Did Digital Nearly Kill Music ... And is Vinyl Bringing It Back To Life?

Three years back I wrote a history of music media in a post here, and at the weekend I nipped into Vinyl Guru and got talking with the lady in there about how when you buy vinyl you feel you have actually got something. You have sleeves, booklets and picture discs. I'm sure I did a post that said CDs were the McDonaldisation of music, all of a sudden you could skip songs , program the order , and the CD jewel cases are not something that look good, though they are very functional.

MP3 became even more dismissive of musical content, and a lot of the iPod generation can't even listen to a full song. When you wanted to record a tape for someone it had to be done in real time, even from CD, but now it's all Spotify and Deezer playlists which, lets face it can be done in thirty seconds, although a well done one can take time to put together.

These days I see a lot more people browsing the vinyl sections of shops and Newcastle now has a lot of shops where you can buy vinyl and this post has a list of them. One thing is there don't seem to be that many impressive covers such as Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" newspaper cover, or Hawkwind's "In Search Of Space", although "Space Ritual" is a available in it's full six square foot fold out. I was in Reflex and noticed  "Faust Tapes" was £25, when I bought the original release it was 49p !

Vinyl provides more than just music, and the shops often provide coffee and food while you browse. People still complain about the cost of music, but remember if albums had kept pace with inflation you would be paying £80 for an album.

When I was in Vinyl Guru I spotted a 12" copy of Biko by Peter Gabriel, which I mainly wanted for the "B" side "Shosholoza" which I don't think is officially available digitally, but I found this lovely rendition of it for you to enjoy.

The Problem With Listening To David Bowie Albums

On this morning's walk I decided to put on David Bowie's "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps". I am still taken in by the dirty production sound on the music, but was almost shocked at the consistency of the songs on itl Almost every song is top notch, with the slightest of dips for "Scream Like A Baby" which would be a standout song on almost any other album.

Starting with "It's No Game #1" which is an amazing opener, into "Up The Hill Backwards" with it's mutant "Not Fade Away" intro riff, then the triumvirate of singles, the title track , "Ashes To Ashes" and "Fashion",, the "Teenage Wildlife" doesn't let up. "ScreamLike A Baby" is the slightest of lulls before we are hit with "Kingdom Come" (a Tom Verlaine song) and the closing reprise of "It's No Game #2". Absolutely stunning.

ANd here comes the problem with listening to David Bowie albums, and it is not actually a problem. My friend John Scott posted on Facebook here  his 10 favourite Bowie albums and asked for people's favourite three Bowie albums. I listed my three with the caveat that it would change tomorrow. Usually I say "Station To Station" or "The Man Who Sold The World" but you know my opinion on "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps".

Basically whichever Bowie album you are listening to is your favourite Bowie album. You don't skip songs on a Bowie album, you discover things you haven't heard before, which is a great situation to be in for any artist.

As well as that it's Friday so enjoy.

Octoberpost

This is intended to be a short post just to say I have equalled my record number of posts on this blog for a year and I still have just over two months of the year left.  It was helped by my #August50 sequence that was the first time I did fifty posts in a month , and I am sure I won't be doing that again any time soon.

As I'm writing this it's dark, fireworks are going off and dogs are barking. It should be illegal except on designated nights because it upsets and scares pets and it is nowhere near Guy Fawkes night or Bonfire Night whichever you want to call it or celebrate.

For some reasons Barclay James Harvest's "Octoberon" album came to mind, just for the title although I loved the cover I don't really know the album, but I do remember "Rock'n'Roll Star" being a single. They produced some great music but never really hit paydirt, though apparently they gave Harvest records it's name, and they had , among others, Pink Floyd on their roster.

I first got into them seeing them perform "Thank You" on  The Old Grey Whistle Test with its brilliant loping guitar riff and I've alwys enjoyed their music though they are not the top of my playlists.

Well my next post will set a new record, so I am sure that will happen before October fades away .....

Unsummer

Woke up at  quarter to six, drinking coffee and the first song on the radio is "Hurt" by Johnny Cash. Last night I watched Pointless, Letterbox and two episodes of "Black Sails" and had a butter pie for tea. Nights and mornings are drawing in and there is more dark than light. Summer is definitely gone for this year.

