How to become a tortured musician in 10 easy steps

1) Start life in a non-musical, working class family and drop hints about how much you want to play the most expensive and biggest instrument you can think of.

2) Get access to said instrument at the age of 17 only by living as a lodger with another family and have to ask every day when it would be convenient to play.  Then learn by ear because you can't afford lessons and end up playing better than the landlady does, who is having lessons, so that she hates you all the more.

3) Leave and go to university to do subjects totally unrelated to music because you've got no formal music qualifications.

4) Pay for your own piano lessons out of your student loan while using out of tune pianos in student practice rooms whenever you can, especially the one right below the halls of residence official's flat who's such a battle-axe she immediately complains bitterly about the noise.

5) Move back to a small town to do a music course equivalent to two 'A' levels just because they've got better pianos than the same course in London.

6) Work on properly learning to play the piano at the age of 21 by working for less than the minimum wage in a local piano shop and getting a piano for trade price and then practise for four hours a day in an attempt to catch up with all those people who had piano lessons from the age of 5.

7) Compare yourself with virtuoso level pianists and try to play the stuff they play.  Relentlessly berate yourself for not being as good as them even though they started playing at the age of 2 and you only started getting lessons at the age of 19.

8) Keep focussing on your songs and piano skills and playing a real piano not a stupid little keyboard instead of trying to make contacts in the music industry because you don't much like going out to pubs and drinking beer anyway.

9) Hit the height of your skill about 5 years before social media and computers to record on come into play so that you miss out on all the opportunities to record for free and promote your work for free.  Be slow to adapt to new music industry model through lack of funds to get a computer because you spent all your money on piano lessons and moving your piano from place to place.

10) Take music and writing songs so seriously that you can't bear to do it in a half-arsed way or 'just for fun' so you always practise loads before any gig.  Which is rather tragic as each gig costs you £40 in cab fare for transporting your full length keyboard (that someone names an ironing board because of the cheap, rickety stand you've got for it because you couldn't afford a better one) and be forced to give up in the end through sheer poverty and trauma.

[Look out for the next post on 'how to recover from being a tortured musician'!  I'm nothing if not helpful, right?]

Starbucks, being a loser and a 'how to'...

I have decided on a theme for blogposts this week, in a sort of attempt at trying to spice things up a bit, as a cunning distraction from the current turmoil in my life. (More on that topic later...) 

As if to make matters worse in my desperate grief over having to leave my lovely flat, I discovered today that a Starbucks cafe has just opened up almost directly opposite Paul's bakery around the corner.  It's as though it wanted to point out to me how much this area is gentrifying and I am now too much of a loser to live here.  

I have resolved that if no new meet-ees respond to the many adverts I've put up over the last couple of months in the next week then I will have to accept that I do not have enough money to afford to move into another flat on my own and I'll have to move in with the cowboy.  Which fills me with dread because I need lots of support when I'm losing something as significant as my privacy and work and living space all at once.  I need extra support if I'm forced to move to a more suburban area too, which his flat is in, and all this means that I will have to run away for coffees rather a lot because the cowboy is not at his best when he has to be the kind, understanding, patient and supportive person in the relationship.

Enough.  I shall get to the point.  This week's blog post theme shall be...(drumroll) a series of 'how to' articles.  Starting with today's mini-'how to' with a stupidly long title:

'How to survive going to your boyfriend's friend's birthday party in a foreign country where you still don't speak the language very well and everyone is the same age as you but they act 10 years older and all have kids:'

1) Play up your posh British accent by exclaiming, "oh gosh, wow!" when tasting and almost choking on the 'vodka melon' pieces that were passed to you that you didn't really want.  This provides great amusement for everyone else, which means they won't hate you (yet)

2) Speak the foreign language in question so slowly that anyone who sits next to you and starts a conversation regrets it within minutes and uses their child as an excuse to have to abruptly get up and go somewhere else

3) Pretend you like cooking your own food while out at a party and grill some big fat sausages over a fire on a stick just to 'join in'

4) Keep your mouth shut and fake not having understood when an ill-informed guest asks your boyfriend how he met his wife (meaning you) and the thought makes you want to exclaim very loudly, "I'M NOT HIS WIFE!!"

5) Be enormously grateful when you get home that you don't have a bunch of screaming kids who'll wake you up in the morning and take advantage of this by having a 'recovery lie-in' till 10am the next day

Uh, that's it. 

