Dear Kingfisher,
Is this fate? I was sitting at a blank page giving some consideration to the title and you flew in and settled on a post about a metre away on the other side of the glass. I sat very still as a gust of wind blew you backwards off the post. It took you no time to recover and you resumed your spot. I reached very slowly for my phone to try and take a photograph, but you were too wily and leapt off the post veering over your left wing to dart along the top of the river again. This essay therefore has to be a letter to you.
I am aware that my letters to you are generally quite bleak. After more than a year I am tired of my own company and would love nothing more than to be able resume real contact with my lover, my family and my friends. Some of them are three miles away and others are thousands of miles away. P. is only seven hundred miles away, but he might as well be on the moon for all the likelihood we have of being able to see each other in the near future. However, I don't want this message to be bleak. My health is good, I have been out for a few strolls along the riverside, but most importantly, in the past few days I have been easing myself back into rehearsing and a little bit of composing too. An occasional melody has lodged in my brain just long enough for me to scribble it out in my manuscript book, something I always keep to hand, although it has not been required for much of the past year.
The thing I dislike most about depression is the way it drains the will to do anything useful. I guess I've experienced a very mild dose recently, which meant that I did no playing. After a pause of several weeks it takes a little while for my guitar-playing fingers to start working through the stiffness, the tips to toughen up and my legs to build up enough muscle strength to be able to play some of the more demanding rhythms on my footdrums. I have a system for this. The first day I play two or three songs. The next day I might manage half an hour. By the fourth or fifth day I'm easily playing for at least an hour, but my fingers get sore if I go on too long. Once they are sore that makes the recovery more complicated. So it is a balance between regular and often as I build towards performance quality again. Of course, not speaking to many people, I can go days without using my voice, so that too needs rebuilding. I try to remember everything I learned from my friend, L., who took on the job of coaching me when I was taking on more Marshlander gigs. She has a lovely singing voice and has been trained by excellent teachers herself. Her lessons were both inspiring and helpful. I just wish that what she tried to teach me was firmly enough embedded in my practice so that I had passed the point of having to employ all the tricks consciously. Sometimes in mid-song I catch myself not breathing efficiently from the diaphragm or slumping into a poor posture as I balance the guitar on my lap and lean to allow my legs and feet to work efficiently on the drum pedals. I have spoken to the great Arthur Brown a few times over the years and his voice in his mid to late seventies is still in great shape. He used to have a routine for keeping his voice in good working order. He lived in a yurt at the time and would walk down the hill into town every day and exercise his voice as he walked. I wonder what the trees made of a burst of "Spontaneous Apple Creation", "Fire", "Time Captives" or "I Put A Spell On You". These days he lives in bricks and mortar, so I don't know whether that has affected his practice regime.
Anyway, after a phone call from a friend who lost his partner at the beginning of the year I have now forgotten what I wanted to tell you. So here are some photographs from some recent expeditions along the river bank. You'll know exactly where these places are.
Love as always,
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