tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16073458556699219302024-03-05T04:45:38.761-08:00BLUES NIGHT - RICHMONDSitting in a shed in North Yorkshire, listening to records.bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.comBlogger52125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-46745220285247675672023-11-04T08:35:00.000-07:002023-11-04T08:35:08.566-07:00The 2nd Annual Berkeley Blues Festival Concert & Dance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjlGMP-tV9IiDiRE6dyc6a-IyDUSSUcvGidyTel9GPBLjjmu0DKCsjq7DYaewtByBlal5GPTwwj0o7-mbZ4UiC2g8YrpOERsho6i2fDvT2Y5UhE42Yw4RVCLOPs7dvmNX90N3pR0EiwXt2WpiIOcncc7pVBQE9epQ_crtqy77MlRw3IO77yABcBOeP7FE/s1947/bf1.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1947" data-original-width="1920" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjlGMP-tV9IiDiRE6dyc6a-IyDUSSUcvGidyTel9GPBLjjmu0DKCsjq7DYaewtByBlal5GPTwwj0o7-mbZ4UiC2g8YrpOERsho6i2fDvT2Y5UhE42Yw4RVCLOPs7dvmNX90N3pR0EiwXt2WpiIOcncc7pVBQE9epQ_crtqy77MlRw3IO77yABcBOeP7FE/s320/bf1.jpg" width="316" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This is, I think, the first time I have written a post for this blog sitting in BLUES NIGHT when it is actually open. All that build-up, over weeks and months, and then I open for very nearly five years (apart from the times when the wise heads in Downing Street were saying that such things were simply not on) with very little to say about it. No wonder some people still don't seem to know <i>What It Is</i>.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">So, just to recap - BLUES NIGHT isn't actually a 'Blues Night'. It's a shed in an attractive Georgian market town in North Yorkshire, where my records are for sale. I have been making beer in the kitchen since August 2018, and I'm starting to get quite good at it. You can come and try some if you like, but you don't have to. Also, you don't have to 'Like The Blues' to come here.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">M told me six years ago not to call it BLUES NIGHT, because it would put a lot of people off coming. I knew at the time that she was right as usual, and (as is very often the case) that made me even more determined to prove her right by ignoring her advice completely. This was BLUES NIGHT’s anti-capitalist none-of-your-business model in embryonic form. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Elsewhere, in far-too-kind articles (that I won’t even link to here, because if you haven’t read them already you’re clearly not very interested) I have spent a lot of time yabbing about how all good music comes from the blues and therefore all good music is the blues yada yada yada, but I have rarely spoken about the time a frustrated blues enthusiast got annoyed with me for saying I wouldn’t just be playing Blues all night (back when BLUES NIGHT <i>was</i> a Blues Night a thousand years ago in South London) because that would be boring. There it is now, though. Hope you liked it.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Sadly, there can never actually be a good live Blues Night ever again, because all of the good blues singers are dead, and probably have beers named after them. The way the music industry has fucked musicians (apart from Adele and Ed Sheeran) over all of this century has led to us over-valuing live music and we really should get back to spending lots of money on old records. These are all just opinions of course. </span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This record is an excellent example of a Good Live Blues Night, but priced at nineteen pounds it is a hell of a lot cheaper than a ticket to go and see Joe Bonamassa. Probably. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifZbC2WsCX00X3C6GqjywFoCZG48C8VgERW7AxcwAldGF5yjtP3h52LehLy80xNyPHASFx6uGOsUfeSNqImBT4DlyZuZhLCivqhf4zRQuqfvarbZo2vl819HZTDHPBgesWTXiCuWm04MTk7Sa45dJS6qMLxIPj3RNIEp14kq3zZTprj7G2wGDSZeLNJk4/s2888/IMG_2218.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2811" data-original-width="2888" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifZbC2WsCX00X3C6GqjywFoCZG48C8VgERW7AxcwAldGF5yjtP3h52LehLy80xNyPHASFx6uGOsUfeSNqImBT4DlyZuZhLCivqhf4zRQuqfvarbZo2vl819HZTDHPBgesWTXiCuWm04MTk7Sa45dJS6qMLxIPj3RNIEp14kq3zZTprj7G2wGDSZeLNJk4/s320/IMG_2218.jpg" width="320" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The second side is all Lightnin' Hopkins and it is just as fabulous as you might expect, but as Russ Wilson said before England won the World Cup, he was "one of the last of the great blues singers" even then. </span><span style="font-family: helvetica;">The first side is part Mance Lipscomb and part Clifton Chenier, and if there's ever been an example to be heard of just how varied and diverse blues music can be, it's this record. Or maybe they're not even Playing The Blues at all. I don't really know. What I do know is that I have started a pattern of always mentioning the sleeve in these posts, so two things - this cover looks right in a row of three on Instagram alongside the promotion of some excellent events (including Live Blues!) as part of BLUES NIGHT's Quinquennial in a fortnight's time, and also it is worth nineteen quid just for Ralph Gleason calling Lightnin's drunken shite-talking 'pretentious' and Strachwitz clearly getting pretty annoyed about it.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Again, as with the other posts, I'm not actually arsed if you buy this or not. There are no copies on Discogs for sale in this country, and only one on eBay, and that's £65. And it's unlikely that you will like this record more than I do.</span></div><p><br /></p>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-81451669973844187022023-10-19T12:21:00.005-07:002023-10-22T00:53:15.486-07:00KLF - Chill Out<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieCKn2bDoTiDp6ToXH9kuhEStRoCUTXPxOgDwpVCV2LpFje_Q16BQjhNlb-awEUKfzoPttFsLOu2QT-D2MMN7GB6hu86ls0OlatOMgfaVg9hc7sQevsffaGViJ92fun-65995x-fF2y52XbS9nta-MST6hyphenhyphenIqDEef7XFCn-FA8HsBz1h9PKOL-otpV-ck/s3024/IMG_2164.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEieCKn2bDoTiDp6ToXH9kuhEStRoCUTXPxOgDwpVCV2LpFje_Q16BQjhNlb-awEUKfzoPttFsLOu2QT-D2MMN7GB6hu86ls0OlatOMgfaVg9hc7sQevsffaGViJ92fun-65995x-fF2y52XbS9nta-MST6hyphenhyphenIqDEef7XFCn-FA8HsBz1h9PKOL-otpV-ck/s320/IMG_2164.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><p><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /></span></p></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">There's a lot you can say about the musical content of this album, the way it was recorded in one take and the devil-may-care lack of sample clearance for whacking great chunks of music by some of the most famous (and famously litigious) musical artistes in history. But it has all been said somewhere else. If you're reading this, you've probably read at least some of it already and if you have any sense at all you won't be arsed about my take on any of it. I am not even going to use the phrase "Tuvan throat singing."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">The sample clearance business is, of course, why this record tends to be so preposterously expensive these days (indeed, it was pretty damn pricey when I got this copy in the nineties) and I must make a deliberate effort to choose a disc priced at under twenty quid for 'Records I Can't Believe Nobody Has Bought From Me Yet Part 3'. This one, like last week's opener, has plenty of signs of having enjoyed itself around the turn of the millennium and, priced accordingly, would have been snapped up on Discogs within weeks, but as we know, BLUES NIGHT isn't here for the quick sales or the optimistic gradings.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">Background noise is negligible however, and this is important with a record that has passages where the music IS background noise. Play this record at a regular volume while bottling a beer or reading somebody's blog and it might pass you by almost unnoticed. But crank it up LOUD when you're as smashed as we were in the shed during scientific testing last weekend, and it crawls in through your ears, fills up your skull and expands your mind in seventy-five altered dimensions... which are costing you one pound each.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">Actually, you needn't spend that at all. Just swing by some time and we will all listen to it. It kind of belongs here anyway, especially as the first elpee we've posted twice on Insta, appropriately enough for a record in a sleeve that looks like it could have been photographed about half a mile up Hurgill Road from here. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">Update: this record is now sold. </span></div></div><p></p>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-49733127084641606212023-10-10T13:44:00.001-07:002023-10-10T13:45:56.822-07:00Darker Than Blue: Soul From Jamdown 1973 - 1980<p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDBvEW0qTdYXQDWu9C021DF26Ba_FsNaj-kDeiHJyFpnQMzEAVfZa4FQygmuouLDSpOVK9Eb9EaHVFwTQsIIi2pto9R1C1mZe8ccaiDYuAlvoq7PDdOARku_3qYFb3Vw-ZYRPdPHn-5xQd0fjykv24PqWIh54x5lE6QkYWuuGIexIbxKbkp6F484JBhlw/s3024/IMG_2156.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3024" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDBvEW0qTdYXQDWu9C021DF26Ba_FsNaj-kDeiHJyFpnQMzEAVfZa4FQygmuouLDSpOVK9Eb9EaHVFwTQsIIi2pto9R1C1mZe8ccaiDYuAlvoq7PDdOARku_3qYFb3Vw-ZYRPdPHn-5xQd0fjykv24PqWIh54x5lE6QkYWuuGIexIbxKbkp6F484JBhlw/s320/IMG_2156.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: large;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">I love doing this BLUES NIGHT thing. It's not actually a Blues Night, of course, it's just a name for a secret record shop. You know, like how a Lion Bar isn't actually made out of lions? Actually, it's not even a secret record shop, it's just that my own personal records are all for sale. Which is the pretext on which I invite people who might be interested in that sort of thing into my shed to hang out and drink beer and listen to music. It's a social thing. It's a hobby.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">So I can't advertise or anything, apart from to offer information up to a potential audience of billions on here, of course. I only do it at the weekends, so the actual occasions upon which somebody buys a record off me are rare compared with a real record shop. I still get new stuff in, but only stuff I want to get in, and only at about the same rate as other stuff goes out. As a result, there are thousands of great records here that have been here for five years now. I often find it a little frustrating when I'm asked, "Have you got any new stuff in?" Because anybody who asks me that is missing the point. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">Instead of telling them that, though, I thought I'd use this underused channel to talk about some of the records I can't believe nobody has bought from me yet. If you find something you'd be interested in here, I'd even be prepared to post it to you, if you're never anywhere near North Yorks.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">This is a superb compilation of soul and funk tunes performed as roots and rocksteady, lovers and dancehall, by some of Jamaica's finest singers and musicians of the 1970s. It's in a beautiful thick hard sleeve bearing no information on the front, just this engaging photo of the crowd at a reggae festival in Brockwell Park in 1974. I spent quite a lot of time in that park in the years following my purchase of this record, but the closest that this copy ever got was probably a wedding reception at the Cambria. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">I almost started this paragraph with the adverb 'sadly' for a moment there, and I'm so glad I didn't. There is nothing sad about the fact that I have played this record out in pubs and bars on dozens and dozens of occasions. Yes, on many of those occasions I would have been too pissed or otherwise distracted to get it back in the right inner sleeve after taking it off, but I would hardly ever have dumped it somewhere it could get scraped. It plays with very little extraneous noise - the countless superficial marks on both sides of both discs are a plethora of badges of honour, a patina to be cherished as well as a good solid reason for this record to be valued sensibly. The only compilation albums for sale in BLUES NIGHT with a price tag north of a ton are on Belzona Records, and that is the way that we like it. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">Frankly, it seems fundamentally wrong for a 21st Century artefact - a comp of singles that can be found fairly easily for the larger part - to be fetching daft prices like £180 on <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/552184-Various-Darker-Than-Blue-Soul-From-Jamdown-1973-1980">Discogs.</a> The idea that (with some of these copies for people with more money than sense) the previous owner doesn't seem to have bothered to listen to it makes it seem even worse, if you ask me. I would like to say I'd describe its condition as VG- but to be quite honest I get so little pleasure out of grading records for brevity that I was prepared to uproot my whole family in order that the discs might be fully playtested by anybody who is interested in buying them. The paper insert of this copy has one gloriously tattered edge where I might have even written a phone number and then torn it off for somebody. I told you I was pissed. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: helvetica; font-size: medium;">So let's cut to the chase. This copy is for sale for sixty quid. I don't really care if anybody buys it or not as I still love to play it, but when I do, no matter how drunk I am, I shall try to remember where I put the inner sleeve from now on.</span></p>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-44364928232155864622020-06-21T09:12:00.000-07:002020-06-21T09:17:59.134-07:00And When I Think About The Hole In The Sky...<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Father’s Day often makes me think
of John Lennon. He was a shitty father to Julian and he knew it, so
he made a special effort to be the best father he could be for Sean.
This probably didn't make Julian feel any better, but after his
father’s murder his music would go on to have a significant
influence upon the development of BLUES NIGHT, which must give him
some comfort.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">This was my first opportunity to
understand that teachers are, generally speaking, terrible with
music. I shudder to remember the hundreds of occasions upon which a
piece of calming classical music (or inspirational M People /
Lighthouse Family) was unceremoniously killed with the stop button
instead of with a gentle fade so that assembly could start.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Music used in lessons is (nine
times out of ten) chosen for its lyrical content rather than the
consideration of whether it is any good. And so it was when, as a
student teacher, I sat in the hall of a great big Victorian primary
school in East Ham, to observe a dance lesson on the first day of my
first placement. The teacher sat her class down in a rough circle
around the wedge-shaped Coomber CD player (no, I have no idea why
schools have to use these) and bade them 'just listen to the words'
of this song. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Immediately I recognised the sub-Strawberry-Fields
organ intro of Julian Lennon's 'Saltwater' and I was struck by the
horrified realisation that these poor kids were going to have to
Dance About The Environment. About four minutes later, the music
stopped, and the teacher announced, “This song is called <i>S</i><i>altwater</i>
and it is going to be the theme of your new dance. Does anybody know
who this song is by?” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Naturally, I did not put my hand up. I was
27, and a student teacher, not a child in the class. Also naturally,
none of the children did either. It had reached Number 6 on the UK
charts around the time that they were born. The teacher was
undaunted, however. As an observer, I was impressed by her
expectations of this group of predominantly Bangladeshi 8-year-olds.
“Okay, but after hearing it, can anybody guess who it was by?” </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>How on earth do you expect them
to do that? </i>I wondered. And then I began to worry. <i>Oh no, you
don't think…</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
“<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Well, I'm pretty sure a lot of
you will have heard of him…” </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Oh no I think you do think…</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
“<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">He was very, very famous!” </span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Oh no. No. Please, no. </i>At
this point my hand would normally have been on its way to my
forehead, but I was new here, it was my first day and I was eager to
impress. In fact, my new ‘Mentor’, the single person it was most
important for me to impress in the world at that moment, was just
about to say something to which it would take all of my effort to
stifle a visible reaction.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
“<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Well, his name was Julian Lennon
and he was the singer in a band called The Beatles.” At this point,
the invisible latch holding my arm in place suddenly dematerialised
and my fleshy, concave palm slammed against my
already-sizeable, end-of-the-century forehead. In this hall it
sounded like a gunshot, and every single child in the class turned
around to look.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">The teacher was already facing in
my direction. “Oh I'm sorry, Mr Barnes, is that not correct?” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"Um, no, I think that was his dad.” I murmured.</span><br />
<br />
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<br />bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-81398822121458416372019-01-24T12:58:00.002-08:002019-01-24T12:58:51.105-08:00Destination: Richmond<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtaFxpf3RmQ0WFTIpZNRrfWi_xBx2Co-3SvM3D7Yngv1ZNt9U9C_Pw8mIZpWu7GcGc-rdZr_wxa3XxlsXt7CqRSysnGVUXj2Cw2zJfvKTeqxmgVHbJJfBDg0nkhRkY4iKe4Lo-FEXUt4w/s1600/IMG_0999.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtaFxpf3RmQ0WFTIpZNRrfWi_xBx2Co-3SvM3D7Yngv1ZNt9U9C_Pw8mIZpWu7GcGc-rdZr_wxa3XxlsXt7CqRSysnGVUXj2Cw2zJfvKTeqxmgVHbJJfBDg0nkhRkY4iKe4Lo-FEXUt4w/s400/IMG_0999.JPG" width="300" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>I know what you're thinking.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>You're thinking <i>Isn't it strange that he has so much less to say about his weird, spoddy little music-shed project than he does about getting told off by various Yorkshirewomen?</i></b></span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>Or you might be thinking <i>I've read that Hi-Fi mag article already. Is that the best he can do?</i> But lots of people won't have, there's a newer issue out now (so hopefully they won't mind) and I have actually taken the time to get the copy in a readable form. And also, everything else I have to say about my spoddy little music-shed project will need to make reference to this lovely article from time-to-time, in a post to follow soon. (Yes, I know you've heard that one before. Shut up and read it.)</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Neil Young’s <i>On the Beach</i>
is off the wall and on the turntable and <i>HFC</i>
is on the sofa with a mug of </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">Yorkshire</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121;"> tea, leafing through a vintage <i>NME</i>, sitting across from friendly and engaging host Tim Barnes.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Tim’s a longstanding record collector, blogger, craft brewer, motorhome
veteran and entrepreneur, and we’re catching up inside BLUES NIGHT, just before
its opening in mid-November. Not only a project years in the making, it’s a
strong contender for the most pleasant shop <i>HFC</i>
has visited in this series so far. Approximately 25 square-metres of cool, the
converted barn is compact, but its lines are clean and it has the aesthetics of
an independent US or Scandi record store.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Refreshingly, all of the LPs, 12”s, 45s, 78s, CDs and cassettes
are for sale at realistic prices, and none of that uncluttered space is taken
up by racks – the record sleeves are in lovely old seventies Suffolk County
Library crates, on a chunky shelving unit. “I didn’t want sections or
dividers,” Tim explains. “I wanted people to grab a whole crate, sit down with
it, and peruse its contents slowly and enjoyably. Seats and tables are there
because I want people to take their time, have a drink, maybe even talk to me!”<br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">One reason for the lack of categorisation is that it’s all the
blues – or at least Tim’s inventive interpretation of it as a broad church. “I
came to the blues as many others did, via the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and
the rest. I’d say they were all blues bands. I’d say Bob Marley was a blues
singer and Underground Resistance records are bluesy. And a lot of people would
assume that I am bonkers. Look at the blues section in your average record shop
and you’ll see that this inclusive philosophy of the blues is not a popular
one.” Tim’s belief is that it’s the cornerstone of all good music, yet it’s a
niche interest that is misrepresented for the people who prefer to stay outside
of it.<br />
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Blues Night’s kit list makes for covetable reading. “I’ve always been more into
hi-fi than DJ kit, but for the shop, I never thought about anything other than
a pair of Technics 1210s,” Tim explains. These came via eBay, along with the
Allen & Heath mixer. There’s also an ancient Goldring Lenco GL75 to play
78s on. The Nakamichi 600 tape deck is the most recent arrival: “I enjoy making
a mixtape even more in my forties than I did in my teens,” he adds. “Sometimes
it’s useful to record onto CD – the closest I get to digitising – on a Sony
RCD-W100. A series of British amplifiers came to an end when the Marantz PM6003
was all I could afford and it seems it will last forever.” The speakers are
bi-wired Musical Fidelity Reference 4s. “I’ve had them since I was a teenager
and I love them like brothers.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">For now, all the stock on sale is from Tim’s own collection: “This is music
I’ve been playing out in pubs, sharing it since I was a kid. Which is why the
shop is called BLUES NIGHT. It’s not just a shop, it’s a musical project. It’s
an attempt to share some excellent music, a lot of which doesn’t get heard very
often.” Setting up the shop has led to moments of musical rediscovery, too:
“It’s been exciting seeing the front covers of records that have been hidden
away, apart from maybe a few square centimetres of spine, for decades,” he
adds. “Records I’ve forgotten I had. Records I’ve thought were incredible, but
only played once or twice. If I sell them all quickly, then I suppose I’ll be
reinvesting as much of that as possible in more records that I can enjoy while
they’re on sale. Or if I hardly sell any at all, I’ve still got lots of great
records! It seems like a win-win situation to me.”<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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BLUES NIGHT aims to blur the lines between business venture and public service.
