on to Augsburg, just two hours east. We checked into the wonderfully eclectic Grand Hotel Cosmopolis, where I had time for a bit of a lie down in the afternoon.

The communal bathroom on Floor 4

'The Cosmo' (as it has become fondly known, with this being a return visit ;) ) is a ground breaking combo of hotel and asylum seekers' hostel built around the rather nebulous business model of 'pay as you feel'. I resisted the urge at any point to say: 'I feel awfully tired...er...how much will that be?' The room I had booked had been commandeered by the people staying before me, who had extended their stay, and I was accordingly bumped to one called '4Null5' (405). To be fair, you really can't go wrong in this place - all the rooms are quirkily fascinating to a fault. As it happens, I had had a surprise nosebleed the previous night, but the Cosmo had thoughtfully anticipated my health issues and provided an ample provision of ceiling-mounted tissues.

At about 6pm Val and 'no fear' husband Chris met me at the hotel, where we exchanged presents (see my Naja review) and had a drink in a cosy snug behind the foyer (its space travel theme neatly dovetailing with the band's latest release, 'Cosmonaut'!).

Then it was time to join the rest of our party for dinner in the bar of the City Club, downstairs from the venue. The three of us shared a giant pizza that had been harmoniously designed by committee, and which kept us going till the similarly late stage time.

As they had famously done in Ebensee, Val and Chris acted as band taxi again at the end of the night, before heading back to their own (more conventionally appointed!) hotel.

Photo courtesy of Val

By 7am the next morning I could feel my hangover kicking in with a vengeance, to the teasing peals of church bells. My pain-killing weapon of choice is soluble Solpadeine, so I decided to nip down to the asylum seekers' floors in search of a kitchen, and a cup. Though clad in my nightie I was confident that I was unlikely to meet anybody at that ungodly - or do I mean godly in view of the bells? - hour, and so it proved. On my wanderings I was touched by the fact that there were several pairs of shoes outside every door along the corridors. After a cursory flurry of cupboard door opening in the one kitchen I wandered into, I felt as though I was trespassing and returned to my room. Where I had the bright idea to break up the tablets and dissolve them in my water bottle. When I recounted my adventure to the band, the bass player suggested that if it didn't already exist, it was time someone invented a collapsible ceramic mug.

Later that morning, as my hangover was lifting, we convened in the hotel garden for a last drink, before Val and Chris ran us all to the station in two car loads, where an elaborate series of farewell permutations ensued. But not before Val had invited the band to smell Galop d'Hermès on her, with its upbeat blend of quince, rose and leather, and given us all a generous stash of Austrian wafer biscuits. I chose the lemon ones, which proved to be a zingy taste sensation!

The journey back

At the airport, it took several attempts to progressively - and grudgingly - rationalise my luggage down to one bag. Sadly Easyjet, with whom I was returning, has not relaxed its carry on rules. At this point I took my knitting OFF the needles and entrusted them (along with the perfume Val had given me) to Caryne, who stowed it all in the merchandise case, which was going in the hold. We agreed that I would pick up the perfume in two months' time at the next gig I plan to attend, while Caryne would post the needles back to me sooner.

On the plane home...

And there was one last game I played with myself in a bid to prolong this all too mini-tour, namely I tried to see how long I could keep the stamp on the back of my hand from the Augsburg gig before it washed off. I promise I did continue to bathe in the normal way!...I just didn't attempt to actively remove the ink by scrubbing.

And I am pleased to report that the stamp lasted - or its faint vestiges certainly - till at least Tuesday... or could it even have been Wednesday?

Big cream taxi: On tour with The Monochrome Set in Holland and Germany - Part 1

I realise that this is the time of year when it is customary for perfume bloggers to publish Christmas Gift Guides featuring a tempting selection of fragrant things, followed by a retrospective post about the year's releases and/or discoveries. I feel so remote from the perfume scene these days that I doubt I will be doing either of those this year, although I do have a few perfume reviews in the pipeline. For even in this becalmed plateau stage of my hobby, a few of the more persistent perfume houses manage to cross my path with their new launches, some of which - I am pleased to say - genuinely stir my slumbering mojo!

Yet in my own small trend-bucking corner of the blogosphere, the event that is still on my mind - more so even than the upcoming festivities - is my recent trip to Germany and Holland with The Monochrome Set, this time in the slightly ramped up (but still essentially nebulous and ineffable) role of 'Logistics Manager'.

The tour has stayed with me because it was the most intense and full-on of any I have been on. Every day felt like a week, and I was so wired all the time that sleep proved chronically elusive.

And normally while away I keep a daily record in a little notebook of amusing incidents or observations of band life. Sure enough the notebook came out with me, but for the entire ten days of the trip this is all I managed to jot down...!

So rather than adopt a chronological approach as in past years, I will go with the thematic format I used to adopt for write ups like this one of my overseas business trips, back in the day.

But first a word about the title (with apologies to Joni Mitchell)...basically, because we were travelling around by train and staying in some out of the way places not readily accessible by tram or bus, we ended up taking a number of (to my mind quite extortionate) taxis: all of these vehicles were of the people - and gear - carrier variety, and all without exception cream in colour.

Source: Taxi 730101

Rum hotels

Now I know that on their travels some readers may stay in reliable hotel chains like the Hyatt and the Marriott - and even in one or two of comparable quality not ending in ''-tt' - as I used to myself on work trips to the States, say, but sadly that is not my reality now - or even that of the band's every once in a while. For example, I spent the first night before we left London in the amusingly named Beaver Hotel in Earls Court - the sort of place where you are unfeasibly excited to find a plug socket in your room, and where there is a very real risk of meeting a man with an enormous paunch and wearing only his underpants on the way to the shared bathroom.

