But before your eyes they are changing

[cosmolinguist]

After thinking we'd missed out on tickets to see Public Service Broadcasting, D heroically managed to both secure them and register us as a disabled person and carer so we could get to the crip section of the venue. He'd been there before and I hadn't, so he really was a carer.

The most exciting thing for D was that the venue which had previously been notorious among my friends for its terrifying stair-climber to get wheelchair users up its many many stairs now has a lift/elevator! (We were able to get out much more quickly and easily than fighting through the whole crowd by going down those very stairs so I still got to see them and, yep, would not like to navigate them as a wheelchair user in any way. I was very glad I didn't have to walk up them on my dodgy ankle!)

The most exciting thing for me was that the crip area had a drinks runner! Each pair of seats had a little leaflet on it with a few accessibility basics and a menu of what we could order from the bar. co2 numbers were high enough that we wanted to keep our masks on generally but okay-ish enough that we could just about feel okay getting one drink, so we did and it was super cool. Of course I usually have a similar system that involves just sending D to the bar! But it was so nice that he didn't have to do it either. Ethan the drinks runner was quick and cheerful and graceful carrying liquids around in the dark and didn't seem at all perturbed by his job, which helped me feel good about asking him to do it for us.

I tried hard to learn the two most recent PSB albums in about a week (and a week when my phone wasn't working well at anything, including playing music, and also one where I had too many work meetings to listen to anything) and I'm glad I did because very reasonably we heard more of them than we did the three I know -- which I think got about five songs between them.

After a few songs from The Last Flight and at least one or two from Bright Magic, a familiar chord filled my ears and my heart and transported me back to 2018, seeing them at Blue Dot with my friend Bethan and then buying myself a t-shirt as a treat to myself after finishing my first year of uni. The t-shirt has "I believe in progress" written above the three versions of their increasingly-abstract logo from the first three albums -- very clearly a radio telescope at first, it because a sufficiently abstract series of lines and angles in the same shape that it could be animated as pumping water out of a mine in the video played at their gigs when the Welsh coal-mining album was new.

When I wrote about their music like this and looked like this:

So, so many things were different then.

But some of the changes really have been progress.

Comments

[silveradept]

That sounds like it was a really good concert for you and D, even with memories trying to come crashing through like that.