Not The End of The Books

I've just finished the excellent "Not The End of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre, and was very impressed , and I was right that he is in the same universe as John Niven. He also has a huge back catalogue so I have the option of buying more of his stuff.

Instead I'm revisiting "The Great and Secret Show" by Clive Barker, one of my favourite authors and these revisitations means that I have an endless supply of books because I can read and reread. As I have said before my memory is not too good so while I have a vague recollection of what the book is about the words are still a joy to consume and the lead me into a different world once more.

I have other favourites too who I need to revisit , JG Ballard and F Paul Wilson to name but two, and this could keep me going til next year or longer.

Music is the same, once you have things in your collection , you have them because you want to revisit them , usually again and again. I've sort of regressed because I play music either digitally or on vinyl with a preference for the latter because it limits you to around twenty minutes of songs, so it connects you even more closely with the music.

Today I revisited "The Lodger" by David Bowie which like all Bowie albums is full of off the wall musical directions and is over far too soon, and that is me listening to it digitally while walking. Possibly tomorrow "Gouster" (unreleased excellent album around the time of "Young Americans") may get a spin. It's only available as part of a big digital box but you can buy the tracks individually to get your own copy at a reasonable price. One of the benefits of digital downloads.

6Music have been playing "Nowhere To Hide" by Ghostpoet from the album "I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep" which has definitely caught my ear, so that's what we go with tonight.

Choose Your Masques

I think facemasks in close contact with people you don't know are probably a good idea, but there are people who think (or probably don't think) they are a fashion accessory. I saw a guy in the street the other day wearing one, pull it down and then sneeze into the air, obviously didn't want any germs polluting HIS mask. As far as I am aware the point of facemasks is to stop YOU spreading anything to others, rather than protecting you. Only the surgical type ones protect you from close contact with infected non mask wearers.

I've given up on th erolling million steps every three months and halfing it to two million steps per year which is around 5.5K steps a day until I get to easily wander again. The main problem is a relatively small area that I am walking in resulting is a boredom / familiarity scenario which is why I don't do gyms and only do swimming very infrequently.

In other areas "Not The End Of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre is rather excellent, although it covers a heck of a lot and the initial "Marie Celeste" event of the prologue has not featured too much , but I expect will be resolved in the final quarter of the book. I home it doesn't turn out like many episodes of "Elementary" where everything is wrapped up in the final two minutes.

So I simply chose the title becasue of the name of the Hawkwind album, but if I wera one it will just be a bandit / neckerchief or scarf , though was also thing of a balaclava / motorcycle helmet inned balaclava thing.

May Ja , May Nein

The 8th of May!

Well I have a homophone for May 9 , although I am not sure how long I can keep this going , although it has given me a line to keep the #maywriteabit going although I did like the 8th of May Motorhead / Lemmy (Ian Fraser Kilmister) memes going round yesterday.

The blogger went into the new format , which like Facebook , seems anything but an improvement. When you are writing , ideally you want something that is going to look in the same ballpark as the published item and the new blogger interface is not that.

So this Saturday is another gorgeous day , but I have been working and listening to more of Max Richter's "Sleep" , and also gone through the childhood upbringing of one of the protagonists in Christopher Brookmyre's "Not The End of The World".

I was sure I'd written about this recently but my Google Pixel 2XL only actually starts after unlocking when I switch it on. This may be true of other phones , but this is the first time that I have started switching it off at night.

I feel that this Bank Holiday is a total damp squib and although I didn't work yesterday I don't really feel that I have had a day off and work starts at 8am on Monday again.

While I have been walking , I like to take photographs of trees , grass and wildlife but with this good weather you get lots of people on Nunsmoor and the Town Moor relaxing in the sun and I always avoid taking pictures of people. Yesterday I managed to use trees to avoid some people, and I wanted the tree in the picture anyway , so if you see one of my pictures with a tree in it , there may be someone behind that tree.

Yesterday I heard a lounge jazz version of "Ace of Spades" played by Huey Morgan on 6Music and I was not impressed. I know the obvious song to go for would be Motorhead's "Ace of Spades" but I am going for another one that 6Music have been playing The Streets & Tame Impala's collaboration "Call My Phone Thinking I'm Doing Nothing Better" ,I do love Mike Skinner's word, this does sound like classic Streets. It is rather good.

May's Even

Well another day where I can't think of a homophone for SEVEN although I sort of fitted it into the post title. The only word I could think of are variations on the names Sven and Steven. So anyway this is continuing with the #maywriteabit

I'm enjoying the Christopher Brookmyre "Not The End of the World" but there are a hell of a lot o plot areas in there, and I was thinking about how long it takes to actually plan out a book be it face or fiction.

I remember an episode of Hamish Macbeth which I think was penned by Danny Bole where a hood was disposed of and his accomplices buried him in some remote spot and then a mobile phone started ringing. They all looked at each other and realised it was coming from the ground where they had buried colleague. The consensus was "Well I'm Not Getting It" . I think the whole episode was planned around that single idea. OK so how can this happen? I think the episode was "The Lochdubh Assassin" although he wrote twelve episodes.

I have thought of a similar scenario to maybe open a book, but as I've told you about the Hamish Macbeth episode it's pointless me including my scenario and i'll probably forget about it. I still haven't started to write a book, because I still haven't thought of what I might think of a killer idea.

So we are on the final working day of this week, and the weather is absolutely gorgeous again.

This weekend I need to mow my lawn and probably do some decent walking.

