While searching for a phone charger with the right end, my eye snags on something on the kitchen table: the cover of a GCSE history revision guide, featuring a black and white photo of a wounded soldier lying on the scarred earth, looking imploringly at the huddle of comrades gathered above him. One has a wobbly balloon drawn in ballpoint pen emerging from his mouth. Inside the balloon, in a cramped, joined-up hand, are the words “shut up you batty crease”.
“Are you off?” my wife says, striding into the kitchen.
“In a minute,” I say.
“We won’t be here when you get back,” she says.
“Why not?” I ask.
“We’re going to that thing,” she says. “I told you.”
“Oh,” I say. The doorbell rings.
“That’s them,” I say.
“Have fun,” my wife says.
For the second weekend in a row I’m heading out on tour with the band I’m in. With two of my children in the middle of exams, I can imagine the chaos I’m leaving behind, but I’m a bit hazy about what lies ahead.
“Where are we playing tonight?” I ask the bass player as the van pulls away. He looks at me, then at his phone.
“I’ll just check,” he says.
Fours hours later I’m walking the streets of Wirksworth, near Derby, in search of a bit of carpet to put under the bass drum to stop it sliding around on stage. The search is fruitless: even if Wirksworth had a carpet shop, it wouldn’t be open.
“Everything shuts at 4.30,” says the accordion player, peering into a darkened window.
“Not this pub,” I say, pointing to a sign on the door. “It doesn’t even open until 8pm.”
“Shut up,” he says.
That night the band is to be billeted among the good people of Wirksworth. I’ve been assigned to Paddy and Debbie, but I’m not sure where they live.
“Don’t worry,” Debbie says. “We’re all meeting at the pub afterwards, just across the way.”
“The pub that doesn’t open until 8?” I say.
“That’s the one,” Paddy says.
The next afternoon I ring my wife from Durham. She tells me the youngest one has had his last day of classes.
“He came home covered in cocks,” she says.
“Sorry?” I say.
“You know, they draw all over each others’s shirts,” she says.
“Oh yeah,” I say. “I remember.”
Two days later I wake up in a hotel room in Cockermouth. I think about ringing the youngest one to ask him to guess the name of the town I’m in, but it’s 7.30, and we’re meant to be loading up for the drive back to London.
When I get home that afternoon the house is dark and oppressively silent. Suddenly my wife appears at the top of the stairs, I nearly jump out of my shoes.
“I thought you were away,” I say.
“We’re going in a minute,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “Why aren’t I coming with you?”
“Because you’re tired,” she says.
“I am tired,” I say.
“And because I’m leaving you one of the dogs,” she says.
“OK,” I say.
“It’s not personal,” she says. “How was it?”
I think back over the weekend – the gigs, the road, the festival on the hillside in Ireby, the pub that didn’t open till 8, the sight of Durham cathedral on a spring morning, the guided tour of a chipboard factory that occupied our Saturday afternoon – and I realise that to describe it as a single experience would be like summing up the history of 20th century armed conflict with the words “shut up you batty crease”.
“It was good,” I say.
