You’ve heard of people suffering in silence, well have you heard of suffering because of the silence? The flat we have moved into has no traffic, no wildlife, no people, no neighbours, it’s dead silent and I simply cannot sleep in silence. When I finally did get to sleep at god knows what time (I ended up oversleeping and being 15 minutes late for my sesh with Rohan in Sydney today), it was because Olivia found an app on her phone – of rain. That helped but it ran out at some point and I heard it stop but by that time, I had been lured into a hypnotic state by the digital drips and fell asleep anyway. So I need a white noise machine, a wave machine, a rain machine, something in the background, the silence is killing me. Then there was the shutter on the first night that made the room pitch black. Total silence and total darkness, it sounds very much like death.

I awoke late for Rohan’s sesh but as I finished Olivia came into the room. We made a point of getting out of the house as quickly as possible as I had another sesh at 4 with Arkansas Daniel and at 6 with New Jersey Chris. New flat, we need some things apart from food over Christmas. What I didn’t expect was that outside, it was sunny, blue skies and 60 degrees. We came out of our front door and at the lift, there was a neighbour standing, waiting, the lift is small so we walked down the stairs, spiralling down and that reminded me of castles and this fascinating fact: In castles, the stairs always ascend clockwise so that the attacking enemy finds it hard to wield his sword right-handed whereas the defender can fight downwards with their more powerful arm – this is, of course, presuming that most people are right-handed. What is truly fascinating is that if castles were attacked by snooker players the theory wouldn’t work because so many of them seem to be left-handed.

It was wonderful walking down the street with the sun on your face and a slight breeze, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year was on Monday so from now it’s getting lighter. Today was a real step in the right direction as a premature spring day showed its face. I hadn’t been out since we moved in, so it had meaning, leaving home to go out to return – home. I took some pics outside, some amazing buildings, and we walked down to the place where we bought my little computer speakers (cash converters) to see if they had any printers or guitars. We decided that a printer might be better bought new especially if it came with new ink and that would mean it would be the same price as a second-hand one without ink. Also in the shop, there were some guitars. A left-handed Chinese-made Fender Squire Strat, 99€. I need a guitar but I need something better than that.

We found a shop and bought the new printer and we walked back up the main street and arrived home just before the seshes started. Adélia, the landlord’s partner, arrived with the plumber (efficiency) but he’s back on Monday, probably to break up the floor to clear a drain. From the plumber onto our 3rd wedding anniversary which is today, we celebrated by confirming the drain meeting and watching two episodes of Californians in Space. We watched the first two episodes of The Addams Family the other day – the 1964 version, black and white, it looks so great without the colour, perhaps we’ll go really crazy and watch Episode 3 tonight too.

Music tonight comes from CAN and Ege Bamyası from 1972 after New Jersey Chris mentioned the track One More Night from the album. We were talking about the drums on this record, the incredible and sadly late Jaki Liebezeit. CAN are strange, they are not exactly chart material although the single I Want More reached No.26 in the UK chart in 1976. What CAN are, at least, is foot tappers and that’s all about Jaki.

Song Of The Daze