I drove to Birmingham last week for a teaching conference. The journey down on Thursday night was pretty uneventful, if you ignore the M42, a jumped up dual carriageway which thinks its a motorway but only has two lanes, even though everybody drives as if there were three. I made it down in two and a half hours, spent the night in a wonderfully Fawlty Towers-esque hotel, and then headed off to the conference which was a very useful and engaging day.
However, I arrived in Birmingham about the same time as Storm Babet. I'm not sure there were any rooms left in the hotel for her, so she raised merry hell for the rest of the night and throughout the following day. My journey home then, took seven and a half hours rather than two and a half, and culminated in a lengthy period sitting on the edge of a hillside in Glossop with a flat tyre, waiting for someone to come and fix it. The RAC told me the waiting time was 5 hours, so I called a local mobile tyre guy who was able to get there in just an hour and a half. When he finally arrived, his headlights revealed that I'd also lost a number plate while driving through one of the many road-swamping rivers I'd had to ford as part of my journey. If only cars still came with spare tyres, like they used to... but don't start me on that.
Altogether, I think I listened to my entire in-car memory stick during those journeys, which is made up of a mix of current albums I'm into (The Hold Steady, Jenny Lewis, The Handsome Family, Laura Cantrell, BC Camplight, Jim Bob, Lloyd Cole et al.), and some older wonders (most notably the first disc in Cherry Red's excellent Where Were You? compilation). To keep me sane while I waited for the recovery guy though, I needed a little more. So I put on a recent edition of the Mickey Bradley Record Show on BBC Radio Ulster (available on BBC Sounds, should you have the time and the inclination). Mickey Undertone always plays a great selection, mixing punk and new wave with classic soul, pop and folk plus a bunch of new stuff that fits well with the old. He may even have overtaken Natasha Raskin-Sharp on BBC Radio Scotland as my favourite radio show at the moment (but don't tell Natasha, she's still delivering the goods). Anyway, here's a few of the tunes Mickey played that kept me going while I waited for a new tyre...
