Diary Of A Busker Day 2587 Saturday August 9th 2025 Winchester.
At The Buttercross there’s a bloke sitting on the top step with a speaker on the ground. He’s singing Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World with a backing track and doing it quite well. The weird thing is, he looks like a fucking Drongo! I’ve never seen him before, no idea who he is and Don’s not about for more info, such as when he started. I go through the alley to The Square and set up there, second day running. The good thing is, because I played yesterday, it takes me a lot less time to warm up. Yesterday it took me an hour and a half but today it’s the usual time of around an hour. Weather was fine, not too bad in the shade but there was quite a bit of wind now and again. At one point, it surprised me with a fucking big gust which blew the guitar case shut and then moved it a couple of feet away so I had to sort that out at the end of the song I was doing, and after that I had to cross my left foot over the right and keep the right foot over the top of the case. Problem solved!
One weird thing with the new guitar, or rather the new strings I put on it after I got the guitar, is the amount of dirt the strings leave on my fingers. It’s weird because the strings are new and can’t be dirty but whatever it is, the strings are leaving some sort of residue on my fingertips. It’s interesting because when I finish, the amount of “work” is represented on my fingertips. For instance, most of the residue by far is one my right hand’s forefinger, with just a small amount – almost unnoticeable, on the middle finger, which tells me that my forefinger is doing almost all the work on my right hand, which isn’t surprising I suppose, seeing as the Focal Dystonia has really restricted what my middle finger does, which is basically sweet fuck all. Still, we do what we can and my trusty forefinger’s power of endurance secured a very respectable £90.91 for an almost non-stop 2 1/2 hour session and most of that was note-age, including four tenners and two fivers…and another hundred quid and this guitar will have paid for itself.