Our beautiful baby daughter, Alice Maureen, was born in Middlesbrough, England weighing 7lbs 5oz. She is now 4 weeks old and is putting on a lot of weight! It was a long time comin' but now she's here!
To leave the Bruce theme behind, at least for one post, if you ever visit Northern England, I cannot recommend highly enough the beautiful ancient seaport of Whitby, on the North-East coast in North Yorkshire. It's in between my hometown of Redcar and where I now live, York. See VisitWhitby for full details. Both Kelly and I love Whitby Abbey. There is also the Magpie Cafe that serves the world's best fish and chips (we must go about 6 times a year!) and the Dracula connection (the original Dracula book was written in and partly inspired by Whitby.) Check out this great photosite on Dracula's Whitby.
... or how I got my first ever Bruce autograph in
London.
At around 1pm on Tuesday 9th May (day after the Hammersmith
show), my friend Sascha and I decided to have a walk
across to Bruce's London hotel. We had been extremely
lucky the previous night as we had managed to get
there very quickly by tube after the gig in
Hammersmith. Bruce had been right in front of us and
Sascha managed to get a "to Sascha" autograph after
telling Bruce it had been his 50th show.
I was just planning on spending 15 mins outside
Bruce's hotel, still feeling disappointed I had not
got an autograph the previous night and with the
similar disappointments in November having waited for
hours outside the Spectrum in Philly, convinced it was
not meant to be for me.
When we reached the hotel there were maybe 15 people
waiting. Around six looked like Italian fans and two
or three people looked like non-fans carrying bags of
Bruce stuff they wanted signing to sell on Ebay!
Around 1:20 Sascha had to leave to catch his flight
home to Germany. The Italians left about 15 minutes
later, leaving about 10 of us there. 10 minutes later
the hotel door opened and out came Bruce, Patti and a
couple of security guards!
We moved over to Bruce and he began signing for
people. I stepped into the road to get a great view of
Bruce about five feet away from me and was told by a
security guard to get back on the other side. I
apologised and moved back to the others. I looked at
Bruce over the top of the others and as he was
finishing signing for someone there was silence so I
said "I was born on 23rd September 69, so I'm exactly
20 years younger than you." At that point Bruce looked
me in the eye (I could see his eyes through his
sunglasses) and said "What's your name?" He held out
his hand for me to hand him something to sign. I
passed him the newspaper review I was holding (not the
best thing I could have had with me, but not bad for
spur of the moment) and told him my name. As he was
signing it was quiet again and
I said "Thanks for everything, thanks for last night."
Bruce said "It was a great night last night". I said
"Yes, it was great", then after a pause, "I've seen
you in seven countries". This comment seemed to pass
him by! When Bruce handed me the autograph I think I
might have said "thanks", I was in an ecstatic haze by
that point so can't be sure. I stepped back and let
the feelings rush over me. I then realised that Bruce
was still just a few feet away from me and I was in a
great spot to watch him so that's what I did. I might
have been co-ordinated enough to take a few photos but
as I thought there was next to no chance of seeing
Bruce on Tuesday I left it at the hotel. You were
right that I should have brought it, Sascha. At least
I had
a half-minute's uninterrupted Bruce viewing without
fiddling with the camera, which would have been tricky
as I didn't want the autograph to get damaged.
As he moved to his car (Patti had already gone over) a
girl asked about tickets for that night's BBC show.
Bruce said "I don't know". She then said she would be
seeing him in Frankfurt and some of the other venues,
also Oslo if she could get a ticket. We all shouted
"thanks Bruce" as he got into the car and that was
that.
It was an amazing end to the London trip for me and
especially great as London was the best Bruce show I
had ever seen in the UK (one of my best of all time)
and my last of the Seeger Sessions tour. These
memories will see me through the coming months and
help inspire me to get the money together for next
time.
Being such an irregular blogger (too many interests on the Internet, too little time!) I didn't get around to posting a review of the D&D Philly shows I went to in November. I also did some pre-show stalking as you can see from the photo! It was good to take my first photos of Bruce but so disappointing, especially on night 2, that Bruce didn't walk back and sign some stuff. The shows were great though - as always with the American shows I've attended, you get great set-lists (Fade Away, Drive All Night (requested by my friend, Dot), Santa Anna, Thundercrack, for examples) but a noisy crowd compared with Europe. I think Dusseldorf stays the best show I saw last year (mainly due to performance, atmosphere, quiet), but the Philly shows were close behind. Apart from the set-lists I really enjoyed the intensity of the really long Dream Baby Dream and The New Timer, both on the second night.
I'm not too excited about the new album (The Seeger Sessions) and tour coming up. I was not keen on the clips of tracks that went up on the Sony website and I will clearly miss Bruce the songwriter. I will have to see how many shows I can attend with baby on the way.... Ramrod and Open All Night should be fun with this band though!
