The Diaries

Fire The Scriptwriter

Month: May 2021

London: The Last Two Weeks, day 79

May 9, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Day 79

Sunday May 9

A wonderful late Sunday morning on Hampstead Heath and for the first time I actually stop and watch a cricket match as Maja’s transfixed by this mad looking game played by men all in white. We’ve just bought ice creams and it seems just too perfect to be able to enjoy them in the sun while taking in this perfect scene of Sundayness. The ground is just off the main walking path a little beyond our entrance to the heath. It’s also behind a line of trees so this enormous playing area is almost concealed from the main thoroughfare. We find a free spot on the grass next to the boundary and settle down for an hour or two in the sun as gentle battle commences in front of us. As for the rules, rather than attempt to explain the intricacies of cricket, the fact that this game could go on for a whole day, and the fact that the highest level of the game can last for five days, I just answer questions as they come up from the action in front of us. How do they score? The two men in the middle run from that end to the other end, and back again if they can, and again if they really think they can. Why aren’t they running now? Because he hit the ball all the way to the edge of the field so that automatically gives them a score of four. And so on. A truly wonderfully lazy activity for a Sunday. On walks around when I’ve seen games happening, I have sometimes stopped and watched from the path for a little while. But this is the first time I’ve ever come in and really taken in a game. We stay for an hour and a half maybe until Maja’s decided she’s seen this thing now and we should carry on with our walk.

Back home and we resume our attempt to find a new one. In another country. And in the country. We’re thinking about budget and the fact that we really do need a house, not an apartment but a house. There’s no way our budget would allow for one in a city centre and most of the ones we’re seeing aren’t even near any towns. That’s fine. We’re thinking small, out of the way place. Maybe with at least one or two local shops so that we don’t have to drive everytime we need a pint of milk. You get the idea. We’re not expecting to be anywhere near anything that might resemble even a small town, but something with a near enough convenience store would be just fine.

We’ve found a place we really like in Mayo on the northern west coast. It’s a big three bedroom place, but because of its isolated location is well within budget. Although we’ve not had much luck with progress, we really can’t believe the size of the places we’re seeing for what we’re looking to pay. I call this house, have a chat with the landlady, and she says, ‘Yes, we can hold it for you.’ Wow. Great. I load up for the next part of the discussion/negotiation then she adds, ‘But if someone comes in the meantime we may have to let them have it.’ What? That’s not holding it. What if we offer to pay right now? ‘Why would you want to do that?’ she asks. What do you care? I think. You’re being offered money right now to give us the place. Six months up front. If anything, this only makes her more suspicious. ‘And you’re in London now?’ Yes. ‘And you want to take it and pay for it now?’ Yes. ‘And what would you be doing that for? Sure you’d have to see the place first.’ Oh here we go again. It’s like she’s trying to persuade us not to give her any money. Surely that’s our decision. I patiently explain that this would mean that we had a place to go to, so we could leave whenever we were ready and just move in comfortably. ‘But in the meantime you’d be paying rent for a place you weren’t living in?’ Yes. ‘What would you be doing that for now?’ Oh, I can’t get through here. ‘We’d have to meet you first, you know,’ she says. Oh dear. This isn’t going anywhere. ‘But we’re in England and are trying to secure a place in Ireland so that we can move there.’ ‘Well maybe you could come and see it before you decide,’ she says. ‘There are a lot of people interested. It isn’t only you.’ This just isn’t working. She then says she’s looking after it for her daughter. So negotiations are going on at a remove here. Never a good way to go. I feel we’re in the middle of a circular conversation so I thank her for her time, say that we may be in touch again and we hang up. 

We realise this just isn’t happening. We’re just going to have to go. People want to do the whole face to face thing rather than do a let on the phone. Fair enough. I totally get that. So that’s what we decide to do. Drive there and just turn up. Get ourselves in situ. I call the lady back, say that OK, we’ll come and try to meet, and she agrees that if we get there and meet her, we might be able to do something. 

But given her total refusal to commit, we accept there’s a possibility the house may no longer be available when we arrive. If that’s the case, we decide we’ll simply make a plan and get something else. What that plan could be we have no idea, but surely we’ll be able to come up with something.

So this is it. We’re going to start tomorrow by beginning the search for a car. Once we have that, it’s just a case of loading it up and leaving. Next stop, our possible house in Ireland. Mayo? 

Casting its shadow over all this is Maja’s upcoming but yet to be booked surgery. We’ve been toying with the idea of her going to Sweden for it, then coming back here, then we go to Ireland. We really don’t like the sound of that, so we come up with this wonderful plan. She books the surgery for something like in three or four weeks. In that time, we move to Ireland, get settled, then we both go to Sweden for Maja’s surgery in the knowledge that we have the place in Ireland to come back to. If, if if, we can get a car tomorrow, we think we can make the move this Tuesday.

With that, we go out to The Camden Head in Islington where we hang out with Alex, the chef and producer/songwriter I’ve played bass with, and his friend, Raul. We’re outside in the beer garden and we also chat with the bar staff as they pass by when they get a moment or two. Prominent among them Tom and Molly. I’ve known Tom years, mainly from Kristoff’s bar The White Hart, but also from The Marquis. And Molly we met at that part here a few weeks ago. When they’re finished, they come and join us and we then tell everyone our wonderful, foolproof plan. We’re going to move to Ireland. On Tuesday. In a car we don’t have to a house we don’t have on a ferry we haven’t booked. They all fall about in hysterics and the sheer audacity and adventure of it. Brilliant, they agree. Right? What could possibly go wrong?

London: The Last Two Weeks, days 80 and 81

May 10, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Day 80

Monday May 10

I’m up at 6am today. No idea why, just felt like it. So there I am at the kitchen table looking at what cars are on the market. Cris, who leaves for work early every morning, comes down and is surprised to see me already there as he prepares to have breakfast. ‘What are you doing up this early?’ he asks. ‘Looking at what cars we could buy,’ I reply. ‘You want to buy a car?’ He sounds shocked although I remind him, ‘Yeah, we’re hoping to move to Ireland tomorrow.’ He kind of knew this, but is a bit shocked to hear it put in so many words. ‘I’ve been thinking of selling my car,’ he says. Now it’s my turn to be shocked. ‘Would you be interested?’ Hell yes. I know his car very well and me and Maja were both in it when the three of us drove in it for that trip to Crystal Palace a few weeks ago. And I know it very well. I’ve been on many drives with Cris for many reasons. It’s huge. A Mazda Sport 5. A seven seater in which all the back seats can be laid totally flat. Essentially a minivan and way bigger than anything we were thinking of. I’m almost scared to ask how much and can’t believe it when he tells me. Well within budget. Ridiculously within budget. Oh wow. I’ll have to check with Maja of course, but yes. Just yes. This is the car we decided we couldn’t ask to use to move all our stuff out of Sarah’s to here. Now we could be looking at owning it and then using it to move everything we have from here to Ireland. In a bit of a state of disbelief, I go outside just to have a look at it again from a totally different perspective. This could be ours. Really ours. While I’m out there I see Luca who’s also having an early start preparing his restaurant for the day. He comes and says hello and we have a chat about the car and our imminent move to Ireland. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘So there’s a room coming up in your house?’ Yep. One of the small upstairs ones. Luca knows the house. He’s taken rooms in it before for workers of his restaurant. He says he’s now looking for a room again for a returning worker. A guy called Mike who we know well in the house. He lived with us before, was a great housemate and friend, and is apparently now thinking of coming back to work in the restaurant again. And just as Luca is thinking where he could house him, along comes a room in the very same house. This would work out very well for us; the move has come a bit sudden so we’re not leaving with the requisite month’s notice, meaning the rent really should be paid for this coming month even though we won’t be there, and there is every intention of honouring this. But if we are able to replace ourselves in the room almost immediately, this empty expense disappears. So it’s not even 7am yet and it looks like I’ve solved two of our big issues – a car big enough to move in and very within budget, and a new tenant to take over from us and save the next month’s rent from having to be paid.

I go back inside and ask Cris if I can borrow the car key for a few moments. No problem. With that, I go upstairs and into the room where Maja is sleeping. I gently wake her up and wave the key and fob in her face. She shakes the blurriness from her eyes and what is obviously a car key comes into focus. ‘What the hell is that?’ she asks. ‘That’s not a car key?’ ‘Yep, but not any car key. This is Cris’ car key. He’s said we can have it for a ridiculous price.’ Maja shoots up in disbelief and takes the key in her hand, regarding it in wonder like a precious, fragile treasure. She looks up at me again in something like shock. ‘And there’s more,’ I say. ‘Looks like we’ve got the room sorted as well.’

She says I should go downstairs right now and confirm the sale of the car with Cris. With that I say, ‘We’ve started the move haven’t we?’ 

‘Yes.’

While I was up very early, Maja also has to be up early enough herself for a phone call to check on a date for wrist surgery. This gets booked for June 3, three weeks and three days from today. This means that we now have to be in Sweden a few days before that, so three weeks from today. Which means we definitely have to have a house in Ireland sorted by then and already be moved there so that we can book a return flight to Sweden from Ireland. Oh this would normally be a huge ask, and it really is a huge ask, but mentally, and in real terms, we are already very much on it.

There’s a formality for the car before it can be sold, which is that Cris has to take it for an MOT. He says he can organise this for tomorrow, adding, ‘My worst fear is that I sell you this car without checking and it breaks down on you on the motorway. No way. No way. My reputation is to do things in the right way and of course I want to do that for you.’ This all means that we probably won’t be able to leave until Wednesday now, but yes, he’s obviously right. So now we almost have a car, which means we can make a solid(ish) plan to leave. Just to remind you, it is now Monday. Have I mentioned we still don’t have a house to move to?

Day 81

Tuesday May 11

Mark:

Insurance. Damn. I’d forgotten about insurance for the car. With things developing until close of office hours yesterday, this morning is the first chance we get to have a look at this. Maja begins the process and all of a sudden it looks like being a real thing and it starts to look unrealistic to think we could be leaving tomorrow. 

The insurance becomes a bit of a complicated, involved thing and we’re starting to think we might have to leave the car in Northern Ireland and rely on rentals for the Republic, but Maja discovers a Green Card system that we could apply for which would at least get us on the ground so to speak. Calling around and being recommended from one company to another and researching options becomes a full time project. 

While Maja is on this, I go into total denial of all possibilities of failure or setback and get on with the business of packing. I mean, there’s no point being ready to go and then looking around at all the stuff we have to organise. Might as well get as much in hand as we can. It’s a bit of a fraught day as Maja goes through the contortions of trying to secure insurance and Cris is having the car checked out. Somehow, semi miraculously really, by 5pm, the MOT and insurance stars have aligned and we have a car ready to go and legal for Maja to drive in Ireland. We’re not covered for the UK in terms of any pickup or roadside assistance, but we’ll have it here for just one day for the drive to Liverpool for the ferry to Ireland, so what’s the point?

With all that sorted, we’re truly on it now as Maja goes ahead and books the ferry from Liverpool to Belfast for 10pm tomorrow. She says she’s going to book a cabin so that we’ll at least be able to have a shower on the boat. Afterall, once we’re into unknown territory in Ireland there’s no telling when we’ll be able to have a shower again. Or a comfortable bed. We really are throwing ourselves out into the world here.

