Day 2353

Diary Of A Busker Day 2353 Tuesday April 23rd 2024 Salisbury.

 

It looks like I picked the wrong day to go to Salisbury. There was a duo – a violinist and guitarist, on the high street and some old singer/strummer on that platform at one of the corners of the market square, so I had no choice but to go down the end of Fish Row. Unfortunately, there were two problems. 1. It was really windy, and therefor very cold, and 2. There was a bloke up a ladder fixing something on a shop a couple of doors up and he had some music blasting out of the shop. I just had to ignore it and get on with the playing, and he had to ignore me, I suppose. 

 

The coinage was slow until around an hour in when a young man donated a tenner. Just after that came a donation of a different sort. Something flying above dropped a load of shite on my shiny new Torino Green guitar and the guitar lead but I was more fucked off about the guitar. I managed to get it off with the hanky I always have in my coat pocket – I left the shite on the lead until later. Just get if off the bloody guitar! 

A man came by and said ‘I’ve seen you three times and every time you’ve got a different guitar!’ He then went on about a Gretsch Country Gent he had but got rid of it because he never played it. ‘Well’, I said, ‘there’s no point in having something you don’t play. Best let someone else have it.’ ‘Yeah…anyway, I won’t hold you up any longer, you need to play.’ ‘Yeah, I do.’ 

 

After an hour and 40 minutes, I was freezing so I packed up, sat on the Guildhall steps and had my sandwich…then to the public toilet across the square. 20p the sign said, but there was no one at the desk so I walked in and got a freebie. A freepee. And then…across the road to Istanbul Barber for a haircut, because I needed one (the wind was blowing my hair in my face all through the set and it was really starting to piss me off) and also, it was warm in there. After the bloke had cut the hair, he said ‘And the eyebrows, sir?’ ‘No, you’re alright, I’ll sort them out later.’

 

Back out, and the bloke playing in the square was still there – ‘I’ll be here til 4, when I get my bus’, and as my hands hadn’t quite thawed out, I went for a cup of coffee at Coffee #1 near where he was. Finally warmed up, I went up the high street to find the couple still there. This left me with another problem, because I’m fucked if I’m going back down Fish Row, with the wind and racket…however, up the other end of Fish Row, they were pulling down the market stalls and I was able to set up near the cross, opposite Goldsmiths jewellers. There was hardly anyone about but thankfully hardly any wind, which was fine by me. An old guy said he thought I was really good and then that old favourite ‘you must have been PROFESSIONAL, were you?’ I said ‘Well, I know what you mean but this money here…I mean, money’s the same wherever you go.’ 

 

I picked up a tenner in the hour and 20 minutes there, which made a total of three hours – long enough. Near the end, four sisters – foreign, possibly Iranian and aged, I’m guessing between 3 and 6, and wearing identical pink coats, came by and made very suggestive movements; arm on the hips, wiggling their bottoms and thrusting out their crotches at me, and blowing kisses. I tried to ignore them and wanted to tell them to fuck off but resisted. After a few minutes, which seemed an eternity, they ran off to their mother, who’d just emerged from a street off the square. Fuck that.