I used to run my own Big Band while at college (for want of something better to do, frankly), and one day the singer of this Big Band said that she was ‘guest singing’ with a local 13-piece that night in a pub, and would I like to bring my charts along?  Get your arrangements heard, she said.  Maybe I’ll get somework out of it, she said.
 
       Well, like an idiot I turned up that night with my charts - but having forgotten two important things: the first was that my calligraphy has always been shit, and was doubly so in this instance as I was writing, arranging, and copying out a Big Band tune a week on my own, which is a tedious enterprise at the best of times, all the more so when, like me, you have the attention span of an olive.  So the dots were - and I can say this freely - all but unintelligible.
 
       The second thing was that I had neglected to ask if the band playing that night could sight-read.  I had foolishly assumed they could.  In the event (unfortunately for everyone) they could not - they had simply been playing the same charts for the best part of fifty years; indeed, the youngest member was well into his eighties, and never mind reading: I don’t think he could SEE.  By the way he was rocking back and forth on his chair, the grunting noises he was making, and the fact that he appeared to have recently urinated into his trousers (the steam and the pong gave him away) I didn’t think him long for this world anyway, so I paid him no heed.  The rest of them were little better, quite honestly, in varying states of dementia, and as they launched ineptly, gracelessly, and noisily into the opening bar ofthe opening tune, like a Mad Cow in an antiques store, I realised I had made a dreadful, dreadful mistake…
 
       Well, I shan’t dwell on the matter; it’s too painful for me to recall in much detail - some sort of ‘trauma memory block’ appears to have set in.  But it was, entirely without question, the most f***ing awful noise that I have ever had the misery to be associated with, andI have played some truly dreadful s**te in my time.  It sounded like afully functional abattoir.  That’s the best comparison I can draw.
 
       The idea was (or had been) that I was to contribute two songs to the first set, and two to the second set, after a half hourbreak.  Well, wouldn’t you know it?  Someone called in a bomb scare! We all had to go home!  Or in my case, to the nearest pub, where I got as drunk as I know how.
 
       Which is very.