Hello sailor!
Well, summer’s here, and the time is right… for drinking heavily in Swindon pubs it would seem. A jolly evening in the Royal Oak, Lou and I rolled up with our shiny (okay, then, shabby) PA all nice and repaired, and were greeted by a worried-looking Ben. “I’ve lost Stuart”, he says. “He went to park the car about twenty minutes ago, I’ve set all his kit up for him, and he’s still not back yet. You how he gets lost driving around Swindon…”
Just as he is saying this, we see Stuart drive majestically past; and so, giggling helplessly, we unload the van; when we’ve finished, just as I hop back in to park it, Stuart comes driving past for another lap. He follows me, as we drive 30 seconds round the corner to the large clearly-marked car park, and we stroll back to the pub to finish setting up.
The gig goes rather well; Lou making yet another spirited attempt to get the audience to buy us all drinks, while hardly forgetting at all any of the lyrics. Not that the crowd care, they are cheerfully singing along to fill in the gaps.
A bijou disaster-ette strikes in the second set, as I clumsily twat my wireless with my elbow again, so I have to finish one song in silence and then use a nasty old-fashioned cable to get through the rest of the gig. My fault for tempting fate by buying us all a pint at half time “to celebrate having got all our kit working again at long last”.
The audience seem unfussed, and there is some bizarre “Swindon dance-off” going on as they “lay down some bitchin dance moves” – as we young people say.
So, another evening in the company of Mr Soldering Iron for me, then…
Saturday 24th – Woodland’s Edge, Peatmoor, Swindon
Ahh, back to where Lou played her very first gig with us; we did our best to make her feel comfortable, and so far she hasn’t really taken revenge on us yet. Yet…
Sunday 25th – Clothiers Arms, Stroud
A lovely little place, this, and I for one am rather fond of the dear ol’ Clothears from gigs here with daughter Lily. Not exactly sure of the start time, it might even be worth checking with the pub. And then letting us know, just to be on the safe side.
Meanwhile, I am beginning to be a little concerned that our Lou has been spending too much time around Stuart. As we drove home after Saturday’s gig, hurtling along the empty motorway under a moonlit sky, after some fifteen minutes of contented silence, Louisa asks me an interesting philosophical question.
“Hey”, she says, “You know when you’re thinking about something… “
“Er, yes…?”
“When you’re thinking something, do you sometime see the words that you’re thinking?”
“Er…no…”
“Don’t you? I do, sometimes”.
“What, you actually see the words that you’re thinking, like they’re printed out, in front of your eyes?”
“Yes.”
We drive on in silence, while I try to imagine what it would be like to see a rolling ticker-tape of all your thoughts printed out in front of you. If you’re short-sighted, could you ask for it in a larger font? What would happen if you looked away, presumably you miss a bit and have to try and catch up with the plot later? Is there some catch-up iPlayer type service so you don’t have to miss anything, and lets you go through you favourite bits over again? But if you’re watching a repeat, won’t you at the same time be missing whatever you’re thinking now?
What if you mis-read a crucial bit? Could you end up with completely the wrong idea about what you think? So what you think you’re thinking is totally different to what you’re actually thinking? But, if it’s only what you’re thinking, then surely what you think you’re thinking is what you’re actually thinking, and what you were actually thinking isn’t any more, because you thought it was something else.
“I think there’s some pizza left in the fridge”, I observe.
“Oooh, yummy!”.
A nice, easy to read one.
Square on
A