Mr P arrived nice and early to collect his missing wallet. He was a short fellow in his fifties and had a tan better than my own. He waved a ten pound note in my direction as thanks. I smiled gratefully and told him not to be so silly. All I asked was that if he was to find my wallet, he’d return the favour. My reward was the feeling of a job well done. Of course, done think me so honest. If the wallet had no ID, I would have spent the cash in the pub, because I do believe in finders keepers. But if you can trace someone, that’s an entirely different matter.
At the moment, it has been hard to record anything. It’s too warm. My fingers keep slipping off the fretboard. But despite the heat, I’ve managed to record a short doodle called “Sweaty Betty” – the intention of this is to use it as a bridging piece to splice onto “Miranda Inspired”.
At the pub, we were talking about plans and ideas and I got it into my head that it might be cool if I could so live performances over the web. With broadband being the norm, doing something from the studio and webcasting it is very feasible. I just need some volunteers to watch/listen. Anyone out there? Anyone?
Category: Diary
Today is the 8th anniversary of our marriage. Of course, this coming 5 September, me and The Missus have been stepping out together for a phenomenal 18 years. The scary thing is that neither of us can figure out where the time has gone. It still seems like yesterday that we were working together at Woolworths in Bakers Arms behind the record counter. When she got another job at Boots The Chemist up Wathamstow Market, I plucked up the courage to go ask her out. On the way back, I popped into Our Price in the arcade and bought Robbie Robertson’s first album. Those were the days.
So we keep any celebrations simple. We enjoy the sun and go to the pub. Sad, but even after all this time we can still go and natter for good three or four hours without getting bored of each other’s company. On the way to the pub I found a wallet in the curb. Normally, when I find lost money on the street, I trouser it. But because this was a wallet and there was a credit card inside, it actually belonged to someone and could be traced.
I had no luck in the phone book looking for Mr P, but I had the clever idea of phoning the credit card company and asking them to pass on my phone number onto him. Ten minutes later, Mr P phoned up and was very grateful to hear from me. He had my details and thanked me for being the only honest person in the world.
If you can’t do good things, what can you do?
I am not sure if you remember my post about the dead bluetit chicks a while back? Well, I was watching a wildlife documentary on BBC2 tonight and I saw a clip of footage that might just explain what happened. Of course, the following clip is copyright of the BBC.
Blue Tit Massacre set to “Atom Heart Mother”
Actually, I found that footage a bit hard to watch when it came on the screen. Yes, I know it is silly to get emotional about wildlife programmes, but it took me back to opening the nesting box and seeing the dead chicks. At least, I could see a possible reason to how they came to pass. As it says in the documentay, the bluetit was only a small meal, not the difference between life and death. But that’s the brutal gnashing maw of nature, I guess. Also, I’ll never be able to listen to “Atom Heart Mother” in the same way again…
In the heat of the garden, we picked some of the miniature wild strawberries that had been growing. In previous years, they had been bitter and unpalatable. This year, despite their diminuitive size, they were incredibly tasty. Of course, this might have something to do with Alex the Wonderdog widdling religiously on them. 🙂
Hmmm…tiny berries watered by the loins of a jumbo Westie
Booze & Berries
Well something’s going on…checking the monthly stats for June, it seems that this little domain pushed out a whopping 57Gb of data. 57 Gigs. Five…Seven…Gigabytes. I can’t believe it. There were three days last month where something gobbled up an awful lot of bandwidth by repeatedly download my video podcast – a total of 1617 times, equally 34Gb of traffic. I can’t believe that video can be that popular and it seems that something or someone out there is upto something. Whether it is nefarious or innocent, I cannot say. It is all rather odd though. To put it in context, an MP3 like the “Cloistered Space 1” which I posted a couple of weeks ago has had a total of 248 downloads, equalling just over 1Gb of traffic . Now this is reasonable as it is also on my podcast RSS, so you can understand how this could happen. Something smells odd and it ain’t my feet in this hot weather.
Last night, something happened that made me very angry, so I decided to take my rage out on my guitar. One thing I am not noted for is my adeptness on the fretboard. I am a more pedestrian player, preferring feel and melody over lightning licks. I used to do that stuff when I was a younger player, because you think it is a sprint, when in fact playing the guitar is a lot like a marathon. You have to pace yourself. Anyhoo, I added an angry guitar solo to the end of “Miranda Inspired” and hopefully it works. It’s not particularly fast, but the intention is there. I will listen to it a couple of times over the coming days and decide whether or not it is fit for inclusion, needs reworking or whether to just continue to use the vanilla Miranda. Here it is for your own sonic audit process:
Direct download: CLICK HERE
Meanwhile, my hayfever is making my sinuses hurt. Mornings and late evenings are not pleasant at the moment, but I mustn’t grumble. It’s not that bad.
Operation Clear-Out sees a number of classic progressive rock T-shirt for sale. Oh yes, all these items have been collected from various gigs I have attended and are unlikely to be worn by yours truly again. Of course, I kept my King Crimson T-shirts as the rules of the clear-out allow me some dispensation. 😉
Just when I thought the Internet had lost its appeal, I find a website that totally made me fall in love with the WWW all over again. The site in question is 419 Eater and it is dedicated to the ancient art of Scambaiting. The idea of scambaiting is simple: the next time you get one of those dodgy Nigerian emails promising you a share in millions, set up a fake email address and respond, stringing along your mark and generally disrupting their campaign of conning the hapless. There are some great stories on the site and some of them are so hilarious I was weeping, yes weeping, with laughter. There’s Derek Trotter’s Art Emporium who gets this stupid scammers to sent him artwork they’ve supposedly create in order to qualifiy for a fake arts grant – they end up spending their cash on expensive DHL shipping or Arse Bandits United where the scambaiter convinces the scammer that he’s looking to invest in Nigerian football or The Great Penis Caper where a lusty scammer tries to marry his mark for money – there’s a catch, he’ll have to supply pictures of his penis first.
