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On the road

Peter Phillips

Wednesday, 8th October 2008

Peter Phillips travels between music festivals

For some reason October this year is yielding the kind of running about the place more normally associated with the summer festivals. From Naples to St Asaph, from Paris to Evora to St Omer and back to Evora in as many days with the added excitement of a broken-down Eurostar and various throat- and ankle-related incapacitations, no one in my troupe is talking about ‘the glamour’ of the touring life just now.

Yet despite, or perhaps because of, the stress of constant travelling, I am still capable of out-of-mind, serendipitous moments of delight when under pressure from schedules. Walking towards our hotel in Prestatyn, near St Asaph in Wales — which I had initially assumed was one of the drugs I was taking for my cholesterol — I suddenly realised that I was completely alone in brilliant sunshine on a beach-side road, speckled with sand, the only building in sight the eventual hotel half a mile in the distance. My colleagues had vanished and I was dressed in London clothes dragging a pile of music and CDs along behind me in a suitcase. I hadn’t any idea where I was and the only clue in sight was a sign in a language more foreign to me than any other on the European circuit. I thought I must have wandered on to the set of one of those ex-Yugoslavian movies about lost innocence.

Language can be a useful locator. On the flight between Brussels and Lisbon, which was part of the transfer from St Omer to Evora, I was jammed into a party of Flemish burghers, whose most prominent physical feature seemed to be their knees, on a jolly to the prehistoric sites of the Alentejo. They were deeply proud people, disapproving of anyone who was not capable of replicating their blunt-instrument intonations.

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