OK, you know I’m writing this book about the horror of touring. So far I’ve done an 8,000-word chapter on vans. But I was just looking through my “archive” (for which read a load of bits of paper in a cupboard) and I found this document, in my handwriting, written in February 1995 after a terrible, terrible tour of Hungary. The title at the top of the page says simply “The Catalogue Of Errors And Mishaps: The Keatons in Hungary, 1995″.

1. Mo gets ‘flu the day before the tour
2. My friend, Matt, who wants to “come along for the ride” turns up 3 hours late for rendezvous at Wood Green to go to Steve’s house in Welwyn
3. He only brings £20 for the kitty when he said he’d have £50
4. Phone call: Vienna gig en route is cancelled – this show was to pay for the whole tour
5. Decide to go on tour anyway. Matt asks for his £20 back and gets on train to go back home.
6. Packing the van takes until 2 in the morning
7. We stay up getting pissed until 3
8. We have to get up at 6
9. The van is cold, damp, condensation is dripping off the roof.
10. We arrive at Frankfurt for an overnight stop with a “friend”. “Friend” has gone to the cinema and doesn’t get back until 1am.
11. “Friend” can’t find key to place we’re supposed to sleep.
12. “Friend” finds key, we go in, Mo sits on a chair and it breaks underneath him.
13. We sleep in absurdly cold temperatures
14. 10 minutes before we leave, we find the central heating switch which was turned off, obviously.
15. We drive through blizzards and suffer low-key snow blindness due to lack of sun shield in van
16. We arrive in Innsbruck to play a show – our continental plugs are incompatible and no-one can find a screwdriver
17. Next day we drive to Veszprem in Hungary. Detained for 2 hours at the border for no reason.
18. Drive on narrow Hungarian roads in dark in driving rain for 3 hours
19. Arrive in Veszprem, can’t find the venue
20. Find venue, unload in driving rain
21. Discover that there’s no PA because the promoter sold all his possessions the week before
22. We are told that the show is cancelled and instead there will be a Depeche Mode disco
23. We insist that we play our set – without vocals, as there’s no PA
24. No food for vegetarians (all but one of us)
25. During the song “MD-AA” skinheads start making Nazi salutes
26. We get paid £20
27. We can’t find hotel
28. We find hotel, but are advised to sleep in the van as it will get stolen
29. So we drive on to Budapest
30. Next day the Budapest show is cancelled because the promoter had a heart attack
31. Gig goes ahead after Hungarian friend argues with replacement promoter without heart attack
32. But the monitors don’t work and the show is a fiasco
33. Get paid £0
34. The hotel showcases a deafening mixture of traffic noise, clanking pipes and screaming.
35. We have to get up at 8am to get the van out of the venue car park which is, by now, a swamp of piss and rainwater

[cut for reasons of brevity and sanity to the return journey to London some 10 days later]

102. We go to the centre of Budapest to change our worthless Hungarian forints into Western currency: it’s Sunday, and everything is shut.
103. For breakfast all we can afford is a bag of milk and a cottage cheese bun
104. We find a bureau de change, but it takes 2 hours to change the money as they can’t find any Western currency
105. Slovak border: detained for an hour and treated like shit
106. Czech border: detained for an hour and Steve is convinced he’s going to be arrested under some obscure local byelaw
107. From Prague to Teplice we drive on a road straight out of Pakistan in the 14th century which knackers the suspension
108. German border: detained for an hour and treated like shit
109. Finally released and immediately run out of petrol en route to Dresden

Actually, I’ve had enough. This book is going to be so traumatic.