29-30^th March

Bus Cairo – Taba:

22.00 / 5.00

30^th March

Taxi Taba – Eilat

8.30 / 9.00

Bus Eilat – Tel Aviv

11.00 / 16.25

1^st April

Tel Aviv – Jerusalem

13.00 / 13.55

Number 21 Bus Jerusalem – Bethlehem

40 mins from Damascus Gate bus station. Bus leaves when it’s full.

3^rd April

Taxi Bethlehem – Ramallah

About 1 hour

4^th April

Minibus Ramallah – Jerusalem

07.00 / 09.30

(including time getting through checkpoint)

Bus Jerusalem – Eilat

10.00 / 14.52

Taxi Eilat – Taba

1/2 an hour

Minibus Taba – Nuweiba

1 hour

5^th April

‘Fast’ Ferry Nuweiba – Aqaba

1 hour (could leave absolutely any time!)

5^th – 6^th April

Taxi Aqaba – Amman

23.30 – 05.00

6^th – 8^th April

Damascus – Istanbul

22.00 – 08.30

8^th – 9^th April

Bus Istanbul – Prishtina

17.30 / 09.40

11^th April

Taxis Prishtina – Skopje

11.00 / 12.50

Bus Skopje – Belgrade

13.00 / 20.45

11^th – 12^th April

Belgrade – Brno

21.30 / 9.30

13^th April

Brno – Prague

12.30 / 15.00

13^th – 14^th April

Prague – London

17.30 / 10.15am

I’m going to sleep ’til next Thursday… No actually, I’m going to Manchester to do a three-day run of the Rebel Cell at the Contact Theatre. Sheet.

I’m going to go to sleep next Thursday.

Big up to everyone who’s followed us this far… The journey goes on.

Prague. We mainly spend our time eating noodles in a Chinese-run traditional Czech pub full of cigarette smoke and Chris Rea. When you’re travelling constantly, cities rushing past you at a rate of three a day, you learn not to try to grab at them. It’s enough just to be stationary, present in one bar for a brief time only. If we were trying to see all the famous towers we’d lose our footing altogether.

We do have a short walk along the river, though: we see boats full of tourists slowly tacking, watched by the statues that guard the rooftops. Buildings are pink and yellow and pale blue. Billy takes black-and-white pictures of their shadows. Turning back to the area around the bus station, we find it full of erotica shops and club posters. A MacDonald’s squats under a flyover.

Time up.

We pick up our bags from the two-woman coven behind the left luggage counter, and take a moment to breathe. This is the last journey on the mission. Here are the people we’ll be spending the next 17 and a half hours with. They’re impassive, a line of shut faces waiting to stow their bags and find their holes.

“Alright mate?”

Nothing.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

Fine. We’ve become expert at shrugging off the human cold. We own the bus. Our seats at least, leathery and reclining. Our humour fills the small space and we settle in for the whole haul, ready as anything. A young woman is looking after us all, she comes down the aisle with headphones and coffee. We sort of make friends. The bus pulls away, through fancy Prague and into the cylindrical world of travel-limbo, that ventilated strangeness of snores and knees and sideways glances.

* * *

I wake rolling over smooth plains, where pylons march jockey-legged against a flat dawn sky. A sign for Dunkirke flashes by, then not long after that a sign for Calais -30km. We’ll be on the ferry soon, I suppose. I look around the coach- the other passengers are slumped in their own unlikely positions, the man to my right with his forehead against the window, jiggling gently. There are only a few of us awake.

“Boozers”

announces a sign on a supershop building,

“The Spirit Of Calais”,

and Calais appears without a word to say for itself, a spread of modern semis with no visible spirit at all.

* * *

I supposed wrong: we’re not getting on the ferry. After our last border crossing, where the French border guards animatedly bad-mouth the British ones, who tiredly wave us through, our bus ramps onto a slot on a train which in turn slides into the Eurotunnel. Within an hour, we’ve got Dover behind us and we’re travelling up the very English M20 to London.