Now I have to get on with trying to make sure that doesn’t go as wild and feral as it could. I call the people with the house in Mayo to tell them we’ll be there Thursday morning. So with that commitment to being there, could they please hold it for us now? I speak to the husband/ owner’s father this time who tells me it’s gone. Balls. So now we really are going to Ireland with nowhere to live. We think about getting a tent and just camping where we can, and looking at houses that way. We discuss not getting a house at all this side of Sweden and just camping until then, and then resuming the search when we get back. We really don’t know. This is starting to look like a real adventure with so much unknown as we prepare to step into it. As we’re starting to organise the car for ourselves – cleaning it and such as Cris used it for work in his job in construction – Maja insists I call the house again, this time trying to speak to the lady who seems to know a bit more. She suspects the husband just told me it was gone out of assumption. OK. She was right. I speak to the lady again who says it is still available but that a lot of people are seeing it, but yeah, we can see if we can get there on Thursday and throw our hats in. So much for holding it. This really is starting to feel like a lottery. 

We have a kind airy dreamy delusional not-really-thought-it-through thought of arriving in Ireland on Thursday and then doing nothing but sleeping for two days. But the more likely reality is we’ll arrive in Thursday morning, rush to see the house sometime early afternoon, then have to wait a few days to see if we have it, in the meantime sleeping somewhere we have no idea of in a tent we might just be able to buy on the way. Or a B&B somewhere. Oh. Did I mention, Ireland’s still in Covid induced semi lockdown mode so no hope of getting a B&B there. Probably a tent somewhere then. Or, and we’re quite happy with this idea, if the initial house attempt isn’t successful, we could drive back to Northern Ireland, book into some kind of cheap hotel there and use that as a base from which to go into Ireland during the days to look at places that we’ve secured a viewing for. Oh, there’s seat of the pants, and there’s…this. As you can see, we’re making this all up as we go and we really have no idea. Absolutely none at all. And the clock’s ticking. Our ferry to nowhere leaves in less than 24 hours.

London: The Last Two Weeks, day 82

May 12, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Day 82

Wednesday May 12

Mark:

Right. Before we get onto moving day, incase you’re coming to this late, or maybe it was so long ago we were writing about this that you’ve forgotten. We’re moving to Ireland because it really is the only place in the world me and Maja can legally live together. Her visa for the UK is only valid for six months – doesn’t have to be six months all in one go, but it is valid for only six months. Bottom line, she can’t legally settle there. Thanks to Brexit. I can’t go and settle anywhere else in Europe either. Thanks to Brexit. We examined other countries around the world and discovered a lot of barriers everywhere we looked, this time thanks to Covid. Yes, this is May 2021 and Covid restrictions are still in place in varying degrees all over the world. But travel and relocating is still OK between the UK and the Republic of Ireland and citizens of both are allowed to live in each others’ countries. And of course, citizens of Europe are allowed to live in the Republic of Ireland. Because it’s Europe. So Maja can live there. So can I. Problem solved. As long as we can get ourselves around all the other problems of getting there from London. Including finding a house, which we still haven’t managed to do. 

6:45am: We wake and see we have an email from an agent we’ve contacted who is up for the six month rent up front thing, but we really don’t like the look of the house he’s proposing for us. Maja also tells me now that, on a whim, she sent an email to a house she saw and is only mentioning to me now. No problem. She shows me the pictures and it really doesn’t look good. She even apologises to me for having made the contact for such a dingy looking place. Again, no problem. We dismiss it and think no more of it until I decide to check out the location. It’s bang in the middle of the country. Maybe we should just remain open on this. Later we get an email from a guy called Adrian replying to Maja’s email. He seems quite downbeat and says the location isn’t good at all for two musicians thinking of moving to Ireland from London. He suggests we try somewhere like Galway instead. Well, thanks for the heads up. We’re really not thinking that hard about this place anyway. But there is still that thing that it’s bang in the middle of the country.

7am: Maja and Cris have completed the paperwork. We now have a car and it is enormous.

While they’re doing that, I’m checking out new houses that have popped up. I email them now and will follow them up later. 

8am: Big news as we receive our Green Card authorisation by email. We are now insured to drive in Ireland.

9am: That paperwork for the car needs printing, as well as the Green Card. I go over to the restaurant to ask Luca if I can use his office to print it. No problem he says. We get on that straight away. 

9.30am: I’m walking across the carpark back to our house, I see a traffic warden three cars away from the car that is now our responsibility. And it’s not supposed to be parked in here. Cris would kind of chance his arm with it, but more often than not park it somewhere else. Today, it is not at that somewhere else. 

I run into the house and into our room. After completing the paperwork, Maja went back to bed and is now fast asleep. I wake her up without hesitation. ‘You need to get up right now,’ I say. ‘A traffic warden is about to hit the car. We rush out, Maja wearing slippers because they were faster to put on than shoes. The traffic warden is inspecting the car next to ours as we jump in and drive off. Maja’s first drive of the car and it’s a getaway drive. 

Me: ‘Are we ever going to have something happen that isn’t dramatic?’ 

Maja: ‘No.’

But the getaway isn’t at all smooth. She’s never driven a car this big before, and when she searches for the biting point in first gear, the revs suddenly go mad and the car makes a huge noise. But she gathers herself, finds the right balance and we ease out of the parking spot and away from the inquisitive warden. Out in the small streets and we just can’t believe the sheer dimensions of this thing. It seems to be far too big for the roads we’re driving on right now. But we get it a few streets away from the house and then stop and take in exactly what we have here. We can sleep in it, and we do exactly that for a 15 or so minute nap. Damn. We have our tent now as well, although it will have all our stuff in it when we get to Ireland so it might not be an immediate accommodation fix.

11am: We get back and Maja does some more cleaning on the car while I get onto house calls. I won’t detail them. It doesn’t go well.

3pm: We’ve finished packing and the car is loaded to the roof. Damn, we had no idea that we really needed something this big. We’ve said our goodbyes and we’re on the road and away. The move is officially on. We still have no final destination. All through the small, slow, winding streets of north London, Maja is learning the car and having trouble with the clutch. She assumes this is just because it’s such a big car and so has a different make-up to the smaller cars she’s used to.

5:30pm: On the motorway and we suddenly feel something bang under the car. We catch a glimpse of whatever it is as it bounces away and we think it’s a shoe.

6pm: We’re following a diversion away from the motorway for a little while which means slowing down and picking up speed at a few junctions and roundabouts. Which means Maja has to use the difficult clutch quite a lot. At a particularly tricky roundabout the rev counter suddenly goes crazy, the engine roars, and the car is filled with a horrible burning smell. Soon after this it starts to lose power. We get back on the motorway and Maja is able to keep it going. Just. I can tell she’s using all the concentration of a racing driver and is in hyper focus mode. While she’s doing that I’m my phone and trying to find mechanics up the road that we could possibly go to. But it’s late. The only one I manage to call and speak to says they’re closing soon so we won’t make it in time from where we are. He says all others will be saying the same thing. Thankyou very much. We’re on our own.

6.50pm: Maja declares that we’re going to try to make a run all the way to the ferry which, if we can keep this speed up, is just under two hours away. With that she gives me a job to do. Keep us on motorways. No junctions, no roundabouts, nothing that could remotely necessitate a stop or even a slow down. As long as she can keep us moving with minimal recourse to the clutch we might just be able to put in some real miles. She doesn’t care how far I have to detour us if that’s what it takes. Just keep us on uninterrupted fast roads. We might just make it to the ferry if we do that. Get this thing on the other side of the water and have it looked at then. The ferry leaves at 10pm and we have to be there for 9. By now I’m watching every mile of the GPS tick off and am watching every minute of the clock tick by. After an hour or so of this, Maja asks, ‘Are you bored?’ ‘I wish I was,’ I reply, and in the middle of this madly dramatic second by second drive we fall into hysterical laughter. I don’t think I’ve ever been less bored by watching miles or minutes go by one at a time. I’m in hyper focus mode too, and am thinking that if we can just keep on, one at a time, we can get there. Looking at Maja now, I realise I really have never seen anyone operating at this level of focus. We have a horrible moment when we have to stop at a toll booth and the car absolutely crawls away, accelerating at a tortuously slow rate. Enough to have cars behind us beeping in frustration. Oh, they have no idea. And their horns do nothing to improve the dark mood in our little world right now. We get to some kind of speed, but it’s clear things are very very weak. As we head round a downhill motorway bend we pick up some encouraging speed, but it’s an illusion. If anything, it feels more like freewheeling. 

8.30pm: We’re 10 minutes away from the ferry. A little more than 10 miles away and we’re starting to believe we might just be able to make it. But then the car starts to slow down. No matter how much Maja pumps on the accelerator, nothing happens. We’re going slower and slower. Soon the decrease starts to increase. Maja reluctantly pulls onto the hard shoulder. Down down goes the speed, as though the brake is being applied. Then we stop. Maja looks at me in resignation, then a little hope as she charges the car again, gets some revs going and we start to pull away. But it’s only a tease. We get a hundred yards or so, never getting above walking pace, and then that’s it. The car, which passed an MOT yesterday, really has gone. This is as far as we’re going to get. It’s dark, it’s raining. We’re on a lonely road. We’re slowly accepting we’re not getting any ferry tonight but that’s not even our biggest problem right now. We have no breakdown cover. We’re totally alone, abandoned on the side of a road somewhere in the north west of England.

Maja looks at me with empty eyes. She’s stunned, mentally exhausted, and almost emotionally broken. And lost. Both geographically and for any idea of what to do next. We’ve been together less than three months and have already been through quite a few crises. But this feels like by far the biggest. I saw an emergency phone a little way back and I’m going to walk to it and see what happens. We normally have pens and notebooks to hand all the time but we’ve somehow managed to neglect that on this drive. All I can find is a pencil and a single piece of paper and frankly, I feel lucky to have found that. And unfortunately, the only thing the hopeful burst of walking pace driving has achieved is to take us further away from the roadside phone. Worse news comes as I open the door and a blast of cold rain is blown in on a harsh, icy wind, instantly destroying what has been a lovely warm, if quite stressful, place until now. Moving day could not be further from fun right now. I jump out into the unforgiving weather and begin the dark, lonely walk back down the wrong direction on the motorway to the phone, wondering what’s going to happen when I pick up and if I’ll actually be able to talk to someone. I am, but it’s not an encouraging conversation. The lady on the other end is sympathetic, but all she can do, she says, is give the numbers of some breakdown companies for me to call round myself. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. Reluctantly, I retrieve the paper and pencil from my pocket and do my best to write down the names and numbers she gives me. But the paper is slowly going soggy while also blowing about carelessly as I try to write on it. As soon as I hang up, I get to work calling the numbers as I walk back to the car, buffeted all the way by wind and rain. And it’s a slightly stumbly walk as well because this patch of ground I’m on has not been cultivated for strolling on and it resembles some craggy, alien landscape complete with deep grooves and gashes you could break an ankle in. I go back and forth between a few emergency companies, comparing prices and offers. This process of finding and comparing service providers can be challenging and frustrating enough when sat at a warm kitchen table with a laptop, pen and notebook and with a lovely hot cup of tea steaming away next to you. I can tell you now that it’s a little more challenging and frustrating right now. And I’m nowhere near a kettle. Oh damn. That reminds me. I am writing this from a warm kitchen table and I am very much near a kettle. My mind is right back at that horrible roadside scene but I can’t take my current cuppa tea making facilities for granted. Gonna go get that started now before I plunge back into this little bunch of misery.

