well...

...so I'm recording this demo on Tuesday, thinking that I've got all day Wednesday blocked out for teaching - I've been doing some through some music shops in the north and they've rigged me up a day at a 'school of religious character' - and I get this call from the teaching guy saying that the people at the school want to meet me before I start and can I come in this afternoon. They have to interview me before I start, meaning that if I don't come in this afternoon I can't start tomorrow. And even if I did, the pay isn't gonna get to me for another month anyway.....
....and there's that sigh, that weariness at the backwards inefficiency of this whole place, worn briefly from this new Londoner and shrugged off in an instant, but what of those who've lived here their whole lives?....
....yeah fine, I make the call and arrange an interview the next morning, speaking to Gerry who keeps going on about 'timewasting' students and how we have to get rid of them. Haven't even bloody met them yet!
So it's an early morning tube off to Totteridge and Whetstone, one of the quainter named stations and the second last stop on the High Barnet branch of the Northern Line. The place is easy enough to find, a couple of brown wood buildings near a field on a private road. The electronic gate shuts in my face.
In this bitter cold we've suddenly had this week (after a balmy precursor to summer), I had to laugh. All part of the continuing adventure I suppose....
So I meet Gerry and Graham, seeming patriarchal moral overseers of the place with their Ultra conservative uniforms and haircuts and they talk me through the guidelines of the Brethren, the particular variance of Christianity that this school falls under.
No recorded music at home: radio fine, but none of that ghastly modern popular music. Beatles and Bob Dylan is fine, but then Gerry's lately had some reservations about them too, so maybe not. So I can show them something from a recording, but I can't give them one to take home or ask them if they're into anything at home - they won't be because they don't have any.....
So Mike, what's your background? And I go into this pre-fab rave blah blah honours music degree did you catch the honours bit blah blah taught in schools for over a decade variety of students blah blah but it's not my main thing of course (all the while screaming in my head SHOW ME THE ROOM, SHOW ME THE PIANO, SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!!)
They attempt some banter at the usual junctures and I'm so not up for it.
They hand me the guidelines of the school which I flip through on the tube home. Here are some highlights:

"...a way of life which is governed at all times in every detail by the Holy Bible"
"....The Theory of Evolution is regardes as a falsehood..."
"The Trustees regard occupation with, and the study of, computers damaging to the proper development of children's minds, and only serve to reduce and limit their thinking capacity to be conformed to programmes and the manipulation of a keyboard and screen. it is regarded that computers in many fields represent a misuse of physical and natural phenomena created by God."
"Brethren children have not gone on to study at Universities since the 1960s, but have suffered no loss through this...'

I'm still interested to see how this all turns out. Apparently music creation is very strong in homes among family members, and the previous teacher has left me a list of the students and where they're at and from a teaching perspective it sounds promising. Maybe the last minute interview request and week's delay set me off about it all. I'm taking the gig because financially, it'll pluck me from a potential pickle...
.....and don't get me wrong here, I have the utmost respect for anyone who chooses a religious path for their life.
It's just the social rules, the conventions, that get me, all those little restrictions and forbiddances, the details that people feel they have to impose on themselves and their families.
An essential part of my experience as a travelling freelance musician has been the observation of human experience. Branford Marsalis has been quoted a couple of times as saying that musicians are basically social commentators, and from my own limited experiences I've seen that the human experience is vast, so much more expansive than setting oneself and one's family to sets of rules derived from a book written long ago and far away.
It's the 21st century, it's suburban London. We shall see.....