Today is what it should have been after the week that was, a day of lounging. I got up and lounged in front of two football games before dinner and then lounged in front of Episode 5 of The Rings of Power. In between I spoke to Arno in France about the week, life and my gear at his house in Brittany and Noel, checking in after he fell in the street and landed painfully just after we left him on Sunday night, seems like it wasn’t just us in trouble. Relaxing is a skill in its own right, as is moving on and not brooding, in our case, the damage is done, and we can’t change it, all we can do is learn from it. The problem with life is that there are so many things to know, so much to be aware of beyond your area of expertise, like for example, engines. I don’t even drive so I’m not very aware of impending issues even if they are obvious to someone in the know. I also wouldn’t know why a garden was dying or how to operate on an injured sparrow hawk.

I gazed out of the window across the fields to see the sun shining down on the harvested wheat crop and wondered what will be growing there next year. In the distance, a house, slightly hidden by the trees and on closer scrutiny, there’s a whole village about to be exposed by the falling of the autumn leaves. People walking dogs on the far side of the field, disappearing into the trees after the grateful pooch’s walk, heading home on a Saturday afternoon. A murder of crows circled the next field, high in the sky, ominous but nothing seemed to happen worse than earlier in the week.

The clocks have already changed in Australia which means that my sesh tomorrow with Arktik Lake Tony will be an hour earlier at 11 AM and when the clocks change here in England and in Portugal, it will be two hours earlier at the ungodly time of 10 AM. Autumn/winter is coming quicker here than it does in Porto and when we fly back there on Tuesday we are as likely to fly into a sunny day as we would a month ago.

Music today has been Led Zeppelin II, I’m not sure if it was inspired by listening to The Cult yesterday. Led Zeppelin are always thought of as a seventies band but Led Zep II was in fact released in 1969. I remember listening to it and the other Led Zep albums a lot in my bedroom in the seventies, with an incense stick burning. I still burn incense, a habit I picked up from my father who had some kind of contradictory appreciation of the exotic from his normal life in the suburbs of Liverpool (The Wirral). I remember once he bought my mum a chunky pewter necklace that looked like it might have been worn by an Inca warrior, I remember she hated it. She was hard to please and was very specific in her tastes, I remember I once bought a teapot stand made out of carved wood, she hated that too. She’d be happy with a bottle of Estée Lauder perfume or perhaps a bottle of whisky and 200 Rothmans although she didn’t need those everyday items as a present. I never really knew what to get her, nobody did, chocolates maybe. She loved swing music but I don’t ever remember anyone buying her a record, I can’t imagine why. She didn’t drive, she worked 9-5 in an office my whole childhood into my teenage years and her biggest interest seemed to be watching the snooker. I suppose watching the tele every day was that generation’s thang. All she ever said about the music I liked was, “You can’t understand the words,” with a puzzled look on her face as if it was unfathomable that you could listen to a singer who didn’t have good diction. They stopped me from going to see Led Zeppelin in London in the seventies even though I had tickets, I wonder how much more damage I got from a house full of cigarette smoke than I ever would have after two days alone in London as a 15-year old, even if England were playing Scotland the same night in notoriously troubled contests. Haha, bless ’em and their ignorance, protecting and harming simultaneously.

Music Of The Daze