Day 60

Tuesday April 20

Mark:

Maja sits down to properly budget today to see how much time we can last on the money that’s available. Into this go a few things we can’t quite know such as the car we need to buy and how much rent we’ll have to pay for whatever we find in Ireland, including deposit. But we put figures here on the highest amounts we want to spend and factor that into the equations. What comes up is that if no more money came in at all, we have enough to last six months give or take.

A little cash injection would definitely help and I think it’s now time to make a suggestion I’ve been thinking about recently which could help us to pull in a chunk more before we set off. If it works and really comes through it could add four or five months to our viability. It might sound scary, but the answer is this. Medical trials. But really, not as scary or outlandish as you might think. I’m not coming at this blind. I’ve done two of them at the same facility in north London and the place in question was considered so safe that even the nurses working there would take out holiday and join a trial. Kinda like the workers in a sausage factory happily eating their own sausages or bar staff eating the food from the bar’s kitchen. Adds a layer or two of consumer confidence. It also helps that on my two trials I spoke to people with a lot of experience of doing them. Some even did them as their main source of income, and others saw them as a very powerful financial supplement to their self employed endeavours. The only financial restriction is that you can’t take a trial within three months of finishing one so you can’t just hop from one to another. But even so, it is still possible to do three or four a year if the jigsaw of schedules falls right. And if you get on the right ones, you really can make a liveable wage. I have a look and there are a couple starting soon that don’t take too long to complete and pay £3000 per person, so £6000 to add to our battle kitty should we both get on. Perfect if we could do that, especially as we have an enforced longer period in London now we have to wait for Maja’s ankle. It would also get us away from the house for a week or so. From what, I’m sure you can imagine, isn’t always the most comfortable of atmospheres. We decide to have a look at it just a little more, sleep on it, and if we still feel good about this tomorrow I’ll make the call. 

I also start to think further forwards and research, digging up and starting to remember contacts of mine from my time in Ireland. As do, I begin to feel like I’ve spent my whole life preparing for this. A few bullet points.

I’ve been involved in live music performance at many different levels for most of my life. Bass mostly of course, but a decent enough amount of experience on guitar, at the very least at a basic rhythm level, perfectly adequate for accompanying purposes.

I was a journalist for 10 years, covering a lot of different topics but I mostly gravitated towards music. There, I very deliberately researched that industry for around 10 years on so many different levels.

Four years of this journalistic experience was in Ireland where I built up the contacts and knowledge of the country and its music industry,

I have a whole bunch of songs I wrote over a period of years which we will now be looking at as we start to create our own set. Or at the very least, all that songwriting gives me a very solid basis of experience.

I spent six years as a full time English teacher in Madrid, and this is now being used to help Maja with her own English, meaning I’m able to answer language questions and explain language concepts to a deeper level than a layperson.

Then there’s Maja.

She’s a singer, or at least has already embarked on the journey of becoming one, along with already having embraced the possibility of fronting a band.

She drives

She has the very highest level of computer and internet skills, a vital component in any business that wants to make a real impact whatever the industry.

And for both of us

We share the same drive, ambition, work ethic and intensity. 

Here’s something we could both say: I’ve always had this intensity. I now feel there are two of me. 

It’s a cliche that any multiple of people can be greater than the sum of its parts, but we’re feeling even greater than a sum. Instead, we more have a feeling of things multiplying.

So basically, on a broad level, we very much share the same skillset and have the same ambitions and directions in which we want to take that skillset. But we also both have things the other doesn’t have and which complement and fill gaps in the others’ spectrum. As we contemplate all this we have a realisation. We are going to be famous. This is said as matter of factly as if we were saying we we’re going to pop out and buy some bread. It just totally feels like a totally unassailable, unstoppable truth.

Day 61

Wednesday April 21

Mark:

I get on the medical trial trail and speak to a person called Hannah who is very happy to hear from us and says that there’s no reason we can’t get the ball rolling from here. During these phone calls we discover that Maja weighs a little bit too much to participate right now, so she decides to go on a strict diet until the trial. Maja is also told she has to register with a GP but we are already looking at this so that’s handy. That happens today at our local practice Kentish town where I also take the opportunity to get the relevant medical records I need for the hospital.