“If I can get this project to make enough money to justify me spending most of
my waking hours on it, it will be worth doing,” says Tim. “I really don’t know
what to expect from it, long-term. I hope there will be live music,
opportunities to sell the beer I’ve been making to occasional decent-sized
crowds, and that it’ll be a venture that my boys can enjoy enough not to want
to hide its existence and their connection to it from their school friends. I
hope that people will listen to and enjoy music that they would never have
picked out for themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Tim has previous, having worked in a second-hand </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121;"> record
shop 20 years ago. “It was the only job I’ve ever had that I enjoyed. But I was
getting paid £60 a day, and I thought maybe I’d try teaching for a while. I
have been planning my escape back into my own record shop ever since.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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The eventual push for the escape plan was bitter-sweet, however. “Living in the
capital, I never had any money – and rarely actually had any time to just sit and
listen to music either. And an old friend died two-and-a-half years ago. I
realised that while he’d never had much money to spend either, he had always
done what he wanted to do – seeing the world, playing records in clubs,
managing DJs and having a good time. That was my eureka moment: I knew I had to
do it now or accept that I never would.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Tim and family sold their </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">South London</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121;"> house and hit the road in a motorhome, driving round the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">UK</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: #212121;"> in search of the perfect place to create the perfect record shop,
dropping anchor in gorgeous </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121;">, </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">North Yorkshire</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">. (Their adventures are documented in a thoroughly entertaining
blog,<span style="border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">bluesnightontour.blogspot.com</span>) “I fell for the town and the
premises instantly,” Tim adds. “It’s beautiful, in a glorious part of the
country, and it seems, to me, to be a little bit of a secret. BLUES NIGHT will
be a secret within a secret; a shop that’s not a shop, tucked away in a
courtyard out the back of a Georgian terrace, the entrance hidden under a
jungle of clematis.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Tim’s commute certainly sounds enviable. “I decided it was going to have to be
a premises inside my own home for a few different reasons,” he explains.
“First, even if it was in a prime city-centre retail location, there would have
been times when I’d be sitting there on my own drinking coffee in the morning
thinking: ‘I might open up a couple of hours later tomorrow’. I got talking to
a guy who’d started a shop stocked with his own collection several years back,
who said he had essentially swapped thousands of brilliant records for a few
years of rent payments to somebody he hated. The flip side of this is that I
hope I might be getting phone calls from people saying they’ve come two hundred
miles for a browse, so is there any chance I can get out of bed and let them
in?”<span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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It’s taken a few months to get BLUES NIGHT ready, not least because of the need
to provide accommodation as well as a comfy sofa. One important aim is to be a
community hub in his adopted home town. “Wherever we went, we were always
looking for a place we could sit down, have a drink, have a chat with somebody
who knew the place a bit, all of that stuff. Now I want to provide that place.
The shop and the town should have a mutually beneficial relationship –the shop
should be a good place for locals or visitors to go, but also be a reason for a
few people to <i>want</i> to visit the town,
and then while they’re here, they’ll discover what a nice place it is.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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Looking around the beautiful space that he’s created, Tim reflects on what BLUES
NIGHT means to him. “This is all about getting these great records I’ve been
collecting for 30 years or so off the shelf, and into people’s hands. Out of
the sleeves and onto the platter. Taste is subjective, of course, but this is <i>certainly</i> stock of a higher quality than
you would usually find in a second-hand shop. Obviously, I need it to make a
certain amount of money, so that I can pay the bills, but the need to make
money has never been the driving force behind this project. I’ve always said I
will have failed the moment I find myself looking at a visitor and thinking:
‘Are you going to buy anything, or not?’”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Shopping list<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Tim picks eight greats from his substantial personal archive,
all part of Blues Night’s stock. From fingerpicked guitar wizardry to hip-hop
and back, via folk, blues and gospel.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Bert Jansch</span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121;"> </span></span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Bert Jansch<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“A young man and an acoustic guitar. A collection of pieces of
music recorded in a kitchen that could very well be the best album ever.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Prince<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Dirty Mind</span><span style="color: #212121;"> </span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Can I choose the tape? Succinct pop perfection. Bang, bang,
bang, bang. Four great songs. Flip it over, and bang, bang, bang, bang. Four
more.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Rolling Stones</span><span style="color: #212121;"> </span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Beggars Banquet<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“The Stones are my favourite band. My favourite Stones album
cycles through Exile, Let it Bleed, Sticky Fingers and this. At the moment,
it's this.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Various Artists<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">I Have To Paint My Face</span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“I honestly consider Chirs Strachwitz's recordings for his
Arhoolie label to be the single most important body of work in the history of
human civilisation.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Moodymann</span><span style="color: #212121;"> </span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121;"> </span></span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Silent Introduction<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“An album of house music that stands up to close scrutiny. Every
track has a soulful musicality, an urban toughness, and a rhythmic intensity.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Various Artists<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Sorrow Come Pass Me Around</span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“A remarkable blues and spirituals recorded in the Sixties. It
took me years to track down a copy. Then, predictably, it was reissued.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The Champs<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">Tequila</span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“I suppose I feel the same about 78s as some younger people feel
about vinyl. A good party tune, on shellac, is just automatically cooler.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">The Ganja Kru</span><span style="color: #212121;"> </span><span style="color: #212121;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Super Sharp Shooter<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“My kids really couldn't give a monkey's
about my records in general, but this is o</span></span><span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">ne track I have
often blasted out and made them dance.”</span>
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<br />bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-83278877517885200092018-12-06T02:50:00.000-08:002018-12-06T02:54:29.327-08:00I Have a Dream<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0nwFZuMhmM55S2PZOibWMmbI2ixtu7M36qNRs6qrQF8v1VjY6_Sd0_jNW3cKBEo0TX0M9qxlIu2agyBklVfVv5LxF3gXU3Rq2Z2KGOd7MAgQu7vzQixfFvrfOLT6Og-VNh0fRi-3gayM/s1600/dream.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0nwFZuMhmM55S2PZOibWMmbI2ixtu7M36qNRs6qrQF8v1VjY6_Sd0_jNW3cKBEo0TX0M9qxlIu2agyBklVfVv5LxF3gXU3Rq2Z2KGOd7MAgQu7vzQixfFvrfOLT6Og-VNh0fRi-3gayM/s1600/dream.JPG" /></a></div>
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: arial; font-size: 18.6667px;">I sent this message to my friend over a week ago. He hasn’t replied yet, for some reason.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">We
were supposed to read Freud on dreams as part of Cultural Studies, but if I
remember correctly I didn’t bother. To be quite honest, I doubt this blog will
suffer from the lack of support from his theoretical framework as it’s bound to
be all about sex, and it’s very unlikely that there’s anything in my dream as a
result of any crumbs of sexuality that haven’t yet been hoovered up. Dream Me
was even reluctant to rub the diaphanous mini-skirts against my shitty
arsehole.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The
only analytical machinery I’m able to employ is that espoused by Philip
Schofield as Joseph out of the Bible. Basically, he theorized that everything
in a dream is a metaphor – seven skinny cows for seven years of famine, for
example (although I’d be interested to hear from anybody who believes that they
can count in a dream - I can’t count, or read, or do anything that requires
looking closely and processing information. Probably because there’s nothing to
see there.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">So,
yes, metaphors. For a start, I’d guess the seventies-style supercomputer
represents the records I have picked up over the last thirty years or so, which
I haven’t yet sold or traded. All of these are now for sale in a barn on Frenchgate
in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">, and although only about half of them
date from the Seventies or earlier, I’d guess they could easily be represented
in my subconscious by a single huge, underused object that is being carefully
broken up into little pieces. It makes sense that my reply-shy friend was there
in a supervisory capacity, as he worked in the same record shop as I did
decades ago.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>And</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>he trained as an electrician, so he is
probably overqualified for his role in my dream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">The
gondola I saw in close-up was, of course, our van. The idea of the pieces of
the supercomputer being taken to an unspecified place far away for a new
purpose is <a href="http://bluesnightontour.blogspot.com/2017/03/right-here-goes.html" target="_blank">exactly where this blog started</a>, which would suggest that the arrival and the hatching is the point in the whole chronology at which we find
ourselves now. The tortoise-people can’t possibly represent my customers,
though. I don’t yet know them well enough to be that rude about them. They have
arrived in ones and twos, and one or two larger groups, and enough of them have
wanted to buy something that I would have to consider my first three weekends
to constitute an encouraging start. I am talking about customers here, not
tortoise-people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 7.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 12.95pt;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">And the whole scenario might be seen to spring
from the idea that by finally getting BLUES NIGHT open, I haven't finished,
I've only just started on something. It really is just me selling off my
records in an every-weekendly yard sale at the moment (Friday, Saturday and
Sunday 12-7, come on in, you know you wanna.) The fact that it looks a bit like
a shop, or a bar, or that it is in fact the only place in Richmond where you
can buy records and drink microbrews, shouldn’t be of any interest to whoever
calculates the rateable values of previously disused slaughter barns in North
Yorkshire, as I’m not producing any waste or encouraging people to park on our
street. But everything that has been achieved so far is only really relevant if
it leads to something else. I’ve talked to custies about live music in the
courtyard, temporary events notices making it possible for me to actually make
some money out of the five beers I’ve been brewing (which have been very well
received so far, and of which I am rather proud, actually), about a little
niche music film night, and a bunch of other things that I’d probably do better
to keep under my hat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 7.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 12.95pt;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">This would suit me very well as I’ve spent
more than is healthy of the last few months contemplating my own inevitable
doom. A friend's death precipitated my decision to go through with all this,
and once I had arrived at what I've always thought I wanted, it became clear
that if I don’t know what's next, there’s not a lot of squares left on the
board. Naturally, I figured out that I have to make plans for what's next
before the devil starts making plans for me, and that's where this dream slides
smoothly into your typical anxiety-driven scenario.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 7.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 12.95pt;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">You know how you get those dreams that you're
still at school, or college or whatever, and you haven't done your homework / essay
/ getting dressed? Those don't happen for me nearly so much since I stopped
spending most of my waking hours in an educational establishment. But for a
while in the van I still got the standard teacher anxiety dream - a class of
unmanageable children driving me to the point where I yell </span><st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">JUST</span></st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> SHUT THE FUCKING HELL
UP and then they all look at each other and grin and chortle because they know
that they’ve won. Now this, too, seems to have passed, and the DJ fail –
something else I’ve stopped doing since leaving </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;"> – has come to take
its place. Except that in the dream I don’t remember getting anywhere near the
decks or having any records. Only the sitting on the toilet and the having done
a poo, which is perhaps a metaphor in itself for <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/MusicBoxRadioUK/london-boogie-sunday-17th-june-2018/" target="_blank">some of my last few gigs</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 7.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 12.95pt;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Why didn’t my friend show up at the dream party?
Is it because I’m a little lonely, having left so many familiar faces far away?
What on earth was he doing, sending Indian servants to attend to me? Have I
become a stupid racist in eight months of provincial living? I now realise that was never going to happen.
I certainly wasn’t going to let them wipe my arse for me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: 7.1pt; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; mso-line-height-alt: 12.95pt;">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;">But this was just a dream. BLUES NIGHT was MY
dream, and now it’s a reality. <a href="http://bluesnight.org/" target="_blank">Come and have a look.</a> I know you can’t see my
legs behind the ‘shop’ counter, but I promise you, that’s a standard swivel
chair I’m sitting on.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14.0pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsFwKf-Puj8qcCbr4l3ev1TwqNFuzFyRiCdaa9SiQnuTbyTDA5v1DXVQFWkVM38wbFSyN6j_D-Kf7FP1lA9Yrk4md9gDWgmI0SfyvLYecr4sMl-FmVI_OHtrm8Ni7EvfUBqWBYD7i1HA/s1600/foggyroom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDsFwKf-Puj8qcCbr4l3ev1TwqNFuzFyRiCdaa9SiQnuTbyTDA5v1DXVQFWkVM38wbFSyN6j_D-Kf7FP1lA9Yrk4md9gDWgmI0SfyvLYecr4sMl-FmVI_OHtrm8Ni7EvfUBqWBYD7i1HA/s640/foggyroom.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<a href="http://gullwingphotography.blogspot.com/2018/11/foggy-autumn-day-in-richmond.html" target="_blank">(Photo by Gullwing Photography)</a>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-63904529733155797242018-09-29T02:37:00.001-07:002018-12-06T03:00:28.871-08:00Six Days On The Road<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaUOgWEk0Sra7OIiDH4anbA0ha-Uo6hVxxgEnZn06-qCghs73HLO8fvR2WaBJFkeiKZsS0znr6yOZFMO82Dko7z5_III9_BPTYRI0v7DkJw3DaWAVOpYQS-epNp1vyoQcuwoSjqYmZHBc/s1600/IMG_0602.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaUOgWEk0Sra7OIiDH4anbA0ha-Uo6hVxxgEnZn06-qCghs73HLO8fvR2WaBJFkeiKZsS0znr6yOZFMO82Dko7z5_III9_BPTYRI0v7DkJw3DaWAVOpYQS-epNp1vyoQcuwoSjqYmZHBc/s320/IMG_0602.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">So,
obviously, the builder turned up later that same day, when he was
ready. He achieved more in one afternoon than I have in my life so
far, I think. Other builders came and went, exactly when they wanted
or were able to. It is remarkable how quickly they get things done
once they actually get started. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Whole walls disappear and new ones
reappear in fractions of a day. Big ugly holes gape in the sides of
buildings and are filled with something that looks so much better
than what was there before that the whole structure seems to benefit.
