Day 2651

Day 2651
Saturday January 31st 2026
Winchester

Out again in a break in the rain – it’s supposed to start up again around 3 o’clock. Gareth is hanging around the top spot. I didn’t speak to him as he usually chats for ages – I made a dash round the back of the monument before he saw me(!) and headed for The Square, which was wet and a bit muddy, as usual, because of the mud people bring in from the cathedral grounds. So…quite sunny overhead (obviously, because the sky’s above, isn’t it?!) and the wind is almost non-existent, for once.
The other thing that’s almost non-existent is the coinage – it’s a good half hour before anything falls in the case. Then a young girl breaks away from her family and takes a photo of the QR code – I checked it later on my phone and it was a fiver donation. Yippee, it was worth me coming out!

A woman who I see around a lot came for a chat. I think she’s the one I used to see with Marcus, who’s now in a care home. She began by saying ‘You’re really part of the wallpaper in Winchester now, aren’t you?’ I said ‘Yeah, part of the furniture…whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know!’
She was very nice, even donated which she doesn’t usually do, and complimented me on the technique – she didn’t really understand how it works so I gave her a short demonstration – ‘You’ve got the bass and middle bits, played by the thumb – the thumb does most of the work, then the high melody (I did a few bars of La Vie En Rose)…and within those, you have different ways of playing them. So, the palm mutes the bass bit so it’s soft (I play it muted then straight to demonstrate the difference)…see? If I play it unmuted, it sounds rubbish, and then the melody has to be sort of drawn out – legato – and a bit louder…’
I asked her if Gareth was still at the Buttercross. She didn’t know but went off and came back a couple of minutes later to say he’d left.

Well, as I said, there was virtually no wind but after 40 minutes or so, the cold really was seeping in so I didn’t think I’d last much longer than the usual hour and a bit…but long enough for another windfall in the shape of a fiver, so yippee again!

Near the end I did Tales Of The Unexpected then got through the first verse of Life On Mars? before I was interrupted by a couple. The woman said – ‘Oh, that brings back memories! and I thought she meant Life On Mars? but no – ‘What was that called…Alfred Hitchcock?’ and I thought, no, she definitely doesn’t mean Bowie! ‘Ah, yeah, Tales Of The Unexpected. They’ve got it on a channel on the TV. Most people do the thing with their arms, like the woman in the credits, you know?’ ‘Oh yes, she was like Princess Diana, wasn’t she?’ ‘Um…’ no, not really!

Anyway, I managed an hour and 35 minutes, which was enough for my poor fingers. When I got back home there was still no rain (it must have remembered a previous engagement and buggered off somewhere else) but there was a £3 PayPal donation from Jason Audsley, who’s donated a few times – I’m not sure who he is but he must have seen me today, or else why would he do it? I have a few people who wave and smile but don’t come up so it must have been one of them. £22.51 was the total so a bit better than the last few days, as a bloody weekend day should be! But not as lucrative as it usually is, the reason being it’s January, it’s wet and cold and no one wants to sit outside eating and drinking.