Insomnia has me in its grips. I have woken several times through the course of the night. At this minute, I gain some relief from typing to you, my dear blogophiles. It is 05.45 GMT and I have been playing the piano for this last hour. Although the exercises that I have been practicing for my teacher are not too bad, my lesson is first thing tomorrow morning and they are not quite up to scratch. My week is paced by these keyboard drills. Thursday is full of optimism. Ivories are tickled conscientiously on Friday and Saturday. Perhaps the garden or the supermarket side-tracks me at the weekend. Monday comes and imperfections flag up to me how rapidly Wednesday is approaching.
On a more positive note, and no pun is intended here, I played Lou Reed’s Perfect Day for the first time at my internet gig at the Cup n Spittle, yesterday. Chordage was basic and sparse, timing was terribly elastic, somehow it didn’t matter; it suited the song IMHO.
I can hear the sounds of a door closing, of a light switch being pulled, of pitta-patta upon my skylight window. I deduce, Watson, two things: firstly that A.N. Other of my family is awake and, secondly, it must be raining. I was tempted to say that it must be raining outside, but given a watertight roof where else could it be raining?
I can feel a craving for a cup of tea coming on. Can you imagine it? Hot and steaming… fingers taking the rich tea biscuit from the saucer… slowly dunking… lifting (careful, now, don’t let it break and grungify your PJs)… open wide… (it’s ok, you are not at the dentist)… and drop it in, sucking off the soft bit cleanly… then back into the cup for a second dunk.
I gave in. I have the tea. It is great!
On Sunday, at Cascadia Harmonics, I played the Nancy Sinatra song Boots. This is not an obvious cover for a male singer. I thought about the lyric and decided that only one word needed to be changed. In the last verse there is a reference to ‘he’ which needs to become ‘she’ in order to secure the gender transformation. In the past I have suffered female infidelity on more than one occasion and no amount of political correctness would inhibit me from singing about it. There are some lovely turns of phrase within the lyric. “You keep lying when you ought to be truthing” is one, “You keep saming when you ought to be a-changing” is another. I’m sure there is a word in linguistics for when a noun is turned into a verb (truthing is an example from the song) but I cannot think what it is at present. Of course, verbing would be a reflexive solution to the problem. There is some discussion of this on the web. See, for example, http://www.dailywritingtips.com/verbing-nouns/
It is still raining. I had hoped to go out somewhere and do some sketching later this morning. I suppose I could sit in the car and draw. It feels a bit dismal to do that and you have to keep flicking the windscreen wiper in order to get a clear view of your subject. Although it is very difficult to draw rain convincingly, one advantage of sketching in bad weather is that shadows pose less of a problem to those of us with Cross-Hatch Anxiety (CHA).
An hour has passed. The cup of tea stands empty. It is time to try for more sleep. Should I say ‘Goodnight’? Perhaps ‘Goodmorning’ would be more appropriate. This is a tricky problem. Typically, goodmorning is a salutation, while goodnight is more likely to be said as farewell. Goodnight terminates things. Normally, it is said in the evening at the end of the day. My deviant sleep pattern appears to be messing up my ability to use the English language clearly and effectively. Were I to be a shift worker, the use of goodnight, as the dawn breaks, might be forgiven. But I am not. I feel linguistically disruptive. If grammar and syntax are the chains that bind reader to writer, context provides the weakest link. Speak to you later.
John's Quavering Pencil 
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