Builders take a long time to get started, get loads done with
astonishing speed, then disappear for a matter of weeks until you
think they might have forgotten you, before returning just in time to
make you realise that just because they work quickly, it doesn’t
mean that they won’t take even longer to get finished than they did
to start.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">And
it should be finished very soon. And then I will realise that I have
a hundred things to do that I could have been doing while wondering
where the builders are. Meanwhile I’ve been off on a mission in my
beloved Vanny, picking up about a thousand 78s that were once the
playground of the shortlived <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%40save_ivy_house%20gramophone&src=typd" target="_blank">Ivy House Gramophone Appreciation Society</a>, meeting up with family and friends in Thanet, the home of
Thanos, and exploring some very good record shops. In Camden Town
there was a get-together of my former MVE colleagues after the
funeral of a genuinely lovely bloke whom I would really like to have
seen more in the twenty years since I left. These are the milestones
that punctuate the journey all of us are making, I suppose, and serve
as reminders that if there was anything we were meaning to do, we had
better get on with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I
returned home to a family that appeared to be pleased to see me. I’d
been gone the best part of a week, at the far end of the country, and
they had been plugging away at the day-to-day business of work and
school. It was time, therefore, for me to start pricing some records.
This is a much slower process than it was in the Twentieth Century,
as the Internet is always nagging at one not to just use that
combination of a little knowledge, a chunk of guesswork and an
occasional phone call to the Soul Basement. In my determination not
to value style over substance, I’ve had to think very hard about my
pricing policy because I don’t want even one record to make me look
like a chancer, or worse, a mug. But presentation is important too,
and although I never liked plastic sleeves when my records lived on a
shelf, they are essential now they’re moving into crates. There
were surprisingly few records bearing the infamous unpeelable grid
stickers of yore, but I’ve still gone through a tin of Ronson
lighter fluid in the course of their careful removal. And I thought,
<i>Why didn’t I do this before? God – they look so much nicer.</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">It’s
those same two interchangeable quantities again – time and money.
The plastic sleeves for the starting stock in the shop cost me
something over two hundred quid. And the removal of every MVE sticker
takes at least a few minutes. On a nice old matt-finished papery
seventies sleeve, it can be much, much longer. Record and Tape
Exchange stickers and their descendants were designed to be
unpeelable, to prevent dodgy punters from trying to swap them to get
their records at a better price (which would only actually result in
the record being lost in the file.) Leave them in place for the gum
to ossify for, say, twenty to thirty years, and they can become very
tricky to shift indeed. Attempt to peel them off without adequate
resources and technique and you get a torn sleeve. As a result, there
are millions of records out there sporting an ingenious grid for
price reductions that is uniquely ugly and devoid of any rosy
nostalgia. But you won’t find them for sale in BLUES NIGHT.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">And it occurs to me that if this blog can achieve something useful for once in its life, maybe it could help, or at least motivate, you to remove these stickers from your records, exposing their natural beauty and liberating them from their memories of incarceration in dusty racks and repeated fingerings by daily regulars patiently waiting for the next round of reductions.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">1.
Soak the sticker in lighter fluid – the sort you once used in your
Zippo. Really give it a proper dowsing, think Hendrix at Monterey. It
will all evaporate eventually.</span></div>
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<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">2. But you don’t want it to evaporate yet! It needs time to have its solvent way with the ancient adhesive. Cover the sticker with something firm and smooth made of plastic. A CD slipcase is perfect.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">3.
Leave it to soak for as long as you can bear. For me, this is about
five minutes. I like to listen to the record and reflect on how seven
quid was quite a lot of money in them days, or appreciate the
evocative petrochemical aroma and think about how cool smoking used
to be. Do not listen to anything with a drum solo, as this creates
the illusion that a great deal more time has elapsed than what has in
reality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">4.
Peel the sticker slowly and carefully, hoping it doesn’t just give
up its top layer (in which case go back to the start) or rip the
sleeve anyway (in which case contact my lawyers.) If you have only
stopped smoking in the new millennium, ask somebody with fingernails
to do this for you. If the record in question is an eighties or
nineties reissue as pictured, the sticker might all just come off in
one go. But it’s more likely to leave bits and pieces behind that
need to be soaked and scraped at all over again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">5.
Even if it does all come off in one go, it’s fairly certain to
leave behind an unpleasant greyish gummy residue that will still look
really shit. I like to use even more solvent on this, rubbing it in
with my abrasive fingertips, calloused to a perfect level of friction
from decades of playing the guitar and never getting any better at
it. Then, the spermy gloop of petrol and glue can all be removed with
a few firm rubs of a softish cloth. Or if you don’t have one to
hand, try the cuff of the hoodie you wore every day while living in a
van, dreaming of a day when you can achieve something very
worthwhile, just as you are making it look like you wipe your nose on
your sleeve. </span>
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<br />bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-35590227082143713052018-08-30T01:32:00.004-07:002018-08-30T01:32:54.850-07:00Act 3, Scene One: The Builder<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">(A small town in North Yorkshire. An ancient barn stands empty, waiting for its destiny to become clear. It is Springtime.)</i></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ME:
D’you think we can get the job done in time to open for the
Summer months?</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">BUILDER:
Oh, yes.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(July)</i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ME:
I’d still like to be able to open some time in August. Will that be
possible?</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">BUILDER:
I would think so.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Early
August)</i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ME:
Could you let me know when you will be able to start? I really want
to be able to arrange some time away with my family while you are
working on it.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">BUILDER:
It will definitely be in August.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(Late
August)</i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">BUILDER:
This is the guy who is starting on the floor on Thursday. I won’t
be here, I’m off on holiday with my family. I hope 8 o’clock
isn’t too early for you?</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ME:
No, of course not.</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>(9.28
am, Thursday 30<sup>th</sup> August)</i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">ME:
<i>(Alone, typing this.)</i></span></span></div>
<br />bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-52803979823048983052018-08-08T02:12:00.000-07:002018-08-08T02:12:05.449-07:00Has Your Record Shop Opened Yet?<div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">This
was </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
strange question to be asked by my oldest friend. </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">If
</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">he</span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">
doesn't know, then who does?</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
I thought. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Um,
maybe </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">nobody</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
knows. Maybe nobody even expects me to open a record shop after all. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I
haven’t had much to write about here, because a blog about waiting
for a reply from a builder who clearly wants the job but
isn’t in any hurry to get started really wouldn’t fire anybody’s
imagination. So the long process of deciding <i>where we </i></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>are
</i></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><i>going
to go and do this</i> gets forgotten about, and now</span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">e</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">verything
about this venture is low-profile and little</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">-</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">discussed. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">For a start, I left the vast majority of </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">the
folks</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">
I knew behind me in London. </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Although
I’m loathe to judge people by my own terrible standards, one of the
things I was looking to escape was London’s enormous gravity. How
can I realistically expect people I knew in London to want to follow
me two hundred and fifty miles out here to look at my records?</span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Before
leaving London, I had a phone stolen and was made to give up its
passcode at knifepoint. They also took my house keys and I got a
little paranoid. I deleted all the content from the website I'd been
tinkering with for eight or nine years, went as quiet on social media
as I have been in all that time, binned all my old emails, lost my
shit at the network for how unhelpful they were, and lost most of my
contacts too. Very few of the people involved made any effort to be
reinstated, but I can’t blame them as I’m sure I’d be the same.
</span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This
blog was intended to provide record shop updates to anybody who
wanted them, but it has lived a quiet life, like a hermit crab.
Occasionally some social media platform picks it out of the water for
a while so a few people can look at it, but it spends most of its
time scuttling around on the seabed, unnoticed by the other
inhabitants of the salty blog ocean.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Before,
during and after this transition, every conversation I have had about
retail, business and the economy has revolved around how difficult it
is to make enough money for one’s efforts to be considered
worthwhile. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
yet the question is, has my record shop opened yet?</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I've
got to know this bloke in the town who plays the guitar like nobody
I've ever heard. I’m determined that within a year you will be able
to buy his début solo album from me on a pleasant-coloured compact
audio cassette, perhaps presented in an oversized cardboard box with
a bit of tissue paper and a hand-painted postcard of my bestest
abstract art. He, for his part, doesn’t seem even faintly
interested in this idea, and told me to stop stressing about opening
my shop. He said that being ready for business within six months of
arriving in North Yorkshire is the behaviour of a man in a terrible
hurry.</span></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #454545;">The
van went for its MoT in May. </span><span style="color: #454545;">There was a
little dog in the office. The lady </span><span style="color: #454545;">owner</span><span style="color: #454545;">
said they were going to be away next week, so it would have to be the
week after. I said this was fine.</span><span style="color: #454545;"> I went
to see the man who ha</span><span style="color: #454545;">d it up on the
lifty thing two weeks later and he showed me rusty holes in the
chassis that were big enough to fit your fist through. He guessed the
last three or four tests had either missed or overlooked them. They’d
need welding, he said, and a new piece across the front that just
bolts on. It wouldn’t be cheap. I asked him if he would do it. He
said he couldn’t do it next week, they were going to be away. I
decided it wasn’t any of my business how often they went away.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #454545;">So
he passed it on to his friend down the road. I heard nothing for a
week, so I went looking for it. It was parked shoulder-to-shoulder
and nose-to-tail with a load of other vehicles, looking rather sad.
“That’s my van. I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to start
on it yet? I’m not in a hurry or anything, just wanted to know
where it was. And say hello.”</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="color: #454545;">Two
weeks later, I went again, </span><span style="color: #454545;">and saw Vanny
in the same spot.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="color: #454545;">“<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
thought you said</span><span style="color: #454545;"> you weren't in a
hurry?” </span></span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">And
all of a sudden, it was done. A brilliant job, at about a quarter of
the price I had been expecting, in his own time. I’m hoping I’ll
get the same from the builder, who doesn’t even reply to my
questions about time-frame nowadays. </span></span></span>
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
<br />
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #454545;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">My
guitarist friend said he had a bloke come round to look at some
building work when he first arrived here. This guy spent the evening
with him and his family, laughing, joking, telling old stories and
drinking cups of tea. He said he'd be back in a few days to measure
things up and they never saw him again. “That was twelve years
ago.”</span></span></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-9231974344614423292018-06-22T05:01:00.000-07:002018-06-22T05:01:24.810-07:00BLUES NIGHT's trip to London<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwHP3vTzv6flaQXTkkAR6V5wCAbO-0wu4YPnnFvqe5BZ1id0VlJ7R6kgqliOjZIgiVWbbZo6SSk8ofm-zinEV5WOSC1WcCgd9HyRwcn2ZqsJy4PzkP347UuEzKxZXzPMpABl-KrmwnhUg/s1600/chapelle.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="444" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwHP3vTzv6flaQXTkkAR6V5wCAbO-0wu4YPnnFvqe5BZ1id0VlJ7R6kgqliOjZIgiVWbbZo6SSk8ofm-zinEV5WOSC1WcCgd9HyRwcn2ZqsJy4PzkP347UuEzKxZXzPMpABl-KrmwnhUg/s320/chapelle.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt;">So it seems that I brought upon this blog the evil
Curse of the Promised Post. I did type out what I wanted to communicate to the
universe about the various Italian restaurants we visited on the tour, but when
it was finished I couldn’t bring myself to post it. Not because it was shit and
boring (it was, but that has never stopped me before), but because the
retrospective angle just made it seem really irrelevant.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The tour came to an end three months ago now, and the
big question we were asking got its answer. Whether that was the <i>right</i> answer or not still isn’t quite
clear. The blog isn’t about driving around in a weird little motorhome anymore,
but about opening a weird little record shop. We’ve slowly but surely sorted
this and that, dickered with builders and plasterers and painters, and the shop
is going to be ready for business some time this summer. Mine ears have heard
the glory of the compact audio cassette for the first time in decades, and I
have enthusiastically embraced this extra element of my emerging empire. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Then I was invited back to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
to play some records on an Internet radio station. So I got in Vanny, and drove
the hundreds of miles to my destination, where I parked up and proceeded to get
heroically drunk. <a href="https://www.mixcloud.com/MusicBoxRadioUK/london-boogie-sunday-17th-june-2018/" target="_blank">The results can be heard here.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-14982815800409385822018-04-30T02:49:00.000-07:002018-04-30T02:49:04.273-07:00Blues Night on Tour by Numbers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfPvQS57hIA5gWJT2xTazu135iF-gWxomzhR8FVtqus8A_tTpwkY9L0tVvDg68xmFqtPcylUUClhO-HSAPBpD8H4YWkl6KMdx1UsyEswNR5_kZiKlNpWqS_kGpsBWy2Y0hbG4xhS4ypPA/s1600/IMG_0074.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfPvQS57hIA5gWJT2xTazu135iF-gWxomzhR8FVtqus8A_tTpwkY9L0tVvDg68xmFqtPcylUUClhO-HSAPBpD8H4YWkl6KMdx1UsyEswNR5_kZiKlNpWqS_kGpsBWy2Y0hbG4xhS4ypPA/s320/IMG_0074.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26pt;">0</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt;"> parking tickets received. I
consider this recognition of impressive commitment to toeing the line.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">1</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> is the number of months we have now
lived in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">,
</span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">North Yorkshire</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">. The sense
of doom has passed (for me, at least – I don’t like to ask the others) but it
still feels pretty weird, like we’re on the witness protection programme or
something. I’m yet to lift an arm with a paintbrush or roller in it (M has
managed rather better), but it is starting to feel like home. To me, at least.
The boys both start back at school today and we’ll all be able to put the sorry
debacle of Home Ed behind us. There was me thinking I was well qualified to
home- (van-) educate my children, but it turned out I was the worst possible
candidate for the role. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’ve developed a morbid fear of education’s <i>Nothing Is Ever Finished</i> philosophy. Too
many times when the boys were sat at the table in the van with their books in
front of them I accepted their bare-minimum, path-of-least-resistance,
typical-boy-approach to work. I think I just don’t want to still have to say,
“Yes, but how can we improve on this?” Not to anybody, but certainly not to my
own children. After all, I’ve just spent about a year telling them I was done
with striving to meet the demands of a world that was offering me peanuts in
return.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Admittedly, though, I’d probably have had even less success
trying to inspire them with the sorts of things that light my fire. At the time
of writing, neither of my sons could possibly imagine something that interests
them less than a secondhand record shop. This is par for the parenting course. There
have been many less formal, measurable gains made in their development and
progress, and they both read more and played together more imaginatively in the
last nine months than the rest of their lives combined. They’ve also learned a
lot about what </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
is like, and it’s been mostly good news.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">2</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> record store day exclusives
purchased – this is two more than all previous years combined, as I’ve always
thought it was just a gimmick. I’m still more or less of the same feeling, but
the legendary <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKtm44DR9cw" target="_blank">Sound It Out</a> records had organised themselves very effectively to
minimise the hustling opportunism. </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Stockton</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
was quite the experience after what I’d said about avoiding towns we expected not
to like very much, but there were lots of kids enjoying themselves in the fountains,
in addition to the great record shop and somewhere to drink really good beer. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">,
by way of a contrast, has neither, despite one of our visitors declaring it
enormously middle-class. It does have a lot else going for it though. People
have been very friendly, I really enjoy the best-kept secret thing about it
(very few people from outside of this part of the country seem to realise that
this great little town exists) and the opportunity to provide good beer and
good records seems like it might be worth the effort. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I’ll know when M has reached the next level in her
adjustment – when she recognises that the fact that the alleyways of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
do not smell of piss isn’t just ‘weird’ but is <i>actually a good thing.</i> Also, we saw the kind of litter that sets my
lips trembling for the first time when my brother was in town. It was that
sunny Saturday last week, and lots of young locals and sort-of-locals had been
having a good time in the sunshine by the river. The boys were all muscly and
the girls all had eyebrows the size of my beard. And not one of them, it seems,
thought it might be appropriate to take their litter home with them. But a few
grumbles on the Facebook group later, and all this trash miraculously
disappeared. Next time there’s a community litter pick going on, I WANT A PIECE
OF THE ACTION.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">7 </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">visitors we knew from our former
lives have crossed our new threshold, four of whom have stayed the night. This
has been a huge factor in helping us to settle, of course. We are eager for
more, especially people who might be able to give us some feedback on our
accommodation before we advertise it to the public. Applications can be
submitted in the usual way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">8</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> Italian restaurants enjoyed. I
think this might be better discussed in some detail. I’ll knock up another post
later this week.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">35</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> counties visited – or that’s how
many we stayed overnight in. All of the others we just passed through, or
perhaps stopped in briefly during the daytime. A favourite one of these was a
stop for diesel and sandwiches in February, when it occurred to me that I was
getting out of the van in Northamptonshire for the first time. Just to check, I
asked the young woman behind the Subway salad selection what county we were in.
She said she didn’t know.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">60</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> percent of what we rub into our skin
enters our bloodstream, according to a lady giving a facial at the food market
in Abergavenny. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I walked past just in
time to absorb this tidbit and it went straight to my brain. The next morning,
it returned as I energetically fisted the U-bend of the public toilet I had
just emptied Vanny’s toilet cassette into, in the process blocking it with a
thick sludge thanks to our brief flirtation with inferior toilet chemicals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The brand I would like to name and shame is the
kinda-racist-sounding Crusader, which proved even less effective than the
experiment with biological washing liquid M had insisted upon at the beginning.
