520 Light-Years From Home

And lo, it came to pass, another year (or 2) slips by without me hardly noticing – ‘twas as it ever ‘twas. For a while there I thought that band would last for ever. How wrong was I! Musical similarities my arse! They fucking hated me. Still, what the fucked, I have moved on to bigger and better thing and much happier for it. Bands always split up, so they say. We did create a good body of work and it is sad that little of that got recorded and will be lost forever, but there were a few memorable gigs in the early days. Those chords will be rockin’ around the heavens for millenniums to come; the speed of sound being what it is (768 mph) it could be some time before any extraterrestrial living beyond Betelgeuse (Beetle-Juice) [Betelgeuse being 520 light-years or about 5,880,000,000,000 miles away from any of the pubs or clubs we ever played in] will hear it; pity. However demise of that short lived little shower hasn’t meant a decline in the playing of the old gob-iron (harmonica to those who are not in the know); I have been blowing with my good friend JT and accomplices, a stint or two with the DB Band (www.dbband.com), and I did a little gig-ette in Devon with Zak, the son of my old mate Simon – Zak, a shooting star in the making if ever there was one. It was the birthday of my other big buddy ‘The Wave’ in a field in Devon where we played. There were friends from my past that I haven’t seen for decades! As Bobby D said “All the friends I used to know are illusions to me now, some are mathematician, some are carpenters wives, dunno how long they studied, dunno what they did with there lives” An just like him I didn’t know either but after that reunion/get together I have a much better idea. Lots of children, moving, jobs, couples, marriages, divorces and a few eternal singletons; it was nice to see them again, and I am proud to have you amongst my friends guys if any of you ever read this. It was a heady time in the field there, emotional even. All too soon I was back in the grind with my day job sucking the life out of me again in the way that too many of them do. But love this sunshine!

I FEEL PITY FOR THE CITY

Time crashes on as the coolness of spring simmers into summer and the last of Murphy’s winter coat falls out all over the house.Highs and lows, nowhere to hide, nowhere to go

Sweet River Thames meanders me through misty memories of days gone by and future yet to come

The swarming mayflies have had their day and ducklings have swam and had their playI’m just sitting here watching the river flow,all dressed down and no place to go

Iced white wine, blue skyline; wild deer and breeze all running free, and me, still trying to see the wood for the trees, weeds and reeds; so few bees; distant church bells ringing, so many birds singing, its such a beautiful day,

its such a beautiful day and I feel pity for the city, feel pity for the city, I feel pity for the city that I left behind.