It’s always difficult to make a tour schedule sound, well, different from any other tour schedule. Basically it’s just a lot of names and places. I was just talking myself through all the towns and cities I’ll be visiting on The Thirty Years Tour when I found that they had a sort of rhythm of their own.I threw in a few extra lines in between and suddenly something that was just mundane became a piece of poetry. I may not unseat the Poet Laureate, but The Ode brought the Tour alive for me.

And thanks to Rachel Alcalay for the pictures and André Jacquemin for the soundtrack, I hope you’ll find this the best list of venues you’ll hear this year!

See you somewhere between Gateshead and Belfast!

Find out more: The Thirty Years Tour

Buy online: The Michael Palin Diaries