We really start to dig deep today, looking at the modern music industry and how we can use it to actually make this thing work. It helps if you can break these things down into actual workable, tangible, realistic projects. With that, we realise we have our first goal: get a place in Ireland and organise the means to get there. Which means find a house in a country we’re currently not even in, and buy a car so that we can drive to wherever that ends up being. We also talk about what kind of music we’re going to write and play and conclude that it will be cute and poppy, maybe with a touch of attitude. We’re on our way. Kinda.

I call Per to say hi and then get round to what’s happening here. Kinda. ‘Remember that girl whose music we listened to and critiqued on the phone to her a few weeks back?’ ‘The Swedish one?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well she’s living with me now and we’re an item.’ I might as well have just told him I’d built a rocket in my back garden, was setting off for the moon today and did he fancy coming. He reacts like it’s obviously a joke. A not very funny one, but, ‘Yeah yeah. Of course she is.’ ‘No, really, she’s here now. Upstairs in the house and asleep right now.’ This actually goes back and forth a bit – more than looks good on the printed page – until finally something breaks. His voice suddenly changes tone he says, ‘You’re actually not joking are you? What the hell’s going on? What happened?’ When I’m finally able to get clear sky to let him in on things and on what we’ve been talking about and what we’re planning to do, he couldn’t be happier. For me, for us, for himself for simply hearing this kind of story happening in reality to a friend of his. ‘You think things like this can’t happen mate,’ he says. ‘To meet a girl whose on the same page as you as much as this on the things you both want to do, and that you’re really making a plan to go to go off and do all that together. That’s just the best thing I’ve heard in years.’ Then, when I tell him about the ankle break and what that’s done to our plans, he goes slightly into overdrive. ‘That’s too much now,’ he says. ‘You know this is a movie right?’ Yeah, I’ve been getting that a lot.

Day 62

Thursday April 22

Maja:

Neither of us sleeps very well, possibly with minds racing that this has all suddenly become very real and very doable.

This not sleeping would normally be OK and we’d just sleep more in the morning, but not today. I have to be at the hospital by 9am. We both go and the prognosis after it’s had time to settle is promising. It’s apparently healing exceptionally quickly. I also ask when I’ll be able to drive again and I am told in a week or two, which is great and may make our Ireland move possible at an earlier stage again. 

Mark:

Maja comes out all positive and almost ready to leave for Ireland this week. Now if we could, it seems to me. ‘When the doctor says you’re OK to drive, he’s probably thinking about a trip to the shops. Not a road trip of four to five hundred miles, without even thinking about how much driving about we might have to do when we actually get there. We have no idea if we’re going to get a place or where it’s going to be.’ A slightly sheepish OK comes back.

Maja:

I can now use the foot to walk with, even without the boot. We walk to hampstead heath and sit on a bench just looking. I am particularly affected by lack of sleep in general. Mark seems completely fine. The diet I started yesterday is affecting me kinda bad. I am hungry all the time and feel very dull, and it is not helpful that I couldn’t sleep last night. 

Mark:

Ambjorn, a friend I haven’t seen for over 20 years, gets in touch online today wanting to make a donation to the Diary. He says he’s read the whole thing, absolutely loves it and feels he really should pay something. Wow. I never even knew him that well. He was more a friend of friends, but yeah, you do the hang out thing and get on and all that, and now, here he is. The timing is perfect. His reachout makes it feel a bit like day one of the project as an actual person has got in touch and wants to make a payment into it. That’s real.

Per is delighted today when I call back and tell him I have someone here I would like him to meet. With that we’re on a three way call as Maja says hi. Before I know it they’re chatting like old friends and then then they start speaking together in a language that isn’t English. I interject to say I had no idea either Maja spoke Norwegian or Per Swedish. They both laugh and say that their languages are so close they’re able to speak Norwegian and Swedish respectively and be understood. That’s my thing learned for the day. As we chat, Per says they’re having a barbeque at his place this Saturday and would we like to come? Absolutely. Sounds wonderful. Thankyou very much. Here, I tell him that that’s my last day at the bar and I’m doing the early one so I’ll be done by five. Perfect, he says. I guess I’ll be seeing you guys around seven then. You most certainly will. So that’s my last day at the bar party planned.