Having said that yesterday was like a summer's day .... minus the heat.

We have now hit Thursday this week and as you can tell by what I am writing, not much is happening at the moment, although I noticed signs of screen burn on my Google Pixel, so I changed the picture to The Huntress of Skipton Castle Woods which looks almost ghostly and ethereal on the phone. My friend Helen noted that that it might be scary to come across in the dark, which reminds me of a ghost story told to me by my good friend Chris who we lost six years back.

One night he was walking back from helping out bailing on a farm. It was late but was walking back over fields and it took him through a smallish wood. A way ahead of him he saw some rectangular grey shapes floating about a foot off the ground. He had had a few pints but started to get more perturbed as he looked round not having a clue what these things were. In the end he broke into a run and then ran into one of the shapes.....

...as he was brought down , all was revealed, the creature was a sheep with a black head and black legs. Another logical explanation for a supernatural ghostly event.

I found "Mad Alice Lane(A Ghost Story)" by Pete Lawlor (ex of Stiltskin) to go with this. I don't know if this is readily available but was used in a Land Rover advert in 1996, still a very atmospheric song. I love it. It's on a "Spirit of New Age" compilation and this is what Pete says:

"Mad Alice Lane. I named this after a spooky alleyway I walked past before doing a gig in York. It was used in the Landrover commercial made by Nils and Roland (Harfensixpence is better than Harfenpenny is better than...) at Dorlands."

Enjoy your Thursday.

Television....Another Time Vampire

Over the last two evenings I could have done many things, but what I actually did was catch up on a few TV shows and also watch a few entertaining quiz shows. Pointless and Letterbox are entertaining and make you think (not too hard)  but are hardly essential viewing, but do pass an entertaining half hour. You watch both and that's an hour of your evening disposed of.

I don't know if this is affecting my social life, but the option of pressing a couple of buttons and actually being at home dos hold certain attractions, in that it's a lot easier, doesn't require any efforet and you can just go to bed when you finish. You probably have all the food and drink you like on hand and I have the added convenience of two  six til eleven convenience stores and several excellent takeawys and restaurants a short walk away.

It not so much me being anti social as me being lazy, there are events to attend, and people to share time with but more and more I am showing a preference for staying in and watching TV. This may have also been exacerbated by my anaemia / iron deficiency and I have been trying to address that and certainly I am feeling more energetic but not perfect. My recent illness may also have contributed but I do need to start getting out more, which may mean my "To Watch" list starts to grow to an unwatchable length.

Anyway it's Wednesday so I will continue on my way, and would be interested to hear what you think.

This Strange Thing Called Life

No it's not anything deep. I find it strange that Facebook keeps suggesting friends because they're friends of people who would probably wish I wasn't their Facebook Friend anyway. Sometimes I spend a couple of minutes removing these suggestions and then let it revert to what it was. Basically I respect others privacy and they certainly wouldn't want  me intruding on them.

I've also regressed to my teenage years in my reading, revisiting Michael Moorcock's "History of the Runestaff" and while the writing is a bit clunky the storytelling more than stands up for me but it's probably not up to GRR Martin's standard, but Moorcock is both influential and a cracking story teller. I have six hundred pages in this book then another twelve hundred pages of a couple of related volumes that I want to revisit so we are talking Tolkein's "Lord of the Rings" and Stephen King's "The Stand" in sheer volume, And at some point I want to revisit the former, I always found "The Stand" a bit bloated and could have been wrapped up in three hundred pages.

So it's Sunday night and today, among other things I ripped the live Springsteen 15 CD set so I can listen to it on my travels, and I have been impressed with what I have heard so far,

I'm going to choose another Moorcock / Blue Oyster Cult collaboration "The Great Sun Jester" from "Mirrors" based on the novel "The Winds of Limbo", it is a wonderful song and I still play it regularly, though when I first got the album this was the only song I liked, but the album has since grown on me as I posted here.

