Quaint ramblings and occasional reflections of a journeying Aussie musician...

15 November 2007

Barthelona!

NFA Day 56

...so she has pale skin a-freckled, and a big mop of black curly hair, and shimmering, dragon-green eyes like creamy jade...and last Sunday she took me to this great place on Southbank, near Waterloo station, behind the restaurant Las Iguanas, right across from Royal Festival Hall....for any Londoners I thoroughly recommend it....it's like French patisserie meets Italian antipasto and all kinds of nutty breads and full desert....scrumptious stuff...
What an afternoon that was...I remember now! I used to do this with someone on a regular basis, a good while ago, in a land far away, before a money-driven bachelor working life took over, motivated by the Edge of London, fuelled on baked beans and meals at gigs. But not last Sunday...a nice walk, and loverly conversation, over a gorgeous meal on a lazy Sunday afternoon where the commanding hands of the clock hung loose and limp. A welcome change from tour buses and half an hour to grab a £3.80 sandwhich at a random services on the M something somewhere among the green fields....
So it was this same place on the waterfront that I took my old and fine feathered friend D-Funk on Wednesday night. He's got an inkling that I'm not gonna be around here for a while, and so on Facebook instigation we met at the great southern rail juncture of the city and headed for the river. We've known each other for ten years, and tonight would be no exception...two bottles of red later, we wind up at Gordon's Wine Bar on the other side of the river for what? some more! and then another pub just up the road for some BEER! If she hadn't scooped us off the pavement and whisked us away, I don't know what would have happened....
...which of course made the next morning far more entertaining as her and I coached it up to Stansted for an early morning Ryanscare flight to Spain's great coastal city. Nooooo, don't make me walk any more from the bus station to the apartment check in, and then another fifteen minutes? I can barely stand, in fact I can barely stand being alive right now....first tip to anyone thinking about coming here...those regular city blocks on the map are far bigger in real life, especially with a lashing hangover...

13 November 2007

A Meal


...I cooked a meal! A massive one, for all the people I was staying with and a straggler. Two things: One, after living no fixed address for fifty-four days on the trot now, it's such a treat to cook a meal, and two, it was for a whole bunch of new friends! Sure, it was a super-easy university-dorm-level Mexican thing, but it was massive and it filled five bellies and we all sat around on the couch afterwards and watched TV - what a treat!, for me at least.
At this transient time in my life where I don't know if I'm coming or going, what hemisphere I'm going to be living in for the near future, hanging out with a certain someone where it's felt the best it has for a long time, and also having been recently extracted from my main source of employment/big bunch of travelling mates with the show, it was just plain great to sit in someone's house and eat a happy-making meal, that I cooked, that was enjoyed by all.

London Tourist

NFA Day 54

...and so I find myself back in London, currently gigless.....well, aside from a three-dayer with another show in Germany in December. It was all politics, my friends, which resulted in the two weeks notice given....yep, was well looking forward to six months of steady work next year, but after five months and with merely three weeks to go before the winter break, not even memorising the pad and playing it better than the guy who wrote it, nor my impeccable professionalism and conduct, could keep me in the keys 1 chair of 'Dancing In The Streets'. And so last Saturday it was farewell to my newfound friends, the company I felt I'd only just gelled with, the people I was looking forward to working with for a while yet, for another itinerant return to London for a while.
The last couple of visits I've felt like a real tourist, compelled to take photographs of stuff I come across - a church with a dragon windvane, or a pedestal with a golden eagle on it on the other side of the river.
About a fortnight ago the show was in Dartford, about a forty-five minute train ride away, and on a particular commute around dusk, the train trundled over Charing Cross bridge, the sun was at just about the right level and there it was, the semi-fabled Waterloo Sunset, where the pallid grey gloom of the buildings that face the river were suddenly awash with pink. In three years, London had never appeared so beautiful.
But like most things in this town, blink and you miss it...that late summer sweetness has given way to the cold and gloom, when this place becomes real depressing, and I'm enjoying being a visitor once again, especially in recent times keeping company with a certain pale-skinned, freckled girl with a mop of black curly hair and shimmering green eyes. We're off somewhere totally new this Thursday, somewhere I've always wanted to go, and if you're lucky, noble reader, I may even write here about it!...

01 November 2007

Dancing In The Streets - Southport

NFA Day 42

We’d been here about three weeks ago with Thriller, at the same venue, but hadn’t gotten past the seaside. I get the impression that Southport was built in the Victorian era, what with the grandeur of our hotel, The Prince Of Wales, and the massive boulevard that I assume is the ‘high road’. After a couple of drinks at the smallest pub in the UK, not far from the theatre, and then one more at the Wetherspoons across the intersection, Matt and Andy and I stumbled into the foyer to find a free PC to check email. But no, it was not to be, as cookies are disabled. What the hell is a cookie?
‘It’s our paranoid IT guy,’ says the concierge. ‘Someone tried to look up the lotto the other day and was denied.’
After three glasses of red I suddenly replied, ‘The words ‘Fawlty Towers’ spring to mind.’
‘That’s right, and you’re only staying here the night!’