After managing the Covid crisis so well, the disease is now raging all over the country. Over the past ten days, the total number of deaths has equalled or even surpassed the total number of deaths that occurred between March and October. Even more depressing is that the average age is decreasing with the result that more and more people in their 30s are in ICUs.
Unsurprisingly, we are back in lockdown. Text 13033 with one of six numbered reasons for permission to leave home e.g. 2 = shopping. If you are working, you need a letter from your employer in order to travel to and fro. To top it all, there is a 9pm to 5:30 am curfew. Greece being Greece, apparently in just one week (and AFTER the 9pm curfew) more than one million texts were sent with number 6, physical exercise. The government tightened up: you can only walk your dog after 9pm. Result? More Greeks are adopting or buying dogs. The inevitable consequence? A spike in abandoned animals once the crisis is over.
Going back to the six numbers, none of them includes visiting someone except if they need help. For example, we use No. 4 to visit my 85-year-old mother-in-law. So social gatherings are out. There is no way we will have a practice in November, and — given the huge rise in Covid infections – I cannot see the restrictions being lifted on the scheduled end date, 2nd December.
I’m practising almost daily and putting new sets together, sets that might never be played. The difficult thing is trying to deal with the pointlessness of engaging in little things that are of importance at a personal level. There is no Irish music scene here and my efforts to establish even the seed of a session scene have been thwarted by Covid, one Covid-related bankruptcy, illness and apathy, by which I mean our failure to attract players outside our little bubble of seven people.
Anyway, here is a little booklet I found yesterday. It can be downloaded and saved: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/513b0e2ae4b00efcff53fccf/t/5b19880f03ce6431f3de7ce4/1528399920889/The+Dutch+Session+Tunebook+-+2nd+ed.pdf
It is a lovely text with sheet music, chords, notes on the tunes, a nice introduction including excellent guidance on session etiquette. Most of the tunes are well-known. The author is on www.thesession.org I will write him a thank-you note.