(I had soon brought this episode to a close when I figured out that I was
always going to be the one actually emptying the fucking thing.) I never had
even the tiniest problem with Thetford Blue and Pink liquids, and consider them
the Technics 1210 Mk2 of making shit easier to pour.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">132 / 71</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> my average blood pressure as
measured over the last week. This is still not exactly Sir Mo Farah digits, but
is a long way down on what I was told it was around the time I pressed the
ejector seat button on my teaching career. I should imagine that most of the
difference is about a very gradual slide down the fireman’s pole of stress
levels, but I probably drink a bit less beer and eat less salt too. There
remains room for improvement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">210</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> nights sleeping in the van. The
boys missed a few, and M several more, when offered a proper level bed in a
warm building instead, and who can blame them. I’ve added two more since moving
- the sense of freedom that Vanny affords, being able to drive somewhere for a
night out – (</span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Norwich</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
to see Crow Black Chicken last week, </span><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Harrogate</span></st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">
the other night to see Mike Ross) is wonderful. I can go somewhere, parking in a
different town just as I did on the tour, and not have to worry about getting
home until I’ve sobered up the next morning. This would be a great way to live
for a single person in their twenties with a bottomless purse and a rubber
liver, but if I keep going for nights out I’m going to keep spending lots of
money and drinking lots of beer, neither of which were part of my five-point
plan moving forward.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">9274</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> miles travelled in the World’s Best
Compact Motorhome. I still hope to add more from our new base, but it seems
that if I want a steady flow of content, I’m going to have to turn this into a
blog about opening a record shop rather than living in a van. Most of the miles
were clocked up going from one place to another, but a few have been added
going back somewhere for another look, or more recently by ferrying 4000 records
to their new home in the North. If Vanny had wings, and she could fly, I know
where she would go. This many air miles could have taken us to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Rio
de Janeiro</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">. But we would have had to
stay there even if we didn’t like it, and adapted to their language, customs
and punishing standards of pube management.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-66828486040294621372018-04-08T13:14:00.004-07:002018-04-08T13:16:25.971-07:00Git In There<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPaGXMOXJNg6iJtc-FZ8hZtzM6om8nF4GbMNg9H660jPQ_K27FsuKsDaxCrJMrtktQSOWlFiSG4EH-HSEYLThiD8pmJtn_rtoKZhi-U1GyK3Nq_qr_GymAyMfciEkwSswCR3wtWw8gnTg/s1600/FullSizeRender+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPaGXMOXJNg6iJtc-FZ8hZtzM6om8nF4GbMNg9H660jPQ_K27FsuKsDaxCrJMrtktQSOWlFiSG4EH-HSEYLThiD8pmJtn_rtoKZhi-U1GyK3Nq_qr_GymAyMfciEkwSswCR3wtWw8gnTg/s320/FullSizeRender+%25281%2529.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16pt;">We moved into our new home on Tuesday. It is brilliant.
It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it has the bonus of a building out the back for
my business. Still, the whole family felt an inescapable sadness for our first
few days here. That dark evil doubt creeps back out of the shadows at every
opportunity, whispering foul ideas and pointing at shapeless fears as we step
into the unknown. It might just be a form of loneliness.</span></div>
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<i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">We don’t
belong here… we don’t know anybody here… what are we even going to do with
ourselves here? </span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">Over and over again. Everything I wanted in
moving away from the capital arrives on a great big sharing platter, and we are
only hungry for crumby </span><st1:city><st1:place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">
leftovers. The friends - many of whom we have managed to see a few times over
the months since we moved out, the pub we cared so much for, the boys’ schools
– shit, even MY school – felt so very far away when we were lying awake that
first night in a huge unfurnished room in Absolute Total Silence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR is an adage designed to
discourage folk from forcing change. It’s a small-c conservative manifesto.
Don’t go looking to make things better - you’ll only make things worse. This
feels so very likely to be true when the whole family is trying and failing to
sleep in one bedroom, because there’s only one bed in the house anyway and
you’re all bloody scared, suffering from post-viral moving cabin fever, unaccustomed
to being alone.</span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;"> <span style="background: white;">I wished for an end to my
spiraling debt, a way out of a career I never wanted and a mortgage I never
could afford. I wanted a chance to see a little more of the world. But that’s
not enough. When I was done exploring, I wanted a bigger house in a prettier
town nestled in dramatic landscape, and a chance to go back to doing what I was
good at – selling black plastic.<span class="apple-converted-space"> All of
my wishes came true</span>, and for the first three nights I lay there thinking
WHAT THE HELL HAVE I DONE?</span><br />
</span><br />
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;"><span style="background: white;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">The key feature of this place that caught my eye was not the
ancient barn that will make the coolest little nearly-secret record shop, or
the courtyard for which I’d been yearning like life was a Seventeenth Century
madrigal, but the archway that was just about big enough to fit a Hymer Swing
motorhome through it. On the day we arrived in our new hometown, M driving E in
the old Focus we’ve got back on the road pretty cheaply (to my delight – I
can’t think of anything I’d be less interested to spend thousands of pounds on
than a bloody car, even if I could still afford to), following H and I in Vanny
up the long bit of the A1, the first thing I wanted to do once we’d got the
keys is drive my van through my new archway. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">Of course, it didn’t fit. The camber of the pavement as it
climbs the hill sees Vanny leaning a foot or more to her left, and it won't
work. The same top corner where I mashed a light the morning after a very
drunken trip to the football in Ipswich <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/" target="_blank">(don’t try to park too close to telegraph poles, motorhomers)</a> was only saved far more serious injury by the
van’s front wheels slipping on the smooth stone slabs beneath
the arch. M, looking on, shook her head pityingly. The van was not, in fact,
destined to take shelter beneath the building that had taken its place as our
home.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">For an hour or so, I was crushed. It was, on reflection, a
bit of a stupid dream, to think I could keep the van in my life by tucking it
neatly into the gap under the boys’ bedrooms. But it was my dream nevertheless,
and I had real difficulty dealing with the idea that it wasn’t going to happen.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">And then I realized that this was my opportunity to model how
to take disappointments in your stride for my boys. H had sat in silence for
the last half an hour of the van journey, and was clearly wondering how he had
ended up heading to his doom in this town he knew nothing about. Then brave E was knocked back by the emptiness of his new bedroom, the naked nails in the wall
and those dark marks around the things that were once there but are gone now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">If in some small way the evaporation of my </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">Tracy</span></st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;"> </span><st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">Island</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">
fantasy helped the boys understand that we all have to make sacrifices or compromises
or something like that, it still won’t stop me being pissed off about it. Even
as I began to figure out how badly the van would have been in the way if it was
parked behind that gate, I still just felt my misery had been compounded. Now I
am in a big empty house in a town where I have no friends, <i>and</i> my van, from being the best thing in my life, is suddenly
redundant. So I park her out on the cobbled street in front, a grubby white
carbuncle on the smooth sweep of Georgian terrace. And there she has sat, save
for a quick run to pick up some records, for ten days now. I
suppose I shall have to sell her. And even as I type that, I’m realising that she would have sat around slowly getting old even if I had managed to fit it
through the archway.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
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<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 16.0pt;">Am I admitting that the tour is over? Not yet. One of
the things that made me keen on a move so far North was that I might use my new
home as a base to explore my favourite parts of this island, and new parts too
– I’ve banged on about Scotland again and again, and my guilt at not having
made it over the border on this tour so far won’t let me sell Vanny just yet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-49910581769535826762018-03-16T13:29:00.000-07:002018-03-16T13:29:10.171-07:00With a Head Full of Snow... With a Head Full of Snow <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimqLLkHSVMfpcnskl-POoMGO985oCmTr10DnGqnTiAvKB3v-AkN5v8SByUWcR45h-miXre-xo3BR_Jn4r0__zToNcHw5gUJlRPr1j7YkKGT3bNRE_z0NC8sbPMRrVR6a7JSs5qwQS9xmg/s1600/chonch.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1196" data-original-width="1600" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimqLLkHSVMfpcnskl-POoMGO985oCmTr10DnGqnTiAvKB3v-AkN5v8SByUWcR45h-miXre-xo3BR_Jn4r0__zToNcHw5gUJlRPr1j7YkKGT3bNRE_z0NC8sbPMRrVR6a7JSs5qwQS9xmg/s400/chonch.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“Dad, can you turn the heating on?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">“No, I mustn’t. I’ve just looked out of the window, and it
snowed really heavily overnight.”</span><span style="color: #212121;"> <br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">“Well, you should definitely turn the heater on then.”</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">“No, that's the thing. It says in big letters in the manual
that if it snows, you should check that the little chimney up on the top of the
van isn't buried, before you turn the heating on. Otherwise the carbon monoxide
can't escape, and it comes back into the van, and then it <i>kills us all</i>.”</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">“Why don't we put it on, and then if we smell the poison gas,
we just turn it off and get out of the van for fresh air?”</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">“That's <i>quite</i> a
good idea, but you can't smell carbon monoxide. We wouldn’t notice it at all.
What happens is you just fall asleep. And when you wake up, you’re dead.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">My sons don’t ask how it is possible to wake up dead. They
knew I was a fucking idiot when we started out on this tour, and they know me
much, much better now. I can see Big E looking at the carbon monoxide detector
he remembers me buying about eight months ago, but he decides not to ask about
it. This is probably to prevent me from seizing the opportunity to say more
stupid shit. Little H speaks again instead. “Is that why Mummy is sleeping in
the house?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In fact, M is sleeping in the house because she is absolutely
sick of sleeping in the van. I can sympathise, even if living in a van <i>was</i> her idea in the first place. It’s
cold, it’s cramped, it’s on a slope, and it has me and our children in it. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I like to think I have been able to turn this lack of
patience to my advantage. At Christmas she grudgingly got on board with the idea
of buying a property that she had previously not been particularly enthusiastic
about. But what we’d been told would be a quick and easy process has dragged on
and on, new properties are beginning to appear on the market, and she is
getting very restless, particularly when we go days at a time without hearing
anything.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><i style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">I’ve got si-lence on my ra-di-o,
let the air-waves flo-ow…</i></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">This incremental lengthening of our limbo reminds me of Mrs
Twit’s walking stick. It’s not a coin-sized disc of wood being glued onto the
end each time, but another fortnight. It is also being used as a punishment, I
think. Or it's a nasty trick to pay me back for suggesting to our solicitor that the
housing market is all one big racket and there are loads of pigs with their
heads in the trough that aren’t doing anything to earn their share of the swill.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Now I have a hefty pile of electronic paperwork to sift
through with repeated references to how I really should consult a surveyor
about this or that. Our feeling had been that it was abundantly clear the
vendor had spent a fortune on the maintenance of the fabric of these buildings,
and they’ve stood for a couple of centuries without falling down, so we don’t
want to pay some bloke a grand to sniff around the place, looking at the same
things we’ve seen already before printing out thirty pages of cut-and-paste
that we will only ever look at once.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Maybe after <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/who-needs-estate-agents.html" target="_blank">we scoffed at the services of estate agents</a> and
<a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/" target="_blank">mocked the findings of our buyers’ surveyor</a> last year, our solicitor just wants
us to know that there is one type of professional in all this pissing about
that we actually can’t do without. And maybe, when you describe a solicitor as
‘fastidious,’ or ‘pernickety,’ you’re simply saying they’re good at their job.
Maybe my tendency to use these eight syllables as a slur is one of the reasons
I wasn’t very good at mine.</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The house Mummy ‘has been sleeping in’ is the same one in
which I grew up, at the quieter end of one of the duller villages in one of the
less-exciting parts of Suffolk, the English county that your average person is
least likely to know or care anything about. We’ve parked outside overnight several
times on the tour, and stayed for longer periods at the beginning, around the
middle, and now the end. In truth, we would all be sleeping in The Big House
(as we invariably refer to the home of anybody we’ve visited) at the moment if
my mother were not such an inveterate hoarder.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Living out the final stages of the tour in this way isn’t
ideal, and we need to go on a few more little jaunts before we move into our
new home and finally get to see if Vanny fits through the archway. I certainly
hope the boys won’t forget the fun we’ve had in a hundred different places when
the weather has been better. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">We might even find that when they arrive in their new home,
the place seems more exciting by comparison. A mile’s trudge through
snow-covered fields and churchyard to a village stores that makes <a href="https://untappd.com/v/k-and-m-supermarket/1218908" target="_blank">Ken’s Shop</a> look like
Selfridges certainly kept their adrenalin levels in check, but I was struck,
once again, by just how <i>beautiful</i>
everything was. I can only surmise that giving up your job in your forties and
mooching around the country with zero goals and aspirations is a bit like
brewing up some mushroom tea when you’re half that age.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Once we are settled into our new home and the shop is up and
running, I must remember to close it for a few days every week to spend some quality
time with my van.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 20pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-34841839688699423552018-03-01T13:56:00.002-08:002018-03-01T13:59:55.107-08:00Best New Album – Worst Live Band (Part 2 of 2)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHmcxpyIAa8zVnOknXlFhNvGCQYxRITzdwnumSG7qKpYT85HSR2E9OUgby-Lu9zUz18_X8ss4YwkEeq8wT36JA8ox1EAZ1WZc7KIbvLxs5rm4ZALTwPP_epqm_d4v2wjKUaAR5b-DQ75I/s1600/bbb.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1196" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHmcxpyIAa8zVnOknXlFhNvGCQYxRITzdwnumSG7qKpYT85HSR2E9OUgby-Lu9zUz18_X8ss4YwkEeq8wT36JA8ox1EAZ1WZc7KIbvLxs5rm4ZALTwPP_epqm_d4v2wjKUaAR5b-DQ75I/s320/bbb.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Back in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Cambridge</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, E
has asked an excellent question – why are guitars seen as so </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">ROCK</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> and
keyboards so geeky? If I had given a better answer I would have focused on
elements of live performance – how the guitar can be worn, strapped to the
performer as they prowl the stage like a gunslinger or pirate, or fall to their
knees. Or lie on their side and run around in a little circle on the floor. I
might have even talked about phalluses.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Unfortunately, I was still smarting from my Deep Purple
Humiliation, which my whole family had arrived in Smugglers Records just in
time to witness, and I took this as an opportunity to construct a defence.
“That’s precisely it – they’re <i>seen</i>
as geeky –” I looked over at the two bespectacled students banging the hell out
of Rachmaninoff on the piano in the middle of the shopping centre – “but good
keys in a band make all the difference. When I was a teenager, I thought that
only guitars really mattered, and so when I heard everybody playing a piss-simple
guitar riff really badly, and then found out Deep Purple’s line-up was built
around a classically trained organist, I decided then and there that I wouldn’t
like them. And I didn’t listen to them again until last week!” But E had walked
deliberately away from me at 'When I was a teenager.' He didn’t actually want an answer; he just
wanted to point out that it was unfair. And he was right. And my answer was
terrible.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">As
were several of the bands we had seen the preceding weekend at
Broadstairs Blues Bash. I spent three days trying to establish why so many
Blues Bands appearing in naff pubs play N<span style="background: white;">aff Pub
Blues. To pose a question that sounds like one of their song titles, “Who Gave
the Blues a Bad Name?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">It was a very well-organised festival, involving about twenty
venues and sixty bands. There were some good performances, as you would expect,
and some good pubs too, but they were both in the minority. The better examples
were those that were reaching beyond the limitations of what ‘THE BLUES’ or ‘THE
</span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">PUB</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">’ has
come to mean. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">Bert Jansch, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Led
Zeppelin, Booker T and the MGs, Dr John, The Doors and many and varied others
have entries in the really quite useful <i>Virgin Encyclopedia of the Blues</i>, because of the music’s
key influence in each act’s sound, but the vast majority of Pub Blues Bands
throughout my musical lifetime haven’t explored a tiny sharp sliver of this variety.
It is more as if some of the less-interesting sixties album tracks of John
Mayall’s Bluesbreakers were crystallized as Blues Essence in the 1980s and cut
into very thin slices for distribution to Every Blues Band in Britain.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">The worst offenders in Broadstairs were built around this
model, and were playing, appropriately, at the naffest pub in town. A virtuoso guitarist
</span><span style="background: white; color: #222222;">à la Clapton, loud wailing harp, a singer who could sing but sounded
like she’d been given a <i>Blues Brothers</i>
libretto to work from (that film is supposed to be a <i>comedy,</i> not a musical manifesto) and a rhythm section that might as
well have been a backing track. All in all, much l</span><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">ess than the sum of
its admittedly capable parts. I won't tell you what their name was because that would be mean, and
because their name was so shit. But here is a bit<span class="apple-converted-space"> o</span>f advice for anybody starting a blues
band - don't put BLUES in the name. It immediately makes you sound like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaM6lTmhnak" target="_blank">Blues Hammer in Ghost World.</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">In spite of much of the music, Broadstairs last weekend was
one of the nicest places we've been. The sun was shining and temperatures were
mild and pleasant - strange as it seems writing that now. The beautiful weather
meant we hardly needed the heating in the van, and it felt like we were doing
this for pleasure once again. <a href="http://morellisgelato.com/Stores/broadstairs" target="_blank">Morelli’s</a>, the ice cream parlour that was
old-fashioned when I was a kid (and hasn’t changed in the slightest since then)
provided E and H with enormous sugary breakfasts on a late-rising Monday morning when their friends would be in school after half term. We didn’t investigate
the contents of the beach hut that advertised ‘Egg fried raisins and turkey
crab nipples.’</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><a href="https://en-gb.facebook.com/The-Chapel-429243593753226/" target="_blank">The Chapel</a>, which was a bookshop for many years before also
becoming a bar, is a fantastic venue, and the New-Orleans-inspired community
band we saw down there really stood out among the acts in the festival for
actually doing something different.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">This got me thinking once again about the blues.
