Freefall: a Saturday night Wurzel

Mum used to play guitar. Dad used to sing. For a while when I was a kid, I guess about 7 or 8 years old, whilst we were living in Kuwait they were involved in a local folk club. Scarborough Fair, House of the Rising Sun, Blowing in the Wind, that sort of thing. 

Lots of lyric sheets handwritten out by Mum with the chords noted over the top were left around our house. Pretty straight forward stuff. A few of Dad’s favourite covers were by Adge Cutler and the Wurzels or Fred Wedlock. Sat out in the dust of the Middle East, I guess the West Country accents let him feel closer to home. And besides, the content of the songs was, in the case of the Wurzels frequently, and in the case of Wedlock always, hilarious. 

So, when I set to picking up a guitar myself, I guess a couple of years or so later, I figured if folks were laughing along at the lyrics, they’d overlook the fact that the performer could neither sing nor really play. Amusingly, the double entendre in most of these songs was completely lost on my ten-year-old self. 

It kind of worked; at least I’m still doing it all these years later. 

Dad’s been a regular at almost every gig I’ve played over the last thirty-five years. These days, he’s mostly sat somewhere amongst the crowd with his camera, recording the set so that my brother Jay, our bassist, can pour over the footage in, I'm guessing, a funk of over-analysis and self-criticism into the early hours following the end of each gig. Hey, we all need our ways of bringing ourselves back down after a show, or we’d never sleep.

Last Saturday’s gig at The Railway in Fishponds, Bristol, was brilliant as always. We never take these things for granted, but it’s one of our favourite venues, so you can always be pretty certain it’s going to be a great one. So when Jay messaged me a little earlier in the week and asked if I fancied doing a Wurzels song for a bit of fun, it was pretty hard to resist.

So, ladies and gentlemen, this is my band’s cover of the Wurzel’s Twice Daily, featuring on lead vocals, Dad.

Guy Fawkes re-evaluation

This morning a friend related a conversation from yesterday they'd had with one of their children. I'm sure they wouldn't mind me repeating it here, but I've redacted names and genders for the sake of their anonymity: 

kid: "Are we doing anything for bonfire night?" 

Cue parent concern as we usually avoid doing anything, because the noise and smell are just too much for at least 2 of our kids.

parents: "No, nothing. You don't usually want to do anything."

kid: "Good! I hate bonfire night. I wish Guy Fawkes had been successful in blowing up the houses of parliament. Then we wouldn't have to put up with fireworks and we might not have a rubbish government!" 

Out of the mouth of babes. Although I'm not sure it's ever quite so simple, I'd never actually condone, sanction or encourage political violence in any form, and I'm certain Fawkes and his mob had their own sinister and malign political agenda. 

But still, it made me chuckle.

Which was needed this morning. In other news, I'm back on crutches. Could feel the tenderness growing in my left heel over the course of yesterday. By the time I went to bed the pain had increased to the point that it kept waking me through most of the night. 

This morning I couldn't put any weight on my foot again.

Exceptionally frustrating.

Photo at the top of this post is just an arbitrary snap of Lottie. Though she had that exact same expression on her face this morning when she saw me reach for the crutches again. 

Alpine MusicSafe Pro Earplugs: little disappointments

A few weeks ago, on holiday in Sharm, I learnt to scuba dive. I'd very much like to do it again, although after the first open water dive down to 18m in the Red Sea, we surfaced and climbed back ashore and I realised the instructor's lips were moving but I couldn't hear a thing he was saying. Or anything else, for that matter.

Oddly, my immediate reaction wasn't any real concern, but a profound feeling of peace.

"Swimmers ear" apparently. A build up of wax compressed by water-pressure up against the ear drum and blocking the ear canal. It did clear up, but not a lot, so for some weeks after I had to manage with considerably diminished hearing whilst I loaded my ears up with sterilised olive oil to loosen things and sought an appointment with a man that could fix it.

Which I duly did, and Tony Lawrence of Gloucester Ear Health Clinic made a fantastic, enthusiastic and cheerful job of the somewhat gruesome task of removing the wax from my ears.

I can hear again. Peace may be lost once more, but practicality outweighs the disturbance.

We concluded with a hearing test which, as expected, showed some significant "age related" degradation in my hearing around the higher frequencies. Aggravated, without a doubt, by the environment I work in.

We discussed the possibility of looking into hearing aids, but as those higher frequencies are mostly the register of my wife's voice, I figured we were so far managing to get along just fine as we were. We did agree I should be using ear plugs when performing with the band, however.

I did have some, but lent them to Dad at a gig after he'd forgotten his own, and never got them back.

I did some digging around on Google and concluded the best option was to buy a set of Alpine MusicSafe Pro High Fidelity Music Earplugs. Reasonably priced, recommended by the Internet hive mind, they came with three options of filter, of which the medium "silver" set would likely be the most useful to me as a vocalist and guitarist.

