John's Quavering Pencil

Today I awake feeling a tad glum. It is a Bank Holiday, and so I don’t want to set foot outside the house; hate celebratory-happy-happy crowds. Decided to fell a small ash tree that a neighbour has been whingeing about. Grab my bow saw and it is down in a couple of minutes. Saw up the trunk which, by now, had grown to about three metres. Stuff the remains into the garden recyling bin and then grump back indoors. I work out my songlist for this evenings SL gig and am conscientious enough to practice’We’re all alone‘ on my Mick McConway electro-acoustic; ‘Careless love‘ on my Washburn tuned to D for slide guitar; and ‘Only you‘ on mandolin (Art, one of my fans from Germany, had requested that I play some mandolin, since I have been neglecting it of late). I will try to run through my ‘1953’ song on piano later this afternoon.

Next, I turn my attention to making egg and shitake mushroom fried rice with tobasco for lunch. I shake out some dried shitake mushrooms and find I have to read the instructions for re-constitution twice. I put them in a bowl of boiling water and leave them to plump up. This takes about 40 minutes, so I dip into another chapter of the Nicci French novel I am reading. I am about 100 pages into the total of 400+ and already there have been two child abductions; not exactly cheerful Bank Holiday stuff. I wander back to the kitchen and rinse out some bismati rice; put it in a big pan to simmer. Next I fry a couple of lightly beaten eggs in the wok, using some groundnut oil, and park it in a dish when it is done. Oh, by the way, I am doing nothing original here – just following another Ching-He Huang recipe. I go on to fry some sliced mushrooms with a few frozen green peas, drain the rice and fry that too. I hoy in the soy sauce and sesame seed oil and integrate the scrambled egg back into the mix. Finally I serve up. It is very tasty, thank you Ching! It is not until I have more or less finished eating that I realise I forgot to put in any tobasco; oh, well, next time maybe.

I’m all squared up in the kitchen now. I think it might be time to lie on the bed and read another chapter of Nicci French. Hopefully, this episode will seemlessly transcend into an afternoon nap. Now, that is definitely the sort of thing to be having on a Bank Holiday Monday. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Today I made a white bread plait. I worked from a Paul Hollywood recipe for a plait with eight strands. Although he recommends working with dough that is fairly wet and sticky, I think mine ended up going a little too far in that direction. Still, I am reasonably pleased with the outcome, and it tastes very good.

I seem to have been in the kitchen rather a lot just lately; yesterday I made Ching-He Huang’s Chinese chicken and cashew nut stir-fry. That worked well and it would have been good to have had some of the bread on the side, even though I had served jasmin white rice with the chicken dish. Well, the weather is good today, so I think I shall go and catch some sun.

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

This weekend I drove approximately 350 miles (I think that is about 600 Km) to a milestone birthday party of an old friend of mine. I did wonder about the sanity of doing this in one day, only to return on the next. Still, I woke up early, threw some stuff into the boot (trunk) of the car and pottered off around 7.45 a.m. The party was to start at 3.30 p.m. since families were involved and there were to be several children present. I felt rather proud of myself, since I arrived at approximately 3.20 p.m. and I thought that was good timing, given the distance I had to travel.

Of course, once I left the motorway, and dived into lushness of the Somerset countryside, I did get lost. At one point I stopped and asked directions from a man who appeared to be mending his chicken run. The sun was shining and we had a great little chat. There was no traffic noise; the air was still and the sky was blue. Eventually, he pointed me in the right direction, and off I went.

The party was held in a garden that ran adjacent to a splendid medieval church, probably dating from the 13th century. Here is a photograph that I took late in the afternoon.

The villages in this area originally came to prominence in the days of the Somerset wool trade (Shepton is, for example, the Saxon name for a sheep settlement). In modern times, the villages lie at the heart of the cider country. Regrettably, I sampled no cider nor any other alcoholic beveridge, since I had a long drive home the next day and I could not face doing that on an apple-pressed hangover.

I had a wonderful time and very much enjoyed talking to my friends Mike and Christine. I met their friends and family and also met up with another old friend, Tim, who I had not seen since 1976. They very kindly gave me a bed for the night. It had been quite a day, and I slept like the proverbial log. I awoke to the dawn chorus and slipped out of the house at around 06.30. Once again, I got lost exiting from rural Somerset. At one point I could swear I saw the Eiffel Tower although there was no basis in reality for this bizarre hallucination. It did prompt the exclamation ‘Merde’ as I accelerated down yet another wrong turning.

The return journey differed from the outward journey in several respects. When I set out from home I was filled with a sense of adventure. Coming back (once I had extricated myself from the web of Somerset lanes and byways) was more predictable and no significant event awaited me at the end. Subjectively, I felt more confident  because I knew I could do it (indeed I had done so the previous day, in reverse). I was also less  concerned about time and on the return leg I pulled into a service station car park and had a substantial nap.

