Legends of the Sun Pig

I used to play the drums. Not very well, and not very much, but I had a Pearl Rhythm Traveller kit in 2001, and a Roland TD-3 electronic kit in 2007, and I enjoyed them. But even playing on an electronic kit sends vibrations through the house, and eventually time constraints and waning interests collided, and I stopped. Rhythm has always been my thing, though, and I always figured that if I picked up a different instrument it would be the bass guitar.

Over the last month or so I’ve been trying “chase Tinkerbell”: to pay attention when my brain sends out a fleeting spark of desire or interest, and follow it where it may lead. When I was in Edinburgh in August, the spark turned out to be musical. While I was redecorating my study, I thought that a drum kit might fit nicely into the one empty corner — but once I moved all the furniture back it, it turned out the corner wasn’t empty after all. Also, the problem of drumming noise hasn’t magically been solved in the last ten years. But a bass guitar, now…

I mentioned it to my manager Keith when I had lunch with him on the Monday. He plays bass, and he had some tips on what to look for if I wanted to get started. On Tuesday I had lunch with Alan Ramsay at Frizzante (which is rapidly turning into my favourite Italian restaurant), and I walked down to Dean Bridge with him afterwards. On my way back towards Pollock Halls, Tinkerbell struck. I knew there was a music shop in the Grassmarket (Red Dog Music), and I stopped in to have a look. A very helpful sales associate talked me through the options, and pointed out the various beginner packs that were available: bass, strap, cables, and a small amp, with prices starting at a modest £250 or so.

“Hmmmmm,” my brain said. By coincidence, my flight to Edinburgh on the Sunday evening had been delayed by 3 hours and 10 minutes: just enough to trigger EU 261 compensation, so long as “extraordinary circumstances” (such as bad weather) didn’t apply. Easyjet make it very easy to make a claim for EU261 compensation, and there is no need to go through a third-party company that will act on your behalf (for a 25% cut, plus taxes). A successful claim would net me €250. So if the claim was successful, I could say that Easyjet bought me a bass guitar…

That evening I went out to the Wye Oak gig at Summerhall. (The last concert I’d been to, back in April, had also been to see them, at Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam.) Madeline Kenney played a warm-up set, then the building was evacuated because of a fire alarm, and then Wye Oak came on and played. Last time it had just been Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, but this time they had a bass player (Will Hackney) with them as well! At most gigs, I spend a lot of time watching the drummer. This time, I found myself following Will’s hand movements on the bass, and imagining myself playing it. It was a good feeling.

Set list:

1. Tuning
2. The Instrument
3. Lifer
4. It Was Not Natural
5. Shriek
6. Spiral
7. Say Hello
8. You of All People
9. Glory
10. Holy Holy
11. Before
12. Watching the Waiting
13. The Tower
14. Civilian
15. The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs (not “The Harder I call, The Faster It Comes”, as described by The List

Normally Wye Oak don’t play encores, but they made a special exception this time:

15. Coyote (cover of a Joni Mitchell song)

So when I got back home I spoke to Abi about it, and she was supportive of the idea. I did some online research and scouted out music shops in the area.

Reader, I bought the bass.

In the end I decided not to take part in the 100 van Leeghwater 100km walk at the start of August. There are various sensible health-conscious face-saving reasons I could give:

• We were right in the middle of a heatwave, in an extraordinarily warm summer, and it had been up over 30° during the day. Just as I intended to skip the walk if it was raining, the heat was too intense for that kind of extreme physical activity to be sensible.
• Partly because of the heat in the weeks leading up to the walk, but also because of other factors, I hadn’t stuck to my training plan, and so I wasn’t at peak walking fitness.
• I am very sensitive to sleep disruptions these days, and a night of little sleep can knock me off my stride for a day or two. Walking all the way through the night was going to knock me out for several days afterwards. Just as I find the sensation of a hangovers not worth the pleasure of drinking the night before any more, I really dislike the dragged-out sensation of not enough sleep.

And while all of these factors played a part, the truth is that I asked myself the question: “do I actually want to do this?” and came up with a “no.” There are plenty of things I have to do, but I’m making an effort to reduce the number of things that I only feel I have to do, and to spend more time doing the things I want to do. Paying the entry fee for the walk, and telling people that I was going to do it were encouragements for me to go through with the walk. They would have worked better if the walk was something I wanted to do in the first place, but my relationship with “want” is strained right now.

Persistence-support mechanisms can be useful, but they can also drag you down if you change your mind, or don’t achieve a goal for some reason. In making the decision not to walk, the hardest part was not feeling like I was failing at something. Our culture rewards action, not inaction. It is seen as virtuous to struggle and accomplish something you have no love for. But managing to avoid effort that would bring you no joy is not something to relish. Shortcuts are somehow seen as cheating. See also Bertrand Russell’s essay, “In Praise of Idleness.”

