The album ‘Pirate Lover’ is coming out soon.  I am grateful to all the musicians who play on the album so in the order of when I recorded them:

Josh Craig on guitar and pedals and engineering, Richard Moore on violin, Will Fergusson on piano, vocals and clarinet, Dave Barbarossa on drums, Graham Dalzell on bass and Greg Davis on saxophone.  I also wish to thank Cameron Craig for mixing the album.

It took a long time.  The day job with intermittent interludes took me to many fascinating places.

Argentina the land of the gaucho, the tango, steak and more besides reaches so far south to the end of the world as Bruce Chatwin called Patagonia. He considered it as the safest place to be should nuclear war break out and the last outpost before Antarctica.  But we didn’t quite make it that far. We followed Route 40 highlighted in yellow until we ran out of time.

We went a bit off grid via the beautiful Cueva de los Manos (Cave of Hands) in Santa Cruz which dates back to 7,300 BC. Here is where the cave is situated so it’s quite a walk across the gorge:

We stayed at a ranch Estancia Santa Thelma belonging to a French exile living on the land in the middle of nowhere Marc-Antoine Calonne with two beautiful girls cooking on a fire on a metallic signpost. He rode on horseback across Patagonia and wrote a book about it which of course I bought but it’s in French. The photographs are fantastic.  He spends half the year in France building a motorcycle museum and half the time in Patagonia. He had a huge poster of Clint on the wall who of course I adore!

The landscape was breath-taking and the roads treacherous.  Luckily, we had no puncture for rarely do you pass a car let alone anything else for long, long stretches of time sometimes four or five hours of gravel potholed roads with no signal (Starlink is not in the skies about Patagonia).

At one point we had to turn back 45 minutes to pick up gas in order to ensure we made it to the next stop.

And the skies were endless, beautiful and eternal I felt like I was on Mars.

Our final destination was when we hit the water at Lago Argentino..

Javier Milie at the time back in November of last year got the thumbs up from everyone we met.  He’s still in power thanks to a 20 billion dollar Trump loan – but will he survive?  Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world once and Buenos Aires its crown jewel.

Kazakhstan is a very interesting country and it’s so much more than Borat…!

My visit to the country twice in a year was a truly extraordinary.  I have never been to such a young country.  The hotel lobby was filled with crypto currency delegates and some giants (it turned out they were a baseball team).  I was grateful to receive not one but two Dombras as gifts. The instrument of course appears on the album.  I had never seen snow so clean and full of crystals and I had not witnessed a city like Astana now called Nursultan with its modern imaginative architecture and quirky buildings.

Project Sapphire is a very interesting period post the break up of the USSR when President Nazarbayev negotiated with the USA the removal of its entire nuclear arsenal off its territory which it inherited as a result of it being the location for Russia’s nuclear testing sites. It’s a fascinating story that brings to my mind The Wages of Fear one of my favourite films.

I even went to an indoor man-made beach at the top of a mall and contemplated this country which adopts a relaxed approach to Islam and how perhaps this is what the future looks like, what young looks like, what Asia looks like and not what the past or old looks like. Nothing like Europe with its rich and complex history and ageing population.   This is a new country which only emerged after the disintegration of the USSR that built its capital city’s major landmarks in two years. I saw two people in Earls Court take two months to paint one railing!

After the collapse of the USSR fifteen nation states emerged in 1991 and two more I visited only last month: Georgia and Armenia.   

Another road trip through these Christian countries, cousins (but competitive and feuding ones) was fascinating. One feels much more western and the other more eastern.  Georgia (but not its Georgian Dream ruling party) looks to Europe.  With Italian style courtyards, treelined streets, its European influenced buildings Art Nouveau style mansions with terraces and balconies- it sometimes reminded me of Havana with its slightly crumbling buildings in bright colours and hidden away bars.

Armenia is surrounded by the enemy and south of it lies Iran. Landlocked it shares some similarities with Poland. Since Russia let them down over Nagorno Karabakh it is increasingly relying on the west but it has always suffered and the genocide of 2 million by the Turks cannot ever be forgotten.  The drive through the Debed Valley and the trip to Areni past a beautiful church with ancient Byzantine paintings and the extraordinary monasteries so enormous and situated on cliff edges –defies belief.  It’s incomprehensible as to how they built these edifices. 

I loved the people and we met a few Diasporan Armenians putting money and investment into the country such as creating a new flourishing wine industry (under USSR it was earmarked only for brandy).  Yerevan just four and a half hours south of Tblisi its capital could not feel more different but both had young Russian money propping up the incredible food and wine businesses from the relocants as they are called escaping conscription.

I will never forget the two sisters who were looking for husbands in some deserted spot driving through Armenia by the sacred stones of Karahunj in the Syvnik Province who sold me a T-shirt nor the gangster wedding in Gyumri with the honking horns of about 20 tinted windowed Hummers nor our night with Amelia Stewart where we hung out with a local jazz musician in Tblisi.

Saturn beats like a drum – time – but as the brilliant as ever Laurie Anderson who I saw yesterday at the Roundhouse puts it: “What are days for? Days are where we live. The flow and then the flow.  They come, they fade, they go and go” (Another Day in America 2012)

And living your days like you are squeezing the lemon to its very last drop as my boss loves to say is a good mantra to live by but not always possible especially when you are looking after others or spending large parts of your day just trying to keep a roof over your head. 

This is especially true if you suffer like I do from procrastination for “procrastination is the thief of time.” 

So I needed a deadline, I made one, I finished and now I got to let it go…SOON!

xxx

Remembering Grandpa today who parachuted over enemy lines