Category Archives: history

Can we ever say more than we did our best?

Delta Ladies, Diana Stones Songs, glass cage, music, Musings, whatever

Can we ever say more than we did our best?  I am not sure we can really. I am mired in gloom today and not really sure why. The sun was out on a crisp winters day.  I took a brief trip to the shop to collect from the amazon locker.  Came home and tried to work on some project stuff but I couldn’t get motivated at all, though I did start a lyric and a couple of ideas for a tune or possibly two.  Its the first week of my extended exercise routine and I think its helpful.  I need to keep fairly mobile now if I can. Otherwise if I ever play a gig again I will  keel over from exhaustion before I even get started. Its a very clear, very cold night heer in Bedfordshire and you can recognise a couple of the major constellations.  the universe continues perfectly well without my interference of course 🙂  Everything feels so strange as we come close to the first anniversary of   restrictions brought in for Covid-19 in the UK where at the time of writing we are on our third lockdown which will be in place until at least spring judging by the way things are currently going.  Some days go well enough but today  has been hard for me. I would like to talk to one or two absent friend but they have passed beyond the orbit of this world now. Its hard going.  I dreamt I was playing a gig with the full line-up of the Delta Ladies with Vicky martin at the helm  in some big edwardian pub or other. Its seems like another world now to be honest. So on waking ity was disappointing to know that that’s pretty much all gone now.  Vicky was a pretty much irreplaceable force of nature and whilst I did attempt to carry on it  we could not quite make escape velocity in the end.  Plus lockdown finished everything  pretty much in March of  2020.   2021 has started and I feel exhausted mentally and  I feel I am beyond the point  where I can try and pick up the pieces again to be honest.  I do not expect there to be anyone riding out of the shadows to pick up the baton now. I am not even sure if I can actually cut it live now frankly.  It’s now nearly one year since the last Delta Ladies gig in a small pub in reading called “The Retreat”. Remaining members of the band have also had fairly serious ill health  to contend with too.  Its possible there may be a grand finale at some point. But there needs to be a  new road or else there is no road to travel now.

It’s  a pretty low ebb for me now. I really need be mixing with people but the current situation makes it impossible of course.  My fairly paranoid internal dialogue is increasingly difficult to block as well.  I am creating music and trying to keep going.  One day at a time is as good as it gets though.  From here onward is obscured to me assuming there is a going forward from this point as nothing is guaranteed in this life.

I send out my musical messages in a bottle  into the either and wonder…

So can we ever say more than we did our best?

 

December begins

Diana Stones Songs, Musings, whatever

What a year, it has been.  Were to start? I am quite daunted by the possible futures that may be coming my way. Everything is new, in this bave new world though and events have pushed me back to the back of the queue now.  Also my mentors and advisers have for various reasons moved on in every sense. I am thrown back on my own resources but that’s really not enough. I will give a hurrah for the first Covid-19 vaccine and the fact that this points at a way forward but its a long road home and much has been lost and will never be the same again. I thought I was set to embark on a different path but its turned out to be a minor divergence or perhaps a pleasant detour but once through the woods I have rejoined that old path again but my companions are no longer fellow travellers in my caravan. 

I am blinking in the light and wondering what comes next?  Also my mind has got to a very strange places and everything I once desired is changed and transformed. A new road calls and its not like the old one at all and trouble may well catch me out somewhere.


Just embracing new thoughts and trying to get comfortable with them is not so easy now.  I was never one for gurus but I think I need one now.  There’s a lot of confusion and possibly illusion too.  So basically help I need some navigational aid. A new roadmap to take me on the next leg of this journey  towards home.
Its a different world and a separate one from many now. Like viewing everything through a perspex safety screen or from a great distance with a sense of massive disconnection.  

So I am overthinking again. It must be time to get back to the music again now.
Do drop in and have a listen 

https://soundcloud.com/dianastone

 

Mostly a review of the year to date

Delta Ladies, Diana Stones Songs, glass cage, history

I think a bit of  a summing up will be helpful for me at this point.  At the start of 2020 I had got to a point where I was just about ready to start trying to reconstruct my life and move forward again. My confidence was rather lacking but I managed to pull my self together sufficiently to front a couple of gigs and at that point in February I felt like I was on the mend again and could start getting out into the world again. I still had the anxiety and arthritis problems but they were not so bad at that point. Then of course at the end of February the lockdown kicked in and the plans I had to link up with a few people were stymied. For the first few weeks I was frustrated but OK. But after my self esteem started dropping and I started to feel pretty useless about myself in often depressed and then on top of that started to have anxiety attacks. Often just triggered by a random thought or the prospect of going somewhere. So I have got more and more isolated as time has gone on and my confidence is pretty much at zero in some regards. I have never had to ability to be an easy mixer or make new friends easily. I am not antisocial but I am awkward and small talk is difficult for me so the normal avenues to making new friends and acquaintances are difficult for me to follow.
As the year has progressed I have found it more difficult to keep things together. 

I do have a routine for most days which is  to practice sight reading and spend a bit of time working up musical themes for songs and other works. I write stuff down on manuscript in a condensed form to keep the germ of the ideas. If I am working on a recording (which is most weeks) I put down parts and premix stuff. Part of the day may also be spent on a remote rehearsal/ collaboration session. In between that there are various exercises I need to do to stop myself from ceasing up. This week I have also managed to get out once a day which is helping with the depressive side of things a little. 

When I moved out of London I had hoped to get more involved with collaborative side of recording as I now have the space to work with 2 or 3 people live, and had Vicky and the Delta Ladies continued that potentially would have made for some very interesting sonic interludes along the way.  Sadly the fates intervened and it was not to be. I really had hoped to try and hook up with some local players  and see what might be done but that did not go to well either. 

If we ever get out of this Covid-19 centric universe again it will be rather like starting from zero in many ways. I cannot imagine a normal world where one can lean on a bar listening at a folk club or music pub again. Just being able to nip out and catch a gig again would be great but it is  almost impossible to do anything casually like that now. I feel that we are in for up to another 2 years, before there is any chance of real normality. Maybe by next year this time there will be a light dawning. I really dont know, but thats how its looking at the moment on the basis of everything I see in from the medical and research community.

I note that many people seem to believe we dont have a problem or that Covid is not real or anywhere near as dangerous as it actually is. That is really not helping.   

I am not on my own and its much worse for those that live alone of course, and I dont have a job to loose so I should l be able to just about roll along and keep the wolf from the door but that will not be an option for many others, and I do worry how people will survive let alone thrive.  As I write this I am  listening to “The New Deal – A Story For Our Times” on Radio 4.   A bleak time but there was hope and things did eventually get back to normal in some respects. In contrast to the current covid threat where it seems that “Normal” is  nowhere to be seen or hidden under a rock somewhere and realistically there does not seem to be much hope of sunny uplands being reached anytime soon.