I did learn a few interesting things during my training:

• The first time I tried using a racer’s loop to tie my shoes was on a long walk with a pair of brand new shoes. In retrospect doing a long walk on a brand new pair of shoes was a bad idea, and I won’t make that mistake again. I couldn’t get comfortable with it the racer’s loop on that walk, but I never really got comfortable with the shoes at all on that day. Once the shoes were broken in, the racer’s loop became comfortable, and was effective at reducing heel slip for me.
• Even so, heel slip still appears to be a characteristic of my walking gait, and the heels started to wear through after I’d put in a mere just 150km on them. What I discovered, though, was that a strip of duct tape on the inside of the shoe works wonders.
  
• Likewise, taping up my feet with plain Hansaplast sports tape works wonders for preventing blisters, and stopping them in their tracks when I feel a hot spot forming. I tend to tape up my heels, the balls of my feet, and the area just under my big toe. Discovering this was a revelation. I just need to pay enough attention to my body to actually stop and tape when I feel one starting rather than powering through to the next planned rest stop.
• It takes my body about 5 days to re-absorb a foot blister if I don’t pierce and drain it. (So if I get a blister on a Sunday, walking again the following Saturday is not a problem.)
• The shoes I have are size Asics Patriots, size 43.5. This size is just perfect for comfortable casual use, but on long walks my feet swell quite up quite a bit, to the point that these shoes are too small. Even though the material above the toes is flexible, the pressure and squeezing can sometimes cause some numbness in my big toe and index toe. I’m not sure if this means I should start off with a larger size shoe, or maybe bring a spare pair with me for switching part-way.
• I walk much faster in cool weather than in warm weather. (9m40 to 10m15 per km kind of variability.)
• No matter how much I pee before I leave the house, I always need to go again about an hour after I start.
• There is a nice public toilet at Zaanse Schans that opens at 08:00, at least during the tourist season.
• Finding the right balance between hydration and publicly available toilet spots is important.
• Cubes of cheese, dried fruit, and Turkish delight make good snacks for on-the-go energy.
• Long training walks are really boring. On my traditional long walks, I always walk to a destination. And I always stop off along the way to look at things and take pictures. But for the training walks I selected loops that started and ended at home, and I was walking them for speed, not for sightseeing. Even with a phone full of podcasts, the training walks felt like work, not pleasure.
• I was using standard wired earbud headphones, and the cord inevitably got in the way, and got tangled whenever I put my pack on and took it off to grab a snack. When I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones last year, I was surprised by how their wirelessness quickly stood out as their defining feature for me. I don’t think they’d be good for long walks, though. They’re too tight around my head, and my ears get sweaty. A pair of Apple Airpods for occasions like this is tempting, but my long walks are longer than the 4-5 hour battery life they afford, and I worry that charging them up part-way through would be annoying. (Or worse: if the battery runs out just shortly before the end of a walk.) Also, Airpods aren’t any louder than standard earbuds, and quiet podcasts are already hard to hear if I’m walking alongside a busy road.

I’m close to wrapping up a project to tag all our old digital photographs with additional metadata that our cameras didn’t record at the time: mostly rotation orientation and GPS coordinates. This has involved a lot of internet detective work using Google Maps, Street View, and the various photos and panoramas that people have made publicly available for Google to index and publish. The detail with which I’ve been able to place our own photos on the map is amazing. It’s the kind of project that would have been impossible in 2000 when we bought our first digital camera (an Olympus C3000Z, ironically bought with the proceeds from selling the car we won from buying a pack of film).

I’ve been working my way back in time, and I’ve reached 2001. In February of that year Abi and I took a trip to Dumfriesshire to have dinner at the Plumed Horse in Crossmichael. We stayed overnight at the Chipperkyle B&B, and the day after our meal we drove through the Glenkiln Sculpture Trail west of Dumfries. We stopped and took some photos near Henry Moore’s sculpture Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1.

I had a vague recollection that we’d driven through a public sculpture trail on one of our trips to Dumfries, but without the internet and these modern search tools I would have been hard pressed to figure out exactly where it was, or what this particular sculpture was called. It would have taken a lot of library research.

What the internet also showed me was that the original sculptures were removed in 2013 after one of them (Standing Figure) was stolen.

Just like we have a bunch of photos of the old Hewit’s tannery on the Lanark Road in Edinburgh when it was still in action, the physical world doesn’t stand still. Things move, change, and disappear. Link rot isn’t just a digital thing: it applies to the physical world as well.

• Make a proper carbonara
• Recognize a magpie’s chatter
• Tune a bass guitar

Yeah, so I’m a bit late with this one. We were staying with Abi’s parents, and this was the last night of our visit. I only vaguely remember the gig, but the Fillmore itself is a bit more vivid. Lots of posters, which may have been influencing my office decor choices in recent years. I also remember walking quite a ways up and down San Francisco’s hilly streets to get to the venue; I think we got off the bus a bit too early.

1. Something’s Always Wrong
2. Rings
3. Stupid
4. Woodburning
5. Crowing
6. Good Intentions
7. Is It For Me
8. Windmills
9. Before You Were Born
10. Torn
11. Know Me
12. Nightingale Song
13. Come Back Down
14. Whatever I Fear
15. Nanci
16. All I Want
17. Fall Down

Encore:

18. Come Down
19. Brother
20. Walk On The Ocean

Support came from Hey Marseilles. I remember enjoying them on stage, but not quite being able to get into their album To Travels and Trunks when I bought it later.