Tom Morton's Other Beatcroft

Safely back in Glasgow, some 11 hours after leaving Dereham, deep in the Norfolk flat-beer zone (Woodforde’s Wherry, absolutely delicious). I stayed with the Allansons last night, Rob collecting me from Norwich airport after an astonishingly quick (50 minutes) flight from Aberdeen. Quicker than the one to Shetland.

This morning, it was off to Dave Wicks Motorcycles, where my much-anticipated Moto Guzzi Bellagio was waiting. A factory demonstrator that had been used mostly for posing models on (it’s Italian), it is the most beautiful motorcycle in the known universe, with the possible exception of the Moto Guzzi 1100 Sport. I got an amazing deal on it, back when the Barnard Challenge was a Guzzi-only zone. Only for us to switch to Triumph for insurance purposes. Oh well.

I had also neglected to tell my wife about said purchase (fully tax-writeable-offable, holds its value, rare, cheap, honest) but then had to phone her to get some insurance details. I took my verbal punishment like a man. A man who had already signed the registration document.

Around 10.30, Rob, aboard his trusty Hyosung, and I headed off for Hinckley in Leicestershire to collect the official Barnard bikes, Triumph Street Triples. All Norfolk seemed to be on the roads, which in this neck of the flatlands are pretty minor. The Guzzi, a wondrous cross between a cruiser and streetfighter, was a revelation: great thumpy sound, sweet gearchange, easy handling, really comfortable. The weather  was hot, too. Still, we made it to Hinckley where Paul, the Man Who, had been expecting us yesterday. Oops.

The Hyosung and Bellagio were carefully stored away for future collection, and the Street Triples rolled out. Rob’s a lurid lime green and mine (an R, which stands for Ridiculous) in sober matt grey. With lurid orange lettering. These are not bikes for shrinking violets.

They hold hardly any luggage, but we’d expected that. Each weighs about as much as a mountain bike, only with a jet engine. They are insanely fast (basically stripped-down 675cc Daytonas) and yet, after a while on the motorway, they become quite comfy; they’re surprisingly effective long distance tools.

Unfaired bikes are sore on the wrists, though. By the time Rob peeled off for Manchester to visit his in-laws, I was feeling the handlebar burn. Still, I made it through the filthy weather of the Lake District, left the holiday traffic behind at Penrith and was in Glasgow by 8.30pm. The aroma of various foods was overwhelming ( did you know that on a bike, each motorway service area smells, as you pass, of burnt fat?).

To the Student Pit of Depravity (flat) and then, once dry and luggageless, to a Place of Security And Safety for the Triumph. One theft of a Triumph from outside Mag’s flat is quite enough!

Glasgow now until Monday night.

Leatt Adventure Brace and bearded scaredy cat

Off on the boat tonight, and that’ll be two weeks away from home on The Barnard Challenge. This strange collar I’m wearing is a Leatt Brace, the simplest, cheapest Adventure model. It was designed by a South African neurosurgeon, Chris Leatt, after he saw one of his friends die of a broken neck – a C2 fracture – in a motocross accident. There’s been little use of them in road motorcycling, but I think that’s going to change. It’s light, simple to fit, and comfortable. It only works with a full-face helmet. Basically, in the event of an accident, it stops your head, its weight increased exponentially by the presence of a helmet, from snapping the twig-like thing it sits on. The spine. At least that’s the theory. We’re going to be covering several thousand miles on this trip – longer than any other motorbike ride I’ve done other than my journey through South Africa on a BMW R1150GS several years ago – and various brushes with people who’ve suffered massive neck trauma convinced me that £200 – the price of a half-decent helmet, and half the cost of some models – was a worthwhile investment. I know, I know: the best thing is not have an accident in the first place. That means several things. Care, skill, observation, caution (but not debilitating nervousness). And visibility. To the end, I’m wearing hi-viz stuff rather than going for the cool black look. And you have to be comfortable, too, as long-distance biking when cold and wet can lead to disaster. But the Leatt Brace is, I think, a simple and useful addition to the personal safety gear I’ll be using (boots, armoured jacket and trousers, gloves). And if I look like a wimp, so be it.

