Bath

Elizabeth the First reputably said she took a bath once a year, whether she needed it or not. I am probably in the same boat, although I do shower at least once a day, whether I need to or not. I don't know why that came into my mind as I showered this morning, although there are times when you are out and you are thinking there are people who who subscribe to the Elizabeth the First model.

Today is the first day back at work, for a four day week for the last week in August. The weather is decidedly Autumnal, Summer is drifting away as it always does, but that's the nature of time and the seasons.

I was thinking of titling a post "Farewell, Adieu, Goodbye, See You Later ...." thinking of all the ways you can say goodbye for no particular reason.

This is post 49 in the #Autumn50 sequence and I think that is really the maximum I could set myself for the month. I will probably do more than 50 but I won't be trying to do this many again. As I say I've seen blogs that do hundreds of posts a day which are basically links to other sites, and I have many friends who started to blog and then gave up, and have one or two friends who post when they feel like it, which is the best way to write.

Oh I've hit my walking target for the month, when I expected it to be difficult, but when you expect things to be difficult you often put in extra effort to ensure that you will meet your target and often hit it with time to spare giving you time to relax when you have hit your target.

Again, for no apparent reason, I will share "Toxygene" by The Orb with you, have a great Tuesday.

... And There Is More

Another lazy day and I have an idea for next months vague blog theme, music that only I, amongst the people I know, have heard. The title is taken for "International Feel" the opener and closer to side one of Todd Rundgren's "A Wizard, A True Star" album which I wrote about a while back here

Todd Rundgren was responsible for the sound on Meatloaf's "Bat Out Of Hell" album as well as a lot more, including his own prodigious output. I found this video and love the number plate reference to another of Todd's albums.

I have been enjoying 6Music's Trojan 50th anniversary celebration and there is a very nice looking picture disc available, but for me the song selection doesn't really do it justice, maybe I should get a slipmat. Note that is my opinion of the songs, others may disagree with me but "Everything I Own" by Ken Boothe and "Help Me Make It Through The Night" by John Holt are hardly essential especially when you have gems such as "Ali Baba" to pick from.

So I'm going to probably watch "World War Z" (that's Zed not Zee) tonight, the first twenty minutes looks excellent.

Time for tea.

Darkness Falls

Nothing bad, but it is getting dark well early now. Today was grey and the central heating is switching it on and we're starting to feel the chill and the temperature dips short of the 20s we've been used to.

It is unusual when where you are expecting light and vision, there is now dark and blackness, lit by street lights and the odd car driving by.

It is only nine o'clock now but I am going to take the opportunity to get some more sleep and more importantly rest. I need to do nine thousand more steps to hit my target for the month so I have no pressure to do a lot of walking this week. I can lie in a little longer and take the bus to work, although I do like walking in and meeting up with the cows on Nunsmoor or seeing the CHAT Trust Phoenix.

Although it's Trojan's fiftieth I was thinking it's a bit late really considering the development of ska and reggae that began in the 1950s , and I was also thinking that Island was just as important, but reading the history here I found that Island launched Trojan so that explains that little mystery.

The first Trojan number one in the UK was "Double Barrel" by Dave & Ansel Collins around 1971, which was the first single my brother bought, and I also saw them perform at Greys Monument six years ago, I put three songs up here.

So I'll share a  full version  soundtracking James Bond dealing with various ne'er-do-wells with you before I go to bed.

Walking Through Treacle (Again)

Although I don't really have to do many steps, today has been difficult, feeling like I'm walking through treacle. I don't feel bad in myself but it's just that having to walk any distance I feel I am pushing against something, like wading through treacle.

Also I'm coming to the conclusion that Firefox is becoming very slow to becoming almost unusable. Microsoft Edge is definitely unusable and Internet Explorer is not very good either. At the moment Chrome seems to be the most reliable browser.

It has been raining but today has been made enjoyable by the amount of ska and reggae being played to celebrate Trojan's 50th anniversary, but I didn't realise that many of the Trojan singles were "enhanced" strings for the UK market, a prime example being Nicky Thomas' "Love of The Common People", although the youth of the time rebelled against this touching up preferring the original raw sound. I've included both so you can hear what they did.

Enjoy both.

Obediah

One of the lowlife characters from the excellent "Fourteen Letters" that I am reading at the moment. It starts of like a full on train, then I thouht it was going to get boring, having a Victorian timeframe setting, but no it just through a lot of connected threads into the pot and every so often you get those "Aaahhh" moments. I will definitely seeing this one through to the end.

This is now my highest posting month, and I don't think I will do it again once I've hit #August50 as you can't always think of something to write about, although in this amazing world there should always be something that you can put down a few words about, although you do sometimes hit a mental brick wall.

