10 days away and it went very quickly. 2 days to get there with and overnight stop in Le Mans to make it not too much of of an effort , though driving in france is very easy compared to the UK most of the time. A bit of a scare when the Engine fault light came on but it seems to have sorted itself out and was likely to have been the DPF. All my cars are a bit on the ancient side and do tend to get worked fairly hard thjough. Fingers crossed it was fine for the rest of the trip though.. The weather was bright and slightly chilly and the 4 gigs went pretty well. A couple were very good indeed. Really we only have a couple of days sightseeing though. I will post a few pictures on the social bit here though. I needed to see a bit of blue sky. its quite bright here in London today as I write this which is a nice bonus. my French is still totally inadequate and I must get a plan to get together for the next trip and really try much harder. More to follow.

The last mini 4 gig break was intentionally to get some sunshine and chill for a bit and it mostly fulfilled that purpose.  Gigs are much like the UK in terms of the kind of places that we play, mostly Bars and Restaurants. We don’t have any of the higher profile stuff in France but its fun and it pays OK and audiences are often more sophisticated musically than some areas in the UK.  One of the gigs at the Kennedy is quite hard work as its a 3 hour show in a fake Irish Bar where no one is irish or speaks anything but French. So you have an audience that drifts in and out and a lot of students who are quite in to it and some of the further out stuff that we do now seems to grab their attention quite a bit. Also its in a very old very crowded town center so parking can be a problem at times. The next one was at a place called Bar Gabariers which is at a riverside location and very picturesque. We had a good gig there. Then Saturday we did a place called Bistro St Pierre in a small village called Nere, which we played earlier in the year to a 50% ex-pat crowd. It was a very lively night and a lot of fun. I swopped scarves with a French woman who had seen us before and this time had brought mum dad and sisters along too. Weird thing is she looked quite like one of my ex girlfriends as she would look now if she was still alive. Thats another story though.

Though I can read French fairly well, of course there are different accents too. I found the woman easier to understand than the men who tended towards the guttural. So my  new years resolution is have proper french lessons LOL.
I am not sure if that’s going to happen as every year I say the same thing and don’t get it all together. The gigs are the fun part but setting up the gear and shifting it is a real pain at times.  You can’t do a gig without being able to get a really decent sound though as you can’t play with sufficient finesse. We do do the odd folk club with no amplification whatsoever and that’s nice because its easy to do if the room has a decent acoustic. Under those circumstances  a room might be very dry occasionally which make playing the violin very hard.  However for these gigs we had the gift of electricity and digital reverb, plus two keyboards and a loop station to fill the sound out a bit when there are only the two of us.
A typical Stage set up for us. This ones at the Bar Kennedy in Angouleme on our last trip.

Sometimes you need to put a few thoughts down in writing to get a different perspective on what’s going on in your head. This is one of those times. I am still not in the best of health and it’s starting to be a nuisance.  Doing some packing today then tomorrow off to do some French gigs. I was looking forward to it but I felt a bit rough recently so I am not wildly enthusiastic about it now, but hopefully I will buck up a bit when we get there. I had a fairly busy weekend with 4 gigs all very different.

The one on Friday was very poorly attended, the fact that there was a massive downpour and also that the pub has been refurbished and lost a lot of atmosphere possibly didn’t help.  So that was a dead loss.

Saturday was a day of mixed blessings. We did very well at the Tenterden Folk Festival but had major problems with traffic getting there so we started half an hour late. Fortunately they were able too accommodate us as so we did our normal set and it was very well received with a good number of people. In the evening we did a completely acoustic performance at the Saddlery.

Sunday was at a small pub in Chelmsford as part of a festival weekend. Not bad but not sure if it was what they were expecting though we had a fair number of people including a few that knew us.

The change of seasons is well and truly here now, not long before the clocks go back and we are punged in to darkness again as well. Argh

So sort of the last post for a while, unless some miraculous internet access spontaneously  occurs in France which is unlikely.
Keep taking the tablets everybody. 😉

I confess i am a socialist. If you had lived my life you might well be too. If I am spared at some point I will explain why in detail. But I am not going discuss that here today,as it would in probability start a full on neo-liberal  troll fest in the comments on this blog entry.  That is a pity because it would be nice to have sensible discourse but its not going to happen is it. I bet  Abraham Lincoln never had this problem but then he was not a Roses member and he had a big hat. Anyway JC continues so we shall see what we shall see.

There is a point to this, which I am working towards. It seems to me that often many of us work towards common goals but then throw up our hands in despair and say this is impossible because we cannot deal with the concept that there might be more than one workable method to achieve the same result.  We are often much more motivated to pursue the business of  trying to prove why our opposites method is impossible. Of course we are seeing a lot of this at the present time.

