Rory McLeod 78

I have mentioned Rory McLeod earlier - he's a musician, most enjoyable.

One of his concert pieces is "78" - a blues harmonica tune woven with a story about collecting 78 records. To sinfully over-simplify the story the problem with collecting old 78s is that they're often scratched and sometimes get stuck in little loops - jumping back a track of two on the disk. With a particularly bad one McLeod got sick of getting up to carefully move the needle on and thought "I'll just listen to it skipping about". 78 is a harmonica piece based on the useless old record. It's a witty torrent of repeating phrases - slowly hiccuping its way through a tune. Admittedly it's a novelty piece, which is never a great thing in itself, but, better harmonica playing you will not hear.

Eminently unsuitable for recording I'm unlikely ever to hear it again - but just in case I set up a Google Alert for "Rory McLeod 78". You know what a Google Alert is, right? They're brilliant. Often I set them, completely forget about them and then get surprised by Google generated emails related to something long forgotten.

There is little chance of this with "Rory McLeod 78" as it turns out that another Rory McLeod is a contemporary snooker player - quite given to scoring 78 it seems. Most annoying.