Generally speaking, I dislike travel and I am not keen on being away from home. I am, however, trying to work on this attitude and the birthday party trip counts as a significan step forward in this regard. I did take a sketch book with me but it remained firmly closed in my shoulder bag for the whole duration of the trip. I therefore made zero progress in terms of conquering my fear of drawing in public . I accept that this has some of the hallmarks of a phobia. I am not sure if I ever will overcome my anxieties in this regard. However, during one of my motorway fuel stops I noticed that they were selling a portable stool, together with a shoulder strap for carrying; I bought one! Will I ever sit on it by an idyllic river scene, sketch book on my knee, pencil at the ready? I doubt it, but I can dream. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

Looking through some notes I had made in an old spiral reporter’s pad, I discovered a quotation I had copied down whilst reading Alistair Cooke’s (1956) book ‘Six men’ (published by Bodley Head)

A professional is a man who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it. (p.136)

Fascinating notion! Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I cooked Sunday lunch for five persons. I started with watercress soup, inspired by the recipe in Raymond Blanc’s Kitchen Secrets book (although I deviated from it in several minor respects). The result was exceedingly tasty. I served it with Creme Fraiche and home-made croutons.

Next up I made my own pasta (again following the good advice of Raymond Blanc) and had the satisfaction of rolling it through my machine. I constructed ravioli, and made a filling of fried shallots, mushrooms and strawberries (with a teaspoon of soy sauce thrown into the pan for good measure). I served new potatoes with the pasta and made a green salad with feta cheese and black olives, to go with it. I forgot to cook a sauce, so it was a bit dry. However, the taste of the filling worked well for me.

For desert, I made some plain short-crust pastry, peeled and cored some eating apples, stuffed the hole left from de-coring with fresh raspberries, wrapped each apple in thinly rolled pastry, painted them with an egg wash and then baked them in the oven at Mk V for 30 mins. I served them cold with double cream. Since one of the diners had requested a sugar-free desert, I used zero sugar to make it. For anyone with a sweet tooth, I placed a bottle of maple syrup on the table and left them to help themselves. I found that there was no need for any kind of sweetening, since the apples were eating apples, not sour cookers like Granny Smiths. I based this recipe on one taken from The Best of Sainsbury’s Desserts.

 
It so happened that the recipe for ravioli appeared on p.139 (in a book of roughly 300 pages) and the recipe for baked apple also appeared on p.139 (in a book of roughly 150 pages). The chance of picking this precise combination might be thought to be approximately 1/150 x 1/300 which comes to 1:45000. If I were to cook lunch each week on a Sunday, on a random basis (at a rate of 52 lunches per year), it would take approximately 865 years for me to get around to this combination again.

The meal was concluded with coffee, crackers and stilton cheese. I have to admit that on this occasion, as on many others of this nature, I tended towards the Keith-Floydian style of amateur cheffery. Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

All a bit depressing.  Speak to you later my dear blogophiles.

I am writing this as a personal exploration of how things are in terms of my creative endeavours generally and, in particular, my music shows in Second Life (SL). Readers unfamiliar with SL may wish to skip this entry of the blog.

Three weeks ago I played my 1000th show in SL since January 2008. I have to say that I luxuriated somewhat in this achievement. It felt like something of which I could be proud. Lest I should vainly rest upon my laurels, I was brought down to earth with a bump yesterday. I turned up for a scheduled gig at my little Terra Fyrmusica venue. I had put out all the usual notices; the show was listed in SL Search. I had my studio set up nicely: the USB mixer settings were just right, the sound of my guitar was excellent as far as tone and reverb were concerned (not too much of the latter but the strings were ringing sweetly). The minutes ticked by and the hour chimed in, as it were, for the start of the gig. I waited and noodled on guitar, concocting a loose improvisation in the key of the first number on my song list. Time passed. I glanced at the clock; it was 1.15 p.m. SLT (the gig was due to start at 1.00 p.m.). Not one single avatar had turned up to listen to my show.

Although very unusual, this had happened once before some years ago. I vaguely remembered that I had made a notice to put up, saying that the show would not go on. I therefore typed ‘cancellation’ into the search box of my inventory, found the board, and rezzed it outside the entrance to Terra Fyrmusica. I unplugged my guitar, switched off my digital piano and, sadly, logged out of SL.

Later in the evening, I wondered whether perhaps this sort of thing was happening to other performers. I logged back in and went to a show by the excellent Canadian singer/guitarist, Max Kleene. The venue was heaving with avatars. Max was still doing well, there was no doubt about that. I then moved on and caught a show by my favourite computer-music composer in SL, Torben Asp. He has never pulled the large crowds that Max gets, but he does have a strong following. And when I got to his show, I saw that around 10-15 other avatars were already there, enjoying the music. I had thus collected proof from two very different sources, that there was nothing wrong with Second Life music audiences in general. I have now to accept that the explanation for zero attendance at my show cannot lie externally in Second Life; the attribution has to lie at my feet.

