Day 2666

Day 2666
Saturday March 14th 2026
Winchester

I’ve got the bike back but I fancied getting a bit of exercise so I walked into town – and the 12-string is light so it wasn’t too bad. There’s some Hat Fair-ish act near the Buttercross (the scaffolding will be up for 6-8 weeks, apparently) but no one in The Square so that’ll do me…and for once, a day with no rain in sight AND a decent temperature of 10 degrees. There’s always something, though, isn’t there? Five minutes in and I’m assailed by the sound of a bass drum, somewhere in the high street I reckon. It doesn’t get any louder or quieter – it’s constant and loud enough to distract from my playing. How inconsiderate! Not to worry, though, as it stops after a few minutes.

A bunch of boys walk by and one puts in a penny – ‘Oi, you can give ‘im more than that! ‘aven’t you got a ten pee?’ his mate says to him. ‘Yeah, you tell him!’ I say.

Dangerous Dave comes by with a mate. I’ve seen this bloke around – he reminds me of David St. Hubbins from Spinal Tap.
‘Hello Marvin, my mate ‘ere, ‘ees a musician, ‘ee plays the guitar.’
‘You don’t say.’
‘You’ve got a twelve-string guitar. Don’t see many of them. What is is?’ says David St. Hubbins, leaning into see the name on the headstock.
‘It’s a Faith Venus. It’s ten years old but I haven’t had it long. It was my friend’s but she wasn’t playing it and was going to sell it to a shop and I didn’t want her to do that so I bought it off her…for a lot, so I’m trying to make it pay for itself.’
‘How’s the tuning? twelve-strings are a nightmare, aren’t they?’ says St. Hubbins.
‘It’s fine and there’s an on board tuner so I don’t have to mess around with clipping stuff to the guitar every time I check the tuning, but I’m used to tuning twelve-string guitars, anyway. I mean, I’ve been doing it for forty years. I’ve got loads of twelve-string guitars! Electric and acoustic. But the tuning is great and it keeps it’s tuning, anyway, and I’ve just put on some slightly lighter gauge strings on it, yesterday, in fact, the high E’s are tens…AND it’s tuned down to Eb, as well.’
‘Ah, very good.’
‘You’ve lost me there’ says Dangerous Dave.

I did Winchester Cathedral again, in one of my standing up sections, only this time I could actually turn round and face the bloody thing, which was quite surreal. At the end, someone even clapped, which means at least one person got it. Then again, it’s an old song and obviously goes over most people’s heads.

A bunch of foreign girls stop to singalong to Here Comes The Sun – I even join them, which is a rarity! Afterwards, one says ‘You know any Oasis?’
‘Oasis? No, sorry.’
‘Wonderwall?’
‘No, I mean I know the song but I don’t play it. I just do old stuff…a lot older than Oasis.’ Bloody hell, I’ve just remembered I used to play that Wonderwall garbage with me old mate Paul, in our duo – more than thirty bloody years ago!

I managed two hours and ten minutes with no hand “issues”, so the lighter gauge strings have paid off. As I started to pack up, a man of about 30 came up –
‘Hi, are you local?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You know any good restaurants we could go to?’
I thought for a few seconds – ‘You could try Cotes, up from the Buttercross.’
‘Cotes…that’s a bit upmarket for us.’
‘Oh right (thinking again)…there’s a place called Greens, their food’s very good.’ That’s where they’ve got some of Don Lavelle’s Winchester paintings but I forgot to mention that.
‘OK, where’s that?’
‘OK, you go through there (indicate the alley way) then you turn left at the Buttercross – where all the scaffolding is, go up the road until you get to Jewry Street, which is the big road where the bend is, and Greens is just sort of opposite there. Really nice place. Good food.’
‘OK great, cheers.’

A good session – I had quite a few compliments about the guitar and a chat about 12-strings in general with the couple (Nigel and Audrie Grundy) who run the Portsmouth Music Experience Exhibition at the Portsmouth Guildhall – they gave me a brochure about it. They’ve got some books for sale and one’s about The Beatles’ four gigs in Portsmouth in 1963 which I would quite like. I’m not 100% sure but I’ve got a feeling Nigel and Audrie have come up to me before, a few years ago! Anyway, it turns out we’ve both seen Roger McGuinn on his solo tours, I saw him in 1986 or 87 at The Albert Hall when he just went on with his Rickenbacker, and they’d seen him a bit later. I said I’d like to see the exhibition and Nigel advised me to phone first just to make sure it’s open on that day.

I was very happy with the coinage total of £49.53, which included three fivers and a £10 CD sale…and the restaurant bloke took my advice because a few minutes later, as I was crossing Jewry Street (bikeless) he was there with two others – they’d just got there and were sorting out an outside table. And just after that, I was coming up to O’ Neil’s and saw a bass drum positioned next to one of the outside tables, and a woman sitting there, dressed in Oirish garb – ah, the culprit of the earlier disturbance!