Friday, November 04, 2011

harpwales goes global

I could feel the electricity running down my arms. Buzzing under my skin it stabbed into my fingers. ‘She’s going to give me a heart attack,’ I thought, the idea alone creating a secondary voltage surge. But as sensation was equal on both right and left sides, there was no pain in my chest and I was still breathing, I worked out that she probably wasn’t.


What I was sure about though was that I was not a happy harmonica player. I wondered what I would have done had I been on my own turf and not in a foreign country, the guest of someone I hardly knew who was being a real pain. Pointless really, because my current state fulfilled none of those criteria.


I didn’t know whether I was more shocked than angry. I had been invited to Mallorca for a few days to check whether it would be a good place for me to look for work as a musician. Now it seemed my hostess was doing everything in her power to block me. ‘If you play here,’ she said as I tested the free movement of my slide and warmed my harmonica up, ‘I’m going for a coffee somewhere else and you’ll have to come and find me later’.