Sandy Beds

"This new addition is ideal for the inner city motorist"

My first road atlas, the one that lived in most of my early cars, was the one I bought the first time I ever flew solo to London. Getting to, through and back out of, the capital was, for a seventeen year old rookie, nothing short of a herculean task. Planning the route in advance only got me so far; the live plotting of the journey with said atlas open on my knee whilst simultaneously navigating the contours of the Great North Road and dodging the wagons, was a skill that had to be learned pretty fast (and in London the atlas was replaced with my trusty A-Z); that and checking oil and water gauges every five minutes on my (not so) trusty Vauxhall Viva Rockbox, whose dodgy radiator would overheat so randomly it placed the driver in peril more times then I care to remember. (Please don't talk to me about 'the Biggleswade incident, I beg you.)

No clockwise. No anti-clockwise

So the A1 became my most travelled road. Long before it was turned into an eight lane autobahn it was full of, roundabouts, traffic lights, discarded cassette tape fluttering in hedges by the roadside and glimpses of towns like Stamford and Sandy; or Sandy Beds as I have to call it. Then the tortuous crawl through Hatfield long before the Galleria and the tunnel beneath and then  finally into London. To younger readers who can't remember a time when the M25 didn't circle London, I grew up in a world where the M25 was just a glint in a town planner's eye. To get south of the river meant crossing Tower Bridge. But, hey as our good friend Alyson would surely say now, this is a music blog not a 70s Top Gear repeat with William Woodard - where's the bloody tune?

Well, in the same way that Sandy is always Sandy Beds, so Aylesbury (not on the A1 I grant you, but close by) is always Aylesbury Bucks. Don't ask me why, it just is. I guess I still have some obscure misplaced affection for the town I only remember visiting the once a million years ago. Which in a roundabout (groan) way leads me nicely to one of this year's finest long players, I Thought I Was Better Than You, Baxter Dury's 8th album. This was the first single he lifted from it:

Baxter Dury - Aylesbury Boy (2023)