Drove up to Carl’s house in North London – on the way I called in at a guitar tech’s house who’d recently re-fretted my PRS with Jim Dunlop 6100 jumbo frets (a bit of info for the gear heads out there!). Re-frets are brutal on the neck of your guitar (imagine, having all your teeth removed and replaced with new ones!) so it takes the poor thing about a week to get used to them – one last set-up and my guitar was much happier and feeling ready for the 6 week onslaught which was to follow (at least one of us was!).
Got to Carl’s house at a respectable time in the morning and set off with him and a driver for Heathrow airport. We met up with Stuart at Heathrow, and the fellowship of prog was reunited!
We flew with Virgin airlines… who have an amazing in flight entertainment system – you can watch any of their programmes or films whenever you want… pause, rewind, fast forward… Anyway, the point of me writing about this is that I watched 2 films… 1 was so moving I just have to tell you about it. It had a deeply profound and lasting impact on me, for days I was haunted by it… not the sort of thing you’d expect to get from an in-flight movie! The film was called ‘Shooting Dogs’. It was the dramatisation of a true event that happened about 10 years ago, in the Rwandan Genocide. If you haven’t seen it, do so at your first opportunity. We need to live with our eyes open to what has happened, and what could so very easily happen again (I see the same attitudes and fears that caused the genocide in Rwanda openly displayed in my home town of Burnley, Lancashire).
Anyway, on with the tour…
We arrived in JFK, got a connecting flight to Rochester where Bruce Pilato and his son Darren met us at the airport. We then checked into our hotel where our battle with the new time zone began!
