It's a strange feeling - the weather is closing in with clouds and cold winds, and tomorrow I am going to Leeds with my daughter to check the place out as she is going to Uni there. I haven't been there since 1982/3, when I left with my wife and infant son. Going back will be strange, and hopefully I will be able to meet up with an old friend that I left behind there - Pat, the original drummer of the Skinbat Scramble, a band which started in Leeds in 1981 and is still going today (we have a gig on Sunday at The Forum in Tun Wells). It's really beginning to dawn on me that the kids are nearly all grown up and will soon be gone. A strange, strange feeling, and at the same time all these memories and places from the past are calling me back. On Saturday I failed to turn up for a drink with another old friend from those days - Nikki Eton-Rifles. I think that the emotional aspects are just occasionally dragging me under, maybe there is some baggage left over from those days? I dealt with it all fairly abruptly in those days, and then just left behind various emotional wastelands that are still there. So many people from the past have reappeared that I am drowning in memories, half-forgotten, hardly remembered. And the kids are almost flown away.

But this is how life is supposed to be, and tonight - soon, I have another band rehearsal to grind through in preparation for Sunday, and the discipline required seems to become more of an effort each time. Malcolm, a friend of ours will be playing with us, and he jammed with Hendrix in Germany once. Strange, strange connections, time is playing its tricks with us again. So much has been done and so many memories created by these gigs, and conections ,made and sometimes broken (especially amongst the younger members) that it is almost sad. Yet, this is that time of year where all these implications and resonances become unavoidable, one is so busy battling through the everyday humdrum reality that you don't notice these greater significances, and they are quite humbling.

So, its Leeds after all these years and then the gig, and whatever happens next...