Halfway through my calls and my phone rings. It’s a guy called Craig and he introduces himself as being from the RAC. I’d quite liked their offer compared to the others although it is still quite expensive. What makes them the most attractive, apart from the name recognition, is that they offer the furthest towing distance from the scene. I have no idea where we have to get to, so the biggest margin for error we can have, surely the better. Craig on the phone also represents a bird in the hand as opposed to the other companies yet in the bush. I accept his call and offer for help. I also had the awareness to write down the serial number of the standing roadside phone I used, so Craig now knows exactly where we are. Already I’m feeling reassured. I think I’ll say now that I’ve already refused another company, that I won’t name, not least because I can’t remember who they were. This is because the guy I spoke to on the phone sounded so unprofessional, unprepared and spoke with zero level of assurance. He was only a phone operator and front person for the company, but I thought that if that was the first impression they were happy to give, I could do without discovering what any of the other impressions could be. Our predicament is not a place in which to be nice or polite to people you think could make it worse. This is not the time to give someone a chance or benefit of the doubt. As soon as the guy started spluttering and hesitating I hung up. But now I have Craig, who sounds decisive, tough and eager to get on with the job. Before he hangs up, he tells me that we are not to stay with the car. We have to leave it and walk back to the barrier behind the hard shoulder. Will do. I feel as safe and confident in his hands as it’s possible to feel in a situation such as this. Totally independently, I take the decision to agree that all payments will be met and conditions agreed to. By the time I return to Maja in the car, I’m delighted to tell her we have the beginning of a solution, but not so delighted to tell her we have to leave the warmth of the car.

This means walking back over that pitted moonscape which Maja, with her newly healed ankle, is not happy about at all. Once we’ve reached the relative safety of the barrier, all we can do is wait in the dark, cold rain. Somewhere in this we manage to have a really big few laughs but I can’t remember at all what we talked about to make them happen. But even as we’re going through this horribleness I think it’s pretty cool we can have a laugh about it. But then, getting serious as our spirits start to dip, I say, ‘You just never know. Something might just happen out of this that wouldn’t have happened without it.’ 

While we’re waiting, we make the call to the ferry company to tell them what’s happened and to book ourselves on the ferry for tomorrow night. The ferry company happily transfers us onto tomorrow’s crossing with just a small admin charge, but unfortunately we no longer have a cabin. Not ideal, but given the circumstances, at least we’re starting to get the dots joined again. However, as we’re waiting here, one thing dawns on us. We told the guys in Mayo we’d be there tomorrow. Now we won’t be and we know they’re showing it to other people. Oh well, that house has really gone now.

The plan, as much as we can make it now, is to see if Craig can fix the car here, but we know he probably won’t. We’ve missed the ferry anyway so that part is irrelevant. At best we’re going to hope we can get to a garage and they can fix it tomorrow. In the meantime, we’ll be booking ourselves into a hotel somewhere in Liverpool tonight. 

9.20pm: Craig arrives. As I suspected by dealing with him on the phone he’s professional, friendly and quite brilliant really. He can’t tow the car as it’s too heavily loaded, so he winches it onto the back of his truck. Only then does he summon us to come and join him in the front cab. He confirms the callout includes a lift within a 50 mile radius. He’s already called a garage and says we’re going to drive there, leave the car there, then he’s going to drive us to whatever hotel we’re able to book ourselves into.

9.30pm: While Craig is sorting out the car at the side of the road and we know we’re rescued, I call Cris and tell him what’s happened. He point blank refuses to believe this isn’t a wind up, even when I send him a picture of Craig with the car against the flashing blue lights. It’s only our increasingly desperate tone that finally convinces him, at which point he has something of an emotional breakdown and can’t say sorry enough. He really thought the car had been checked enough to be totally solid but something has clearly gone wrong. 

10.20pm: Craig is done and he gestures us to come and join him in the cab. Finally. We’re ready to leave. Our feet are almost numb. We’ve been standing here in the cold, wind and rain for almost two hours. He tells us the clutch has burnt out and that only a garage job will do.

10.30pm: A short drive during which he asks about our story and soon can’t believe what he’s hearing, and we’re at the garage where Craig gets out and prepares to leave the car to be picked up in the morning. While he’s doing that we call hotels. The first one is full. Oh dear. Not good. The second asks why we want a hotel because we’re still in Covid times and you can’t just go and book a hotel apparently. It has to be some kind of emergency. I tell them what’s happened as briefly as I can and they relent. Yes of course we can have a room for the night. Oh wow. Now I call Paul who lives in Warrington, just a short drive from Liverpool. I tell him our story to stunned silence and then see if he fancies coming to meet us somewhere tomorrow, and in doing so, meet Maja properly for the first time. He’s well up for that, although he does sound a note of caution that we shouldn’t expect the car to be fixed tomorrow. Not really what I want to hear because we kind of need it tomorrow, but he does have a hell of a lot more experience of cars and repairs and garages than I do. I decide to engage the denial dial and concentrate on the real outcome which is that bizarrely, we now have plans in Liverpool for tomorrow. By the time Craig comes back we’re able to tell him we have destination. Before setting off to drive us there he gives us the number of the garage he’s just dropped the car off at and tells us to call the mechanic at 8:30 in the morning. Then it’s off to the hotel where we gratefully check in. Despite the uncertainty still ahead of us, we’re so so relieved to be in a warm safe place with clean dry sheets and a shower. Will the car even be fixed tomorrow? We have no idea. We have no idea about anything. But somehow, feeling calm and even joyful – how?- we settle in for the most wonderful night’s sleep.

London: The Last Two Weeks, day 83

May 13, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Day 83

Thursday May 13

On our first 13th of the month together, which was March, we almost killed a cat. On the 13th of the next month broke her ankle, throwing all our plans into chaos. I wonder what will happen on this one. Surely we’re due a good one, if for no other reason than to balance out yesterday.

We’re up at 8am and at 8:30, just like Craig said, we call the mechanic. He goes against all Paul’s pessimism and promises they will have the car ready today. We’ll see, but right now I’m happy to take his word for it. We chill around for a bit, try to call a few house prospects but get either no answer or no luck, then at 12 we have to check out. In the meantime I call Paul and he says he’ll be here sometime around 4pm.

So at 12, all packed, we leave the hotel and find ourselves out on the street. We’re in a pleasant enough seaside pedestrian area called New Brighton but today is not a day for daytrips in the sun. It’s raining and a little bit chilly. And we’re out in this and homeless. And Covid restrictions are still in place, meaning we can’t even go inside anywhere to warm up. Not a library, not a cafe, not even a bar. Bars are open, but for outside table service only. We do the only thing one can do in such a situation. We go to the seaside promenade shops and get donuts. The kind that are made right there as you order them. They really are quite wonderful and we go and find a bench on a covered bandstand and settle down with our hot sugary paper bag.

This done and we call Cris. Last night, once he’d decided to believe us, and once he’d got over the shock, he offered to pay for the repair of the clutch. We don’t mention the cost of a call-out, or the cost of the hotel. It’s a well meaning, genuine gesture and I know he’s horrified and thought he’d done everything he could to prevent anything bad happening. A clutch repair is no small financial thing so yes, we’ll be grateful to accept a reimbursement for that alone.

Well, we’re on the seaside, so once the donuts are done, we might as well go for a seaside walk. There is an interesting looking fort type building and we think we might go and have a look at that, but closed. Of course it is. So we take a casual walk along the seaside edge and pretend it’s not raining. During this we try to call a few more house calls. Nope. Nothing.

We reach the end of the promenade and we’ve come to one of those newly built shopping arcade areas. The ones with a cinema and bowling and stuff. My phone rings. It’s a guy called Adrian calling from the house Maja emailed late Tuesday night and which she apologised for doing so Wednesday morning. He says he’s had a few viewings but he likes the short story we presented of ourselves on our email to him; all our emails have also included links to our website so people can really see what we’re about. It seems he’s actually gone that extra little bit and bothered to have a look. On the phone now we get into a bit of a chat and I tell him a little of what’s happened and a few encouragingly sympathetic sounds and words come back. I go for it now and say that our ferry leaves at 10 tonight. We’ll be in Northern Ireland around 6 the next morning and can be at his house sometime late morning, however long it takes to drive there. I promise we will absolutely be there. Would he give us a guarantee that the house is ours if we turn up as promised? He mulls this over and I almost break the phone from holding onto it so tight in suspense. Maja can’t hear the other side of the conversation, but she definitely has the gist of it. She’s also looking at me in the highest of anticipations. The silence seems to go on forever and I don’t want to break it and break this guy’s thoughts. I just have to wait to see what comes back. His thinking done and he replies. Yes. Yes I can do that. See you at 12 more or less. Oh thankyou. Thankyou very very much. I hang up and me and Maja hug tightly but not yet in celebration. But finally finally, we do have a destination. And hope. Realistic hope. 

Almost as soon as I hang up on that call Paul calls. He couldn’t have timed it more perfectly. He’s ten minutes away so it’s off to the pub where we’ll meet. We did have a little check on bars in the area on our walk earlier and so have our location all staked out. We tell him what it is and make our way there. 

The three of us all arrive at pretty much the same time and just manage to get the last table under the awning. Yep, it’s still raining. Him and Maja have a big hello then we sit down and have lunch while Paul hears a little more of how we got here, and the big news of our last phone call just a few minutes ago, not that anyone’s completely relaxing just yet.

While we’re here, we have a look at the map and think about where we want to cross into the Republic from Northern Ireland. There’s no hard border but we still want to avoid any stops from anyone. We just don’t want to flaunt that we’re trying to move there, especially given the fact we don’t have an actual address to give, which we know is one of the requirements when entering a country during these Covid times. We are still homeless. So we don’t want to cross the border at the first opportunity, instead we plot a route across Northern Ireland, planning to plunge south deeper into the country.

Final leg planned and we continue our joyous hang and catchup until we become aware it’s painfully close to 5pm and the garage still hasn’t called. I have been in touch sporadically but with no real news. Then at 4.30 my phone rings and it is the mechanic. Our car is ready. Wow. Guys, we have to leave. Like, right now. We finish our teas and cokes and Paul drives us to the garage where the mechanics lead us to the newly repaired car. As we’re doing this, one of them comes out with the broken clutch that was the cause of all our problems yesterday. ‘How far did you say you got on this?’ he asks. ‘A hundred and fifty miles give or take. About two and a half hours.’ All around us are small gasps of wonder and appreciation. I’m almost surprised they don’t break out in applause for Maja’s feat of determination and concentration. ‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ one of them says. Yes, we had a massive rev count somewhere in the detour that started all this, but they are emphatic in pointing out that this clutch is worn out to oblivion. ‘No way this happened in one incident,’ one of them says. ‘This is clear wear over a long period of time. Basically, you guys had no chance.’ Wow. And now it can even be confirmed that even if we had made it to the ferry, with all the stopping and starting and attendant clutch work in such a situation, the car would have just broken down right there in the queue. We were never going to get on that ferry. So really, just as well it stopped us when it did is the conclusion. 

