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It’s here! The Highway Cello book is now available. It felt to me as though it was a slow process – a long time coming. But they tell me publishing is never quick. Actually I’m supposed to tell you this is a pre-publication offer. There’s a formal, real, publication date in May. But for you, my special blog subscribers(!), the ebook is available today. And you can order the actual, real, physical, bricks and mortar (I mean paper and ink) book for delivery, post-free, next week!

I’m very excited. It seems to me a good day to publish a book. It is, after all, the birthday of one of the 20th century’s absolutely supreme cellists – one Mstislav Rostropovich. And if you’ve been paying attention to the blog so far, you might remember that means it’s my birthday too. Well, happy birthday, then. Thank you.

I thought we’d take the opportunity for a general update, spring-clean, and re-launch of the website, too. So there’s lots of new stuff on there, if you want to have a browse…

And talking of new stuff, I’ve been getting into some new music too. One of the things that’s got lots of us cellists excited lately is Wednesday. Mention that in a group of people, and you learn a lot very quickly. You immediately know who watches Netflix, and who knows about The Addams Family. I confess I’d never seen The Addams Family, but this spin-off is fabulous. No spoilers, but just let me tell you that Wednesday, the daughter of the family (played magnificently deadpan by Jenna Ortega) plays a black cello. Her rendering of the Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black is simply magnificent.

And I’ve been trespassing on violin territory, and trying to play Monti’s Czardas. Well, I have to tell you, it’s [word removed] difficult on the cello. So you might not be hearing me play that one in public for a while yet.

But there are some gigs coming up. Do you remember Christian, the Brazilian cellist with a bike, who I met in Canterbury? He’s back in Europe, doing a big tour again. As part of that tour he’s coming up to Cumbria, and we’re going to do a few gigs together, in April. I’m getting excited about that.

And I’m trying to organise a book tour, and a few other things. Watch this space. And invite me to play a gig, of course!

Please spread the word about Highway Cello. Tell everyone to read it. Buy it for everyone for Christmas. Post a review. Etc., etc. You know the drill.

Thank you for everything!

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Lots of people said I need to get on and write the Highway Cello book. So I got on and wrote it.

The first draft, and first edit, are complete. (That’s not a real book cover you can see there, sorry).

I suppose now the real work starts – it’s a complicated process to get from here to a finished book in a bookshop.

So I’m looking for a few volunteers. It’s very hard to judge the worth of what we’ve written ourselves. The publishing industry calls them – I don’t know why – “beta readers”. A few people who will read the draft, and give critical feedback.

Would you like to do that for Highway Cello? I would be very grateful for a few volunteers. And you’d get your name in the book!!!

The only rule is you have to promise to give properly honest feedback – what worked, what didn’t work, did it make sense, did you want to turn the page or would you rather have put it down. Is the tone right – is it too serious, flippant, complicated, simplistic, episodic, discursive, ordinary, unbelievable, etc, etc. Did you cry? Did you laugh?

If you would like to help in this way – and get first sight of it all – please leave a comment, or send me an email.

kennethwilsoncello@gmail.com

Thanks!

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One of the great things about being home is that you can get back to proper practice – lots of scales – which I wasn’t able to do when I was away.

So I’ve been back in the UK about ten days.  I had two nights at home, and then went off down to Malvern and Gloucester, for a family gathering, and a gig arranged at short notice.

John had seen something about Highway Cello, and got in touch to see if I could stop off and do them a concert on the way.  I couldn’t, because it was too far off route.  So we put it on the back burner, neither of us really expecting the opportunity to come quite so soon.

The Theatre of Small Curiosities is a wonderful place.  John designed and mostly built it himself, and hosts a wide range of performances, spanning the spectacular to the simply eccentric.  It seats twenty in comfort.  John is himself a poet, and a Morris dancer, and an engineer, a cyclist, motorcyclist, and trials driver.  He looks a bit like the Green Man T-shirt he’s wearing.  And he knows a lot about bicycles.

