And the good news is the new guitar is sitting beside me (and all the others) while I type so I now have no reason for delaying planned recording any longer. My intention is to record all the songs I have written this past couple of years using guitar, banjo, mandolin, slide guitar, piano and assorted other bits and bobs. As can be seen from the pile of books stacked against the fireplace too, time is the problem - with so much work to do already but I like to think of this room as my version of the garden shed. Somewhere to potter around as the inevitable slip into middle age (well... perhaps my final trimester) confronts my sensibility - or is that me clutching to my musical past. Who cares, if Dylan, Jagger and Richard are still alive there has to be hope for me - surely. And so the next chorus I am going to write a song around is:
And I will be waiting,
waiting down here,
waiting to walk
to the end of the pier.
Wish me luck - though I am not walking "off" the end of the pier - not yet! But walking on the wild side has some appeal - and tons of charm for such a sleazy song. This song accompanied me from Edinburgh to London and then to Brighton in my time of awakening. At least that is how it felt then - and when I look back, well, nostalgia being a return to a place the never existed, it will suffice as a memory for me. Though I can honestly say the last thirty years have been better than the first twenty-five, so that has to be good. David Eagleman has written in his book SUM: Tales From the Afterlife that, "As the happy result of a free-market capitalist society, we are finally able to determine our own hereafter... to forever live in a virtual world... It is no surprise that everyone is lining up for this avant-garde afterlife..." Well I don't know about free-market capitalism because I would choose the life I have, steeped in left of centre politics, a musical heritage to die for, a glass of wine when I feel the urge and surrounded by people, words, sounds, smells and love - if this is avant-garde I am already living it.
