A good a start to August playing live music in the courtyard at “The Drawing Room” in Chesham with Jon Bickly (guitar and vocals)  and John Maw (mandolin and cigar Box Guitar). Good Beer and good food and all that a hobbit could delight in.

Also I have discovered the delights of cleanfeed which is a remote recording an broadcasting software like having multiple ISDN lines and is amazing for doing remote recordings and rehearsals in CD quality. So I shall be able to start collaborating with people easily from the home studio in real time a bit. I think by the time we hit the winter months that’s going to be really useful for creative sanity. 

I don’t expect to see anything like normal pre-covid life resuming for a very long time. Perhaps even a couple of years or so. I do know that I have to make sure I get out of the flat on a daily basis to keep my mental health on track. As there are starting to be a few social distanced events starting up I will try and get out a bit more and hopefully show my face a bit again. One tends to obsess somewhat with just ones only company a lot of the time. We must have a bit of faith in the future

Yesterday was a strangely mixed day. A video conference and a test collaborative music session online where we recorded from 4 different locations live together and got a very decent result that sounded much like it would if we had all been playing in the same room.  That’s something that has really been an eye opener for me in many ways as I feel we have a long way to go before we can fully escape our current lock-down days. So a good start to the day. Unfortunately, my back had other plans so whilst it started well, I Had a lot of pain and ended up watching a lot of YouTube and i Player stuff.

Today was a walk in the woods, well riverbank and very uplifting. I needed that I must admit. Fortunately, there is plenty of space to enjoy nearby. In the last 4 days I had got a bit despondent and not been out and was frankly sinking a bit. The news never gets any better either.  My last proper studio recording was on Tuesday and since then I had been struggling a lot.  A lot of background static in my mind has been playing out. The sort of stuff that its often difficult to discuss with anyone to be honest.