Tuesday 12 April 2016

The State Bar house band in full flow….

I MANAGE to get a few things off the to-do list before a courier drops off a garden seat/swing thing that Margaret ordered from Amazon the other day at a bargain price.

She’s always wanted an American-style porch swing, but our house doesn’t have a porch or any reasonable way of adding one, so this is the closest we’ll get for the time being.

We open the massive box and find – as usual when something is a ‘bargain’ – there’s a million ‘bits’. Anything that could be separate is…millions of different sized screws, nuts, blots, spring washers, normal washers…and as many bits of metal and material. This is gonna take a while to build.

The rain comes on and postpones our swing-building until, probably, tomorrow.

Meantime, we get some more work done. I’ve got a bunch of posters and flyers to be packaged up and sent to various venues/promoters then we drive down to the village, drop the poster packs at the post office, leave the car and jump on the bus into Glasgow. It’s the State Bar’s 20th anniversary blues jam tonight.

We drop into Nanakusa for a quick dinner then into the State Bar where Martyn and Louise have commandeered a table. It’s gonna be a busy night, so good to get a seat!

Although we’ve been to a few things in the downstairs room over the last few years, this is the first time we’ve been to the Tuesday night blues jam since we moved out of Glasgow nearly seven years ago. We used to live at Charing Cross just a few blocks away and it was regular mid-week haunt for us.

It’s nice to see State Bar main man Jason and catch up with house band members Al Fleming, Sandy Smart and Tim Clark as well as regulars John Beattie, Callum Ingram and loads more fellow musicians and pals amongst the packed house. There’s lots of other folks it’d have been lovely to chat with too, but the place was so busy it wasn’t gonna happen.

Kenny and Lottie join Martyn and Louise and I at our table and we have a grand night of music, beer, whisky and chat.

Louise has an early-ish start in the morning and has opted to drive so we pile into Martyn’s van for a ride home. A grand night out.

Great company and chat with our pals Kenny, Al, Lottie, Martyn, Louise and Margaret