I left the house in a bit of a rush today, confirming the fact that if you have more time it makes no difference, you’re still late. Swimming pool summer times have changed so it’s an hour later than usual and next week the new season starts on September 1st and the times are all going to change again, plus the Covid protocols are going to change, so the routine isn’t set. The swim was wonderful today anyway, the freestyle mile and then after some extra lengths of different strokes I was inspired by Monday’s hair tie search to swim underwater, so I tried it. It’s ok if you’re kicking off from the wall, you can make it quite a way but I couldn’t get anywhere near the 25-meter length of the pool, maybe I made it a third of the way. But rising for air and staying under without the wall kick was hopeless. I suppose swimming a whole length underwater would be extremely satisfying but I can’t imagine it is even possible with 63-year-old lungs. We’ll see.

On the way to the pool, I noticed that the Marquês square was covered in brown leaves, this is way too early for autumn, plus it’s Portugal so I was surprised to see such a bed of brown. But then looking up, the trees looked just as fresh and green and thick as they have all summer so perhaps Portuguese trees shed this way and although it was a little cooler today it doesn’t feel anything like autumn is coming. I walked past the PPB, the pigeon poop bench and every other day when I walk past this particular bench, there is someone sitting on it. How they don’t see the PP on the bench I just don’t know. I always say, “Cuidado!” – “Watch out!” then point at the stains and then point up towards the branches and show them the culprits. This is the only bench that has this problem and the people sometimes react as if it’s not a concern then as I look back you see them looking at the bench, looking up, and moving.

Reality hit today for booking our trip to England so we can start with packing up the archive and getting the paperwork together (and the money) to move it here. We are going to take the ferry from Bilbao or Santander in Spain to Plymouth, Bournemouth or Portsmouth depending on our routing, it’s almost £500 each way as Ariel is coming with us. We have to go to London, we have to go to Somerset, sort out the storage house and bring road cases and boxes down to Penzance for packing. I also have to buy 700 boxes for the albums, singles and CDs and that is going to cost £1,200 that’s all before the cost of shipping everything to Portugal, the latest quote being £9,000. Then when everything gets here we need to have it go into premises that we will need to rent. All for the love of music. I’m just hoping that all these personal items are not going to cause problems with customs because there are so many records and music gear. We’ll see – the paperwork, oh my, the paperwork.

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Music today has been a stroll through my sixties playlist which you can access on Spotify (if you have it) below. At the moment it contains 149 songs and lasts for 7 hours and 14 minutes. I have it ordered in song length because when I made the list I was putting lots of songs together by the same band.

As it’s sixties songs the songs are mainly two or three minutes and putting the songs in duration order breaks them up nicely and you don’t really notice that the shorter songs are first because they’re all short. At this point there are no Beatles or Stones songs on there because I hadn’t figured out how to break them up and there are so many songs by them, now I’ve figured it out I’ll be adding them to the list in the future.

Music Of The Daze