Now that I’m home I’m reading his book about the painstaking restoration of a penny-farthing bicycle which he undertook a few years ago, and which he used to ride around town occasionally.  Normally he rides a Moulton, or a copy of an 1893 Pedersen.  The Pedersen, as I’m sure you know, doesn’t have a saddle.  It has a hammock.

His invitation to return, and do another gig, spurs me to get started on the Highway Cello follow-up.  You heard it here first…

I want to do more house concerts, and performances in small venues like John’s theatre – anywhere 15-25 people can gather.  But small events can’t economically be done in isolation.  They need to be organised in groups of four or five, on consecutive days, not too far from each other.  A Tour, in other words.

So this is a shout-out for venues.  Would you like a house concert at home?  Or is there a nearby venue you could promote me to?  Let me know, and we can start planning, and fishing around for others nearby.  I’m asking for ideas, not commitments, at this stage!

And I’m working on new programmes.  Centred around Libre, of course, but including stories and extracts from the book which – of course – I’ve started writing.  If we get the timing right, yours could perhaps be the book launch tour, couldn’t it?  How about that then?

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According to the screen we are travelling at 249kph, which I calculate is 155mph, about twelve times as fast as I would normally go on a bike, and in a much straighter line.  The seat is very comfortable, and the air is conditioned.

I can give my full attention to the view, without worrying about potholes, suicidal or murderous drivers, insufficently leashed roadside dogs, broken glass, sunstroke, dehydration, or any of the other inconveniences that have attended me for the last few weeks.  It’s quite soporific.

Libre is flat out on the luggage rack above me, almost certainly asleep.  The bicycle has been left in the capable hands of Julia in Rome, who will dismantle it as much as is necessary to fit it in a box, and post it home.

Home.  I’m on my way.  Three hours on the train to Verona, which I keep calling Verano by mistake, then tomorrow a longer journey to Munich, before an early start and a late finish should get me home a bit after bedtime on Sunday.

Verona, where at least two gentlemen came from, and where Shakespeare also located Romeo and Juliet.  Do they know it’s fiction?  You can pay a touristical fee to admire the balcony from which Juliet wherefored her Romeo.  Shakespeare, as far as we know, never went to Verona.  But we shouldn’t spoil a good story.

Yes, to answer your question, I did go to Hadrian’s Villa yesterday, my last day in Rome.  Libre sensibly stayed behind – it was a joint decision – while I peddled twenty miles there and twenty miles back again.

Nobody could accuse Hadrian of being a spendthrift.  He puts Imelda Marcos right in the shade.  Unfortunately the heyday of his villa – which is more of a large town than the word “villa” suggests, at least to me – is well past.

There are glimpses of a glory that must have been, but mostly the marble is long gone.  There are bricks, in a distinctive style, on the diagonal, the occasional pillar and half cupola, a great number of extremely informative notices in several languages, and lots of ruin and dust.

I stayed longer than I might have done, partly from the tourist’s requirement to get value for money, but mostly because I didn’t want to face the road back to Rome.

The road out of the city was busy.  There are about ten miles before you see a blade of grass.  There are some roadside cycle tracks, but you can’t use them because the positioning, and occasional emptying, of recycling bins mean they are covered in a confetti of broken glass.

Once out of the city the road narrows, but the traffic doesn’t get less.  And there’s a lot more glass, and plastic, and generally dumped rubbish, some of it burned.  Then you reach the travertine stone yards, which generate more heavy traffic, and more dust.  Take the bus next time.

*

Libre isn’t coming with me.  They wouldn’t want her at the opera, she said, and I’m afraid I agreed.  So I’m going to La Traviata alone.

We’ve arrived in Verona at the height of opera season.  In the third largest Roman arena left in Italy, and one of the best preserved, they have a summer of Carmen, Aida, Nabucco, Turandot and La Traviata.  It’s a big arena, but there aren’t many tickets left for tonight.  There are a lot of tourists in Verona.