Unfortunately, when the arrived Saturday morning it was apparent that they'd sent me a package with only one of the medium filters, and and extra light filter. I followed the breadcrumb trail through Amazon's customer support, to find myself directed to the manufacturer, so emailed them.

I received a prompt and courteous email in reply essentially saying that as I'd bought through Amazon, I had to go back to them.

This I tried this morning, being the first time since Saturday I've really been back in front of a screen. I spent about an hour being quizzed by AI bots and directed down various rabbit holes, all of which seemed to end with just the option to return the product, which aside from the inconvenience for something that only cost a shade over £20, was probably now inappropriate, as I'd tried using them with the strong filter version on Saturday night.

Which felt a bit like singing under water, so I gave up on them and removed them for the second set.

I guess this is the peril and inconvenience of buys something online. On the other hand, it's terribly convenient to  buy a different set of ear plugs in time for next weekend's gigs. But I feel somewhat disinclined to buy them from Alpine again. 

Although I should say that their own customer service has been nothing but prompt and courteous. 

But that's the trouble, I wanted something more than prompt and courteous. I wanted the problem resolved quickly and with minimal fuss. Just put a missing filter in the post. For the mere cost of a stamp the goodwill generated would have been significant and enduring.

I suppose the moral of the story is don't leave your customer service to a company like Amazon.

The photos are from my holiday in Sharm, most taken by a lovely guy and fellow diver called Mahmoud. There are only so many photos of ear plugs one can put in a post before the subject matter becomes a little tedious.

Petrella: odd jobs season

Gigs Friday and Saturday this last weekend, and a rubbish forecast for Monday meant it wasn't worth skipping work to extend the weekend for sailing. So Dad and I took a daytrip down and back to Plymouth on Sunday just to check on Petrella and catch up on a few jobs. 

I think I'm going to have to regretfully accept that the sailing season is all but done and odd jobs season is now upon us.

After a late night Saturday, crawling out of bed at 0800 Sunday morning to drive down to the boat felt like an unreasonably brutal start to the day, but as we pulled up into the marina carpark and got out the car, I could smell the salt on the autumnal air, and immediately remembered how much I've missed it.

My own jobs didn't extend much further than checking the lines, running the engine up to temperature, exercising the sea cocks and topping up the the diesel and coolant in the Webasto heater in preparation for the coming winter. I also fitted a bracket to the con for a tablet.

It's just a refurbished 10" Samsung tablet on a mount, running the Marine Navigator app with the raster charts from visitmyharbour.co.uk

It's a waterproof tablet (only IP68 - so I won't take it swimming!) in a waterproof case, should run all day off a battery pack in the cup holder beneath, and is independent of the boat's electrics and GPS so gives a nice bit of redundancy if anything goes wrong with the latter.

It's not as clever as the boat's Raymarine, but I like the familiarity, ease and simplicity of the route planning and tracking with the Android app, and the screen (and corresponding projected course over ground that tells me what we're going to hit within the next 10 minutes) is a bit bigger and clearer for my aging eyes 🤓

Only downside is the touchscreen probably won't enjoy having rain on it. But then, neither do I.

Dad spent the afternoon replacing a catch on the cupboard door underneath the galley sink. It's long been faulty, so the door has been prone to swinging open whilst we're underway. The static / receiving half of the catch was broken, possibly as a consequence of having been previously forced, so needed replacing. Unfortunately, finding replacement parts for the furnishings of a 36 year old boat isn't as straight forward as one might hope.

Happily, Dad's got a workshop, so he made a pattern from the catch on one of the other doors, and 

machined up a new one. After the requisite bit of fiddling and cursing to fit it, it works a treat.

The clocks having gone back, the sun was setting by the time we closed the boat back up and headed home, but it was a pretty sunset over the Barbican. The drive home was complicated by an accident just ahead of us on the motorway which added a delay of an hour or so but we got home safe in the end. 

The band is really busy between now and New Year, so unless I take a sneaky Monday off work, any more trips down to the boat will likely be another Sunday down and back, squeezed in between racing the dinghies on the lake. I really feel like we haven't used Petrella enough this last year, or the year previous. This year's diary has the band playing 62 gigs, which would go a long way to explaining why it feels like that.

I love playing with the band, but there have been other "internal" stresses with many of the gigs this year, nothing to do with the music or performance, that have made things much less than pleasant, and often made me (and at least one other member) question why we put up with it. 

But it's a very hard thing to walk away from, even when you know it's making you unhappy.

We have 33 bookings in the diary for next year, ending with NYE 2026/27 at The Railway Tavern in Bristol. The band's diary for 2026 is now essentially closed, and we'll see how we still feel towards the end of next year.

Perhaps having half the workload will remove or reduce some of the stresses that have been causing the friction. At the very least, it should give me a lot more time to go sailing.

As I write this, I can see a button to screen-right that offers to "Automatically insert Google Search links" for me. I've clicked it just out of curiosity, and deleted some of the more random or unnecessary hyperlinks Google has then obligingly made for me. I've left some of the others in place though; in case you were wondering why, so am I.