We get in the car now and Maja has a quick go at driving it and is almost hysterical with joy at how different the clutch feels. ‘It’s like driving a brand new car,’ she declares. ‘Thankyou thankyou thankyou.’ While she’s speaking to the guys and they’re still in wonder at that incredible feat of driving, the payment gets processed and we’re ready to be on our way with one last thankyou. As our two car procession leaves the forecourt, they close and lock the gates behind us, while happily waving to us, their day having ended on such a positive note. Wow. We really did just make it in time. There’s still another few hours till we have to be at the dock, so we stop off for another cup of tea or two at a lovely countryside looking bar with a decent sized garden.

About 7pm we say our goodbyes to Paul and head off to the dock. Once on board, Maja takes charge of finding us a spot for the night and finds a lovely sofa type thing against a wall facing the front. This is as good as it gets, she says. Yep. It’s very comfortable and will definitely do.

On February 26, day seven, we each made a list of the things we would have have to accomplish just in order to be able to be together: ‘As an entire list, it’s impossible. Just impossible,’ I wrote at the time. ‘There’s no other word for it. We are totally deluding ourselves if we think we’re going to get that lot ticked off and somehow sail into the sunset.’

And now, here we are on day 83, Thursday May 13, 2021

It’s still daylight when we find our little area and settle down with something of a spark of hope. That hope, of actually having a house to go to, of having a home to go to, lies with a man we have never met, and with whom we have no written agreement. We are leaping into the wide blue yonder with nothing to land our feet on. But when we get to where we’re going, we believe we’ll find something there. When we do get to that house, and if Adrian does keep his word to us, it will mean that after everything we’ve faced up to, including last night’s actual breakdown, we will have ticked off our impossible lists. With rising feelings of almost overwhelming relief, tinged with a bit of realistic caution, we settle down on our sofa and gaze out of the window at the slowly moving city skyline. As the ship leaves the dock, we are literally sailing into the sunset.

The Ireland Diary, day one to day 52

May 14, 2021 / / 0 Comments

The Ireland Diary

Day one

Friday May 14

Mark:

We kind of have a destination now but we can’t totally bank on the house being kept for us, or anything at all really. With that, Maja is being careful to sleep as much as possible. First, because we do have that drive ahead of us as soon as we get off the ferry, but second because we really have no idea what will happen if we don’t get that house. We have some vague plans, number one on the list at the moment, to drive back to Northern Ireland, find a hotel just inside the border and start a proper on the ground house search from there. Maja does pretty well with getting to sleep, but I don’t. Instead, I go off wandering around the ferry, and then settle down in the flickering darkness of the games arcade and write a whole bunch of lyrics, essentially detailing our story since we left London on Wednesday, up to where we are now, somewhere in the Irish Sea sailing to what, we have no idea.

6:30am and we’re off the ferry and driving into Northern Ireland. First we drive west across the country for a while rather than plunging direct south and the first border from the ferry. We just don’t feel like advertising that we’re attempting to move house into Ireland. As a result, we cross the border at Cavan, going over the tiny motorway bridge over the Woodford River. On our maps system we can see the border approaching. Five hundred metres, four hundred… and we count it down. Then, just like that, in a flash of waterway, we’re across and in Ireland.

It’s just after 10:30am and now we know we’re more or less on schedule to meet Adrian at the house as promised. In high anticipation I call the number. No answer. Oh. OK. Maybe it’s too early. I try again half an hour later. The same. And again when we’re half an hour away. Still no answer. Oh dear. This does not look good. It’s all stopped being fun again and we continue the drive with an increasing feeling of tension.

Just before mid-day we arrive at what we think is the house and park across the road next to a kids’ playpark and take it in. Could this really be the place? On the advert there were no external photos and I did look at a street view and see a detached house on a corner at a crossroads. Could that be the place on offer for the price asked? Didn’t seem right. Now we’re seeing it for real and yes, it’s the same place but I’m still not convinced. But maybe none of this will matter because the phone is still going unanswered. We keep trying for the next hour before reluctantly accepting that the promise wasn’t kept, the house has gone to someone else and this guy just isn’t going to answer to us. That’s it. The worst has happened. We left London with no house to go to, just throwing ourselves to the wind and hoping something would come up on the way. Something kinda did but yeah. That old one. Too good to be true. And here we are. Right in the let down zone.

We were a little mentally prepared for that and this process kicks in now as we begin serious discussions about what to do next. Now we really are thinking about buying that tent and just camping out somewhere while continuing the search. But maybe while looking for a place to do that, we could keep an eye open for any to-let signs. That’s literally what I did in Madrid when I was looking for an apartment one time. Just walked around the city and looking for signs saying se alquile (for rent). As for the tent, this is still lockdown Ireland and the stores are all closed. Or at least non essential places where one would expect to find a tent. We’ll probably end up falling back on the plan to go back to Northern Ireland, checking into a cheap hotel just inside the border and carrying on the search for a house from there, driving into Ireland for viewings until we get somewhere. We’ve arrived and this really is the nightmare scenario. So what do we do as we’re confronted with this face punching reality? After everything we’ve been through to get here. Do we breakdown and cry? Do we have a moment of total despair? Are we in a state of abject resignation? Nope. We realise we’re sitting next to a children’s park. So we decide to go have a play for a few minutes before beginning whatever the next phase of all this is going to be.

We run over and play on the roundabout. Well, it’s more of a bendy stick thing with a base that you spin directly around on. I don’t know what else to call it. We make it go really fast and are screaming in delight, heads thrown right back to the sky. Look at us. Not a care in the world. Just two grown up kids having fun in the park. 

Then the door of the house opens and someone walks out. Towards a car parked right next to the house. I suddenly turn serious and frantic. ‘Stop stop stop. Someone’s come out. but they’re getting in a car.’ No no no. Almost maniacally we jump off the roundabout. Whoever that is, we cannot let them get in that car and drive away. We’re running across the park and calling out. Hello hello. Stop. Over here. Mercifully, the man does stop and turn towards us. Great. At least he’s not going to disappear on us now. Oh this is all getting too much.

Breathlessly we run across the road. ‘Are you Adrian? Are you Adrian? Are you Adrian?’ Talk about making a calm, unruffled first impression. ‘Yes,’ he says calmly. Oh he has no idea. ‘And you must be Mark and Maja.’ Yes Yes. We’ve been calling for hours. ‘Oh,’ he says, almost absent mindedly. What number were you calling. I tell him. I know it cold by now. ‘Sorry about that,’ he says. ‘I left that phone somewhere and have been on a different number today.’ Oh wow oh wow oh wow. For that we almost just bounced ourselves off into the Irish countryside without a clue where to go next. ‘But you’re here now,’ he continues. ‘Do you want to look at the place?’ Oh, do we. Oh yes please. ‘Follow me.’

We walk eagerly into the house and immediately see that it’s not the dark and dingy place depicted in the photographs. Inside it’s really nice and modern looking and really quite spacious. And it smells of paint; Adrian, with a care free smile, tells us he’s been doing the final touches and was still in the process when we arrived. In the front door to a little hallway, then left and into a really big stone floored kitchen/ dining room. Back into the hallway and into the door across from the kitchen and you’re in a similar sized room, this being the front room with a black leather type sofa on one side and the two armchairs facing it, set against the back wall. These two rooms and the hallway make up the entire downstairs, meaning they both have windows front and back OK. Upstairs now, which means back into the kitchen which leads to the stairs. There we find a large double bedroom, directly above and the same size and shape as the kitchen, and then a smaller single bedroom with a skylight instead of a back window and a small bathroom – with a shower but no bath. And there’s a little more. First, there’s a small, very private back garden. Second, you reach this garden through a back door from the kitchen, and by passing a utility room out there containing the washing machine. Then round a tiny little outside passageway you come to another small but open space which contains a large fridge freezer, in addition to the inside fridge. So, even more stuff outside. Two more rooms essentially.

The place is truly perfect.

Yes, we’ll take it. Well, of course we will. What else are we going to do? Go bouncing back out into who knows where? Formalities get arranged, hands are shaken, and Adrian leaves us to it.

We can’t believe it. We live here now. We actually live here. We have totally landed. All the uncertainty and jumps into wide blue yonders, and everything leaving London and arriving in Ireland related. All done done done. Oh wow. Just wow. The relief, the elation. And the house. What a house this truly truly is. It’s perfect. We could not have possibly even come up with anything better. It’s really decent sized. Big even. It’s totally detached, so we can make any noise we want, day or night. 

It is with a huge amount of jubilation, celebration and still a whole lot of disbelief, that we start to unload the car and pile everything into the kitchen in the house in Ireland in which we now live. I have only two words. In. Credible.

It really is very special when, ridiculously early for us, we have a shower and then head off to bed. Oh. Oh, oh. And bed. And to have a shower as well. It’s almost too much. When, as late as 1pm today, we had nothing. And now here we are. We really still can’t take it in.

We’ve said it many many times, but surely this is the biggest.

What. A. Day.

Day two

Saturday May 15

Mark:

We were saying that when we got to Ireland we would spend two days doing absolutely nothing. And here we are. Do not expect much to happen in these next few days.

When we wake up, we can’t quite believe where we are. We live here now. I go down to look at the kitchen from the stairs, as they have a left turn at the bottom and then lead into it. I stand there in wonder, just taking in the scene of this fantastic and large space. Later, we get on internet map stuff and check out the local area a bit more closely using the satellite images. We’re in the centre of an actual town and directly behind the main high street. We hadn’t noticed that before; of all the other houses we were looking at, nothing that we saw in our budget was within walking distance of more than a single local shop. We’ve found a place with an actual high street. Alright, not that big a high street, but a high street nonetheless. Having come from almost central London, it seems a mad thing to say, but we can’t believe that round the corner, in this town in which we now live, there are two supermarkets. Two. They don’t look like they’re that big but…

We count seven or maybe eight pubs; as they’re all still closed due to Covid, we’re not sure which ones will be opening again, but still. And all the little things you could possibly want for when things do open up again. Cafes, takeaways, coffee shops, butchers, a very big looking hardware store – a must for anyone in a new place. And so much more. We really can’t take this in. A quick check shows that the population of the town is around 3,500.

As for location, oh it couldn’t be better for anyone looking to travel and play around Ireland like we are. We are right in the centre of the country. And I mean the centre. We’re the only house on a four road crossroads and look at a map shows that this is the most central crossroads in the country, meaning that we are very possibly living in the actual most central house in the entire country. On the whole island of Ireland. A touch of research bears this out. The actual centre is in a place called Adamstown, just 15 minutes north of here. But ours is the most prominent crossroads in the general area, so yeah, we have a good bit of a claim that our brand new house is the most central house in Ireland.

But back to practicalities, Dublin is just an hour or so to the east, Galway on the west coast is also an hour away, and just about anywhere in the whole rest of the country can be reached by car in three hours or less. And another look around the map shows us that just 10 minutes or so away we have Tullamore which is a pretty decent sized town, and little over 20 minutes away, we have Athlone, an even bigger town. Population check again here. Tullamore is just over 14,000 while Athlone is around 22,000. Comparisons. The population of the Republic of Ireland is just under five million, while the population of London is around nine million, with just little Kentish Town holding around 14,000.

Our own mental checklist of what we wanted of an ideal house and location wasn’t as comprehensive as what we’re looking at here. It ticks more boxes than we’d even thought of.

Day three

Sunday May 16

Mark:

We get on things today, cleaning the house a lot and really getting to organising, especially the room that will become the studio. This is the room on the ground floor that most people would consider to be the living room.

