Mustang Ford

I remember as a teenager wanting the album "My people were fair and had sky in their hair .... But now they're content to wear stars on their brows" just for the cover. The song "Mustang Ford" seems to be a bit of an oddity here but the subject would have been more suited to the electric T. Rex than the acoustic Tyrannosaurus Rex.

I never got the album although my first purchase was a budget FlyBack compilation "The Best of T. Rex" on the Fly label with the four square design. This album is now in my collection on CD and get's the odd play, but the cover is still, in my opinion the thing that drags you into it, it has a lot to look at and extra things keep jumping out at you, Pink Floyd's "A Saucerful of Secrets" has a similar effect on me.

This post came about because I saw a friend in their Ford Mustang and this is part of the raison d'etre of this blog to record events big and small that actually matter to me. The number of times I go back through this to dig up some extra information.

I'm also updating by friend Bob Armstrong's website and he does some amazing landscape paintings which you can see here. So enjoy Tyrannosaurus Rex and Bob Armstrong's amazing paintings on this cold bright Sunday.

Feeling Good - #Oktoberfest #21 - Seven Drunken Nights - The Dubliners

I'm not exactly sure why but yesterday I made two walks without thinking and without noticing that I had made them physically. One I do most Friday's but the other I sometimes take the bus for, instead this time walking from Citygate through St James' Park then Leazes Park and , yes , it took longer than the bus , but it was just incredibly natural. Both walks are up a hill, probably a couple of hundred feet rise and usually, while it doesn't bother me, I am aware of it, but yesterday I just wasn't, and I am not sure why but long may it continue.

The only very slight change is I have run out of Omega 3 capsules and been eating Minneolas , Oranges and Apples and yesterday had a Mumbai Sandwich from Snackwallah for lunch. I will see how this continues but feeling physically good is excellent, most of the time I feel OK, sort of adequate, but I do want to feel better. I am writing this at 6 am because, although it is Saturday morning I am mentally compos mentis enough to put fingers to keys and tap this out without any effort and that's good.

To day I need to get some website updates done for my artist friend Bob Armstrong (check out his amazing work by clicking here or on his name) , he does some amazing work. His wife Ann runch a plant nursery Woodland Plants and the Codonopsis Plant Information site both of which I also maintain. I'm not a fine of Web work but Bob and Ann are really lovely to deal with and lovely people.

So I've finally got round to including The Dubliners in the #Oktoberfest sequence but their first entry is going to be "Seven Drunken Nights" a song I've always found funny, and while I don't remember my parents having any Dubliners records they definitely always turned the radio up when this came on. It is Saturday morning , still dark and I have to have a shower , but this is a good start to what will be an excellent day. I challenge you to listen to this and not be taken in and sing along.

Let Forever Be

Finally finished "How To Stop Time" an easy / hard read but with an upbeat ending so happy about that, and now I've started on "The Fouteenth Letter" by Claire Evans. It doesn't look like the sort of thing that I normally read but has started very well and I shall inform you how it progresses. I have started other books and films that have an explosive start and then you spend ages waithing for something to happen and nothing ever does. YOu do need something to keep your attention, and the Matt Haig book certainly does that.

I don't know if it's me or my computer or my ISP but everything seems to be getting much slower, possibly due to the number of adverts, and the number of security bits that then they try to bypass. I don't want to stay logged in to most sites, especially not Paypal or Facebook, and I don't want Firefox or Chrome to remember my passwords either.

I've just listed some more CDs on Discogs as I need to make some more space and I do have digital copies of most of my CDs. I've just list a lot of Paul Weller if he's your thing. On the one hand it's difficult getting rid of stuff but you have to think if you are not going to play them again then someone else may have them.

It's the same with books and DVDs, if you are not going to use then make room, space is good.

The stuff I don't think will sell quickly are dropped in to Charity shops, mainly the Westgate Ark shop round the corner from me.

So another day like many other days, skies are grey ,but yesterday I sorted a couple of major work things, then came home and watched an episode of Gotham and Black Sails before retiring to bed. Bruce Wayne's car is getting more and more Batmobile like every week.