An Appreciation of Half Man Half Biscuit on National Album Day

I'm not a fan of National anything Day, and I'm sure Nigel Blackwell is of the same opinion, he did write "National Shite Day", the closer on "CSI Ambleside" . When people say "Oh I'm only into 80's or 90's" music , if you mention Half Man Half Biscuit they just gawp and go on about ABC or Duran Duran (both fine bands).

I cant't remember the first song of their's I heard , whether it was "Trumpton Riots" or "All I Want For Christmas Is A Dukla Prague Away Kit", but the latter made me go out and buy their their first album, and I just loved "Dickie Davies Eyes" and was disturbed when they split after that hit number one in the Independant Charts.

There is a lot in the Guardian about the band and until I read this I didn't know Nigel did advert voice overs, the article is here but there are quite a few see here. This is the bit about how the first album came about.

"Their record label then, as now, is Probe Plus - as ramshackle and free-spirited an independent as one could find anywhere. Probe operates from the Liverpool home of its proprietor, Geoff Davies, whose rambling Sefton Park manse is cluttered with Biscuit ephemera. Some of HMHB's more celebrated merchandise includes collectors' item teatowels (Some Call It Godcore tour - six dates in eight weeks) and the almost unobtainable McIntyre, Treadmore & Davitt mugs. They are an unusual pop group. Blackwell is a most unusual fellow.

Davies vividly remembers him coming into the Probe shop with his demo tape. "I looked at the back of the cassette and it was full of things like The Len Ganley Stance and Venus In Flares. I said to him: 'If the songs are half as good as the titles, we'll do it.' I was listening to the tape with my partner that night as we drove home and neither of us could believe what we were hearing. The lyrics and the subjects were astonishing, and probably actionable - but I called Nige the next day to say that we'd do an album."

To Davies's astonishment, Blackwell turned up on his doorstep a couple of days later with the finished master tapes of the album. "He just said to me: 'This is it. I've done it. That'll be £40, please.'"

"I might've told him it was 40," concedes Blackwell, "but I think it was more like 30. We recorded at Vulcan Studios. They'd just got in this eight-track studio upstairs and Half Man Half Biscuit were the guinea pigs. We went in. We did it. We put it out." "

Their site here has a list of a lot of radio sessions , and the Brampton one contains the definitive version of "24 Hour Garage People" and a three way interview between Andy Kershaw, Geoff Davies and Nigel Blackwell, in which Andy describes them as England's premier folk band. These were available for free download but removed when people started selling them when John Peel passed on, but I do have copies of the sessions and if you want a copy please contact me.

I love their very black humour "Blood On The Quad" , social observation "Lord Hereford's Knob" and pure charm "What Is Chatteris" and they always leave you with a smile on your face.

The lyric project here allows you to read their lyrics and enjoy the sheer poetry of Nigel's penmanship.

If there's a record of their's missing from your collection today is a good day to fill that hole.

Have a good one.

The Book Problem and The Clock Stopped at Midnight

I have an Owl Clock that I got from Whitby, and this week I noticed it had stopped, at midnight... or it could have been mid day as it's a standard analogue twelve hour clock. For some reason my mind is awake, my body is tired, and it's 3AM Saturday morning, ideally I should be asleep, my body says yes, my mind says no, so as I compromise I am writing this blog post in the hope that I can send my mind to sleep.

Bar Loco - Beef Stew

And here is what I was planning to write about yesterday but didn't get round to.  Yesterday I had a birthday lunch with my two brilliant daughters at Bar Loco, and went for the beef stew. I'm supposed to be eating iron rich food and was surprised when it came with mashed potato and long stem broccoli, and it was very scrumptious indeed.

You can see it to the right and didn't realise that the broccoli seems to be the biggest portion on the plate! It wasn't but it was all enjoyed.

Anyway now to the main point of this post, and I am starting to feel a little tired.

Yesterday I finally finished Simon Singh's "The Code Book" . It was hard going but a great great read, particularly twisting my melon like mind when it hit the quantum theory play out section (which was followed by ten coded messages to solve which I looked at and then shut the book).

