Friday, September 19, 2008

Goodbye Mumblers

Our band said its final goodbye last weekend, at a rather chilly but very friendly and enjoyable wedding in Poland. Krakow is a beautiful town, relatively unspoilt by the WWII destruction that went on in Warsaw and many other places. It has beautiful sculpted rooftops and shady squares with fountains...

Of course we didn't see any of that because we went straight from the airport to Nowy Sosz, which is neither sculpted nor fountainous.

The weekend began with a rather dramatic event. Our lead guitarist turned up at the airport with only an out-dated ID card; outdated by 6 years! Of course, not even Transavia, the budget airline we used, would allow him to travel with that, so he had to go back to the city and take a train, chuffing through Europe by way of Cologne and Warsaw. It wasn't a disaster in the end, because he arrived ten minutes into the wedding ceremony and managed to play the song he'd been supposed to play. Still, we were all a bit fraught and worried that he might not make it at all, and our repertoire really relies on his playing to sound anything at all like how it's supposed to.

Why he thought he could travel with an ID card that expired in 2002 is beyond me, but all credit to him, he braved the Eastern European train network and managed to get there in time, so that's the main thing. Of course he had to take the train on the way back too, so he spent 40 hours out of his weekend sitting on a train. I think he started to understand why there was a murder on the Orient Express.

So now it's time to hang up our microphones, stay in one more night a week, and leave the world of rock'n'roll behind us. Well, for now anyway. All bands have their life cycle, and this is the end of ours for the moment.

This weekend is a lot calmer, too. I'm in Chablis today and it's nice and quiet. I'm working on my website for my translation business, but it's much harder than I expected. I have new respect for designers.

Next trip, Boston...

1 comment:

Lola said...

Mindblowing bab!

Au revoir aux Mumblers! My best memory... trying desperately to keep in tune with Cyrille's brother in law during in an impromptu wedding version of we haven't heard singing as bad as this "For the Longest time".