I do have an extremely loyal group of about half-a-dozen fans who come to my shows time after time. But, obviously, they have their own lives to lead and they cannot be expected always to be online just to hear me. Yesterday, by coincidence, none of my regulars were around to come to the gig (or were busy). Rationally, such a situation has to be accepted as a logical possibility; I want to make it VERY clear to my virtual fans that I am in no way feeling that they somehow ‘ought’ to have been there. I accept that this may sometimes happen.

The question I have to address is why I have such a small core group of fans, and why I do not have a much larger group of fans who pop along to my shows from time to time. If I did have a bigger fan base, comprised of those two categories of people (plus a few one-off visitors to each gig), the probability of a zero audience would dwindle to almost nothing. The reason that I do not have a larger fan base such as this has to come back to me, my repertoire, the style and quality of my instrument playing, and my singing. There is no other way around this issue. And this is what I shall think about now.

Freda from the Utopia venue raised the issue of my audience size a couple of weeks ago. I was rather defensive about it then but, looking back, she was quite right to do this. Maybe, as a venue organiser, she could see what I was wilfully blind to. We exchanged some fairly lengthy notes about this issue in order to develop a better understanding of it, and I shall draw upon some of the things we discussed, here.

Singing to backing tracks of chart hit material (past and present) tends to go down well with SL audiences. However, I dismiss this (almost contemptuously) as mere karaoke.

Turning to those who both sing and play instrument(s), many (especially those from the States) play rock ‘n’ roll of one sort or another. I would not say my repertoire fits snuggly into that category. Indeed, perhaps part of the problem is that I offer something of an unusual variety. I don’t think the problem is the standard to which I play piano, guitar or even mandolin; I would argue I was reasonably competent when compared to other  SL players in this regard.

My original songs can sometimes be capricious and are perhaps an acquired taste. My covers do tend to be rather dated, often going back to the contemporary acoustic popular or folk music of the 1970s. For the past year or two, I have been keen to learn pre-rock-n-roll items such as ‘A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’, ‘April in Portugal’, ‘La Mer’, and so forth. In part, this has been inspired by the way Rod Stewart explored the standards of the American songbook, over the past few years. If only I could improve my piano playing, I would love to cover a few of Frank Sinatra’s famous songs (my guitar can just about manage some of them, but I think they suit piano better).

I have in the past tried to learn more covers from the 1980s, 90s, and the ‘naughties’ but for some reason I never seem to get very far. Maybe my heart is just not in it. I do think I could write more original songs than I do currently. Last year I produced a crop of about five, using a rather elementary piano boogie style for the accompaniment. In the past, I always felt that my main composing instrument was the acoustic guitar and maybe it is time to return to that way of doing things in future.

Apart from spending time on piano and guitar, I have been devoting more attention to my sketching and drawing recently. I have been trying to edge towards making cartoons and caricatures or portraits of celebrities/politicians. Some of my first steps can be seen on my website at this address: http://www.lewismusic.co.uk/Cartoons.html

When I choose a topic for a cartoon, I usually do some preliminary research on the subject, and maybe I could marry this to song development. This would certainly be an exciting development for me but I doubt it would solve the Zero Audience Problem (ZAP).

I don’t think there is very much I can do about ZAP. I can’t see any ways to change my repertoire in order to attract more people. I  know I want to write more music, but I cannot imagine that anything I do write will appeal widely to SL audiences. So, I have to come to terms with it. I have to learn to accept that I am not a popular performer and that I will never be so. At the end of the day, I have to enjoy playing for itself. It is the music that counts, not the fame or adulation.

This leads me to consider whether the issue might be that I am conceited. It is very easy to use the size of the audience as an indicator for quality of performance/performer. If that is the case, then the inescapable conclusion is that I perform badly. My conceit is that I think I am good. So that is why I get upset when nobody comes to see me.

However, I don’t feel comfortable with this  analysis. I refuse to accept the negative self-image that would necessarily flow from it. I therefore reject the view that the size of my audience bears a close relation to the quality of my performance and/or my skill as a musician/singer. Ergo, I must stop worrying about small audiences. I must zap ZAP. Last night, I should not have shut up shop and logged out; I should have played on and enjoyed making the music for its own sake.

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.  

I think it is very sad that what was a simple speeding ticket led, eventually to them receiving custodial sentences. Still, as the judge opined, the tragedy is entirely of their own making.

I have attempted to draw portraits of Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce sympathetically. I did not want to fashion a nasty cartoon or caricature.  You can check out the result on my website (on the sketches page):

http://www.lewismusic.co.uk/Cartoons/Huhne.html

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

We had a couple of days of spring but now winter seems to have returned. The harbour down by the seaside was looking very murky when I popped down for a breakfast with my friend Tom yesterday.

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.

I had a little pastry left over from yesterday when I made the celery tart. So today I made myself a pasty with it 🙂

Speak to you later, my dear blogophiles.