The nasty enervating illness I have been labouring through is waning. To prove that every cloud has a silver lining (and that where there’s a will there’s a platitude) it seems to have sapped my will to worry about work. If I get sacked I’ll just have to deal with it, at least I’ve got a week off, paid. And if I’m not sacked I didn’t have to work through that nasty cold. It was weird, I didn’t have a runny nose, or anything much except a little bit of a cough and tired eyes, but I just felt so weak I barely felt able to stand up. That and a temperature. Bad, but brief. Three days, and I was on the mend yesterday. Which reminds me, I need to swab out my sax mouthpiece now, in case it’s possible to reinfect myself! The sax is coming along apace. I have two books; "Learn as you play saxophone", and "A new tune a day for tenor saxophone." The former is the one my sax-sensei Pete teaches from, the latter is more challenging. Both want me to read music and play at the same time in chapter 1. That really is challenging! Pete asked me if I had any musical experience, I said I could play the triangle but subsequently confessed I could not read music. He said it was alright, that people often learnt as they went along, but I sensed an inward sigh. I think I’m doing well though. In the space of a week I’ve gone from blowing like mad and being pleased I got something that sounded like a note, to expecting to hit each note of the middle (damn, lingo breakdown! Not sharp or flat, the middle bunch of notes! Damn , damn, damn!) octave, and worrying about keeping to 4/4 or 3/4 time! (You go girl!) Wendy, whilst appreciating the rate and degree of my improvement, is less than ecstatic about my practising. Hearing someone try over and over to get the right time and notes of ‘Chanson de nuit’ and ‘Au clair de la lune’ whilst you are trying to have a quiet chill must be irritating. Did I mention the soundproofing was a flop? The egg-trays are apparently an urban myth, they give you wonderful acoustics, but don’t stop next-door from appreciating them. Genuine sound insulation relies on density and thickness. I briefly examined a professional soundproofing site, worked out that one wall of a soundproof box would cost around £500, then gave up. I have resorted to the old standbys of a thick pair of socks down the horn, and practising my fingering without the mouthpiece in (on top of the hour’s blowing). The socks are, at best, a token gesture. There are that many holes in a sax that the horn is just the final projecting bit. I’ve taken to sitting in the hall upstairs, with all the bedroom doors, the bathroom door and the front-room door downstairs shut (so there […]
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Work means freedom
Hi again, this really is to be a quick one (Heroes is on in 25 minutes!). Had to commit this to pseudo paper though. Of late I’ve been struggling with the Taekwondo. If I’m on 2-10 shift I can’t go because I’m working, and 6-2 I’m so tired I just can’t drag myself to go. Then there was missing the grading due to my HGV lesson , and I didn’t go to one lesson I could have made last week as it was the final one before grading and we’d have just been going through the stuff we needed for it. Which I do every time I exercise (most days on 2-10). So all in all I was losing it. I had to force myself to go tonight or I felt I might just quit. And then there was tonight’s lesson. I am buzzing off it. Sure I’m tired now, and will be worse tomorrow (I am too wired to go straight to bed now even if I didn’t want to watch Heroes), but for the first time in what seems like ages I am invigorated, chipper to the point of cheerful and focused again. I want to learn, to strive, to master the damn painful discipline. I have been down. Low of mood and spirit. If the simple expedient of sweating blood and stretching till you cry keeps me charged and breaks the cycle of work/ sleep/ work, I’ll have to force myself to go to lessons. Another point in the class’s detriment on 6-2 is this, you come in at 9.15 or so, have a shower, want to talk about it for ages, and are buzzing for ages afterwards. Not conducive to a good nights sleep. Well, Wendy’s going to bed and watching Heroes later, so I’ll try and get some extra kip. By the by, went out to the mighty Micra this morning at 5.30 and because of the rain yesterday, and it freezing overnight, it was like a little Micra-shaped ice-cube. An igloo, indeed. I hit the central locking button, the doors unlocked but were frozen into position! I ended up forcing the key into the hatchback lock, heaving that open, then clambering in the back and knocking the door open from the inside! I was late. Overnight we are forecast tons of snow, the roads are already iced over, so it’s going to be fun. Later, Buck.
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