Neat

I don't know how I've managed to do this today, but lots of tiny little irritating tasks have been completed after months of lingering and itching. London is sweltering and humid, but my house is cool and it's a perfect refuge from the roasting sunshine.
It's a huge help having so many charity shops around the corner because often the problem is an old smelly cushion that I felt that I couldn't get rid of because it came from McMum and McDad's old house, or an expensive but useless article of clothing which is the last straw on the eBay camel's back, the eCamel. Bags of paperbacks have been despatched to the back of the Oxfam shop, and nothing has been bought to replace them (liar! I bought three trashy novels today).
Television? I'm not tempted by the Commonwealth Games because the Scottish Independence vote is just around the corner and I don't know who I'm batting for; it would be Scotland but I'm not into nationalistic anti-English sentiment (nor anti-Scottish for that matter), so I'm bypassing the whole thing.
Nationalism sucks, wherever it comes from, and you only have to look at Israel and the Ukraine to see exactly where it leads to. Sports are not exempt from the nasty side of competition: if not from the competitors, then from lay commentators who spirit up haloes and plonk them above the heads of whichever side they're on.
That's enough mini-ranting!
All I was saying is that there is no new series of Poirot or Sherlock to distract me; I've even put in a couple of solid hours of quotation-mining for the research I'm doing. All good and useful stuff but the more I do, the further the goalposts seem to move away, or the further away the finish line seems to be.
Sporting metaphors aside, it's extremely absorbing and I hope that I'm doing something useful for the future of music studies.
Next week I will do a full week of research. I have three things in the pipeline and I need to get them well under way before term starts again. Lots of people seem to be away on leave so I might get a head start; the kitchen is piled with books and so is my desk at work. So many ideas......
Before then, there's a gig at the funky St Cecilia's Hall in Edinburgh next Saturday, where I'll be playing a bit of skiffle and a bit of not-skiffle too from 8 p.m. I've had the chance to practise my playing more that normal and I have the familiar thickened and painful finger-pads on the left hand to prove it. There are no new songs in the pipeline yet; an emotional switch has yet to be altered to allow that to happen.
I also say Happy Birthday to Martin for yesterday; lots of people from the past went to meet him in Gosforth yesterday evening and I think he found that touching, and so do I.