What I understand by it, as opposed to what it has come to mean. The organizers of the
festival heard the blues in this music, and rightly so. Professor Longhair, Lee
Dorsey and Eddie Bo would all have recognized this music as blues. Alton Ellis
and Laurel Aitken and Jackie Mittoo would have bought R&B 45s straight off
the plane from </span></span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Louisiana</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, and
in turn made a Jamaican blues that came to be known by half a dozen different
names. Meanwhile, in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">US</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, R&B
combos were the house bands for labels recording a huge range of soul singers.
This is LeRoi Jones’s <i>Blues Continuum</i> in motion, and this is what I think of when I think of the blues.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">I once got into a slightly heated online discussion with a bloke who was the
sort of person I was hoping to attract to a Blues Night, because I’d said
something like ‘Not just the same old 12-Bar Blues’ on the flyer. He wanted to
know what was <i>wrong</i> with 12-Bar
Blues, and all I could manage was ‘Nothing at all. But I wouldn’t want to
listen to it all night long. It would get boring.’ I came to the conclusion
that it never works when you were trying to define something to say what it is
not. Every child in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">
already knows this is true, from all those lessons writing Non-Chronological
Reports.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">There’s me moaning about musical manifestos and I might as
well have just written the OUR PHILOSOPHY page for <a href="http://bluesnight.org/" target="_blank">bluesnight.org.</a> </span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Henry VIII <i>did</i>
go to </span></span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Cambridge</span></st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">University</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, paying
for this and founding that, but he was only continuing his father Henry </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">VII</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">’s
work. And I doubt if he went to any lectures or learned anything from the
experience. He had inherited the title Earl of Richmond in addition to the crown on
his father’s death, as well as a number of palaces on the </span><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Thames</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, one
of which was named </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> upon
</span><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Thames</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> was at the heart of the
British Blues Boom of the 1960s, which was just one strand of the blues spider-web,
but seems to have become What We Think Of When We Talk About The Blues in this
country. This, I think, is a shame.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><st1:place><st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Richmond</span></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, </span><st1:state><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Indiana</span></st1:state></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> was
the home of Gennet<span class="apple-converted-space">t Records, where Blind
Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton cut sides thirty years earlier that were among the first recorded country blues, but nonetheless exhibited a remarkable variation of style and form.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Richmond</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, </span></span><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">North Yorkshire</span></span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, will soon, I hope, become a new home of the
blues. A more positivist, inclusive blues that has evolved and grown and
spread, strong and far and wide, into almost every sub-genre of popular music – or at least way beyond the
foil-thin definition offered by the average record shop’s Blues section or the
average pub’s Blues Band.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I think that OUR
PHILOSOPHY webpage is going to need a bit more work.</span></span></span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: "arial"; font-size: 20.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-65632960084995572582018-02-28T11:27:00.000-08:002018-02-28T11:27:04.024-08:00Best New Album – Worst Live Band (Part 1 of 2)<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white;">"How old is </span></span><st1:place style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Cambridge</span></st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">University</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">
anyway? Didn't Henry VIII start it or something?"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;">
<span style="background: white;">"Nah, I think it's even older than that. He
probably just went there."</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">"Says here it was founded in 1209, by some </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Oxford</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">
scholars who had to move after a fight with some of the townspeople."</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<span style="background: white;">"I bet they lost."</span><br />
<span style="background: white;">"Well, obviously."</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">M and I are out of our depth discussing the
noble history of student-bashing in and around the world's oldest universities.
I did get pushed down a flight of stairs and stamped on once, for looking a bit
like Wolf off of Gladiators, but this was the same year PEL became UEL and
hardly in the same category.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">M has many happy teenage memories of </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Cambridge</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, the
city. I know it fairly well too, and no longer imagine the success of the shop
to be dependent upon me getting students into Lightnin' </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Hopkins</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> and
even greater debt. Further, we both probably knew that we wouldn't have been
able to afford Oxbridge. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Like with the albums that will be for sale, a long and
illustrious history doesn’t necessarily mean ‘Better’ in 2018, anyway. Nevertheless,
we are still rather taken aback by an ad for what looks like a crappy room in a
crappy house, being available for rent at a hundred quid a week. That, as they
say, is Almost London Prices.</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">We've just spent a lovely week in Leigh on Sea,
which has some terrific houses (also at Almost London Prices), and <a href="http://www.leigh-records.co.uk/" target="_blank">some great records </a>and <a href="https://en-gb.facebook.com/thecraftyhalf/" target="_blank">beer for sale</a>, which are both justifiably expensive, regardless of geography;
I'm sure you would agree. </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Cambridge</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> has
at least some of that too, in addition to the best part of a millennium's
history as one of the world's great seats of learning. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">This isn't what we are looking for, though. The city centre
has nowhere to park a compact motorhome, and its suburbs are, as with the other
endless residential Nowheresvilles surrounding most cities, mind-numbingly
dull. This may be the perfect working environment in which to bring together</span><span style="background: white; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> quantum theory and thermodynamics, or to </span><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">write
a double album of tuneless non-songs full of weird noises with some cows on the
front, but it leaves me cold. Which is exactly how I felt as we waited for the
Park and Ride bus.</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Deal, which we revisited in-between-the-two, is
a place of real inspiration by comparison, and would be an excellent place to
open a record shop with good beer if it were not a place that already had
<a href="http://www.smugglersrecords.com/" target="_blank">Smugglers Records</a> in it.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">When I visited early in the tour, I was kidding
myself that it was not the time to be shopping for records, but more recently
I've caved to my instincts, perhaps in anticipation of setting the shop up
soon. Leigh's old records by Alex Moore, The Cure and the John Renbourn Group
may appeal enough to make me part with cash (even when my hi-fi is still
disconnected and spread to the four winds), but what I am really craving now is
something new. I've always wanted my own little record shop, but it was when I
started buying brand-new records again, just a few years ago, that it became an
imperative. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">The remarkable <a href="http://www.fives-records.co.uk/" target="_blank">Fives</a> sold me discs by Kurt Vile and Courtney
Barnett, or by the Wave Pictures, that were very good, but won't bother my
thousand favourite albums. Yet every
day I am anticipating that first listen of another Benji, or another Channel
Orange.</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
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<span style="background: white;">And so it was that I was in Smugglers again,<span class="apple-converted-space"> flicking through racks of titles I know well and others I know nothing about, but failing to fall for </span>these sleeves because I was just listening to what it was that they were playing. It sounded so
new and fresh and cool, perfectly recorded and produced, with lots of classic
rock motifs. A tourniquet-tight little band of thrilling musicians with a
really great singer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><i>Shit, </i>I thought, </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><i>ALL</i></span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><i> the hip
young people must be into this band. I've probably heard of them already,
because they are so good, but I have no idea who it is. It’s hard rock, sure,
but (and I try so hard not to use this word because it is so frequently
misappropriated by square teachers talking to children) it’s just so damn
FUNKY. They're going to be MASSIVE. </i><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I gave in. “Who’s playing?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">And he held up the sleeve of DEEP PURPLE IN </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">ROCK</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">.</span></span>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-3454709727441813312018-02-13T00:17:00.001-08:002018-02-13T00:17:27.380-08:00"What's the worst Brexit shithole you've been to?"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeOwGtIWGFty8caZsOOMlDsvUNJNW_7Az-F6EN85snhbhi2NgMDe5NZoulwr3hUYFAIYJFb-ANdy4eEANC6ANyh2qzGFe80c1YqUPX9hyphenhyphenK3eku-HriEgq3MV0ur4J5HG_WW7XQfZp5pvk/s1600/wifi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1196" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeOwGtIWGFty8caZsOOMlDsvUNJNW_7Az-F6EN85snhbhi2NgMDe5NZoulwr3hUYFAIYJFb-ANdy4eEANC6ANyh2qzGFe80c1YqUPX9hyphenhyphenK3eku-HriEgq3MV0ur4J5HG_WW7XQfZp5pvk/s320/wifi.jpg" width="239" /></a><br />
<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Asked an old teaching colleague over on the Twitter. I wasn't really able to answer, for a couple of reasons. We haven't been to any towns we have particularly disliked. Some city centres have been too busy or noisy or smelly but that wasn't what she was asking, and these city centres were probably the places most likely to have voted remain, as most of them have significant immigrant populations and large universities. We haven't exactly been looking at EU referendum vote maps to choose where to go either - I feel fairly safe in claiming that I haven't mentioned Brexit at any time previously in this blog.</span><br />
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Admittedly, we haven't been to any towns that we <i>assumed</i> we were <i>going to</i> dislike, either. Although we've been to every county in England, some of them we've done no more than stop to fill up the diesel. Great swathes of the Midlands and the North, to say nothing of the Home Counties, have gone unvisited, especially those towns with names that make them sound awful in the first place. I'm sure you know the ones I mean. Towns that were flattened in 1944 and never properly rebuilt, or where the historic architecture was neglected until it had to be pulled down, or where the one industry that supported all human life was killed off by Thatcher, or where there was never any money to build something nice in the first place. Towns where it's visible that the council just doesn't care, there is no work for anybody, and everybody is angry or bored and has turned to drugs or crime or using the one time in history that the state has asked their opinion on something to mash a self-destruct button with the palm of their non-vaping hand.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But I can't say that I've stopped to think about the politics of the people in any one town. If you were looking for a blog written by somebody who is well-informed on the subject, or has a lot to say about it, you probably won't be reading this one any more. I don't have much of an opinion on Brexit and I can't remember having a single conversation about it during our time on the road. Quite frankly, I couldn't give the tiniest shit which way individual people or towns voted - it's done now. Granted, it was a complete balls-up on every level and at every stage, but I reckon about half the other big decisions in the history of politics probably were too.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I did find myself musing on what my colleague could have meant by asking the question though, and came to this conclusion - she wants to hear about dreadful places where everybody is a bit racist and always blaming the Metropolitan Liberal Elite in London (as well as immigration) for how shitty their lives are, I would guess. Some middle-aged Londoners are desperate for most of the rest of the country to be as crap as is possible, as I suggested once or twice before - otherwise what are they getting in return for those extra decades before the mortgage is paid off? This doesn't sit well with the fact that among all the people I've worked with, nobody has been seen to do more to include everybody, to reach out and welcome in, than this particular colleague. She doesn't seek to divide and classify, but she does have a wicked sense of humour.</span><span class="x_Apple-converted-space" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">And we all like to assign characters to people we don't know. My family are not immune to this of course, and are just as quick to say, "Here's where the racists live..." when we pass a house with a flagpole in the front garden as we are to say, "Look - it's the murderer's house!" when we pass one that doesn't appear to have been lived in for years.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">But I really haven't been travelling the country judging people on appearances or looking for evidence of right-wing politics. Rather, when I saw neat block capitals printed on a wall in a car park in Ipswich declaring - NO POLISH - GO HOME - I had a mental image of my father, having spent fifteen minutes squeezing into one of The Spiral's strangely tapered spaces, looking down at the dusty, dried-out leather of his shoes, sighing, and returning to his car.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There's actually plenty of Polish in Ipswich. And Lithuanians, varnish, Albanians, linseed oil, Kurds and dubbin. It may not be a city, but last week it seemed as global as southeast London. Many of the shops were still open on a darkening Sunday evening, and there were lots of people around. Young E observed that the only ones he had heard speaking English had been some shouty teenagers who had nothing to say and nothing better to do. And he's grown up in Peckham, as a true citizen of Planet Earth, completely separated from the notions of Old Empire and WWII hangover that formed my worldview as an eleven-year-old.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Ipswich actually seemed rather pleasant. It has plenty of shops and pubs and places to eat, has some stunning countryside just down the river, and in Christchurch Park it really has one of the best urban outdoor spaces in the country. Some of the trees are incredible - like with those in Anthony Browne books, you can see loads of scary stuff hidden in the twists and lumps of the branches and trunks. Amidst these ancient sentinels, Yummy Mummies chase children on little scooters and bikes, all radiant beneath their winter woolly hats. If the town where I was born has gained this much innocent charm, our delondonisation process is complete, and Brexit is harmless.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">How many times in our travels have we been having a perfectly reasonable and pleasant conversation with somebody and then they’ve decided it’s time to say something racist? Only once. This is pretty damn good going, I think, as I used to hear something virtually every day in South London twenty years ago, even if it was usually from one of a tribe of old men who are surely all dead by now. But while London has moved with the times, the rest of the country has at least been keeping up, I think.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A friendly woman in her thirties was talking about how much happier she was in her village in the South Downs than she had been in Suburban South London some years before. "You go there now and it's like Spot the White Person and I'm not racist." There was little aggravated intonation or emphasis in her delivery, and so she seemed genuine - the almost-complete absence of white people in Croydon can be better observed by a self-proclaimed non-racist person than by anybody else. This may be true, because I don't believe that I have ever told anybody that I am not a racist, and on each of the handful of occasions that I have visited Croydon, I've seen fucking hordes of white people milling about. Even she, though, has clearly been advised not to preface racist utterances with, "I'm not racist but..." and has taken to appending the disclaimer smoothly to the opposite end. It made her seem rather more gentle in her opinion - perhaps even to the point where she might begin to wonder why she bothers sharing it.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Meanwhile, the van has also been struggling to stay the pace with 2018. It's impossible to air it on any kind of basis, let alone daily, as when we are home the windows need to be closed to keep the warmth in, and when we are away the windows need to be closed to make sure that nobody else steals our precious family warmth. There is no escape for the moisture in the air, worst of all in the boys' bed over the cab. This is the most compact space with two humans in it who will insist on breathing all night long, the highest space where the hotter air eventually ends up, and the only space with three outside walls and ceiling, and could almost be a patented condensation-catcher. Prolonged periods of cold weather like this one, with all four of us in the van every day, expose the van lifestyle as Not Completely Sustainable. The moisture leads to mould and the boys' pillows end up sopping wet and smelling like granny's attic. We had to throw them away - yet more waste.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">A few days earlier we had been visiting London - for a third time on the tour, this time to take some papers to the solicitor. On the day we came to leave, the van wouldn't start. This was no great surprise, as it had been sitting there charging 20000mAH power banks day after day, while I didn't even dare to start the engine in case it cost me a hundred quid. A new battery was only marginally more expensive than the London LEZ charge, of course, but we had to pay that in addition later that day. I wasn't exempted for wrecking my battery with good behaviour. This was the first time I'd noticed the TfL website encouraging me to sign up for an account. "But that's almost as if you WANT me to keep bringing my [supposedly] heavily-polluting vehicle [with an engine the same size as that of the average Saab] into London... and to keep paying you two hundred quid for the privilege!" I shouted at the Internet, which didn't hear me.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Vanny will still be our cheapest and easiest way of visiting London once we are settled in Yorkshire, however (which is one of a number of reasons why I get nervous as M makes louder and louder noises about selling her). We've broken free from the capital's economagnetic field, but we will want to go back pretty regularly. It has been a great place to live, in recent years at least. I have a vivid memory from 1991, standing on the roof of a multi-storey car park in Stratford E15, after a biophysical science tutor had shamefacedly accepted that he was absolutely desperate for students who could start his course the following month. The view was toxic industrial wasteland and housing that showed utter contempt for its occupants. "Look at this shithole," my friend and I said together.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Very few places have changed as radically as Stratford, but the whole world has been evolving with incredible momentum in the twenty five years since. All that time inside the M25 meant I hadn't spent enough time elsewhere to notice that it is changing for the better outside of London too, whether it's the food in Cornwall, or the decreasing likelihood of a country bumpkin complaining about the people in cities who aren't white.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There was a young woman who worked in our neighbourhood in London cleaning the streets - picking up litter with one of those claw things. I think she was probably from Eastern Europe somewhere - maybe she was Polish. She stood out, of course, because the majority of people doing her job are men. I never spoke to her, never asked if she got paid the same as the men did, for example. But I assume she's still doing it, because the streets around our old home are usually fairly tidy. The disgraceful mess at the sides of the country's A roads varies from county to county, which makes it obvious that some councils don't pay anybody to clear this shit up any more. 'Litter' just doesn't do it justice - the recent winds have seen to it that there are miles of road where every single tree and bush wears a bag, and whole, full bin-liners can be seen here and there, carefully placed by somebody who really wanted rid of them, but couldn't think where else to do it.</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The scene is made even more grim by the roadkill. The veins and arteries of the nation are clogged not only with thin layers of plastic but with a variety of decaying corpses. I've finally seen more dead foxes than I ever saw live ones in London and I must have seen a hundred dead badgers too - I should organise myself to see one living happily, to exorcise their many ghosts. At one point, I can't remember where, I saw a huge stag lying in a ditch. Such a great beast, you'd think, must have made out a will - 'Leave Me To Rot By The Side Of The Road.'</span></div>
