The New Guitar

What a way to start the week! My dream guitar has just arrived! It's a 2015 model Les Paul with a tobacco sunburst finish. Okay, I wouldn't personally have chosen tobacco sunburst. Neil Young plays a wonderfully battered black Les Paul and I consider that the true classic colouring. This guitar isn't battered. It is brand new, in its original box, and obviously hasn't been touched by human hand since the day it left the factory. The retail price is a mere £2,499. It's sitting in the hall as I type this. Look -->

And the reason I'm typing this instead of plugging the guitar into my amp and hitting a few power chords is that I have no bloody idea who the guitar belongs to. It was supposed to go to the neighbour's house but they're not in. Not that the name on the box is actually that of our neighbour. Which makes me wonder: what kind of person buys a two and a half thousand pound guitar and doesn't make proper arrangements for somebody to be in when it gets delivered?

If I believed in God, I'd say God was testing me, punishing me, or simply mocking me.

Yet I say that but I've never been a huge fan of expensive guitars. I like looking at them and I know a better guitar would improve my playing immeasurably. I have two guitars. My first is a Gibson acoustic which despite being relatively cheap when I bought it, is now considered quite a decent guitar. The only problem is that it has an extremely high action and isn't the best guitar on which to learn. Since I've been learning for decades, I suppose I'm use to it. Or, at least, I'm used to not playing that well or feeling that I warrant, deserve, or (if I'm honestly) would ever pay £2,499 for a guitar. My other guitar is a Fender Strat but one of the cheaper Japanese models I bought when I was working but still didn't really understand these things and couldn't afford a Les Paul. I don't really like the Strat, though it's much easier to play. I assume the guy who bought the Les Paul sitting in the hall can play like an angel. That, at least, is what I'm telling myself along with the lie that I'm not really too jealous. Had it been a Surface Pro 3 that had just been delivered, I might have believed it a message and I'd had given everything up before breakfast.

As it is: I have so much to do this week. Two websites to build and two 'projects' on the go. I'm determined to finish the smaller of the two projects, launch it on one of the two websites I need to build and use that as a trial for the bigger project. I hate talking about projects that I still don't want to talk about in detail. It makes me sound like I get nothing finished. This week I want to have at least one thing finished and that means I need to work. It might, at least, take my mind of the £2,499 guitar sitting in the hall.