Another solo show this
afternoon but thankfully with a live music guest, Patrick Plunkett was one of
my first guests when The Sunday Alternative
first started so it was nice to see him again. Having never gigged in
Nottingham before, by wonderful coincidence he is playing at the Jam Café on
Thursday. That’s not even why he was playing on the show as I only found this
out yesterday. I panicked a little when both he and my sound engineer hadn’t
arrived by the start of the show but it all worked out well in the end.
When I was a child, my family
moved around quite a bit to various places around the country. One thing that
sticks out in my mind is the wooden tea-chest, something that you just don’t
see anymore and nobody seems to know where they went. Perhaps they were used to
collect up all the white dog shit? That would explain their disappearance
McIntyre/Kay style, it’s not a funny observation but the Rule of Kay dictates
that you can’t make a funny observation after the year 2005. Anyway, tea-chests
(originally used, would you believe, to export tea) were routinely provided by
removal firms and (in theory – we always had them in the house, or that might
just be my memory) returned when you had unpacked. Nowadays it’s all cardboard
boxes, and you can’t make a tea-chest bass for a skiffle band with one of
those.
That is exactly what went
through my mind when I saw two old-school wooden tea-chests on the ground
outside Trent Towers (not an actual tower) this afternoon. They had labels
pasted to them regarding fireworks so I assumed they had been dumped by the
fireworks shop next to the studio (I should have been a private detective). I
knocked on the door but there was no sign of life, so I went round to the
computer shop to ask advice and the advice was to just take them if I wanted
them. That is exactly what I did, and now they are in my cellar.
I don’t want to form a skiffle
band really, but it would be cool to have a go at making a pair of skiffle
basses. Maybe I could sell them on and have it as a side business whenever I
come across tea-chests, or start a lucrative skiffle bass rental service for
musicians!
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