We're on the middle day of the Bank Holiday and I have some very mundane shopping today and also a few basic chores to do, but the main thing is I am getting some rest while still exercisng my mental faculties.

6Music are doing a feature on Trojan Records to celebrate it's 50th anniversay here. The real conundrum about sixties ska which was the music of Jamaican and Windrush Immigrants is that it was also the msuic taken up by racist skinheads which was a real mystery although it was very working class / classless music so maybe that was the attraction. It was also prevalent on fairgrounds as well , as I remember from my short time working on one.

Slade Looking Hard

So maybe we will go for Symarip's "Skinhead Moonstomp" one of the many songs on my huge Trojan Box Set collection. I don't know if you know but Slade (as Ambrose Slade and early on) were a skinhead band so I enclose a picture, with Mr Holder looking very threatening on the right.

Enjoy your Sunday people.

This Connect

The title is just more unknowns sending friend requests, I doubt  they would even speak to me, so they're deleted. If someone comes along and you have mutual interests or can talk or chat via text, then Facebook connection is fine, but an anonymous request, hit the delete button.

It's Saturday morning the Sun is shining and I feel I've got a load of things to do, including grocery shopping, physiotherapy exercises, a few website updates for Codonposis here.

Menu Français des Fleurs Sauvages

The weather is cold but sunny but I definitely feel a restful weekend coming on, after just feeling tired all week and missing a pirate metal gig ate Trillians.

I have also remembered I need to share a recipe for Tartiflete with Wildflower. after sampling their gorgeous French Onion soup yesterday. This is their menu for the next thee weeks so I will possibly sampling more, though it may be just more Onion Soup.

So now need to choose either some Francophile music or Pirate metal

Maybe we'll go with David Bowie's take on Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam" which manages to cover a few European bases,

Enjoy your Saturday, I intend to

Red Sky

This morning looked out the back and the sky was a definite shade of red and deep pink. Made me think of of the "Red Sky in th emorning, Shepherds Warning" , although the sky outside looks sunny and blue with wisps of fluffy clouds.

Musically Jimi Hendrix's "House Burning Down" - "Look at the Sky Turn a Hell Fire Red" sprang to mind as well as U2's "Under A Blood Red Sky" which was the first U2 album I really liked all the way through paving the way for "The Unforgettable Fire" which was their first studio album to show what they could really do.

The 22nd was my sister Yvonne's birthday but for some reason I didn't make a blog post, which given that I am trying to hit #August50 gives me another one to catch up, but this is my 43rd post this month which equals the number of post I did in October 2015 when I did my #ALifeInNumbers sequence which was a sequence of fifty nine songs for my fifty nine years in which the sequence number appeared in the song.

Hendrix music is very sparse on Youtube but this Randy Hansen tribute is rather impressive.

It's the Friday before the Bank Holiday, have a brilliant day everybody.

Being Lazy

Due to one thing and another I expected today to be the first day in a very long while that I stepped into the office having walked less than a thousand steps. It turned out I had done 1500 steps, still not a lot but more than I had expected. I am 50K steps ahead of my target for this month so there is very little pressure to up my game for this.

Weather is grey and rainy so not the most uplifting of days.

The thing is I hadn't realised that this weekend is a Bank Holiday weekend, so we have a long weekend which causes a short week next week.

On the subject of apathy and laziness I am feeling so tired and wanting to just sleep that I am not sure if I can even complete this post. I will do, but  it is difficult to actually just write about nothing when your mind and body are not firing on all cylinders as you need it to.

Tomorrow I have a physiotherapy session for my left arm, which hopefully will aid me, although to be quite honest while my arm is sore and weak, it is improving. That reminds of Rick Allen drummer with Def Leppard who lost his arm in a motor accident when his safety belt was improperly fastened. One of the things he said was he didn't realise how heavy his arm was and took a while to come to terms with only having one are.

I think that we all don't realise how much strength and energy we need to put our arm out for a bus.

There, I've managed to finish this and also weave Def Leppard into it and feature "Overture" from the first EP which I bought from a bargain bin in WH Smiths in Liverpool. I remember John Peel played it to death and then the band complained and said he never played them, John Peel was where I first heard them, and I am sure a lot of other people nationally.

One Word Poem

The last couple of mornings I've drifted awake at about five and thought I'll reset the alarm for seven and have a lie in. My body and my mind are fine with this, but there is something else, a nagging presence that keeps telling me I may as well get up, lying in be is just wasting tine.