Next I wanted something that was going to be entertaining but easy reading, and decided to go back to my teenage years and The Runestaff sequence by Michael Moorcock, which I was drawn into because of his affinity with Hawkwind one of my favourite bands of the time. The individual books come in at around 150 to 200 pages, and I was sure I had a reduxed anthology of the first four book but where the hell could it be, ad did I even have it. I wouldn't say I am a book hoarder, I know people who have a far greater affinity with books than I, but I wasn't sure where to start.

I cleared the pile next to my bedside cabinet and luckily it was there in the cabinet. But it was a far thicker volume than I expected, nearly seven hundred pages of quite small text. This is part of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" and "Multiverse" (which incidentally is part of quantum theory) series which spans maybe a hundred books, most of which I have read and now I am going to read again hopefully.

I am on the second chapter and while the writing may not be perfect, the ideas are still stimulating and I am looking forward to continuing on. When I was working at Oxfam I came across "The Dreamthief's Daughter" and Elric novel and found that absolutely wonderful, so I will leave you with "Black Blade" by Blue Oyster Cult which features lyrics by Moorcock about Elric's sword, Stormbringer, the Stealer of Souls.

Have a brilliant Saturday,  I'm going back to bed.

Quantum

I was going to initial just write about dipping into the Bruce Springsteen "Complete 1978 Radio Broadcasts" 15 CD box set but this morning I read a bit more of "The Code Book" by Simon Singh and it has wandered into quantum theory.

Someone said about quantum theory, if you your mind is not bent and you are not confused by it then you don't get it. Well my mind is still bent and confused by it and I still feel that I don't get it. Taking into account possible simultaneous states of quasi matter and the concepts of multiverses and things be the same and the opposite of themselves my mind is a little twisted to say the least.

It's come up because of the concept of quantum computers, which if implemented will wipe the floor with current computers and effectively destroy the sort of digital privacy we currently have, which is based on  DES and  RSA encoding (I won't explain as it doesn't matter). To combat this cryptographers are working on quantum codes and cyphers but as yet do not have quantum computers to actually implement these concepts.

Anyway back to Bruce Springsteen and I listened to the first album and it's just a feed from a radio broadcast so it's like a bootleg and the crowd are fairly prominent but it is a wonderful experience. The opener of Buddy Holly's "Rave On" for me doesn't really work, but by the time you hit the closer of "Thunder Road" you are totally immersed. Absolutely wonderful. I now am looking at another fourteen discs which I am sure will be just as excellent.

Have a great Thursday everybody.

Iron Man

I am not. Had my annual check up and it turns out I'm anaemic and iron deficient among other things. Some hard skin is stopping feeling on my foot which is not good if you are diabetic. So need to eat more greens and get some moisturiser on my feet. This could explain why, this year, I'm usually to tired to go to things at night, social events , gigs, quizzes etc. So I may let you know what happens. I've loved the Sunday afternoon gigs at The Cluny because I've not been feeling shattered.

Last two days I've been on bed by nine, and most nights I am in bed by ten where I used to be able to stay up very late and still get up early for work. This morning I forgot to set my alarm so ended up getting up half an hour later, but glad to get some information on what's actually wrong with me.

I think for the first "Iron Man 2" film was soundtracked, sort of appropriately, by AC/DC so I'll include "Shoot To Thrill" for this very short Wednesday post.

4:45

Due to a 7:15 AM doctors appointment this morning I set the alarm for 4:45. Obviously outside it's black and windy and I hopefully will be getting a 6:25 bus to find out what they have to say, it's just an annual health check and I will ask them to do a 'flu' jab. Did you know that 'flu' is probably the only common word that has a double contraction and therefore needs two apostrophes to indicate int's shrinking from influenza to 'flu'.

One of the good things about getting up early is, in theory, you can do more during the day, and after a week off coming back to quarter end / month end I have a lot to get through this week.

I've managed to keep up my steps on my holiday and today may not be a full step day due to the doctor's appointment but we shall see.

6Music is playing, and I always think that 6Music almost negates my need for a music collection. They are currently playing  "Master Pretender" by First Aid Kit, all their records are wonderful so I will share that with you. The video is rather good too, so worth watching and listening to.

