chrisg's Tour Diary

Colchester was a fun show. I think it was the biggest crowd we've played to outside of the Garage so far. We played with two really good bands, *Teevo and Beat Glider. *Teevo were really fun to watch, and rocked out. Beat Glider were more moody and atmospheric, and great as well. They said they haven't played a show since August, which is either a lie or I need to practice a lot more. Dan broke a string during our second song, and *Teevo totally came to the rescue with another guitar. Otherwise, I think the show went pretty well. We officially sold out of our CDs. What's a gold record ' a few hundred thousand? I think record sales should be like wedding anniversaries ' there should be more signifiers along the way. So I hereby award us a Paper Record?? for these 100 sold.

We got to leave our instruments at the venue overnight (hooray! No load-out!!!), and stayed the night with Stafford. Talked a bunch with Alex that night, and learned about print making (which she studied at school) and lithography. I try to convince her to screen some cool tshirts like my pals Noah and Mike do at imperfect articles, but I'm not sure she bought it.

The next morning, Staff points us to a restaurant for a proper English 'fry.' Dan and I both get the 'All-Day Breakfast', which consists of two sausage links, two rashers of bacon, an egg fried over easy, baked beans, mushrooms, and toast. By 'all day', they obviously meant that I would not need another meal for the remainder of daylight, because I walked out of there at least three inches wider.

Today is our first day off, and so we head to Norwich, where FAFU Shoma lives. She takes us into town for a little sightseeing, where we walk a little maze in a cathedral courtyard. We enter the cathedral, and see them setting up for a performance that night of a piece about Hildegard. It looks very modern, based on the crazy time signatures and lack of key signatures that we see on the scores. As we're walking around, the 5:15 Evensong starts, and we are treated to the reverberations of a pipe organ and boys choir. It is a beautiful sound, and I secretly want to stay for the entire thing but know that everyone else is eager to leave. Still, we get to hear about 15 minutes and then head to Adam & Eve, Norwich's oldest standing pub. If you make your eyes go out of focus, you can almost believe that the joggers running by are horses, and it's ye olden tymes. We get some drinks and then Shoma, who is getting a Masters degree in Social Work, schools us on attachment theory.

I begin to feel the dreaded Impending Threat of Sickness. You know what I'm talking about. It's that little tickle in the back of your throat that tells you to go by the drug store on the way home that day, because tomorrow you're gonna be sick and you'll be so happy that you already have Dayquil on hand. Yikes.

Back at Shoma's, she cooks us an amazing meal of tandoori chicken and lentils and rice. We play a fun game of celebrity with her, Malcolm, and her roommates Andy and Luce. If you haven't played it, celebrity is a game where the participants write names of celebrities or characters on pieces of paper, and then teams compete to guess the most (first round: three-word clues; second round: one-word clues; third round: charades). We end up with 2 Neville Chamberlains, 2 Jane Goodalls, and 2 Olivia Newton Johns. We learn that the British do not know Strawberry Shortcake. Correspondingly, we do not know Kirsty Ailsop.

I write some postcards and fall asleep on top of the covers, still in my clothes.