Day 2624
Sunday November 9th 2025.
1. The Square. 2. Alley opposite Marks & Spencer.
Back to The Square and the rain overnight and today has washed away all the chalk work but not the smaller bits of glass from the goblet dropped by Kat and her friend last night. They’re all stuck in the cracks in between the paving stones. How long will they be there? Watch this space.
I’ve just set up and a young bloke comes by to see if I’ve got change for a tenner.
‘Sorry no, I haven’t even started yet.’
‘Oh ok, I didn’t know if you were starting or packing up…aren’t you the guy in the paper who’s been playing fifteen years?’
‘Yeah, that’s me.’
‘I’m sure you’ve been playing longer than that, I’ve been here longer than that and I remember you were playing when I moved here.’
‘Well, no…it’s fifteen years. I keep a diary and I started it when I started and that was fifteen years this October. October 25th, to be precise.’
‘Really? No, it was longer than that.’
‘Honestly, I assure you it wasn’t’
‘Yeah, OK, thanks anyway.’
I sold a £8 CD but apart from that the coinage was pretty scarce so I packed up after an hour and twenty minutes, went to the toilet then set up where the flower seller usually is – at least if it starts to rain (very likely) I can pull the stuff undercover.
I’d only been playing a few minutes when one of those weird things happened. During the first session I was in the middle of a song and it suddenly occurred to me I hadn’t seen Marcus the painter for ages. Well, not half an hour later this man comes up and says ‘You remember Marcus? He used to paint?’ and I’m thinking, this bloke’s just said “used to paint” in the past tense so he must have died.
‘Yeah, of course I remember. Is he alright?’
‘He’s fine. He’s in a home, a care home in Otterbourne.’
At this, I breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Right, OK. I was wondering why I hadn’t seen him and you won’t believe this but he suddenly popped into my mind about half an hour ago.’
‘Yeah, he’s OK. You had a photo of him and Jan in your book. Jan passed years ago. Have you got chapter two??’
He means the second volume. Apparently, Marcus asked him to get the book off me, if he saw me in town. So now he’ll have it.
I asked his name – it’s Jonathon, then related how weird it was about me playing the Gymnopedie, Marcus’s favourite, and nine times out of ten, either near the start or during the rendition, he’s suddenly there! I could never get my head around that and neither could Marcus and we used to talk about how weird that was. It was uncanny, supernatural. Oh well, it doesn’t look like it’ll happen again. I asked Jonathon convey my best wishes to Marcus. C’est la vie!
Anyway, I did much better here – I did an hour and ten minutes, so that’s a total of 2 1/2 hours, and sold two more CDs which, with the book, came to a total of £41.23.
It DID start raining near the end so I stopped and quickly pulled the stuff in and packed up at a leisurely pace.