I am looking forward to tomorrow and maybe a more leisurely lie in.

Sleepwalking Into Pitch Blackness

One of the great things about being on holiday is having the option to lie in, which I took great advantage of this week. I only thought of getting up when light appeared through the curtains. This morning as I'm writing this, it is pitch black outside although it's getting a bit lighter. I am wondering whether to walk in or to take the bus.

The thing is that when it's dark, you tend to think it's not warm, and the lack of sunshine is probably a major factor in that.

This morning I switched on 6Music and they were playing "The Somnambulist" the new single by Echo and The Bunnymen. While I have always loved their sound this took me back to when I first heard "The Cutter" or "Seven Seas". Goose bumps and just wonderful music and every time I hear it I don't want it to end, and absolutely perfect record and a fantastic way to start a Monday morning.

The album it comes from is mainly transformations of some of their classic songs with a couple of new ones, it has a great title, "The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon", so I will be investigating that soon.

Well it's back to work today, so I'm going to make coffee, enjoy your Monday, only five days until the weekend.

Them Big Oak Trees

One of things I noticed on the walks in the Lake District was the number of big oak trees that we saw along the routes. It's not surprising that one of the pubs we frequent is The Royal Oak in Ambleside, which I discovered as it was featured on the cover of Half Man Half Biscuit's excellent "CSI Ambleside" album.

While there are lots of different tree species, Oaks are fairly distinctive and are striking and obvious in any landscape and there are a few examples on this slide show instagram link here.

I was wondering whether to combine this post with the last post, but it does give you the opportunity to just listen to one song to accompany my mindwanderings, but it's always good to see Oak Trees as I don't think there are too many round the Newcastle area.  I certainly haven't noticed on my walks to work, although tomorrow morning I will keep an eye out to see if I can see any.

So I going to include the excellent "Them Big Oak Trees" by The Wonderstuff from their album "Hup", and I only recently discovered that Miles Hunt of the band was married to Mary Ann Hobbs the 6Music DJ.

So I am just about to have tea, an Aloo Chol from Rajnagar after enjoying the first episode of Doctor Who with the wonderful Jodie Whittaker, looking forward to the rest of the series.

Pastoral

I didn't really write last week, though I was on holiday, although as I was doing what I wanted I would have expected to write even more. The main thing about a holiday is to get away for the pressure of having to do things although you do force yourself to do things because you are on holiday.

One of the days we did the Dalemain Loop which is a six mile part of the larger Ullswater Way , taking in Dacre and Pooley Bridge before returning to Dalemain Hall. There's some images here if you want to see.

Dalemain Hall contains a hell of a lot of marmalade so i helped myself to a couple of jars, and the people there are very helpful.

In Pooley Bridge I had some coffee and cake at Granny Dowbekin's and later visited The Crown next door for some excellent food. Granny Dowbekin's had an excellent range of food including a decent spread of vegan options.

The Crown's food was excellent including courgette fritters which you can see here.

At one point we were walking along the river and a bird took off and it reminded me of the sound effect used in Pink Floyd's "Grantchester Meadows" which was part of the Roger Waters solo section on the studio section "Ummagumma" so I will include that for this post.

61

That's me sixty one years on this planet, and I still find it amusing the number of people who deem themselves old or middle aged at thirty, forty or fifty. Really you can do nothing about time and a birthday should be an excuse have fun not be despondent. Though the fact is some people are only happy when they're miserable, the usually read the Mail and don't listen to music.

I have not done much today barring visiting Ambleside, eating at The Priest's Hole and researching whether to visit Skipton Castle and Woods, due to the amazing cane sculptures that I want to see.

I was in Kendal yesterday and was sad to see that the only record shop I know has gone, so it may be that I don't pick up any music this holiday, but I do have more than enough to listen to, and one of those is the new James album as well as the new Arctic Monkeys album. So I willleave you with "Better Than That" by James, which is just absolutely wonderful.

Going to catch upon "Better Call Saul" and "Constantine" tonight.

