On Sunday I was asked by friends to take my guitar along to the Sapporo hotel in Sakhalin "for a bit of a twang".

Turned out on arrival that I was the only person there with an instrument. Not sure if I was deliberately suckered, but I ended up doing a set of 24 songs over about 2 1/2 hours, which exhausted pretty well everything I can play confidently, except for a few obscure ones that I left out as they didn't seem to "fit" anywhere.

The "muse" must have been with me as I played and sang confidently and as well as I do in the privacy of my attic room. It helped that the audience was pretty uncritical. It wasn't large, but appreciative, and as long as I threw in something like "Hotel California", "House Of The Rising Sun" or "Wish You were Here" every few songs, they were also enthusiastic about my renditions of such things as "Banks Of The Sweet Primroses", "The Trees They Do Grow High". I threw in a couple of instrumentals (Jigsaw Puzzle Blues, Last Of The Mohicans) which also went down well.

I've never done more than a 4 song set before and thought this would be a real trial, but I enjoyed it myself.

Best thing was, they asked me back to play again on the Monday night (last night). I wasn't as good, as the muse was on vacation, and I had to do some of the songs that I was less confident about to avoid just repeating my previous set, but it still went down well.

On a bit of a high now!!!!