Day 2699
Sunday May 31st 2026
Winchester
Out a bit late today. I got to The Square after 4 o’clock and dinner is at 6 so it’s just an hour’s set – all the hits! I’d just plopped the cases down and was about to open the amp one when I heard the sound of a guitar. Very quiet but definitely somewhere close by. I walked to the edge of the pavement and there he was – Rick Tarrant, sitting outside The Eclipse, gently strumming away. Rick’s a nice bloke so I went over. He stopped playing and held his hand out to me, we shook hands and I said I’d have no problem playing somewhere else, after all I was here yesterday. I told him about the Hambledon arse taking the photo – ‘That’s just not necessary, is it?’ he said. Anyway, I told Rick to carry on and I went down to the flower seller’s usual spot. Dave wasn’t there so I set up, well in the shade.
Just after starting up, the battery in my left hearing-aid conked out and I searched in vain for a replacement. I always carry a spare packet in the case but there wasn’t one! Oh well, something else I have to remember – check the bloody case for the bloody hearing-aid batteries!
Only an hour but long enough to meet some nice people. One I’d met before – that young guy who bought the two CDs from me a few weeks ago in Southampton. He was out with his mum. Well, I assume that’s who it was as she looked like him and was 30 years older.
Another was a chap who was listening on one of the benches in the middle of the road. He really liked the fingerstyle technique – he was a guitarist himself. I say “was” because he’d got a big problem with his left hand ring finger, which is inclined to press against his palm and it’s stopped him from playing – ‘See, if I do this (bends it outward)…it just springs back.’ I could really sympathise with his predicament, poor chap, and I told him about my focal dystonia, which he’d never heard of. I said it was due to the signals from the brain to the fingers being ever-so slightly delayed. I said ‘In the beginning, I was distraught. I thought I’d have to stop playing but I’ve just had to work around it.’ I felt really sorry for this bloke – he was much younger than me and seemed a really nice person.
Later, an American woman who’d been listening on the same spot came over to pay a compliment – ‘I’ve missed a bus so what better way to pass the time than to sit and listen to you!’
I was talking about the fingerstyle – I said they’re mostly my arrangements apart from a few Chet Atkins ones. She wasn’t familiar with him so I did a few bars of La Vie En Rose. ‘What’s that?’ she said. I told her and she then said ‘Oh, I don’t know…it seems to lose a bit of it’s, what do you call it…it’s specialness, it’s charm.’
‘Oh really? Oh well!’ I said because you can’t please everyone.
‘Yeah, I don’t know…it sort of, what’s the word…trivialises it?’
‘Fair enough…I mean, it’s a pop arrangement, I suppose, so there’s a strong beat, you know.’ I didn’t take it personally, though Chet might!
My final visitor and most generous – a QR donation of £10, was a young, black-haired and very pretty (despite the nose ring) young woman who, again, was on the seat in the middle of the road. It turns out she was waiting for her boyfriend to come out of work at one of the shops opposite from where she was sitting. At one point, a man a bit older on a nearby bench was making conversation with her. He asked what she was holding so she held it up, the Winchester edition of Monopoly. A bit later he got up and sat next to her, trying to chat her up I suppose. He said something and she pointed to the shop then he stood up and held out his hand, hoping for a high five, which she gave him and he was off. Better luck next time, mate.
The coinage, thanks mainly to her, was £26.50. Not a bad hour’s work.