Saturday, 14 August
The body clock kicked in with the regular 4:30 wake-up and I was out of bed looking forward to the prospects on offer feeling good. Predictably a spanner was immediately lodged in the works. Once the laptop powered up I was ready to start tapping out the details of Our Journey So Far but I checked the email while I boiled the jug, and was hit with a flurry of messages with subjects like R.I.P. Richie Hayward.
This wasn't entirely unexpected news. Liver cancer, a case of pneumonia, reports that doctors weren't sure what was happening with Richie's lungs, the fact that I'd lost both parents to pneumonia and reports that suggested the case was too severe to risk moving the patient to a larger hospital meant that I wasn't confident he'd be back in the drummer's seat for Little Feat.
Still, even when developments don't give you much hope, hope you do.
With the email scanned, I started a preliminary draft of the R.I.P. section of The Music Pages and sent off part of it to the Hoy Hoy mailing list while Madam showered, then took my turn in the Rain Room before we set out on a time-killing expedition. The train wasn’t departing until 2:55 and with the morning to be disposed of before we checked in it made sense to cut the next six hours into chunks on either side of checking out of the overnight accommodation.