Diary Of A Busker Day 697 Friday February 27th 2015 Winchester (1. Opposite Oxfam, Time: 2:56-4:26pm, 2. Opposite Vodafone, Time: 4:50-5:50pm).
Temperature: 6 degrees and windy. I spend a few minutes cycling around to find the least windy spot…and end up down the arse-end. Song Of The Day: 3rd one in – Here Comes The Sun, as it got five donations including one from a woman who said ‘beautiful’. Posh BrYan came by, pipe in gob. He stops but doesn’t donate. The conversation:
Me: ‘That’s a lovely smell, Bryan’.
BrYan: ‘Do you smoke?’
Me: ‘I have a pipe and also I like the odd Cuban cigar – Romeo and Juliet, Cohiba’.
BrYan: ‘I stopped smoking Monte Cristo when they went up to £100 for a box of twenty-five, and that was a long time ago’.
That’s £4 each, they must be £25 each now. He must be talking about 50 years ago!
I reckon it’s time to change the amp batteries. No more Procell, though, as I couldn’t get them. They’re now orange ones called Industrial – still by Duracell. So I’m road testing them, and it’s been about 22 hours. If I hold the low string down on the 7th fret, like I do on California Girls – the one I’m doing, it will start to distort if the batteries are getting low, as it’s doing now. As I’m putting the guitar down to sort the amp out, a man says ‘I heard you had a bit of trouble awhile ago’. I look up and it’s a man a bit older than me, and Delia is there, too. The man is her son – I know she’s got two: Mark and Colin.
Anyway, I relate an abridged version of the incident with the drunken idiot, then say ‘It’s Mark, isn’t it?’ Wrong. ‘It’s Colin’, says Colin. I apologise and say I’ll remember next time, as my uncle’s name was Colin, and so is our cat. Delia somewhat embarrasses her son (Colin) when she says ‘Mark is my other one – he’s older, Colin’s my baby’. Baby – he’s about 60!
There’s something wrong with my Good, Bad, And The Ugly Theme, and it takes awhile to work out what it is. I’m playing the first bit too high – the bit with the sort of yodel: Ah-ah-ah-ah-ahhhh… wah, wah, wah…so the guitar part sounds wrong. But I sorted it out. I moved it down two semitones.
After an hour and a half – a long set in the cold, I took a toilet break. Just toilet, no book shop as I came out here quite late. Still, I took 20 minutes off. I had a good look about and there was no one else out, again. I don’t blame them: it looks sunny but it’s bloody cold. I do an hour at Vodafone which was twice as long as I wanted to.
At the end, I was cycling up the road and did a stupid thing. All the market people were gone but their gazebos were still up, all in a line from near The Butter Cross, right up to Jewry Street. So I thought I’d cycle through a few, but there wasn’t quite enough clearance for the gigbag, which is sticking up above my head. Of course, I realised this a split second too late, it caught on the gazebo roof and pretty well stopped me. I didn’t even use the breaks! For one terrifying second I thought the neck – the guitar’s, not mine – might have broken, but it was OK. It helps having the bucket over the end of the guitar, I think. Anyway, I won’t be doing that again.
Earnings: £29.24p