How lovely to have a long day in rehearsal. We are all aware of the gradual march of potential Covid restrictions, but we are moving in the honest hope that we’ll be able to do this show wholeheartedly. We have to, otherwise we would go mad.
We are only two days into rehearsal and it really feels like we are finding nuance and making shifts in material that we might feel like we’ve mined quite deeply. The team changes every year. This year as every year it feels positive, fun and geeky. It’s hard not to have fun making this show. We are here to thaw frozen hearts.
Anyone that knows how long it takes me to pick up right hand accordion business will know that I’m aarghing about the fact that I’ve taken on some more of it. It all makes me better at this, my chosen instrument. That’s why I take it on. I like to put myself under pressure and I need the pressure to improve. I play that instrument by ear and feel alone, but I’m getting better and better with it. I’ve even started thinking about fingering, and remembering those gentle childhood piano lessons where I learnt the rudiments. The obedience of the boy practicing his scales is not familiar to the carnage-master rolling through his accordion these days, but I’m glad that distant boy did that distant work. Mother! Father! Your piano lesson money wasn’t completely wasted! I think I just needed a folk musician for a teacher, and not the series of mathematicians I encountered.
This evening after rehearsal we filmed a bunch of Instagram stories that Jack and I wrote for gradual marketing release over the first twelve days of December. Who knows how they went, we turned them out at a decent lick and for me it was mostly about remembering. I hope they prove fun and useful. I expect if they don’t get enough plays we won’t get all twelve through the edit so considering this is my first long foray into this digital video marketing malarkey, I’m likely gonna share the heck out of the links to it once I have them. There are only about twelve people left in Jersey who haven’t booked for the show, but we wanna make sure we’re playing full houses so we need that dozen to book.
Meanwhile I’m gonna get back to Jack and to mindless wind down big American men breaking one another’s teeth over a ball. Because why not?
Late start tomorrow to balance the late finish. Jack and I are taking the opportunity to wind down together here in the IKEA flat, knowing we get a lie-in. We had mussels. There was wine. There still is wine.
Neither of us have seen anything of Jersey yet, but there’ll be time for that. For now we are inexplicably watching the NFL while, outside, a storm is raging. Jersey knows how to do weather. Everybody on this island this evening is gonna be huddled like we are, in our granite houses, as this vicious maritime wind roars into the windows.
AlBarclay 