PELTING DOWN

Just hearing 'Lightning' singing with such feeling - and cop that guitar! - makes the little dribble I'm moaning about feel like sunny days again.

Anna's ploy: some friends of friends on Bainbridge Island were coming up from CA to check out property and we were thinking on how to discourage them.

It was cats and dogs at the time.

Anna - circa nine - chirped up,

"Why dont I put on my bikini and Dad put on his Hawaii shirt and we meet them at the ferry and go like "Yayy! You brought the good weather!"

and then as we drive to Kris and David we're like telling them all the fun things planned:

BBQ in the garden (mud glorious mud)

Games round the pond (ie the pothole in the drive)

Go to Sasquatch beach and look at Seattle thru the Puget Sound mist.

How we laughed, the scamp.

In the end they didnt come; preferred their cosy hotel room up on 6th and Columbus to the chilly deck of Washington State Ferries. Didnt sound like our kind of people any road.

Whoa, that photo of Koutsi up there, feel a song coming on. Where dat woman wit' her kazoo? Need that cat sound.

"Got me a lonesome bell to toll, use it to call my hungry cat
Nnghh ... that lonesome shepherd bell, sound like heaven to a hungry cat,
Maybe six of sister squirrel, half a doz' o' Mister Rat"

Lord have mercy ... been to the nation, all around the territo' just for a decent cut of rat.

This rain keep up, make my guitar a sampan ... float right down to Di' Ella's Delicatessany.

Gorgeous submission by my favourite blues man.

So obvious, from the first wail, why he likes it; the harp sounds like him and on first hearing it he must have dropped that thesis and rushed straight to the cellar to wail.

I will get him in the end: we'll be at some blacktie do, donnish chatter, everyone behaving, 'Lycidas and his Languid Lutes' playing discreet Dowland.

I'll have slipped the guv'nor a tenner to take one song and one only.

And i'll start into this beauty and savour the sight of the penguin-suited prof twitching and groaning ("Maria, surely you packed my harmonicas? What, not even the D?")

I'll eke it out, the audience entranced, Jimmy P disintegrating as phrase after phrase passes, crying out for punctuation.

The prof turning left and centre:

"But you dont understand, it really does need the ... oh, never mind.

Traitor!"