I have some web updates to do for Bob Armstrong and Woodlands Plants and at Art exhibition Ivelina Goverdovskaya: "Work in Progress" at Arch 16 to attend tonight so not a lazy day today.

For some reason (maybe talking about art) the excellent Michel Gondry video for The Chemical Brothers "Let Forever Be" came to mind, so I'll sign off with that.

Funny How

While people are not reading my posts as much as I thought , it doesn't help if I don't post on Facebook, even so the average hits per post have dropped from 50 to 25. Something that has been bothering me for about about a year is changing to format and hosting of Song of the Salesman and my friend Bob Armstong's sites.

Bob's is a static site so that was simple , but Song of The Salesman is an Access Database driven .Net site, which has served it's purpos and I don't think people are bothered what song was used for a Guinness Advert in 1999. I am looking to move it over to Joomla as people are more bothered about current information that past.

Today is the first day this month that I wont hit 11K but I am ahead of the target having done 4K so far, and I am going to brave the rain and do a few more steps soon.

Anyway, it seems recently I've not really been writing about the fun stuff, like music and travel and film, though I have been watching and listening , and I have just had an idea to put some of Bob's images together  and soundtrack it for a youtube video, and maybe use something like King Crimson's "The Night Watch" which is about the Rembrandt painting.

That seems a great point to stop and maybe I will post again later for #August50

Surprisingly Amazed by John Martyn

The late John Martyn is one of my many favourite artists, the amazing performance above left me awestruck and immediately had me captured. However in a completely sideways tangential coincidence I was sorting out my daughter's birthday present and as I was on Amazon I thought I'd check out their MP3 store for freebies and noticed the John Martyn Island Years (£160 on disc) for seven pounds. I don't know if this is mispriced, but if not it is a definite bargain.  Seventeen CDs , featuring nineteen hours of music, which will have knocked up my already large music collection fairly significantly.

Today has been another excellent day, despite visiting a dodgy part of town for a hospital clinic appointment with a very pleasant nurse, and again the weather has been beautiful.Have a great night everyone.

Nant Ffrancon Farm by Bob Armstrong

I could do with a picture and I keep ripping of Rebecca Cother, so I'll have one of Bob Armstrong's instead!

Problems, Solutions,Good Things, Art and Valhalla

We all have have them , sometimes they seem insurmountable. Sometimes you feel as though you are up against a brick wall and there's no way forward. Sometimes you find an alternative and it might be wrong , but sometimes you find an alternative and it's right. This breakthroughs are often inspired by totally unrelated happening within your life or experience such as a piece of good news or something great happening with a friend. For weeks I've been trying to work out how to do something with misfuctioning software. I had the option of trying to roll back the software (as yet the company haven't found a solution but they normally do) , or hand coding , both pf which I loathe and to lazy to do.

Then lots of little good things including Katie Pukrik's song selection on 6Music this morning (Springsteen's "Thunder Road" , Sparks "Number One Song In Heaven" among others) , good friends I've spoken to in years reappearing on the scene, and amazing film "Valhalla Rising" (who needs a plot and dialogue if it looks brilliant , and has Mads Mikkelsen  <Hannibal>as a one eyed mute) and today I shall wander over to Summertyne , and the weather is still excellent.

Anyway all this set a light bulb of it my head and though ah - that might work, and it did , so the site is now finished for another year. You can check out Bob Armstrong's wonderful paintings here.

Also got some news last week that the loss of control over my left hand is likely to be a trapped nerve not a TIA as first proposed.

Thoughts On Writing

The reason I started writing this blog was because I hoped I would get an idea for writing a book or screenplay. My basic problem is that I am not motivated and too lazy to take the next step , well that's my opinion.

A blog is a diary and some contain some brilliant writing. It's a great way or remembering things you don't want to forget. There have been many incidents where I go back into the blog to have a chuckle about certain events , the B & Q application form being one that springs to mind.

