Love, Poetry and Revolution - Thursday 18th May 2023

Still not sleeping properly. Ho hum. Another slow start to the day, which is only possible today because the cleaner cancelled late last night. A lucky coincidence!

Work, obvs.

Back to The Idler drinks again tonight with guest speaker Madeleine Bunting, talking out English seaside towns and her book 'The Seaside: England's Love Affair', an extract from which can be found here. Madeleine was a great speaker and had some interesting thoughts on the English seaside, bringing back memories of teenage summers spent in Torquay and Babbacombe as well as many more recent favourites.

After the talk, a chat with Idler friends before dinner with sons 1 and 2.  In the end - there are always delays - son #1 and I watched another, very funny, episode of 'Colin From Accounts', which I'm loving.

Off to bed early. Again.  Chatted with Q, natch, then hoped for sleep.

Jane's Addiction / 'Just Because' / 'Strays'


[[]]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Tales From The Crypt - Friday 21st and Saturday 22nd January 2022

Image
Another one of those combined posts, this time covering Friday and Saturday, with both being written after the event. Friday was a working day so not much to say about it other than the observation that this week felt like it was one of the longest weeks ever, despite at the same time feeling that January is almost over and also being the month with 90 days.  Time and our perception of it, eh? Saturday started as usual with a trip to the bread stall in the market plus a few of the other shopping haunts before returning home for breakfast, washing and packing. Mid-morning, all chores complete, I packed my car and headed south for the coast, hoping to stay until Monday morning as there are several reasons why that would be a good idea, not least the company. Looked at a house in the afternoon, returned via the supermarket to get some ingredients to make lasagne and carrot cake cheesecake for dinner. The day draws to a close with another day away in prospect to look forward to... Melo...
Read more

Dreadzone at SUB89 in Reading Friday 7th April 2017

Image
Back to SUB89 and also to Dreadzone after a semi-enforced break, on a Friday night and accompanied by my sons - "Dreadzone virgins" in the words of MC Spee: sounds like the setting for a great night out... ...and so it proved to be! There was no support act though Greg Dread (Greg Roberts, drummer) played a DJ set prior to Dreadzone taking to the stage - a gentle warm up for what was to follow.  The band took to the stage to cheers and applause and launched straight into 'Rootsman' from the new album, a great reggae-based opener that led neatly into MC Spee's intro for 'Return of the Dread' - and already the "bouncing crew" was in full sway. Dreadzone are a joyous band live - it's impossible not to dance - and I for one had a grin from ear to ear whilst dancing for the entire two hour set. There was a good mix of old and new songs though a definite bias towards their most "successful" album, Second Light. S...
Read more

World Shut Your Mouth

Image
A lot of people seem to go to gigs to hear the headline act, but nothing more (not to mention those who don't seem to go to hear the music at all?)  I'm  always keen to hear the support, especially if I've never heard of them as you never know what you'll find. And so I found myself at the front of the stage in SUB89 waiting for Tom Hickox to take to the stage. Never heard of him or heard anything by him, so looking forward to hear what he does. As the hour of 8pm arrived, he took to the stage and seated himself behind a large electric piano, joined by Sam Grimley on various guitars. From his opening number, I was struck by his voice - he really has presence on stage. For the first song or two I just thought, 'yeah, he sounds OK, but...', and wasn't really drawn in. A couple of songs had great stories behind them, and his spoken intros to 'The Lisbon Maru' and 'The Dubbing Artist' were intriguing.  The song that really land...
Read more

Love, Poetry and Revolution - Tuesday 25th March 2025

Image
After a long period of stasis, I have just completed the first step in changing our house and garden to meet the needs of us all.  The first step is converting our garden into a usable space for socialising and hosting gatherings (maybe with food if guests are lucky!) I'm on the verge of starting a project to convert our garage into a combined music room, library, and guest bedroom. It's long been a dream of mine to have a library and a music room, and this dream is now almost a reality.   You might ask why I didn't start this sooner? The overarching reason is that being E's carer, with all that entailed, it was almost impossible (for a long time) to muster the energy or positivity needed to make such big changes. Not only that, some of these changes would have been impossible whilst E was in her hospital bed. Getting to the point where I could even imagine there was a future for me was a very long process involving pain, upheaval, and a lot of counselling.  I need t...
Read more

Winner of January's Album of the Month

Image
Funny old world! I’ve been listening to these five albums (you remember, the latest from The National, Salem, Oneohtrix Point Never and Wire plus an oldie, Cluster ’71 by Cluster) since the start of January and my thoughts about almost all of them have changed several times.  At least I didn’t rush out and buy them all: chalk one up to the experiment! I had planned to write an interim posting of thoughts on the albums so far, but in fact time has overtaken me: this post announces the winner of the January album of the month instead. Before announcing the winner, what of the other albums? King Night the debut album from Salem : I had high hopes for this one. I like it. It has the sort of ‘dark’ sounds I find appealing, but if anything it’s just not dark enough. Nevertheless it has quite a unique sound somewhere on the fringes of dubstep, dark core drum ‘n bass and industrial electronica, much of it slowed down to a crawl.  On the basis of ‘King Night’ I’ll keep a look out fo...
Read more