So morning music. Just because it came up in my feed and looks mad , we'll go with "Supernature" by Cerrone and "Spacer" by Sheila & B Devotion (who I always thought was Sheila B Devotion) segue / mashup , some late seventies electro disco.

May Tree (May Free Too)

This is my second #maywriteabit post today although I think that's not quite in the spirit of the thing , but here it is. It has a convoluted title and if you read the previous posts yo may understand what I mean , though probably not. Today is a Sunday and for some reason I've been on a bit of a downer , though I haven't a clue why, but it's just been one of those days and I suppose the weather is a major contributor plus the general isolationism of the lockdown, leading to the situations where a lot of little things we used to look forward to we now don't have, however.....

.. when the sun comes out you get an immediately get a lift , or I do.

I'm reading the Christopher Brookmyre book "Not The End of the World" and that is becoming more enjoyable by the page, I like the quip when one of the protagonists Steff heard about the CFC (Christian Family Channel - your average Televangelist thing) he says  "Oh we've got a religious CFC and an RFC  as well (he's referring to Celtic Football Club and Rangers Football Club as he's from Motherwell ... somewhere south of Scandinavia.

..then, maintaining the "Scandinavian" connection, there was Ragnar Lothbrok's Christian Funeral in Notre Dame, Paris in Vikings , I was well impressed with his coffin too. So thanks to the internet and digital connections I do have things to look forward to , it's just sometimes you actually lose sight of things.

It also improves the mood when you hit some kinf of goal like my daily step total which has had a reasonable start.

I've also started watching "20,000 Days On earth" the Nick Cave film which, even though I've had the DVD for years, it took a showing on Film4 for me to record it and watch the damned thing, and very good it is too.

My technological incompetence still can't understand how data is transferred over airwaves, it's a bit like teleportation, is what appears at the receiving end a clone of what was sent? I suppose it is , so if I teleported would it really be me on the arrival pad or just an exact clone and how would anybody know.

Another thing is I use BubbleUPnp on my Kindle Fire to play music, it seems update itself at ceratin points and does not always reflect what it on the network, and as I listen to this the first Neu! album is playing, I think they are the band that initiated "motorik" which is an unchanging almost mechanical beat

And then I started writing this, so all in all , it's actually not a bad day at all.

So I will share with you "Negativland" by Neu! which my dad asked me about in the seventies , he said istarted with drills and then had a great beat. See what you think.

April Shower

Yesterday got a phone call from my practice (Thornfield Medical Group) telling one of the drugs I am taking should stop if I get Coronavirus. Shows the excellent service I get from them and why I have been with them for twenty years. I am going to keep on taking it but know if I get hit with the Coronavirus to stop the tablet (Forxiga) .

I didn't think I would hit my monthly walking target and normally I have a few free days at the end of the month , but I need to walk 6K steps today to hit the target , so that's a target hit although May may be a different kettle of fish as it is getting a bit samey and that is something that I don't particularly like when I go on a walk.

The last few days have been decidedly dreich so April is ending with showers.

I'm into the Christopher Brookmyre book "Not The End Of The World" (an appropriate title for our current situation) put was put off because after the large print of "A Shadow on the Wall" by Jonathan Aycliffe this is small and densely printed and I don't like the font so it looked challenging , but there was an interesting prologue and there is a lot happening in it. For some reason his style reminds me of John Niven , well in the same universe as hom.

I've just finished series three of "Lucifer" on Amazon Prime , although the final two episodes (which were after the series finale) were entertaining but a little disjointed, so now it's either Netflix but I have rejoined "Vikings" and have four series of that to work though.

There are two records that have could my ear while working at home, I share the second tomorrow but today the almost wrong doom laden  piano motif driven rap of "Ooh La La" by Run The Jewels, an absolutely excellent record.

A Library ...

I've just finished "A Shadow On The Wall" by Jonathan Aycliffe which I wrote about in my last post here and like many of his books, you are just coming down from the relief of everything being resolved ... and then in the last line of the book you realise it might not be.

So I went looking for another book to read and decided on a Daniel Easterman and then noticed "Not The End of The World" by Christopher Brookmyre , which looks interesting and one that I had got from Barter Books in the old Railway Station in Alnwick. The book looks good and I can't remember reading it, again this is possibly my magpie mentality kicking in , buy or acquire and then forget about it.

A sad incident was when my mum gave two sets of impressive Encyclopedias which our family had had for years , to my younger (disowned by me) brother , saying she didn't want any books in the house because she didn't like them. My girls would have loved and used those books, but  sometimes things don't happen as you would want them to. I used them for schoolwork and research although now we generally have the internet which is brilliant if used properly.

I was then thinking , that because of my imperfect memory, I probably don't have to buy another book ever, there are some which I had forgotten about and many that I  remember which I want to revisit, I'm thinking "The Adversary" series by F Paul Wilson , six books starting with "The Keep" and finishing with "Nightworld" , plus various William Hope Hodgson , and these are all books I have.

Although there are bookcases round the house , effectively this is a small personal library, and the do look good but book are there to be read or referred to , but I often see people's books and big libraries and think "Have these books been read, or are they just there for show?" , and I know not all of mine have been read and I have slightly shifted my perspective to discover what I already know that I have.

I think everywhere should have physical books although I now put the bigger tomes on my Kindle as it's easier to read them that way , essentially five hundred pages or less , physical book , over that Kindle. There is a complete HP Lovecraft collection on Kindle for 75p here although for some reason individual books are more expensive.

Going off on a tangent I'm going to share a live take of the beautiful "Book of Love" by Stephen Merritt , but here's the Magnetic Fields take and a Peter Gabriel take from "Scratch My Back" which is stunning.