I am currently reading "The Thurber Carnival" , a collection of  James Thurber short stories and realise that in order to write you have to be disciplined enough to research , or just know lots of things like , say , Stephen Fry.

As well as this you have to have a spark of originality or a muse to create a work that others want to immerse themselves in.

The internet and Amazon's self publishing package mean now that anyone can publish a book if they believe they have the capacity to produce a worthwhile work. The problem being it starts becoming literary karaoke where people believe that they are the next Dan Brown and have the key to untold riches.

I was shocked to hear that the average earnings for a writer was around four thousand pounds per annum. When you think how much the big earners make some writers must be on pennies.

I have incredible respect for my friend Paul Campbell who packed in his job and became a script writer. Similar to another friend Bob Armstrong who did a similar thing to become an artist.

This is another post I'm writing using the iPad's Note application. I reckon that the iPad with the addition of a keyboard is a very useful piece of kit, although when you have no internet connection you can feel a little lost.

The Joy of Communication

Thanks to TV , Radio , Newspapers and the Internet we can find out things that we want to know and and a lot of things that we don't.

The success of the internet , effectively invented by Tim Berners-Lee is due to the fact that it was open source and therefore free to use. Yes you pay for access via your connection , but the internet itself is free to use. If it hadn't been it would have just become another closed network. This was explained to me on TV last night on a program I caught some of while channel hopping , but it was probably on BBC4.

This morning Terry Wogan on the radio mentioned a cook who "peeled peas" , I hope this was a joke rather than some mad new cooking methodology, Sunday Lunch will take weeks to prepare unless Primark take over the supply with their vast army of slave labour (how else do you sell shirts for £3 , it's certainly not economies of scale).

One of the things the internet allows is anyone can use it to be contacted or to advertise effectively for free , though people have to be able to find you. Here are four sites which are essentially information sites about the owner and their trade but have still managed to generate sales of their products be it pictures or plants.

• Woodlands Nursery - Plants in Louth, Lincolnshire


• Bob Armstrong - Landscape Artist


• Mark Johnson Travel Photography - Some amazing European photography


• Paul Campbell - Scriptwriter (Eastenders , Casualty , Doctors . IMDB Entry here)


• Mark Johnson Aircraft - Professional Aircraft photography featuring some amazing shots.


• Harry Willis - Gas Boiler Servicing and related services in Newcastle

These are the new equivalent of the card in the shop window or phonebox, but with a potentially wider audience, and they show that the internet is for everybody and anybody.

Anyone Can Do The Web ...

..but not everything is worth looking at. The web or net or whatever you want to call it , is a great leveller , in that absolutely anyone can create a website , which means theres an awful lot of dross out there, full of "Under Construction " signs , or just unfinished and left to rot or just plain bad. The main thing about a web site is that it must do what it's supposed to do , no more no less. Amazon is a great example of something that doesnt look great , but allows you to do what you need (ie buy stuff ) , very efficiently. Play follows it very closely in this.

Then you get entertainment sites such as JibJab which allows the sending of e-cards and is one of the few sites of this ilk that is worth visiting. You can see various examples of Jib Jabbery throughout this blog , such as here.

There's also the personal websites that are the equivalent of cards in the shop window , but can be made to look like a page out of Vogue such as Mark Johnson's Photography Gallery , with an example picture below, which is a small catalogue of the sort of photographic work he undertakes. This includes commercial photography and travel photography as well as bespoke photographic commissions:



Another is Bob Artstrong's Paintings Gallery which displays some of Bob's work (he's an excellent Lincolnshire based artist) and has news about exhibitions and the like . One of his paintings is displayed below:



And finally this last one is for Woodlands Nurseries in Louth , an excellent plant nursery in Lincolnshire,which is an online news and plant catalogue, with many pictures of the beautiful plants available to the public:


And then there's the more mundane but neccessary world of Gas Boiler Servicing and the like . And my mate Harry Willis has his own site to advertise his services, such as installation , radiatore sytem flushing as well as annual bioler serviceing in the Newcastle area here.