We also break down the past week. It went like this and it really doesn’t seem possible.

Monday: 6am, agree to buy a car from Cris

Tuesday: Insure car and book ferry for the next day.

Wednesday: Trying but failing to get house sorted, start packing by 12pm, leave at 3. Breaking down and missing the ferry.

Thursday: Meeting Paul and ferry that night

Friday: Arrive in Ireland, drive through the country, see the house and take it there and then.

So, from a standing start, with absolutely nothing in place, we organised and moved house – to another country, in five days.

Day four

Monday May 17

Mark:

Back on it today musically as I’m downstairs in the studio practicing bass by going through the Players Path tracks on Scott’s Bass Lessons.

And today, Maja gets her surgery confirmed for June 3

This gives us a bit more time than we thought we would have, and it was this imminent surgery of course that put so much pressure on us having to leave London and get to Ireland to get a house sorted out before having to go to Sweden. We’ve got the absolutely biggest thing done and out of the way now, and now Maja has a date for the next thing. So can start to plan and look forwards.

Day five

Tuesday May 18

Mark:

Now dates have been confirmed, Maja books the tickets for Sweden. We leave on the evening of Sunday May 30.

The timing of this is quite mad because way back when Maja was booking her ticket to come to London she had to give a return date because of the whole Brexit thing. She totally arbitrarily chose June 1. Well, given the timing of these flights, and the slight time difference, we’ll be arriving in Sweden from Ireland just after midnight as the calendar ticks into May 31. 

Day seven

Thursday May 20

A total crash today. Just exhausted. This has been happening quite a lot this week as we’ve woken with plans to organise this or that, had something to eat, and then just crashed. But today is particularly spectacular. Everyday so far we’ve been up early, sometimes by 6am or even earlier. Today Maja is up by 9 and in the studio playing, but Mark doesn’t even begin to emerge until 11:30.

Day nine

Saturday May 22

Mark:

The studio is looking really cool now!! And we’re starting to get the house in really good shape regarding total cleaning and organising. It’s beginning to look like a place to really call home now.

With this, we’re starting to think more about music, especially Maja, who is starting to play guitar more and more, saying, I think me and the guitar are going to be friends.

With the studio in good shape, we spend the evening in it listening to my songs which Maja has compiled. There are quite a few in here that could form the basis of any musical plans we have when we start to get properly on that.

Back and listening to the tracks compiled by Maja.

The house is now more or less ready and a lot of the settling in work is done, so now thoughts can turn to Sweden, which is now just over a week away. With that, thoughts turn to which song, or songs we’re going to work on from the compiled tracks. Although we’re calling ourselves a musical duo, we still have nothing we can actually play. We don’t want to go to Sweden, tell people we’re in Ireland pursuing music, and have nothing that we can play.

Day 12

Tuesday May 25

Over the past few days we’ve got into trying to play a few of my old songs. We got the list down to five from the 50 or so we have. Top of that list is Can I Fly and we’ve started tinkering with it to get it to a key Maja can sing it in, and then maybe adding a few more bits and pieces. It’s not quite coming together as quickly as we thought it would. 

Day 13

Wednesday May 26

As I’ve been working through my SBL Player’s Path course, Maja has been working through her own online singing course that she signed up to. We both have a look at that today and really get into it together. Well, I intend to be doing some backing vocals, so I need to get in shape here as well. 

Today becomes a bit more significant when we confirm that we now have a place to stay in Sweden as Maja’s brother says he won’t be at his apartment for quite a while, so we can have it while we’re there. 

Day 15

Friday May 28

It’s been a breathless and momentous couple of weeks, and now we’re saying goodbye to our new home for a while as we head to Stockholm for Maja to have her surgery, go through the full recovery process, and then tie up all the loose ends from when she left for what she thought would be a few weeks in London.

Ireland is still in lockdown mode, bars are still closed, and traveling is still a bit tricky. But because Maja is going for surgery, I’m able to accompany her on this trip. We get to Dublin airport and are met with the most surreal sight. Not a single person is waiting to get through security when we arrive. And it’s barely more inhabited on the other side. This really is the strangest of travel experiences and it’s singular bizarreness is a quite fitting end to what has been a ridiculous up and down adventure ever since we first met at Heathrow all those hundreds of years back on February 19. Really only a little more than three months ago. It just doesn’t seem possible.

Stockholm, May 30 to 27 July 

What to write about what becomes a two month stay in Sweden? Not much really. Family stuff and Maja tying up some loose ends left over from when she traveled to London. And the minor wrist operation which was the reason we came in the first place.

Music really doesn’t happen as much as we thought it was going to and that does become a bit of a frustration. We try, but it never really feels right and somehow we just never quite manage to capture any momentum. There are probably simply too many other emotions and general weights in the air, so Maja gets on with her things and Mark helps out where he can while basically just trying to keep up with music practice and maybe start to develop a little as a guitar player. Maja joins in this from time to time and some musical advancement does occur but it’s really just a time of treading water a little and trying to get things in order.

Towards the end of July and after what has been a very hot summer with some lovely day trips and beach trips as we’ve made the most of our time here, it’s time to head home to Ireland. Because yes, it really has started to feel like that, Maja even lamenting that she already misses the rain. And together, we have visions of the place we’ve only barely lived in for two weeks. Oh how we want to get back to it and start to explore what we could become. For whatever mysterious reason, we just haven’t been able to do that here. We can only hope that once we’re in our own space with our own studio and our own time, we can start to find our own sound, our own songs and our own music. 

The Second Ireland Diary

Day one

Wednesday July 28 2021

Maja:

The morning is spent packing as we finally prepare to leave Stockholm after what has somehow managed to become a two month visit.

We’re bringing with us three suitcases, a bass case containing my Fender P bass, and carry on luggage. It is a really heavy load. At the airport we discover we have overpacked the suitcases and have to get what we can into our carry-ons. We manage to get it all down to 23 kg, 23 kg and 28 kg. With the allowed limit per suitcase at 23, this means one extra fee of 450kr – around €45, which is great.

Mark:

Brilliant, but in the panic pack we keep out the biggest shoes for me, a pair of Doc Martens. It’s only now as we begin our walk to the terminal that I discover that they really are too small for me. I struggle for a while but it is too much and I end up having to take them off and hustle to the gate in my socks. Well, at least we’re on a smooth airport floor and not outdoor gravel but it still isn’t much fun and just a little undignified. This is how I leave Sweden.

Maja:

Arriving at Dublin it’s two buses to get to Heuston, the central train station. Between changes we have to struggle with the weight of all our luggage. Not a fun walk. Arriving at the station we have a nasty surprise. I checked train timetables last Sunday and saw there was a train leaving for Galway at 20:30, which would stop off at Clara. Great, we thought. What we didn’t see was that that train was only departing on Sundays. The rest of the week the last train leaves at 19:30. We’ve arrived at 19:50, missing it by just 20 minutes. What train has its latest departure on a Sunday? But a more important question is how in the world are we going to make it home now? Should we take a taxi? That costs 200 euro from here. No way. But a hotel will probably be the same price anyway, so maybe yes way. 

The customer service guy says there are no more trains even going our direction today so it really does look like taxi or hotel, so probably taxi. But then we find another station attendant who comes up with a town called Portarlington which is at least somewhat closer to home, and there is a train departing at 21:05, in 45 minutes. Great. That’s our new plan. Train there then a much cheaper taxi than expected to home. We have dinner at the burger place in the station, only managing that just before they close. Then it’s time to go catch that train to Portarlington. On the train I search like crazy for any taxi we can take. 

Just as I find a taxi company my internet connection dies. I’m crushed, and tired and exhausted and irate and all kinds of bad emotions, and it just seems like we won’t be able to get home tonight. Mark is equally crushed. After a little while we must pass through an internet wifi spot and the number suddenly becomes visible again. Mark writes it down quickly before it disappears again, and calls them up. And he is able to get us a taxi! The relief is immense! We’re on our way home now. The taxi driver will wait for us at the station, and we will be with him a little after 10pm. Arriving, we have to carry all our luggage across the bridge to the other platform to get to the exit gate. Which we discover is locked. It looks like we’ve made it this far only to get accidentally locked in a train station for the night. I feel panic coming on as we try to open the gate. Maybe a shout of despair escapes me because at the end of the platform a man suddenly appears and calls out that it’s possible to exit through where he is. We walk over there and see that there is a piece of the fence missing. Through this we’re able to walk out to the parking lot. There we find our taxi driver waiting, but with an ordinary sized car. Oh dear. Yet another challenge. How in the world will we fit everything in there?

So we start to tetris up the car, and eventually do manage to fit everything in with Mark squeezed in the back seat, half covered by the bass case. It’s really handy that he is so small. I sit down in the front seat, and we’re finally able to start the last part of our journey home. Home. 

The drive takes 40 minutes, and it’s hard to know what to speak about. We’re both exhausted beyond, and the driver has a little bit of a hard time with small talk as well. So mainly, we just enjoy the fact that we will finally reach home soon. 

Walking in, and dropping all our things in the kitchen we both feel this incredible sense of relief. We’re finally home. And it’s so nice here. Then, as we look through the place, we see we have everything we need. We really can’t believe how well stocked up it all is. It really feels as though the elves came and did a total number on the place, but of course the elves were us. Two months ago. Thankyou to us of two months ago. Courtesy of our elvish selves we even have plenty of cold beer in the fridge so we pour ourselves one pint of Guinness each. ‘Cheers Mark. Thank you for coming to Sweden with me, but I am so glad we’re back home now.’

We sit in the kitchen, drinking our pints silently, much like we did on that epic first day when we arrived from London. We’re both too tired to really say anything. It’s a moment of celebration, but equally a moment for us both to start to heal our wounds. Soul and body are both exhausted beyond, and there is no way for us to be alert right now. We finish the pint without saying many words beyond faint expressions of the immense relief to be back home, and then we go back to bed. 

I’m asleep before my head hits the pillow. 

Day three

Friday July 30

Maja:

How can you wake up and still be so tired? I don’t get it. And Mark is completely gone too, and he is probably feeling it a little bit more because he had his first Covid vaccine yesterday. I feel tired too, but I somehow also feel absolutely energetic and want to do something. But I am too tired to really want to do anything. What a dilemma. Anyways, waking up I just feel like I need to enjoy our music room a little bit so I leave Mark in bed and go down to play some guitar. It’s good to get my hands on an instrument. I haven’t been able to do that in a while. I practice some chords, and then just some power chords. I’m not really mindful of playing any songs, since I literally have no repertoire, but I know a bunch of music theory and some chords and how to groove. So I am able to make some nice sounding rhythms out of it. Then it’s back to bed to rest some more. There really isn’t much more to today than that.

Day six

Monday August 2

Today is the first day we’ve both really felt awake since we got back. So for the first time since we moved here we decide to go out and have a proper look at this town we’re living in. The Covid thing has moved on a little since we’ve been away and places have started opening again. Pubs in Ireland opened two days before we arrived. But we forget that it’s a bank holiday so all the shops are still closed. We still manage to have a decent look around. It doesn’t take that long. It really is a small town. We count nine pubs but only four look like they’ve opened. Some look like they might not reopen at all. Maybe they didn’t make it through the lockdown period, or maybe they were closed before even then. There’s no way of telling. In any case, with Mark only just having started his vaccine cycle, it will be a while before we can go into any of them and properly start socialising and meeting people. 

