Monday 31st of July, 2000
Bought too many pillow-cases, which is not like me.
Today things started to happen - I woke up at eleven or so (I had strange dreams which I can't remember now, but I do remember thinking "those were strange, even for dreams"). Pete called to say that I could get into the flat at three, and to kill time, I went to the local Starbucks for breakfast (I know, I know - Starbucks, the Evil Empire). The rain was hammering down - the fringe must have officially started, since the bad weather has arrived.
Got into the flat with no problem, met Grover (resident number five) and got keys cut. Went back to Ellie's to collect my stuff. Then went to buy bedding at What Everyone Wants, which is a sort of department store down the road (I had thought it was a cut-price store, but this is not, apparantly, the case). Bought too many pillow-cases, which is not like me.
I have the really big room, again. Which is nice. It's on a corner, so I'll have a panoramic view of the drunks beating each other up on a Saturday night, and the students staggering back to their digs and, if I am lucky, both meeting up. Very quiet now, but you can already hear English and American accents on the streets, so the first of the shows are starting to arrive. The flats in the buildings over the road will have a panoramic view of me if I forget to close the curtains.
Finally got a shower - absolute bliss! It feels so good to be clean. I was beginning to get paranoid. But I stink no more. Or not too badly, I hope.
Went down the the Tron, where I'm playing tomorrow night, to see Pete Rowan and Holly Tomas and a sort of Edinburgh Songwriters Showcase Supergroup called Word. It was quite a long show, and very hot - the room was packed. I can't imagine that it will be like that for me tomorrow, but I managed to get Pete's attention for a few minutes about tomorrow and he didn't seem too perturbed. He said that the room wouldn't be completely empty, and not completely empty is a full house for me. I aske whether there was any remedial promo I could do (the fliers still being in London) and he didn't think so. I had spun fantasies of handing out hastily-designed fliers on the street tomorrow, but now think I'd be better off using the time to practise. Basically, promo stuff has had to take a back seat to work, life and packing, and in the life triage that I have been practicing, biog writing and press pack assembly have fallen through the cracks, so Pete hasn't had very much to promote me with, and I haven't had much of an opportunity to promote myself. Ho hum. I've played to empty rooms before. Bodies absorb high frequencies and muffle the sound anyway.
Memo to self - do cover for demo CD.
Still no internet access - Pete Harris will sort it out when he arrives tomorrow. The electricity is on a card here too - I had to toddle along to Allday's when the lights went off - pfft, like that, put in twenty quid, got £5.96 worth of power. Have to have a word with Pete about that.
And there's a dishwasher! I'm sure that ninety percent of all the strife in the world could be cured by giving everybody access to dishwashers. Hurrah!
I knew I shouldn't have unpacked anything - I have to sneak back to Ellie's to get the pickup for the standby guitar, which is coming up tomorrow. Probably spend Wednesday changing strings - on the steel-string I use for Phil's gigs, on the standby guitar (which, if previous years are anything to go by, will get used, once) and on my classical - I don't want to change the strings on the classical too soon before a gig, so I'll leave it to Wednesday, after the gig.
Or that's what I plan, anyway.