Start Again

Surprisingly this month is already the highest monthly hit rate for a month since I started and effectively this seemed to be kicked off my the demise of Google+ , because I looked for another way of sharing my posts and tried MeWe that doesn't really seem to have taken off but provides an easy way to copy the link post which I shared on Twitter. That then seemed to kick it off. Under google posts, generally a good visit count would be 100 , average about 50 but when Google+ went I was lucky to get 20. Facebook doesn't really seem to help although a few of my friends visit via that link.

Anyway after sharing on Twitter I was picked up by Feedburner and since then I have had more than a thousand visits a day, still very few comments, so maybe it's all robots, though I would love to see comments from friends. Yesterday I had 2,600 visits , that's more than one a minute which is impressive.

I finished "The Secret Commonwealth" by Philip Pullman and although I am a very slow reader I always have a book on the go, and while my last few books have been fiction, I have a lot of music biographies and commentaries still unread. I briefly considered "Tarantula" by Bob Dylan which I have read several times, and for me is an easy enjoyable read being a stream of consciousness based narrative by Dylan. I decided to take "On Some Faraway Beach" by David Sheppard , the biography of Brian Eno.

When I opened it I immediately baulked, 450 pages of of tiny unrelenting text, books like this really do initially put me off and need to be special to keep me on board. I'm on to chapter two so it is actually a goer and will be my book for the next few weeks.

Today I am also going back to contact lenses so that's another restart for me, and at the moment the lenses feel absolutely fine.

Looking out the window it's still dark grey and featureless, but every day is another day of potential to discover and do new things. The David Sheppard book opens with a quote from the brilliant Edward De Bono who's books and methods taught me a hell of a lot:

"“The need to be right all the time is the biggest bar to new ideas. It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong than to be always right by having no ideas at all. ”"

... and I suppose that just hooked me into the book. Many of the chapters are named after Brian Eno songs and pieces, so we will go with the creepily ominous  "The Great Pretender" from "Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy" a truly wonderful album.

Enjoy your Monday, Make it special.

The Final Chapter

This morning I slept through , almost ten hours. It does help when you have switched off your alarm, but again it was a surprise and probably good for me.

When I decided to write this I had one chapter to go in "The Secret Commonwealth" but as the final chapter was only ten pages I could not resist finishing it off. This books has a lot of parallels with what is happening in the world today and there is a touching tribute to the Grenfell disaster (caused by our government getting rid of safety standards to improve profitability) but that's by the way. At 700 pages this is a hefty read and is only part of the "His Dark Materials" / "Book of Dust" double trilogy, and like all great books I did not want this one to end, so I now have to wait til my next birthday for the final installment which I am now actually waiting for.

The last two days have been so grey that I don't think I have even seen the sun. Today is mist rather than rain but yesterday was very rainy.

It is a Sunday morning here an the last week in November.

I was vaguely toying with the idea of posting a good Christmas song each day in December but I sort of did this here in 2013 and after going on about Rush in post number 2113 there was this post in that sequence which was virtually on the same subject with the same points, so I do repeat myself but who remembers what they said on a day six years back.

Music wise I'm going with The Cascades "Rhythm of the Rain" due to this inclement weather, but it's a great song and I found a more than decent live take. Obviously the band have aged but they are in fine form and still sound great.

In the sixties bands imagined they had a shelf life on two or three years and often that was true, but for others they found they could go on and on until they are physically removed from this mortal plane. The Rolling Stones , The Who and The Beach Boys are three that come to mind.

Anyway it's time to do Sunday things now.

Do I Love You? (Indeed I Do)

I am not a fan of Strictly Come Dancing but caught a bit of it tonight in which Kelvin Fletcher and Oti Mabuse danced to a cover of Frank Wilson's "Do I Love You? (Indeed I Do" which is one of the greatest singles ever, and a staple of the Northern Soul circuit.

At one point this was the most expensive vinyl single ever sold worth over £25,000 according to this article although thanks to digital such as MP3, CD and Youtube anyone can listen to it and thanks to reissues anyone can own a vinyl copy a;though not the Motown copy of which only three copies may be in existence.

Part of the reason I am writing this, is that although I have the song on several compilations and can listen to it on Youtube I think it might sound great on my record player, so I am considering buying a copy. The cheapest I've seen one is £3.49 plus postage but I will decide whether to do it after posting this. I can get it from Amazon by Monday but that will be a bit more expensive.

On a separate not the visits to the blog are slowly increasing and think that this month will be another record and expect to easily hit 400K visits by the end of the year and maybe half a million some time next year.

So you know what record this is, enjoy it , and below are links to buy from Amazon plus some Northern Soul compilations. Listen to it and I am sure you will want your own copy too.

Lost (in) Music

When Brian Matthew used to do "Sounds of the 60s" he'd get communications similar to "my husband's favourite record is XXXX, could you play it because he has never heard it since 1967 when it went missing in a house move" and more recent Chris Hawkins has a Lost Love feature where people write in with messages akin to "My favourite record as a teenager was XXXX but I haven't heard it since 1990".

Now the thing is we live in a digital age and we can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world instantly if we are both, in some form , online. A benefit of this is that you can usually easily find your favourite record. This blog relies so much on Youtube because you can find virtually everything on there, if I can't find it I will create a slideshow and put the record up there and hope it doesn't get pulled for copyright reasons. Most of them stay and you can check my channel which is a combination of such slideshows and live performances.