Chai tea, cake and Wax

I nearly wilted in the heat walking out to the Costa coffee place at the department store on národní today but I was very grateful for the air conditioning when I got there.  I decided that, after a bad night of dreaming a dream that left me full of grief, and generally having been feeling hopeless and despondent lately that I should at least treat myself to that chai latte and chocolate muffin I'd been lusting after.  

It was as good as I had anticipated, though I found I couldn't eat the whole muffin, but I made a good stab at it by eating three quarters of it.  And I was glad of the freebie corporate/advertising newspaper in Czech that was sitting on the table as I sat down.  It made for an excellent fan when drinking a hot drink made me wish the air conditioning was stronger.

And this evening, as both the heat and the sense of grief continued, I consoled myself by watching a few old videos of Ruby Wax's interviews with people like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Joan Collins and, the genius interview with Imelda Marcos on YouTube.  God bless Ruby Wax.

Art is the only answer

"When I asked for a separate room it was late at night and we'd been driving since noon.  But if I'd known how that would sound to you, I would have stayed in your bed for the rest of my life just to prove I was right that it's harder to be friends than lovers, and you shouldn't try to mix the two. 'Cause if you do it and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you." 

                                                                                                                      Liz Phair  'Divorce Song'

There's nothing worse than realising that your own unhappiness is your fault and yours alone.  ('Cause if you get what you wanted and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is YOU.)  However, there is rather a good remedy for this: decide to be happy just for now.  Just for now, I'm living in my dream flat.  Just for now, I don't have to do any work I hate, and I only have nice meet-ees.  (That was not the case on Tuesday, but we needn't dwell on that.)  Just for now, I have all the resources I need.  Which is rather fabulous, is it not?

However, just as I think things are ok, I'm pulled out of my momentary serenity (or is it denial?) and I find myself yelling at the computer.  Yesterday it was because it wouldn't let me order printer ink from a Czech online shop and pay with my British debit card.  The other day I just snapped about something silly that the cowboy said.  He forgave me and understood right away that it wasn't much to do with what he said and far more to do with having no money and no prospect of being able to move into a flat that is so right for me as this one is.  But it was particularly unlike me to flip-out like that.  I still don't know what's going to happen.  It's possible I could make enough money to scrape by and pay the rent for this month and not dip into the funds I've been lent but that would still mean I only have enough to pay a month's rent in advance.  I don't know where I'll find enough for a deposit.

And in the meantime, a lack of money is a big problem in this kind of situation, because I think I know better than most, having moved house so many times in my life it could almost be called a hobby of mine, that when you get down to the nitty gritty of sorting through stuff and packing boxes, you need to get out every so often and get a coffee somewhere (and preferably a piece of cake too) just to escape the bedlam and calm down.  Not to mention needing to eat out because there isn't time to cook and wash up after meals.  So how will I get through this process without that spare change?  I just don't know at the moment.  (I'm lusting over the idea of a trip to my old haunt the dept. store on národní and going into the Costa coffee place there and getting a chocolate muffin and a chai tea latte...  I want that so much, I could write a love letter to it, "Dear chai latte and chocolate muffin, you have been elusive for so long but my heart cries out for you..." etc.  But it's a friend's birthday soon, not to mention the cowboy's and my parents' and I will need money I don't really have to cover getting them all something.  I need a miracle!  A chocolate-and-chai miracle!)

The other day, I was at the cowboy's place and did some vacuuming just to help out and I distinctly felt that were I to have to move in with him, we'd be at each other's throats within a week because if I were told to do the vacuuming, I would resent it.  Offering to do it is quite another thing.  If I then took up all of his spare room with boxes of my stuff, he'd be pulling his hair out at the lack of space and no dedicated guitar practice room.  It's so sweet that he keeps reiterating his offer to let me stay but the more he does so, the more I know he's got no idea of the impact it would have on his life.  There's not enough room for the two of us!  There isn't even a wardrobe.  I'd be living out of a case.

And I'd be unhappy.  Because I need space to think.  Space to do silly creative things.  Space to do ridiculous paintings, make silly cards from photos of pictures made from smarties (or 'Lentilky') as they call them here.

Space to read romantic and seemingly irredeemably stupid books.  Or space to play the keyboard and sing loudly.  And that's the thing I definitely wouldn't have space to do in his flat.

