Today was torture my hands day, sorry I mean rehearsals. It’s a bit of a struggle at the moment because the ends of my fingers haven’t got hard yet and my thumbs are giving me some trouble, so slowly one of those painful events will sort itself out by simply playing. But the thumbs are something else that’s not going to get better by playing. Let’s just hope it doesn’t get worse. Without giving anything away, we’re trying some songs we haven’t played live before, there are so many to choose from. It’s been a long life, a lot of bands and a lot of records. My thumbs are nearly 65 years old, not much lasts that long, apart from turtles.

Boydie and I went out today, him to the tip, me to Screwfix (exciting Sunday) where I couldn’t make myself understood. I asked for a ‘power board’ and he had no idea what I meant, eventually we translated it to ‘extension lead’. But then I couldn’t get him to understand what a 9V power pack was. When I got back to the house I looked on Amazon and they are called 9V power adaptors here in England. So I hit the sidewalk, checked that Boydie had emptied the trunk, made sure he didn’t need gas, and drove back to his hood.

I bought some batteries for the clip-on tuner and the reading light and talked to a very old man with the broadest West Country accent who told me that he couldn’t find anything in the psychedelic psupermarket aisles – I also spoke to a very young cashier who had terrible difficulty in speaking at all. In the car I noticed how overdressed I was, it was warmer today and I didn’t need all those layers but then the rain came, the weather forecast threatened snow in the week and we were back to where we were with 8th March in Kinbrace in the Scottish Highlands experiencing the coldest day of the year so far at -15°C. But then again, we were in Minneapolis at Christmas, we would have been throwing our coats off and having picnics in our swimmers if it had been -15°C.

Two seshes tonight with Rajan in Brooklyn and Jed in Minneapolis where it’s still snowing. We’re planning to make records but then can you even say that anymore? We made a great record with Ahad (Afridi/Willson-Piper) but it was only streamed. Is it still a record when it’s not physically available?

Music today has been the first Blonde on Blonde album Contrasts (1969). The band was from Newport, South Wales and made three albums between 1969 and 1971. This album has an odd cover of Eleanor Rigby. Guitarist/vocalist Ralph Denyer left after the first album and joined Aquila, but that’s another story. He wrote the well-known Guitar Handbook. He sadly died in 2011.

Music Of The Daze