The band I’m in is playing its penultimate gig of 2022, in Stroud. Our trumpet player is not available, because she just had a baby. We’ve rehearsed a set that covers for her absence, but at the last minute the fiddle player tests positive for Covid. Suddenly we’re down from seven to five.
We have swapped parts, changed arrangements and added some songs we haven’t played in years. It feels like a bit of a high-wire act, but it is only when it’s time for me to play a brief guitar solo – one I have played perhaps hundreds of times without incident – that things go catastrophically wrong.
