Leaving home with an umbrella, fighting horizontal drizzle and wind, I wondered if more people swim when it’s raining or do they just stay home? Swimming in the warm rain is lovely, but this wasn’t a day for an outdoor pool, it felt like January, not June. In reality, it’s an uncertain April, April is like that, unpredictable and today what came with it was a low spooky mist that clung to the roofs of the houses, limiting visibility and fuelling the imagination as it evoked an old Dracula movie. The rain continued to fall into twilight and dusk until darkness fell and brought with it a damp chill. It was moody and I didn’t want to close the shutters waiting till the last minute before Olivia came and locked out the monsters, the misery and the cold.

On a brighter note, and believe me, they were few and far between as the clouds came crashing down, obscuring any glimpse of blue, I mentioned the other day the pleasure of seeing old cars, well today I saw a Saab. It wasn’t even that old but it still stood out, it was a Saab 900 from the eighties but it just reminded me of the Saabs of the sixties. Saab is of course a Swedish car although they filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and it is now exclusively a defence organisation which brings me to the story of the Swedish jet!

I lived in Stockholm and on August 8th, 1993, the Water Festival was in full swing with half a million people enjoying the festivities. There was an air display, a Saab JAS 39 jet was roaring around the skies. I stood on my balcony as it went over a couple of times, my neighbour Arthur was on his balcony watching it too. We were standing watching because it was quite low when suddenly it seemed to stop and hang in the sky. The pilot ejected and the plane fell like a proverbial brick straight down to Earth. Miraculously no one was killed, one person suffered burns as the plane crashed and burst into flames. The pilot Lars Råde was unharmed. My neighbour Arthur said something like, “It’s just part of the display” how wrong he was. It was a shocking sight to see this machine just suddenly fall to the Earth.

Over the last couple of days and tomorrow, it’s test pressing listening days. Our friend Mathias from Cologne was in town and he had his test pressing sent to us so he could listen to it here on my stereo system. I also just received the test pressing for Space Summit and the album with Jerome Froese. Today after the swim it was a sesh with Mike in Chicago and Fred in Minneapolis and after another busy week of exercise, seshes, and Anekdoten rehearsals, I will be staying in bed tomorrow morning, unless I wake up and watch Man U/Everton of course.

Music today has been Pink Floyd – Hey, Hey, Rise Up! featuring Andriy Khlyvnyuk of BoomBox.

Music Of The Daze