Route 66 # 2

This is the last day of 2020. It has been the strangest of years and yet I have finished it with a new record - on general release in the new year, which has been a source of creative joy to put together. It's called Fisherrow and is a series of echoes from the place and surrounding area. Fisherrow sits on the Firth of Forth leading out into the North Sea waves; waves which bring the Gothic quiet of the haar, where murder and love could stay secluded in equal measures. The Firth of Forth coastline, neither unchanged by centuries nor ignored by modernity, exists in my mind still as a place of restlessness, of longing, of escape and return; the sea can take us from and bring us back. The pubs, the streets, the shingled coves and sea-worn crevices in the cliffs which are fit only for seabirds to breed and exist and yet that familiarity is not. Coming back always feels like returning to a place which never existed in the first place. The sense of continuities is the illusion all of us carry for the places we leave. And the people too, especially those who are gone, come to exist as an echo - like when I took a last trip to Dunbar with my father:

Give me maps and a compass, some old bones,

a bag full of shells, beach washed pebbles, dried

seaweed, a clear stretch of water, a sunny day and a view

of the Bass Rock; it’s okay, you can sleep off the night

shift, while I plan the journey, there’s no rush,

I’ll no’ be far away.

 

Even now I think of you every day.

There will come a time when I won’t. Maybe later,

when dusk settles over the Firth o’ Forth, I won’t hear you

saying, ‘Think we could swim tae Fife fae here?’

‘Aye,’ I always said,

though we never did,

but that was okay.

 

Last year was the strangest of years and I started it by posting this picture, not knowing how fractured it would be. But it has also been a year for learning that life is for living. In a curious way, instead of losing the year to lockdown and all that goes with this strange C19 pandemic, I have made new friends, written new music, made new inroads into this new part of my life (since giving up work) and in many ways it feels liberating. I wrote this song for the record and recorded for the online Portslade Railway Roots Club - the half empty bottle on the table, can be half full... if you like.

A guid New Year tae yin an aw, an monie may ye see

An durin aw the years tae come, O happy may ye be

An may ye ne'er hae cause tae mourn

Tae sigh or shed a tear

Tae yin an aw, baith great an sma

A hearty guid New Year!

Route 66 # 1

 

This year I am travelling on Route 66. Life has a way of lining our journey along this road with milestones; age is another. In official pages I am a pensioner, an OAP and all that goes with that, and this and that and whatever is, is of no real consequence. Some say age is but a number, that may be so; others suggest it is a signifier of something else, experience perhaps and that is also so; I'm not sure what it is for me, except, perhaps, a sense of contentment. Well in the first week of Route 66 I will be releasing a limited edition of my new record and chapbook called Fisherrow. Fisherrow is a small harbour town at the delta of the River Esk where it meets the Firth of Forth. I lived there for seven years. The record and chapbook isn’t in any way a biographical account of my life there, or a travelogue of the place, but echoes I heard during the time of Covid (2020) when I had lockdown and quarantine time to listen out for them. Like all echoes they are imprecise and often only loosely attached to the source, so it’s only a true story, maybe... Only a true story maybe, echoes of a past which like nostalgia is a return to a place which never existed in the first place - and yet... and yet the echo persists. So on Route 66 I propose a new echo every month. It will be my milestones on that road. Because on the very first day this also occurred - I gave a poetry reading in Patros, Greece. 

Yesterday we travelled to Patros, in the northern Peloponnese; Jen Webb, Anne Caldwell and me. There wasn't an Odysseus sailing us there, or a Circe to delay our journey (that would have been such a swine); neither was there a Daedalus father providing wings for guiding us away from the hot sun, those flying days are suspended for now; but it was warm all the same, and we read poetry and listened to the thoughts of colleagues scattered, far flung, across Europe, Australia and the Indian sub-continent. It was my birthday, what a special way to say how much we all cared.

At the time of writing we are still in the middle of the 'pandemic' - no point in saying its not a pain in the backside, it is no way to travel, but it is what it is - the future is no longer what we thought it was. 

This is a track from the new record which I recorded for an 'episode' of Portslade Railway Roots Club, online.