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<span class="x_s1" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">What a strange way to end a blog post about beautiful England. About how it's getting better, and about how considerate and kind its people are. Mind you, it is just another thing on the web now, which has even more rubbish on it than the A14. Everywhere in this country is a nicer place than the internet.</span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-66775995043408770262018-01-26T02:44:00.000-08:002018-01-26T02:44:00.537-08:00Space Travel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">It's been six months since we set off on tour. A voyage of discovery has
led us to a small town in </span><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">North Yorkshire</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, via dozens of convivial
conurbations, full, as far as we can tell, of good food, good beer and good
people. The overall experience has been one of learning that there are many,
many great places to live in this country outside of </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">. But more of that some
other time.</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
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The road hasn’t ended yet. There is no standing still. <span style="background: white;">Since we all agreed on where our home and shop will be, however, we've
struggled a little to know where to go and what to do. Hopefully it'll only be
about a month of living footloose and fancy free, as it's cold and wet outside,
loads of places are now closed for the winter (a lot more than there were back
in November) and we've just about had enough of living in a van. Until
summertime at least.</span><br />
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So we’ve been revisiting some friends in The South and going back over
some old ground from the early days of the tour. It’s been an interesting
experience, staying in the same spot in Walberswick as we did on that first
tumultuous night, but with none of the nerves about what we were doing and
whether we were allowed to do it anyway. Or walking back along Southwold pier,
in bright sunshine once again, but with ninety percent of the rest of the
population having been wiped out, perhaps by climate change.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">We found a great little campsite on a farm in </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Thetford</span></st1:placename><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Forest</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, which I would have
avoided if I’d known how strong the coming winds would be. On the way I’d
stocked up in <a href="http://www.beautifulbeers.co.uk/" target="_blank">Beautiful Beers</a>, a great shop in Bury St Edmunds. I heartily
recommend the place to anybody who is after a decent beer in a town that would
have oodles of it, if it were not the home of Greene King. The shop’s
particularly strong in the <a href="https://www.tempestbrewco.com/our-beer" target="_blank">Tempest</a> department, and after several bottles of
Marmalade On Rye (among others) I had completely forgotten that there had been
any mention of squalliness. In fact I was fast asleep.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">I awoke to an almighty crashing noise, one of those that you can only
establish has just happened because bits of it are still going on, even now
you’ve had time to collect yourself. And by you, now, I mean me, then. The wind
was howling around the van, which bounces around happily when a larger vehicle
drives past, so in a gale she becomes a zero-gravity simulation. I assumed the
noise had been caused by the removal of a substantial part of the vehicle, but
was still too drunk and tired to establish exactly what, so I went back to
sleep.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In the morning, the sun shone and total peace reigned on the farm. Alone
on the January campsite, the family in the van laid in until ten. I drank some
water and felt quite super. Fried some sausages, read to the kids, took my time
about thinking where we were going to go next. Not for a fraction of a moment
did it cross my mind that there had been a storm last night. Until we set off,
that is. The farm stood in a large clearing, but proper foresty forest was only
about a hundred yards to the rear of our van, and as soon as the farm track
entered the trees, we had to stop because one of the larger ones was lying
sideways, completely blocking the way.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">In falling, it had brought down the electricity line with it. This, we
saw as we backed up, had pulled two telegraph poles askew to crazy angles, and
now lay along the line of the track like a menacing cyborg snake. One of the
farm workers welcomed us back from our micro-excursion with what was frankly
unbelievable good cheer, considering he now had his work cut out for the
foreseeable future. He showed us that the powerline had nearly ripped the
chimney off the roof of the cottage and had started a fire in the surrounding
trees, told us he’d been at it since six taking the farm’s one generator around
the various sheds and animal feeders, and gave immeasurable care and loving
attention to a pewter-coloured dog in his arms as he described the route of a
smaller farm track that “ye <i>moight</i> be
ayble to ge’ back ow’ ahrn.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><i><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Moight</span></i><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">, here, was the
operative word, and he didn’t look the tiniest bit surprised to see me walking
back down the muddy path less than ten minutes later. He had warned me about
the big dip, of course, but I’d been so delighted to sail straight through that
and back up again, I’d decided to celebrate with a change of gear and suddenly
found a world of no traction. At all. None. Again and again my front wheels
would spin, but there was no hint of travel. To look at them from the side was
a mystery indeed, as they had not dug into the turf at all – it didn’t even
look muddy here. It was just as if I had stripped my tyres naked and slathered
them in goose fat. Admittedly I’d been pretty drunk the night before and had
forgotten quite a lot, of course.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">Still, he didn’t even wait to hear my cries for help, just jumped behind
the wheel of the nearest tractor, drove up to me and hoisted me into the cab,
then rolled on half a mile to Vanny and set about her liberation. It was, in
the truest sense of the phrase, all in a day’s work for him. But if a tree
falls in the forest and the only person nearby is too pissed to hear it, or
remember that he has heard it, should he really get away so easily, leaving
such devastation in his wake?</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<br />
A few days later we were back in <span style="background: white;">Overstrand, on
the </span></span><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;">North Norfolk</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> coast, looking out to sea. “Do you know,”
I asked E, who automatically rolled his eyes, “if we were to sail away, out
there, Due North, where we would arrive first?”</span><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
<br />
A shrug. “</span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: #212121;">Iceland</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: #212121;"> or </span><st1:place><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121;">Greenland</span></span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121;"> or something?<span class="apple-converted-space">”</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
“<span style="background: white;">Good try.” That’s what I would have guessed
too. Luckily I had already looked at a map. “We wouldn't actually meet land
between here and <i>The Arctic</i>.”</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121;"><br />
“<span style="background: white;">Oh. Wow.” There aren't any words for how un-wow
his wow sounded.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">I tried again.</span><br />
<br />
“<span style="background: white;">I like this idea of being back in the very same
spot we were in six months ago, when we are actually as far from where we were
as we will ever be. In, like, astronomy terms and that. About 180 million miles
across space, we were, in fact, in the very same place.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />
“<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Yeah, but the galaxies themselves are moving
too. A lot further and much faster. The universe is always expanding.” He
pointed to a muddy spot about thirty feet away. </span>“<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Plus, last time, we were parked over there.”</span></span></span></div>
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<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-31600247347705870462018-01-17T03:51:00.000-08:002018-01-17T03:53:15.586-08:00Friendly Street to (Highw)A61 Revisited<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuR6rsx3Qt3iczYPQd09fZvYuQKins_2Nzyg7DgPHnoS4rzep5teYu68Tluo7Gk2d2OFRFk2DQ7j2x7OE5vyKD_n8XdEKI1moTxqZ7yRbJlwkvk_E50Bw1K7h7ZkxhoueakD0WN7Q2NzI/s1600/IMG_1762.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuR6rsx3Qt3iczYPQd09fZvYuQKins_2Nzyg7DgPHnoS4rzep5teYu68Tluo7Gk2d2OFRFk2DQ7j2x7OE5vyKD_n8XdEKI1moTxqZ7yRbJlwkvk_E50Bw1K7h7ZkxhoueakD0WN7Q2NzI/s320/IMG_1762.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;">"You hear it all the time - 'People are Friendlier Up North.' I reckon it's a myth. People aren't any friendlier here, it's just that </span><i style="color: #212121;">they talk to you</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;">." The most Southern bloke I know (in the North) shared this observation in his Ilkley kitchen back in September. Within a week, </span><a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/a-conversation-that-didnt-happen-in.html" style="font-family: wf_segoe-ui_normal, 'Segoe UI', 'Segoe WP', Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif, serif, EmojiFont; font-size: 14.6667px;" target="_blank">I would be the audience for one of Yorkshire's foremost parking experts.</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;"> This alone didn't seem much of a coincidence, let alone resemble the beginnings of an emerging pattern, but our weekend visit to Chapel Allerton, a gentrifying North-Leeds suburb, made my Useful Soundbite Gland start oozing again. All three incidences occurred within an eight-mile radius of Otley, it emerged, as I drew a big red circle on a map in the police station of my mind.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The woman in question on this occasion was neither a police officer nor a parking enforcement non-officer, but felt that she was entitled to an opinion on our very presence next to the park across the road from her house. We are still really careful not to sit our big ugly machine right outside somebody's front door unless we absolutely have to, but it appeared that this was an individual whose personal space straddled the highway. To be fair, she had probably noticed we'd been there all night, it was now late into the next morning, I had always expected our van to be on the receiving end of negative public opinion quite frequently, and this was literally the first occasion of it. I should also make it clear that I dithered on my way to the door to answer her knock, and that once again it was M who actually dealt with the Enemy of the Van. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Earlier I had stared at a particularly interesting droplet - among millions - in a protective veil of condensation inside the windscreen. Meanwhile she squawked at her silent husband about us, as he carried the cat basket to her little yellow car.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">'I would usually park it here, where THIS BIG VAN IS,' she told him. He gave no audible response. I would imagine that he knows where she usually parks her car, or perhaps he was thinking that she can only park it there when there isn't another vehicle parked there already. Or maybe the cat was just really heavy. He put the cat basket in the car, which he could almost certainly have done without her company for the long diagonal trek to a geographical point about thirty feet in front of us. They walked back to their house, which looked really nice. Then she strode purposefully to her yellow car again, this time without the husband, who had presumably gone to hide in the shed. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">She stood and glared at Vanny, probably able to make out a rotund silhouette in the front seat, and waiting for it to move. Waiting for me to move when I don't absolutely have to is a losing game for anybody of less-than-otherworldly patience. Eventually she gave up and walked off to her house again, so I went in the back to the toilet. As I came back, there was an impolitely-loud knock at the door.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Hello.'</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">'Are you visiting someone? I've got a broken foot.'</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">That's all I really remember of the conversation, but it is all I really need. This utterly perfect non-sequitur told us a great deal - that she suspected we had no real reason to be there at all, but that if we did know somebody in the neighbourhood she wanted to know who they were and why we couldn't park our big ugly van outside their house, and that whether or not we actually had the right to be parked in the unrestricted parking on the street where she lived, taking up her preferred parking space not immediately outside, but across the road from, her house, and forcing her to walk a little further to her car, we were proving ourselves shit-arse inconsiderate by doing so, because we should have been able to infer that she was carrying a debilitating injury, perhaps from the way that she made the same journey two additional times in order to glare at, and eventually, talk to, the people who were making her life so much more difficult. But she wasn't being friendly.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Nevertheless, M was superbly polite and sweet with her, which impressed me as much this time as it did with <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/arch-theory.html" target="_blank">the parking bloke at Durdle Door</a> and <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/best-pub-worst-swannery_25.html" target="_blank">the toilet man in Abbotsbury</a>. But she wasn't looking to make a new friend here either. The problem was not the woman's unfriendliness in itself, so much as the fact that this was the morning after M's third successive sleepless night. We had been to see a house, also for the third time, and made an offer that was accepted, and now it looked like the Tour was in its final stages. More importantly, it was dawning on us - long before dawn - that we were soon going to be living in a town where we didn't know anybody, at the far end of a massive county where we only know half a dozen people, hundreds of miles from most of our friends and family. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">It's when you're lying there alone with your ill-marshalled thoughts at night, unable to sleep but not really awake either, that the thin, brittle enamel of what you're doing with your life can give way and open up a festering cavity of loneliness. I'd had it myself on the first night - up to this point it has all been imagination, projection and fantasy. But just as it becomes real it suddenly seems so much less desirable, and so much more scary. Don't get me wrong, the place looks amazing, I can't wait to get started on the shop, and the boys will probably get straight into their new life, but the shadowy forms of one's doubts and fears do tend to congregate when you should be asleep, don't they? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">After Christmas in Suffolk, we had spent a very enjoyable few days back among friends in London. The highlight, for me and my stomach, was a visit to <a href="https://www.timeout.com/london/restaurants/everest-curry-king" target="_blank">Everest Curry King</a>, which I'd never called on in a quarter century in the capital, but which I could not commend more completely. Not only is the food amazing and the cheapest we've found anywhere in the country, but the people are so damn <i>friendly</i>. M recalled the occasion at the end of the nineties when we'd walked a group of drunk Geordies from the Blue Posts on Berwick Street to Leicester Square tube. 'Tha's fookin greet ovya man. I orlaz thought Cockneys was a reet buncha unfrenly coonts,' their translator offered as he groped for his Travelcard. We didn't tell him that he'd said that six times already, and that we were only doing it to prove him wrong.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;">After return visits to York and Richmond, Leeds revealed a lot of what we'd missed the first time, an inner city residential district with lots going for it, the waterways and industrial buildings, and in particular the breweries based in them. <a href="https://www.northernmonkbrewco.com/old-flax-store/the-refectory" target="_blank">Northern Monk's Refectory</a> was everything that the Magic Rock Tap wasn't, with the added bonus of a sign saying they'd spent £1872 replacing stolen glassware in the last year, and that they were "as tight as anyone else from Yorkshire," so if you liked their glasses so much, why didn't you just buy one? </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;">Durham, meanwhile, seems to be a city that is absolutely dependent on its university and its cathedral for the entirety of its identity. Take those institutions away, and the Jack Wills would go out of business, leaving little but the building works of desperate-looking redevelopment around t</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121;">he river on which my brother had shouted at teams of eight strong women at a time so long ago.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br style="background-color: white; color: #212121;" /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">The boys set an excellent example of getting on board with this house thing, despite the fact that it couldn't be much further away from Worthing, which was their preference. They were cheered enough by the discovery of a decent sweetshop in the town that they turned from flat refusal to a kind of acceptance on a sixpence. This says much about the fickleness of kids but also their supportive relationship - having each other, and a place they can go for sugar, will be enough.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;">There are friendly faces everywhere you go, I'd told them as we were setting out in July, and we've seen dozens of them since, but now it looks like we will be living in the one town that is furthest away from any of them. The boys will make friends easily, I think (and hope), but what about their parents? And if Northern Monk are right about Yorkshire, to hell with friends, what about customers?</span>bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-50610579901275762782017-12-24T09:28:00.000-08:002017-12-24T11:53:45.009-08:00Motorsport Can Be Dangerous (Devon and Cornwall, Part 2)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVT8m4ElR7-jRfuawiPqQAnDbjaRhh78oU_-fnC6CgIQff_i9pCFw-HszGqoue3BQ0KGQF2Ix7j-7slHJxd3lMYvF1gk2vGesIFLcA5TX2BjUhfZuRzjqbTecZwYbGs8Tz6TXjiRWXUVE/s1600/moto.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1196" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVT8m4ElR7-jRfuawiPqQAnDbjaRhh78oU_-fnC6CgIQff_i9pCFw-HszGqoue3BQ0KGQF2Ix7j-7slHJxd3lMYvF1gk2vGesIFLcA5TX2BjUhfZuRzjqbTecZwYbGs8Tz6TXjiRWXUVE/s320/moto.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">We were headed for Lands End. Not the place
itself, which, despite being the setting for <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/07/featuresreviews.guardianreview26" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;" target="_blank">one of the great unsung classics of
children’s literature</a> is, according to M, “really boring,” but Penzance and St Ives. I was interested to visit both towns, and they’re as close to the
Southernmost and Westernmost points of England a</span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">s
we could be bothered to go. I did have a look at how much it would cost to get
to the Isles of Scilly, and decided it wasn’t worth it. I’ll go there when I’ve
made my fortune selling secondhand records and I’m trying to decide what to do
with my yacht.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Penzance</span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">is a great town. Sure,
it has plenty of tell-tale signs of people living in poverty and heroin, but it
has lots going for it. It has atmosphere, dramatic landscape, architectural
interest and more miles between it and London SE15 than the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><st1:place style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;"><st1:placename>Tyne</st1:placename></st1:place></span></st1:placename><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><st1:placetype><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><st1:placetype>Bridge</st1:placetype></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">.
