JazzChantoozieitsJazzChantoozieturningthefinalbendandapproachingthefinish
line…yesitsJazzChantoozieJazzChantoozieleadingthefield…butwaitaminute…
whatsthis?…comingupbehindJazzChantoozieitsReplacementAustrianJazzFilly!
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyisapproachingJazzChantoozie…shescatchingup
…butJazzChantoozieisstillinthelead…JazzChantoozieisleadingthefieldwith
ReplacementAustrianJazzFillyaclosesecond…myworditsalmostneckandneck…
willJazzChantooziefallatthefinalhurdle?

Hopefully not.

Actually, a better analogy than a horse-race would have been a relay, with me handing over the baton. But then I don’t think athletics commentators talk quite as fast as horse-racing commentators. So it would have been a bit boring, to write that commentary.

So, hey ho. Here I am, coming into the final straight, indeed.

I have a final rehearsal with the guys in a few hours - I want to make sure our final two performances are as good as they can be - and in the meantime, may start packing. Or more likely: do some gift-shopping. On Sunday I go back to Ipoh, where T and C live (funny, that looks like ‘Clive’. Her name isn’t Clive, though); and then on Monday I go to Kuala Lumpur - or KL as everyone calls it here - to spend my final night at the Hilton (the Hilton, I tell you!), before flying back on Tuesday, and landing in the UK on Wednesday.

It really hasn’t hit me that this time next week, I will be back home.

Partly because I’ve been hearing about the snow; and that makes it all the harder to imagine. How on earth am I going to top up my tan?! Tell me that!!

I’m already expecting it to feel very dream-like, this experience. That I will be sitting back home, in my little (probably cold) flat, and be thinking: “Did that really happen?”. I know what it’s like flitting between New York and London seeing B, having two lives; with each place, and the life lived in it, suddenly and abruptly seeming like a dim and distant memory - even though it may only have been 24 hours previously that I was there. And yet conversely, each time I’d return to the place, whether London or NY, it would feel like only five minutes since I was last there, even if many months had passed between visits.*

Clearly, man wasn’t meant to travel quite such distances quite so quickly. But then man also engineered planes, so go figure, evolution fans.

As for the Austrian Jazz Filly - yes, the new singer arrives (with T) today to pick up the microphone-shaped baton. Or rather, to pick it up on Tuesday, after I’ve gone. Although you never know, I may call her up on stage to do a duet tomorrow night.

E (for that is her initial) won’t be performing with the same trio as me; and I don’t know whether it was my suggestion or what T had planned anyway, but she’ll be singing with two different, alternating bands. This is a much better way to work it, as it’s hard to secure players for a six nights a week (they normally have other regular residencies which, understandably, they don’t want to give up for a two-month booking); and also, perhaps most importantly, it means that he can book the guys who are already playing, and know and love, jazz.

So… off to the shopping mall for final, final-gift buying. There just wasn’t enough utter tat and Michael Buble CDs at the street market, y’know?

*I called this phenomenon TARDIBAR: ‘Time And Relative Dimension In B And Andrea’s Relationship’.

A silly thing happened today. I was looking at videos of old jazz performances on YouTube, and found myself going from link to link to link until I ended up watching a few scenes from a film I’ve never seen before.

(I think the sequence of events was Betty Carter > Charlie Haden > Charlie Haden & Pat Metheney > film clip.)

The film was Two For The Road - and the reason I was led there is that Charlie Haden and Pat Metheney, on their lovely album Beyond The Missouri Sky, played the theme tune from this movie, which is by Henry Mancini. Apparently ‘Two For The Road’ was his own favourite out of all the songs that he wrote.

But that’s by the by.

Two For The Road was made in 1967 and stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney as a married couple going through a bad time; and the movie traces their relationship in the form of flashbacks. Like I say, I’ve never seen it - I just gathered this from the clips on YouTube and from the write-up on IMdb.com.

But once again: that’s all by the by.

The reason I’m writing this is that one of the clips made me cry. And it doesn’t matter really very much what it was about… Because what I’ve realised is that I’m finding it difficult, these days, to watch lovers. Or actors pretending to be lovers.

I get up on stage and sing love songs every night; and yet I am yearning, longing for love. And feeling its absence so acutely that it hurts. I feel like I’m clinging to something, and barely hanging on to it.

It’s two years ago to the weekend that I met B.

And I miss him.

And my heart is at a loss. And I don’t quite know what to do.

Maybe I shouldn’t even publish this.

But what the hell…

Night night, all.