BBC at last.

You can’t beat country life and sunny weather. I’m not sure that I’m ‘settling in’ to my new home as, every morning while sitting outside, listening to birdsong and looking out at Lough Boffin, while enjoying my ‘whore’s breakfast’, a cup of tea and a cigarette, I feel like I’m on holiday. My work, for the moment is my busking and I don’t consider that to be work at all. In theory, if it covers my fuel and food, that’s all I expect and anything else is a bonus.

Today, for the first time ever, I went busking in Northern Ireland - Eniskillen in Co. Fermanagh. Google maps told me it was little over and hour away and, as I’ve been mostly playing locally - yesterday a farmer’s market in Carrick on Shannon and Wednesday, a return to Longford (no better - even in the sunshine), I haven’t been doing a whole lot of driving. Today’s trip was a sort of day out - sightseeing and driving along some beautiful country roads (and lanes too). I still don’t know where I went wrong - I need a paper map - but it took almost 2 hours to get there and 2 and a half back. The phone’s ‘sat-nav’ drops when the signal is poor and, I suspect, that’s where you should turn left or right or whatever. The ££££s I earned will just about cover about half the petrol - sigh. Still, in spite of the pessimistic forecast, the weather was beautiful.

I’m well used to my dog, Clara, being the star of the show but today took the biscuit. I was playing on Church Street - just after Darling Street coming into town. Not a penny earned in the first half hour and across the street, two guys were filming with a serious looking video camera and microphone. They looked like they were doing quick interviews with random pedestrians and showed no interest until….. they crossed the street down to my right and the camera man crouched down and focussed on Clara who had resigned herself to the fact that I was going to be playing for a couple of hours and was doing a great impression of a dead dog and zoned out to conserve her energy for the walk/swim that would inevitably follow.

The microphone man then dropped a few coins into my case and thanked me for allowing then to film Clara. They were from the BBC and filming opinions for the forthcoming Northern Ireland elections. The program goes out next Tuesday.

Evening now and it’s raining - maybe normal life will resume and leave me remembering our glorious summer in April 2015.