Source: Tripadvisor

The balance was quickly redressed by an Ibis in Holland and a business hotel in Leipzig - even though it was so far out of town it may once have been technically in Poland - before things took a dive again in Berlin. Although my ill-defined role as Logistics Manager related mainly to booking train travel, I also made a couple of hotel reservations, one of them at the Easyhotel in the Mitte district. It was close to the venue, modern and cheap. I still haven't fathomed in what way the hotel was easy, mind you - for the punters at any rate. The rooms were so tiny that when lying on the bed your feet were practically in the shower, and the complete lack of space around the bed took me right back to childhood caravanning days.

The difficulties of negotiating our 'easyrooms' in Berlin paled into insignificance, however, compared to the dizzying array of malfunctions that awaited us in the Stadt-Altona Hotel in Hamburg, the choice of the record label this time, who one can only infer must have enjoyed preferential terms. To give you an idea of the inherent unsatisfactoriness of this accommodation, I had three different rooms during my two day stay, while the merchandise team and the bass player had two each. We built up a comprehensive photographic record of all the snagging issues we had found, and it became a competitive sport to wave our camera phones around, as we bigged up our own rooms' shortcomings: "But I had more clumps of fluff on my (weirdly sealed with gaffer tape) air vent than you did!" "Ah, but I had actual rust spots on my radiator, not just an inaccessible knob!", and much more in that vein.

My inaccessible radiator knob in Room 2 of 3

Within the overarching category of 'rum hotels' there should perhaps be a sub-thread on the lack of full - or even three quarter length - mirrors in the rooms almost everywhere we went. I took it as a sign from on high not to be so vain as to wish to see if my hastily donned outfits worked as an ensemble, but over time it did lead to a slightly disembodied feeling from not having seen my reflection below shoulder level since leaving England.

Rum toilets and graffiti

Regular readers will know this as a well worn theme of past tour posts, and the selection of graffiti-strewn conveniences on this trip didn't disappointment.

Hafenklang, Hamburg

Not to mention those facilities featuring unexpected pop art:

The ladies' toilets in DB's, Utrecht

While at NAUMANNs in Leipzig there was a Waterhouse in the Water Closet.

Source: Caryne Pearce

The toilet theme really did have legs...here is some (consciously?) amusing signage from a Russian restaurant in Berlin:

Oh, speaking of graffiti, we were back in the same venue in Frankfurt this year where the singer had made his mark on the wall on our previous visit - one of the more wholesome examples of self-expression on the wall, it must be said.

So obviously he had to have another crack this time round...Take 1 reads, with the merest soupcon of numerical irony: "1) This is my second attempt at graffiti. I find this far from unsatisfactory." Then Take 2 reprises his tone of British understatement: "2) I have returned. I am not entirely displeased."

Passive smoking

Between the higher proportion of Germans versus Brits who are smokers - especially in Berlin! - and the fact that half the band are also prone to lighting up, I did an awful lot of passive smoking while away. So much so that I really feel it qualified as active smoking. I didn't actually inhale directly from a cigarette at any point, but I did agree to hold one for the singer very briefly while standing in the doorway of the club in Cologne...under a red light. Let's just say that I shan't be doing that again, as I think the pose I unwittingly struck may have given out quite the wrong signal to a passing local.

Source: Caryne Pearce

One of my roles as Logistics Manager was estimating in advance whether the stops some of the regional trains made in small country halts were long enough to enable the keyboard player and the singer to nip onto the platform and have a quick puff. So I would get off first, scurry along the platform at full tilt to find the conductor, and put the question to him. On one occasion, the sight of him having a smoke with the driver gave me my answer right there. On another, the singer was asleep when the all-important fag break window hove into view. The keyboard player immediately hopped off when I told him he had 13 minutes, but I let the singer sleep on. I checked with him later and he would actually have preferred to have been woken up for the express purpose of having a cigarette. Which I didn't see coming either.

And it wasn't just the people who smoked on tour - it turns out that that these dancing bunnies from Berlin - who have featured in action in previous tour posts - also like a crafty ciggy at the end of the night.

Mould growth

Aha, not what you may understand by 'mould' - the heading refers to the steady progress I made with my knitting of a scarf commission for a friend. Because the wool was cashmere and inherently furry - as well as being a sort of bluey-green colour - we  had no sooner left St Pancras when the bass player observed that I was knitting 'mould'.

From that point onwards, my handiwork was known as that, such that people would encourage me to "get another row of mould done" before the next stop, type of thing. Despite the joshing, I carried on undeterred, while also acquiring excellent night knitting skills in the tenebrous venues where we spent many hours waiting around before the gig. I am pleased to report that the scarf - fashioned in five countries in the face of great provocation and ribaldry ;) - is finally finished and on its way to its new owner.

The satsuma rider

On arriving at a venue for a sound check - even though dinner is often catered in within the hour - it is usual to provide a band with a spread of food on which they can ravenously descend - or graze ad libidum through the course of the evening. In German, this buffet literally translates as 'arrival snacks', and the name stuck. Right from the first gig in Utrecht - possibly for seasonal reasons, or the perception on the part of the promoter that your average musician could succumb to scurvy at the drop of a hat - we clocked the inclusion of a crate or bowl of satsumas everywhere we went. Even though no one had specified it - J-Lo and the anti-clockwise-stirred cup of coffee-style - this fruity leitmotif came to be known as 'the satsuma rider', and we all took to stashing them away for the journey. It was rare in fact for someone to have fewer than five on their person at any given time, and I even found a couple that had snuck into my wash bag.

Part 2 follows shortly! (NB There will only be two instalments this time, notwithstanding the length of the tour, on account of the paucity of my note taking mentioned above. ;) )