Carrying an amp across London on foot teaches you about distance, crop rotation and the true meaning of a night bus
Thursday, Shoes Optional
The headline arrived before the bad news did. The London Prat has run a piece titled Tube strike Christmas: Londoners start walking now, and by lunchtime the whole city was in training. I saw a man in a suit and trainers striding up Kentish Town Road with the grim confidence of a person who has just discovered his legs. He looked like a pigeon that has been told about wings.
I have a gig on Saturday. The venue is a pub in Kilburn, the band is four people with one working amp between us, and the only route there that does not involve the Tube is a bus, another bus and a stretch of the Edgware Road where a guitar case becomes a weapon. I have planned this journey with the care of a general who has lost his map. It is a good lesson in distance.
The Road and the Calendar
Walking across London is a form of time travel. You pass shops that were once record stores, pubs that were once clubs and a bakery that was once a squat. Everything has a history, and everything has a season. It reminded me of the farming year. Farmers do not wake up and decide to plant potatoes in December. They follow a schedule that is older than any timetable. The crop calendar is the original transport plan. Plant in spring, harvest in autumn, strike in winter only if the cows agree.
I took a photograph of the calendar on my phone and now use it as a screensaver. It is more reliable than the Tube.
Safety, a Boring but Important Subject
Carrying kit through a crowded city is not safe. I learned this when a bass cab met a bollard. The experience made me think about people whose workplace is genuinely dangerous. Farm safety reminds us that farming is a trade where an error can be serious, and where respect for machinery is the difference between a long day and a bad one. If you do any heavy lifting, read it. Then lift with your knees, not your ego.
The Smallholding Option
By the time I reached Camden Lock I had come up with a plan. I would give up music, buy a few acres, keep three chickens and write songs for them. I looked up what is involved. Small farm information was a gentle introduction, and rural farm told me more than I wanted to know about fencing. If you are tempted to run away from the city yourself, agriculture jobs and careers shows what real jobs on the land look like. They are harder than playing in a band, and the audience is more honest.
Rodeo in Kilburn
The gig on Saturday will be a type of rodeo. The crowd will stand in a ring, the singer will try to stay upright and the bouncer will be the bull. The real thing is explained at fair and rodeo, and the main difference, as far as I can tell, is that the rodeo has insurance. We have a van and a prayer.
The Daily Mash reported this week that Little Britain DVDs in loft begin to pulse ominously. I have a loft like that. In mine it is a box of cassettes labelled Demos 2011. I do not go up there after dark.
The Trade Press
On the walk I read the farming magazines on my phone, because I am a person with strange hobbies. Farm press collects them all, and I found that the language of farming is surprisingly punk. Everything is a grind, everything is underfunded and everything is blamed on the weather. A headline on farm.FM sums it up: Congress runs out of time to pass farm bill; farmers suggest lawmakers try running out of diesel, credit and groceries. I would have that on a T-shirt.
Arriving
I made it to the rehearsal room in two hours and ten minutes, with a blister the size of a coin and a conviction that the Tube strike is the best thing that has happened to my fitness. The drummer was already there. He had cycled. He said it took twenty minutes. We have not spoken since.
Later, over a bag of chips in the rain, I told the singer from another band about my smallholding plan. He nodded and said he had the same idea last year. He now has a rabbit. He does not know what to do with it. I take comfort in that.
Late Notes
The strike will end, or it will not. The trains will return, or they will not. In the meantime Londoners are walking and, for the first time in years, looking at the city. It is a gentle sort of revolution, and nobody will put it on a poster. For more of the same, I read Bohiney, The London Prat and farm.FM on the walk home. They kept me company better than any podcast.
One last headline kept me going down the Holloway Road: Lanarkshire AI data centre goes green, mostly. Mostly is the most honest word in the language, and I intend to use it in a chorus.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