One week ago, I was 10 floors above the west end of Glasgow, eating roast lamb with all the trimmings, hot and tasty. I’d already had home-made lentil soup, and there was  fruit and custard to follow.  And it was all free.

The Western Infirmary’s acute surgical ward has a great view and the hospital’s food is surprisingly good. But there are better reasons to go there, especially if, like me, you thought you had (a) bowel cancer or possibly (b) a potentially fatal strangulated hernia or (c) a combination of the two. It’s a big, old battered, city teaching hospital, its buildings run down, scarred and graffitti-veined. But they do good medicine. They heal the sick. They tell you what’s wrong.

I took ill on the way back to T in the Park, after a quick  trip with Susan to Glasgow to avoid the mud and rain. Nagging gut pain which had hung around for weeks erupted into a crippling agony which meant I couldn’t walk. Already in Balado, we could have headed for Perth, but Glasgow is what we know and love and have faith in. so back to the Dear Green Place we went.

It was Saturday, tea-time when we began to interface with the Western, straight off the street and into accident and emergency. it was already full. I spotted some gammy legs, a few bloodstained hankies. My son Sandy, who works in A&E in Derry, says  that GBs accomplish a great deal (Gobby Relatives) and Susan took on this role with aplomb. In a comparitively short time, I was in a backless robe, waiting to be examined.  The pain was still horrific.  A drip was set up. Nothing oral could be taken, in case an operation loomed, so a shot of morphine was sent thundering into my veins. It was like getting hit by a train. The pain didn’t go. It just retreated to a little box, somewhere…over there. And I stopped being able to speak in sentences.

A doctor arrived. I am a connoisseur of doctors. This one was very impressive. Embarrassing examinations, blood samples, urine samples. All around me, as ambulances came and went, screams and moans sounded, and Glasgow on a Saturday night began to rev up for injury and illness. But it was all as distant as my pain. It was way over there…

I was to stay in overnight. Supine, I was trolleyed to the crumbling old lifts, and given a bed in a  ward with just one, extremely battered looking young man in it. And this is where I draw a curtain of discretion over the five patients who eventually, with me, filled the ward, arriving one by one over the course of the night and following morning. It wouldn’t be fair to talk about them. But I can say they were all, without exception, friendly, kind and, in every way, wonderfully Glaswegian. Another good doctor. Then another. CT scan in the morning, they said.

Susan went back to T in the Park, where the weans were worried and Yurt-bound. I dozed, dreaming lurid opiate dreams, woken occasionally by the advent of new patients, some very noisy indeed. Next morning, I had emerged from my morphine insulation and the pain had genuinely diminished. The consultant surgeon did his ward round accompanied by students and doctors. More poking and pressing, but less pain.  ’We’ll see what the scan shows…’

Time passed. Three of us were wheeled down to the CT scanner for swift and precise electro-magnetic scanning. It was like being in some old sci-fi film. Much less scary than X-rays. Then we were wheeled back to the ward. It’s amazing how quickly and willingly you submit to being a transportable object, rather than someone who can move on their own two feet.

For one of us, the CT scan revealed a need for immediate surgery. We were scared on his behalf. We could tell it was deadly serious stuff. A passing doctor told me my scan was ‘clear’. I immediately felt a huge wash of relief, and guilty about wasting everyone’s time. Hours passed. I was given the aforementioned roast dinner. A surgeon would come and talk to me, a nurse said. Did I mention the nurses? All friendly, all enormously efficient. I was addressed, universally, as ‘Thomas’, as that was written on my notes. Which felt odd.