The other thing, even if you are not digitally connected, if you are lucky and have one , libraries and record shops can search out music for you, and they would be on the end of a phone. The people who contact Chris Hawkins have no excuse at all, they contact him exclusively by email so are connected.

In the nineties Voiceprint Records based in Houghton-Le-Spring re-released a lot of music digitally. This was a good model because the music was only downloadable so apart from the server and site costs they didn't have to invest in vinyl / cd print runs. There is still music on th eimprint (see below).The problem with digital media is it can be stolen over and over again that applies to video, music and e-publications.

So I should really play a song I have forgotten about, but if I've forgotten about it then I can't remember it so I will just play something that I haven't played for a while, although I want't to also play something fairly obscure which I had difficulty tracking down, but I did on either Amazon or Ebay. That song is "Dizz Knee Land" by Dada from 1992 and it is a great record.The title of the song spelling was changed by the group so as not to interfere with copyright laws, however "Disneyland" is also the nickname for the Orange County Jail.

2112

Actually this is post 2113, the last one here was 2112. I only realised as I was getting towards the end of it and it was all about my eye infection. 2112 was an album by Rush and was pretentious as hell but I always equated Rush with Abba, music generally awesome but lyrics were sometimes very iffy. Abba had the excuse of English being a second language but Rush didn't.

It didn't stop Rush producing some great music and when they reigned back their pretentious side everything was excellent, but even the pretentious stuff , the music still more than stands up. The first song I heard by them was "Finding My Way" from "Fly By Night" on the John Peel show and thought it was Led Zeppelin, they were that good. I must have heard their early albums because I didn't actually by them and generally they were patchy in my opinion, but  the live "All The World's A Stage" changed that which is a live tour-de-force and that was the first Rush album that I bought.

I actually sang "Spirit of Radio" with Spoon and always have difficulty singing rubbish lyrics, "Spirit of Radio" has excellent lyrics, but I don't think I have a recording anywhere of that to see how good or bad I was.

So I really have to included "2112" that took up side one of the album it named. Great music and dodgy lyrics for this Friday.

Eyes Adrift

On Sunday I noticed my left contact lens was a bit curly at the edges but still put it in anyway. By the afternoon my left eye was stinging and I took my lenses out and had to bathe it as it had become very uncomfortable to the point of being painful. Monday and Tuesday I wore my glasses for work and my eye seemed to be better although the aircon at work does dry the eyes out a bit,

Wednesday morning I walked to work ( you can see some of that on Instagram here) with contact lenses back in but when I got into work suddenly I could hardly see out of my left eye and it was also affecting my right eye as well. I ditched the left eye contact lens but was feeling awful and disorientated and got myself back home. At 11:45 I rang C4 Sightcare , my opticians of 20 years, told them the problem, my left eye felt like it was filled with grit or sand, and they asked if I could get it by 12:15 which I said I could. By this time the sun was shining and due to Blackett Street being closed for the Christmas Market I had to walk a fair way to the opticians but I could hardly see due to the bright sunlight and the discomfort in my left eye and nearly walked into a few people.

My optician examined my eye and said the cornea was cloudy, but there was no major problems, although the pressure jets were painful, and prescribed me some GoldenEye Antibiotic Cream. I went home and slept for 5 hours and today has been much the same but the eye in improving. I will probably do without contact lenses over the weekend, although I don't like wearing glasses all day.

So when Kurt Cobain died Dave Grohl formed the Foo Fighters, but bassist Krist Novoselic formed Eyes Adrift who I think only made one album which featured a beautiful song called "Inquiring Minds" which I have found a live acoustic version of  but click on the title for the album version, or buy it from the link below. This is possibly the first paragraph I have written that mentions every member of Nirvana.

You can see that my eye is improving because I can actually write a blog post, so things are improving.

A Record - Godbluff

This is post 317 this year, that surpasses last year's total of 316, so any more posts this year will just cement 2019 as my most prolific posting year ever. I have no need to actually surpass that, and this year I wasn't actually trying to surpass last year, but I just did.

This, for some reason reminded me of "Godbluff" by Van Der Graaf Generator, another of my favourite albums, which consists of four songs and is an incredibly atmospheric album punctuated by Peter Hamill's staccato stabbing words and vocals. The NME reviewed it favourably but commented that it needed a format that allowed it to be played non stop (this was mid seventies, 1975). Obviously CD facilitated this but there was the option of recording it to one side of a C90 cassette or if you were posh a cassette player that had autoreverse. Classical music had the same problem, but I play vinyl now and don't mind turning the record over, and also think that twenty minutes is a fine length to listen to a piece of music.

I found a copy of the album, so you can also listen to it non stop now thanks to digital technology or you can buy it on the link below.

This morning I was getting my weekly tablets, and one of the things is that tablets have their own boxes and colour scheme. This morning I notices that my Metformin have changed from a blue compact box to a green long box, the same a s Doxazosin. I had mistakenly pulled out some new Metformin instead of Doxazosin. Now I know we are resistant to change, even when it benefits us, but this is not a good change, I could have been double dosing on Metformin and not getting Doxazosin. Now I spotted it but there may be many who don't do this. I think I may go to chemist and feed this back, you can see here. on my Instagram feed.

It's minus 3 degrees centigrade, cars are iced up, so will be a cold walk to work.