The Big Weekend

Just back from seeing The Automatic at the Big Weekend. I made it there for the first time in years. Bumped into some old mates from the mental health drop-in and had a good bitch/whinge cos I was feeling a bit depressed. Dave asked for his bass guitar back which is a bit of a coincidence as I was going to give it back on Monday. I didn't get on with playing it as my hand span isn't wide enough for me for to place a finger in each fret at the top of the neck near the headstock yet in reality most guitarists play further down the neck where the frets are placed closer together and their fingers on the left hand slide up and down the E and A strings. Higher notes are found near the body of the instrument so they do this rather than play the D and G strings for the higher notes with fingers placed by the frets near the headstock.

There was lot of moshing and crowd surfing while The Automatic were playing. Seen them once before at T4 on the beach earlier this year but I was way back. The were booked before they made it into the charts so there weren't headling; Kubb were instead as they were already in the charts at the time of booking but they didn't pull the crowd in the same way. Met a psychiatric nurse during the interval and we talked about Madonna and the old punk bands. She works with challenging behaviours and has been attacked a few times by patients and here's me whinging on about being threatened when I challenge people with mental health problems or express my opinions to them. The lesson here is not to take it personally. It's a good job I've taken a couple of short basic self defence courses. I still think it is important to express oneself in a firm but polite way and not bottle things up because that leads to anxiety, stress, depression, migraines and angry outbursts. The trick is to know how to communicate effectively and calmly and to tailor the way you say things to the person concerned. Having to bite my tongue all the time isn't doing me any favours because I will get out of practice at asserting myself. It's hard to adapt from one situation to another. I have to go to bed now so that I can be up in time to get ready for my holiday and there's still more de-cluttering to do.