Phew once more. Musical retirement challenges again. Quite a weekend just gone on the music front. Not quite in a planned way and once again I’m left wondering is there really any point in trying to plan one’s retirement. It really can seem like trying to pin the proverbial bar of soap / jelly to the wall.
The bare bones of it were, a folk fiddle gig on the Saturday and a different jazz workshop on the Sunday (the previous workshop having finished for the summer hols) but this one, recommended by my previous leader, still going on for a couple of weeks. That’s the simple version.
The reality was somewhat more complicated largely made so by the fact that I seem to have damaged my Achilles heel. Not to be recommended I can tell you, especially if you need to walk. The folk fiddle gig was one that, because I knew it would be tricky to organise, I would have been happy to miss. But out of a sense of loyalty to our leader I felt I needed to be there difficult though it was likely to be. And so it was.
I’ll spare you the details but briefly my heel meant that standing was painful and hence playing the guitar was impractical. So I sat down and played the bodhran. All well and good for a while but then, as I do with the bodhran, I got bored and began to wonder if anybody could hear me anyway. I concluded they probably couldn’t.
Furthermore as I was sitting down at the back of the stage, nobody could see me. What the blue blazes was I doing here? As I told Mrs Summerhouse later, overall it was a lot of pain for very little gain and all out of a sense of probably misplaced loyalty. Silly me.
I should have mentioned that, as our gigs go, this was a big one. We were performing (well the group was, only partially me) at the Kirkstall festival. I read somewhere that a possible 25,000 people were expected to attend, so quite a big deal. To emphasise the point, we were on a proper stage and all ‘miked up’ as we musicians say and the music coming out of proper speakers. We even had sound techs and a sound check, just like a professional band. Everything was grand, except, that is, for the choo choo train that ran behind the stage every few minutes, and the Scottish pipe band or something and the local politician shouting to make her point into a neighbouring microphone. So some complexities.
The ‘miking up’ worked well with the guitars plugged in because you could hear what we guitarists were playing through the monitor speakers at the back of the stage. I say worked well but one of my co-guitarists told me I was playing too loud, so not a complete success. But when it came to the bodhran I had no idea whether anybody could hear me and thought they probably couldn’t. Hmm, so it went.
By the end of the hour’s gig I was in some discomfort but for domestic reasons I couldn’t be picked up and had to struggle a distance back to the car park where Mrs SH and the pups were waiting. Millie had refused to walk down to where we were playing, too many people I think. Fair enough.
Anyway at the end I was wondering why did I express my loyalty when nobody really had a clue that I was there? Even on the team photo (see above) you couldn’t in fact see me because I was hidden behind a large red hat. Some days you just can’t get ahead, ha, ha, as they say. Everybody else seemed to enjoy it, so that’s good. But it left a bit of a scar, well two scars mental and physical in fact.
And it was the mental scar that took me to the jazz workshop on the following Sunday morning. I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go but I thought a positive musical experience might help me ‘recover’.
I had gone to some length to check out with the leader who would be there. If some of the people in my previous jazz group were going to be there then I certainly wasn’t going to be because it wouldn’t be a positive experience. In this case I knew I didn’t have to walk far so it was purely the psychological / social side of things that were going to make or break the session.
And bugger me with a fish fork, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who should be the very first person I meet? My nemesis from the last group. All smiley bonhomie. Well, you can bugger off I thought a little unkindly. But the real twist was that this was his first visit to this particular workshop, just like me. You couldn’t write it, could you?
Had I not set up my equipment I might have cleared off but, as I had, I decided to adopt the, this is fate and it’s not to be resisted, approach to the morning. Once again no chance of playing the keyboard as I slightly imagined there might me. So a morning playing guitar, plugged in again as it was an electric guitar, and though I say so myself, I played OK, and I could hear myself and everybody knew I was there because there were only eight of us including the tutor who incidentally had red painted finger nails. Slightly distracting but in the scheme of things, for this morning, fairly unimportant.
Musical retirement challenges again summary
So there we have it. Two very different musical experiences and all through the pain of my Achilles heel, which is OK when I’m sitting down. Once more it begs the question, is this a sensible or desirable way to spend my retirement years? Am I getting the level of challenge ‘right’ or just making my retirement miserable? Once again, my answer is, buggered if I know.