I spent the early hours of a Wednesday morning in an eventually unsuccessful attempt to realign the old body clock on the second day of a four day concert swing through Sydney. The old early to bed, early to rise cycle doesn't play nicely with late nights and you don't want to run out of steam in the middle of a (hopefully) prime blast of vintage Costello and The Imposters, do you?
That sort of realignment takes more than a single day, and I'd started the process by staying up late Sunday night, rising just in time to check the email before the morning walk on Monday. Latish into the cot Monday night, leave the exit therefrom as late as possible Tuesday morning and much the same Wednesday saw things kicking into gear around a quarter to seven.
Much of the sleep in time, predictably, doesn't get spent in actual sleep. The brain needs to be kept from self starting. Leaping straight into action isn't the way to go, so I aim for a sort of warm fuzzy semi-dose as I muse on matters of interest, trying to bring up mental images that'll possibly morph into vaguely remembered dreams as Hughesy re-enters the realms of Morpheus.
So, hoping to dose, you muse. And the musings, on all three mornings in question, head towards the notion that the first few months of the year are the prime time concert scenario as far as music fans down under are concerned.
There are, I think, a couple of reasons for this, and three mornings enumerating the issues without getting around to tapping them out until Wednesday seems to have worked fairly well.
The first of them is, predictably, climatic, and one hypothesises there's a lack of symmetry in each of the four notional seasons. If the Australian summer is supposed to run through December, January and February, it isn't something that gradually builds and then equally gracefully subsides.
Theoretical Spring stretches through November, ratchets up the temperature and holds it there through early Summer, so it's late January and February when the temperatures really go through the thresholds of comfortable non-airconditioned existence.
One assumes the northern hemisphere Winter follows the same pattern and notes a "back home" posting on Bruce Springsteen's official website at the end of February that was heavy on snowbound New Jersey and canine affection.
Bluesfests and related activities