My guts, the surgeon said, having scanned my scan were in a mess. They were all over the place, in the wrong place, badly plumbed, and I was suffering from a bad case of diverticular disease. I cannot tell you the sense of relief I felt to know that, first of all, there was something genuinely wrong and second, that it actually had  name. ‘It’s not cancer then,’ I said. No, it wasn’t. High fibre diet. Don’t be too concerned. Half the people on Byres Road have diverticular disease.

I left 24 hours after I entered, walking alone up Byres Road, looking at people and wondering which of them had DD. Feeling rather emotional about myself. And very grateful.

Bob Dylan performing Highway 61 on Saturday night

It was a mad scheme, conceived after a few glasses of wine, when James (19-year-old offspring) complained that he’d probably never get to see Van Morrison; or Bob Dylan. Some Googling indicated that they were both appearing at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, the first weekend of July. Not only that, but in what appeared to be a spoof bill, so were Richard Thompson, Dr John, Ray Davies, Mumford and Sons, Pete Doherty, Los Lobos and more. What’s more, in late May, it wasn’t sold out. A few clicks, and tickets had been booked. Camping tickets. Hey, it would be an adventure.

So it was boat to Aberdeen, drive to Glasgow, do the show at PQ, then overnight sleeper to London. The Scotrail sleeper is very convenient, crushingly expensive, great fun and an embarrassing mess; the rolling stock is shabby, the cabins worn out and the buffet awful. No hot water for breakfast tea. It’s like Soviet Russian trains, only worse. Still, hurtling through the night at 80 mph sound asleep is…well. You’re asleep. On a train.

In London, we went to St Paul’s Cathedral (£22 to get in, unless, I’m told, you claim to be worshipping. How can they tell?) then Tate Modern (main galleries free). Art, faith, money. An unholy combination. Have to say I’ll go back to see Monet’s (unexpectedly vast) Water Lilies, and not the Cathedral. But I’m a cheapskate that way.

Train from Charing Cross to Tunbridge Wells, there to do the TM Show from a steamy cupboard at BBC Radio Kent. Tunbridge Wells is posh. There’s a Carluccio’s cafe where ladies who lunch lunched. Then it was a taxi to The Hop Farm site at Paddock Wood, 15 minutes away. The taxi driver didn’t know it was on. There had been so little publicity, I wasn’t sure it was either.

But there were the oast houses and the giant stage and the Portaloos, baking in the sun. We pitched our tents in the packed campsite and were soon sipping Larkin’s Festival Ale among maybe 10,000 other folk while Dr John (with Chris Barber, no less) walked us to New Orleans. It was glorious. Van Morrison played what I thought was a great set, suffused with the usual grumpiness and marked by the usual refused encore. No Guru, No Method, No Teacher was magical. The Irish Independent said Van looked like “a West Belfast butcher on a stag weekend” and who am I to argue? Van himself looks for three or four ‘moments’ in a set, and this had at least that many.

We missed Los Lobos. Blondie were charmingly awful. Richard Thompson, solo, was in truly fantastic form. Genesis Hall and Vincent Black Lightning 1952 leaving me quite overwhelmed. Funny too. “Thank you for choosing the folk rock dinosaur over the 70s pop dinosaur” he said, as Blondie boomed raggedly in the distance. “It’s all one.” No it isn’t.

We slept badly. Drunken 18-year-old students in the next tent were roundly taken to task by the family next along, the guy whose tent they pissed not-quite-on, and others. But, as they loudly protested, “it’s a FESTIVAL…” and that clearly means, for some, staying up all night shouting and urinating upon the products of Blacks of Greenock. I took pity on one hungover nedette next morning, and gave her a drink of water, in exchange for a promise they wouldn’t do it again. Next night, they whispered, and briefly. Nice young folk.

Saturday, was long, brutally hot, but rewarding. And much busier. Up to 40,000 people were on site – too many for the infrastructure. Long, long queues for both drinking water and beer (Gadd’s Seasider and Larkins Summertime are both recommended) resulted, the campsite water pressure disappeared and the small patches of shade were keenly, but politely contested. This was a very mannerly festival, for the most part. Even Pete Doherty was polite. And nearly professional.

