richard ford

it turns out he was just like old friend DR... (PD to some)...

i woke early, went over to beneath the trelick tower...checked out the lesson i'll be teaching in a few weeks, the man who's currently teaching it is off touring by then...

perfectly nice...

then home, found the sports writer which had been missing for a little while... got on my bike, went down to aldwych... bvsh house...

had a fine old time... asked my question.. which i think has a better chance of being aired on the show than last time's question... because it drew an interesting bit of conversation...

he signed my copy of the book, i had a glass of wine, played the thing i often end tunes with on the steinway grand in the room...

then once outside i bumped into him again, he was waiting for his car to take him to the hotel, i offered him a backy, but he said his prostate might give him trouble, he said my prostrate might start giving me trouble too...

i asked him how old he was, hoping he'd say he was 72... because i met the 18 year old me on the train down to brighton on friday night & it made me realise i was surely going to meet the 72 year old me as well fairly soon...

(18 years old (ish), half my age, doing mechanical engineering (mathy) @ university, plays piano, has a stud cat... (we had a female stud cat)... so the 72 year old i'm going to meet will have been doing roughly what i'm doing now... 36 years ago...)

he said no he was 66... oh well, nobody's perfect...

it also turns out that there's a 3rd book to the frank bascombe books (the sportswriter, independence day...) called the lay of the land, which he was writing just as i started reading him... back in 2002...

so that's very exciting... i've got independence day ahead of me, then the 3rd...

so i was totally high on life as i cycled away from bvsh house... went over to le fam pevo to deliver some books josiah wanted them to have (baby stuff)... had a gradually calming down evening with those lovely folks...

it turns out EQ is just about to pop... by friday apparently...

now i'm home & i've got my 1st huge tuesday since the holidays ahead of me...

oh & i met a nice woman on the tube... as you do... (in the 1st half of the day, the 2nd half all bikey)

x

large emotional gradient important me is interviewed

the 1st of several mental days today...

and i didn't know it was going to be this mental when i woke up,

in fact, when i woke up, i felt quite desperate, not sure why exactly, but then about 12 hours later, cycling up kingsway, i felt like i was floating on a cloud...

because, whilst i was @ work, i got an email from someone @ the BBC, asking if i could be part of a trailer for the world book club event coming up in about 3 weeks... the one where richard ford is coming to talk about the sportswriter...

the one that i'll be attending,

the email i sent to ask whether i could come was very enthusiastic...

that's why they asked me to be part of the trailer, because i was so enthusiastic...

and i was so enthusiastic, not just because richard ford is such a fantastic writer, but because i'd started rereading richard ford a few months back, well, further back really, 6 - 8 months... in an effort to connect with the version of myself who existed before i was with dinah... a getting over dinah kind of thing...

that book that i'd left down in brighton in the house of a man i barely knew, and got back a month or so later...

that was "just a little piece of my heart", it was great, and it was very good timing for the world book club to decide to bring him over...

anyway, la la la...

i finished the sportswriter over the weekend and again, very good timing to be asked today to do the trailer thing...

it turned out that the best time to do it was this evening after work, (because the next few days are going to be mental) and i cycled over to bvsh house in the rain around 7ish, floating through the barbican highwalks along the way which i love...

met with a lovely guy called B who led me through the plush old parts and into the not so nice newer parts, sat me down beside a neumann mic and asked me questions about the book, the writer, myself, my thoughts...

it was lovely... just to have a chance to talk about something i care about, and be listened to...

i left there just after he turned up the microphone on big ben for the 3 chimes of 8:15.. (so cool to have that mic on big ben all the time, live, so when you hear the bongs for the news it is actually big ben bonging...)...

and i cycled home high on life... stopping off in muratori's cafe, full of cabbies, for a largish roast meal... while mum & dad were probably eating down in earlsfield with kat & her G, celebrating the new flat, which is on my itinerary for tomorrow...

the trailer will be made by next tuesday and there'll be an extended web version around too, B's going to send me a link when it's around and it will make me very happy to hear myself on the BBC, or at least on the BBC website...

ok, bed, big day of travel tomorrow, biking it down to whitechapel for a meeting and to drop the bike off for a service in the one bike shop i trust in london (bicycle magic, greatorex street)...

