As luck would have it . . .

Given that this blog had its origins in a diary I kept for many years in the pre-digital days when the world was still in B&W, it would be odd if I didn’t mention something which doesn’t occur to everyone, but which recently happened to me: emergency eye surgery

It wasn’t, thank goodness, the result of an accident. I had a routine eye test last Friday morning - six days ago - in which the opthalmologist spotted a small tear in my retina. Can’t have he told himself, probably in Ukrainian as he was Ukrainian, and immediately got on the phone to our local major hospital, The Royal Cornwall, Treliske, in Truro, for an examination at its eye clinic that afternoon

It turned out that there were five small tears in the retina, not just one, and that the retina had already began to detach itself from the back of the eye. It was explained to me why tears can appear in the retina - inevitably, it has to do with ageing - and how these tears can lead to the retina becoming detached, but I shan’t attempt to pass it on because I’m sure to get it wrong. Oh, and once the retina gets fully detached, you go blind in that eye

I was asked to pitch up at Truro the following morning at 1o for the op. What with one thing and another - I this was an emergency eye clinic, and I should imagine there were greater emergencies to be dealt with than mine - my operation wasn’t until just before five

I had both laser treatment and some other treatment which I was told involved removing some of the fluid in the eye, then injecting a gas bubble to force the retina back against the eye (and I shan’t use any technical terms as I’ve noticed some folk who have undergone surgery are apt to do, as I’ll more than likely get them wrong). It was all done under local anaesthetic and apart from one tiny little prick I didn’t feel a thing

I returned home by train wearing an big, white bandage over my eye, and returned the following morning for a post-op check-up. That went well, and the bandage came off. Since then I have had a black bubble floating around at the bottom of my eye, getting smaller by the day, which, I’m told, is the gas that was injected. Because you are not allowed to fly with such a bubble in your eye, I had to cancel my annual trip to the music festivals of Bordeaux which would have taken place this week

I had another check-up yesterday morning and it seems everything is going well. Every time the consultant takes a look at your eye, both get drops of some kind to make the iris huge so he can have more room to look through, giving the patient the appearance of some kind of junkie on downers, and everything is very bright indeed

That’s it really. Another check-up with the senior consultant next Wednesday, and the eye should settle down within four weeks. My brother-in-law suffered a rather worse example of a detaching retina a few years ago, and he is now as right as rain, so . .

I’m sure there is some possible silly joke about eyes and noses, and that when it comes to which organ has the greater capacity for afflictions needing sensitive surgery, they eyes have it, but as I can’t think of it off-hand, I shall leave it there

. . .

Incidentally, given the ongoing debate about underfunding of the UK’s National Health Service, I would like to remind those in Britain reading this that all treatment is completely free. Out of interest, I looked up the cost of the treatment I had for someone who did not have health insurance in the US. It ranged from between $4,700 to $10,000.

Bear in mind that there will be a reason why someone doesn’t have health insurance and that will usually be because they are unemployed and/or to poor to afford it. I know some US states have welfare schemes, but many don’t. And even if you have health insurance, perhaps paid for by your employer, you would still have to cough up around $200 for this, that and t’other

. . .

I like to find illustrations for my blog entries so here is one of an eye, chosen at random from the web when I googled images for ‘vitrectomy’. The great thing is that if I told you it was a close up of Mars, you would be none the wiser. In fact, for the sake of comparison (and because I an impeccably liberal heart beats in my breast which insists on fairness all round, here is also a picture of Mars. I leave it to you to decide which is which.

Bit by bit by bloody small bit this hopeless guitar player is becoming just a little less hopeless. Onwards and upwards (or whatever cliche you prefer, you know what I mean. Never stop trying, something it has taken me a little longer to learn than others)

NB Included in this post are some tunes which your browser should be able to play, though sometimes certain browser/OS combinations cannot. If you want to hear them but your browser is refusing to cooperate, try a different browser.

One thing I had long planned to do when I retired was to take piano lessons. But I haven’t. Instead I am taking guitar lessons. I would still like to be able to learn to read music and play the piano, but the fact is that if you spread yourself too thinly, you end up doing and achieving very little, and I had already long been playing guitar. Then there was the fact that a reasonably sized keyboard, let alone a full-sized upright piano would be hard to fit into anywhere in the cottaged down here on the edge of Bodmin Moor.

As it is my wife, a farmer’s daughter, hoards pretty much everything and is loth to get rid of anything, so space is at a premium. Then there is all the baby crap my daughter has introduced into the house - she splits her time between her and my grandchild living here, usually during the week, and at her boyfriend’s house 17 miles away at the weekends, mainly because he and his parents all work and the house would be empty during the day. (Incidentally, my heart really goes out to new mums with a young baby stuck several stories up in a high-rise tower block of flats, seeing and chatting to hardly anyone and locked into a routine of feeding and sleeping.)

If and when, of course, there would still always be time to try to get to grips with the piano, but I decided to learn to play the guitar properly. It’s not that I can’t play guitar - I can and I have been able to play for many years - it’s just that like so many other players, I got stuck in my groove, simply playing what I could play and not in the slightest bit pushing myself. So, of course, like everyone else stuck in a similar groove, you don’t really improve at all. Anyone reading this will who plays guitar will know what I mean: you do a bit of this for 20 or 30 seconds, then a bit of that, then a bit of t’other, then back to the first bit, and convince yourself you are playing guitar. Well, strictly, you are. But you’re not getting anywhere, and won’t ever.