We met up with some other ex-regulars from the Ivy House who moved out of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><st1:city style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">London</st1:city></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">at about the same time
as us. They’ve both got jobs down there, and their young son is starting
nursery school. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">What they make (so far) of their drastic change of circumstances
is given interesting perspective by the fact that they’ve both taken the time
and trouble to be American.I don’t know them particularly well, only chatting
to them on a few occasions prior to this, and I tend to assume that Americans
experiencing The Great British Countryside can only possibly be enjoying a
quaint oldy-worldiness. People hailing from a continent where the scale of
everything dwarfs what is possible on these islands surely can’t actually be
thrilled by the best that our natural and built environments have to offer, can
they? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">As<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>we walked down the hill
away from the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://www.intocornwall.com/engine/business.details.asp?id=42" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;" target="_blank">Admiral Benbow Inn</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(where I was moved to tell the barman
that my two pints of Proper Job were the best cask ales I’d drunk in the last
six months, the length and breadth of the country), one of our new friends
leapt into an involuntary star-jump at the view. “</span><st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><st1:stockticker style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-large;">LOOK</st1:stockticker></span></st1:stockticker><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">at this place.” She
almost snarled. “I FUCKING LOVE IT.” And, for the umpteenth time on this
journey, I had to agree.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Not just because I’m a little scared of her
(because the first time I ‘met’ her, she was heavily pregnant and just standing
in the doorway of the Ivy House, firing ice-laser-beams out of her eyes at her
partner, who had already fielded two ‘come home’ phone calls while sitting at
the bar nattering about record shops in Brooklyn), but also because the view
across harbour to water was impressive. She is, I realise now, one of the most
talented pubgoers I’ve met, effortlessly striking up conversations with locals
everywhere we went (The<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://whatpub.com/pubs/COR/373/lamp-whistle-penzance" target="_blank">Lamp and Whistle</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>was very good too), although Being
American might be cheating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">He, for his part, has already got himself a
regular spot playing records in some late-night bar, and gained unrestricted
access to one of those stupidly huge archive-type collections you see YouTube
videos about. The thought occurred to me that<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Penzance</span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">was all the more
inspiring a place for us to visit because it had this family happily living in
it. They took us to the lido café for breakfast, which was amazing – the food,
the elegant lines of the building, but, more than anything, the light.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Also, one member of staff (still) wore a<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/may/31/penzance-cornwall-jubilee-pool-reopens" target="_blank">Save the Lido</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>T-shirt, and I felt a little
Londonsick for the first time. People would ask me why, a year after the pub
reopened, the Twitter account I was running was<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>still</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>called Save the Ivy House, although we
would always both know that if nobody spent any money there, it would close
again, forever, and soon. Being a customer for small businesses is like Mr
Incredible says, “No matter how many times you save the world, it always
manages to get back in jeopardy again… sometimes I just want it to STAY SAVED,
y’know?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Near St Michael’s Mount (or a good view of it
from Marazion) there’s a great spot to park up<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://www.searchforsites.co.uk/marker.php?id=27518" target="_blank">(we have found it much easier since M
found this website)</a>, away from the road but open to the elements. We were
battered by the wind and rain more relentlessly than on any night since
Rothbury, and although we never quite got to the bottom of whether Plymouth is
truly “Britain’s Ocean City”, I’m not having anybody try to tell me that what
was blowing around and through Vanny that night was a breeze from the English
Channel or Irish Sea. That’s the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"><st1:place style="font-size: x-large;">Atlantic
Ocean</st1:place></span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">right there, and you
can’t tell me any different.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Two of M’s least favourite things (on this tour,
at least, after me) are<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/best-cream-tea-worst-action-scene.html" target="_blank">steep, winding roads on which I might end
up running her over</a>, and towns where most of the buildings are Londoners’
second homes. But, like the Bio-Electronic Navigator<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">BEN</span></st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">-GUNN
in Disney’s version, she arrowed in on St Ives Rugby Club, which is a good
overnight stop (if you’re prepared to ignore a few signs) and saves you from
having to take your van down the slope into the narrow lanes of town.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Big H had told us to beware of ‘low-flying
seagulls and Barbara Hepworth sculptures’ and we were soon victims of both. In
something of a Cornish Cliché, M had the last bit of pasty stolen from her by a
gang of gulls. A gull gang, or rather, one adult seagull and a bunch of teenage
gulls flying around him, trying to look hard. Despite the armour of the brown
paper bag it was barely protruding from, M, showing me her angry-red fingers,
said she could feel that the seagull’s beak was serrated at its edge. I call
BULLSHIT. (Remember to Google that before putting it in the blog.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">It’s interesting how Dame Babs has left great
slabs of stone and metal lying next to our route throughout, from the dreadful
sculpture above John Lewis on Oxford Street, where I spent the vouchers my
colleagues collected for on my departure exactly a year ago, through Big H’s
retirement japes with a cardboard replica of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Two
Forms</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>(which had been a
well-loved landmark in the best lesson I ever planned (rendered unreusable when
the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Divided Circle</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>was recombined in a backstreet
scrapyard’s furnace six years ago)), past reading about what Leeds is famous
for, and ending up peering into her garden.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">There were some nice ones of hers in the Tate,
though. Big H’s younger namesake must have received an irreverent message
psychically, as his behaviour in Tate St Ives was the worst I’ve seen from
either boy on the whole tour. (To give credit where it is due, this wouldn’t
even place him in the 30<sup>th</sup><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>percentile
of the Boys’ Bad Behaviour Bell Curve I didn’t draw when I was teaching.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">H just wandered about looking grumpy and bored
and saying sarcastic-sounding things that his vocabulary didn’t quite stretch
to. I didn’t exactly help, delving into my<i>Tired and Bored Teacher’s Mental
Book of Wind-Ups</i><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>as we sat in
front of Roger Hilton’s<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hilton-oi-yoi-yoi-t01855" target="_blank">Oi Yoi Yoi</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">“I just don’t like it. It’s not very good. It
doesn’t even look like a person.” He opined.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">“Ah, but you’re still responding to it.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Well Done</i>. You are appreciating
it for<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>what it is</i>, whether
you like it or not.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">This made him really cross, marching off to one
of the two stations in the gallery that asked for feedback to be written on
little paper circles which could then be hung on little round pegs. There were
lots of little pencils with which to write something heartfelt. H was the
second most-motivated (after his Christmas list) I’ve ever seen him when
writing, “I didn’t like any of it. And I’m keeping the pencil.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">It was, as my brother has suggested, a good time
to visit the town, and be able to enjoy its pubs and bars and beaches without
all the bloody part-timer tourists getting in the way.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.beerandbird.com/" target="_blank">Beer and Bird</a>, the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://www.firehousestives.co.uk/" target="_blank">Firehouse</a>,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://www.theliquorcellar.co.uk/" target="_blank">John’s</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>bottle shop and more took plenty of
money from us in return for great food and beer and incredibly friendly, professional
service. It was, in fact, one of those phases of the tour when it felt like we
are just on a really long, greedy holiday, breaking off chunks of Property Pie
and stuffing it into our fat mouths, getting all bits of filling stuck in our
beards.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Or maybe it was just me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">So for the first step of the journey back East,
we thought we’d do something more educational. E had been insistent upon trying
either quad biking or paintballing. It was a school day and I felt that driving
a motor vehicle would hopefully be a more useful transferable skill for his
future than shooting people, so we visited Blackwater’s<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="http://atv-centre.com/" target="_blank">ATV centre</a>. Like the shit and boring
Dad I sometimes have to be, I made a point of standing them for a meaningful
moment in front of the sign that says MOTORSPORT CAN BE DANGEROUS in big
letters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">It wasn’t really that important a lesson for
these two first-time drivers. The sign would probably be better-deployed next
to the A30 near Ottery St Mary. The boys were given full safety gear and
excellent tuition, and the quad bikes themselves had little throttle limiters
that the young bloke adjusted carefully, according to their respective ages and
body weights. These, I feel, should be fitted to<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:stockticker><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">ALL</span></st1:stockticker><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">vehicles driven by
anybody under the age of 45. As they pootled around a well-designed course,
they looked like they had a lot of fun, even if H did shout “I HATE THIS,” each
time he passed me in the pits.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">I consider this to be a healthy attitude to
motor vehicles. Although I’ve never particularly enjoyed driving, this van
is the most comfortable and least stressful ride I’ve ever had. Part of it is
the position, up nice and high so you can see everything. Part of it is never
having to stop because somebody needs the toilet. But the biggest part is that
it doesn’t go very fast, so I don’t feel obliged to keep my speed up. The fact
that I can’t see out of the back, so I don’t feel the pressure of a great long
line of Audi drivers shaking their well-groomed fists at me, probably helps too.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">M had just come back from the loo. This is
illegal, of course, but I would like to see any of you try and stop her, even
if you weren’t driving. The fact that you can’t see what’s behind you came as a
blessing yet again, as I was only aware of these two cars, bumper-to-bumper at
about seventy-five, as they appeared in the right-hand corner of my vision. As
the second car, a little sporty-hairdresser’s thing, was passing me on my
right, it was looking to accelerate across in front of me and undertake the
first car in one very short diagonal line.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">“Undertakers. Friends only to the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Undertaker,</i>” I decided to write
in a blog several days later.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">He lost control with his car a few feet in front
of Vanny’s brave little snub nose, immediately going into a spin and bumping
skywards off the central reservation, spinning mid-air, broadsiding the crash
barrier with an enormous, well, crash, bouncing up in the air again and doing a
lot of quick backwards swervy stuff before gradually slowing to a stop. All the
time this was happening, I was just looking at the slow-lane gap, leaning
forward over the wheel like Dougal in Pat’s milk float.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">M said she felt she was looking at his face all
the way through. Both boys were watching too, and all of us reported something
different – M didn’t hear a crash, E was just mesmerized by how many “bits of
mud and other stuff were flying up in the air,” H’s keen sense of drama
reported that he was sure he’d heard the car knock some bits off the van. We
were all in shock, and resolved, then and there, to stop off in Frome again and
get drunk. On our previous visit,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/brewedboyfrome?lang=en" target="_blank">Brewed Boy</a><span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>was closed. This time, thankfully, it
was not. And it is<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>excellent</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Like Chris Rea, we felt we had been driving home
for Christmas for about thirty years, but we made it to my Mum and Dad’s in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Suffolk</span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">in the end. Where will
we go next? Um, dunno yet. But we hope that you all have a very enjoyable few
days off from whatever awful things you have to do the rest of the time, and do
take care and look after each other.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "arial"; font-size: 14pt;">Merry Christmas, if that’s your sort of thing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-236415847074945192017-12-20T03:16:00.000-08:002017-12-20T03:16:58.952-08:00Best Pasty Filling - Worst Festival (Devon and Cornwall, Part 1)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqe1QVmi_2Bg6Ijk4PQ_xmiXGRARAt9vUNYGyp9HVJHyf_he1j8dT_mfLtoOkVNQT2JnhTKmM4FmiEz8-e_BFgGe3Fv1WGKuU3L7b1zvsi8AQBOWQQI0GXqvKhHCu9yXpRfKQZ-mNSzE/s1600/tinta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="956" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTqe1QVmi_2Bg6Ijk4PQ_xmiXGRARAt9vUNYGyp9HVJHyf_he1j8dT_mfLtoOkVNQT2JnhTKmM4FmiEz8-e_BFgGe3Fv1WGKuU3L7b1zvsi8AQBOWQQI0GXqvKhHCu9yXpRfKQZ-mNSzE/s320/tinta.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">
The West Country has always been associated with four things in my mind:
pasties, cider, festivals and dangerous driving on inadequate roads. As this
pair of pre-Chrimbo posts will reveal, nothing has changed. We’re approaching
the final stages of our adventure (at least the part that involves driving
around in a van every day), and this leg, out to the far reaches of Cornwall
and back to Suffolk in time for Christmas, means we have been just about
everywhere we need to go before deciding where home and shop will be. That
said, this travel thing is damn good fun and we are keeping the van (I might
even sell some records out of it one day) with lots of the British Isles still
to explore.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> Ω<br />
<br />
"Okay. Get the pasty if you must, but just </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">DON</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">'T </span><st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">LOOK</span></st1:stockticker><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> INSIDE IT." The
year is 1992 and I am visiting Seale-Hayne agricultural college in Newton
Abbot, </span><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Devon</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">. We've just walked through the union bar,
where preparations are being made for tonight's Christmas meeting of the
college's Drinking Society - bins have been moved to the middle of the room and
the floor is covered in plastic sheeting. My friend, who is over six and a half
feet tall and, folded carefully, drives a Peugeot 205 at consistently dangerous
speeds, has warned me that either the drinking culture or the isolated location
of </span><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">the college (or perhaps
a function of both) has made it possible for the canteen to prepare and sell
the worst food that he has ever had the misfortune to eat. Intrigued, I have
picked out what appears to be a perfectly appetising (and quaintly local) meal and,
sitting down, have just been shown a metaphorical Big Red Button with the words
DO NOT PRESS stencilled above it.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><br />
<br />
I take my fork and lever the armour-plated top sheet of pastry away from What
Lies Beneath - a mangled, twisted mass of gelatinous grey material, it
resembles edible food in no way whatsoever. In fact, in line with popular Urban
Myths of the time, it looks very much like the mutilated carcass of a rat. Anybody
who has ever known me will understand just how unpleasant this food looked when
I say that I could not eat any of it.<br />
<br />
This experience of South-Western cuisine stayed with me to the extent that I
have rarely been drawn to the pasties one sees on sale everywhere else, and it
was with gastronomic expectations very much in check that I drove Vanny into </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Devon</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> for the second time on this tour. M
had set the controls for the heart of Newton Abbot because there was a house I liked
the look of there.<span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">I’m sure pasties
are okay. Even M likes them. I’ve eaten enough in the last fortnight to
exorcise the ghosts of the Worst of All Possible-Rats and </span><st1:place><st1:placename><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Seale-Hayne</span></st1:placename><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> </span><st1:placetype><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">College</span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> (which closed down just a few years
later, although it’s still not clear whether the food had anything to do with
it.) But I’d still say the best pasty is the one you're eating right now, if
you are hungry enough. It helps if it is still warm, and if you can penetrate
the pastry casing with a normal set of teeth. There should be chunks of steak
in the filling, not minced beef, and it should be abundantly peppery. Yes,
there should be some vegetables in there too, but frankly I couldn’t give a
rat’s ass what they are. I’ve had some very nice ones from a chain called <a href="http://www.thecornishbakery.com/" target="_blank">The Cornish Bakery</a> in Bude and Tintagel. Pasties, not rat’s asses.<br />
<br />
I wasn’t, however, expecting to be blown away by the very first place we
visited in Newton Abbot at the beginning of December 2017. <a href="https://teigncellars.com/" target="_blank">Teign Cellars</a> is the
kind of pub most localities (including cool areas of </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">South London</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">) can only dream of - a proper pub with
all sorts of (all right, local) people drinking in it, that sells some
incredible beers at excellent prices. Okay, it smelled a little funny and the
music was awful, but both these factors could be integral parts of being a
proper local instead of a poncey beer bar. We drank pints of Deya's Steady
Rolling Man at £5.20 a go (still can’t quite believe that) and asked the nice
man if the town got much tourist trade nowadays. He shook his head and
shrugged.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Teign Cellars deserves
some kind of award for its brilliance, and its cheesy chilli chips that were probably
better than those of the much-vaunted Red's True Barbecue in </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Sheffield</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> and </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Leeds</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">. “Just in case you're worried, that is
chilli on there, just with chunks of steak, not mince” said the nice young man,
presumably accustomed to people complaining if it doesn’t look like a tin of
Old El Paso<span class="apple-converted-space"> Chilli con Carne. </span>So
I'm going to say their chilli was the best pasty filling. Because it's my blog,
so there.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> Ω<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">If there were ever
two reasons to believe in a place, it's what Newton Abbot has right now - a
great place to drink beer (another bar showed up on my standard iOS Maps search
– “craft beer [name of town],” but we didn’t feel the need to go there) and a
great place to buy records.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span>In a music
shop called <a href="http://www.phoenixsound.co.uk/" target="_blank">Phoenix Sound</a> M told me I had to stop spending money on myself, as
she was not able to. This, I felt, was unfair. She can spend money (up to a
certain amount) on herself any time she wants to (up to a maximum of about,
erm, twice), because we are not </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Santander</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">’s pigs any more, and the records are
really nice.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><br />
We stopped in at </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Plymouth</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">, where the boys and I traded knowledge of Sir Francis
Drake, his game of bowls and his Golden Behinde, before eating lunch in
McDonalds, losing patience with a Limbo Dancer and picking up the next
instalment of <i>Super Diaper Baby</i> for H's edumacation and headification.<span class="apple-converted-space"> We also discussed whether the sea splashing
around at Plymouth Hoe was, in fact, the </span></span><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Atlantic
Ocean</span></span></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">, after noting the smart new signs
declaring </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Plymouth</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> “</span></span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Britain</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">’s </span></span><st1:place><st1:placetype><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Ocean</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> </span></span><st1:placetype><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">City</span></span></st1:placetype></st1:place><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">.” I
then discovered that <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-21943352" target="_blank">these signs have cost the city council seventeen thousand pounds each</a>, and am still trying to work out how.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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Okehampton suffers from a shoddy reputation, but deserves better. It's on the
edge of </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Dartmoor</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">, near the middle of </span><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Devon</span></st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">, and some of its cashpoints still
work. Why it has three supermarkets on the same narrow spur off the </span><st1:street><st1:address><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Main Street</span></st1:address></st1:street><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> is beyond me, but the car park at the other
end of town provided us with a quiet spot by a noisy river to pass another
night, en route to visiting the beautiful people in Langtree again. I can
recommend eating in <a href="http://www.blackhorsedevon.co.uk/" target="_blank">The Black Horse in Great Torrington</a>, especially if you are
skint, or greedy, or it is Christmas, or all of the above. The town car park
actually makes proper provision for motorhomes to stay overnight, too.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> Ω<br />
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Things are different over the border in Bude. <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/a-capital-idea.html" target="_blank">The technicalities and semanticsof the rules that hope to forbid it elsewhere</a> aren't strong enough for </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">'s campervanishest county, so they have
their own rule to prevent them from being overrun - campervans and motorhomes
are simply not allowed in council car parks between </span><st1:time hour="11" minute="0"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">eleven o'clock</span></st1:time><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> at night and six in the morning.<span class="apple-converted-space"> (I expect they only pay a little ticket man
to work nights in peak season though.</span>) A quick bit of research from Undaunted
M (she's better at it than I am) found that the King Arthur's Arms (great pub)
car park in Tintagel allows motorhomes overnight for a very reasonable four
quid, so we went there, <a href="http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel-castle/" target="_blank">had a look around the castle</a> (as far as we could when
the island was closed) and I did a little internet-finding-out of my own.<span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">As
unconventional as our curriculum and angle of approach has been through our Van
Ed so far, the boys are very quick to hang a subject label off of everything we
do. E says he doesn't like history, for which I blame Michael Gove, colonialism
and class teachers' tendencies to ask their cover teacher to do the history
when they're on PPA, in roughly that order. But when we begin a session with
the question "What can we find out about King Arthur?" and quickly
establish that the most important fact about him is that he did not necessarily
exist, all the retrospective planning or curricular fluidity in the world is
not going to help us – once again, NOBODY KNOWS. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">In fairness,
we were mildly interested in whether it could possibly be true that he once
slew, personally, almost a thousand men in a battle somewhere. We like a story
about a place, but we're not that arsed about a place about a story, so the
tide being too far in for us to enter Merlin's Cave was no real (or even
legendary) disappointment. In conclusion, we quite enjoyed the walk around an
interesting bit of coast, but it seems King Arthur's greatest contribution to
the world we were exploring was having a reasonably priced car park that allows
motorhomes overnight named after him.<br />
<br /><a href="http://www.lanivetinn.co.uk/" target="_blank">The Lanivet Inn</a> is a really good, busy local that does excellent food. I had
the monkfish and several pints of a sweet but sneakily strong cider called
Rattler that seems hugely popular down here.<span class="apple-converted-space"> It
reminded me of the effects of the Glastonbury Festival Brothers Bar cider, back
before it started to appear in cans in your local Londis. Even when ordering my
fifth pint, I still couldn’t drop the double T central to pronouncing it as the
locals do. <i><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></span></div>
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The following night, we economized by staying at the very friendly <a href="http://doubletreesfarm.co.uk/" target="_blank">DoubletreesFarm</a> caravan site in Parr. At twenty-five quid it was cheaper than parking for
free behind a pub and provided us with the facilities we don’t absolutely need
to hand, but definitely appreciate from time to time. It was only a mile from
the Eden Project, another of the top five things to do in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Britain</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> checked off our list, and almost worth
the money. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">I say <i>almost</i> because the Rainforest Biome is
tremendous, while the rest of it is predictably low-key in December. Also,
tickets allow free entry for a year, so we were able to return the next evening
for their winter Festival of Sound and Light. This was seemingly as atmospheric
for the boys as the <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/10/best-coffee-worst-cheese.html" target="_blank">Blackpool Illuminations were for me, back when they weregood</a>. However, it would have taken eight pints of Rattler and some peyote
buttons harvested in the dark for me to get into this festival. The lasers
weren’t moving and neither was the music. Still… like I say, the kids enjoyed
it.<br />
<br />
The next day I took them to a trampoline park, which is the sort of thing I was
promising them while explaining that they were going to have to leave all they
had ever known behind. Bodmin is home to iBounce, which is a good one as far as
I can tell. As they bounced, I checked my emails. And found I had to pay a £500
FINE for entering something called the fucking </span><st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">LOW</span></st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> EMISSION </span><st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">ZONE</span></st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">, which is basically the whole of
Greater London inside the M25. I had absolutely no idea this was in effect
already, even though I’d been driving a small petrol vehicle past a sign that
said something about it on the A12 for years. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">Unfortunately,
ignorance is no excuse when it comes to this kind of thing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">Fortunately,
the fine is halved if you can pay it quickly. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Unfortunately,
even though I’m aware that I have to pay a charge to drive Vanny in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> now, that charge is A HUNDRED POUNDS.
