a long, awaited update!

Tuesday 5th September 2006

1:12 p.m. I think I have come to realise one of the potential pitfalls of blogging which is if you go for too long without updating your blog you forget some of the stuff you wanted to say! All I can do is summarise the events of the last week, or as much of them as I can remember!

Last Tuesday night was really good, felt that I was back on form, the evening flowed well, and when I had finished a lady told me that her and her husband have been going on the North Sea boats for years, and usually they retire by 10 o’clock but they stayed up just so that they could listen to me play, which was nice.

Wednesday evening started off very quiet, so I did mostly instrumental numbers. Did more vocal numbers as the bar steadily got busier, and they went down well despite the number of obscure requests. A couple were celebrating their wedding anniversary and asked me to play Wonderful Tonight, to which they did a slow dance, which was a first!

Thursday was a bit of a disaster, the evening did not flow at all well, there wasn’t much of an atmosphere in the bar, and I ended up playing whatever came to mind. James and Jo came to listen later on in the evening and I played some honky-tonk, which ironically seemed to be the most popular with the audience!!

Friday night saw another return to form, the bar was busy and there was a good atmosphere, which was encouraging. There were two couples who stayed from beginning to end, and requested several songs, which always a clear good sign. Also to my surprise, there was the same guy with the son who sang before (on 22nd July) and I let him sing Your Song again. At the end the man from one of the couples asked me where I usually play, which was very flattering! Also he mentioned that he had recently been on the Pride of Hull (one of the Rotterdam boats) and met Julian.

Saturday night was again a bit of a non-starter, however half-way through the evening a guy came in who was a blues singer and he got up and I accompanied him singing a few numbers, including Mustang Sally and Route 66, which went down well.

Sunday night was fairly unremarkable, it wasn’t the best night I’ve had, but it wasn’t by any means the worst either. Not much audience participation.

Last night was probably the quietest night I can remember so far since working here (probably owing in part to the school holidays coming to an end). I played almost all instrumental numbers for the first set, and it had been so quiet that I decided to postpone my first break and carry on until things picked up a bit. It ended up getting quite busy for a while, and had a few requests. However when I came back for my last set at 11 it was almost empty again.

Wednesday 6th September 2006

2:10 a.m. BST Tonight was a bit testing as the bar was full of unreceptive Germans. However, there were a few people listening and had several requests from a small number of people during my last set.

The Managing Director of Live Business (the agency I am working for) was on the boat tonight, he came to hear me play and gave me some very positive feedback, relating to my selection of songs, my playing, and the audience participation. I felt this was particularly positive as I must have made an impression for him to comment face-to-face rather than feed back via James.

I spoke to Peter yesterday, and confirmed that my next contract will start on 22nd October for five weeks.

I walked all the way along the beach to Blankenberge with Alex and Lisa from the band, this afternoon. Among the discoveries I made there were a bed-selling establishment known as ‘de Slaapshop’, the interestingly-titled arcade ‘Club 77’, and a news-agents, advertising its bizarre wares in the window, including a kids’ comic called “It’s fun to learn English”, and CD by leading Belgian dance act “Hooverphone”.



We caught the tram back to Zeebrugge.



After alighting from the tram I discovered the St. George’s Day war memorial and the church.



I’ve taken some more photos recently which I have uploaded to my web-space. I’ve decided to start annotating my blog a bit, as it struck me that the text-only format was a bit indigestible!