wedding text

it's been a mad day, my last meal @ manolis's (god only knows what i'd do without you playing on the radio as i left), scratching (as mentioned below) and reading...

yesterday i realised that to the wedding was not in my possession... i think i lent it to dad one day because he had a train journey ahead of him and no book... anyway i was convinced that i'd find the reading for D & M's wedding in that book so i took my remaining book tokens and bought it (again) along with the english patient because the writer is appearing in the world book club's 5th anniversary recording at the end of september...

read the wedding book (by john berger) in two days but didn't find an appropriate reading...

so:

over a few hours i had a look in many, many books before deciding to do the reading as the lyrics to a song, which i'm not going to tell you about, in case you come to the wedding...

x

Manolis's letter

To all my customers - old and new

Just to let you know that I shall not be operating after this coming Thursday 30th August so I would like to thank you all for your support throughout all these years.

- No need to be told you are going to be missed
- Not for improving my bank balance
- But for being you.

You can look forward to new food experiences like I shall look forward to a different kind of life.

If my manner or my cooking was, on accasion, not to your liking, please don't take it too personally. I have meant well, at least, in most times.

So on that note I would like to thank you all sincerely and wish you the best of luck in whatever you want to do.

Thanks

Manolis

P.S. If any of you wish to see me again I shall be performing my cooking tricks at:

No.3 Stroud Green Road,
Finsbury Park

bitten again

bram stoker was probably suffering like i am when he wrote dracula... it's such a sensual thing, knowing that you shouldn't scratch but scratching anyway... the momentary release before the nagging need begins again...

it's as though my bites were independent beings, calling to me...

a couple of nights ago we slept in dinah's room and a mosquito bit me in 4 places...

i was awake when it was happening and i could feel it, i've suspected for awhile that there is at least one, if not a family of them in her room,

anyway, i pulled anchor and relocated back to here with dinah in sleepy tow and have been dealing with those bites since...

i was fairly good yesterday, there's one on my neck and i was wearing a T'shirt which rubbed against it all day, so that was hard, but i only succumbed once or twice,

then we slept again in her room last night, after she'd burnt citronella in there to clear them, in fact i'd cleared one the night of the bites, possibly the only one that was in there...

it had bitten my left elbow where my arm had been around her and my right shoulder... then i'd moved, trying to cover up completely but with my hands were by my neck and it had bitten my right hand and my neck...

so when i decamped i found it on my shirt, patiently waiting for me to settle down again, so i grabbed it in a tissue and flushed it down the loo...

last night i don't think there were any in there but there were some in my brain, i would almost fall asleep and then automatically scratch one of the bites, before scratching all of them... leaving me in a state of nervous/anguished/half-satisfied wakefulness...

my right hand is looking a little better today but around the bite a sea of red has expanded, taking over at least half of the back of my hand, and a trail of red snakes it way down my wrist almost to my elbow... very strange, i might get some antihistamine tablets...

anyway, long and rambling and i haven't even got to the main thing which is manolis's letter... i'm going over there in an hour or so for my last ever meal in that cafe, this is the letter he's put on the window of the cafe... actually i think it deserves it's own post... x

back home

glad to be back, but it was lovely being away...

visiting greenclementime & trave & chatoille...

felinity came too, just lovely hanging out with family, all us brothers and sisters, me with my dinah, trave with his clementime, but felinity without her G...

very tired now,

had a notion that we could make it the 30 miles or so beyond leamington to where an old, old friend was celebrating his 40th birthday but it was a very car centred place and the taxi was going to be too much...

anyway, too tired even to link to these folks... bed now x

yr2wk10 longcat piano improvisation

posting this from M & D's x

transformers

oh... piracy...

so me & felinity saw transformers a week or so back and since then i've been itching to find a pirate copy of it so i can get all the early desert battle bits that i like and put them together...

and now i have achieved exactly that... it's 5 minutes long and i've put miles runs the voodoo down to it... i'm tempted to put it on youtube but it's definitely copyrighted material...

for now i'm just happy to watch it myself...

oh that scorpion robot transformer thing... i can be such a geek sometimes...

about to go out to the piano job, thinking of taking W(floopy)shaman's camera tomorrow and getting some footage for prospective work hunting...

x

yr2wk9 rhodes & voice

recorded last night after my week of work...

but the other thing i want to briefly mention is the mediatheque @ the BFI, where on thursday and friday night's after work i sat and watched great things...

thursday night was my 1st visit and i foolishly only asked for 30 minutes at 1st, which ran out and i had to ask for more time... in particular i really enjoyed Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968), which i watched all of, and We Are The Lambeth Boys (1959), which i watched some of on both thursday and friday night's, also on friday i saw hitchcock's blackmail (sound version - 1929)...

all for free... what an amazing resource ladies and gentlemen, check it out if you are london based and with a bit of time at your disposal...

x

tuned heaven

still short on sleep and i've just returned from a lovely night's work playing the piano...