We can still see that we really have landed in a good looking town. It has everything you could ask for given how we were looking for a countryside place for a cheaper house so we could make noise and do our thing.

Day seven

Tuesday August 3

With the town now starting to open up even more, we’re delighted to discover the local library, which is right across the road from us. Oh, the little pleasures. Things like this really do make the difference. Now we both have library cards. It feels a little more like arriving.

Day nine

Thursday August 5 2021

Maja:

I wake up at 8 AM, seeing a message from a former colleague. That’s very unusual for me, but I am happy that he got in touch with me. It seems like something’s happened at the company I used to work at, and we take that excuse to have a catchup on the phone. I call him up immediately, and we chat about this, that and the other for about two hours. It’s really cool to hear what’s happened at work since I left, and to hear what he has been up to. But it’s also sad, since these kind of catch ups are usually prompted by some kind of problems happening. I am also able to tell him what I’ve been up to, which is refreshing. It’s always nice to have a friendly ear that listens on the other side, it really means a lot.

So I’m up and alert at 10am and go down to the studio where I find Mark equally alert, doing his morning stretches. ‘Hey, Mark. I feel like doing something… ’

‘Yeah, me too. What do you want to do?’

‘I’d really like us to get to music now. To actually do some of the things that have been bugging us for ages now.’

Mark lights up.

Mark:

It really has been weighing on us so much that for one reason or another we haven’t been really able to do any music. It’s like you know, when you fall out of practise; for every day that you don’t touch your instrument it just gets harder to pick it up and before you know it, weeks then months have gone by and you’ve almost forgotten how to even play the thing.

Maja:

Yes. This is kind of where we are. At our stage right now, it feels almost impossible to know where to really start. In the studio we start to look for the lyrics of the songs Mark wrote a long time ago. We have a couple of printouts, and we’ve been talking about working on a song called Wide Blue Yonder.

I start up by doing some vocal warmups, singing along to a video on my computer, and I hear Mark sing along next to me while he does some runs of his guitar. It’s quite hard to get back to singing, I haven’t been doing any singing whatsoever in a while now, so I feel like I am losing it. It doesn’t feel comfortable hitting low or high pitches and my voice almost feels hoarse. It really isn’t a good sign when you’re supposed to practise the songs to make them performance ready. And we’ve maybe not been approaching things in the best way. For example, when we were in Ireland last, we focused way too long on trying to play the song Can I Fly which I never was able to sing comfortably no matter how much we altered it. I mean, I am able to sing it, but it doesn’t feel comfortable and it really demands too much from my vocals leaving me feeling tired and hoarse afterwards. So what we’ve realised is that having overworked and rewritten and rewritten that song, we haven’t gotten really anywhere, and a lot of frustration has been built up over not nailing that one song.

So today we decide to change our approach. We’re going to start on a new song, see how it feels and not spend too much time on it. Give the song a go, and then we can continue working on it later if we like it. In between we’ll also try a few others, so we can find something that works for us and also feel like we’re working through different parts of our first potential repertoire. It’s a strategy that we hope will help us reach a set much quicker, and also save us from frustration when things prove to be hard. I’m not a professional level singer just yet. I am still learning the ropes so we have to adapt to that. We’re not going to be an act at all if I’m not able to sing our songs.

So Wide Blue Yonder it is to get things started. It’s a song that Mark has had recorded professionally and I’ve it loads of times, so I am fairly comfortable with how the feel of the song should be. Just as we’ve decided all this, the rain starts pouring down. It’s absolutely torrental. We suddenly abandon our as yet begun session and run up to our bedroom and sit down on the little cozy window sitting area we’ve made, looking out on our crossroads, watching the rain clash with the ground. It hits so hard,it splashes up several inches. Water starts to collect in the lower parts on the road, and it’s soothing to watch. Mark says to me, wait right here, and runs down. He comes straight back up bringing the lyrics and the guitar. And he sits down on the bed, holding the guitar ready to play and looks at me slyly. Let’s just go for it.

It’s hard. There’s no way around it and I can’t express it in any other way. It’s really hard work. I try to sing, and Mark stops me. ‘No that pitch is wrong, it should be like this. ‘ Or like this: ‘No, you need to take a breath here, and shorten the tone, let the words get more space.’ Things of that character. All. The. Time. 

It’s quite frustrating since as soon as I start I get shut down immediately, and it is really playing with my confidence in a bad way. But the great part with this is that I’m never let down. I’m never left alone to just guess how it should be. He has a vision, and he helps and guides me every step of the way to reach it. It’s really hard, but it is the right way to do it. I’m frustrated about it, but at the same time grateful. This is the way it has to be done. I just have to do it, and we are doing it.

The session goes by with a combined feeling of frustration and relief over finally getting somewhere decent. It’s not like we reach a perfect state of anything, and Mark’s constant critique is hard to handle. But what that really means, is that when he says that anything is OK, it’s performance ready. It’s harsh, but we’re able to feel that we’re getting somewhere. And it’s great to know that my voice is good. And at times, I’m even doing good parts of the song. It’s really different to work with an experienced songwriter. 

I’m really glad we’re taking the time to really work on this. We have longed for this so much but have never been able to really get to it. The ‘not getting to it’ has eaten on both of our confidences. After finishing our session we realise that we’ve been at it for nearly three hours. That’s incredible. We kind of drop down on the bed afterwards and look at the clouds racing over the sky through our skylight. It’s amazing what we did just now. We almost have Wide Blue Yonder, and we sang through Can I Fly again as well. It’s amazing to have finally started again. Or as we agree upon, finally started for the first time. We’ve been wanting to get to it for so long, but not really been able to. We’ve only really dabbled, and never truly got anywhere. So today feels like the real beginning of our project. It’s devastating that such a long time has gone by, but that can’t be helped. Now is everything we have, and we finally have momentum. 

We go back down to the studio after resting a bit and I start to look for the lyrics of the songs Mark wrote a long time ago. I have them on my computer, and we listen a bit to the rough home demos he has of them as I just print out every song that feels relevant for now. Which is a list of songs which Mark practised the guitar on while I was fixing with moving and divorce errands in Sweden. We need to have a list with things we can just attack so we don’t lose momentum. We can’t lose it again. I print out 14 songs, which I bluetack to the wall so they’re visible and ready to hand. It’s great to have what you’re working on visible. It isn’t really enough to have it on the computer.

This time, we have prepared the PA with a microphone for me. It’s good to get used to it, and using the PA means I don’t have to sing so loudly, which will save my voice so we can work more. 

Off we start, and I look at the lyrics in front of me. ‘I wanna give When I’m With You a shot,’ I say

‘Sure.’ Mark grabs the guitar and off we go. It’s just impossible. No matter what key we choose, when the verse sounds good, the chorus is off, and when we get the chorus to work, we discover we’re in the wrong key to be able to sing the verse. We soon stop and go for the next song. Run From Our Hearts, and it’s promising. It’s a hard song, a lot of timings that need perfection and it’s vocally demanding. Mark has to really think about how he wants to show it to me, how we should alter it. We work on that song in different keys, and I feel that using the PA makes it so much easier to sing prettier vocals, which this song demands. It’s really fun to work on this song. Frustrating when I don’t get it, but with the proper guidance Mark gives me, it really feels OK. Another two hours or so and our focus starts to drop. We’ve been able to get the first verse and the chorus to a good place. Wonderful progress and a great start off our project. 

We go to bed tired and happy.

Day 10 

Friday August 6

Mark:

The fence in our back garden was taken down while we were away. Which means the whole back area is now open to us. Which means we now have a river at the bottom of the garden. And we also have a huge garden in an old mill site containing the ruins of two large mill buildings. It’s mad to just be able to go out and walk around and contemplate hanging out here in the mornings, or whenever. A spectacular place to go, sit and have a cup of tea.

Maja gets her second Covid vaccination booked for Monday. I have to wait a little longer. Until we get this properly sorted, we won’t be able to play live at all, although to be fair, we’re still quite a long way off being able to do that anyway.

But we are on it, starting today’s session by working on We Run From Our Hearts, a song I was asked to write for an artist in Brazil way back in 2008 just as I was getting ready to move from Cork to Madrid. This song was begun in one city and finished in the other. Nothing came from it but it was still cool to be asked and I got what I thought was a really good song out of it.

As we get to it today, we totally rewrite the breakout section, meaning it’s at least a semi current song for us now as it has new stuff in it we’ve just created. Can I Fly did that too and I’m starting to think that as we continue to get to my back catalogue, other songs there could get the same treatment, hopefully improving them and also bringing them into whatever sound it is we end up making. Right now we’re very much groping but we do have a whole body of material from which to grope with which is a really great start to have. If nothing else, we don’t have to sit around struggling to write songs, forcing them out or waiting for inspiration to strike. No, we have a whole list to just dip in, see what we pull out, then see what we do with it. As it is now with We Run From Our Hearts. This is the first time we manage to put together a full version of a song that we’re at least kinda happy with. It’s still very rough but that’s OK.

We do the same later with Breakthrough, a song I actually managed to get on Irish national radio all the way back when this was a newie. That would have been around 2001/2002. Damn. Twenty years ago. So it’s a very very old song. But apart from friends of the time, no-one really knows it which makes it a new song. We manage a full run through of this one today as well. Between that, We Run From Our Hearts, and general song exploration, we’ve been in and around the studio all day.

Also, since we’ve got back, as well as the two kinda completed songs just mentioned, we’ve also put real work into Wide Blue Yonder, When I’m With You and Can I Fly, which of course we worked on before Sweden, and a little while we were there. We might just be starting to inch off the ground here. OK. Maybe not. But hopefully I can say we are at least now taxi-ing with intent.

Day 12

Sunday August 8

We don’t do much today, and yesterday’s efforts just seemed to lead to a lot of dead-ends through frustratingly unproductive sessions. The same is happening today. We’re pushing the cart but we’re just not getting anywhere. We’ve been pushing hard this past week and we have to admit it’s caught up with us a bit. 

So we decide to develop things physically instead. We go out and buy a big screen which will be better for studio and production work rather than trying to stare at a small laptop. When we get back, we go to work setting up the studio, with this new screen as something of a centrepiece. When we’re done, it looks like we have a respectable looking studio. Brilliant. But that’s it for us today. No attempt at any further practice.

Day 13

Monday August 9

Maja gets her second vaccine, and we’re straight back home. Our small green shoots of momentum may take a hit here as the vaccine gets a hold and knocks her out for a few days, but before that happens, we’re right back on it again. A one hour session on Breakthrough really is a bit of a breakthrough as it produces our best work and sound yet. The song feels almost complete after that as we tinker with long established parts and it starts get get moulded into something that might just sound like us. As yet, we still have no idea what that is.

Like We Run From Our Hearts, Breakthrough is another song that straddles countries. I started writing it while living in Orpington, a town just inside the very outer edge of London. So outer, in fact, that it wasn’t even a part of London at the time. Soon after beginning this song I’d made the move to Cork where I’d been invited to become a feature editor on the Evening Echo after being recommended by a London headhunter consulting for them. So Breakthough began in Orpington and was completed in Cork, going through a few versions and rewrites before it became the first song recorded by what would become my own Cork band, Fly On The Wall, which began with just myself and my friend Aibhlin, who I met at Fred Zepellins’ open mic night. A night I actually ended up running after I’d been in Cork a year or so.

