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As Our Man rightly reminded me, I have a turtle fighting for her life right now, travelling from Costa Rica to the Galapagos. Obviously, and luckily, Turtleocity is not doing it by herself. There with another 10 friends...and guess where my turtle is??? Number 8.

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tourists or travellers?

Here follows Alex Kapranos' last article for The Guardian's Sound Bites:

Sound Bites

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End of the road

In the last column charting his gastronomic adventures around the world with Franz Ferdinand, Alex Kapranos is appalled by British table manners in Prague

Friday August 25, 2006
The Guardian

This is Prague. It's time to stop writing about food. There's a booth selling sweet dough that has been wrapped around a metal cylinder, roasted then coated with sugar, steam rising from the hollow stack like smoke from an Ottoman chimney. I'm in the main square by the astrological clock. It seems to be on the side of a church, in a marriage of superstition and religion. The queue for the sweet chimneys is about 15 long when the stallholder announces that he is shutting. He has run out of dough. Disappointment ripples along the queue like a domino rally. It reaches two teenage British girls with pink faces and heavy backpacks. It's too much for them. Consternation propels them to the lip of the stall, where the last of the chimneys is being handed over. They have an unquestionable sense of privately educated self-assurance. Girl One fixes the stallholder with an upturned nose and schoolteacher gaze. She barks like a vicar's wife.

"You can't possibly close! We're leaving tomorrow!"

The stallholder glances at her.

"I said, we're leaving TOMORROW!"

Girl Two pulls an anxious face that begs "please" like a dog at a dinner table. "Sorry, we have no more," says the stallholder.

"God, I just can't believe these people," huffs Girl One as they turn their backs on the chimneys. I think something similar. I don't know how many times Prague has been invaded, but tonight it seems to have been invaded by wankers: British wankers, German wankers, North African wankers and American wankers.

A tourist in his early 20s is explaining to another tourist in her early 20s that he is not a tourist: he is a "traveller". They have a tourist map spread on the cafe table in front of them, by the English translation of the menu. He is saying that his experience is richer. He looks, smells and acts like a tourist. I don't get it. Because he stays in a hostel rather than a hotel, is the veritas more veritable? Or is he just a git?

I'm a tourist. I tour the world. I don't feel I have to excuse myself. The travelling bit is dull. In my mind, that is standing around baggage belts hoping that my case hasn't been lost again. Of course I'm a bloody tourist. I don't have the insider's perspective. I feel like a stranger everywhere I go. I like that perspective. In restaurants, I love to sit with my back to the wall so I can watch the other diners. You see what authors and film-makers attempt to capture, but in real time.

Just because you're a tourist, it doesn't mean you have to behave obnoxiously. If anything, you should behave better than you normally would. Two great British cliches are a) to presume that if you are in someone else's country you can do what the hell you like and b) that if you are in a band it's obligatory to behave like a boorish thug.

The festival site feels like an abandoned cosmonaut holiday camp. Loose tiles fall into the paddling pool. The rusted umpire's chair has toppled over by the overgrown tennis courts. In the murk of the surrounding forest are shadows of buildings that could have been dormitories or centrifugal test chambers. Tinny loudspeakers broadcast bloc versions of easy classics: the Cornetto tune, Edelweiss, the one about the meatball rolling down a hill, all with soft Czech vocals. There's a huge home-welded spit and brazier.

The fire has settled to steady embers and two men grunt as they lift a meat-covered pole on to a ratchet system connected to an old engine. The meat must weigh more than either of them. It looks incredible, like a medieval feast transported to the mid 20th-century. Ministry are setting up on stage one. A tech is erecting the skull-encrusted microphone stand. The Pet Shop Boys are setting up on stage two. They are working out how the dancers can burst from the neon-lit white cube. We're somewhere in the middle.

In two weeks we'll play the Reading and Leeds festivals: the climax of a year and a half of touring. It has been an intense adventure - crawling across the planet, performing to millions of people. Each night as I walk on to the dark stage, the white light of the strobes and the white noise of the crowd send a wave of adrenalin to my heart, setting off a vascular explosion that feels as if it could kill me.

The blood feels as if it'll burst from the fingertips as the arteries fling it through my flesh. Before my pick flicks the strings, my toes have already flipped me into the air, hovering over the boards in a fast-frame of anticipation.

It's time to stop. You can only play the same songs a certain number of times before you get bored. It's time to stop because it is still exciting. It's time to stop because I need to live somewhere that isn't a bus or a hotel room. It's time to stop touring, so it's time to stop writing about food. What I eat at home isn't interesting. It's the same as anyone else.