Libre didn’t come out earlier, either.  We were both hot and tired, she said, and anyway her contract ended in Rome.  Go and be a tourist, she said, and I’ll stay here.

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I gave a private concert for the Mayor’s Diplomatic Ambassador.  On the roof of the Musei Capitolini, in the sunshine, with the ancient city spread out below us.

Actually it wasn’t that private.  It required a staff of six to organise, escort, take notes, photograph the event, and generally see fair play.  As I said to the Ambassador, it made me feel very welcome in Rome.  I was right to feel that, he said; I was indeed very welcome in Rome.

In the last few days, when I’m supposed to have been resting, recovering, I’ve biked a lot of miles over Rome’s back-breaking cobbles.  They look nice, from a distance, those cobbles.  But they are not nice for riding on.  Libre does not like them at all.

Proper Romans ride electric bikes with enormously fat soft tyres.  Much better on the cobbles.

I’ve played in the Piazza Navona in front of a famous fountain and a million tourists.  I’ve played a couple of times by the Fontana Tortarughe, the Turtle Fountain, serenading a little wedding party with The Swan while they took their pictures beside the fountain’s rather immodest bronze youths.

I tried to negotiate with the police to play in front of the Colosseum, but there was no room for negotiation.  Even the suggestion that I’d just play the Italian national anthem didn’t stop the solemn shaking of heads.  

So I played instead in front of the “fake Colosseum”, the Teatro Marcello.  That probably wasn’t allowed either, but the police were elsewhere.

I’ve played for the shoppers and tourists and stall holders at the Testaccio Market.  I’ve played for the evening strollers, and the young and dangerous footballers, in the local piazza, and then strolled with them, carrying Libre and eating ice cream as slowly as the heat allows.

And tomorrow, my last day in Rome, I really should get back on the bike, for one last hurrah.  As the Ambassador was presenting me with a rather fine print of the Piazza Campidoglio, where we were meeting, they were quite clear.  Having started from Hadrian’s Wall, I should properly finish at Hadrian’s Villa.  

It’s at Tivoli, just 20 miles outside Rome.  Hadrian built it so that he could govern the Empire in comfort, not cooped up in the little villas and palaces of the city itself.

Will I go?  I really ought to.  They were very definite, almost insistent, about it.  But I think I won’t take Libre.  I really can’t see my little homemade aluminium cello rack surviving any more of these Roman cobbles.

We’ll see how we feel in the morning.  We’ve come this far together, and at least one of us might get separation anxiety if we don’t go together.  We’ll see how we feel in the morning, our last day in Rome.

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“Is this the first time you play at the Pantheon?”  The question was aggressive.  The questioner wasn’t wearing a uniform, but he had a large Polizia badge hanging round his neck, and resting on a very authoritatively sized stomach.  The badge was not much below my eyeline when I stood up.

I didn’t have time for any of the usually persuasive story about having biked from almost Scotland.  “It is the last,” he said, wobbling his badge with power.  “Here it is forbidden.”

You could see why it would be.  The crowds were big enough for a football match (though well enough behaved for rugby), and had just been dangerously parted by a parade of three horse-drawn carriages.  No authority would be in the mood to tolerate a stationary cellist eliciting mild applause.

Even so, I did get a photo, and a video, to prove that I did play in front of the Pantheon – which has probably seen worse in the 1897 years that it’s stood there.

Rome is a city of many superlatives and magnificences like this.  The Highway Cello journey was conceived as being “from the edge of the Roman Empire to its heart.”  And here that heart seems still to beat.

I’ve been here nearly 72 hours – in Rome, silly, not specifically at the Pantheon – and I’m still trying to believe that the project is effectively over – the goal has been reached, I’ve arrived, I’m in Rome.

So I’ve been going around all the iconic places, and many little hidden corners, shamelessly blocking the tourist traffic, and playing Bach, and Debussy, and old English folk tunes that may or may not have been written by Henry VIII, and Irish love songs, and anything else I can think of, trying to get it into my head that I’m in Rome.