Me and Aibhlin recorded that song, along with Can I Fly. RTE had a national radio office in Cork and the DJs were quite accessible and relatively easy to get hold of, plus I was in the media myself which made it even easier. I got these songs to John Creedon who had the mid afternoon show on RTE Radio 1, and he gave Breakthrough it’s first ever radio play, putting it on immediately after the midday news bulletin. John Creedon predicted big things for us as the song played out, and then soon after, 96FM, the city’s leading music station, added us to their playlist. Then we got a record deal. With a subsidiary of a major. But nothing happened. We just didn’t push our tiny opening enough. We tried to get a band together around ourselves but just couldn’t really get any of the lineups to work. And that version of Fly On The Wall petered out. But here we are again with Breakthrough being the first song of our potential repertoire. The first song we might actually be able to perform for people.

Later we go out for a walk and end up on a kind of date, sitting on a bench overlooking Clara’s green, with chips, curry and beer. Here we work on some of the vocal aspects of Breakthrough as we continue to polish what we have.

When we get back home we go straight into the studio. I pick up the guitar, smash through a few chords, just messing really, then some lyrics and something of a melody start to fall out of me. When I take a toilet break, I ask Maja to see if she could pick up where I’ve left off with lyrics. She does, and when I return we realise we’ve really got a hold of something here and we just keep hammering it out. All the time we record what we’re doing so that ideas can be found again but we really just keep going. Exactly an hour after I first picked up the guitar in here and started blasting those chords, All Kinds Of Wonderful is finished. We didn’t even sit down with a concept or a single lyrical idea. Now we’re sitting with a whole new song in our hands. The first full song we’ve written together and I feel tremendous relief at that, just the fact that something complete and new has finally been created. I didn’t write it on my own, but this is my first song in over seven years, the last one written sometime in the spring of 2014 when I essentially gave up on trying to be a songwriter and decided to become a professional bass player instead. As with anything new from the creative process, this might prove to be no good at all, but just to have a new song feels massive. I am giddy with joy about it.

Today really has been a breakthrough.

Day 14 

Tuesday August 10

After last night’s burst of activity, the vaccine catches up with Maja. She spends all day in bed and I spend all day taking care of her. But we have a new song. We have our first very own brand new song. I still can’t believe it. We’re also starting to think it might not be as finished as we might have thought, but that’s absolutely fine.

Day 16

Thursday August 12

We return to working on All Kinds Of Wonderful, trying to sort out the bridge. This never felt quite nailed. Late night, we struggle with one of the verses, trying so many different variations of one line that just don’t work. Then Maja comes up with an idea while Mark is the shower and that’s it. 

Day 17
Friday August 13

Mark:

I’m up early. Not long after 7am. I’m straight to it in the studio, working on All Kinds Of Wonderful for two hours, during which I fix the bridge and add an ending. Then Maja comes down. I play her where I am, and we then decide to take a break from this and go out and discover the country a little. This leads us to a drive out to Portlick Millennium Forest, which Maja has discovered online this morning.

What most people do when arriving at a beauty spot is stop the car, get out and start exploring. We don’t do that. When we stop, I reach behind me and pull out the book containing the lyrics to All Kinds Of Wonderful. There’s one little piece I still don’t feel right with and we go over it now, basically songwriting while sitting in the front seats of a stationary car, haggling over a single word here and there. We do this for about an hour until we feel we really have it, changing a few more bits while we’re at it. It might have taken a single hour to feel like we had a song back at the beginning, but it’s taken days and hours and hours to really feel like it could be considered something even nearing complete. 

We’re now ready to go out into the forest and we discover it to be a truly magical place, complete with a fairy walk designed, it appears, by local school children, with signposts and little fairy houses and ornamental displays hanging from trees. Just a totally new experience. Then we come to a clearing which contains the ruins of a huge house. Nothing left but the first metre or so of perimeter wall and some vague outline of where rooms might have been. In the same clearing is a rope swing and of course we go and make the most of that. This whole little secret area could be a great video location. We store it in the mental bank. This is also a walk that we could return to again and again.

Back home and we hit the studio again for a five hour session. This takes in Breakthrough, When I’m With You which comes together very quickly after our painful earlier experiences with it, and of course All Kinds Of Wonderful. Then, over dinner we continue listening to other songs from my back catalogue to see what more can be reconnected with or brought out for us to play with and incorporate. Once again we marvel at how I’d almost let the entirety of this songwriting trove disappear as it sat under a bed in London on a broken computer until Maja came along.

Then, on the computer we’re listening to it all from now, I go on a bit of an impromptu explore and discover a hidden file containing a whole bunch of lyrics and seven more completed songs. Seeing these now I’m like, ‘Oh yes, of course.’ But they’d evaded my memory totally until now.

Day 18

Saturday August 14

We get All Kinds Of Wonderful somewhat finished. We thought it was a full, new song on Monday, but it really has taken the rest of the week to tinker, craft and bash it and get it into real match fit fighting shape. 

Day 19

Sunday August 15

Mark:

While out and about on my own shopping for a few bits, I come across a bar in town called The Trap which has a poster advertising live music for last night. No idea what kind of music it was, but I tell Maja about it the second I’m back. She says she never imagined we’d have ended up in a place with live music just around the corner. 

Then we get talking about experiences of playing in Ireland and the general positive reaction here to original music. Here, I tell her of a great day I had with my songwriting friends in Cork when we decided to go on a pub crawl, but would play our own original songs in each place, each person playing some kind of instrument to accompany the lead songwriter with each person taking it in turns to be the lead. During the whole day, only one bar told us no. This was when we walked into a large place, which was totally empty except for the one barman who was clearly very hungover. He took one look at us with our instruments and just called out, ‘No.’ Fine. The place was dead anyway. 

Once we’re on it, we log another five hours of studio time including more writing. Nothing that truly sticks, but we’re really starting to feel a momentum building now.

Day 20

Monday August 16

Maybe with yesterday’s session swirling round in my head, I have no idea, but I wake at 6am with a start and a new song already forming. I have to get up. Now. 

I go down to the studio and this thing just falls out of me. Melody, rhythm and lyrics all spilling out onto the page so quickly. Too quickly. I take a pause from writing after I’ve got about a page and a half of A4 paper down. Going back to the beginning, I realise with dismay that I can’t remember anything of the rhythms I was writing so confidently into. OK. Some of the rhythms. But some of the lines I just can’t get to fit into the one line they really should fit into. But I still feel what I had and I stick at it, writing with no musical accompaniment. By the time I sit back to survey what I’ve done. It’s called Baked Honey. What’s baked honey? I have no idea but I’ve just written a song about it. Give me baked honey/I’m so sunny I could melt a radiator. It then goes on to talk about how the terminator tickling protagonist invented science and stole the S from maths.

When I sing it to Maja – without guitar because it has no guitar part yet, she has no idea what to make of it. But I think as the day goes on it grows on her. I think. Finally, she says, it’s a children’s song. It just has to be. It would be perfect on a kids’ TV channel.

Late tonight we’re sitting at our kitchen table. Which has become our hang out place of choice in the house when we’re not in the studio, although the floor window in the bedroom, complete with ground throw and cushions is also very cosy.

Maja’s sketching parts of my face absentmindedly as our thoughts meander and another bottle of wine gets opened. Then she looks up, as though taken by a sudden idea. Dreamily, lazily, she stares at me and then says, ‘You know, I really do like you better when you’re naked.’ Oh my, oh my, oh my. I have to write that down. Suddenly other phrases start coming. I pick up the guitar and a whole chorusey type thing emerges as we bounce ideas backwards and forwards. We feel we really have something here and carry on at it. After half an hour or so of frenetic activity we have a chorus and a verse, and of course an idea of what the whole thing is about. That will do for now. I really do take this as a session. It’s very rare a whole song comes out in one go, although it does feel like that happened with Baked Honey earlier. But as we’ve seen, even with the one hour complete song of All Kinds Of Wonderful, it still took days and hours and hours of actual work to make something we could consider finished. So yeah, I’ll take what we’ve done just now. This really is something to come back to.

Day 23

Thursday August 19

Every band I’ve ever been in has had one dilemma. What to call itself. It really can be a horrible little period as people come up with all kinds of inappropriate or just boring names. Here, I often mention bands like Guns’n’Roses. Or Suede. Or Oasis. I know where it came from but I think Guns’n’Roses is just the worst name for a band ever, and the others aren’t much better. It can be like naming a pet. Does it really matter? Just make it simple and memorable. Biscuits. That’ll do. Or AC/DC, after one of the guys saw a label on a vacuum cleaner apparently. LIke every other project I’ve ever had, we’ve been struggling to come up with a name for ourselves. Well, Maja has an absolute flash today and suddenly calls it out to me like it’s the mosts obvious thing in the world. ‘Mark, I’ve got it,’ she says, full of the confidence of knowing. Go on. The Diaries. Now, this is the thing for me. A band name has to be something the whole band goes, yes, yes, that’s it. Otherwise it doesn’t work. Just my opinion. Well this, it just hits me like a rocket. Like, how could we not have thought of it before? It’s just perfect. It’s what I started way back in July 2014. It’s what Maja started in May 2020. And it’s what we combined to start together in February 2021. And our life, pretty much, is what we think will inspire much of our songwriting. 

So, just like that, ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you, and us, to…The Diaries.

That finally decided, Maja gets onto domain names and finds thediaries.band is available. And here we are today.

Day 25

Saturday August 21

Maja gets busy creating our new website. While she’s doing that in the studio downstairs, I’m upstairs working on I Like You Better When You’re Naked. While I’m doing the dishes, I have a flash of inspiration for one of the verses, and with that the song is done. When we’re finished with our respective tasks, we get together in the studio and just sing through a whole bunch of songs and have a general mess about with them. This is exactly where we’ve wanted to be for so long. To have something of a repertoire we can just have fun with. It’s been a hard place to get to, but here we are.

And now, in our studio, we have all our prospective songs up on the wall which is full of lyric sheets of songs existing and to be worked on. You could cal it our Wonderwall. 

This becomes even more fun when we watch our first full movie in here – Yesterday. The one about the guy who discovers he lives in a world where he’s the only one who knows about The Beatles and sets about learning all their songs to claim as his own. There’s a scene where he contemplates a wall full of lyrics. As he does so, we look around our own little place. Yes, it’s exactly like that. Except, these lyrics and these songs belong completely to us.

Day 29

Wednesday August 25

Rehearsal hits a new level today as we finally run through a few songs in performances that we would be happy to put on a stage. Breakthrough is one of them, but the first is We Run From Our Hearts. It’s so amazing to hear the way Maja sings it. So delicate and so absolutely inside the song. Now we just need another eight or nine like this and we’re ready to go. This really is a hard, hard, process, but we are getting there. Today really feels like a milestone on the journey.

