Earlier this morning this was a 20-track album of weak tracks that had accumulated over the weeks - I thought they were too good to instantly delete, but not good enough to appear on any of my high-profile chart-busting hugely popular albums of zero downloads and minus-seven visits per day.
So this morning I felt emboldened to publish it at last. I decided to quickly skim through the tracks to maybe weed out one or two of the ones that really really were too bad to go outside for public derision. In the end I decided that all 20 tracks were absolutely woeful. But I come from the generation where the greatest crime is to leave food on your plate, and I couldn't just toss away a whole album. These are the four very best or very worst tracks.
Together, like this, these things that are either trying very hard to be annoying or delightful, somehow mix together very well - it's like that Christmas party where you worry that your demented grandad and your sweary granddaughter are going to get into endless arguments and in fact they end up on exactly the same wavelength and they're the only two people who have a good time.
Yesterday I caught the 5-33am train to Romsey, arriving ten minutes later, and striking out for the Test Way, heading northwards. The drizzle never stopped, and sometimes mustered enough ooomph to become rain. The idea was to head up to Mottisfont along many paths I'd never walked before, and then turn left and walk to Salisbury along paths I know well. The weather and time of the week and the atrociously muddy paths meant that in about 8 hours I only passed four people - a female jogger who decidedly ignored me (possibly a former fan of my music), a female dog-walker who was very friendly, a male road-worker who was setting up traffic lights along a silent lane near Kimbridge who was friendly, and a man down a similarly silent farm track who was setting up a rifle to shoot deer - he was the friendliest person of all.
This was my first long walk since mid-December last year when I fell downstairs and smashed up my knee - I thought (and think) it was a torn meniscus, but friends who know more about these things, being properly athletic/sporty, kept on talking about my ACL, which I'd never heard of, even more than I'd never heard of torn meniscuses (?).
The first symptoms after that disaster were that I could barely stand and couldn't climb stairs. So I read a lot of books and slept for weeks on the sofa. Things improved, I could stand and even climb, and I could walk, but if I walked at my normal fasti-ish pace that was painful.
People ask What Happened, and I say I fell down stairs and they think that I was drunk (I wasn't) and I explain that these things happen when you get old, even though half of them are older than me. They don't believe it. "Getting Old " is something that happens to other people - not me, and certainly not them.
When you've known as many people as you and I have and heard about people and read about them, you know that falls about the house are one of the main things that lead to something that kills you. I recently watched a brilliant documentary about Shane McGowan - just one name among millions who fell so simply and unexpectedly (twice) and whose life forever changed and soon ended.
This is the exciting knife-edge even boring timid safe-life drifters like me and the people I like walk - you can be innocently grazing in a field and then bam you're dead. I put a brave face on things but after my fall I did get privately rather depressed, I thought I would never be able to do any of my long walks again. I can relive every step and path and stile of every one of my favourite journeys, and at night I often replay one, and would cry to think that I could never do any of them again in real life. I even sometimes have a mad but wonderful wonderful wonderful dream of getting rid of everything and just living like a hobo, walking all over Britain and Ireland - oh I really do - I just need a day of extraordinary reckless bravery, the sort that comes randomly and must be grasped fully.
Well, I am elated that yesterday I walked all that way and my knee behaved beautifully - not only during the walk but after it too, there isn't even an ache this morning. I've dodged one bullet and am feeling so reckless that I'm actually releasing this album - perhaps if I kill off my music career the Fates will spare me in other ways, just for a while.
recorded over the past few weeks, cover painting by me
she says this is the last album she'll make like this before she goes off and makes stuff with Lana Del Rey - so just for this moment we have Kathy to ourselves - (yes I love Lana's music too) Simon Aulman
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