Metal bodies in my finger

www.betika.co.uk


I had a random and unexpected episode of self-torture yesterday. I was folding up an old microphone stand when I suddenly felt a strange, dull pain in my finger - I looked to see what might have caused it, and discovered that a piece of chrome plating had flaked off the stand and embedded itself beneath my fingernail. Blood started seeping out, and it quickly became apparent why things beneath the fingernails were the instrument of choice for torturers from ancient China to the modern day. I tried pulling it out with a pair of needlenose pliers, but being a piece of flaky chrome plate, the bit at the end that I was pulling just, well, flaked off. I realised that I'd have to do something that was going to cause me a lot more pain before things stopped hurting. I cut away as much of the nail around the foreign body as I could bear with a pair of side-cutters, then accompanied but an awful lot of screaming and cursing I pushed one side of the needlenose pliers under the nail, (and so not to push it in further, under the piece of metal), gripped it and pulled it out as best I could. Did I mention that I was doing this with my left hand? I've probably got better than average dexterity in my left hand than the average right-hander as a result of the years I've wasted playing music, but it still felt very unnatural to be conducting exctractive surgery on myself southpaw. As a consequence, the metal came out in about half a dozen short stages, rather than the one short, sharp tug I was aiming for. When I finally got it out it was about two millimeters by four, totally disproportionate to the amount of discomfort it caused me.
I spend the day doing something much more pleasant - making field recordings of an open fire, and then later of birdsong out in the New Forest. The birdsong made me particularly relaxed and happy, spring has most definitely sprung and I reckon there were a good dozen species around me, all in good voice. And one other that didn't make a sound, as far as I could tell, and I spent ages watching it - a Green Woodpecker, not something I've ever had the opportunity to sit down at watch at length before. I don't know if they do actually peck wood, like the spotted woodpeckers do, this chap was pecking the ground with his enormous great long beak, every now and then thrashing his head around - like a dog that won't give your tennis ball back - as he wrestled with some unfortunate subterranean invertibrate.
In the evening Carolyn and I returned to the room where a very different incarnation of Betika recorded "Heads smashed in by the boy/girl thing", to record what will be the first section of the first song of the oh-so-nearly finished new record. We did this for continutiy, and a little bit out of nostalgia. The section we wanted to record was only around a minute long, but we did something like 67 takes of it! I think we cracked it around take 52, but we kept going, just in case we managed a better one. We'll listen back to it all tomorrow and find out.