Diary Of A Busker Day 281 Friday September 7th 2012 Romsey, the Market, Time: 10:16-11:33, 12:28-132pm
Return to Romsey (sounds like an old film) – a sort of brief respite from Winchester, and drunken idiots falling down and bleeding all over the pavement next to me. And it’s nice to see Bertie again; when I told him I was momentarily fed up with the home town, he said so was he, after twenty-four years. Twenty-four years? I thought he’d said he’d been selling flowers there for sixteen years. ‘No, I was in the same PLACE for sixteen years but in Winchester for twenty-four.’ After three songs; Yellow Bird, Wheels and Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring, a woman says she really likes ‘the Elizabethan dance.’ Elizabethan dance? What’s that? After some discussion, involving her humming (very badly) it turns out she means Jesu. Apparently it was known as The Elizabethan Dance some years ago, the same way, I suppose, as some other old melodies, like Chopin’s E Major Etude, were given silly titles, to commercialise them for public consumption.
Song Of The Day is Can’t Help Falling In Love, which accumulates more coinage than all the ones before put together. I’m very near the market traders, which is something I’m not used to, and the guy running the fruit stall is selling bowls of oranges – ‘ANY BOWLS – A POUND!’ – he must have shouted that every five seconds, the whole time I was there.
I take my break in the usual place, on the steps of the monument in front of the abbey. I brought along my pipe today, so I have a bowl of KBC after my packed lunch. Walking back, I notice an amusing sign in the window of the Abbey Hotel pub – “HUSBAND CRECHE – Is he getting under your feet? Why not leave him HERE while you shop!!! Free creche. Just pay for his drinks.” Back at the market, Bertie tells me there’s now a lull until about a quarter to two. I ask him why. ‘Lunch, everybody goes off for lunch.’ That’s more than an hour from now…I’m not hanging around until then. I may as well do what I usually do, which is play! Bertie puts in his usual request of Einstein A-Go-Go which, as usual, I can’t remember, so (as usual) he whistles it and I try and replicate it on the guitar, which takes a bit but I get it in the end. Actually, his whistling has reminded me of what I learnt the other day for Walter; the theme from Bridge On The River Kwai! So Bertie gets that too, free of charge.
At the end, a middle-aged couple who have been sitting at one of the restaurant tables a few feet away to my right, get up to leave. The man gives me a coin and says, ‘Thanks, that was a really nice atmosphere, we could chillax.’ I say “chillax” is a word far too modern for me but thanks anyway. He then buys a CD so I say I hope he likes it but if he doesn’t, he can let me know and I’ll refund him. ‘That’s alright,’ he says, ‘if I don’t like it, I’ll make it into a flowerpot!’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘A flowerpot. That’s what my father used to do with any old 78s he didn’t like.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah, ’cause you can bend them – they’re made of bitumen – when you heat them up. Any song he didn’t like, he’d heat them up, put a flowerpot in the middle and bend the sides up, bend the record up and he’d have a flowerpot! So if I don’t like the CD, I’ll turn it into a flowerpot!’ He looks at the CD and sees it has Albatross, which he really likes so I offer to pull out the guitar and do it for him (I MUST be in a good mood, probably relieved to be away from the recent stupidness), but he says no, he’ll hear it in the car on the way back to Brighton; they’re on holiday. There I am again; another holiday memory! A few minutes later, I’m on the bus back, with twenty-five old ladies.
Earnings: £38.06
Expenses: £6.30 (bus fare)
Profit: £31.76 + 2 CDs