I just thought that the noun / adjective derived from the verb to lie is lying. I suppose lieing or liing would possibly be a bit strange, but that's the nature of the disparities the English language. On that one of thos mad concepts came in to my mind, a "One Word Poem". How impossible is that, although I am sure someone has presented it as a valid piece.

Obviously One word rhymes with itself and has the same number of syllables as itself, and maybe you could have a poem made of words that are spelt the same but sound different, for instance:

"Wind

Wind"

or

"Read

Read"

Then you could have a list of words that sound the same that are spelt differently

"Wind

Wined

Whined"

or

"Read

Red"

Just a few linguistic mind wanderings before I finish my coffe and take off for work. It's Thursday and it's a good day.

Maybe an appropriate song is Bowie's "Eight Line Poem" from "Hunky Dory".It is amazing how Bowie still manages to influence us and make us think, an amazing man.

I Don't Want

I was thinking of a maybe writing a poem that started:

"I don't want coffee

 I don't want tea

 I don't want alcohol

 I don't want soup ..."

Then I thought I couldn't really stretch it out any further.

I never understood the phrase "I need a drink" refering to alcohol. I've only ever needed a drink when I have been thirsty. I understand also, the need for stimulation so coffee and other caffeine based stimulantscan be beneficial.

Most alcohol tastes attrocious, though I did acquire a taste for Guinnesswhen I was in hospital recovering from ITP in the mid eighties, and the odd alcoholic drink has been pleasant, I still love the smell of Southern Comfort.

Flavoured Ciders are the new alcopops, Cider is Apple flavoured not berry or mango or whatever. They are very easy to drink though and I also used to like drinking Cider, it was usually quite refreshing.

I don't mind Diet Coke and often use it for a caffeine fix but am well aware of the damage Aspartame can do, so if I do indulge it's generally two 500ml bottles a day, or maybe two 330 ml cans. It does surprise me that a 500ml bottle is classed as two servings.

So as I've been on about drink what about The Dubliners' "Seven Drunken Nights"

Grey

The sky is a uniform grey (or is it gray), surfaces outside still are covered in rain / dew, the lawn is finally looking very well but is obviously too we to be mowable and I am drinking decaffeinated coffee as I write this. I've taken the Grammarly spelling  / context checker off because it became too intrusive and was slowing down my typing everwhere. Maybe I should prepare my blog posts in Word to ensure  that it's reasonably grammatically correct and the spelling is correct.

It's my sister Yvonne's birthday tomorrow, which I knew was coming up, but last night my dad said he was worried because he couldn't remember how old she was going to be. I told him she probably wasn't bothered and she would just love a card.

It is amazing how you can miss words out but it still makes sense to you , but to someone else it may look as though you don't know what you are talking about.

I'm not sure if it's raining outside, so I'm not sure if I will be walking into work today.

This weather seems to create an oppressive quiet, though I will disperse that by leaving on my Donna Summer and Malcolm McLaren mix on my player. That's another thing, it now takes a minute to put together a Spotify / Deezer whatever playlist but in the seventies a live DJ had to do that in real time, then we got cassettes (I know there was reel to reel but they were hardly portable) and you could create your mixtape but a sixty minute tape took more than anhour to put together, and if you made a mistake it took even longer.

I'll leave you with Donna Summer's take on Jon & Vangelis' "State of Independence".

Have a great Tuesday

Walking Soundtrack

When I finally started the music as I walked over Nunsmoor, I'd forgotten what I'd set up to play. It was four of my favourite Donna Summer songs and Malcolm McLaren's "Fans" which is a wonderful album.

The four Donna Summer Songs are:

I Feel Love (Original)

I Feel Love (Patrick Cowley Remix)

Unconditional Love

State of Independence

People complain because I don't really rate "Hot Stuff" but life would be so tedious if we all liked the same thing, wouldn't it?

"Fans" is jam packed full of gems and I'm going to share Boys Chorus (La Sui Monti Dell'est) with you, some heavenly backing with Malcolm's cockney wide boy / Artful Dodger chorus of :

"All Work

No Joy

Makes Mac

A Dull Boy" 

Which is true for all of us, well it is definitely true for me. All of this music should be in your collection and given the capacity of our devices we cany carry huge collections with us.

So I will be listening to this for a while but feel free to enjoy.

A Quiet Walk

This morning the first half of my walk to work was done without headphones, so it was effectively quiet , just the sounds of nature and the traffic. It is sometimes nice to just have the non silence, although I always eventually need to listen, but more of that later.

I was in Bradley's on Saturday and mentioned and showed them pictures of the CHAT Trust Phoenicx which I decided to route my walk past this morning as you can see here. This was after noticing the excellent notices on the four doors of Dabbawal in High Bridge on Sunday here.

