These were received while busking:

Man putting in 50p: “I’d put in a quid if you’d play something decent.” [What. I mean. What.]

Woman walking past while we were playing some fast jigs: “Thank you. It’s very calming.” [So how was she feeling before? Crikey...]

Middle aged, portly man with glasses and a beard: “Now, you can very obviously play the violin. That’s good. Now, don’t you think that instrument [pointing to Tom's bouzouki] – now, it’s exactly a lute, is it?… but anyway, it would make a very good continuo if you were to play some Corelli or Vivaldi…”

And so we are brought to two more of our Categories of People Encountered While Busking. The last example actually falls into both at once, and the first falls into one of them.

The first category is: People Who Are Slightly Offended That You Have The Ability to Play an Instrument But Are Not Using It to Play The Exact Genre of Music That They Like.

I mean, how dare we? How dare we spend years learning to play an instrument and not develop a) the psychic ability to determine when somebody wants us to play ‘Wonderful Tonight’ [probably what the first man wanted, by the look of him...] or Vivaldi, and b) a universal knowledge of and ability to play all music ever written? It’s shameful, really. I don’t know how we sleep at night. I do, however, live in hope that someone from this category suggests to us that although what we’re playing in very nice, what they’d really like to hear is a little Stockhausen.

Category 2, for today, is “Experts”.

These are almost invariably slightly portly, bespectacled, bearded, middle aged men, who for some reason are desperate to communicate to us that they know a bit about music too. This desire for recognition generally indicates that actually they don’t know very much about it at all, they just want to – a true academic such as a music lecturer would be more likely to just watch and smile from a distance, and if they were to talk to us it would probably be some kind of sparse compliment such as, ‘Very nice.’ But these chaps who want to appear scholarly insist on telling us all sorts of information about what we’re playing, because apparently they know much more about it than we do. And the problem is that frequently they don’t and it makes it all rather difficult because my natural urge is to contradict them and it’s very difficult to find that happy medium between the inane ’smile and nod’ approach and coming right out and saying, ‘Look. You have gaps in your knowledge. You obviosuly do not know more about my instrument than I do so stop asking me about it and then contradicting everything I say; English tunes are not certified ‘Gaelic’ and why are you asking what that last tune was called just so you can say, ‘No it wasn’t actually, it was this other thing’?” You see it’s tricky. Usually I aim for the ’smile and be ever so subtly sarcastic’ approach, but it really uses up a lot of brainspace which I’d rather use for being able to remember what the notes are etc.

I suspect most of them play the recorder expressionlessly while wobbling their heads, because of some misguided notion that that’s the authentic way to do it.

And here ends today’s rant.