The rain comes down on the Portuguese summer but it’s nice rain, it’s not cold, even though there are low clouds and the mist is back with a slight wind changing the rain’s direction. The empty streets are quiet, only the sound of the water dripping from the trees and flowing through the gutters and drain pipes. The sight of perfect circular ripples in newly formed puddles. I used to love swimming in the rain in hotter countries, in the sea, in an open-air hotel pool, there’s something about getting wet from the sky and from the ground simultaneously. After today’s mega swim (102 laps), I managed to get home before the rain arrived, it was spitting as I walked and it’s odd being immersed in water for an hour and ten minutes, shower, dried off and then exposed to it again, one minute revelling in it, the next trying to avoid it.

Almost every morning I eat papaya for breakfast and usually spill some on my shorts, some on the computer and some on the floor. Is it me or the nature of the fruit? I don’t have it on a plate, I cut it in half, scrape out all the tiny, shiny black seeds from the trough in the middle and then eat it with a spoon, holding the gourd in my hand – I guess that explains the spillage. With every spoonful, you feel it adding another ten minutes to your life. On the walk home I dropped into the bakery and picked up some pães da avó (grandma’s bread rolls) for Olivia and me and came back to the flat (apartment) and juiced a bag of carrots, adding another quarter of an hour to the ten minutes of life extension I’d already gained from the papaya.

I had a sesh today with Kristin in New York and was supposed to have another sesh with Noelle in Montreal but she wasn’t well so I watched the new 18-year-old tennis sensation Emma Raducanu who has advanced into the second week of Wimbledon. Sadly she retired hurt but she’s a great player, I always wonder how the racists who like tennis reconcile the latest British star, born in Canada with a Romanian father and a Chinese mother. Wimbledon takes a back seat to the European championships, semi-finals tomorrow and Wednesday, first Italy vs Spain and then England vs Denmark. If England makes it through to the final, the country will explode as they haven’t been in a major final since they won the world cup in 1966. When Andy Murray won Wimbledon in 2013 he was the first British man to win since Fred Perry in 1936, that’s 77 years. If Scotland gets its independence, I suppose he won’t be British anymore, he’ll be Scottish and from an independent nation and the wait to win Wimbledon, that quintessentially English competition on grass, may go on for another 77 years, by then strawberries may be extinct but like ‘a Fred Perry’ will there be an Andy Murray fashion item?

The Arktik Lake test pressing was delivered today, last time we received something from outside Europe we got hit with a massive customs fee (it was two cookery books), this time nothing, although it took a while and some complicated customs forms to get here from Australia. It arrived warped and I don’t have a proper stereo system here – and who does? Those days seem to be mainly gone except for nerds like me and our cult of vinyl. So, I’m trying to give an opinion on this test pressing for the vinyl manufacture using a “three-in-one music centre” (as they were called) – turntable, cassette and radio, it would sound better if I put speaker cones in my cereal box. So I’m looking for a place to listen to the Arktik Lake EP quality so it can be manufactured and available to buy (only 200 copies, blue vinyl – eventually).

Last but not least the poster for the next Anekdoten shows in Sweden next year has been posted, see above.

Music today has been Onward (2012) by Hawkwind, an album I hadn’t heard before – sounds like later Hawkwind to me. Although it had one song called Aero Spaceage that they’ve reworked from the excellent Robert Calvert album Captain Lockheed and The Starfighters (1974). Afterwards, I went thrashing around listening to all kinds of playlists and listened to one or two Vanessa Paradis songs, I tried AC/DC’s latest but didn’t last long, The Beatles, The Zombies, The Foundations, The Box Tops, that sixties stuff is so great. So much music, so few ears.

Music Of The Daze