It’s all right Ma, I’m only dreaming

BRITISH seaside towns. All fish and chips, crimson radiated bodies, flab and flip-flops as far as the eye can see.

Happy, yelling children, pebble-tortured feet, beach-casting anglers with nothing biting. Screaming Stuka gulls dive-bombing the unwary ice cream eater.

Faded cloud-white hotels called The Imperial, Grosvenor, Atlantic, Riviera… Ocean View. Bars packed with silver-haired silence and solitude, old people staring into long-gone stories but lacking the energy to give them voice.

And somewhere between the shingle line and the limp English Channel tideline, there sits the lone harmonica player singing to the waves.

Once a busker, always a busker. Even if there’s no longer a hat or cash-hungry instrument case gaping wide like a fledging bird’s beak, the notes nevertheless keep coming and sent wailing across the seas to France… and maybe even beyond, who knows.

That busker’s me. Most days during this holiday week, I walk down to those stony sands with a lunch bag full of metal sandwiches in various keys. I find a suitable spot, unfold the collapsible chair, sit down, stare at the horizon for a while, and take in a full lungful of salty sea air.

Then, in the manner of Little Jack Horner, I put my hand in the bag and pull out a musical plum. And just like Jack, what a clever boy am I, because it’s in the key of ‘A’ which makes it perfect for a ‘cross harp’ blues solo or two in ‘E’. Blues harp players will know what I mean.

Those sometimes drunken, slurring notes seem to melt into eternity. Who knows, maybe they fly like migrating birds to their birthplace in America’s Mississippi Delta. Maybe get as far as Clarksdale, sacred city of the blues.

Or could it even be that the soul of Chicago’s great harmonica maestro Little Walter can hear them, waking him in the spirit world, with perhaps the great man even giving them his approving nod? One can dream.

Ah, a few middle-class passers-by have seen me. Nevertheless, they pretend otherwise - of course - and keep their distance, probably thinking that the elderly man with a jazzer’s greying goatee beard and tattered straw hat is off his rocker and roll.

After all this is 21^st century Britain. Nothing out-of-the-ordinary is allowed to disturb the hallowed halls of social media, Love Island and its botoxed, bicepped and pectoral heavy synthetic celebrity.

After a while, the diatonic harmonica goes back in its case, and is replaced by his bigger cousin, a stylish, silver-bright chromatic instrument that’s been endorsed by the late great Toots Thielemans, no less.

Yes, Toots Thielemans. I met Belgium's famous son once in Brussels. He was enjoying a meal in the Rue Des Bouchers and I took the liberty of introducing myself. To my horror, he promptly poured an entire glass of red wine down his beige summer suit. I do have this effect on people…

Mind you, later that evening, I saw him empty another brimming glass of vin rouge down the same garment, so – surmising that this might be a habit of his, or a ritual of some sort – I started to feel less guilty.

Who knows. Maybe if I start following suit – as it were - I will become as skilled as he undoubtedly is on the harmonica.

Unlike the guitar, such is its small size, the harmonica can always travel incognito, ready to emerge from one’s pocket and make its appearance known, should circumstances permit or even encourage.

However, don’t even think about it should you find yourself in Sicily. I was once nearly arrested on Taormina railway station when a smelly, sweaty policeman with several days’ growth and extract-of-dung breath interrupted my impromptu harmonica accompaniment to a train that had just pulled in. Think Junior Parker’s Mystery Train… 16 coaches long.

Anyway, he gave me the full menacing foreign cop experience, but thankfully, I had my passport handy and it was possibly that – plus me playing the innocent for a change, instead of the fool or said harmonica – which convinced him to eventually move on to persecute someone else.

Later that day in Catania, I saw a young female busker being hassled by the police, who not content with giving her grief, also broke up the enthusiastic crowd which had come to hear her play. Buskers take note - avoid Sicily at all costs. It’s not just the Mafia you’ve got to contend with.

Busking has changed out of all recognition since my first foray on some long-lost late 1960s seafront. Back then, influenced by the sterling example of the late Don Partridge, I quickly realised that learning a few chords on a guitar, plus a handful of rasped tunes on a diatonic harmonica, could open the portal to whole new universe, one that for me had instant appeal.

Sloop John B. Tom Dooley. If I Had a Hammer… Got My Mojo Working. Sounds familiar. And that’s a statement not a question.

And while it’s true that busking since then has moved from the acoustic to the amplified, with many musicians now using an array of electric gadgetry to sell their sounds, it seems that reports of the street artist’s death, as in the case of Mark Twain, may well be greatly exaggerated.

As for me, I still like to travel light. For just as legendary gunslinger Doc Holliday could produce his pistol in an instant, so can this harpslinger draw his weapon of choice in a split second and start fanning notes in all directions.

So - if you see a certain elderly man with a goatee beard wearing a tattered straw hat sat on a beach somewhere near you, please rest assured he’s not completely mad. For as Bob Dylan almost said - but didn’t - it’s all right Ma, he’s only dreaming.