Wednesday’s E&E performance went fine. We were a bit late getting started (the school’s fault, not ours), but managed to get through most of the programme anyway. The workshops went fairly well, though Mat needs more credit for the songwriting ones as we ended up leading them together. I hadn’t realised how difficult it would be to teach in a language that isn’t my first. It’s the only time since I’ve been here that I’ve experienced difficulties with English. Still, the kids seemed to enjoy it.

Mat came up with the awesome idea of writing a class song for the kids, by asking them about their school days, getting key words and ideas from them and turning them into lyrics. We put a melody to them and sang them over a simple chord progression together with the children. Most of them were very enthusiastic, and had a blast with us telling them to sing as loud as they could.

That evening I went to a jam night at a pub in Walsall with Robin. It was awesome! We had such a great time. Robin and I played Commercial for Levi which caught on, apparently. Then I came up with the idea of playing Little Wing which Adam happily joined me for. That one was very popular!

I had three new types of ale, and talked to strangers and generally had a great time. At the end of the night they were playing Hey Joe and James, who runs the jam night, did this thing where he started switching out musicians while they were playing. He switched singers twice, changed out the bassist, drummer, guitarist many, many times. Then he had this girl up to sing, but she didn’t know the song and seemed very uncomfortable so he went to fetch me instead. I don’t know the words to Hey Joe, either, but I figure in the end you don’t have to. As long as you get the “Hey, Joe!” part right, the rest can be “herdiberdy herp derp” and no one’s gonna care.

We jammed it out for several minutes, switching styles into reggae and disco before bringing it back to the blues-rock towards the end. Such a great show! I love jamming.

Yesterday I had a rehearsal. I’ve changed guitarists, which at the moment feels like a step back because Luke has to learn everything we’ve already done from scratch, but he did really well on Infra-Red and Supermassive Black Hole, so I’m pretty enthusiastic about that.

Then I was supposed to go to Chantal’s, and that’s where my week stops being cool. Chantal hit me up on Facebook and told me she had too much work this weekend and it wouldn’t really work out so well having me over now. Put a real dampener on everything.

What’s worse, Abi told me yesterday that she’s moving to Gorway Halls, which, while it’s not exactly far away, still means that we’ll see less of each other and given that we hardly see each other as it is… It makes me feel very lonely, to think that I won’t have her around anymore. Annette left last weekend, too, to go back home. We’re only four left now, of the original seven who came here in September. There’s French Girl in Emma’s old room, but she’s leaving soon too, and to be honest, it’s not like we see all that much of her. We see her blonde friend from upstairs more frequently. For the most part, we only notice her presence by way of her taking up so much room in the fridge.

So at the moment I don’t feel like I have so much to be happy about. I woke up at 10 this morning, but decided to go back to sleep. My mind punished me with an awful nightmare where I got stuck in Amsterdam on my way home to Norway because I’d forgotten to check in for my flight and it was too late.

Today I’m doing laundry, and that’s about the only thing I have planned. Well, other than trying to make something for the middle section of heapsong1 whenever Immi sees fit to reveal it. It’s not up yet…