This was my last full week of work before my contract ends at the end of the month (plus one day, but that’s for next time). I’ve been trying to tie up loose ends, write down things that were in my head, and make sure that I’m not the single point of failure on anything.

A few of us from Sanshinkai played at the Bermondsey Folk Festival on Saturday. It was the first time it had taken place since 2019, and it was a low-key event this time. We played some music from Okinawa, with me doing a quick instrument switch from sanshin to guitar for Warabigami and back again for the next piece, then I played guitar accompaniment for a set of songs from Amami, which was formerly part of Okinawa, but was ceded to Japan in the 17th century and has evolved a distinct culture. In particular, they play the sanshin with a different type of plectrum and tuned about a third higher.

Musicians with sanshins and a guitar in a small tent stage. There are speakers and a forest of microphones and a man is sorting out technical stuff.

Soundcheck

Even though I don’t like the sound of acoustic guitar pickups, I’m considering fitting one for live events because miking up a guitar is a repeated hassle. I saw a video about an amazing pedal that automatically trains an impulse response system to replicate a miked-up sound from any old pickup, but it costs £550 – and it’s sold out for now. But that led me to look into cheaper options, and it seems that you can do the same with an IR loader pedal for £50–£75 and a bit of processing on the computer.

It raises the intriguing prospect that I could fit cheap passive piezo transducers to many of my acoustic instruments and actually produce a good sound.

I never thought that my first-year university classes on convolution would end up intersecting with my hobbies decades later.

As it’s not far from our house, I invited everyone back for an after party. This did mean that I had to get around to reassembling the chairs that L— had reupholstered so that we had enough places for everyone to sit. This wasn’t as easy as it should have been, because whoever had reupholstered them the time before that had abandoned the mechanism that was supposed to attach the seat backs (screws that lock into keyhole slots) in favour of just gluing them on – probably because they had broken off the screws when attempting to disassemble them the first time. All it took was filling the torn wood with epoxy and drilling new holes; the hard part was getting everything to line up and working out how far in to drive the screws so that the back would fit just tightly enough.

We have two more chairs to reupholster. This time, I’m going to sort out the mounting before they’re covered, when it’s much easier to line everything up.

I was busy on Friday: as well as fixing the chairs, I also tidied the house, went shopping, prepared food for Saturday (pizza, so that meant organising all the toppings and making some dough so that I could quickly assemble them after the festival). And I practised for Saturday.

Sunday was very relaxing after all that.

I have a lot of opinions about the Digital ID proposal but for now all I’ll say is that, from my experience of government, trying to do that in three years is optimistic. Doing so in the face of significant opposition (see, for example, the petition which already has over 2½ million signatures) makes it even less likely to happen.

Also, I’m trying to minimise the malign influence of the little black box of misery in my life. I resent anything that forces me to own a smart phone that I have to buy from one of two malign Big Tech companies.

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