Day 2645
Friday January 23rd 2026
Winchester
It’s 8 degrees and a VERY windy day. The Buttercross is taken and Kev’s slouched in his deckchair near Marks & Spencer so the crossroads is where I’m headed. I don’t even get through the first verse of La Vie En Rose before a huge gust of wind blows over my album, which is leaning on the rear bike wheel, the stool (I’m standing up) and blows the gigbag shut, which means I have to stop playing and sort it out. The way to stop two of those problems is to prop the album in the edge of the gigbag, between the top and bottom bits, thereby securing the album and keeping it upright and on display, and it also prevents the “lid” of the gigbag from shutting. I’m patting myself on the back for that…until a few minutes later when the whole lot – gigbag with album blows five feet in front of me. A woman helps put it back where it was. Nice lady.
I need a better solution…I’ll have to sit down (which stops the stool from blowing over) and put my right leg over the top of the gigbag so it will stop the lid from shutting and keep the gigbag in place. And that’s it, it works a treat.
The first donation is one of a group of young Chinese blokes who between them conjure the grand amount of…2p! Then there’s a group of three, one of whom films me for a few minutes from outside the Pret place. No donation. But help is at hand, from the bloke running the Myndful Mushrooms stall opposite, where Gus and his Real Leathers usually is. He comes over and donates a fiver, saying ‘yeah, I like a bit of live music!’ And that’s not all, during the hour I was there, there were a further three fivers that found their way into the case, all quickly retrieved by me before they blew away. So FOUR FIVERS! During The Third Man and old couple stopped – ‘Is that The Third Man?’ he says.
‘It is, also known as The Harry Lime Theme.’
‘Yes, my father was stationed there when I was a little boy.’
‘Oh, in Vienna?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve always wanted to go there – they’ve still got that big wheel, haven’t they?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘You should go there’ she says, ‘go while you can, life is too short.’
‘I know.’
After the hour – I couldn’t play longer as my fingertips were frozen – I’d collected the very satisfactory amount of £28.02p. Result!