less than a week to go...

...before I have a week off!

Monday 7th August 2006

11:43 a.m. A better couple of evenings, fortunately. Saturday was steady but became so quiet that by the time I finished at 11:30 p.m. and packed up, the entire bar was empty! Although I am fairly certain that this had nothing to do with my playing…

Last night was a lot busier and saw some people who had been on a couple of weeks ago who remembered me, they had requested a song that originally I didn’t know but by the time they came back I had learnt it so I played it for them.

Got a letter from Julian this morning, he is currently working on the Pride of Hull, which is one of the two ships that does the Hull-Rotterdam route. It sounds like he is getting on well.

Think I’m due for another jaunt into town today…

4:50 p.m. Am back from town after a fairly successful shopping trip. Still haven’t managed to get to a dry-cleaner’s though…

Forgot to say earlier that the sea was as calm as a duck-pond last night after a week or so of instability! So much so that there was no swell at all at some points which was quite amazing, never seen that before.

Tuesday 8th August 2006

4:43 p.m. CET Had a good night last night as I played confidently and as a result was well received. Have had several requests over the last couple of nights for stuff that I didn’t know so I’ve got my work cut out for me. Am going to make an effort to get some new material together while I’m off as well, as it can get a bit monotonous playing the same old songs two or three times a week.

Only one week to go now until I have my week’s break. And in two days time I will have been on here for exactly one month!

Wednesday 9th August 2006

10:54 a.m. BST I forgot to say yesterday that the night before last there was a guy sat by the piano who was harmonising to a few songs and he had a good voice so it sounded good.

Last night went fairly well as well, although my voice was a bit croaky. My playing was all right but not my best. Having said that, there were two family groups sat nearby and they very much enjoyed it, so much so that they stayed until the end, and I even had an encore for only the second time.

I think I’m ready for a break now. Good job there’s only three round-trips to go before I have just under a week off.

11:38 a.m. James arranged for us to go up to the bridge for a short while last night. Was really good, and although it was dark, we got a pretty good view across the sea, could see several other ships plus a couple of oil rigs in the distance, and the lights of the Norfolk coast. They have quite a bit of equipment up there as you can probably imagine, and it’s pretty sophisticated. Apparently the majority of the journey is navigated by the ship’s auto-pilot. One of the instruments has a built-in satellite tracking system, which showed the co-ordinates of our position in latitude and longitude. I’m going to look it up on Google Earth later and see where we were!