Okay so went home Wednesday night totally psyched to ‘attack’ my violin lesson (after two weeks of almost crawling there filled with flu to sneeze over Robin) and the return to the homestead to finish the what seems to be millions of reviews and articles that I seem to have promised to write sometime now-ish. Violin lesson went okay but Robin gave his usual lecture about practicing (cause I’m now alright at playing I still tend to try & wing it, this apprently is bad), Promised to try harder & then he told me the good news which is that we (I don’t remeber being consulted about this) have been booked for two more gigs. One is at the same local boozer the Cherry Tree, the other is playing with Peter Waters (of ‘I restore violin in Wallingford and have very sparkly eyes’ fame) so that’s good. Still can’t afford one of his fiddles though, but here is the address should you wish to drool…. http://www.watersviolins.co.uk/
The review writing alas didn’t go that well and I ended up getting frustrted that it wasn’t just writing itself (this is possibly why it wouldn’t be that great writing for a living at the moment. When I can’t do something I get really annoyed at myself, which isn’t that helpful). Stepped away from the reviews and wrote a piece on rounders (you remeber the horrid sport you played at school (only topped by hockey) when Lisa Higgs hit the ball really hard at you, or being dumped in the outer ring of fielders as you couldn’t be truested to catch the ball?). Well work have decided to gather a team so I had to write an article basically hallowing it’s greatness for the mag. The end result wasn’t that bad & I got a thank you note from our ed. I wrote back asking if she had any inspired knowledge about writing gig reviews, the advice was remove all adjectives. When I complainedabout writers block she commented (somewhat cruelly) “you see you’ll never get a ‘proper’ publishing job and you will have to stay here and write for us forever” (followed by evil laugh, not helpful and really not what I wanted to hear at this point). Last night however at some extreme hour I finally finished them all and one of my nice teammates has agreed to give it a glance to make sure it is as alright as I think it is (and I wasn’t just having tea hallucinations).
I’m not sure whether my eds ‘words of wisdom’ were the cause of this break through but I’ve decided to set up a parallel blog to this one to act as a bit of an archieve of my music reviews. The address is here http://parkanation.blogspot.com/ but fear not if you don’t want to drift over there these will probably be posted on here as well (but other content may not, so keeping half an eye might be wise). I’m calling the new blog Parka Nation as this was the name of the radio show I had at Uni. The phrase comes from when I was growing up in Manchester and you used to see all these like minded kids in parka’s (whatever the weather) hanging round the racks in Picailly records, nodding at each other. I though if we all joined up we could take over the world with indie music and hence make it a Nation of Parka wearers. You’ve gotta admit its a nice idea. The second blog is realy a bit more for my records of what I’ve written and to act as a handy portfolio should aforementioned awesome job in ‘proper’ publishing indeed come up…. This weekend its off to the Smoke to see my long term friend (and quite frankly brilliant genius) Zoe. Zoe has just moved in with her boyfriend Steve (congrats to them both) and I’m taking the obigatory squid whisk and going to check out their new pad. Zoe it seems has already got several cultural but cheap options pencilled in, so with the perfect weather that’s been predicted it should be a cracker!