Sitting in Belgrade airport in existential trip mode. It’s so hard to focus at these moments. Apparently you can tell if you are dreaming if you can’t remember how you got to the place you are at. I remember a plane, a sleep, a flat, dry cheese sandwich and a smiling old lady with blonde bone white hair. That memory and a slight chill on the lower part of my left arm from the air conditioning unit make me believe that this is real.

I am trying to learn the lines from the song but it’s poetry won’t flow from page to memory. I so admire actors who can perform these mental feats and make it look easy.

I have three hours here in limbo so I will try again and again. But it is so hard to focus.

Mediterranean Bar, Sarajevo

So it turns out that I am here, playing CDs in this place at the behest of ronhill (one word, all lower case, simple, sophisticated looking but not overly flashy typeface). That’s ronhill, not Ron Hill, who is probably a very nice bloke who lives in Croydon, but ronhill, the cigarette brand that is sponsoring the Mediterranean Bar, which is a pop up bar that has popped up outside a venue in a large, slightly run down concrete square in a concrete city that is currently in the middle of it’s (actually up and coming) film festival.

As a so called artist I can’t afford to be touchy about working for fag brands, even though I don’t smoke and think that I would approve of a complete ban on smoking if it were possible, I think, because surely people should have the right to get addicted to stuff and kill themselves, slowly, if they really want to. It’s a tricky one.

Anyhow, the gig goes well, considering the temperature has plummeted to a very unseasonal 15 degrees centigrade and the bar is outside.
So I play a good bumpy, pumpy house set. ronhill has a girl dancing behind a screen so I take a picture of her shadow then sneak a peek round the side of the screen just to make sure she is real and not a video that looks like a girl dancing behind a screen. Yes, there she is.

And the set flows nicely, in that rather good, unfocussed, not really thinking about it way that good DJing has to be.

And I’m thinking: There are so many people smoking here. And I’m thinking: This city is so full of brutalist concrete architecture that even I, a person who loves brutalist concrete architecture, am a little overwhelmed. And I’m thinking: I wish I could stay and explore. And I’m Thinking: Boom, boom, boom.