… yesterday about those photos.
They were not in fact by Emma Barthère at all. These are the ones that are by her – people sitting on rooftops (something that was the subject of some not inconsiderable discussion at that meeting the other night) all over Granville.
The ones that I showed you were by a photographer called Thomas Jouanneau and are part of his “Ile de Chausey” project.
So now you know.
What you’ll also know in a moment is that just by way of a change I haven’t crashed out yet today. And that’s despite being wide awake at 05:30. And it wasn’t as if I’d had a particularly early night either.
So I imagine that I’ll be paying for this in very early course.
After the usual morning performance and a little relax, I sat down to get on with some work. But it wasn’t long before I had a little distraction and ended up chatting to a friend of mine in Germany, about music and a few other things too.
And the result of this chat was that I ended up having a good hunt around on the internet. 30 years of storage haven’t been too kind to the bass guitar and it needs a few bits and pieces to restore it to its former glory.
Apart from a seized potentiometer, the machine heads and tuning pegs need replacing. And I’m not putting cheap rubbish on them but proper original Gibson equipment. And they took some tracking down too, but I might have found some in the USA.
They are going to be quite a price, and the person to whom I spoke is working out a price to include delivery to over here.
But before you all faint away at the price, just let me mention that the guy in the USA pointed me in the direction of a couple of basses the same vintage as mine that are currently on sale, and the cheapest one is at $5200 so you can see why I’m not fitting cheap and nasty rubbish to it.
Another thing too is that since I bought the tuning foot-pedal the other week, I have hit an unexpected snag. The foot-pedal goes on the floor of course, with the guitar plugged into it. And I don’t use an amplifier but a Vox Micro amPlug
And now the amplug, instead of plugging into the guitar round about waist-height, plugs into the foot-pedal on the floor. And with the headphones only having a cable of 1.5 metres and I’m 1.73 metres, you can immediately see a problem.
You can’t buy headphones with longer cables, so eventually I was able to track down a 15m extension cable. And a proper pair of bass studio headphones while I was at it instead of the hifi headphones that I use. Might as well organise myself properly.
While I’m on the subject, another thing that I’ve been doing is to track down the guitar tabs for some of the tracks that I’ve been working on, and transforming them into images to save. I don’t read music quickly enough to play it with a score, so I play by ear. And I’m finding that these days it’s “ear today, gone tomorrow” and I’m spending more time trying to remember what I worked out the previous day than actually learning new stuff.
At least, having some kind of music enables me to work out at a glance where I’m starting and finishing, and where to keep in rhythm.
All of this took me up to something of a late lunch, so I made my butties (the salad oil mix that I made yesterday is delicious), grabbed my book and headed off for my wall where I was joined by my friend the lizard. He really enjoyed the pear leavings once again.
This afternoon I cracked on with the web page that I’m still miles from finishing, as well as having my walk. And spending 45 minutes trying to figure out the bass line to one of the tracks whose guitar tabs I worked on this morning.
And it’s times like this that made me wish that I’d paid more attention to Miss Ricketts’ music classes at school. That really WAS a wasted opportunity, that was. I don’t know what I must have been thinking when I chose my ‘O’ Level subjects and excluded Music.
My response from Nikon came back this afternoon too. Basically “ignore our earlier e-mail. You’ll have your lens next week some time”.
I had a mental block for tea tonight. I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted to eat. After much binding in the marsh, I ended up with a vegan burger and veg with thick gravy.
Out for my walk this evening, there wasn’t much wind but there was quite a sea boiling up.
You wouldn’t have thought that there would have been enough energy in the sea to send the waves crashing up over the sea wall, but there we are.
And the photo hasn’t done too well, has it? I dunno what’s happening to my equipment these days. I think that the nut at the rear end of the camera must have a screw loose.
Just round the corner, I could hear some noise coming from the direction of the town.
Further enquiry revealed that there’s some kind of event in the town tonight, as this photo of the rue Paul Poirier will reveal. I was half-tempted to go down and see what was happening, but these days, I have to consider that it’s a hell of a way back up the hill late at night after a full day’s work.
I’m not as young as I was, am I?
And I was buttonholed by four young teenagers, probably about 13 or so, sitting on the wall with a smuggled bottle of cider. Could I take their photo with one of their phones? And so I duly obliged.
So having written out tonight’s entry twice (having pressed the wrong key and wiped off the previous version by mistake) I’m going to bed. I’ve had a heavy day what with one thing and another and I need my sleep.
Shopping tomorrow, of course.