Day 30

Thursday 26 August

Maja:

It’s been really hard to get to a place where I can finally perform any song in a comfortable manner. And I just feel amazing regarding my performance yesterday. I did great finally nailing that piece. When I wake up, the first thing I do is to hit the studio with Mark. I go downstairs and am ready to go again. Mark’s been up writing or doing something like that since around 6am I think, so I make two cups of tea for us. Tea in one hand, Mark in the other, I drag him out to the garden singing my vocal warmups I try to do everyday. We go to the river by the mill, the water is flowing very nicely and we sing together. I am getting stronger. I can feel it. My coordination is up and it feels easier to hit the notes, and I sing more powerfully. Mark isn’t doing a half assed job either. He is getting better at hitting pitches he used to be uncomfortable in and is generally singing much stronger than he was a few months ago, so that’s all good. It’s a bit surreal, you know, standing there, beneath the ruins of the mill, looking at the river flowing at such a fast speed. It makes you understand why they chose to build the mill here over 150 years ago. We get back inside and start working with the songs. First up is Run From Our Hearts, the song I finally had a breakthrough with yesterday. I now know how I should sing that song. We listen to the track once before starting, and I am absolutely amazed. I sound good! The voice holds everywhere, and yes I am making mistakes, but that’s OK. In a few recordings my voice has sounded a bit strained making it uncomfortable to listen to. But that’s not the case now. It sounds smooth. Melodic. Lovely even. I had never sung the song like this before. It’s nailed. Spot on, but I can still hear how at places I struggle with phrasing and lyrics. 

I’m ready to go again. We start up with the same song, and work on it for an hour or so. And we’re finally getting somewhere. It sounds decent. Phrasing and lyrics are improving, but most importantly, we’ve found the key and the voice I should sing it in. 

Finally.

Finally finally finally.

Finally.

We take a break, and feel wonderful about ourselves. This is finally getting somewhere. When we’re back at our next session, we decide to approach it by just going for any of our songs we think we can get. Mark wrote down a list with songs we could try that we kinda have in our repertoire now there are seven songs on that list. We go through all of these songs, some of them only once, some of them a couple of times. And they fit. I’m just able to sing them. It’s absolutely wonderful. Mark plays around with different keys, and I am able to do something I’ve never been able to before; everytime we decide to try a new key, I am able to go with it immediately and am spot on in tune with my vocals. I’ve always felt confused how to do this when keys have just been changed on me. But now, I just need to hear the new pitch of the first chord and I know exactly where to place myself. It’s like something just unlocked in me. 

By the time we finish this session, which clocks in at two and a half hours itself, we’ve been at it for more than five hours today, and we have almost seven songs ready. From not having had a single one just 24 hours ago that we felt was near. It’s enormous.

Day 33

Sunday 29 August

Maja:

Mark’s up at 6:30am and working on various songs, setting up studio equipment, writing, stuff like that. But really, we’re both too tired for any real recording

Early evening and we’re just chilling in the studio. I’m reading and Mark’s chatting to people on FB. Just catching up with people, while also having one eye on who to maybe talk to to get something of a tour started. We’re thinking about Spain.

Then we have a eureka moment, which shoots adrenaline all over the room and wakes us both up. We’re alert now. Rather than think about a country and see who’s touring that, we have a moment of clarity and decide to see who’s touring, anywhere in the world, and see if we can get ourselves onto that.

We almost have everything sorted for that but decide to wait until we have a seven to nine song set and then really go for it. We now realise that we could end up anywhere in the world.

This wakes us up enough to start to think about recording to be able to have something to show people, but we both know energy levels like this could drop as quickly as they arrived and we could just get frustrated. We decide to leave it, relax for the evening and tackle it fresh in the morning.

Day 34

Monday 30 August

Six studio hours in the studio today as we try to get things recorded, and also try to write a few bits and pieces. 

Day 35

Tuesday August 31

We very much put the time in yesterday but really didn’t feel like we got anywhere. So we just take a time out today.

Day 41

Monday September 6

We’ve spent the past few days trying to record things and it’s been equal levels fun and frustrating. Not much we’re going to keep, but it’s all good experience and studio practice, not to mention good general music practice.

But after all that, today we feel a bit flat so we dial it down a little and don’t push ourselves too much. It’s a day for yoga, swimming pool and basic chilling.

Day 45

Friday September 10

For the first time we’re able to play through our whole first set of seven songs and we get onto that first thing in the morning, working through to early afternoon. Mostly these are songs from my back catalogue including Breakthrough, When I’m With You, Wide Blue Yonder and We Run From Our Hearts. But we do now have our first own original in there – All Kinds Of Wonderful. It’s a rough performance with some edges that need to be smoothed out, but we really feel we are almost there with something of a set in the 20 minute mark. Enough for a support slot should the opportunity arrive. We still have a little way to go before this whole thing is stage ready, but it’s a huge deal that we can stand here and play through 20 minutes of repertoire covering this many of our own songs.

There’s another huge deal today as we receive our new business cards and our very own Diary beer mats. Yep. We have beer mats now. Absolutely brilliant. 

Day 46

Saturday September 11

We’ve decided we’re going to London. We have to sell the car we bought to move here with and it has UK plates, so London it is. I call my friend Kristoff who, among other things, was a big fan of The Insiders, my bass/acoustic cover duo with Dan who played in Kristoff’s bar The White Hart and a few other bars in central London, most notably The Marquis just by Trafalgar Square and run by Kristoff’s friend Tommy. 

Kristoff suggests a place we could stay. A mutual friend of ours is now executive chef in a central London bar and also happens to be an ambitious and very talented songwriter, music producer and bar DJ. His name is Alex, I know him very well, he was also a big fan of The Insiders, and my bass playing in particular. So much so that I played sessions on his own tracks. We get onto Alex and he confirms that yes, we can stay in his place. Brilliant. Sorted. His place is on Upper Street, Islington, one of my favourite places in London.

We think about dates and agree we will go sometime around the 20th, with Maja then to go to Sweden on the 28th and me to return to Ireland the same time. 

We talk about where we are and agree the target is to have three tracks recorded and ready to go by the time we go to London. This will mean we will go there with everything ready for us to be able to present ourselves. We’re going in probably nine days time, maybe a little earlier. So between now and then, the focus is just to get songs ready and recorded. It still isn’t fully up and running, but Maja will finally be able to see and experience a little of my London. Of real London.

Day 49

Tuesday September 14

Full studio day. Start 10am, finish 6:30

Day 50

Wednesday September 15

Pretty much the same as yesterday. Full studio day in preparation for recording

Day 51

Thursday September 16

Maja:

We’ve been at it for ages. Ages. And today, we are finally ready to start to record our first video demos. I’m feeling very tired and spend most of the morning in bed. When I finally manage to drag myself out from under the covers, it’s well after noon. Mark’s been on it the whole morning, organising the studio for the recording, but I felt like the best I could do was to rest. I take a shower and put on some clothes. For today’s recording I think I’ll go for neutral and smart. So, no makeup, and just something easy when it comes to clothing. 

Mark:

The plan for today is to do one takes. Just us, song and guitar. Turn the camera on and go. The idea is that we just get stuff in the can today. A kind of safety net of recordings that just work. Then tomorrow, we’ll really go for it, confident in the knowledge that we at least have something useable to present ourselves with. Once we’ve got safeties in the can, we can just go for every take and if we blow it all, we’re still good. Maybe we’ll even get to that today.

Maja:

Setting up, we now amplify both of our voices, since Mark has started doing backing vocals now. Using the voice in this way, with a microphone even though the songs aren’t that loud, means I’m able to sing almost in a whisper at times. This gives me more melodic control, and it just sounds so much better. It’s been a theme that’s been very present these last couple of weeks as I’ve been developing my own way of singing. I’m not a trained singer, I’ve not done anything like this ever before. Choir, well yeah, but nothing else. I’ve also been working on an online singing course but for now, I’m still really just doing it my way.

Yesterday I had a breakthrough regarding this. Usually when I sing songs like our song A Listing – our reworking of an old Drunken Monkees song that Mark wrote with Rick – it’s like my voice kind of breaks. I go for a pitch, and sing it powerfully, as I imagine it should sound, and my voice just breaks in the middle of it. It doesn’t feel very nice. It’s a bit painful and singing like that doesn’t seem sustainable. So I’ve known for a while now that my singing technique is lacking, and it’s been one of my priorities to figure out how to sing better. So yesterday, after a long day of rehearsing, I just sat at the table as Mark fingerpicked the guitar and gently, gently sang. That’s how it should be done. At least for now.

Mark:

It doesn’t quite go as smoothly as we were hoping and it’s take after take as red light syndrome, or something, kicks in. If we were hoping for the safeties to come quick to get onto the real thing we were kidding ourselves. It takes a full day to get three songs just about right, even if the performances aren’t quite ready to break Youtube. A bit flat to be honest, but we have something of ourselves and our songs ready to go out there now. Breakthrough, Your Smile Is Going Round and A Listing. We can have another go to really nail this tomorrow. For now, we’re done and with London coming up the day after tomorrow, it’s time for us to go out and finally start meeting some of the locals round here. Yep. We’re finally going to the great Irish pub, starting with The Trap.

The Covid hangover is still here which means you have to sit at a table, even at the bar, where tables are set up with a perspex screen between the bar and customers. Walking into The Trap for the first time and we see it’s pretty decent sized and quite traditional looking. Stone floor, plenty of TV screens and a few different seating areas, although basically an open design. A semi square U-shape with a an area to the left of the door, something of a stage area to the right, the main bar in front, and then off to the left of that, another area again. We will learn later that there is quite a bit more to this place, but this is what we have for now. There’s a decent crowd in. Not packed, but enough to provide a bit of atmosphere. There’s also an available table at the bar with a couple of guys at the next table over by the wall. We take the free one, order our first Irish pints, and cheers to today’s recording. We’ve got at least this far. It does feel a bit of a milestone.

There’s quite a cool vibe in here and we hear the guys next to us talking music. After a while we turn and say hi to them and are welcomed by Seamus and Mick, the latter being from Clara but with a strong Manchester accent. As we learn that they’re strong music fans, so they learn that we are too, and that we take it a bit further than that 

As we continue talking, Mick says, can we hear any of your songs? Could you sing anything? Way back I told Maja this kind of thing could happen. That people in Irish bars would sometimes just sing. I’m not entirely sure she ever believed me, but now, in her first ever outing to an Irish bar she is actually being asked to sing. We confer a little and she somewhat reluctantly and shyly agrees to do Breakthrough. No guitar, so just Maja it is. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes and begins. It’s a gentle song and as soon as she’s into the first few lines, the people around the bar start to go quiet. Someone even gets shushed as they attempt to keep talking. Maja has immediately got the attention of the entire place. But with her eyes closed, she doesn’t at all see what happens next. People start to leave their places and walk over to us, over to Maja. She’s now got six or seven people in something of a semi circle around her, with a few more people sitting around the place paying full attention. Total silence all around. She comes to the final chorus and I can just feel the weight of the audience. Maja’s first ever audience. Captured. She finishes and the final words tail off. She opens her eyes and looks round in surprise as the place erupts into applause and compliments. I look over at Mick, who made this happen, and he’s nodding in approval and all but winks at me in appreciation. Well, that’s one way to say hello to the neighbourhood.

Day 52

Friday 17 September 2021

Nope. No chance of any real takes. What we did yesterday is what we have. How does today disappear from us? It totally does. Between shopping, packing and organising the house, we somehow manage to not get a spare moment and don’t finish the last chore until around 11pm when we collapse in bed in exhaustion. OK. We return to London tomorrow. This could be emotional.

All rights reserved. This work is not offered for AI training purposes. We do not consent to its use in creating artificial intelligence.

© 2025 The Diaries

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