The Airedate Terrier
Last Tuesday, I tried to catch our Airedale Terrier (terror?) who has become unhappy about coming back at the end of her outings. Unfortunately, I caught the middle finger of my left hand in her collar, and when she ran, she broke the bone above the top joint. It’s been x-rayed, and it has a splint: the medics reckon 6 weeks to repair.
It’s not sore now, and the swelling has come down. I’m treating it with comfrey poultices from time time (nearly daily), and that does seem to help. It’s a better colour now, though still a long way from better.
This has put paid to me playing the clarinet for now altogether: you can’t play it with one hand. I can still play some piano – I have full use of the right hand, but I need to be really careful with what I do with the left. I can play single notes, or even octaves, but once I start playing, I tend to get carried away, and forget that I can’t use the middle finger at all. Still, better than nothing.
I”ve been using Jamulus in this lockdown, and have put up a server on the Google cloud in London. They allow one to rack up US$300 of usage for free, presumably hoping that by the time yo’ve done that, you’ll need the system. I may well… meanwhile, I do use it to jam with people both locally and in this part of Europe. Further away, the latency gets too long, and it becomes impossible to interact properly. Still, better than nothing.
And for the Dunblane Folk Club, we use the Facebook watch party facility on the Dunblane Folk Club Facebook page: people upload videos of them singing or storytelling or playing a tune, and then someone (often John Symon, sometimes me) puts these videos together in a sequence. At the same time, there’s a chat going on between this listening. It’s quite fun, better than nothing….
Anyway: I have to run it tonight, in an hour or so….. The finger will, I suppose, get better: not handy, I was enjoying getting on with the clarinet. I’ll just have to cope, like with the lockdown.
Tags: broken finger
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