Alice Cooper – Billion Dollar Babies
Emerson Lake & Palmer – Brain Salad Surgery
Roxy Music – Country Life
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
David Bowie – Diamond Dogs
Electric Light Orchestra – Eldorado
Electric Light Orchestra – ELO 1
Electric Light Orchestra – ELO 2
Emerson Lake & Palmer – Emerson Lake & Palmer
Hawkwind – Epoch-Eclipse
Fripp & Eno – Evening Star
Soft Machine - Fourth
Chopin - Nocturnes
Various Composers – The World of Your 100 Best Tunes: Top 20
Tina Brooks – True Blue
A day of two halves today...
The morning was spent moving CDs and other belongings out of the back room and finding other places around the house for them to be stored until the “makeover” of the room is complete in a couple of weeks...
We also tidied out the garage and installed one of the sets of shelves from the back room there to hold Anne’s “gardening stuff”...
At 1pm my mum arrived. I was taking her to East Kilbride for the 80th Birthday party of her cousin Marion...
It’s not her real cousin though. My mum’s mum died when my mum was about eight or nine and her dad remarried (her dad died when she was about fifteen and her step mother then remarried leaving her with two parents, neither of which were her “real” parents..)
I have no aunts, uncles or cousins of my own as neither my mum nor my dad had any siblings...
Birthday Marion is the niece of my mum’s step-mother (also called Marion) and there’s another Marion ("Wee" Marion) at the party who’s birthday Marion’s cousin and also my mum’s step cousin....
Here's my mum with "Wee" Marion...
So these two Marions are my first step cousins once removed. I am in a house full of people who are my long lost relations but who aren’t really related to me...
I have an unexpectedly great time though, chatting to my second cousin once removed, John and his girlfriend, Fiona....
Both are seventeen year old musicians – John plays jazz on a bewildering array of saxophones while Fiona is a classical clarinetist about to start at the RSAMD in Glasgow...
John’s older brother, Billy, plays jazz piano (and occasionally toots a sax for fun)...
They entertained a few of the guests in their purpose built music room by playing a few John Coltrane and Charlie Parker numbers...
It turns out John knows the young Sax player Anne and I saw a couple of weeks back at The Jazz Bar and, in fact John’s coming to Edinburgh towards the end of this month to play The Lot with Tommy Smith. He even knows Roger Spence of Jazz Promotions Company, Assembly Direct. I played five a side football with Roger for nearly 15 years before we both retired from the game (so to speak)...
Small world etc...
Birthday Marion is a real character and she’s up dancing and singing at four in the afternoon, wearing the feather boa and ostentatious jewellery, including a tiara, which her friends have bought her...
What an enjoyable day. I even ended up playing drums in a jazz trio with John and Billy (they were really good, while I really only played the Hi-Hat and the ride cymbal)...
You can just see the kit in the corner...
We got back to Crispycat Towers around eight and I printed off some photos of the day for my mum before she made her way home to Loanhead...
Anne had been working like a Trojan on the back room and every scrap of wall paper was now removed and all holes in the wall filled in..
We relaxed for the rest of the night watching footie and the programme about Italy presented by a Venetian Count – made us think about visiting that country again soon...
Highlight of the Day : Being the weak link in a jazz trio...
1 comment:
In fact my mum was 25 when her dad died. Thanks to sister Pam for rectifying this point. I often get things like this wrong. I once let it be known in the pages of the Scotsman that I was born in a particular hospital in Glasgow. They printed it. The hospital does not exist.
Oops...
Post a Comment