PSST gig and arrests are made

 

I had just come back from three months working in Greece. No sooner had my feet touched Rhyl soil than I found myself back in the chaos — onstage with Psycho Sexual Sex Terrestrials at the Bistro.

The band were already in bits before I even walked in. Robin was pissed, Paul was pissed, Jon and Scott were pissed. Dean, ex–Dam Yankee, was holding it together on rhythm guitar, while Hot Scott was doubling up on bass. I clambered up and joined them for Kennedy and Distance, hammering the bass and generally wrecking the place. The set was a shambles — Robin broke two strings and just carried on regardless, Dean stopped mid-song to bollock Scott for fucking up, and I threw myself into what a reviewer described as a typical demonic Crud performance.

But the gig was a blast. A sweaty, chaotic mess of music, broken strings, shouting, and laughter. It was also the last time the Bistro allowed live music for quite some time. We burned it down in spirit, if not in flames.

The after-show was pure carnage. Paul was trying to juggle not one but two girlfriends — both sat at the same table, glaring daggers, while one of them, soon to be his wife and mother of his child, tried not to combust. The whole band was spiralling into chaos, fuelled by drink and bravado.

Leaving the gig, things got darker. Dean was assaulted outside, which sent Paul, Robin, and Jon — who doubled as a Special Constable — into vigilante mode. Dean spotted one of the culprits, so Jon screeched his car to a halt, leaving the engine running and doors wide open, Robin drunk in the back seat. Dean, Paul, and Jon bolted after the lad, Jon arresting him in full Special Constable glory.

But when they returned to the car, it was gone. Vanished. Robin, in his drunken wisdom, had decided to “help” by moving it out of the road to avoid an accident. Unfortunately, he moved it straight into the path of a police car.

The cops saw he was pissed and hauled him out. Robin, furious at not being recognised as the upstanding citizen he believed he was, kicked off. He lashed out at the officers, smashed the windows of their van, and earned himself seven charges: assault, destruction of police property, drunk driving, no insurance — the full house.

The entire band somehow ended up in the police station, joined by one of Paul’s girlfriends who had just discovered the other one existed. She was screaming, “I hope you catch fucking AIDS!” at the top of her lungs while Robin raged in his cell. The police even tried to confiscate the video of the gig to use as evidence. They didn’t get it.

By some miracle — maybe because Jon was a Special Constable, maybe because Robin had some kind of luck lodged in his bones — he walked away lighter than he should have.

It was a hell of a welcome home for me. Three months in Greece, then straight back to Rhyl, straight into the heart of the storm.

Day 78: Frankfurt to Paris - Training Thoughts

 

Train journeys are strange social experiments — quiet, confined hours spent in close proximity to total strangers, where everyone pretends not to be watching everyone else.

But of course, everyone is watching.

It’s the ritual of the observer: staring discreetly at the person opposite, then darting your eyes away the moment they make contact. It’s a subtle dance — as much a part of train travel as the ticket punch or the low rumble of the wheels.

Say what you will about the continent, but at least European trains run on time. They're clean, punctual, and notably free of graffiti like “MUFC 4EVA” or “Shaz 4 Darren” scratched into the toilet mirror. The air doesn’t reek of stale lager, and there's no sticky floor beneath your boots.

And the fares? Mercifully cheaper than back home.

Leaving Frankfurt, I settled in for the long haul to Paris — a journey made bearable by what I like to think of as seat-side theatre. You don’t need a book when the carriage offers an entire cast of characters.

---

The People-Watching Game

Across from me sat a middle-aged German woman, travelling with a small group who spoke in that soft-yet-stern tone peculiar to those born under heavy Teutonic skies. What fascinated me wasn’t what she said — I understood almost none of it — but her face.

Her neck was so broad that it was difficult to tell where her chin stopped and her face began. Even more captivating: at some point in her life, she had taken the time to painstakingly pluck every individual eyebrow hair… and then drawn them back on with all the elegance of a geometry set. Thin, arched, deliberate — like twin commas hovering above blank expression.

---

🎒 Enter the English

Around 25 people boarded with me in Frankfurt — all of them in hiking boots and ridiculous matching yellow hats, the kind children wear on school trips to make them easier to count.

They shuffled along the corridor, chirping their beige little sentences at each other.

“What time does the train leave, Roger?”

“Isn’t this a beautiful station?”

Ah yes, I thought — only the English could look that daft abroad. And sure enough, I picked up the accent as they passed.

Still, they were right about the station. Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof is nothing if not beautiful — all steel, glass, and sweeping arches. A far cry from the grime of Rhyl or the existential despair of Crewe.

---

Roland’s Germany

Earlier in the day, Roland (my German acquaintance with something of a vendetta against his homeland) had said to me with venom:

“Welcome to Germany. Look at all the nice people in their nice cars. Look how everything has to be in order. Not a thing out of place.”

To him, Germany’s obsession with order was suffocating.

To me, coming from the grey sludge of British public spaces — broken ticket machines, gum-stained pavements, bins overflowing with chip wrappers — it was reassuring.

You begin to notice just how filthy some parts of Britain are only after you leave them.

---

🎫 The Journey

There’s something therapeutic about a long train ride across Europe. The world rolls past your window like a slow film. Forests become suburbs, suburbs fade into farmland. People board. People leave.

And all the while, you're sitting there — between languages, between countries, between lives — pretending not to stare at the woman with the marker-pen eyebrows while quietly judging people in yellow hats.

---

Next stop: Paris.

Let’s hope the eyebrows stay behind in Germany.

