Hi! head to Heralds on Soundcloud and listen to the Newcastle recording! Off to London now for a gig with Lydia Towsey at the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane, then two weeks with Arun Ghosh's quintet around Germany and Austria.

... Then yesterday listened to the fantastic Get The Blessing and had a great start with Arun for Germany!

Well. Germany has been fantastich, so to speak. The sound engineers here are marvels. They really know what they're doing. The trains are almost never late, and have space for anything. Even the old ones. People are friendly. A beautiful country.

A day off!! Who'd have thought it? And we're in Cologne for most of it—a beautiful, hip city. We'll be heading to Karlsruhe later as well; but today I shall enjoy looking around and not doing much. Still, missing the many joys of home, and looking forward to be back. A mixture of feelings.

I'm still in Linz. Woke to find that the breakfast had two levels the one I wanted and the one I was allowed... but a happy 14km jaunt inspired me to get some Alpenwurtzel, Baerlauch–Kaese and a cheap Syrah—Austrian picnic for under 5 Euros!

Apparently the club is very weird. I suspect Arun wants to be weirder. We will see who wins... but should be a laugh!

Just testing more code... sorry. Today is a quiet day as it stands: working on an arrangement of Poulenc'S La Reine de Coeur, and recovering from Germany!

Speaking of which, I suspect the instrument will require an overhaul too... took a batter on the journeys. I took pictures—a rare thing for me to do, so with luck I'll be uploading them over the next few days. AND I'll write about it too!

For those that are interested in having a XMPP/Jabber micro-feed like this one, I'll be writing a tutorial in the next few weeks; probably on the testbed page.

Although the feed LOOKS like one of those Twitter feed you see everywhere, this one is not limited by character length; which comes in handy when you've got more to say than Twitter allows. So an essay could happen in your Jabber status, and appear as an article on your web-page.

But first a nice cup of coffee and some reading...

There's being some casualties in the arts funding mish-mash with regards to jazz; but luckily EMJazz has done all right, so congratulations to them!

I suppose the only thing we can do is keep going until they leave, and beyond!

But also hoping other committed promoters up and down the country were duly recognised. It's a mark of the risk-aversive nature of our current "rulers" to nail down the more liberated forms of expression.