It’s a strange quirk of human nature that yesterday’s dreams have a habit of becoming today’s expectations.

You work on something for months, somehow manage to pull it off, and it all ends up being even better than you'd hoped.

A few years ago, the idea of touring original music across the country, booking main stage festival slots, selling vinyl around the world, hearing my songs on the radio and working on a second album would have felt like a pipe dream.

Once it happens, though, there’s a real danger that it all begins to feel like the new normal.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not making any grandiose comparisons here.

But we see this pattern repeating itself everywhere.

It ruined songwriting for Billy Joel.

Once you’ve summoned up New York State of Mind or Scenes from an Italian Restaurant from the ether, you've set a pretty impossible bar to keep jumping over.

But what could be more painful than trotting out songs you know aren’t as good as the ones you were writing twenty years ago?

“I couldn’t be as good as I wanted to be. That was driving me crazy… I was always trying to feel like there was a real progression in my work, and eventually I realised I was only going to be X good. I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life beating myself up for not being better. So I stopped.”

Now, luckily for me, I’m still very much at the foot of whatever mountain it is I’m trying to climb.

But part of me worries that if I don’t figure this pattern out, it won’t matter much how much higher I get.

Because every summit has a habit of becoming a new base camp.

And if that’s the case, you’re never going to stop and take in the view.

Which, presumably, is why you wanted to climb up there in the first place.

So I thought I’d share a few reflections on the last few weeks, if you’ll forgive the self-indulgence.

It might also give you a glimpse into what life on the road is really like when you are, to quote a reviewer who came to the London show, “probably the best artist nobody has ever heard of.”

(I’m still trying to work out whether I should take that as a compliment.)

Relief, contrary to expectation, is a pretty wonderful emotion.

You’ll understand that I still see it as a minor miracle that anyone bought tickets to these tour dates.

I mean, I don’t have a publicity team. I’ve never gone viral. I don’t have a record label or an agent.

I hit the road in the middle of a heatwave with only a few well-placed Facebook ads and a set of crossed fingers.

The idea that there were people in Glasgow on a Monday who both knew we were coming and actually left their houses to sit in the sauna of a pub basement still seems ridiculous, even though I watched it happen.

Every night I found myself in some state of panic (much to the amusement of Dan and Grace) until I realised there were going to be at least twenty people in the building.

Because the truth is, I’d rather play to nobody than to two people.

The worst of it was Oxford.

With fifteen minutes to go, the only people in the audience were an old friend of mine who has recently moved to Aylesbury, and his wife.

Moments before I was about to suggest we forget the gig, head upstairs to the bar and get hammered enough to relieve the awkwardness, the room suddenly filled with glorious, living, breathing people.

Relief.

You can’t beat that feeling.

There’s also something strangely addictive about the rhythm of life in transit.

For a ruminator like me, it leaves very little time for rumination.

You wake up, eat breakfast, drive for a few hours, check in somewhere, play the gig, have a beer and go to bed.

Then you wake up and do it all again.

And in the middle of it all there are weird little problems to solve.

In Bristol, having lugged an entire PA system up several flights of stairs and rearranged an odd-smelling café by ourselves, we were met by the news that the local folk choir would be rehearsing in the room next door.

I suspect The Rolling Stones don’t have to worry about things like that.

In Oxford, the venue’s sound system simply wouldn’t work.

The sweet, though useless, lad behind the bar was predictably unable to help, and the manager wasn’t in.

Once Dan had managed to coax some noise out of it, we quickly discovered that one of their speakers was blown.

A quick trip upstairs to inform the lad behind the bar was met with a guilty smile and the immortal line:

“Oh yeah… people do actually tell us that a lot.”

Brilliant.

Weirdly, I wouldn’t trade any of it.

There’s something deeply satisfying about getting stuck in, figuring it out, and putting on a show anyway.

Luckily for me, I had Dan, our guitarist — a man I once watched assemble a makeshift mic stand from bits of wood salvaged from the backyard skip of an Italian beach bar, thereby saving an entire wedding gig.

We’ve been playing together for years, and I genuinely can’t imagine a situation arising where he wouldn’t just laugh, think about it for a few minutes, find some inexplicable workaround, and then spend the rest of the night making me sound twice as good.

I see him as a strange sort of savant.

If the power went down at Glastonbury, I suspect he’d disappear for ten minutes, emerge with some gaffer tape, and somehow it would all be fine.

He even managed to pack an entire PA system, three guitars, an amplifier and three suitcases into the back of my Toyota, leaving enough room for me to drive us all to Nottingham.

Which still doesn’t make physical sense to me.

We also had Grace Kelly with us, to balance out our particular brand of mid-thirties northern male awkwardness.

Grace moved to Manchester from New Zealand when she was nineteen, and I knew I needed her in the band the moment I watched her play an open mic night and effortlessly charm the entire room in a instant.

This is why choosing the right people to do things with matters so much.

I’d been feeling semi-guilty for months about the prospect of her spending three weeks in a car and various cut-price Airbnbs with two of Bolton’s weirdest men.

Not only was she entirely unfazed by it, she was a constant joy.

She’ll also put a harmony to anything, follow me like a ventriloquist when I forget my own lyrics, play second guitar, and open the show solo in the most unforgettable way.

Finally, everyone who came to the gigs was lovely.

We packed out every room in the end (although, admittedly, hosting a modest Christmas dinner would probably have packed most of them out), and meeting everyone afterwards was the perfect way to end each evening.

A special shout-out has to go to the man who brought handwritten flashcards of my lyrics for me to sign so he could auction them for charity, in what has to go down as the auction item least likely to raise any money in the history of auctions.

We had people driving from Devon to Oxford, from rural Scotland to Glasgow, and mysterious strangers who somehow knew every word to songs I once presumed would never make it out of the spare room.

All told, I need to remember that experiences like this—for all their ramshackle charm—are probably the ones I’ll look back on someday with more fondness than anything else I’ll ever do.

Because if every summit does eventually become a new base camp, perhaps the trick is to spend a little longer taking in the view.

I can’t wait to do it all again.

Thanks for coming.

And keep dreaming,

Rob