I wanted England to be sunny, all cricket whites and village greens, but it isn’t.  We roll into London under a sky of grey flannel, past Beyonce Hair Salon and a gap-toothed crackhead, who weeps and offers a fistful of cigarettes to a hooded bloke.

Victoria Greenline Station. We emerge from the bus blinking, the last two to disembark. We can’t be arriving yet. Not yet. There’s a fast food place in the station, does it do breakfast? It does breakfast. We order one each, and there we are, sat stunned over plates of beans and chips and tin-tomatoes.

Welcome home.

I don’t know what we’re going to do with ourselves, without journeys to make.

A documentary, perhaps.

On the train to Brno, we share a slot with a young family and an IBM worker on his way to Bratislava. The worker lived in Omagh for years and has a strong Northern Irish musk in his Slovak accent. The little girl sings to her Smurf. We’re passing through countries without noticing, in the Schengen now. It’s a relief after the last many borders.

A Tesco sign announces our arrival in Brno, and Rita is waiting on the platform. Her face comes out of the crowd like an old friend, although we’ve never met before. She is American and an expert listener.

Brno. The Old Western World. Where Kosovo was crumbling or newly assembled, Brno is statuesque, ornate pillars and ground that has been paved for centuries. That’s where Gregor Mendel was a monk; there’s where Milan Kundera was born.

We catch a tram to Rita’s place, a cosy, well-lived flat at the top of a building. It’s still morning- Rita cooks us a hearty North American breakfast, which we eat with a special vigour (the vigour of people who’ve lived weeks on falafel and flimsy pizza). Eggs! Bread! Mugs of coffee! We eat until our moods are two sizes larger, and then Rita takes us out again, this time through a city washed with rain. We land at Masaryk University, in a big panelled room where stern-faced professors stare from the wall. The space is huge, and the stage is governed by a lectern. I wonder how many people will come, and how I’ll manage to work a vibe into existence in a lecture theatre. Within an hour, though, the seats are almost all full of buttock, and somehow the gig is working- me slinging rhymes and explanations at EFL students, them shouting Yeah at all the right moments. I get excited. I get the mic lead tangled. I pull the computer monitor off the lectern. Gully.

Afterwards, I’m embarrassed by the number of people asking me to sign things, and more embarrassed by the number telling me they didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I thought we’d really connected there.

Nonetheless, Masaryk is enthused. Twelve of us sit together in a side room for their weekly Music Group (I’d asked if I could take part), us and Rita singing Woody Guthrie songs in a mostly Czech accent and playing beats with yoghurt pots. The music leads us to a bar, and onto another.

I find these Czech minds honest to bursting. English men are generally ugly, I’m told. English humour is frankly shit, I’m later informed. And this delivered with impeccable hospitality, constant generosity and attentiveness. Tough love.

I go home to Rita’s with a pulse in my temple and a sway in my step.

Thank hiccup.

Thank you Brno.

I’m performing at the University here at 3pm, and then we’ll be joining the music group for a rendition of Czech folk songs. Gully!

Tomorrow we make our way to Prague for a few hours there and then 17 and a half hours on a coach home.

“Bus full”

We are told.

“Next one at 5”

Hearts sink. Five is just not possible. Our train from Belgrade to Brno is at 9.30, and the journey there takes 7 hours. If we miss the Brno train, I miss my Brno gig, my final slice of purpose for the last stage of the journey. We plead, and the woman agrees to sell us a 5 o’ clock ticket with a note on the back to the 1 o’ clock driver

“Let these idiots on”

or something similar. We rush through, waving the noted tickets, and find the driver. He doesn’t know the English word for No, but he’s fluent in the gestures. Fuck Off, his arms and face tell us loud and clear.

Bruised puppy, I stand by the door of the bus while he loads the other passengers on.

Fuck Off, says his back.

