Indeed why would you not to be fair. We are nearly at the end of February. Musical projects role along in the usual way. Boldly going forward because we can’t find reverse. I am now officially a pensioner by my own governments definition. I shall now buy a union jack teapot and mutter darkly about the loss of empire and say how lovely that nice young mr Farage (or is it Farago)is and how he is going to stop all that. Or possibly not? Sometimes I get so far out and so fast I pass myself coming back the other way.

Friends. I have left people behind. Usually it has to be said because from my perspective, they have been bigoted and often far right. But not many. A problem with having struggled with the balance of power with my mental eleves for many, many years has made friendships more difficult to sustain. Sometimes people change or we change too much for them to accommodate and our personal venn diagrams are disrupted. Other people sometimes have to leave you behind and there are always words left unsaid, and often far too many or words that you would rather were not said at all.

Here is a slightly further out tune from my library newly minted at the time of writing this. It’s sort of Jazz ish/Rock. No fiddle on this one.

I am getting out and playing a bit more at present with a very diverse bunch of musicians. It’s nice to be up and doing again after a break of around 2 years plus. I really hope this can continue. I do feel very tired though a lot of the time. Maybe the seasons changing will give me a booster.

I have a fairly diverse selection of musical hats that I wear these days. The above being from my folk side. It looks almost composed like a painting, but it’s just a slightly enhanced still from a video clip. It iss sort of anarchy (in the original sense of the word), a song or tune starts and people join in if they can or of they can’t they just tap the table gently. I busked on the Irish “tunes” that I didn’t know, the reals and stuff by playing under the other fiddle line which seemed to work. But you can pick the tunes up once you hear them often enough. So it trains your ear a bit. My folk playing is much more European than Irish though… the youngsters know the names of the tunes in Gaelic so no chance of looking them up on google. They start by saying lets do ” Narly och gargoch” or something that sounds vaguely like that and you think what the fuck is that tune but you recognise it so you do your best.

I am a bit worried about being this tired. The thing is I am fairly relaxed now a lot of the time. I don’t have adrenaline pumping all the time which is good but maybe I have just worn myself out a bit with worrying and worrying about stuff in the last year or so? I think that my be part of it. The flat is comfortable but with the heat up enough to get rid of the aches and pains it really makes me sleepy at the best of times. Its February though of course. I think this is stil a bit of a post viral covid hangover potentially. Of course I could just be mad.

I looked at some old video from our French trips. Its stuff I haven’t put on the web. the performances are good, but what I notice is that in them, in some frames when I am playing violin, my back is so curved over it looks like I am never going to be able to get it straight again. The good news is that now (pains notwithstanding) am nowhere near as hunched as I used to be. I may use some of it and employ some video effects and editing to minimise the worse parts. put still shots in and stuff. It did give me a bit of the shivers though. I also looked at the gig diarys from 2012 onwards. Many weeks were 3 gigs and some were 4. or more Incredibly busy. Even 2018 was much, much busier than I thought it was. I hope i can get my sea legs back again.

Evening all, mind how you go.