I nearly choked with fear after looking at the horrors of the flats available within my budget in a central area like the one I live in currently.  From kitchens with a curtain right next to it with a shower cubicle tucked behind it (seriously, right next to the kitchen unit!) to tiny bathrooms that have a loo that you have to walk past to get to the tiny shower or bathrooms that also have a washing machine pushed into...I just collapsed.  These are the images which may now fill my nightmares.  And they want 10,000Kč or more for this?!  It's just shocking.  While the rest of the world is in recession, the world of renting is still doing ok for itself.  Maybe rents haven't gone up as much as they might have done in the boom years, but they certainly haven't fallen.

All I can think of is that this is a time when art and being creative is the only remedy.  Not for earning money but for trying to stay sane and see a reason for continuing to live.  Making silly pictures out of smarties may well be the way forward.  If not, little sketches in my notebook, painted copies of children's book illustrations, 

scrawled poems thrown down on paper in anger and big cups of coffee

to keep me awake to do all this are the order of the day.  Art will save the world!  Hurrah!  What a manifesto, eh?

(Failing that, wearing ridiculously glam shoes indoors works almost as well.)

Road trip part 4: Ogallala - last stop before Colorado and where everything starts to get interesting....

After making it across Iowa and most of Nebraska without much to report, we were getting kind of desperate for entertainment.  And then along came a little place called Ogallala, on the edge of Nebraska before you get to Colorado.  The name itself entertained us for hours, as we childishly sang, "Ogallala" to the tune of 'Oklahoma' and then proceeded to see if we could play around with this strange word and make some other meaning out of it.  We tried seeing if the name could be used as an equivalent of the French, 'Oh la, la!' or as an expression of disgust, changing the stress in the word to see if that would fit.  Or, in traditional English humour (which I hate by the way) we turned it into a sort of innuendo word, and put the stress and rising intonation on the final 'la' of Ogallala' and much fun was had by all.

In the place itself, we stopped overnight at a Best Western motel and were greeted by the kind of salt-of-the-earth type staff who all spoke with a distinctly 'kind granny' type of American accent, all soft and soothing.  Our room was decorated with old country style wallpaper and dried flowers accordingly.  Totally not our style at all, but it was sweet nonetheless.  Like staying with a kindly relative whose life consists of writing cards and letters and meeting the deadline for post box collections and maybe making tea and coffee for the church coffee morning but not much else.

The cowboy nearly ruined this nice atmosphere by 'stealing' a couple of hard boiled eggs at breakfast and sneaking them out as we headed back to our room.  But the nice lady taking care of the breakfast area didn't notice and instead said, "You folks have a nice day!  Drive safe!".  It's such a Czech thing to try to get the most out of a 'free' breakfast though, so I had to just hope she wouldn't hold it against us if she noticed.  You can take the boy out of the communist country but you can't take the communist country out of the boy....

More free things awaited us just around the corner, and this time it was my kind of freebie - free coffee.  

We were headed for Denver that day but we stopped at the first rest stop across the border with Colorado and found there was a visitor's centre with free maps and leaflets and pensioners volunteering as visitor guides.  

Ah, little Julesburg visitor's centre, what a haven you were!  We also crossed the timeline and were now an hour behind Chicago, which meant we gained a bit of extra time that day to enjoy Denver more.  But before we set off, we got a fantastic bit of background info, a map and a 3D drawing of Colorado from the lovely people at the visitor's centre who outlined for us what the deal is with Colorado, i.e. that it's the same as Nebraska until you get to Boulder.  Then that's where the mountains begin and it's a whole different world after that.  

We wanted to get to Denver however, so we took all the maps and leaflets and finished our cups of coffee and headed off into the windy day to see how long it would take us to get down along the I-76 and into the centre of town.  It was most fortunate that we gained that hour because it meant that when we did reach Denver, we had time to go straight to the Zoo!  My favourite thing to do...

Denver Zoo was lovely and full of really amusing animal enclosures and fun information boards.  We had to see the hippos of course, but we also saw some cute meerkats, a few monkeys and lemurs,

a wild chipmonk running along the path at random, some penguins 

and sealions and some weird-looking fish.  

There were big statues of hippos too, and a conservation section with letters from school children about saving the environment (some of which were written in Spanish, which was cool!) 

And the giftshop had some gorgeous things, which I could have bought more of but couldn't afford...alas.  

