Doubt and Pain

Very sore legs this morning after last night’s football but it soon wore off.

On listening back to the splices for Ian’s CD I discovered a slight glitch on one of the tracks and spent a good two hours or so trying to fix it using various different parts of different takes of the tune in question until, eventually, I could take it no further and had to say “that’ll do”.

I’m glad to say my mysterious hand injury, which appeared just before the recent Spanish trip, putting paid to my return to playing live, now seems to have healed up and so I spent two hours or so today playing through all the songs from the “Deeperdown” project with just my acoustic guitar.

Of the fourteen songs, I’ve decided I’m not 100% sure of around six of them. But we’ll see. I suppose anyone who writes songs goes through phases of not liking some of them or doubting them in some way. And with my guitar playing, I’m probably not hearing them in the best of conditions after all!!

I’ve had sore arms now for a very long time – probably more than 10 years, in fact I can’t remember when the pain started but I first became conscious of sleeping with my arms in a particular position when we were on holiday in Sicily in 1985 and I’m convinced this is the cause.

I had a long course of physiotherapy which ended around a year ago without much improvement really but I’m to blame to a certain extent in that I’m loathe to do the small exercises I ought to be doing every day to help keep my arms flexible.

I’m pretty sure that the only time in the last 10 to 15 years I can remember when I had no pain in my arms was when the physiotherapist injected courses of steroids into my shoulders and even then, the relief only lasted for half an hour or so because it was the painkilling element rather than the steroids that gave me respite.

I mention all this because at present, if I play an acoustic guitar for any length of time I get very bad pains in my left arm and this is annoying to say the least.

So, all in all a fairly uneventful, but (self-inflictedly) painful day today.