It always gives me a lift to see witty and funny and original window decoration, and this definitely falls into that category.

This post is about harlf the length of the posts I normally do, but when I add this bit and then talk about what piece of music I am going to share it will suddenly self expand and I will have hit my normal 250 word target.

Maybe we can go with the Happy Mondoy's cover of John Kongos' "He's Gnna Step on You Again" (a favourite of my dad's) which the slowed down, baggied up and retitled as "Step On".

Time To Turn The Hourglass

It's Monday Morning, which is nicely alliterative, but it is time to get off to work. The temptation is to get the bus.

Skies are grey, the trees are still green but Autumn is coming and Summer is slipping away, but this mean we get the beautiful colour changes in leaves and bushes.

Given that I have been continuing with th ehourglass analogy (and yes turn it hover and we have a full hourglass of fun time for the week, I am going to choose "Hourglass" by Squeeze, although reminds me of the first ever Squeeze song I heard, the amazing "Take Me I'm Yours" which I think was on the "No Wave" compilation (though I may be wrong about that>

Anyway this is a short post to keep me on track for #August5, it is Monday Morning so have a wonderful day everyone.

The Eighty Minute Hour

It is sort of strange and amusing how when the weekend starts petering out that time seems to go so musch faster. It's basically the fact that on Friday night after the Friday afternoon where the clocks seeme dto stop and hours stretched out to seem like eighty minutes or longer despite the fact you were doing so much and seemingly becoming unbelievably productive.

Then when you get out you have the whole weekend , and full hourglass of being able to take it easy and do as you please. Then at nine o' clock on Sunday night the sixty four hours of pleasure time you had are reduced to eleven hours and seven of thoses you will hopefully be sleeping.

It's like when you are trying to meet a tight deadline (although with devcnt planning you can always meet deadlines as long as everyone does their job and there are no surprises or unexpected hitches).

I've borrowed the title from Brian Aldiss' excellent story which is a wickedly simple concept and I suggest you investigate it further, and you may soon believe it is actually happening.

I always illustrate why time seems to get faster by this concept:

When you are six, you get six weeks summer holiday from school. That seems like forever, a week for every year of your life. To get the same effect now I would need a sixt week summer holiday to see a break as unbelievabley wrong, but we get four weeks a year and I never take more than a week at a time because I don't want endless weeks at work without a break.

Sorry if this is a bit of a downer, it's not meant to be so I'll leave you with "Time Capives" from "Journey by Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, a wonderful band who were one of the first to you the Bentley Rhythm Ace Drum Machine which once went on a fifteen minute drum solo that they couldn't stop. Ah when things were mechanical in the pre digital age.

Sleep well.

Saturnight

I'm sure the title was used for a Cat Stevens compilation in the dim and distant past, in fact it was a Japanese only live pressing from 1976. Here's the description scraped formAmazon:

"CAT STEVENS Saturnight - Cat Stevens Live In Tokyo (Scarce 1974 Japanese-only limited edition 12-track LP recorded at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo in June 1974 & housed in a unique numbered sleeve with world tour dates that year printed on the back with an illustrated inner six-page Japanese/lyric insert & obi-strip. "

The title is a contraction of "Another Saturday Night" the song of Sam Cooke's that he covered and had a biggish hit with.

I am enjoying "The Fourteenth Letter" though people are dropping like flies and there seem to be a plethora of subplots to unravel and get tangled in.

I've also finished the last episode of "Timewasters" and hoping that there is a series two in the pipeline.

It's eleven of the clock on Saturday night so Cat Steven's "Another Saturday Night" would be appropriate, although it shares it's title with a great zydeco compilation by Charlie Gillett which I have a copy of on vinyl.

Sleep well.

Friday Night

"Blackness Within Blackness

Shadows Within Shadows

Darkness Within Darkness

Hidden and Sightless

This is Life For Some ......."

I'm not sure what brought that on, reading "The Fourteenth Letter" may have done it.

It's Friday night and I am ready for the final episode of "Timewasters" the rather excellent spiky, jazzy, time travel comedy with class lines, lots of laughs taking on institutionalised racism and sexism with more than a little good music.

I think they have been influenced by Post Modern Jukebox but the comedy quality an dthe music is totally spot on, so I'll include a clip from the series and  a take on Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise" by PMJ , ironically returning almost to the Stevie Wonder original ("Past Time Paradise" from "Songs In The Key Of Life").

Finding Timewasters is a little difficult but there may be a legal option here.

So I suggest you sample all of these musical and visual treats, you will feel much improved by them.