At the end of our day, we found another Best Western motel and got the best room of the whole trip.  It was divided into sections, one bit with the bed and a desk and TV and the other bit through a door separating the two, a mini-lounge with another TV and a sofa and even another desk with a wheelie-chair!  Oh, and a free newspaper.  A writer's idea of heaven.  I could have stayed there all week...

Letting go

As I was picking up the inner bits of my cafetière from where they were drying on the washing up draining thing this morning, a glass that one bit had been drying on got stuck and then rapidly unstuck again and broke.  This was one of my favourite glasses originally bought as a pair from a second hand bric-a-brac shop on Pembridge Road in Notting Hill.  I remember buying them and washing them because they were in a bargain bin left on the street outside and they were only a pound or 50p or something like that, but I knew they'd be gorgeous after being washed up.

The loss of this glass today was like an omen.  I'm probably going to have to let go of a lot of things that hold precious stories from my past and discard them to help with moving out.  I still don't know where I'm going to go, but if the worst comes to the worst and I end up having to move in with the cowboy, I know it will mean discarding even more than I otherwise would, which for me is like letting go of my identity.  Books and diaries, scrapbooks and magazines all form a kind of 'family-and-friends' community for me in the absence of geographically close ones of the human kind.  

How I will live with the idea of throwing books into the recycling bin is quite another story.  I used to give them to charity shops in the UK of course, but there aren't any second hand book shops here, except antique ones and those would be books in Czech, of which I have a more limited supply than English ones.

That glass was also a symbol of reward.  A nice little glass of wine in it was like a little acknowledgement that I had worked hard and survived and deserved a soldier's recognition for fighting through the loss and hardship.  Now both that glass, the champagne glass pictured in my profile pic and all the other nice glasses and mugs and things I had to leave behind in London are gone.  Along with my piano, several beautiful photography books and more.  Will I have to get rid of all my diaries and letters from ex-partner and photos from my life too?  Where will I draw the line?  How will I draw the line?

Someone (probably some great leader or guru or someone that I should really know) once said that all pain comes from attachment.  Maybe I have to learn that getting so attached to things is silly.  Or that cherishing things is the root of all evil.  Or something.  I always thought that being attached to things, especially things no-one else would like to steal, but that mean a lot to me, was a better strategy for life than attachment to people.  Because people can up and leave of their own free will and 'there ain't nothin' you can do about it'.  Maybe I got it all wrong.

That glass breaking was like the very beginning of my heart breaking.  It symbolised all that I've lost over the last few years and all that I have yet to be forced to relinquish.  So I burst into tears.  (I hadn't yet had my coffee of course, so that's my excuse.)  Because I'm not entirely sure that this is 'no more than you can handle' as people say about life when it gets tough.  You're not supposed to be sent 'more than you can handle' but I think I'm going to need a helluva lot of help to get through this because the last time I moved I had lots of help.  And then some.  And I bloody well needed it because I had to give up my piano, my country, my relationship and my work all at once.  Not to mention a good few friends too.

This time it feels like giving up the last thing I had going for me: my privacy.  My space in which to do all the things I need to do to keep me going: aerobics, writing without distractions, listening to music, peace and quiet when I need it, being able to sleep in my own bed, having a bath with a chair piled with books and magazines next to me, doing singing practice and even recording.  These are my strategies for survival when there's no money or when there's no-one out there who gives a damn or when hope seems to be beyond the reaches of the planet's atmosphere.  Are there any flats available on a planet in Andromeda by any chance?  I mean, San Francisco would be wonderful, but beggars can't be choosers...

Klatovy and calamities

There's a word in Czech to describe a type of person, and it's probably more precise a description than we have in English: ,,cholerik".  It means short-tempered.  Someone who gets angry or wound-up about things at the drop of a hat.  The cowboy knows that he's this kind of person.  But I can usually find a way to get him to see things more accurately and therefore not get so irritated.  But getting paint or varnish for the cupboard doors his brother recently made for him has proved a little harder than I'd thought.

We had to drive to Klatovy [It's referred to as 'Klatov' on the town info map, but all the road signs have it in plural as, 'Klatovy' and I STILL don't know which is correct or why there is this confusion...] to get to a big 'Obi' store, which is basically your Czech equivalent of 'Homebase'.  I don't know why he always wants my opinion about what to buy.  It's so funny.  I would know exactly what I wanted to get already and I'd be straight into thinking of what kind of varnish I wanted, not whether I wanted varnish or paint.  As it happens, I wouldn't have bothered getting doors for the cupboards/shelves in the kitchen part of the flat in Sumava anyway because it's so small, that it's better just to have immediate access to the shelves.  But, given no choice on having doors, I definitely wouldn't want to paint the wood.  I'd maybe varnish it, just to protect the wood somehow, but that's all.