I have been ‘playing’ pretty much since I was 14 and at boarding school. There was always a few guitars lying around to be picked up and strummed and it is as easy as pie to learn the two chords everyone learns first of all, because they are the same shape: E major and A minor. Then it is on to D major and D minor and - whizzo - before you know it you are playing a G major and then C major. The E, A and D are enough for you to bang out a passable blues, and the G, C and D will take you passably into folk and country music territory. And, of course, using just those simple chords, depending upon how much you practice, you could easily sound - and be competent.

The next step involved looking up the chords to various songs you wanted to play - in my case (52 years ago, remember) it was songs by The Beatles - and by and by discovering ‘bar’ (or ‘barre’) chords and the several variations which make music more interesting but which initially are not quite as easy to master as the simply major and minor chords - the major 7th being one of the most prominent.

Yet even religiously learning the chords to a song was hardly ever satisfying, particularly as I had an older brother around who was gifted in ways I could only dream of. When he played guitar, he sounded like someone playing guitar. When I did, I didn’t. (My brother also had a natural gift for drawing and a very good brain, so good that he could excel at whatever he turned his mind to. Sadly, all too often he couldn’t be bothered putting in the effort and also sadly he had some flaw in him which meant that - as I now know, but didn’t then - he was already demonstrating obsessive behaviour from an early age, and by the time he was 12 when we were living in Berlin, my parents took him to a child psychologist.

Over time, it simply got worse and worse and worse, so that from his early twenties on and until he died a few years ago at that age of 67, he was in and out of mental care, lived in doss houses and generally didn’t have a very happy life. The medication he had been taking for many years eventually brought on dyskinesia, which distressed him even more. RIP Ian.)

So there it was: I was ‘playing’ guitar after a fashion whenever I found one knocking around - there was a battered old acoustic in the flat I shared in 23, Castle St, Dundee, with Eric Clyne, Dave Pilkington and Nigel Selwyn which could never be properly tuned and which was so cheap and cheerful it was murder to play. But I never had a guitar of my own until I was living in Milan in 1973.

I can’t think why I finally decided to buy one, but get one I did (at a guitar shop near Milan’s central station if I remember), a bright orange ‘Spanish guitar’ style item which sounded awful but was within my modest price

range. The first thing I did was to remove the nylon strings and instal metal strings, which everyone who knows about guitars and his dog will tell you is a complete no-no: the guitar’s neck is simply not strong enough over time to survive the tension of metal as opposed to nylon strings and will warp. Well, mine didn’t.

Possibly the neck did warp, but I didn’t notice, and my playing still being of a rudimentary standard it’s a moot point whether I would even have noticed. Eventually, while living in Birmingham in the mid-1980s I also bought an electric guitar, a Les Paul-style shape, and a small amp. My playing, though, didn’t improve because I was still in the groove of playing this, that and t’other for 30 seconds or so and not pushing myself.

I moved to Cardiff in 1986, into a ground-floor flat in Richards Terrace off the Newport Road, and while I was in Germany visiting my sister (and not having checked before leaving whether or not the back door was locked), I was burgled and both guitars were stolen. I can’t remember when I next bought a guitar, a Fender Strat copy, but I was still living in Cardiff and it was there I took my first lessons. They were, however, a complete waste of time as I simply didn’t go the scale exercises my tutor set for me.

. . .

This is all getting a little long-winded and to be frank beside the point. So here’s a tune, Witchcraft played by Jimmy Bruno, and the kind of music I should like to play and at a standard - a bloody great standard - I should like to reach. I doubt I ever shall, of course, but there is no harm in trying and seeing just how far I can get.


Witchcraft - Jimmy Bruno


I have indeed made progress, for two reasons: first I am now regularly practising various exercises and also because I have a very good tutor, Paul Berrington in Padstow, who, though, has one tiny fault - he teaches too fast and by the end of my weekly hour my head seems about to explode with all the stuff he has told me. At first I was a tad despondent, though I didn’t tell him, and wondered whether I would ever get my head around any of it (it was the music theory I was interested in as much as becoming more dextrous).

But by and by some if it began to accumulate and in that odd way these things have, the more you understood, the more you were able to understand, and the more you understood, the more you were able to ask pertinent questions. Furthermore, all the - for my baffling - mystique of many jazz chords became far less baffling as I got to know more and more music theory. So, for example, if looking up the chords to a song I came across Bbm7b5 (B flat minor seventh, flat fifth, all I could do was to memorise ‘where the fingers went on the fretboard’ - and there are several shapes/inversions for every chord - and trust I would remember. I never did.

Now, such chords hold no fear for me, or rather less. It’s not that I understand music theory, more that I can now see how I might understand music theory and if that sounds a little too Irish for some, please bear in mind that your average Irishman or woman is more than a tad brighter than the rest of us.

Knowing the theory will not necessarily make you a better player. But practising the scales and particularly arpeggios does wonders for finger dexterity, muscle memory and finally - the Holy Grail - of playing instinctively what you want to play without thinking about it at all.

I have to be off now, so here are a few more tracks by guitarists I like. If I could become even a tenth as good I would be reasonably happy, though I suspect if I were to become a tenth as good, I would then try to become even better.

. . .

Here’s another favourite tune of mine, Lullaby Of The Leaves. I have five versions on iTunes, two guitar version, two horn versions and one by Art Tatum. This one is by guitarist Grant Green.
Lullaby Of The Leaves - Grant Green


Then there’s the guitarist John Scofield, who played with Miles Davis in his younger years.
Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get - John Scofield


And if that’s a tad to middle-of-the road for you, try this:

The Nag - John Scofield