Pete Thomas’s Blog

You’ve read about our experience of being caught in the worst downpour since records began, Goretex is now our best friend. When I first bought the waterproof trousers I got home and thought, F***, I’ve just paid £90 for plastic trousers. No, no, no. I ‘m so glad I didn’t take them back and buy the £9.99 Pacamac trousers from Matalan. I soon realised once they were on that they had some great features. Not only a zip on the bottom outside of the legs to help put them on over your boots, but there is a sort of double zip feature so you can also unzip the outside of the legs from the top of the leg downwards if you want a bit of ventilation on your thighs without undoing the whole thing from the bottom upwards and having them flap about in the breeze. I hope you can follow this, easier to understand (just) if you are actually wearing them.

There is something deep in your psyche that makes you not want to put waterproof trousers on. I don’t know if it’s just the palava of pulling them over your boots or a macho thing, but once you’ve experienced boots full of rain you know you need them. The problem is scattered showers (which is what the weather forecast always says as they have to hedge their bets - you can’t really really complain if they are wrong about scattered showers, if it doesn’t rain they’ll just say you weren’t in the place where they were scattered).

On the last walk (which included scattered showers) I had the Goretex trousers on but felt slightly uncomfortable on the inside of my right thigh, even though my normal trousers were quite light and comfortable. So, I took the plunge (having threatened Laurie for a while with removing my actual trousers and just wearing the waterproofs), and we stopped (luckily a bit later than than the sudden meeting with the Fickles Hole Riding School weekly outing) for me to remove my trousers and resume the walk in just the Goretex trousers.

After some trepidation (and hoping I wouldn’t turn into a Goretex fetishist), I realised that it was actually working quite well and that maybe I could become friends with these trousers, especially the upper zips on the outside leg. Just a pity there is no zip at the front.

Apart from one round of begging emails to friends and clients, my fundraising has all been via donations on my website and forum, along with any advertising revenue from the sites. We were initially going to try yardsales and fundraising parties, but so far things are looking quite good as it is and I’m quite close to the target £2650, but of course it will be nice to make more.

Luckily the main site seems to be quite popular, I have plenty of jazz and saxophone tutorials which unlike many comparable online resources, are available free of charge, but I do of course suggest that donations for the fundraising are welcome.

“Sampleaid” is working particularly well. This is where I make my own custom made working audio files available. Many music producers have such a library which they have built up over the years, and are usually a jealously guarded personal unique resource, and mine was no exception until last year when I decicded to make part of it available via downloads and CDs in order to help with the fundraising. I set up a “Sample Aid” paypal account so the funds can be kept away from my own business earnings and all the income can go straight to APEC.

The saxophone instruction DVDs are also selling very well, but I have to buy these from the producer so can only donate the profits to the fund. They are also available from Amazon and various other on and offline retail outlets so I have a bit of competition with those.
The UK Saxophone Teachers directory is not doing so well. I thought that this would attract more applicants than it has. I’ve raised a small amount with it, but realised that it needs a lot more publicity and work getting it networked via other online directories. I won’t give up on this, but because of the amount of work it will have to wait until after the Peru Trek.