then public transport down to earlsfield to see kat & the new flat...

then up to ladbroke grove for another meeting,

then the science museum for their science museum lates night, a core arts staff do type affair...

covering all 4 corners of this great city i'll be...

x

dawn & bike mishaps

i slept through the dawn project yesterday, and vowed to get it this morning, but i woke up at the point where i was supposed to be taking the shot, which is at least 15/20 minutes away from my bed...

i started going through the motions and in fact got out there on the roads, on lilith - dinah's bike - but it was so light, the sequence would have been so wrong, i turned back...

it is a beautiful day as well, it would have been a great day for filming...

so i'm currently downloading the latest demo of carina's voyager so i can work out what time tomorrow morning i need to be out there to get roughly the same amount of light as if it was thursday morning, maybe it'll just be a minute or two before, maybe 15 minutes...

so for the 3rd morning i'm waking up with my alarm at that ungodly hour, only this time i'll get out of bed when i should...

and it turns out that it'll be very similar, if i'm there either at the same time or maybe a couple of minutes earlier...

ok so the bike, a strange problem began last week directly after i fixed a puncture on the back wheel (only ever on the back wheel)... i cycled from work to the royal albert hall where we were being taken to see cirque du soleil, all the musicians from the 4 way improvisation were there, all being staff at hammersmithwork whose do it was...

it was great, particularly two men being lifted with ropes and leather straps and swinging about... very beautiful...

anyway i was cycling home and i felt a regular sensation which became a regular sound in the bike...

i looked down and there was a bulge in the back wheel where the inner tube was coming out from the outer tube at one point... very strange... i let out some air, pumped it up again and carried on my way... this happened twice more in the same journey...

anyway i didn't use the bike the next day but when i came to use it again it seemed to have fixed itself... (famous last words)...

so i was cycling it happily again up until wednesday when i was just about to cycle home from work when i noticed it had done it again... so i did the same thing, let out the air a little, sorted it out, pumped it up, and went on my way, within 5 minutes it was bulging again and in fact i didn't have time to stop before it burst...

so i walked it to the bike shop i like and chained it to a lamppost, got to go down there today and take it in to the shop... that's two hammersmith thursdays i've missed cycling to now...

now is it worth going back to bed?

x

last day off

listening to howe gelb's marvellous Sno Angel album, which is what i was listening to when i beat Wfloopy(shaman) for the 1st time online earlier on...

took a few printed out greek poems over to manolis's earlier only to find - and remember at the same time - that he doesn't open on mondays... so i ate a monday roast in the amazon instead... me & dinah having missed our amazon sunday roast yesterday because we were down south living it up with producerG... birthday boy...

we'd cycled off on our matching shopper bikes... cutting a dash as she told me... getting on the train @ kentish town down to tulse hill, cyling a little further when we got down there...

her bike is simply elegance itself and she only bought it on saturday so we're still in the honeymoon of it...

she returned on the train from somewhere past watford with it and we cycled up to the amazon, ate, then cycled over to regents park just because we could... beautiful day as it was... then yesterday the somewhat drunken and lovely time with producerG & his C, meeting a few lovely, lovely people as well...

then back here and a bottle of rose cava before the evening and a kind of house fun thing set up up by Gordy... darts, other daft games, dr K came, only spski was absent from the house and it was really nice, good to hang out with people we don't always get on with...

today i've been slowly thinking about music... sounds... i'm considering arranging a cover of guinevere by crosby, stills & nash... just me & my keys... a rhodes sound doing the chords which will be tricky, just my left hand... and my voice and a hammond organ doing the harmonies...

maybe it's too ambitious but i dig the notion...

also i need to sort out the sound setup of my keyboard before the rehearsal with T's band on wednesday...

also a tune that's brewing, started on sunday while i was waiting for dinah to be ready to leave the house... a touch of a bheki mseleku tune in there and it may morph into the half remembered faces tune i started the night me & filmo saw the dead C...

today has been my last day off for this week, the new semester is upon us and my wednesday's off are now a thing of the past... so i need to get used to doing everything i need to do today, like my laundry which i must get going real soon...

Howe Gelb now singing his Down Home 2000 album which is odder, not so nicely produced... but still great...

ok later x