On Thursday 17^th June 2004 I made my way down to South Wales in order to see Bob Dylan play at the CIA the following night. I had decided that it would be better to drive down the day before and stay at my parents’ flat in Penarth, a pleasant seaside town just to the west of Cardiff and where I had lived for the first six years of my life before rolling up and down the length and breadth of the land due to the work my dad was involved in. Driving down on Thursday evening would ensure avoiding any possible Friday jams on the roads, especially the M25 and upper part of the M4 which could be bastards to deal with if things weren’t looking pretty. It turned out to be a good decision because even taking into account the detour I had to make to my parents’ house in Harpenden in order to pick up the keys to their flat, it still only took me around 3 ½ hours to get to Cardiff.

So much was it a good decision that the only thing I really had to think about on the way down was whether or not I should visit my old friend Rik Dixon whom I hadn’t seen in about three years, possibly four, and who lived in an attic flat in Penarth which he shared with his long term partner Hazel. For quite a long time I sat there behind the wheel of my Nissan weighing up the pros and cons, trying to figure out if it would be a good idea or not to climb those stairs up to Rik’s place, and the further I made my way down the road the more I felt like it would be a good thing to do. On in the background for the duration of the journey was Bob’s far from perfect but still quite likeable Under The Red Sky from 1991, where for me the best songs on it were the title track, Unbelievable, Born In Time, God Knows and, coming in a distant fifth, Cat’s In The Well.

June 2004 and two Bob shows are coming up. It seemed like it was not so very long ago that I had finished writing up Three Bob Shows which covered the three bob shows that I had been to in 2003; Sheffield, Birmingham and London in that order. Great shows, naturally, although I have to admit that I did get into a couple of scrapes along the way, which led me to believe at times I was getting a bit of beating from the gods and that I’d better learn to stay on the right side of the road. Enough of that for now, suffice to say that I just about managed to come out of it with the sun still shining brightly over my shoulder as far as my love of Bob was concerned and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.

Early June, hay fever season, a bit of a distraction for me at some points to say the least, because on a bad day I can suffer from it pretty badly, flat on my back for hours and hours on end. Guess you just have to keep on riding with head held high, despite the fact I get up some mornings feeling like I have been boxed around the around the ears, walking around whilst sneezing continuously all the way to the coffee machine in the kitchen. No doubt whatsoever that I am looking forward to the 2004 shows, which will be numbers 22 & 23 respectively as far as my precious list of Bob concerts are concerned. Looking forward to upcoming Bob shows can be for me like seeing visions of glory, but having never done anything glorious in my life it is not possible for me to accurately define or describe what those visions might actually be. The main thing was that there was no way I would not be making it to them, only if strange lightning struck, or if some other such particular act of fate came along to cut through me like a knife.