But on to other matters now.  I am feeling very introspective at present.  Some of you may have have heard of this.
Script Analysis is the method of uncovering the early decisions, made unconsciously, as to how life shall be lived’. It is one of the five clusters in Transactional Analysis, involving ‘a progression from structural analysis, through transactional and game analysis, to script analysis’.
Well my “life”  script only went so far and I have been winging it for a while.  I feel like in some respects I might be into extra time, so I try not to take anything for granted. I even had a gypsy (proper Romany, not a scrap metal dealer ;))read my palm whilst I was on a holiday in the south of France.when I was about 23 years old, and basically said something dreadful would happen around the age of 50. Well as far as I can tell it didn’t. Then again maybe they got the time and date wrong. You never know.  It was weird  because I did not ask for a palm reading and the gypsy wanted  no money for it. Weird or what.  The things that are important to me when I am feeling sane enough to know, do seem very different than the concerns of other folk.  In some ways its as though in the past year or so my brain has been re-booted. I still have the knowledge I had previously but a very different and often somewhat curiously detached viewpoint as though when I remember events they happened to someone else.  I don’t like to get too excited about stuff, I hate surprises and i like to keep calm. That’s when i am happiest. I have tried striving and to be honest i am no great shakes at it. I sort of just plod along. I do seek a  purpose though.  Music keeps me going but beyond that I am searching for a sort of sense or order in the chaos that goes on around me.  I suppose that’s why people get religion, because it would all be too much if everything just was. That might be too stark a vision for many.

Most  weekends for me go like this. Gig on Friday Gig on Saturday and Gig on Sunday. Some times there is one in the week as well. So its a bit like a rotating shift pattern.

It’s quite interesting to find out what people think it takes to do a gig. So here is an average description of a typical gig day. For this example we will say the gigs in Brighton.

Anatomy of an a average gig

1. Load the car, some gear might already be in the boot, but not aways. So about 25 minutes.
2. Drive to gig say about 90 minutes depending on traffic.
3. Park on quite often double yellow lines dump the gear at the venue and zoom off to find somewhere legal to park.  If your lucky its t down the street If not it might be a 10 minute walk.
4. If  its a pub get some tables and chairs cleared
5. Set up PA. We use a 1K system with 2 300w monitors. That can cope with anything from the very small to quite large places. It takes around 40 minutes to rig it all. Slightly longer if we have the 5 piece with Bass and percussion.
6. Very quick line test & Soundcheck 5 mins
7. Get beer (very important as it must be real Ale) 😉
8. Start first set which is usually about 70 minutes.
9. take short break, attempt to flog CD’s chat to punters and go for a Pee 15 minutes ish,(the break not the pee as that would be epic! )
10. Start second set, audience may be slightly pissed by this point which may or may not be a good thing LOL play about 50 minutes and if it goes well do an  encore or two.
11. Go for a pee,  sometimes chat to punters in the ladies. Example conversation.
    “I enjoyed the set, my husband’s going to buy a CD”. Then suddenly a strangled cry from the other cubicle, “Shit there is no toilet roll, can you pass some under the door “.
12. Chat to punters and break down the gear and repack it. 30 mins, including muttering and swearing when stuff won’t got back in the boxes and bags you took it out of like a recalcitrant ventriloquists dummy! Resort to shouting get back in your box. and I could swear that the mixing desk talks back to me and says “No, won’t get back in the box”. Perhaps take it a bit easier on the drugs…
13. Try and remember where you have parked the car and walk for 5 minutes in the wrong direction….
14.  Finally load stuff in car.
15. Get money. Hurrah! My children will not starve this week…
16. Finally drive home usually about 00.00 to 00.30 by now.
17. 02.00 Arrive home shift more gear out.
18. Cup of tea quick snack take makeup off and fall in to bed about 00.03.  Discover that you can’t sleep so get smart phone out and go on facebook check news or maybe even watch TV.

So on average out for about 9 to 10 hrs, of which only 2 hrs is actually performing.

Festivals and different as its someone else’s problem re PA and so forth, but often there is a lot of hanging about.

Monday is my usual Sunday as it were. Thats the day that the aches and pains catch up with me. Also the day for updating websites and stuff like that. Check oil level on car and tyres. Thats fairly important as I do a lot of motorway miles.  Maybe work on one of my personal musical projects. If I am really cream crackered the Tele goes on….

Our percussionist Danny is going in for a cancer op and will be out of action for a month or so. He should be OK, though its unlikely he will be able to to go over to France in October with use. He played with  us on our gig in Dorking on Friday which was really a great vibe.  It’s a very small world though as a women who knew about us because of a Bistro local to where she lived in France came in just by chance.  Also in another coincidence a guy who photographed us in France earlier in the year also turned up. Spooky. Perhaps Dorking is on a ley line or something? Or perhaps there is a multi-dimensional portal linking to south western France.   Also spoke to a very  nice chap who had retired to Lanzarote but was back over for a family occasion and he said he had really enjoyed the show. As you might imagine we quite a bit different from a lot of the acts that play on the pub circuit which is a good and bad thing. We are a sort of musical marmite which you may or may not dig particularly as we have moved a fair way from what we used to do. We now use a double keyboard set up and looping along side the fiddles and banjos so its a very different sound. It seems to go well though.

Curiously the music I play in the Delta ladies has almost no crossover with my solo stuff which you can find here >  Diana Stone and also here > https://soundcloud.com/glasscage and here > http://www.soundclick.com/dianastonemusic among other places.   I used to get college radio play in the US way back when and a few years back got some play on BBC Radio 6 on the Tom Robinson show which was nice and rather a feather in my cap at the time.  I have had always had very eclectic tastes in what I listen too and the music I write and/or play.  I used to have CD’s for sale in the US in a store in Salt Lake City. God knows how that happened? Life’s always taking unexpected twists and turns and we are along for the ride, but like  riding a  wayward nagg we can steer with a light touch on the reins but pulling harshly may get us thrown into a brambly ditch.

But I digress which is I find always the best bit.

Here is my  thought for the day
Whatever you think they are  thinking you’re probably wrong and even if you asked them they wouldn’t tell you anyway so just suck it up and get on with your life.