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.