Yes, it is greatly juvenile. Yes, it is a phenomenal waste of time. But it keeps the scammers busy. And while they are busy, they aren’t conning your Auntie Gladys out of her life’s savings in a bogus lottery scam. It is your public duty to join the crusade. It’s not particularly time-consuming – the idea being that you waste their time, not your own. Of course, scambaiting is an art and you should take great care with these criminals because lesser men have ended up robbed and dead with a bullet in their head on the dusty streets of Lagos. Even if you don’t get involved, I think you’ll agree that some of the stories are hilariously funny.
The baby mollies have almost tripled in size…
OK – if you are a regular visitor to this blog you might be interested to know that I’ve added an artist page to the Last.Fm website. What this means is that you can listen to my “Without Words” and “Textures” albums for nothing. Yup, that’s right. Free music for your lovely lugholes. Just head over to: http://www.last.fm/music/Darren+Lock and get listening. You might need to start an account, but they don’t hassle you. I’ll be adding “Sow’s Ears” soon. I also recommend downloading the Last.Fm player software because then you can listen to my albums uninterrupted using the power of the World Wide Web. Amazing!
Yesterday, finished some work. I was in the bath when the doorbell rang. Realising that it was The Missus back from the funeral and that she might have forgotten to take her key, I legged it downstairs, protecting my modesty with a towel. It was The Missus, but she also had the in-laws with her. I am really glad that I didn’t fling the door open wide and thrust my soapy genitalia her way…now that would have been embarrassing.
Did a tiny bit of recording on Disc 2. I can feel that it is almost done. I only need a little bit more music to complete it, but whenever you want something, it dries up. So I am having real trouble nailing the ending. G’ah! It’s annoying me. I just want to finish it. Then I can move onto the next disc.
The baby mollies are doing fine…
Today, The Missus is out attending a funeral. Her 18-year-old cousin died of a brain aneurysm a month or so ago and so the family are united in grief. While she wasn’t close to that side of her family, because of the age and circumstances of the death, the least she could do was attend. Very sad, but it reminds you that we all walk a very narrow tightrope between here and the great hereafter.
I remember being aware of my own mortality at a very early age. I couldn’t have been any older than 7 or 8 years old. We were on holiday as a family, my father still on the scene, and while in bed, struggling to get off to sleep, that thought struck me that one day I might not be here. For me, it is a real fight or flight reaction and the thought of death is a blind panic. This is one of the reasons I have trouble sleeping. There are few nights that go by that I don’t think of my own demise and that I don’t castigate myself for not being productive enough during the day. The fear makes me feel sick and I just want to wake The Missus for some reassurance, but she is always in a fitful sleep. The fear is primordial. It is bright flash of light, a sudden rush of adrenalin, heart beating in my mouth and the urge to run. However, you can never run away.
Bereavements are tough, funerals are for the living and not the dead. My grandparents died within two years of each other and they were like my mother and father to me. Their deaths were quick, all fluster and dialling of ambulances and then racing to the hospital to see the face of the nurse adopting that “it was inevitable and there was nothing we can do”. When my grandmother died, we never had a phone in the house, so I had to sprint around to the local phone box to dial for help. This leaves you questioning yourself: if you had run faster, would the ambulance arrived quicker and the situation changed? With my grandfather, he was taken ill in bed. He was feverish and very sick. We called the doctor who came out, recommended bed rest and went away again. All the while, my grandfather was slowly bleeding to death through a ruptured artery. He could have been saved. When the doctor re-visited later, I had to be physically restrained. His laid-back, “there was nothing we can do” attitude made me want to tear him to shreds. Luckily, I’ve had nothing to do with doctors ever since. Because he died at home, the police had to come out and the police officer had to make notes. I had the job of identifying the body for the paperwork. My grandfather looked as if he was asleep, but his face bore a grimace, a slight evidence of his dying pain.
Life and death are all part of the same process. You can’t have one without the other. Luckily, my bereavements have been quick. No lingering pain, no visits to the hospital with Lucozade and fruit to watch that person turn into a shadow and slip away. My other grandfather (on my father’s side) went like that – I visited him once and it was awful. He was on ward C5 – the terminal ward. You can imagine my horror when a few years later I was moved onto the same ward myself while being treated for pneumonia at 13 years old. I thought my time was up.
Death should be quick and blissful. If and when I get diagnosed with something untreatable, I am taking my credit card, flying to somewhere warm and sunny and just drinking myself into oblivion waiting for the tide to wash me out to sea. In a way, we should be more humane, like the way we treat our pets, and able to have a little dignity. However, quick deaths don’t give you the option to say goodbye, tell them all those things you wanted them to know, go out on an even keel.
I miss my grandparents an awful lot…
And while we are on the topic, yesterday I noticed that we have a shoal of baby mollies in the fish tank. Never had any baby fry before, so it is quite exciting. Yes, I know it is a complete change of tone, but life and death are all part of the same handshake. I’d take some pictures, but they are camera-shy and they only seem to come out to eat. They are hiding from the bigger fishes.