In the depths of Englandshire last weekend I crossed a narrow hump-backed bridge and realised as I passed a skinny sentry box containing a little old man that it was a toll bridge.  Not wishing to run the risk of ending up in a foreign jail I stopped and walked back a hundred yards to regularise my situation.

The little old man thanked me profusely for my upright conduct and I paid the 5p toll.  Can there be a heavy enough stream of traffic going over this bridge to make that economic or it is maintained by a jolly band of volunteers who form Ye Olde Toll Bridge Preservation Society?  Whichever it is they probably don't have number plate recognition cameras so I could have sped off with impunity and spent the 5p elsewhere though I can't think of many things you can get for 5p.

I had another interesting financial moment when I proffered a Clydesdale Bank tenner in a branch of Tesco.  The cashier expressed doubts as to the acceptability of the note and summoned a supervisor.  She said oh yes, as long as it has sterling on it it's fine.  So there's what to do with any old notes from faraway places that linger in your holiday clothes.  Overprint STERLING in nice bold letters and nip down south to a remote branch of Tesco.

I had been away to play the saxophone in the company of others in two different places.  One I had been to before is a local authority institution where all sorts of courses are run year round and where there is a full catering staff.  There were about 30 of us and I played in groups from two in number to the full strength and played a great variety of music.  In our last session for example we played music ranging from a Glen Miller medley to the finale of Dvorak's New World Symphony.

The other place was a large farmhouse rented by the couple running the course.  They do the same thing in other parts of the country and abroad and not only do the music but the catering as well.  That seems to me quite a challenge which they managed successfully, so the dozen or so participants were well fed in both regards.  There was more of an emphasis on individual performance here so you spent a certain amount of time preparing something to play in front of the others.  That helped the organizers get on with the domestic side I guess.

The others in this case were not all saxophonists. There was a flute contingent and one clarinettist who floated between the saxes and the flutes.  

Now in between these two courses I had a weekend and rather than bounce up and down I stayed in the area, did a bit of tourism, went to the theatre and visited some friends whom I hadn't seen for some time, in one case for over 20 years.  In preparation for all this whizzing about to places I'd never been or hadn't been to for decades I bought a sat-nav, something I've resisted for years.  But it proved very useful, to the extent that on leaving a multi-storey car-park in Northampton in the dark I didn't even bother to think whether I should turn right or left but just went with the flow and let it sort me out.  Its one weakness would seem to be a failure to issue warnings on approaching 5p toll bridges.