Day 77: Ancona - Innsbruck - Bad Kissengen

 

After crawling through customs at the port of Ancona, I found myself once again at a crossroads — quite literally. With no onward ticket, no plan other than to head to Paris, and no real idea which direction to walk, my first task was to find north. The hope, as always, was to hitch a lift. I gave it a long hour by the roadside, standing in the Italian dust watching indifferent Fiats and overloaded lorries fly past. Just as I was ready to admit defeat and trudge back to the station in search of a train, fate intervened.

A VW campervan pulled up beside me. Inside were Roland and his girlfriend, Jutla — total strangers — who saw me stranded and took pity. Not just a short ride up the road, but all the way to Bad Kissengen in North Bavaria.

I climbed in, grateful and slightly dazed, and off we went — up the spine of Italy, across the Alps, and into Germany.

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☁️ The Road North: Ravioli, Radios and the Return of Cold Air

We lunched on ravioli, shared stories, and cruised to a soundtrack of decent music. As the day wore on, we approached the Italian–Austrian border, stopping briefly to change money — where, for the first time in nearly three months, I felt the cold.

After a Greek summer of sweat, sun, and dust, that crisp alpine air was almost a shock. We passed through Brenner Pass, the mountains folding up around us, and caught sight of the massive Europabrücke (Europe Bridge) just before Innsbruck — an epic, sky-slicing piece of engineering, stretched above valleys and treetops. Roland pointed out a castle nestled at the foot of the mountains: once the only access through the Alps during winter, before motorways and flyovers came along.

---

🍺 A Bavarian Detour and a Pub Full of Cowboys

By 9 pm we reached a junction, and Roland turned to me and asked, “Left or right?” I shrugged and said left, and off we went — a spontaneous detour to Nusdorf, deep in southern Bavaria.

We parked up and headed into a local pub. It was packed with loud, beer-throated Bavarians — and when we walked in, it was like a Western: everyone stopped talking and stared at us. Roland leaned over and muttered, "That’s just how Bavarians are..."

The place was brilliant. Proper food, deep wooden booths, and best of all — real beer. Not the bottled Amstel I’d been drinking in Kythera for the past three months, but deep, earthy Bavarian lager. The kind that tastes like someone actually cares about it.

“More beer?” Roland asked after our first pint, and it didn’t take much convincing. Four pints later, I fell asleep in the back of the van, full, warm, and happily worn out.

---

🌧️ Nuremberg, Rain & a Midnight Rescue

We made a brief stop in Nuremberg, then continued north as night fell and the rain came down. Sometime in the early hours, Roland and Jutla gently woke me. We’d reached Bad Kissingen, a spa town in northern Bavaria. They didn’t want to leave me on the side of a motorway in the cold and dark, so they put me up at their flat, insisting I sleep properly.

We arrived at 4:30 in the morning, the kind of hour where streets are empty and the world feels paused. I crawled onto their comfy couch, grateful beyond words.

---

🧭 From Coastline to Castles

In a single day and night, I’d gone from Mediterranean coastline to alpine valleys, from staring hopelessly at a road in Ancona to sipping Bavarian beer in a pub where the walls practically smelled of history.

It’s the kind of journey you can’t plan — the kind that only happens when you’re travelling light, saying yes, and following strangers into the next story.

---

📍 Route:

Italy: Ancona → Bologna → Brenner Pass

Austria: Innsbruck

Germany: Nusdorf → Nuremberg → Bad Kissingen

Day 74: Leaving Kythera

 

The wind howled across Kythera this morning, the kind of gale that shakes shutters and whips the sea into a frenzy. For a while I thought it was fate’s way of keeping me anchored to the island, perhaps for another week. The ferries rarely challenge such weather, and with the island battered from all sides it felt like the Aegean itself wanted me to stay.

I hitched first to Potamos and then on to Agia Pelagia, expecting to find the port in lockdown, no boats daring to brave the waves. But at the Martha booking office the young woman behind the desk reassured me with a smile—it wouldn’t be Pelagia today but the more sheltered harbour at Kapsali. A ferry would leave at 5:30 p.m. Hope restored, I had a few hours to gather my scattered belongings and say my farewells.

Up at the Vouno I collected my pack, said goodbye to Cheryl, and left a note for Wayne before taking the winding road back down to Pelagia. I lingered there over lunch with an Australian teacher, though her conversation never strayed far from smoking joints and late nights. The sort of girl, I thought, you’d fall into bed with at a party and slip away from before morning.

The road carried me onward. Two Aussies gave me a lift as far as Aroniadika, then a Greek driver took me further—his car enlivened by an unlikely passenger: a London rasta with a Jamaican lilt and his Oxford-based girlfriend. Strange combinations, chance encounters; it seemed fitting as my Kytherian chapter closed.

At 6:15 p.m. the ferry pulled away from Kapsali. I stood on deck as the whitewashed villages and craggy hills slipped into the distance, swallowed by the dusk. Did I regret leaving? I wasn’t sure. Three months of steady work, food, and a bed had given me comfort and routine—but comfort can quickly turn to confinement. Out there lay uncertainty, hunger, nights without shelter… and freedom.

By the time we docked at Neapoli I had company again: the rasta, whom I dubbed “Peter Tosh,” and Marie, his girlfriend. They’d just been searched by the police and assumed it was racial harassment. But minutes later I was pulled aside too—their real quarry, it seemed, was a German causing trouble somewhere in town.

The night ended not with triumph but with fatigue. Hitching toward Sparti was hopeless; no cars stopped. I bought some bread and cheese and made do with a corner of an unfinished hotel as my bed. The stone was cold, the air damp, but I had crossed the water.

800 drachmas lighter, but one island heavier in memories, I had left Kythera.