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Chris Evans (not that one) risked traversing the country to come to help me set up all the
Twitch TV stuff that we need to record the snooker, games and online interviews. It was all a bit beyond me and slightly less beyond him, but with the help of Gobin King Rob Sedgebeer (who has been helping me get online now for a quarter of a century) by the end of the day we had worked out the best position for the snooker camera (it can’t be too close or I will hit it with my snooker stick) and got various scenes created for different set ups. Hopefully I will slowly get to understand what is going on, because I really like the possibilities. We even have a green screen. I don’t know how to use it yet, but how exciting is that?
Very soon I can hunker in my attic bunker (if that is possible) and stream to you 24 hours a day. We struggled to find any versions of the games that I like that will work on updated computers (my copy of Civ II has stopped working since the last update) and Addams Family Pinball on the iPad lagged too badly to be able to play, but Scrabble should work out OK.
I continued my morning stone Clear with around about 200 people accompanying me on the journey. I think if I put on a gig at 8am I’d struggle to get that many people to watch it, so it’s impressive/terrible to think people will watch this rambling entertainment (pun intended).
It’s largely fun being forced to stay in the house with the family. Luckily my wife and I mainly like each other (though will the lack of absence make our hearts grow harder) and the kids are at a fun age (again though, imprisonment will make it all a bit more Lord of the Flies). There are more positives about having to concentrate more on being a family than we would have done. Tonight we read
Poppy and the Orchestra - another book complete with snatches of lovely music. One of the characters plays a cello and there are a few bars of
Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals, which almost moved me to tears.
My sister was and is a brilliant cellist and this tune transported me back 40 years to Cheddar and memories of her practising this piece in the dining room. She was a rebellious teenager who loved the Bay City Rollers, but she still found time to make this instrument sing. I am sure that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it much at the time - I certainly hated learning to play instruments myself- but now that tune picks at my heart and pulls a thread that goes back four decades. We’re usually apart now anyway, of course, but somehow the forced separation was now accentuated and there was something funereal about it all. A wake for the past perhaps. But as I found with my grandma and Clair de Lune, when a piece of music is heavily associated with one person then it becomes an incredibly emotive thing. That music is nothing like my sister in spirit, but it’s hers entirely.
We enjoyed having a visitor for possibly the last time in months and had dinner and a couple of bottles of wine with Chris, and also some rum soaked flambed banana. It was a fun party to welcome the Apocalypse. And though we were by no means the worse offenders (as so many people were still drinking in pubs) it felt like we’d smuggled in an escaped airman and could be busted at any second.
Hopefully the mild risk will be made worthwhile by the low quality of entertainment that I will now be able to provide.
