Thursday 14 October 2004

I'm just back from a brief visit to London, which included an enjoyable curry with Matt Wadsworth to plan our trip to New York in April. But we were both a bit sleepy, and concentrated mostly on the curry.

Playing in a variety of venues throws up some interesting cultural differences. A while ago I received a 15 page contract from a venue we're scheduled to play in, and finally got around to perusing it properly on Tuesday. It expects us to provide printed publicity material in considerable quantities (thousands), which is not something we do unless we are promoting or co-promoting the gig ourselves. In this case, we've been booked for a fee, and it's the venue's responsibility to publicise the event - after all, they rather than we will be pocketing the box office take. So I heard back from the marketing manager today, who suggested that they would produce their own print, and deduct the costs of this from our fee. Well, I don't think so. It does feel like a waste of time and precious energy to formulate polite business-like replies to people like this, when really it would be simpler to call them up and tell them where to get off. Where will it end? "Sorry, we'll have to deduct our heating and lighting costs from your fee, and charge you with the supplying of the beer and ice-cream for the interval. Don't you normally bring your own for us to sell?"  

In today's mail, lots of brown envelopes, most of them from the Inland Revenue, a big box of books and some CDs. Enough to keep me busy for a while one way or another. The contents of one brown envelope in particular were quite cheering. On Saturday I was feeling decidedly cynical about the royal procession and opening of our new parliament building in Edinburgh, given that the first major project undertaken by the parliament (the building itself) is three years late and 11 times over budget. It's not an encouraging start. But my letter to the transport minister about my tiresome dealings with Caledonian Macbrayne in the summer has yielded a detailed, informative reply with several good positive pieces of news in it, including that from next Monday, the company will have a Customer Care Unit with four dedicated staff.  The end result is that citizen McGuinness feels connected to the public servants he pays his taxes to fund, and feels that they're working for the public benefit. If only it happened more often.

Thanks to Sara Greenberg for naming my newly-tuned Yamaha melodica 'Barney'. (it's purple)