Mostly inconsequential stuff
I've been saying this for ages: the terrorists are winning when we change our way of life out of fear. Their aim is not to kill people: that is just the means to the end of sowing chaos, disorder and fear, and they seem to be doing a very good job of that right now. Bruce Schneier puts this better than I ever could.
I'm feeling pleased with myself and that I have stepped past another milestone in my learning about the harmonica. Last week I got hold of an electronic chromatic tuner and a toolkit designed for harmonica maintenance, and over the weekend I took my first steps in customising my own harmonicas. I took a cheap and fairly nasty harmonica that I had previously damaged, and with a couple of hours work I had an instrument that played better than several of my far more expensive harps and was retuned to the "Paddy Richter" scheme (by tuning one reed to a different note you can make it a lot easier to play certain tunes, especially traditional diddley-diddley music). By the end of the weekend I had a second Paddy Richter (in a different key) and another harp just retuned slightly to sound better — and I was getting a bit quicker at the job.
This is a true revelation. I can buy a £3 harmonica and make it sound at least as good as one costing £20 (though the resilience, etc. probably still isn't as good). Once I've messed with a few more cheapies and get the confidence up, I'll try tweaking one of my decent instruments.
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Saturday evening was fun. A friend was celebrating her birthday by hosting a ceilidh in Chippenham, so <3, the in-laws and I all turned up with our best dancing pumps on. The band (Random) were good, the caller did a great job, and we all danced our socks off. <3 was feeling a bit tired (pregnancy does that to you, apparently) but joined in on plenty of times, even managing to survive the bonkers Orkadian strip the willow towards the end. I keep forgetting how much fun ceilidhs can be.
I've just stumbled across this cartoon which pretty much sums up some of my thoughts on the subject. I'm just glad I didn't have a mouthful of coffee at the time.
So, there I was in one of our local charity shops. I took my purchase to the till, paid my money, and as the old lady went to get me a plastic bag, I said, "No thanks, I already have a bag," and indicated the little backpack I had brought with me.
"But I have to give you a bag," she told me.
"But we have a house full of bags and are trying to not get any more, which is why I brought my own bag with me."
"Well, I have to give you a bag. I think it's to do with advertising."
"You know I'm going to just put your bag inside the one I already have?"
She shrugged and gave me my purchase in a plastic bag, which I proceded to put into my pack. So what's all that about then? I thought we were all trying to reduce waste these days.
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Later on we were with friends playing Curse of the Pharaoh, a murder mystery game produced by Freeform Games, a firm co-run, as it turns out, by an old acquaintance of mine from a past life. This was lots of fun, more of a roleplaying game than the boxed murder mysteries that we had tried before, and I singularly failed to achieve any of my goals.
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And finally, last night I finally got to play at our local folk music session. This was terrifying for me: I only started playing harmonica early this year, which is the first musical instrument I have ever learnt to play, and the first session I went to was only a couple of months back (where I just sat and listened).
The regulars were very supportive and encouraging though, and soon it came to be my turn to start a tune. I said that I only knew two tunes and wasn't confident enough to lead either, so someone kindly started Miss McLeod's Reel for me and I tried to play along. It went more quickly than I was comfortable with, but I just about managed to keep going despite losing my way a few times. Whoa, that is a completely different experience to playing on my own — or with one other person, as I have done before.
By the time it was my turn again there were more people around, and I got nudged into starting my other tune, The Kesh Jig myself so it could go at a speed I was happy with. I pretty much fell apart during the first time through the tune, but after some encouraging noises from the others, I got going again and then suddenly just about everyone was playing along with me. This was awesome, and I felt so much more comfortable this time
Now it's time to learn a couple more tunes for next time. The other musicians were good enough to play The Butterfly, a slip jig which I'm now trying to learn, and I think The Boys of Bluehill is another good candidate for the list. We'll see how I get on...
I was just wondering what the terrorists' real aims and objectives are. I had an argument along these lines with a friend after the London bombings in July last year. My thesis was that the number of deaths were incidental. Yes, more deaths makes a bigger statement, but the key is to disrupt our "way of life" to the point that we have to do whatever it is they actually want us to do in order to stop being hassled so much. They basically want to inconvenience us so much that we have to accede to their demands. Granted, being dead is pretty inconvenient, but that is not the only way they can succeed.
Today's "disrupted" terrorist operation has resulted in grounded flights, travellers being unable to fly, and those who can being prevented from taking any hand luggage, not even a mobile or a drink. Apparently even baby milk must be tested before going on board. We can be thankful that (if the intelligence was accurate) a significant loss of life has been prevented, but I reckon that this has probably actually been a successful terrorist attack. Unfortunately we haven't been able to avoid dancing to their tune.
I'm slowly making progress with the harmonica, currently working from two main angles: (1) learning folk tunes, and (2) working through exercises to develop technique. Of course, I'm also noodling around with the odd blues lick for a bit of fun as well.
On the folk tunes front, I can now play a passable Irish Washerwoman, and am starting to get somewhere with Miss McLeod's Reel and The Kesh Jig. At least, I'm getting somewhere when on my own with nobody listening. Lunchtime today I got together with a colleague who goes to the local pub sessions for a bit of a practice (me with the moothie and him with a fiddle), which was the first time I have ever played with anyone else (I think the messing about with Gav on Saturday doesn't count). This was great fun, but revealed just how far I have yet to go (unsurprisingly I was slipping up all over the place). At least I have stepped over another hurdle in my musical development and am slightly more ready for the next session (as long as I keep practicing in between).
The current exercises I am doing are from Charlie McCoy's All-American Harp book, which is doing a good job of getting me over one of the major technical hurdles: bending notes. This is a technique that allows a player to play most of the notes that are "missing" from a harmonica, meaning that the little 10-hole blues harp has a full 3 octaves of range. More advanced techniques allow access to all chromatic notes, but I'm not worried about that right now — many successful harp players go through life happily not playing those extra notes. Anyway, I can now just about do semitone(ish) bends on the first four holes. Go me!
The McCoy book is really good, but I'm glad it wasn't my first bit of tuition material. It runs over the basics very quickly, and would have probably just put me off. As a bit of follow-up material, though, it is great. The book that got me started was David Barratt's Basic Blues Harmonica Method, which was a great starting point (and I still haven't got through all of it), though helped massively by getting the DVD which accompanies it. Other than that, I have Ben Hewlett and Paul Lennon's Get Chugging (the linked one is a newer edition), which is just great fun for playing with rhythms and breathing exercises, and have more recently picked up Brendan Power's Play Irish Music on the Blues Harp which does what it says on the tin and was a great opportunity to get hold of a pair of customised harmonicas at a discount. Seriously, those Suzuki harps are wonderfu
