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Showing posts from 2016

Time and Space and Me

I still can't believe it. I'm pinching myself. Urrrnnngghhh. Mmmmmmnnnnhhhh. I had more postal business to do yesterday and if you don't know, me and post offices, we are natural enemies in the wild.  But yesterday, yesterday, it felt like I turned a corner in my life and suddenly was walking along in a parallel universe. In this parallel universe not only is the post office open after lunch in the summer, like every single week day, it is populated, staffed if you will, by friendly, helpful people. Pinch pinch. But I'm ahead of myself. I got the news that I had to post off some more plakate (posters) to this venue I'm gonna play at. I got this news at 11.57am. I thought, gees, it'll take me two minutes to grab the posters and walk to the car and get out into the street. By then it will be 11.59am. I'll have one minute to drive to the post office. Which is not impossible. But if I arrive at 11.59.59, for example, the 'ladies' at the post office ar

Moan Me This

Tomorrow evening we drive through three or four separate nations to arrive at a beach on the north Adriatic. The drive is about the same distance as Gympie to Tamworth, so it's no monster and we have two drivers plus two back-seat drivers. This is what one must do here in order to get to an actual beach. Okay, there's no surf in the Adriatic but one thing at a time. But today, today I drove to Filderstadt to get my hair cut by a bent-over Italian woman who was tired of living. She wasn't 70 or 60 or 50 or even 40. I'd guess she was 33 or 34. She slaughtered the guy in front of me with her slovenly, inexact swoops of the electric clippers, each swoop accompanied by a moan or a sigh and sometimes even a roll of her heavy eyes. They made this sound, the eyes: "wwwhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrr cacluck!.... like a pair of 1950s bowling balls. The dude was thin, like a cardboard cut-out. He sat obediently affixed in his slot on the chair while the sardonic bitch wove her magic

Oh yeah, the music

It is late March of 2015. The weather here in Europe is confused, bordering on psychotic. They tell me every year it's never been this way, but then the next year comes along and confounds everyone yet again. I first came out to Germany in May of 2003.  I stayed on til the March of the following year. I remember that cos I played a gig in an Irish Pub on St Patricks day of 2004 in Stuttgart in the "theatre district" and I didn't play a single Irish song. The Irish expats were livid. The manager of the Irish pub was also livid. Even though, as I explained early on in the night, I had warned him the previous night that even though I would be happy to play on St Patrick's Day I did not know a single Irish song. At that point the previous evening he had been desperate because every Irish musician in the world already had a gig for St Paddy's Day.  He'd contacted most of them. All busy, thanks. Me being Australian, well, I was the next best thing. So h