And so it was that we drove to Klatovy and then wandered around the square first because the cowboy wanted to make the most of being out for the day.  And there was some kind of town festival going on anyhow.  

Except he remarked that they were playing typical 'old-people-communist-songs' that used to be on TV on Sunday evenings, right before he'd have to go back to school so he always associated it with that pre-Monday morning dread.  Poor boy.

So we went up a tower instead.  It's the Czech thing to do.  And thankfully, as towers and lookouts go, this was one of the more interesting ones.  There was a big bell, a clock mechanism 

and some entertaining graffiti on the wood inside as well as the nice view at the top.  We even added to a bit of the graffiti.  (Well, I didn't, but the cowboy did.)  And we walked around the surroundings, a tiny park and some of the original boundary wall.  

It reminded me a bit of Canterbury in places. Just without the actual bustle and commerce of a proper city, as opposed to a tiny little town.

And then we finally braved 'Obi', got some paint and came home.  And then spent ages deciding if it was right or not.  And in the end, the cowboy hastily tried to 'improve' the colour by mixing it with a bit of leftover paint from IKEA but he recklessly mixed it into the same pot. So there was no going back.  Except for us.  We went back to Klatovy the next day to get more of the original coloured paint.  Only to decide that evening that it wasn't a good match for the rest of the flat anyway.  Back to square one.

In the meantime, the extractor fan for the bathroom has broken, I made a disappointing attempt at a cooked breakfast this morning because I'm just not used to electric cookers (and I don't like them) and I left the lounger mat out on the balcony yesterday and it poured with rain and still hasn't dried.  Oops.  Still, I'm not complaining.  I had a very nice blueberry and nut ice cream [pictured as already half-eaten because it was so hot that it was melting instantly.  Honest.]  in Klatov on the first day 

and I had time to do a bit of reading yesterday while the cowboy did some guitar practice.  So I'm doing ok.  The cowboy is too, but he's too wound-up to know it.

Homeless...

I have finally attended the most Czech of events, namely the village rock concert/beer festival and now that I feel like a Czech, I find I might have to leave.  The sweet irony.  The weekend before last I was in Slany, watching 'Support Lesbiens' do their thing at an outdoor concert and I sang the Czech words to a song they decided to sing the English version of under my breath while holding (and occasionally sipping) a beer.  How more Czech could I have been?  They were entertaining enough, though the fireworks afterwards nearly perforated my eardrums, which is saying something after an hour of watching a rock band. Nonetheless, somehow I didn't really fit in.

Apart from the fact that I don't like beer, I am not keen on being out at a festival kind of deal anyway.  I'm always too concerned about where the nearest toilets are.  Mind you, I did survive, and having period pain got me off the hook of having to sit on someone's shoulders just to do as the Czechs do to all short-arsed people like me.  (Usually known as kids.)

But this weekend, by contrast, I have been informed that my landlady wants me to vacate the property and leave in two months' time.  Which is a crushing blow because a) I love this flat and think it's the best thing about living in Prague and b) I have absolutely no money at the moment.  And a whole flat full of stuff I cherish and will be forced to throw the majority of away.

Having had such terrible luck since getting back from the US trip and earning so little I am very inclined to give up and just leave this country altogether.  If I had a viable alternative that is.  I want to move to California.  Preferably southern California. There I said it.  That is what I want.  It is 'out there'.  But that is my dream.  The reality is, I don't have enough money to pack up my things and ship them off to London, nor buy the overpriced flights for this time of year in order to be able to leave.  And why the hell would I want to go back to London weather anyway?  Can you think of a place with a more depressing climate?  No, me neither.

So I'm sweltering in the heat here, unable to sleep and feeling utterly distraught.  The option of moving in with the cowboy has been discussed but this is a lousy reason to move in with someone and I don't have any other reason to than that because I really do thrive by living on my own and I think two weeks of living together with my stuff and the things I like to do would be enough to kill us both.  But that's where we stand right now.  Up sh*t creek without a paddle.