A Handkerchief

We hear so much about recycling these days yet still get our milk in plastic or cardboard disposable cartons and use paper tissues instead of handkerchiefs  and when we see  that we need to sort our rubbish into separate containers so that things can be recycled, I think if we reused things there would be little need to recycle thing. Things would be built to last.

I used to work on a farm and bottled milk which was delivered to customers, and went it was delivered the used bottles were returned and then reused. The only disposable part of the operation was the disposable aluminium foil tops.

Now we use disposable paper tissues when I clean handkerchief feels good to touch , and after use can be washed and reused for a long time. I used to like having a handkerchief although you do need somewhere to put it and keep it, but we are generally good at things like that.

Similarly with nappies / diapers, again washing and reusing saves the need to recycle create landfill.

I think a perfect song for this is "Recycled Vinyl Blues" by Neil Innes written at the time of the early seventies oil crisis when vintl prices went up , but also saw the advent of the 12" single, as if 7" wasn't enough.

So just a few thoughts on recycling when we should be reusung.

The Secret Commonwealth

Although I've not really spoken much about "The Secret Commonwealth" by Philip Pullman, it's a 700 page tome and I am about three quarters the way through it, I am thoroughly enjoying it. It's the fifth is the His Dark Materials / Book of Dust sequence and possibly a little less magical and more political.

The events in the book are reflecting the current political situation in the UK and USA while still staying in the alternate reality of people and their daemons. This is at the same time as the BBC / HBO are showing a dramatisation of "His Dark Materials" and that follows the, in my opinion,  excellent "Golden Compass".

The irony is, and I am sure Philip Pullman did this deliberately, "The Secret Commonwealth" in the book refers to the world of magical creatures. The whole series, books and dramatisations is worth investigating, and I am loving all of it.

When I see a seven hundred page book I think will I ever get through this? When you are coming to the end you don't usually think that's the finish line, you just don't want it to finish. There is always the option to go back and two of my favourite book clock in at over a thousand pages, they are "Imajica" by Clive Barker (my favourite book ever) and "Lord of the Rings" by JRR Tolkien. Incidentally when my daughter was 8 she told her teacher she had read "Lord of the Rings". He was a little sceptical about this so quizzed her on it. He then realised that she had read it and had star pupil status.

So what music do we have this grey Saturday morning? We could go with Bo Hansson's  1970 album which you can hear here , but it's a bit elevator musicish. I'm going to going with this Peter Jackson "Lord of the Rings" sequence soundtracked by Clint Mansell's theme to Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem For A Dream" which is well work watching on a big screen played loud.

Documentation

My intention this morning was to walk into work, but I awoke to a deluge, it's dark and cold, so I think it may be a bus journey. Lots of thoughts going through my mind, a bit difficult to put into works because while not bad or downers they are not particularly positive and are the sort of thing that can put you on a downward path if other bad things happen.

It's another day, and another opportunity and I need to start on some documentation at work, effectively redoing documentation I have already written in a new template. Don't you find that often they template takes 75% of the documentation? The good thing about this is it's a single page, which will obviously expand when it's fleshed out.

I'm a great fan of a combination of white space and laconic text in documentation, because then, in my opinion, it's more likely that people will actually read it. Just like instructions for an IKEA flatpack , you think , sod it I'll just do it.

So as the black sky turns to grey the rain seems to have stopped, so why don't we go for "Have You Ever Seen The Rain" surely a rhetorical question by the brilliant Creedence Clearwater Revival.

This excellent video is part of the 50th Anniversary Vinyl Release (on the stripe below) , and I just love the lyrics to the song that opens with:

"Someone told me long ago 

 There's a calm before the storm

 I know it's been comin' for some time

 When it's over so they say

 It'll rain a sunny day

 I know shinin' down like water 

I want to know 

Have you ever seen the rain? 

I want to know 

Have you ever seen the rain 

Comin' down on a sunny day?"

Enjoy your Thursday my friends.

Time Runs

This morning's post was the 13th post this month on the 13th day of this month and I have done many posts about the number thirteen that you can read here so I won't mention that again (this month).

This morning I got up at the normal time but decided to do some washing and had to package a CD and send it off to Germany from my Discogs store. Given that I laso washed and showered got dressed but all of a sudden two hours had gone and I still had to post the CD.

I got out of the house and noticed the bus I needed to catch leaving the stop down from me, however there was so much traffic that I gently strolled to the next bus stop and caught it there.

There are times where no matter how much you plan things run away from you and you have to deal with it, but other times you take opportunities and things fall into place and at the end of the day things fit.

While it's good to be proactive, it's good to be able to be reactive when the situation calls for it.

So I know a short and almost pointless post, but it provides an excuse to include "Time Is Running Out" by Muse, and Muse is always good.

Stille Nacht

Last night, oddly and exceptionally, when I decided in was time for sleep , I thought I don't want anything playing, I just want silence. Normally I have something playing, maybe Brian Eno or some space rock /  Krautrock such as Hawkwind or Tangerine Dream and let myself get lost in the sounds and drift off into the realms of Morpheus.

I know a lot of people who have difficulty sleeping and going to sleep is a bit like riding a bike, if you think about it, you can't do it.

This morning I posted off a CD to Germany and had difficulty writing the letter "ß" as it sort of comes out as a "B" when I write it, but hopefully it will get there.

The "Silent Night" aspect of this post reminded me of two takes on the Christmas Carol by Franz Xaver Gruber one by Can and the other by Sinead O' Connor (from "The Ghosts of Oxford Street" by Malcolm Mclaren, a great album / documentary if you can track it down. My friend Alison just found that it's on All4 here , so watch , learn and enjoy.

I've inclluded both for your enjoyment.

Take The Skinheads Bowling

Yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I walked to and from work. Both walks were in the dark as it's autumn and the days are still getting shorter as we are still on the way to the Winter Solstice and the shortest day. I did about 18.5K steps which at 2.5K steps per mile is about 7.5 miles. I don't think I will do that today as I need to be at work a bit longer today but I will definitely be walking in , and my step cout is ahead of schedule for the month.

I got to listen to the excellent "Dirty Computer" by Janelle Monáe, my favourite album of the last two years, repeating a couple of songs as I played it then finishing off with Marcel King's "Reach For Love" , one of my favourite singles and Shaun Ryder's favourite Factory single. That's the great thing about walking, these days (and really since the dawn of the compact cassette) we have the ability to listen to music on the move. Although cassettes are having a revival, the problem has always been their fragility, but they did combine that with convenience. A friend of mine had a cassette player that allowed you to program the playing order, but the fact that it had to fast forward and rewind between songs sort of negated the convenience, but an impressive piece of technology none the less.

The blog is now eight posts away from the annual record (last year I hit 316) so that will be easily surpassed this year and that will probably be it for posting records.

One of the points of this blog is to share music with friends and I was thinking of something by Janelle Monáe or Marcel King, but Chris Hawkins on 6Music has just put on "Take The Skinheads Bowling" by Camper Van Beethoven who once retired to a cabin and recorded Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" (my favourite Fleetwood Mac album and even got album of the week from NME despite being a double album by "dinosaur rockers" in the middle of the UK punk explosion, and the CVB one is good as well). So we will go with "Take The Skinheads Bowling".

Just as I was writing this , my tablet box somehow fell out of my pocket. It is round. I looked down it was nowhere to be seen. I guessed right and it had rolled under the chest of drawers. C'est la vie.

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.