The Lover Speaks

I wandered along to the office after the gym yesterday because I had left my mobile phone behind after watching the Friday Abbeyfest jazz the night before.

Surrey Strings get people to play the bandstand on Saturday and Sunday lunchtimes, and as I bowled up there was a couple on stage making quite a pleasant sound so I thought I would take that in for a track or two.

"Here's a song I wrote about twenty years ago," said the bloke on bass, "that we were lucky enough to have covered by Annie Lennox," and they launched into "No More I Love You's".

Serendipity indeed. I've always considered it one of the best songs of the Eighties - even before Ms Lennox made it famous - and here was the writer on bass, with his wife on guitar and vocals, belting it out at the Mills on summer afternoon.

I watched until the end of the set and then nipped up the stairs to get my phone (and perhaps a beer from the fridge) to find that there was a message with a change of plan asking me if I could take my five year old to his school fair which meant that I rushed off on that mission and didn't get a chance to embarrass the musicians by gushing over them when they came off stage.

I doesn't say who they are on the Surrey Strings Events page either.

All in all Surrey Strings are on the side of the angels. They were showing me all the scores of instruments that they were reconditining to send off to Cuba last week for Luthiers Sans Frontieres. They've been doing it for nine years apparently.

They also provide my music lessons. I'm arranging a tune for string quartet at the moment.