My spirit slumps, and my face follows. It must be a mask of despair. He turns, closes his eyes, inhales a lungful of pity and says

OK Then

with a swipe of his hand. We blossom into action, swing our bags into the hold and board the bus triumphant. We spend most of the journey cramped into the stairwell, being stared at by an old lady with the most impressive moustache I’ve seen for a while, but we do arrive in Belgrade in time for our train, clutching cold slices of pizza we picked up on the way. I stick my head out of the train window as it pulls away. If I had dog ears, they’d be streaming out behind me.

The old pain is still there, though, hiding in the corners: talk to a Kosovan for five minutes and you will hear a story that aches your heart. One told of his Albanian school being shut down. He and the other pupils were moved to a school up the road, a Serb school- they had to attend at night once the other kids had finished. He was beaten up every day, he said, his nose broken. The Serb kids brought chains and sticks. When the war came, he was a refugee- his father was in the army and wouldn’t follow orders. He describes how it feels to turn on the television and see the names of family members among the newly dead.

Another man says he was stopped in the street by four policemen, who searched his bag. Finding an Albanian language book, they beat him with boots and batons. There was nothing he could do but take it.

This was just over ten years ago, when I was into pills and falling off my skateboard. I’m humbled.

My time in Prishtina is busy; Lara (a friend’s friend who lives here) has set me up just lovely. First is a slot on Urban FM, a local hiphop station manned by Bim, run from the top of a ramshackle house with a punctured van outside. Afterwards, Bim drives me to his mate’s studio at the top of another house, his mate a long tall producer with a mad expressive excitement for his craft. The three of us set to making a tune together, and I find I can write about nothing but Palestine, walls placed to diminish your pride, sticks and stones.

The next morning I go for a run in a park close to the guest house Vigan arranged for us. Kids play with a ball, crisp packets blow through, and I come across a cluster of graves. There must be forty of them, and every single one carries 1999 as the year of death.

Though razor wire lines the cloud and saps its colouring

The music isn’t dying out. In fact it’s flourishing…

We work further on the song that afternoon, and the more I repeat the words I wrote for Palestine, the more they fall for Kosovo.

A young child’s lifetime ago, this nation was subjected to systematic persecution, racism, rape, murder. And still, I’m in a flat with three of its grinning sons, bopping our heads in the universal dance of hiphop appreciation, stating ourselves with equal pride and equal humanity.

… and nothing can stop it. Not a tank, not a government

We do it for the rush and the love of it.

In the evening, I perform at Vigan’s other place, the Tetris bar- jammed full of people, all shouting Yeah at the right moments. Vigan plays Roma music off his laptop, afterwards, and we all dance ‘til we can’t any more.

Kosovo, Pristina. Photographs of men who 'disappeared' during the conflict are pinned on the government gates, to remind politicians of issues that have still not been properly investigated. 2010

Kosovo, Pristina. Children carrying a football walk past the Kosovan government buildings. Pinned to the gates are photos of men who disappeared during the conflict. 2010

Kosovo, Pristina. Shopping for jeans, downtown. 2010

Kosovo, Pristina. Locals buying groceries at the public market. 2010

Kosovo, Pristina. Posters cover a wall in the capital with hateful images of 'Don Anton' - a Catholic minister, originally from Kosovo, whom local people say "compared Kosovans to dogs".

Kosovo, Pristina. Wall of a house in the market area. 2010

It’s going to be a busy time- I’ll be on the Kosovan radio station Urban FM this evening, then when that finishes we’ll be heading to a recording session to put a UK-Kosovo track together with some local rappers, and then there’s a party somewhere… Tomorrow night, Dizraeli plays solo at the Tetris bar, alongside DJ iPod.

Kosovo is an exciting place to be- a young country finding its feet and stating itself.

Sleeplessness has brought us close to enlightenment. At least, everything seems very profound right now.

I’m going to go and have a nap.