Hopefully

The weather doesn't really seem to be improving, still cold , wet , dreich.  This is my thirteenth post this year , though the second today. so overall I am still scaling down the number of posts though lockdown is affecting me getting out any distance to find things to write about, although artists are still managing to produce output while staying in.

Today has had me listening to a couple of David Bowie CD boxes , the first "The Next Day" and "Station To Station" is playing now. Both are examples of how a really great presentation can be made from the artist to the fans, both boxes are on the list below.

Hopefully the weather will improve and tomorrow on another day off  I will get to see my granddaughter Alexis , but me and her mother agreed it's not great to meet in weather like this.

The skies are getting greyer and darker and I still need to gout for a third walk today to try and get my steps up.  February is an annoying month , twenty eight days meaning that it reality I need to average 12,200 steps a day and so far this month I have not done anything like that , and in this weather I don't really feel like doing it, but I know that I will, the only thing that normally puts a spoke in my works is illness.

So I know there really isn't much in this post but will share the title track of the album that I am listening to at the moment , it is a definite favourite of mine.

Keep It Dark

 Although we are way past the shortest day (on the Winter Solstice) it is still dark in a morning although lighter in an evening. It's 8AM now and coming light but we will soon be implementing daylight saving again (slightly pointless in a 24/7 society) and will be back to even darker mornings.

This is another post that I started a couple of days ago and then have picked up to finish today. The weather has been dreich although last night we had snow again which you can see on my Instagram channel here.

I have been doing a work course in Power BI yesterday and today so not much time to listen to music, but yesterday I picked out a free copy of "True" by Spandau Ballet and wasn't too impressed , but luckily it's only thirty six minutes. "Lifeline" is good , but the rest is dross although the title track was successfully integrated into the excellent "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" by PM Dawn.

Anyway the song I am going to share is the excellent "Keep It Dark" by fourth phase Genesis from "Abacab" which I believe was titled after it's chord sequence and is one of the many great songs they produced after Peter Gabriel left.

It's light now and it's 8:18am.

A Snowy Interlude

It was dreich and depressing , then we had snow which was cold but pretty, and now the snow has gone and it's dreich and depressing the day before going back to work. 

Still is always good to try and find something positive and I have been listening to some great music and seen a surprisingly good film "Cold Skin" which sort of reminded me of William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land" which I have not read for some years , replacing the pyramid with a lighthouse in the Antarctic.

Also have been trying to think of music that is in the same universe as The Moody Blues , and on album that came to mind was "Trespass" by Genesis. While "The Knife" is definitely too aggressive for The Moody Blues but all the preceding songs could almost be a darker Moody Blues.

So I will share "Dusk" with you from "Trespass" , appropriate for this time of year, and still a great song.

Temporally Speaking

I find it amazing how time flies by if you are doing something that needs to be done , or you are enjoying it, but drags like hell when you are waiting for something , doing absolutely nothing , or doing something that bores you. 

I love doing things that interest me and detest boredom but when time is dragging or flying I always call to mind "The eighty Minute Hour" by Brian Aldiss, where the controllers slow down timepieces when you are at work and speed them up when you are not. If that were the situation , how would we know.

This morning I started out extra early , got things done then , had to do more thanks to a milk leak in my rucksack meaning that had to go in the wash , and suddenlty you don't feel any further forward that you thought you would be but you actually are.

It's a bit like my current paperback "The Other Log of Phileas Fogg" , it's only 166 pages but the font is so tiny it is going much slower than I expected. Having said that, though I know the overall concept and have seen a couple of films I have never read Jules Verne's "Around The World In Eighty Days" , although my girls as children used to love the cartoon character Willy Fogg, but this book is giving me a good grounding in the original book while setting my mind off on lots of "What is happening here" questions. I am enjoying it and , unusually , this is taking longer than expected , and "Imajica" on the Kindle Fire is going very slowly , but , in all honesty , that is a book I never want to end despite having read it several times.

The weather this week has been totally dreich and showing no signs of changing , but weather is weather. The thing I don't like about it is the featureless skies.

There are lots of songs that refer to time , but I'm going with Todd Rundgren's "Time Heals" from the album "Healing", the video was a staple of MTV in the early eighties.

Uniform - #AnimalAugust #16

The sky is a uniform grey and it's raining and drizzling a perfect situation for the word "dreich" , not exactly great walking weather or inspirational and certainly not summery.

With the weather being so awful I was wondering if I could hit my 11K steps without actually leaving the house. I know people have done it, but basically the house is about ten steps from side to side, so going from one side to the other and back 550 times would actually do it but I could see that tedium would  hit me very quickly. Of course there is up and down stairs and the rest of the house to use but it's a lot of repetition, which I am not really up for.

Yesterday during a work meeting the sound went off, and I assumed that there was a problem with the person speaking then realised my TV , that provides the sound, and switched it self off which it does after four hours. After several months I found the setting to stop it from switching itself off, but this means I now have to remember to switch it off when I've finished with it.

On my #MusicWhileYouWork Instagram sequence which I started when working from home I am now listening to the Bruce Springsteen "Soundstage" 15CD box , which is still available for around £20 , and while it's a radio broadcast quality , it is still excellent. I'm on CD2 so a long way to go and after this I have a 4CD David Bowie set (The Collaborator) to enjoy.

Still on "Venus on the Halfshell" and though it's dated tongue in cheek , I am still enjoying it, and it is packed full of ideas and observations that are very relevant today.

Over the last week I have binge watched (for me) lots of TV coming to the finale of "Veep" , one and a half series of "Bosch" , which is very good and his apartment and view is worth watching the program for.

"Shortly After Take Off" by BC Camplight has just been played by Chris Hawkins on 6Music, followed by "96 Tears" by ? & The Mysterians which put me in mind of Sam The Sham and The Pharaohs who had a hit with "Wooly Bully" which will do for today's #AnimalAugust .

I'm just wondering whether to have a September sequence based on fruit , but will have to think of a hashtag for that.