Well, now we’re back from the Lake District, and we didn’t get lost in mist, I can breath again and chortle quietly at all the electric spasms of fear I experienced whenever I saw low cloud approaching. In fact, it didn’t ever ‘approach’, since it was invariably already there. All in all, though, a good time was had. I won’t bore my readers with talk of map reading mistakes or extended sessions in the steam room but I feel I must set down a brief account of our unsuccessful attempt at ‘Taking Helvelyn by Striding Edge’.

We set off on a foul morning with Geoff and Tanya keen as mustard and the rest of us slightly less enthusiastic. Immediately we left the car, the wind hit us. It must have been 80mph. Unremitting gusts tore at our clothes and more or less prevented us seeing anywhere but down at the ground, away from the wind. Then the rain began. I’ve never known conditions like it. I was soaked through within minutes. My boxer shorts felt like a sodden dish cloth.

Shielding my face, glancing up, I could see thick blankets of swirling mist swooping down on us. So far as I was concerned, I had been ready to go back almost the moment we had started; but naturally, it wouldn’t do to be the one to suggest anything so craven, so I waited for someone else to mention the possibility that we would certainly all die if we went on, if not of hypothermia then by striding off Striding Edge into the well known and oft frequented precipice on one or other of its sides.

Luckily, before things got even worse, Crip’s specs were whipped off his face. We all stumbled around for ten minutes pretending to look for them (if I had found them I would, of course, have secreted them in a side pocket and slipped them his way later) before admitting defeat and descending.

The nadir of this expedition, for me, was twofold. It was bad enough getting lashed in the face by a piece of brittle plastic flapping on the edge of Tanya’s poncho that felt like my cheek had been stabbed by an ice pick; it was worse when, sitting shivering in the passenger seat of Crip’s car, I felt scalding hot liquid suffusing my bum and thighs. Good Lord, I thought, the privations of the morning must have affected my bladder control. How shaming. Thankfully, as it turned out, the driver, who shall remain nameless, had spilled scalding hot coffee onto my seat. Oh, happy day!

This snapshot of me going out to dinner later tells its own story:

Excert from a recent John Cale interview:

LP – Finally, there’s a popular story about you cutting the head off a chicken onstage with a meat cleaver…

JC – It was a really nice meat cleaver. I bought it in Berlin. So beautifully balanced. It didn’t take very much. There was no sawing, you just lowered your arm and the weight of the cleaver carried it.

LP – There’s been no explanation why you had a chicken and a meat cleaver onstage together in the first place. Presumably it was premeditated?

JC – Yeah. My band left over it. It turned out they were vegetarians. We got the chicken from a farm outside of Oxford. I told my tour manager to put it in a box and just come out with it. Of course, he had to grandstand it. He came out holding the bird, right up high, and that was it. We were screwed.

The bird was on the floor of the van all the way to London. The band had all this time to ruminate over what was going to happen. They were like ‘What are you going to do with the bird?’ Nothing. ‘Are you going to hurt it?’ Of course not.

Around that time everyone was gobbing on musicians. Tom Verlaine came over to play the Marquee, and he couldn’t believe that people would drink beer and spit it at you as a form of adulation. So I took it a step further. I threw both the head and body out into the crowd. Everyone was kicking it away from them like it was contaminated. After the show, the band came up to me and said, You lied to us. You said you weren’t going to hurt it. I said I didn’t hurt it. It didn’t feel a thing.

Oh dear!

My three favourite musicians each released a new LP (or should I say album) recently. I refer to Mike Oldfield, John Cale and Brian Eno. The Oldfield double CD is okay, perfectly listenable, and a number one choice for having on in the background without it being necessary to stop whatever you’re doing to listen more closely. The first half is better than the slightly techno second. A bit too much of it is made up of snatches of better stuff from the past. Cale’s latest has its moments, but it’s a fairly typical offering, with some jaw dropping classics mixed in with a few total clangers. It definitely needs pruning down to half its original size. At any rate, it’s not a patch on his earlier work; although, I have to admit, I’ve listened to it much less often than the others, and it may grow on me yet. Eno, however, with his first vocal offering for many, many years, has come up with an absolute stunner. As the proud owner of the Eno vocal box set, comprising Here Come the Warm Jets, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, Another Green World, and Before and after Science, I feel I must know what I’m talking about. Staggering, chocolate melting melodies and bizarrely beautiful lyrics make this my release of the year.

This

This chord
This water
This son
This daughter
This day
This time
This land
It’s all mine

This Calling Bell
This Forge Bell
This Dark Bell
This The Knife Bell
This calling
This burden
This falling
The world’s turning

This What I thought I knew
This What I thought was true
This I understood
This In the deep wood
This Ah there I stood a child so fair
This On a certain square
This Down the dirty stairs
This To see the table set
This With golden chairs
This Ah to follow, follow, follow, follow there

This race
And this world
This feeling
And this girl
This revolver
This fire
This I’ll hold it up higher, higher, high

Surely some variant of this is possible?

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We cycled to Chi by Walberton, calling in at Melbourne Road to eat our lunch and say hello to Bilson and Nance; then we headed down the Centurian Way to West Dean, and from there ascended to the Trundle. We came back via Eartham. Four hours in the saddle left our bums sore. Sensationally balmy weather for mid October, we could almost have gone swimming.