I am at an industry-fest and there is a lot to be gained from these things, but sometimes the avalanche of new people to interact with kinda gets me down.  When I started writing this blog absolutely not one single fucker ever read the thing.  In fact, I wrote about music for about two and a half years on my own website which had precisely no readers at all, because I can lay a website out adequately, but search engine optimisation eludes me completely.

I started writing on the pretense that my little brother, who lives in Boston, could now read about the music I was listening to without waiting for me to send him a little packet of compilation CDs twice a year.  This was something of a fig leaf, however, and one which I did at least acknowledge to myself deep down, ineffectively trying to protect my modesty from the rather geekier truth.

I wrote album reviews on my old website for over two years with not one single reader.  Looking at how things are now, where an album review going uncommented for a few hours makes me just a little jumpy, I find that kind of amazing.  No comments (I didn’t know how to do that), no readers, no actual reward of any sort beyond clattering out reviews of albums no longer than about ten sentences long for no other reason than that I enjoyed writing.  I still enjoy writing.  This blog is a tad focussed at the moment, but I promise you I could witter on for hours about more or less any subject you could mention and just enjoy the process of turning buzzing thoughts into paragraphs.

Musicians get this too – so much work that they have to remind themselves what the fuck they’re doing this for.  For me this moment is right about now.  Schmooze, schmooze, schmooze… ack, fuck off somewhere quiet and sit down and have a pint and wash the constant fucking name-dropping one-upmanship out of your fucking hair with a few dozen gins.

The first time anyone started reading Song, by Toad was a while after I moved over to a Blogspot account, which was some time in 2006, and was when one or two of my favourite bloggers started talking about the site and telling their readers that they should pop over and have a read.  That was a weird thrill – that first incoming link.  I’m not even sure who it was from, but first real comment, first proper link, you remember these things.

1. What do you grit your teeth and get through during your working day?
2. And how do you wind down from it?
3. When did someone last acknowledge something you were doing out of the blue and make you happy.
4. Who is the recipient of your most often suppressed “FUCK OFF!”
5. What do you do for the sheer pointless satisfaction of it?

Peter Gabriel – Biko (12″ Version) From Jim at the Vinyl Villain.

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Thomas Mapfumo – Mwoyo Wangu From Davy at the Ghost of Electricity.

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Beulah – Emma Blowgun’s Last Stand From Marcy at Lost in Your Inbox.

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Pavement – Frontwards (Live) From Tim at The Daily Growl.

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Richard Thompson – 1952 Vincent Black Lightning From Ed at 17 Seconds.

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I got an email today from Cogstar, one of our readers. He didn’t want anything really, just to congratulate the Meursault lads on getting that slot at Glastonbury, and to ask if I’d be there so we could have a pint. And fuck me I was relieved to be talking to an actual real person instead of a music industry fucking contact for a fucking change.

I miss Mrs. Toad.  Can you tell?

I was reading Marcy’s excellent Lost in Your Inbox today and happened across a post of hers that gave me pause for thought, and just a little wistful remembering.

The last few years of my life have been relatively stable. I have been in Edinburgh for about three years, and was in London for three and a half before that, but I haven’t always been so sedentary. In the years preceding London, in reverse order, I managed the following: Cambridge – 18 months, Manchester – 6 months, Montreal – three months, Cape Cod – a year, Glasgow – ten months, Cape Cod – four months, Grongingen – ten months, Glasgow – three years, Manchester – one year, Vienna – three years, Singapore – three years. In other words, over the course of about fifteen years I upped sticks and vanished about fifteen times.

It wasn’t quite as crazy as that, but it was quite hectic, and most of the time it involved abandoning pretty much my entire life and all my friends and disappearing off with no more than a couple of suitcases to my name. Because of growing up in international schools where people changed countries, and hence schools, on a regular basis, I have seen so many disrupted friendships dwindle as well-intentioned letter-writing slowly tailed off. Consequently since high school, whenever I move country I tend to just cut the cord and go.

It’s very, very rare that I stay in touch with anyone from my past actually. Once gone, I tend to just look forward and try and make a life wherever it is that I have ended up and reading Marcy’s words I was reminded of just how many people I have ended up just abandoning to the swirling mists of my past – how many good friendships have been aborted, how many shared things have been forgotten, how much human kindness has gone unremembered.

It’s sad, I suppose, but it’s not a bad thing, I don’t think. There’s little point in stringing these things out beyond their natural lifespan. Most friendships are surprisingly context-dependent and there have been quite a few times when I have known them to have an uneccessary cloud cast over them by ill-advised and utlimately fruitless attempts to keep them going once the environment in which they first grew has ceased to exist. Nowadays I tend to just wrap them up in my history as good, complete entities and let them rest there. Some day a song or a coincidence or a conversation will remind me of them and there will be one of those warm, nostalgic moments where you relive that time for a little while, before setting it carefully back in place and returning to the present.

So it is sad I suppose. Or melancholy. But there’s a warm, happy core to the sadness too, so I still think it’s a good thing in most ways. Ironic, too, that I ended up marrying a girl I knew from high school and hadn’t seen for the best part of ten years by the time we met up again.

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head
Michelle Shocked – Anchorage
Gene – I Can’t Decide If She Really Loves Me
Supergrass – Moving
Tom Waits – Shiver Me Timbers