The whole thing (in its third year) is the brainchild of Vince Power, former Reading, Glasto and Mean Fiddler promoter and handily, pal of Van Morrison. There was no branding or sponsorship at all. The bars were handled by the Workers’ Beer company. Hence the Gadds and Larkins. It succeeds due to its simplicity, an incredible line-up, its position an hour from London, and the weather. But I’d expect changes next year, probably involving some caving in to corporate branding.

Anyway. There was some great food (loved the local cherries, Leon’s veggie curries and the Gado Gado stall) and the music on Saturday was, at the very least, fascinating: Laura Marling has some fantastic songs. Seasick Steve has secrets, and not just in those supposedly primitive guitars. He delivers, though. Mumford and Sons have one song which they do several times, in slightly different versions. Johnny Flynn is like both Marling and Mumford, only with a mandolin and more tousling.  Then there was Ray Davies, former Kink.

Wow. One of the greatest songwriters in the firmament, he arrived with a rough old pub band, proceeded to slag off Dylan (” I didn’t live in a gated community, like some artists on this bill”) the promoter, for trying to get him to play to time (“We’ll play all fucking night if we feel like it”) sang out of tune, acted like an ornery, honorary Gallagher brother and still was brilliant. Many, but not all, of the great hits were there, surviving the gleeful hammering being handed out to them. Cussed, arrogant, bitter, strange. A real rock star.

Bob Dylan is much more than that. This was the same band as I saw in Edinburgh at the Playhouse, slick, sympathetic, protective, subservient to the master’s mad passion for playing bad organ and worse lead guitar. He grunted hoarsely through many of the classics. They were recognisable. It was a thrill to be in his presence. The band wore tan 1950s suits, Dylan was dressed like a tango instructor. James loved it. I admit that before the end, I was cranking up the Trangia stove back at the campsite, making tea as ‘Forever Young’ came floating through the cooling air. And that was magical too.

Ray Davies doing Sunny Afternoon at Hop Farm.

Up at 6.00 am after a cold night, to another blisteringly hot day. Shuttle bus to the station, tube to Euston, Virgin Trains (Starship Enterprise to Scotrail’s Sputnik) to Glasgow. Was it worth it? Definitely. And in five days, it’s T in the Park. Hope the blisters heal…

Up at 5.30am (no sweat, can’t sleep anyway) last tidy of the flat and then see if the squelched knee (making alarming creaking noises) will carry me undergroundwards. Hillhead opens for Outer Circle action at 06.33, so me and a few washed-andscrubbed early birds are ready for the working day. Not even bleary. And the leg is holding up, thanks to the walking stick.

Buchanan Street, which is a mistake, as I’m getting the bus, not the train. Cowcaddens is nearer. Never mind, the AM/PM cafe is open at the bus station, and for four quid I get a gigantic portion of scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and tea. Great. For whatever reason, bus station cafes usually are. The closure of the fab greasy spoon at Aberdeen is a major cultual and culinary loss.

Bus leaves promptly at 6.40 am. Smells funny. I have a feeling the chemical toilet is swilling about a bit too much on corners. Only about 10 other folk aboard.

There’s a huge queue of traffic at the Broxburn roundabout approaching Perth, and when we finally reach the bus halt, next to the Travelodge, the problem is explained to us: fatal accident on the Friarton Bridge, road closed. All traffic having to go through Perth, and anyway there’s no driver. He’s stuck on the way in from Dundee.

Half an hour passes. I have to say I like Megabus. All their staff are friendly, polite but efficient in a way which you sense reflects a fierce company refusal to accept shit from anyone. Even the passengers. Somebody who complains about arriving in Aberdeen late is robustly informed that  ‘someone has been killed, my dear’. Quite.