The heat has dissipated, and the forecast is for a comfortable 33C today.  It went out with quite a bang.  Jenny and Alfie had put on a little party, and I’d played some stuff out on their terrace, overlooking semi-suburban Rome – yes, Rome – and I was sleeping on the same terrace because the bedroom was too hot, when I woke up to find I was being blown away.

We’d seen some lightning in the distance, earlier, and suddenly the storm arrived.  The wind was fearsome, and fearsomely sudden, and stuff that wasn’t tied or weighted down was banging and crashing and flying away.  Rome – yes, I’m in Rome – can really put on a show.

They have pizzas here, and ice-cream.  And fountains.  And a river called the Tiber.  And history, and Empire.  And tourists who seem sometimes to want a break from all that just to listen to a cello playing in the shade.

And I’m sitting in a heap, reflecting that I’ve ridden 40 days, and 1800 miles, and climbed the height of approximately 3.3 Everests to get here.  And feeling that odd mixture of finality, and mortality, and emptiness, and accomplishment, that goes with the reaching of a goal.  

A goal, by the way, that would have been a lot harder to reach without all the encouragement I’ve had from patient and indulgent readers – for which, thank you, and thank you again.

When I should, at my age, know that life is not about goals.  It’s only process.  And the process continues, and today’s another day.  So what shall we do today?

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“Are you going to play for the Pope?” Terence asked, as he snipped the hair that was a good deal greyer since the last time I’d seen him, just before Covid.  “Well, you should.”

That was a few days before I left home, in the last week of May.  Not the Pope himself, I thought; but how would you go about getting permission to play in St. Peter’s Square?

I had a quick look at the Vatican’s websites.  But they were too complicated, and I gave up.  There were lots of other things to do, and Rome was a long way off.

But now here I am.  I must have been in a hurry.  The miles flew by, and after an hour I was sixteen miles out of Bracciano.  I had to ring the reception committee, and tell them I’d be early.

Committee?  Not exactly.  But Jenny and Alfie are going to meet me at the Vatican.  BBC Look North, who made quite a feature of my departure, want to make another of my arrival.  Do it on a phone, they said; make it look homemade.

If you don’t ask, you don’t get.  So I approached the Carabinieri, four of them, chatting outside their van with a soldier, his finger on the trigger.

“We don’t have jurisdiction,” they agreed.  “You have to ask the police.”  I didn’t have to look for the police.  When I returned to the bike, there were half a dozen of them, wondering to each other whether they should arrest it.

So I asked.  I’ve come from Hadrian’s Wall, yes, on the bike, yes, with the cello.  Please could I play for five minutes in the Square – a fitting end to the journey.

“We don’t have jurisdiction,” one of them said.  “That’s another country.  You have to talk to the Vatican State Police.”

Where, I wondered, aloud, might I find the Vatican Police?

“You don’t.  I call them for you.  Show me your documents.”

So with my passport open in front of him, he rang his office, and explained the unusual request.  “Normally of course, this isn’t allowed.  But I think they might say yes.”

Ten minutes later the yes arrived, a phone call, followed not far behind by a large but un-uniformed Vatican official.

The policeman, from the neighbouring country, held onto my passport until I’d finished playing.  He handed it back with a broad smile.  “Complimenti”, he said,  “Welcome to Rome.”

So I’ve played my cello in St Peter’s Square, outside the Vatican.  My arrival has been officially filmed, in a homemade kind of a way, and should appear on the BBC later, by way of proof.

I’ve arrived.  And in 1800 miles, and forty days, I haven’t had a puncture.  I’m going to lie down.

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It’s 27 miles to Rome.  If the weather had been different – which I think it sometimes must be, unless all these roadsigns warning of snow are someone’s idea of a joke – I would just have pedalled on, and reached Rome a bit later today.

It wasn’t quite so hot today.  But one of these flashing signs says it’s still 35 degrees at nearly bed time.  Too hot to cycle further.

