Diary Of A Busker Day 509 Tuesday February 18th 2014 Winchester (1. Opposite Vodafone, Time: 1:40-3:15pm, 2. Opposite Bellis/O2, Time: 4:05-5:05pm).
Woke up with a hurting left shoulder and back…! I’m visited by that old lady I usually see down the other end – probably why I haven’t seen her for awhile. I tell her I got fed up with the situation down there – mainly the buses, although it didn’t help having a bad day, coinage-wise. But it’s the buses I go on about to her. I say I was getting fed up with the noise they were making as they were going by. So much so, in fact, that I was starting to stop(?!) playing – from the 20 seconds of the bus’s approach, the passing, then the retreat of the noise – probably around 45 seconds, all in all. It was really depressing me, so I’ve avoided that spot.
Legless Brian stops in front of me, in fact, there is a misunderstanding, as he doesn’t usually stop – it’s only the last couple of weeks that he’s even acknowledged me. He does so now, I think, because my bucket’s in his way, so, to ease his passage, I move it a couple of inches towards me, and when I do, he says ‘I’m not going to take it’, and produces a pound coin which he drops – it misses the bucket and lands on the pavement, so I pick it up, hand it to him and he puts it in. I say ‘Sorry, Brian – I thought it was in your way’. He says he enjoys the music I play, then he’s off. Fair enough.
Near the end, a busker with a guitar and small amp, walks by and says hello. Thinking he might want to set up, I say he can come here, as I’m off in a minute. He says it’s OK – he’s going down the road – ‘we’re the only ones out today’. I told him I’d been off for awhile, with my hand and he said he was so skint, he had to put his guitar up for sale in Cash Converters, so he couldn’t play – ‘Can’t play without a guitar’. He says his name’s Chris – I think I recognise him…anyway, off he goes, so I do another half hour – too long! When I go to the toilet, he’s there, at the alleyway entrance, with his acoustic on his lap and now I know who he is – the guy who does the really fast tapping stuff, who I’ve been slagging off!
Five minutes later, when I emerge, he’s gone, and I reckon it must have rained – it’s been like for weeks now: it’ll start suddenly and stop suddenly. In Waterstones, it’s back to: The First World War – A Miscellany, and page 100 – Moustaches… “1916 Command Number 1695 of the King’s Regulations read: The hair of the head will be kept short. The chin and under lip will be shaved but not the upper lip. Whiskers if worn will be of moderate length”. In October, the army’s Adjutant-General issued an order rescinding the regulation, making moustaches no longer compulsory. So before October 1916, you had to have one! Another one: “Father and son. George Lee and his son Robert served in the same artillery battalion and were killed on the same day, 5 Sept. 1916. They are buried side by side in Dartmoor Cemetery”.
Back outside, walking up The Pentice, one of the friendlier Drongos – a young guy – says hello and asks me how it’s going. I say it’s OK, then he walks ahead a bit and I think ‘I bet he knows what’s happened to Big Issue Simon’, so I catch him up and ask, and he says he’s not dead – he’s had ‘a major operation on his leg’. That explains why he was limping, the last time I saw him. So there you go, not dead!
I’ve just started playing Blowin’ In The Wind when right above my left shoulder, a voice says ‘So, you’re using a capodistria’, and I know who it is, even before I turn. Mick. It sort of puts me off a bit – I’m barely into the first song and someone starts talking! So I thought ‘I’m not going to stop playing’, so I carried on – or tried to, as I don’t know the song well enough to play it without thinking, not like Albatross. Damn – I should have switched to that one! But it means taking the capo – sorry, capodistria – off: thanks Mick for informing me of the absolute correct word. Actually, I stopped to write it down, then resume the song – or like before, tried to. Mick says – ‘Yeah, Dylan, couldn’t bloody sing!’ – something I completely disagree with but don’t say because I can’t be bothered getting into a discussion/argument. Instead, I say ‘Well, it’s not really his melody. It’s an old folk one’.
Then Mick says ‘Fifty years since The Beatles went to America…that McCartney – genius’, then he starts going on about Here, There And Everywhere – ‘…there’s some complicated chords there (no there aren’t)…major 7ths, minor 7ths’. I interrupt – ‘No, there aren’t, Mick. I’ve played that one – some minor 7ths, but they’re not complicated’. ‘But B flat to an A MINOR!’ he says, like it’s something mind-blowing. ‘That’s in the beginning bit – that only happens there, doesn’t it?’, I say. ‘Yeah, like they used to do in some of the old songs – the bit at the start’, he says. (It was only later, when I remembered they did the same sort of thing in Do You Want To Know A Secret?’)
Anyway, hard to think and play at the same time has caused Blowin’ In The Wind to fall to pieces. I think I started it FOUR times while Mick was there. I think he got the message in the end. He said ‘Right, well…I’ll stop annoying you’, and went off. Ha! I did two and a half hours – a bit too long: my thumb was starting to hurt…as well as the shoulder…and my left foot (there’s a film in there somewhere), which went to sleep a few times. I kept having to stand up and shake it (all) about (there’s a song in there). None of that helped my mood much.
Earnings: £35.89p (+ 50 euro cents, and one East Caribbean silver coin of 10 something or other denomination).