Project Busking

My normal college alarm rang out through my bedroom and I could have screamed. I trick myself every morning I have to wake up with this method; having selected the most irritating alarm sound on my phone, every morning I have to hear it makes me want to throw it into the nearest river. I guess you could say it works but it also ruins my mood. If I manage to fall asleep again, it'll start playing again twenty minutes later. 


So I hit dismiss at 7am after only sleeping a couple of hours because I stayed up all night making gifs of my favourite bands and again at 7.20am and finally roll out of bed at 9.20am to inform my mother that I had to go out before ten and if I could have a lift to town.

My lack of sleep dulled everything and I nearly left the house without being fully dressed and without my sign for Dan and my camera. Actually I did leave my camera behind and had to turn back half way because the camera was the whole point of me today. I rocked up ten minutes late at the meeting spot and I didn't even have any Starbucks.

A soya frappuccino later, things were looking better. I no longer wanted to punch everyone who looked at me, and me, Dan and Matt were finally on the tube to go busk in London. Matt had a wooden box drum to sit on that makes noises and is generally quite awesome. Dan carried a mandolin and baritone ukulele in their cases and was extremely relieved when I told him I knew he'd forget his capo so I brought mine.

We discussed where we're allowed to go and after visiting one spot, decided it's best to go on the South Bank. We spent about half an hour on the south side of the London Eye, where I took photos of the two boys and also shot some video, gushing about cinematography and being excited about the snow. It was absolutely freezing though and we soon became hungry. 

After sandwiches in Subway, we decided to try up on the north side of the London Eye as it was pretty dead where we'd been before. After talking to the patrol people about where exactly we could busk and waiting patiently for the (obvs amateur, I mean they left their bags unattended at points!) short film making people to finish recording whatever they were doing, we started playing. We played a bit of Winter Winds, Forget You, Love It When You Call, Last Request and some of Dan's solo stuff.

There was a fairly large group of French kids who were all very excited to see us. They took photos and videos and were very enthusiastic, especially when Dan managed to talk to them with the little french he knows. I got out the sign I'd made him with his name and links to social media and the kids took photos of him with it. It was absolutely lovely to have this attention because it was snowing quite hard and Dan had already cut his fingers from playing in the cold and got blood splatter all over his uke.

Eventually they left and we decided we had to leave, if only to save the instruments and our fingers. We counted on the train the money we'd made and our grand total is - £3.11! Pretty good I think for first timers who spent far too much time waiting around and being frozen. We plan to do it again next week in what we claim as our spot and more in the summer. I might even take my guitar along then. Not sure if my twenty year old acoustic can quite manage the snow.