You are allowed to enjoy this…

Boy, have I got stories to tell…

So, dear readers – we left you having very little time to do any packing. Having just an hours sleep between Sunday and Monday, we managed to pull off the impossible. The  removal was done quickly and we were left waiting for the monies to transfer so I could give the keys to our buyer. Eventually, at about 1.30pm, the money had come through and it was just a matter of me handing over the keys.

Of course, the buyer needed to bring the cheque to pay for the stock. The amount had already been argued over with the stocktakers the previous day, so I was expecting trouble. The man arrived, I am friendly, I offer him the keys and ask for the cheque because I really am late and need to go.

He refuses to write me the cheque. He wants to ask questions. Questions he has asked several times before. I say, no time for quyestions, we have completed. He wants to do a visual inspection. I say, fair enough, but I want to call my solicitor to see if I am legally allowed back in the shop. I expect him to want to do a visual inspection of the stock to make sure it is all there before he writes the cheque.

So I let him in, go to the car to get the mobile to phone the solicitor and then his head appears from our upstairs bedroom window. The place is dirty, this is unacceptable. At hearing this I had enough. The “dirt” was just the fluff you find under the bed and the removal men had packed our hoover and brushes. Before he could say anymore, I threw the keys at the floor and told him he’d be hearing from my solicitor.

You see, this was just another delaying tactic. I knew the next lines out of his mouth would be about taking money off the stock amount to pay for the clearing the “dirt”. In the car, I left a message for my solicitor and headed to the new house.

The next day my solicitor calls me. He tells me we need to discuss how to proceed and that I won’t believe the letter he’s received from the buyer’s solicitor. Before he begins, I tell him my side of the story so as we are both reading from the same page as it were.

To cut it short, my buyer has accused me of “trashing the home” and it is going to cost thousands of pounds to put right and this money should come from the stock take amount. This is all lies, I say. Why would I do such a thing. What would it achieve when I’ve fought so hard to rebuild the place?

And so my solicitor is now fighting to get back the money that is owed to me, whilst the owner of my old shop is trading with stock that he has effectively stolen from me. A right laugh, innit?

What to say? What is there to say? I don’t know. An expensive folly? An experiment in wasting time? A way of discovering the things you like and the things you don’t like? I don’t know what to think. The Missus tells me that many people talk about the things they want to do but I am one of the few that actually do it. I did it. Whoopee do!

I’m not going to talk anymore on it here. If you want to know the story then email me and I’ll talk privately, but not here. There’s no point. Whatever I write here can be taken down, bent and moulded into whatever they want it to be. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been silent on my blog over the past three and a bit years.

But it was nice the first day back, to walk out with my daughter and to have no one stare at me, to be anonymous again, to be me again. It is nice.

Now the blog is back on again in full effect. I bet you are all pleased, no?

So I have finally finished “The Luckiest Man in the World” and have done the sleeve design. All I have to do now is get the masters uploaded and produced. Anyway, for those of you who want to see the sleeve ahead of time, here it is:

Lookee – someone has used my music in a short animation piece (mine is from about the 45 second mark). Yes, my stuff does make for good atmospheric film music! The track snippet is from “Descent of the Fallen I” from the “Empty Spaces” CD.

Going through all the old data folders for my archival project, I sometimes come across some audio gold in there, tracks that have been forgotten. In this case, I have found a 10+ minutes ambient guitar piece that I must have recorded close to the 9/11 Twin Towers attack (because the file was title “Twin Towers” and upon listening to it does have a certain cinematic quality relating to the events of that day).
This was recorded back in the day when I was using a Roland GR-1 as my guitar synth and in terms of looping I think I was using a Line 6 DD-4 digital delay pedal. The great thing about the DD-4 was that with a little bit of cheating, you could coax 20-seconds of decaying sound-on-sound stereo delay.
Twin Towers was recorded in this fashion with the guitar going straight into the delay pedal and everything being played live with no overdubs later.
Enjoy!

Of course, we all know that Christmas is really just about the kids and this year Verity has shown more interest in the festive season and can ably articulate her thoughts. Because she’s only three-years-old and she likes any excuse to stay up a little later, we often have extended chats about this, that and the other. Tonight, we talked about Christmas and she was so on-target, I grabbed the video camera and captured her thought process.
It sounds mawkish and sentimental, but it is times like these that you understand why you have children. They transport you back to a more innocent time – heck, I’ve never look forward to Christmas so much since we’ve had the kids!