The day started with Liverpool losing 0-1 to the team at the bottom of the league, Bournemouth, after last week’s 7-0 bashing of Man United. But it made me think about the hardest thing to achieve, consistency. It’s the same for the humans out there on the planet, you are faced with different situations all the time, people who play by different rules, your game plan might not work with everybody. Your tactics have to change sometimes, you need different solutions to different weather and right through till your last dying breath you will be both brilliantly avoiding trouble and inadvertently walking into disaster.

It was nice to see the woodpecker today first flying in and clinging to the tree trunk, checking out the scene before hitting the feeder. The robins seem to have control over the smaller birds, chasing off the sparrows and dunnocks but they don’t dare hassle the much larger great spotted woodpecker, black and white with its red flash. I could sit and watch the birds all day. At one point a squirrel arrived, fidgety but this one wasn’t just sitting up and eating what it had found on the ground, it was collecting material for its drey (yes, that’s a new word for me too), carrying everything in its mouth. I haven’t seen that before.

The day eventually evolved into rehearsals on either side of dinner, trying different songs that seem to work well but it’s hard trying to remember all those pesky lyrics, the guitar parts come easy, despite the issue with my thumbs – we’ll see how that pans out a few gigs into the tour. But this is why we have music stands and reading lights and if it’s good enough for old souls like Bob Dylan and Lucinda Williams, it’s good enough for me – at least until those words are branded into my brain – how did Laurence Olivier do it? I guess he didn’t have the internet.

I’ve had to buy yet another tuner because I now have three 12-strings that I will potentially be using. I was trying to use one of those that clips onto the end of the guitar or in the Seagull’s case an in-built tuner but nothing works better than a Boss TU 2 or 3, quick, efficient, and easy to see, the best tuner I’ve ever used and as I have three 12-strings, I don’t need any struggle, keeping 36 strings in tune is enough to worry about.

Music today was The Legendary Pink Dots‘ album Any Day Now (1988), something of a rarity by this intriguing Anglo-Dutch band that has released 32 studio albums, and 52 live and compilation albums. Where do you start with this experimental, catchy, psychedelic bunch of intellectual punks? The answer – here.

Music Of The Daze