Diane and I get up early and go to a conference in Manchester

Well, it's Saturday morning, and Diane is having a go cos our cheap train tickets are taking us via Hebden Bridge and the scenic route from Leeds to Manchester. Anyway a few scenic old factories, viaducts and hillsides later, she is converted [not that I realised that I had booked the stopping train].







Our conference is in the G Mex Centre, where, a few years back, Morgan and I went to see Bloc Party.

We are met by Manchester Music Service Steelband, and it was lovely, natural, unpretentious style of playing, without any forced smiles or unnecessary dynamics. I loved them, but Diane told me we had gone for the conference, and so we had.

After we discussed this and that, we caught the scenic route back in the dark, stopping at even more stations.

I retrieved my bike from the racks at Leeds Station, and headed back to Hyde Park. En route I encountered a retrieve the streets march, and walked with it till it melted into Leeds Met.

Manchester Grammar School meets steel pans

Now then Debs,

It is my turn to go to Manchester. Robert and the crew have been over here and checked out  all the Leeds pan schools they need, have ordered a set of pans from Grafton, and will hire a few from us in Leeds while they wait. Which won’t be too long. 

We are also selling them a set of our surplus basses and cellos, relics from the days before the new builds' builders misunderstood the information: “and we have to house a set of steel pans in the new school building.” 

Two sets of basses came from when the college of Music bought a 20 piece set in about 1990, expecting, but not getting great things. Ten years later they were sold to the Music Service. I found a primary school to use one set, but when Melvin and I went to pick up said pans, we found they had been abandoned, and had spent summer outside a portastore cabin in the carpark, and were now full of water and gently rusting on top. They must have been mistaken for old oildrums! How could that have happened?

So over the Pennines again on Tuesday with the gently rusting basses and the rest. And I put Robert, Ruth, Gary, Otto, Jonathon and David through their paces. Forgot to photograph them in action so here's Ruth and Robert posing after they'd all left.