Took an early morning walk around Colmar, just thinking about Gene’s passing. I felt lucky, yet, I felt unlucky. The irony of life had me in deep thought. As I walked to a café I thought about Kose and Bent playing Backgammon. Rusty was betting on Kose and Anthony and myself had Bent. The first to win 7 games was champ. The series went down to the wire, with Kose winning and Rusty and Kose winning 8 Euros. I had totally forgotten to mention any of that yesterday. And we finished off the 3rd bottle of Glenlivet (and that only left a bottle of Chivas). I also didn’t mention the restaurant we ate in last night where the toilet backup from the sewer had the whole place stinking something awful. After some air-conditioning and open windows, all was fine. We all pretty much had pasta, except Kose who had his usual; steak and brandy. (Just think, I’d forgotten that in Diary #36).

So, I was at the café when I saw Daddy O and Chapple. We all surfed the net a bit and then I bought a kebab which was awful and then walked around Colmar somemore. The City is beautiful. By 5pm we were sound checking at the venue by 7:30pm the club was serving us dinner. The food was beef, mushrooms, salad and green beans. The funny thing is, it was sitting in the oven and the club help was standing around, looking at us. They spoke no English at all. All of us, band and crew were asking in English about the food. All they could say was, “non parlez vous anglais”. So I played a bit of charades and asked how do we ‘get that food over there’ to ‘this plate over here’. They laughed and we were eating in no time. The red wine complemented the combo and some guys had dessert. (Not me, never).

Got back to the hotel about 8:15pm. We wouldn’t go back to the venue til 9:45pm so I went to the “Brussells Café”, order a Stella and wrote postcards and such to my family. Got to the club about 10pm and caught my “Baby Woodhouse” last song. They rocked and they’re Danes! Hit the stage at 11pm and rocked a thoroughly dead French audience for 80 minutes. It was one of our best performances which we all agreed on. (Which is rare). After the show we went back to the hotel, the nook was locked and we were armed with a bottle of Chivas and an 8 pack of beer. The night porter assured us that we would not be allowed in the nook at 1am. I’d had enough of the French ‘back-talk’ and decided to take matters into my own hands. I hinted that we were better off down here than on the 1st floor waking everyone up. He gave it deep thought and agreed. “Good”, I said, “Now dose us up with some snacks aswell”. It was typical crude Americana but it DOES come in handy from time to time. I left the boys about 1:45am to wash up and go to bed. The club was extremely smoky and with no ventilation. I packed my case and was asleep in no time.

Tomorrow we would be driving through the Swiss Alps, on our way to Bergamo, Italy and a meeting up of none other that Irish Barry, aka Barry Bresnahan.

Mike Randle