And the roads have been really terrible most of the day. Suitable for tractors, but definitely not for bicycles with cellos. Quite a few rude words were said, aloud.

Bracciano is a fine place to stop.  Like so many of these towns, there’s a little medieval heart, with steep, stepped, cobbled streets.  Then there’s a castle, which in Bracciano’s case is mostly newer, and a fine collection of churches.

Bracciano also has its lake – not as big as Bolsena’s, but handsome enough to be in Cumbria, and way below the medieval town so you can see nearly all of it in one go.

The square, of course, isn’t medieval.  But I’m sat on a metal bench facing a fine town hall, with a nice fountain beside me, and children running about.  I’ve played a Bach Suite, with all the repeats, and the square seems generally to approve.

There are still a few people working in the town hall (it’s nearly 8 o’clock), and periodically the balconies fill up as they come out to listen, or just to take the air.

I needed to play this evening, not having found anywhere all day, and not wanting Libre to stay in her case again.  And Bracciano, in the square overlooked by the castle, seems a good last staging post before Rome tomorrow…

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I smell like the Devil.  Literally.  It’s nothing to do with the heat – though more of that later.  It’s a real and strong smell of sulphur.  And it’s coming from me.

When I saw the signs to the Bagno San Fillipo, 4km up the hill to the right, I imagined a shaded square, with cold water gushing from ornate fountain heads, sustaining a village, and several bars and restaurants where you could get coffee, which I was desperately needing.  The signpost had a picture of a fountain, or something very like one.

The SS2 – that’s the name of the road I’m on – begins (or ends) in Rome.  The signs are counting down the kilometres, and I’ve reached 160:  100 miles to Rome.  

At this rate, though, I’ll never make it.  The road goes through a desert, and I’m parched and fading.  Should I go off route – and climb 500ft – to enjoy the relief of San Fillipo’s Bagno?

I changed my mind twice before I actually began the climb.  And when I got there I found the whole thing had been mis-sold.  

There was no mention, at the bottom of the hill, of the word termico, “thermal”, which is now everywhere.  These are hot springs, not cold mountain waters, and there’s a strong smell of sulphur in the air.

But I’ve come all this way, and there’s no shady square, and no coffee.  It would be churlish, I feel, to use that as a reason not to take the waters.

The result is that now I’m enveloped in this strong sulphurous perfume, which is going to accompany me for the rest of the day.

In the end the only place to get coffee on this hellish road was a petrol station.  At least they filled my water bottles.

A small wasp got inside my shirt.  By the time I’d stopped, and ripped off my helmet, and struggled with the sodden shirt, it had stung me twice in that little bit of the back you just can’t reach.

The forecast said it would be 37 degrees today.  The green flashing sign outside the Chemist says it’s 39.  The red flashing sign outside the discount supermarket directly across the road says it’s 41.

They’re flashing at different rates, and the effect is like two drunken men sparring without ever landing a punch.  Why can’t they just call it a draw and agree it’s round about 40 degrees?  It’s too hot to fight about anything.

When it’s this hot, waves of heat, way above body temperature, sweep up off the black road.  You notice it most on the ears – they’re constantly burning, as though the dry countryside is talking about you, mocking you, hissing quietly about the lack of shade.

The grass beside the road gave up long ago.  It’s the same straw colour as the emptied fields.  This landscape might be beautiful in the Spring.  It’s hard to see it that way now.

Still, Bolsena, by the lake of the same name, is somewhere to aim for.  You can see it from a distance – the lake that is – and it must, you feel, cool the surrounding air a little.  

Entering the town, with its stupendous old castle on one side, I aim for the lake on the other.  I’m looking for a little hotel as close to the water as possible.  Let me in that water!

The lake is a slightly cool bath temperature.  The air is a quite warm sauna.  Don’t you just love the summer?

I’ve washed off most of the sulphur, so I think I can walk up to the old castle, through the avenue of the grandest and biggest plane trees I’ve ever seen, without crosses being waved at me.  But I’m afraid Libre is staying behind.  One of us is just too tired.

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