Getting through Perth takes ages. I’m always slightly disappointed in Perth. The river should be the centre of town, not a kind of adjunct. Finally we  are on the Dundee road, and motoring. Jute Central arrives, and an apologetic driver announces that legally, because he’s been driving for such an unexpectedly long time, he is now obliged to take a half hour break.

There’s no moaning. We’ve learned our lesson. And anyway, within five minutes, a new driver has been found and we’re on our way.

It’s about 11.40 am when we roll into the precincts of Union Square in Aberdeen. All told, four hours isn’t so bad. The taxi to the BBC costs more than the Megabus Aberdeen-Glasgow-Aberdeen fare.

The show done, it’s another taxi to the airport. The threat of sea-fog closing Sumburgh is ever present at this time of year, but we take off (FlyBe) on time at 6.30pm, landing an hour later in cloud low enough to cancel flights in the old days. I remember desperate, three-times around the airfield  approaches of the past, the British Airways staff handing out copious fresh drink every time we tried to land. Then going back to Aberdeen for a riotous, free night in a hotel before trying again next morning.

Not this time. We’re on the ground, in nasty, grey, cold weather. Welcome to Shetland. An hour and 10 minutes by car and I’m home. 8.40pm. Long day.

Thanks to Fraser Hamilton over in Michigan for forwarding these images – billboards found throughout Detroit, aimed, presumably at boosting the self-image of long-term GM customers and residents. No songs about Volvos? Maybe not. But I can think of songs about Vauxhall Veluxes, Grey Cortinas and MGBs…

Up at 6.00am, befuddled by the combination of new Casio alarm clock and light-defying eye mask. Another calm, quiet day in the Greater Zetlandics, and I don’t think…

One carton of probiotic gunk, and it’s into the Subaru to go and fetch Martha from the Aberdeen ferry, due in at 7.30am. We’re 37 miles from Lerwick. Still groggy, I slot in the new Steve Miller album (Bingo, old blues covers, splendid) and turn it up loud. That’s why, on reversing around our personal roundabout, I don’t notice any crunching noise as I collide with the Citroen C4. No damage to the Scooby, bashed back door for the French pile of junk. Bad karma for the day? Huh.

Lerwick, to see the ferry docking. Martha’s off quickly, anxious to get to school (mega magazine duties, before her next trip south, on Thursday night’s boat). She’s just back from a fiddle workshop in, of all places, Grantham. She, almost alone of the party, has not succumbed to Norovirus.

Home (37 miles), Martha changed, get row from Susan for bashing (my own) car. James (recovering from appendicitis) has to take Lulu the St Bernard to vet for operation. 35 miles away in Scalloway. He agrees to drop Martha off at school on the way (12 miles).

Now all we have to work out is what to do about tonight. Susan is going into Lerwick (37 miles) with Magnus, both working there today. But tonight, Martha is playing cello in a charity orchestra bash. We need to be there, as loyal fans, but then so does she. And she needs transport. From the house, as she’ll be getting the bus back after school (12 miles).

I, meanwhile, have to go to Lerwick to do the show (37 miles). I plan to take the bus, stay in town, see the gig and get a lift back (37 miles) with Susan and Magnus (who has been strongarmed into attending a classical concert). They’re going to wait in town and get some tea before the performance. But how does Martha get into town with cello? I calculate there’s just enough time for me to get back on the bus (37 miles) pick her up and go back to Lerwick (37 miles) where I can leave the car and get a lift home with Susan, Mag and Martha (37 miles) having consumed hasty pints of Valhalla ale.

But no. James phones. Lulu’s getting her operation today and will be ready to head home around 4.30pm. Could I drive into Lerwick for the show (37 miles) and pick the dog up on my way home (37 miles plus a 10-miles detour)?

I agree to do this. Deal now is that James will take Martha into town tonight (37 miles) and back (37 miles) if he’s feeling OK. Otherwise I will do it (74 miles round trip, third of the day).

And yes, all this does involve three cars, not counting the bus. Such is the radical carbonisation of our collective footprint caused by a large dog and a daughter who plays the fiddle and cello.