Good to see you back, Jerry. I love these pictures you are 'painting' of your journey and the people you met - keep it coming ! I agree with you 100% about how important it is to get out of the regular routine - puts things into a wider and more healthy perspective. Even in a country as small as England, there are so many "worlds within worlds".

You asked what's been happening: well, after a really tough time with my mum in hospital over several months, and all that that entailed, she is home and doing OK. Visiting her had taken up so much of my life and it was very difficult to keep everything going workwise, but now we are through it and I've been out doing lots of walking in the glorious weather we've been having, trying to read maps and getting lost and in the process discovering some lovely places in the middle of nowhere. I have a book of "Pub Walks in Essex" which takes you along the system of public footpaths that covers the whole of Britain. The one we did last week started from a pub called the "Shoulder of Mutton". What I love about these walks is that the footpaths are often tucked into little nooks and crannies that you would otherwise miss or would think, from looking at them, that they are private property. But they're not: they are open to everyone.

The start of the walk from the "Shoulder of Mutton" was nothing short of magical, and I learned a new word: "Twitten" - The book directs you to "walk along the twitten between the brick wall and wooden fence". This "twitten" was the narrowest of little passageways, just about wide enough for one person at a time, with the very high wall and fence either side. I would never have noticed it was there, or imagined that it led anywhere. The twitten went quite a long way and the wall and fence became high hedges, very dark, with just the glimpse of a river on one side. Then suddenly, magically, the path opened up to a sweep of grass leading to the river bank, with willow trees dipping into the water, dappled sunlight, tall reeds. There was a little wooden jetty with four or five rowing boats and the very trusting owner had put a box there for people to put money in to take one of the boats out. It was just like wandering into a scene from "The Wind in the Willows", totally idyllic and made all the more magical by the way we arrived at it.

What's been happening with music ? Well, nothing "folky" at all, though it started out as being "folky": I had been thinking for a long time about getting an autoharp, but there are more crucial and necessary things to spend my money on (like food and rent !) and as well as that, I have tended to mess about with the instruments I already have, very much in the "master of none" category. So I decided, rather than get the autoharp, to revive and improve my piano playing, and I'm having a whale of a time. I got a very good book: "Improvising Blues Piano" and working my way through that. It's full of exercises explaining chord structures and so on and I'm discovering things about music I wish I had had explained to me years ago. An eye-opener. I've also found out that the music exam boards now do a series of graded jazz exams (when I learned as a kid, it was only classical), so I'm going to do those as an incentive to keep at it. In the same way as it's good to go to new places, it's good to do new things, and no-one is ever too old to learn !

Good to see you Jerry. PM on its way.

- jeanie (Blues Name - from another thread here - Princess Passionflower)