Last week was awesomely busy.  There seem to be a lot of people inspired to learn to play guitar for the summer.  This for me is very good.  This means I have been spending increasing hours in the first half of my week meeting new guitar students.  This is good!

Interspersing my increasing demand as a tutor came a nice little couple of days off for my long-ago-booked gigs in London and Brighton.  These two gigs have been on my list for a few months so I was very excited when they finally arrived.  With the National Express and Mega Bus as my chosen method of rock n roll transport I headed down to Greenwich on Wednesday towards The Pelton Arms.  The British summer has so far being a British summer at its best…this of course means a lot of rain.    This meant that en route to gig I got absolutely drenched.  I stayed in a hostel near Deptford Bridge.  Round the corner from the hostel was a piece of paper stuck to the wall that had ‘Cardboard City’ written on it, with an arrow pointing down the road.., this did make me question whether I had made a mistake..

So…London…my gig was with Icarus Club run by the lovely Phil Dearing.  Very friendly and supportive.  I sold copies of my album and had a return invitation.  This I take as positive.  The bar was some decent real ale and a pay-what-you-want for food deal on a Wednesday. 🙂 I played and ran off into the night towards the Cutty Sark and onto cardboard city. All was well.

Up early and I jumped on a bus to Brighton.  Pre-gig I met one of my good friends Mark M Thompson from uni that I haven’t seen in a few years.  We obviously hit a few pubs and pints of beer and had the quickest catch-up, compressing 6 years into 3 hours.  Knowing I had to sober up a tad in order to play a gig of decent caliber we headed for some food, bid goodbye and I again ran off into the rain towards the Brunswick. 

A friendly gig where I also got chance to see the fabulous ‘The Finds‘ headline.  Very tight band.  The sound was great and there were a few familiar faces from the Pool there too.  Unexpected and very welcome.  I met some really nice people who like my music too.

I stayed the night in another hostel in which at 4am a massive fight broke out upstairs by seemingly somebody who was very upset about his bed…  The morning hit and I took a long walk down the sea front, had an espresso in the Alchemist Cafe and begun my 9 hour coach journey back to Liverpool.  On our stop off at London a guy tried to get on the coach with a Tarantula….he couldn’t quite grasp why the driver said no….:/

Done., looking forward to many more trips and gigs!

x