Diary Of A Busker Day 2543 Tuesday May 13th 2025 Winchester.
The singing bloke with backing tracks who’s usually at The Buttercross on Mondays is now there today…down the road at the crossroads is free, though. The coinage is very slow…the highlight of the first hour was a woman walking by with a toddler and a crate of 12 bottles of water balanced on her head (it was just the water on her head, not the kid). I think the last time I saw that was on a program about Nairobi. I don’t know how those women do that. Practice, I suppose, but it’s quite mesmerising and I can’t take my eyes off her as she’s disappearing into the distance, up towards the top spot. I wonder is he’ll have the same effect on the bloke up there.
Another toddler, maybe a bit older, “dances” to the Tales Of The Unexpected in what I can only describe as violently stamping on someone’s grave while desperately trying to flag down a bus which he knows isn’t going to stop. This was very amusing and helped to kill a few more minutes. In fact, a handful of others thought it was amusing which resulted in one woman donating £2. Whatever the kid was doing, it was better than I could do!
After two hours were done I came home for some sustenance then out again, and with the sunburst Strat for a change. Well, no one can say I wasn’t forewarned; while cycling in I noticed a massive dark cloud in the distance to the east and it was getting closer. Still, not to worry…fast forward 15 minutes and I’m at the top spot and I’ve started with Here Comes The Sun and am nearing the end of Tales Of The Unexpected, the massive grey cloud’s now above me and wham. Within less than a minute it’s gone from complete dryness to a torrential downpour. I’ve never packed the stuff up so quickly – I must have broken my own record but all the stuff still got wet. I took shelter along with a hundred others at the end of The Pentice and waited. Fuck me, after a couple of minutes it began to hail down…after 15 more minutes, it stopped but not before I had a lecture on clouds by a 6’5″ ex-pilot – ‘That was a cumulus and within those are hundreds of other little clouds that fall a thousand feet in a second and that’s what does this. I remember trying to land near Cerne and they weren’t letting anyone in so I had to fly to the Isle Of Wight and they let me land there…all in all, there were dozens of planes at all the airfields that were wrecked, turned over…’
Before the downpour, I’d made a couple of quid so I thought I’d better go somewhere else and resume the set – I only wanted to do another hour and The Buttercross was streaming with water. I ended up down the road in front of M&S…and started with Here Comes The Sun and fuck me, if it didn’t start drizzling but then stopped, phew. But then I’m beset with some bad luck in the QR department. Firstly, Barry (who loves Albatross) comes by and wants to donate a fiver but the code doesn’t work, then a young woman (student?) comes by and wants to take me up on the two CDs for £15 offer but it doesn’t work for her, either…and I don’t do Apple Pay. She asks if I’ll be around in the next few days. I said probably but thought ‘Sod it, I’ll give her the CDs and she can pay me next time she sees me’, which is what I did. My good deed for the day. Anyway, I was down £18 because of that. People go on about how fucking amazing technology is and then it doesn’t fucking work half the time!
But the downpour, which thankfully didn’t start up again, was mental. As I was walking the bike down the high street before the M&S set, one of the more civilised drongos pointed to a big drain cover, one side of which had been raised a few inches off the pavement as it couldn’t cope with the water and I saw another one like that on the way back. Mental!