Diary Of A Busker Day 610 Wednesday August 13th 2014 Winchester (Opposite Bellis, Time: 4:12-5:42pm).
I couldn’t believe it – I forgot the tuner! First time I’ve ever done that. In fact, I was so annoyed, I was going to come home. All the stuff was on the ground: the lead, capo, tattered old music folder, cloth, bucket…no tuner. I searched every crevice of every pocket in the case…nothing. Sod it, I had to do it manually: something I hadn’t done for years, not out here, not even at home. Oh well, on with the show…
…and another case of mistaken identity. A woman comes up and says she’s seen me at a theatre show, playing some kind of madrigal(?) I have to tell her it wasn’t me. She says ‘it’ looked like me. I say ‘it’ definitely wasn’t me. She says, ‘Oh well, you’re good enough’, which was a nice way to end the conversation, I suppose.
A man comes up and says, ‘I’ve got a white Les Paul’, and that’s it. It’s always weird when people come up and make these statements. Anyway, he just stands there grinning, like some sort of congratulations are in order. I say, ‘You’re lucky, I haven’t’, which is all I can think of saying, apart from ‘Well, I think they’re too heavy and even if I had one, I wouldn’t bring it out here’, which I can’t be bothered saying.
I stuck it out for an hour and a half in a tuner-less state. Actually, it wasn’t too bad. It was noticeably out on only a couple of songs…and I shouldn’t have tuned down for Wheels and Yellow Bird – that was just force of habit, after playing an hour and a quarter – because it took awhile to get it right.
The coinage was up from the usual, though. I could tell by a quick glance during packing up. The filipino (why’s that not with a Ph?) woman from the bakery was having a cigarette and she asked me how it went. I said for the first time, I’d forgotten my tuner, but I’d done better than usual, then added, ‘Maybe they liked it better out of tune’.
Earnings: £21.57p
I never found the tuner. I must have left it at Chichester…which reminds me, three young foreign guys came up and said they’d seen me yesterday, in Chichester!
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