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.