enabler danger

Just got in from a chilly walk around the park with Lottie. She's a pretty dog, I think she has all the colours of autumn in her coat.

Winter is definitely nipping at our heels. We had our first snow last week, which lightly settled for the day with the temperatures around zero C, before melting again as the weather warmed back up over the weekend by a dozen degrees or so and a storm blew through. 

I spent a very wet weekend on the boat with Lottie and Dad. Any of the original ambitions we had of sailing to Fowey for the weekend was made a mockery of by the weather, and we stayed secure in the marina whilst the wet south-westerly blew through over the two days with gusts of up to 50 knots or so.

The boat was very comfortable in the weather, despite the perpetually wet dog aboard with us. The drive down Saturday morning and the drive back Sunday afternoon were less comfortable in the thick rain, but manageable.

The temperatures have fallen back down to around freezing again today. I haven't bothered to look at what they might do for the weekend, as I can't go sailing anyway. I have a gig in Cheltenham Saturday night, and it's my daughter's birthday, so we're taking the family out to lunch on Sunday. It'll be nice to see the grandchildren again, I've quite missed them.

I've had my eye on a new guitar for some weeks or more now. It's more than I should spend and more than I need to spend, given that I have a perfectly lovely guitar that I gig with already, and a very nice collection of other guitars, electric and acoustic.

The algorithms that drive the internet have haunted and taunted me with frequent images over the last month or so. I can't even guess how they work out our interests so keenly, then saturate us with advertising at every turn.

I saw a joke the other day on a site that these afore mentioned algorithms frequently point in my direction. I enjoy the humour of the site, so they're not wrong.

I can confidently inform you from personal experience that it's not twenty eight or twenty nine, either.

The trouble is, it's not just the Internet advertising algorithms that seek to enable me. I mentioned this guitar to Nikki, thinking she'd very quickly put me straight. But I should've known better. I think she gets a rush out of spending money, and I don't think it matters what on.

I mentioned it to the guitarist in my band, Matt, thinking he'd set me right. He's absolutely the best guitarist I know or know of, but he owns two electric guitars. Both exactly the same, except one is silk black, and the other finished with a natural wood appearance. Ironic, as both are actually made out of carbon fibre. He got the first when he was about nineteen, a couple of years after he joined the band, and the second he bought a couple of years later.

So he's had these two guitars quite a while now, as neither of us are nineteen any longer. But no, rather than talking me down, he waxed lyrical about how he'd gone up to the shop in Birmingham with his wife the other weekend to find her a bass, and had seen this guitar himself and had immediately thought of me.

Finally, I mentioned it on a call to my friend and business partner, Will, about an hour ago. By this point, I wasn't so much looking for somebody to talk me down of the ledge, but rather affirm my wayward inclinations. Will's a fellow guitarist, much more technically proficient than me in many ways, though in his case it's for his own pleasure, he's far too committed to his work and family to have time for a band and doesn't perform.

But he does have a fine collection of guitars of his own. In his words, "I've never regretted buying another guitar"; and in truth, neither have I.

It's amazing how few key-presses it takes to commit to spending such a large amount of money on the Internet. Three, in total, I think it took. And the guitar should be with me on Monday. A gorgeous, American built PRS, serial number #0371825.

Far more guitar than I really need or could ever rationally justify. Some men spend their mid-life crisis on a sportscar or motorbike. I refuse to count the boat as such, so instead, this can be mine. Anyway, I'm planning fewer gigs and more sailing next year, but even with that in mind, within a year she should've paid for herself.