Thursday, December 01, 2016

Travelling Girl

I have been travelling since 8.15 this morning: walk, bus, train, bus, plane, walk, train, train....
In an hour and a half I will be in Aalborg in Denmark (I hope) ready for tomorrow's Art of Record Production Conference.
In the morning there will be a panel, with Katia Isakoff, Susan Schmidt Horning, Paula Woolf and me. In my bit I'll be showing a short and early version of Stories from the She-Punks and talking about recording and the women punk bands of the 1970s. In the afternoon, I will be presenting a paper on entrepreneurship and female producers, and listening to some very interesting people talking about their enthusiasms in great depth.
I'm not going to be at the whole conference and I'll miss Valgeir Sigurosson's keynote (he worked with Bjork), and also some other really interesting papers. I'd arranged to come home early to play a gig which I'm not playing now, but even part of the ARP conference is better than none at all and I'm bloody pleased to be going there. Thanks to the University of the East for paying for part of it, and to me for paying for the rest of it, and to my colleague Steve for covering my lecture today.
For now, I'm sitting in a good-natured scrum of noisy older Danish ladies who seem to have been shopping in Copenhagen, some rushing girls with plaits who hurry up and down the train carriage at regular intervals, and some serious gentlemen with all manner of trendy-looking backpacks.
Why am I blogging? Because I am too tired to do the work-on-the-train that I meant to do (how do people manage to do that?); I've read today's paper from cover to cover, read too much of the new Ian Rankin book (nearly 15 quid! I bought the giant version by accident); read the free copy of the Independent that I got at the airport; eaten a big fat cinnamon bun and drunk a cup of coffee; and I'm too afraid to go to sleep in case I  end up back in Copenhagen again after a four hour train journey in the other direction.
Danish people don't sound quite so like Geordies as Norwegians do, but they still have that twang.

Just got the fright of my life- the train is going back in the direction we came in, but the Danish ladies have explained that it goes in a circle. That doesn't quite make sense but I'm going to have to go with the flow- what else can I do?

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