The Value Of Music (Again)

A few weeks ago I noticed a Bruce Springsteen box set. It was good quality bootlegs from 1978, comprising five complete concerts backed by the E Street Band, and the tracks are obviously the same for each concert, but this clocks in at fifteen discs, which is more sixteen hours of music and the cost of this set? Thirteen Pounds. Even if you class it as a single three disc concert that's still a lot of music for your money. That's less that a pound per disc.

In 1975 albums were around £2.75, at that time Job Seekers Allowance or the equivalent was £2.75 a week, so if albums had kept pace with inflation we would be paying £80 for an album, but even I think a tenner is the norm for a CD these days. A vinyl album is around £20 and I did pay £25 for Hawkwind's "Space Ritual" on vinyl with the original fold out artwork.

I also bought a box of Phil Collins' first eight albums in a presentation box for £7.99, again less than a pound an album, and a Graham Parker set for the same price for his first five albums.

Rhino have a series of Original Albums consisting of five albums in replica card sleeves for around a tenner, less than two quid an album. Although this is already recorded material so there may not be any production costs apart from the printing and pressing it's still a remarkably cheap way of getting your hands on music and I do wonder whether the artists are getting their just rewards for this music.

So this is the last post for September and tomorrow my number of years on this planet increases  by one. Luckily I don't have to go to work but think I may be off to Ambleside,weather permitting.

That Was Close

This was the first month that I thought I couldn't hit my 340K step target. The main reason was the amount of time I was ill in bed. I hit my record all time low daily step count at less that 1.5K, that is half the very low national average. Many days I struggled to hit 5K and I needed to average 5k, but today I hit the target with two days to spare.

I think October should not be a problem but it's all based on the weather being OK and me being fit enough to walk.

As I write this I'm checking for updates for my laptop as it hasn't been used for a couple of months so that may take some time, last time I did it via my phone and it wiped out my data.

So it's Friday and this must be the most boring post I've ever done although it's my 250th this year.

So we'll go with The Pet Shop Boys "Being Boring" then I'll drop into the realms of Morpheus.

Throwing Darts In Lovers Eyes

Over the last couple of days I've been listening to "Christian F" and I have posted about it here and here in the past. It's a cherry picking of Bowie songs from the Berlin era and quite short although that may be just me wanting more and more.

It opens with the excellent istrumental "V2 Schneider" which like most Bowie songs, once it starts you have to listen to the end, although this is effectively an instrumental with background vols chanting the title.

It contains a live take on "Station To Station" which is possibly my favourite Bowie song, although it is split in a few brilliant sections after opening with the electronic steam locomotive sound, finally hitting the excellent coda of "It's Too Late ... The European Canon is Here"

Also the title of the post comes from that song and it's a violent image that has stayed with me since I first heard it, another example of Bowie's excellent poetry. I have found another live take to share with you, for you to enjoy and the weekend closes in on us.

Enjoy

The Sydney Opera House Illusion

I'm still coming to terms with "The Sydney Opera House Illusion", seeing it out of every window in my office, with the realisation that this is not just what my eye/brain combination is doing, but it can be caprured by camera, so it is real, but I'm still at a loss to understand how it happens. Yes, I understand he effect of frams and angles but surely they should dot cause items to appear nearer the farther you move from the frame. You don't even have to try, and the thing is, because you see it every day, you become immune to it until you actually notice it.

Most people don't notice it, but I am not most people, as you know, I often go off on tangents and lots of my thinking is very lateral, so I am the sort of person who will notice things like this. The thing is, I am 60 and this is the first time that I have actually noticed this. Sometimes it means you see things that you normally wouldn't see because it magnifies small details (though you don't actually realise this is happening). When you are next in a room with a view, you should try it.

I think "Just An Illusion" by Imagination is a pertinent accompaniment for this post.

Flash O' Fire

Last night as I got into bed I thought I saw a flash of fire across the room. I didn't, of course, but thought I did. This happened twice. One of the things is that our our eyes only see bits of what we actually see, and our brains fill in the rest, so it's no wonder that that we get optical illusions and hallucinations.

