london Archives » Angelina Egerton

10 January 2014 2 Comments

I hope everyone is settling in to the New Year nicely, who is keeping their resolutions?

So I just looked back to my ‘Week 2’ post of last year. It makes rather depressing reading. I was struggling financially and needed a part time job to tide me over. I felt out of control regarding my earnings and hated living month to month, not knowing if I’d be able to pay rent next month.

Well, a lot can change in a year.

I had so much work in November and December of 2013 it was absolutely fantastic, as well as a bit frantic. I admit I was looking forward to the quiet of January. I knew I’d made enough money to feed myself even if I got no work this month – which happily isn’t the case. I also feel a lot more in control of my finances since using the iPhone app ‘Back in Black’, which I talk about in the post Will We Always Feel Skint?

So rather than wallowing in the lack of work and freaking out about the future, I’m taking a different approach this year. I’m being generally a bit more on it, getting stuff done regarding admin, practice and other life-stuff that needs doing. I’m also using this time to take stock, to think about possible projects for the upcoming year and setting myself some targets. More info coming on those projects as and when… but I’m pretty excited already! So basically, when I thought January would be something of a holiday, I was wrong, it’s a holiday from three gigs a week but there’s still so much to do!

This last week I’ve been playing down in London, but annoyingly I’m not allowed to say what I was doing! This will definitely be the subject of a post around April time so keep your eyes peeled. This photo was shared on Facebook so I guess I’m allowed to share it here, check out the beautiful paper birds:

But that’s literally all I can say at this point, so watch this space!

In other news, my harp quartet have been brainstorming ideas for this year too. 2014 is going to be an exciting year. If you haven’t seen our website yet you can visit it here.

London!

Yesterday I spent the afternoon snoozing on the train down to London Euston. I had a background gig in the Royal Courts of Justice with the lovely, talented, Esther Swift. We form half of the harp quartet Clouds, I’m sure I’ll be writing lots more about us in the upcoming months but only two of us were available on this occasion so we were the Clouds duo.

Before smartphones, I have no idea how I found my way around London. I love going to visit and see the sights – I always have to visit the Natural History Museum, that’s the geeky part of me – but I had no idea where to find the Royal Courts of Justice. Google maps, what a life saver. Also being able to google ‘nearest tube to courts of justice’ proved very handy. All of which resulted in me arriving one and a half hours earlier than I needed to. Luckily there was a nice looking cafe right opposite so I sat in the window and took some photos:

This was after the first attempt, a car drove past me at the wrong moment and it just looks like a nice photo of London cab:

Anyway, Esther arrives and we decide to make our way into the building, past the security checks and then we had to wait for the harps to be delivered.

A note here, thank you so much to Holywell Music for allowing us to hire a couple of lovely harps for the evening. I’ve driven to gigs in London before with my harp – so not worth it – I had a run in with a traffic warden who made me cry (I was in a designated loading bay!) And just finding parking that’s accessible with harp is so difficult. London-based harpists… I salute you!

So hiring harps meant we could get the train down – very cheap – and I could have a drink after the gig! Amazing!

We were provided with exceptional canapés, which looked so good I had to take a picture:

I’d like to add that that’s apple juice, not whisky.

We were playing on a balcony overlooking the Great Hall, the view was fantastic:

The whole hall was packed for the event, luckily we were mic’d up so apparently we could actually be heard. It really did look fantastic. I gave my card and demo CD to a man who organises weddings in Rhodes… what an amazing gig that would be!

Finding a stair-free way to get the harps onto the balcony was interesting, everyone was telling us different things and I don’t think anybody really knew if there was a way. But we found one, unfortunately we found it after taking a harp up a lot of stairs, only to have to bring it back down – it would be comical if it wasn’t so annoying!

A big thank you as well to Ben Lloyd-Evans at Sternberg Clarke for sorting it all out for us. We had a great time!

Erm, where’s my time off?

London!