Ally and I had worked out the instrumentation and I had figured out a vocal melody on this track before it had any lyrics. And time was running out, so I ended up expanding an old poem I had written in a notebook. The result was a much more phonetically-driven set of words, trying to capture as best I could in pure imagery and abstraction the kind of things the poem was originally about.

Namely, the claustrophobic feeling of knowing an anxiety attack is around the corner, being trapped near the toilet in a stuffy coach full of strangers for 8 hours as you drive back from London to Newcastle. I had been down there for a demo and everything about the march and the action felt laced with futility to me. The people sitting next to me on the coach were patting themselves on the back and bragging about how many times they'd sued the cops. I got sucked into a very existential cycle of "is happiness even possible under capitalism" and "am I attempting to quantify my happiness because of capitalist socialisation". Not a fun place to be with no one to talk to, a dead phone battery and only a cold and tasteless vegan sausage roll from Holland & Barrett for sustenance.

So my eyes were fixed on what was happening on the other side of the window, for the most part. The long lines of lorries on the motorway didn't help much but every now and then we'd hit a stretch of countryside or a far away spattering of twinkling lights, and the moon eventually rose, and I eventually made it home. So I guess it's also kind of another survival song - whodathunk.