This is probably the reason why people see ghosts, apparitions and UFOs and aliens, sometimes you see what you want to see rather than what is actually there. I often see things which I know cannot logically exist where I see them. It's always and instantaneous thing, that I see for a split second, though I am not sure what I would do if the apparition became persistent to the point of me believing that it was actually real, but some people are less fussy.

Another optical effect I've come across is that way objects that are further away seem nearer the further away from them you are when you view them though a window. It is a real mind bender when you first notice it and even when it is explained to you, which makes perfect sense, your mind still rails against the actual effect. Here is my Instagram post about it. Here is the Sydney Opera House Illusion explained.

Again this gets me to those 3D Magic Eye drawing images which  were big in th e1980s, though most of the time I really couldn't be bothered to concentrate to see the images. Then we go to th emind bending art of MC Escher which again bend reality for you and did inspire a scene in "Labyrinth" which bring David Bowie into play for this post.

Codes and Ciphers

Why am I writing at 1AM on a school night. I've woken up to prevent another coughing fit, as well as feeling queasy still. Yesterday was spent in bed sleeping so I was expecting to be fit and back to work today, then about 5PM I woke and started coughing again.

I've finished my course of antibiotics, but none of the standard remedies seem to be working for me. The worst thing is I'm sort of able to do things (I can write this) but then when I start coughing, feeling sick then I get out of it and am not fit to do anything and would certainly not be appreciated in work.

When I am trying to occupy my mind I am reading Simon Singh's "The Code Book", possibly his most unassuming title. THhs is third of his books that I have read, the first being "The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets" which is an entertaining observations on why The Simpsons is jammed for of mathematical asides, the second being "Fermat's Last Theorem" which is a remarkable detective story about a conceptually simple but complex theorem and much of the side effects of of that area of mathematics then there is this....

"The Code Book" means to read it and understand it you have to think, it explains the development of codes and ciphers from the beginning of time to the present day, though I am only half way through the book. One of the things the book does explain is the difference between a cipher and a code:

"The difference between a cipher and a code is: a cipher changes a message on a letter-by-letter basis, while a code converts whole plaintext words or phrases into other words or numbers. That’s it, question answered."

Full explanation here. The book has taken me through the story of Mary Queen of Scots and the continual development of more and more complex code/ciphers each time with accompanying examples of how these work up to the Enigma machines and how Alan Turing drove the team that broke it, developing what became the computer I am typing this on on you are reading this on today, and probably shortening World War Two by two years.

Ofne very frightening part of this is that if the authorities that be had known of his homosexuality, Turing would have been jailed and Britain would have lost the war, remember that when someone is not the same as you. Society still drove him to suicide after the war.

Essentially this is another excellent Simon Singh book, and the work of Turing is leaving my tiny intellect floundering and I am only half way through.

I was trying to think of an accompanying piece of music for this and thought maybe something from Public Service Broadcasting's "The War Room" and a tribute to another major contribution to Britain's War Effort, "Spitfire".

Right now time to try and get some sleep.

Chas and Dave

I've been woken up again by a coughing fit. I don't feel bad other than the coughing but it does give me the opportunity to pen my own  short remembrance of Chas Hodges who we sadly lost to Cancer yesterday. The older we get, the more this happens, it's the nature of life and time but it still affects us all.but I think thanks top the digital age we still have their filmed memories immortalising them for us.

I never saw Chas and Dave live but saw lots of them on TV and probably have several of their singles in my collection managing to span rock and roll, cockney knees up, music hall, pub sing-a-long music and Londay Folk in to their own unique brand of music call "Rockney".

Their Wiki page is here and there are more in depth tributes such as this one here.

They had worked in many sixties bands and formed in 1975 , opening for Led Zeppelin at Knebworth in 1979. They were loved by everybody regardless of your own musical tastes, if Chas and Dave came on the radio or on Top of The Pops, you never complained because it was a breath of fresh are and a fun interlude and they could also talk.

The had a TV series in 1983 set in an East End pub, but I don't think they ever appeared on EastEnders but it is sad that the duo is now split, but we do have a lot of lovely memories.

Hopefully now I have calmed down enough to try to get  back to sleep, but I'll leave you with their breakthru single "Gertcha" from 1979.

Sleep well.