Day 121
Monday July 13
With the session with Alex on Wednesday, I pull the track out and have a go to see where I am with it. I play it through once. By the time I finish my left shoulder and left hand are both burning. Two hours later and my left shoulder feels like someone punched it. The track is six and a half minutes long, which means that’s the entire time of practice it took to produce those results. There’s nothing for it. For the first time in my bass playing life I’m going to have to call a sickie. Alex understands, tells me to take my time and we’ll pick up when I’m ready. Cool. Well, not cool. Very not cool, but you know what I mean.
After a full four months, which will become the iconic four months, as that’s the period a huge number of people in the UK have had their lives on full pause, I’m back in the bar next Monday. Well, this Thursday and Friday actually, along with the planned team meeting on Sunday, but I know the first two days will be putting the place back together. Monday is when it all starts for real again as it’s back to whole days and evenings of on your feet and walking. I need to make sure I can still do that. So as a test, I decide it’s time to go for a real long walk. Nothing fast, just long, and this sees me hit the streets for five hours. The longest I’ve been out in what feels like a long long time. And I do it pretty well, having earmarked Little Venice for the outing, which gives me a great walk through Regents Park then along the beautiful canals of Little Venice before heading back along the canal that borders Regents Park. All with a little backpack, which isn’t the best preparation for the physio appointment I have later on; as soon as I get there he checks my neck and shoulders and finds tension and I have to tell him that that’s probably because I’ve just been wearing a backpack for the past five hours. But we carry on and he checks a load of things out and asks about my general approach to things. Among this, what comes out is the recent time it took me six hours of warm up during I was able to squeeze out a single hour of bass playing. And also the time around the same time that I spent a straight five hours doing yoga and stretching. He’s a physio, so a professional look after the body type person, but even he finds this a bit on the extreme side. Well, that’s where I’ve felt I’ve had to take myself and still, nothing. This thing just won’t shift. We go through all the motions and not only can he find nothing wrong with me, but he’s very impressed with some of the hand and arm extensions I’m able to do. So not just, ‘everything’s good,’ but, ‘A bunch of stuff there is better than what most people have.’ In the end, he starts offering me a 20 per cent discount on the appointment because he can do nothing for me. I refuse that so he offers a free follow up appointment at some time. OK. I can do that. But really, apart from anything else, I think he’s just curious now. We conclude that I should possibly see a doctor, but before that I should get a Covid antibody test. The kicker here is that the absence of antibodies won’t prove you haven’t had it. Maybe you had them and now you don’t. But if I do have them, then it will nail on the fact that I’ve had it and maybe we can go on from there. Fine. So I’ve spent the money on this appointment and now I’ve got to go and pay for the antibody test. Between the two of them, the total bill will come to £125.
Day 123
Wednesday July 15
This hand and arm pain, for whatever it is, seems to have somewhat crystallised, or at least I think I’ve localised something. Pain in the elbows. Right at the very corner of the joint. You know that elbow bump that’s kind of usurped the handshake? Well that actually hurts. When you’re playing bass, both arms are of course bent, and so the discomfort starts in the elbows and then makes its way round everywhere else. I could try and play through it but everyone knows you don’t practice through pain. But apart from that, the pain, or discomfort, just makes it really hard to concentrate. And on top of that, it just stops playing bass being any kind of fun at all. And of course, out of hesitation or anticipation of pain flashes or anything increasing, I don’t go for stuff like I usually would. All in all a hugely frustrating experience, so I’m just not doing it anymore. For now. I think the hope is that it will somehow just eventually go away on its own.
Tomorrow, as we saw earlier on, I start back in the bar again. I’m thinking that right now, I’m grateful I still even have a job to go to. Forget dreams. So many people have been plunged into nightmares through this, personally and professionally. So I’ll be happy with this reality.
Early on, I mentioned that myself and our housemate considered ourselves really lucky to have this music thing to fall into as everything stopped, and we said we really felt for people who didn’t have something they felt so seriously about to do. Well, when I stopped playing, and by muscle extension (and simply because not much was going on) writing, I became one of those people. And yeah, I have to say, I got pretty fed up. I never hit depression in any of that time. Just really, really fed up. I also started seeing this a huge missed opportunity. The luxury of all that time, no money worries and no pressure to have to do anything to change the situation. In other words, it’s not like I was unemployed and had to go out and do something about that. So really, a Utopian existence. Except, in that Utopian existence, if you have something, you’d be like, ‘I’d do that.’ Well, that the that that I had, I couldn’t do. Fed up is the right word. Fed up and frustrated and that very true feeling of a once in a lifetime opportunity, that I was so excited about, lost.
Day 124
Thursday July 16
This is it. After four months. I’ve not been sure what to think about going back. I know I’ve not been too bothered about it, although I’ve experienced some quite high anxiety about how it’s actually going to be with all the social distancing and the new normal and all that. I’m very surprised when I’m wide awake well before 7am and ready to get up and go. Which I do. And here I am writing by 7am on Thursday July 16. I think this is the earliest I’ve been up since everything shut down. As for going into the bar today, I even feel a mild buzz of excitement. Hey, we’ll take it where we can get it. At the very least, that shows that I’m happy to be going in rather than having that first day back at school feeling that I’ve been hearing some people have been feeling. And I never thought I’d be equating a bar job to something like this, but I’ve been comparing it to the days before my first ever major movie extra job which was on the Star Wars movie Solo. A curiosity which was so intense it was painful. This is going to be two days in a bar like I’ve never seen before. No customers for a start. Just putting things together, whatever that will mean. And learning about how things will be in this next bit, whatever that will be. So, two full days in there setting things up, then Saturday off, then just two or three hours Sunday afternoon which is a team meeting to prep everyone for coming back. In which I’ll have an advantage, having done the two days’ advance. Then the next day, we open. I won’t be there for the first hours of that as I’m scheduled to be in a 5pm. So I get the first evening.
Bum. Got to stop writing now. – I wrote this bit on July 16. All that stuff above, I did today (August 5) – Left bicep is starting to burn a little. See what I mean? Just when I felt I was getting on a little roll. Bum. I managed less than 600 words before that started kicking in. For perspective, if I’m on form, I’ll casually smash out a thousand words in half an hour, and carry on effortlessly after that, sometimes for an hour or two. Times have changed.
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