This morning, for the first time this year, I enjoyed my first coffee of the day out in the garden. The sun was strong and bright, and it wasn’t at all unpleasant: spring, it seems, is here at last. Mind you, I should probably point out that I didn’t have my first coffee today until about noon, due to the fact that I didn’t get up until gone eleven, but that was because we had gone to bed rather late.

Lyn and I were out last night. We went to a bobby mcferrin concert, up at the Barbican. To be honest I don’t think I had ever heard the name bobby mcferrin until Dominik mentioned it on saturday, but it seemed to get Lyn excited, and when they explained that he was the guy who sang Don’t Worry, Be Happy, I became just as enthusiastic. I love that song. Dom had only suggested going on saturday; we’d bought tickets over the phone Sunday morning, and, yesterday evening, D’s friend Asia with us, we were setting off up into London. I love how quickly such things sometimes happen.

However, getting there didn’t turn out to be so straightforward. In fact it turned into a bit of a game of Mornington crescent, (although nobody got this reference when I made it last night). It was lucky I was in my manual chair, as the problem was finding our way to an accessible tube station near enough to the venue. We were forced to go all over the place, eventually arriving a few minutes late despite leaving in plenty of time.

I think we missed one or two songs, but it was a great gig. I was very impressed by Mcferrin’s vocal gymnastics: he does something akin to what now would be called beat-boxing – using his mouth to create sounds which are not words. To hear it live is truly impressive, and I was genuinely stunned at what he was doing. He was playing alongside a band, as well as his equally talented daughter, and together they made some truly cool music. If I had one criticism of the night, though, is that the content of many of his songs was a tad too religious for my taste, but then, he is from the american south (I think). I was also disappointed that he didn’t play Don’t Worry Be Happy after all, unless that was one of the songs we missed at the top of the show. But then,, after about forty years of playing that song, he must be quite fed up of it.

The journey home was much more straightforward than the journey there. We stopped to buy a pizza in the local kebab shop, and, shortly after wolfing that down i my usual pizza-devouring manner, I went to bed, humming this, despite not actually hearing it played.