only 2 nights next week now and this 6 week stint will be over, still haven't found myself anything else...

they had the piano tuned today and it was heaven... i started playing @ 8 and after some gorgeous improvising i started playing my first tune... when that was over i looked at my phone and i'd already been playing for 30 minutes...

that's how lost i was in the sound of that beautiful instrument...

funny how last night's gig was fraught with worry of one kind of another and tonight's was so lovely...

this sleep business has something to do with it probably,

i haven't caught up since sunday night's lack... monday night watching the cloudy sky for a gap and a meteor... in bed late and up in the morning, last night piano playing, tonight piano playing... every day this week i'm working during the day, tomorrow morning i'm up super early for the dawn project...?

so... my bed now, and my beautiful girlfriend...

x

sun on unmade bed

short on sleep and if the sky is clear tonight i'll be up until about 3 looking at the meteor thingy...

i'm into this summers weeks work, going well, with lovely J who used to be my apprentice...

cycled into town early to accompany dinah but also to check out the BFI's archive thing and it was shut (as it is every monday),

then after work i went to the same place and lost two games of chess to the bookseller...

short on sleep... off now, enjoy the film,

x

yr2wk8 rhodes, voice & bongo paul crawford

the 4th collaborative improvisation features bongo fella himself...

x

dawn project videoblog week 21

this is from last week's dawn project, i had decided the week before to stop doing them, but it was such a beautiful morning...

as it says in the video this will probably be a monthly affair, or more likely, whenever i think it's worth doing...

x

short on sleep

i worked last night instead of tonight and by chance my dad is watching the cricket today so me & felicity are meeting him for dinner tonight... i forgot to remind dinah to record heroes for me last night, and i wonder if she did it anyway?...

2 nights ago i slept badly, worked all day yesterday and then gigged in the evening...

i was pretty fragile by the 2nd set but then i played the opening to gymnopedie no.1 (i can only play the opening so far, but then that's the bit everyone knows - dinah knows it as bom ching... bom ching... from the amount of times i've called it that but claims not to actually know what it is...) and i heard a voice behind me say... oh how lovely - i must get a piano... and as i improvised over those 2 chords (with the leaping left hand) the room gradually quietened and i think i'm right in saying i brought a hushed silence to the room (just for a moment)...

not that anyone clapped or anything, that's not what you get in this kind of gig, i've had it once in the 8 gigs i've done there... after my last tune - which generally is april in paris at the moment...

anyway this revived me and i felt a little less like i was being eaten by flesh eating beetles...

i came home and foolishly fell into watching TV with dinah gradually curling up and sleeping on my shoulder, in the middle of the night i saw that the skulls was just over an hour in and i'd been vaguely wanting to see it for a little while, so i found ITV2 + 1, and watched it, and it was pretty good, it's got that guy from CSI in it as a senator...

then immediately after that the larry sanders show was on over on ITV4 so i couldn't not watch it... it was fantastic...

crept into bed around 3:30... was up @ 8 for the dawn project...

so still very short on sleep...

think i'm going to skip over to a mossbros in muswell hill to book my suit for trave & clementine's wedding...

slow but nice day...

goodbye piano

went into work today a little hungover, to hand in some marking that i toiled over this weekend. while i was there somebody told me that some men had come to meet me today to pick up the piano...?

and i realised that the piano i picked out many years ago to hire for work must be leaving, being as that work is shifting to another building - so i'm assuming the piano is going back to the people we hired it from...

i swiftly nipped upstairs to say my goodbyes to the piano and video'd it for posterity... i finished playing - i've been practising this amazing piece of music called lushlife recently - and went downstairs to leave, only to find the men had come back, so i showed them to the piano, watched while they carted it away, played it a little in the alley outside work - in transit -

it was very sad, seeing that piano go, i've played many things on it, wrote more than a few tunes on it, sang songs to people, to classes...

i will miss it...

x

yr2wk7 piano & voice

took a break from marking to record this week's improvisation x

i have been ignoring facebook for awhile now and today, particularly after speaking with felinity yesterday... i gave in...

did the dawn project this morning and i did do a videoblog, even though i'd told myself i wasn't going to... at least not every week... but i've been knee deep in marking all day and haven't had a chance to edit it...

felinity met me yesterday to buy me my birthday present, a ritual we began on her birthday, (or was that last year?) and she got me the birth of the cool music, scored out for 9 musicians...

i can't wait to get my teeth into it and get an arrangement for my piano...

we almost went to see transformers... it looks like that'll be saturday night now... and we did eat in the chinese place we eat at and drank in the salisbury... awfully nice as ever...

and earlier on during the day i'd been to the BFI, largely to play chess with the bookseller there (although he didn't have his board with him) & i took the opportunity to check out the new back bit...

and it is lovely...

it has a media centre there where you can search the BFI's archives... some day soon i will be perusing randomly...

anyway, still marking and i've got to get myself ready to gig tonight so i'll leave it @ that x