Sleep well.

Friday Morning

I was thinking August would be difficult to keep up my steps because of my Liver Biopsy at the start of the month, but surprisingly that's not actually been an issue hitting 20K steps on a couple of days and sitting with a 30K step surplus and close of play yesterday.

I was also thinking that #August50 was an impossible target but after this post I only need to post 18 more entries before the end of the month and we still have two weeks to go, so that's nine posts in each of the next two weeks which is more than doable (is that a word? and how many times have I asked that question).

The problem with doing an hour's walk it that it takes an hour of your time and  to hit my 11K a day that does take two hours and i often think that could be better spent doing someting else.

On my walk to work I am always looking for photo opportunities and vary my routes, but always in the direction of work (essentially Newcastle City Centre) from home. I seldom deviate from this direction except when I have to pick someting up from the Post Office, and to be quite honest I prefer traversing parkland to urban areas.

Walking is a simple form of exercise and anyone can do it and make it interesting. I always found gyms soul destroying but others swear by them, but it's different strokes for different folks.

Today on my walk in I kept with Mike Nesmith and listened to "Tropical Campfires" for the first time, and though it covers some standards such as "Brazil" and "Begin the Beguine" more than adequately the original stuff is excellent, I particularly liked the instrumental "One". Specific late period Mike Nesmith songs are difficult to find on Youtube (ie they are not there) but I found this full concert from 2012 at Union Chapel for your enjoyment, which includes a few songs from "The Prison"

While it is grey , it is Friday and we have a wonderful weekend to look forawd to. Enjoy

Aretha IS Aretha

It was sad  that we lost Aretha and I've seen lots of "RIP" Aretha posts on Facebook, and people suddenly people doing the Facebook sadness as though Aretha were a close family member. It was the same with David Bowie, George Michael, Freddie Mercury and Lemmy and any artist you can think of.

All of a sudden their artistic output is halted.

Thanks to human brilliance and science and things like Facebook ,we can share our memories and listen to Aretha's sing and even watch her perform anywhere we are on our phones, tablets and computers.

I shared her Blues Brothers sequence singing "Think" which summed up  a small part of her brilliance, but she had a brilliant range of singing styles.

I feel for her family, and they will be grieving quite rightly, but her fans should be celebrating what she has done for them ,and enjoy the music she made because all of it made you feel uplifted and feel better. That's what music does for you and and song featuring Aretha will make you feel good.

I will leave you with her collaboration with George Michael, the appropriately titled "I Knew You Were Waiting For Me" .

Have a great Friday and enjoy some of Aretha's music. Remember the wealth of great music she has given us.

Reading The Garden

Tonight when I got home, I decided to read and listen to Mike Nesmith's "The Garden". It's surreal and follows on from The Prison, The narrative is fairly simple and the story can be read as you listen to the album. The narrative is split into chapters that take as their influes seven paintings by Monet:

1. The Artist's Garden of Giverny (1900)
2. A Bend in the Epte River, Near Giverny (1888)
3. Vertheuil in Summertime (1879)
4. Valley of the Petite Creuse (1889)
5. Poppy Field in a Hollow Near Giverny (1885)
6. Wisteria (1920)
7. Waterlilies and Japanese Bridge (1899)

The album clocks in at 55 minutes but it does seem to pass more quickly than that, or it seemed to for me. The Wiki page is here.

While you don't have to have read "The Prison" itis referred to many times in "The Garden" and it does help if you have experienced "The Prison" fully.

I enjoyed both, though I don't feel I have to reread either but can still enjoy the excellent music.

There isn't too much from either album on youtube so I have included the opener from "The Prison" to give you a taste.

Link Past Geek Talent

I often get requests from people to add me to their networks on Linked In and I usually add them no problem, mostly they are recruitment wallahs , but today took the opportunity to trawl though my network list and cull cetrain people, mainly people who didn't have a photo or who have crossed me since we linked up.

The big surprise was the number of people who I had just forgotten about, and the surprising titles of some who I actually have friendships with and respect for.

I remeber after my redundancy at EE that I was really happy about (though not how they were after) I spent a couple of months with Geek Talent who had a brilliant recruitment concept that used social media connections including Linked In to create relationships between you and recruitment targets They've come a long way since then and were using a lot of software which I found impressive but felt I was swimming the deep end, but the people I worked with knew their stuff and could translate any ideas or notions that I had into something that was actually useful. Their site is worh a visit to find out more about the.

Rather than a music video I've included a video about Geek Talent featuring among others my friends Dominic (the MD) and Keith.

It is surprising how a Linked In request sent me off on a tangent to write this post.