By DON McGLASHAN

Brighton is the next gig, and I'm getting the train down early to see some friends.

First I have to walk to the tube and take the Northern line to Victoria, a journey of about 12km which takes about as long as driving from Auckland to Hamilton.

When we lived in London, I used to write a lot of songs on these trains.

Once through the outer suburbs, all the London lines choose their points to dive underground, away from light, parks and supermarkets and into the murky subconscious of the city.

On the Northern line it happens after East Finchley and it seems to involve a time change as well. The next stop, Highgate, has tiled walls that look like they haven't been touched since the Blitz. Then Archway, Tufnell Park, Kentish Town, Camden, where the carriage suddenly fills with noise and colour (ah, the real London - pink hair, leather thigh-boots, Union Jack skirts - and that's only the Spanish schoolchildren), then under the West End to change at Embankment for Victoria Station.

I buy a ticket to Eastbourne. I doze off as we trundle through Clapham, and hear ancestral voices in strange, 19th-century inflections welcoming me back, making odd, clipped speeches of post-colonial forgiveness and reconciliation, except they're not.

It's the conductor saying that, because of flooding all over the Southeast, the train will divide at the next stop. The front two carriages will go to Brighton, the back two to Eastbourne, the one marked "S" will stand still, and any left over will become exhibits in a transport museum in Scunthorpe.

I feel like a penguin on a disintegrating ice-floe, and the uniformed staff all seem to be Croatian refugees, whose command of English extends to "No," but a bunch of elderly, hair-netted women come to my rescue.

"The 10.15 always divides, luv. Has done ever since the War. You come with us - we'll see you right."

They do, and I get to Jevington village to meet my friends, and then on to Brighton in time for soundcheck.

We rehearse a new song, Stay Hungry, and decide to put it in the set. It's not really finished but sometimes it's good to throw songs into the water and see if they swim, before they get too sure of themselves. It works. Big smiles in the audience tell us it was the right time to try it.

Back in London, and the final gig at Shepherd's Bush. The Empire sits at one end of Shepherd's Bush Green, with an incongruous, decaying grandeur, like an old Shakespearean actor standing in line to use an ATM.

Inside, the venue is much bigger than the others we've played in the past month. There are staff hovering to plug things in for us, tune our guitars and tape our leads to the floor so we don't trip on them.