Sunday 10 September 2006

A day off, buying furniture and a tree, and planting the latter.  A good thing to do.

Well, we got through the last few days somehow. We recorded a lot of music on Wednesday, rehearsed on Thursday, and after a spectacular journey through Aberdeenshire hills, gave the lovely people at the Woodend Barn an energetic and entertaining couple of hours, playing on its brand new stage and in its wonderful acoustic. For the first time ever, my melodica breath tube fell out of my mouth while I was playing, leading to an unexpected and very embarrassed silence: fortunately I was upstage and had my back to the audience at the time, but it still made me feel like a complete incompetent. Before the concert, the three of us had a picnic on the grass, and Alison managed to fit in some mushroom spotting in the nearby woods. Afterwards, a beer on a park bench in the moonlight by the river Feugh.

Incidentally, we achieved the 'extra thing' that we wanted to do on Wednesday, which was to record a set of Katherine's tunes. The session tape is sitting in front of me here awaiting my proper and full attention.

At 7.30am yesterday we put DG on the first leg of his flight home from Aberdeen (which turned out to be via London, Ottawa and Montreal after he missed the connection to Halifax at Ottawa, and during which he was surrounded by barfing adults and crying children) then Alison and I headed for Stonehaven to take some sea air on the way south. Special mention is due to Molly Gunning's cafe bar on the front, where we sat outside and had enormous fried breakfasts (mine even had fried clootie dumpling, included on the menu 'for Glaswegians'), and we watched the sun on the water.  Shame the open air pool was shut.

Well, we're over the first hurdle of playing again. Now we can start to get to grips with re-thinking what the group is and how it operates. A long process I think. But we've learnt a lot already.