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.