EVERY </span><st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">DAY</span></st1:stockticker><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">Fortunately,
there only seem to be cameras recording when you go in and when you go out, and
they can’t charge you for going out, or assume that you spent the In Between
Days driving around, poisoning the millions of children who get driven half a
mile to school every day. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Unfortunately,
I don’t know that for sure. I was wondering why </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">London</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"> wasn’t full of people living in motorhomes,
smirking at the system. But now I know. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">Eventually
EVEN I get bored of the LEZ and start talking to the bloke. Turns out he used
to be the manager of Peckham Pulse for a while. We discuss our respective
muggings at the ends of our South East London working lives in good humour, as
if being victims of crimes and dangerous behaviour were all in our pasts. I’m
not suspecting for a moment that within a week I will be watching M get mugged (okay,
by a seagull) and get so close to a Hollywood-worthy high-speed car crash, I will
be delighted not to shit my trousers. For once.</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-25591498754575327562017-12-04T12:12:00.000-08:002017-12-04T12:24:12.082-08:00Arch Theory<div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Yes, I've managed to cheer up since last time, thank God. It was just a blip. Not a brief blip, but a slow descent to a nadir of ridiculous self-pity and back up again. Part of the process. Part of </span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">any</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> process for me, I sometimes think.<br /><br /> I have been saved by archways. Specifically ones I've still not passed through but would really like to. From Southampton we went to look at Stonehenge. It was bloody freezing that day and there are few things that interest my two sons less than lumps of ancient stone that raise questions with the answer "NOBODY KNOWS," but M had some work to do in the van and so we walked to the new visitor centre and handed them almost fifty quid. There weren't any new answers in there either.<br /><br /> Once Upon a Time, I told the boys, it was possible to just walk up to this most ancient of monuments and sit among the stones, contemplating the achievements of one's species over thousands of years, or watching the sun rise or something. Hell, it was possible for Chevy Chase to reverse his Austin Maxi into one of them, wasn't it? The boys looked nonplussed, so I made a mental note to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYy_TcbhcR0" target="_blank">look this up on YouTube</a> later.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /> Moving those great rocks all that way though? Aligning them with the position of the sun in the sky at different times of day throughout the year, lifting some on top of others and balancing them? It's all absolutely staggering</span></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">. </span></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">I've always been a tad intimidated by feats of engineering</span></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">, from the construction of the dome on St Paul's Cathedral to the process by which the gas operation of the refrigerator in a compact motorhome can use </span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">heat itself</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> to facilitate the </span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">removal</span></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> of heat. Awestruck, I ask myself (or the kids, or whoever is listening,) 'However did they manage that?' as if somebody is going to give me some answer other than, 'By an enormous amount of careful planning and hard work, probably involving a huge number of people who devoted or even sacrificed their lives to the project,' although it's hard to imagine scores of men living and dying that Vanny might have a fridge that doesn't cane the battery.</span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"> </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /> I've done my share of (mostly) careful planning and hard (if not always smart) work over the last twenty years, and I'm quite prepared to do some more when I know where to do it, but a character-building chat in a record shop in Wincanton (that I actually can't find on the web) did make me wonder if the direction I have been trying to point myself in is even worth the first few tentative steps. He knew a bloke who started out with an enormous collection and turned it into a shop, didn't want to have to work there all the time, and ended up swapping lots of lovely records for rent and wage payments before giving up. I shall have to own my premises and staff them all the time they're open. I reckon I might do well to ask punters to make informal appointments outside of some manageably brief core hours. Would that work?<br /><br /> Meanwhile, my travels have taught me the true value of a good pair of sunglasses at last. En route to Shaftesbury, this pair of Aviators somebody bartered for burgers at Borough Market many years ago were on and off my face with frightening frequency. I considered asking for bits of burger back when they shed a screw with removal on arrival, revealing an earlier shoddy repair with one that wasn't quite long enough. I'm indebted to S H Harrold Opticians, who fixed it on the spot for free, with a proper Ray-Ban screw. So I felt rather ashamed that E had done a Chevy Chase with the carefully-balanced Christmas presents in the window display while we waited.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /> Durdle Door, another archway I couldn't pass through (without a kayak or similar small vessel) was a sun-drenched winter setting where the last of my dark mood finally lifted. The s</span></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">usurrus of the tiny round stones moving in the water, the unreal plopping of handfuls as they dropped into the shallows made deep by the ridges of millions more, the total absence of fingernails-on-blackboard seagull screams gave the beach an audible beauty that matched the view. We lingered there as long as we could, had a pint in the pub and parked up for the night. In the morning, a friendly but diligent parking marshal approached the van and told M that overnight camping was not allowed. "Oh, we wouldn't do that," she replied with a smile. I had to admire this answer, as the use of the future tense was both a technical avoidance of the lie and an assurance that we hadn't decided we lived there now.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255,255,255,0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /> I don't suppose there are a great many people who read this blog looking for wild camping tips, yet I can't recommend the Top o' the Town Car Park in Dorchester highly enough to motorhomos like ourselves. Here are my reasons.<br /><br /> Number 1. There are oversized parking spaces solely for the use of commercial vehicles and motorhomes. Although I take particular pride in being able to squeeze Vanny into a normal space in almost any car park, biggies are often available when the normal spaces are full. This was the case here, as it was in Ord St, Newcastle Upon Tyne. It also means you have plenty of room to access your toilet cassette for Number 2.<br /><br /> Number 2. There is an excellent public convenience. One of the main advantages here is that it has three cubicles - two more than a great many of the relatively few facilities that are still open elsewhere in the country. This helps one avoid that awkward moment when one emerges, smelling like a drain, Ghostbusters Backpack in hand, to find a queue of people waiting to use the only trap.<br /><br /> Number 3. There is a café that would have been used as a location for a scene in a Coen Brothers film if it were anywhere in the United States. It is not only an Aladdin's Cave of weird cuddly toys and twenty-year-old business cards advertising polyphonic ringtones, but is also a great place to buy big floppy bacon sarnies and catch up on the local goss, by earwigging on the enormous man holding court in the corner.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Fortified by the sandwiches and in thoroughly good cheer, we headed off to Devon (again) and (this time) beyond.</span></div>
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bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-53007255161606589612017-11-26T23:57:00.000-08:002017-12-04T12:28:04.894-08:00Border This Now<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: #454545; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Last week was the worst of the trip so far. No difficulties, no challenges, no unpleasantness from anybody or anything outside of my head. Just my mood. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Pathetic, isn't it? As Philip Norman said of Jagger's persona, it is the insufferable <i>ennui</i> of being handed everything. I have no work to do, no bills to pay, no deadlines to meet. I have all I want and need right with me and can choose where I want to buy a house at my leisure. And last week it was really getting on my tits. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">My birthday was probably the low point, perhaps because I'd expected something to have materialised in the property search by this landmark date, or 'cos I'd always assumed there would be some record-shaped celebration when I reached Halfway To Ninety. We've visited lovely towns, crossed our first national border into a breathtaking landscape, and all I've been able to do is moan that we're not getting anywhere, every town is starting to look like the last, and I'm not getting my own way.<br /><br />M says she has been feeling the pressure that she knew sharing one small room with her family for most of every day was sure to bring, but we don't actually argue. We don't even quietly seethe. We just seem to start feeling unhappy, and are probably blaming each other subconsciously even if we don't articulate it. The boys start picking up on the frustration and ask infuriating questions about what is going to happen and when, and we get more and more exasperated with them asking for answers we really don't have.<br /><br />I found a house I wanted. M seemed to quite like it too, but wasn't as confident she'd be happy living there as I was. The vendor was good enough to spell out exactly how little she would accept, and M licensed me to offer her fifteen grand less. This was rejected, of course, and after a while I became convinced that it wasn't about freeing up cash for paint and plant pots, but about making an intentionally inadequate offer because she didn't really want to buy the house but didn't want to be honest with me either. So I spent the next few days visiting towns and thinking 'Y<i>eah this place is great but what is the point of liking it? If I decide I want to live here, M will just decide she doesn't.'</i> This, of course, is <i>my</i> problem and only existed briefly in a small space on the inside of <i>my</i> skull. I am over it now and would be better off not sharing it with anybody. Whoops.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Shropshire and the Brecon Beacons have been very pleasant places to visit, like everywhere else we have been. The tour has been a success in terms of teaching us there are a great many places to enjoy outside of London, but a total failure (so far) in terms of narrowing things down. In Ludlow, a man running a micropub and bottle shop (that seemed to exist in complete isolation from the big changes in the beer market of the last decade) told us of a number of advantages of living on the other side of the border, principally the free prescriptions and support with tuition fees. He also spoke knowledgeably about the beauty of the Welsh landscape and the cheaper property prices, before saying that the only drawback is that there are a lot of people with very nationalistic views. 'What, like in England?' I wondered-out-loud, but his point was that it <i>is</i> the English that a Welsh nationalist is most likely to despise. 'It makes no difference to me though really,' he continued, 'I'm a Brummie, so I'm used to being hated by everyone.'<br /><br />Armed with this wisdom, I crossed the border ready to keep my Englishness in check. The first person I met who wanted to speak about this divide was an English chef with that commonplace angry-bitter-controversial chef's sense of humour, who was talking about having a red dragon tattooed on his arse.<br /><br />Both E and H are dyslexic and are only beginning to recognise reading and writing as useful forms of communication, rather than the stuff of day-to-day slog and chore that is schoolwork. And that's in English. I don't think that returning to school to find there is another, much more difficult, language to read and write in, would go down too well. If we were to set up home on the other side of a border, it might work better for it to be In Scotland, but that's a long way away and one thing we are not struggling with is a lack of options. We need to narrow things down really, before the money runs out or the weather turns too cold to make this viable.<br /><br />Hay on Wye was a great little town, once the chef stopped trying to talk to me. We enjoyed some tremendous beers at <a href="http://www.beerrevolution.co.uk/contact/4590686030" target="_blank">Beer Revolution</a> and some pretty damn good Chinese food ('we just call it "food",' a Chinese bloke said to me once) and revelled in the town's more understanding approach to car park signage - the text above says something like "no caravan or motorhome may stay for more than one night in seven," which seemed very civilised to me, but wasn't accommodating enough for the man who had obviously been there with his car and caravan for a while, feet down, TV aerial up and noisy little genny chugging away into the night.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">There was no such crafty beer place in Abergavenny - a huge hotel called The Angel dominates, but within, the traveller discovers a handsome bar with a disastrously poor beer offering. It occurred to me once again that there are still opportunities in the beer market in certain towns. I'd really like to be able to offer the sort of beer that M and I like to drink in a town where there aren't any other places to drink it. There was a great food festival on in the town hall though, with all sorts of options and excellent atmosphere, but H wasn't really able to enjoy his burger.<br /><br />He had toothache every time he ate for a few days back there, so we needed to get him to the tooth doctor, as well as getting Vanny to the van doctor (the skylight leak is fixed - hurrah - but we had to wait for them to order the tap, so they'll fit that after Christmas. It's not exactly a long walk to the bathroom tap though.) We couldn't just take him to the dentist like you do when you're living at your home address. Finding a dentist who would give him an appointment took several days - in fact it's difficult enough just to find a practice that will take on new NHS patients even if they do live locally. So we went back to M's mum's place to sort this out. H </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">now has a very nice young dentist who cares enough about him to tell his mum he should never have <i>any</i> sugar. Since then, he's managed to lay off for the most part, even during a visit to see his very bestest friends on the South coast. We've stopped off in Southampton and checked my penultimate English Brewdog bar off the list (very nice it was too) and narrowly avoided paying TWENTY-FIVE QUID to drive Vanny across a toll bridge. Now it's time to head for Cornwall, which we missed on our first journey to the Southwest for reasons I can no longer remember. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br />When we have been there to our Satisfaction, we will have driven through every county in England, and I think we should be ready to make a serious move on a place that has caught our collective eye. The boys have been amazing together, and so positive about the whole thing, but they probably need to start spending more time in the company of other children their own age. They're not bumping into kids in playgrounds and places as often as they did when the weather was </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">warmer.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br />While watching Blue Planet II, E expressed genuine concern that we were not recycling enough. It's very difficult to organise recycling when you are in a small space and have no bins of your own, so we do it when we can, but have thrown away a hillock of glass and plastic on this trip. We would all much prefer to put this guilt behind us as soon as possible. In stark contrast to how we lived, skint and time-starved in London, we've been huge consumers too, as much so as the muscly</span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"> bulging young men we saw in Worcester, nearly bursting out of the ripped skinny jeans that go so badly with their Fred Astaire hairdos. Eating out virtually every day is expensive, fattening (when you hoover-up everybody else's lefties) and does something to my soul. Every oversize, open-top refrigerator and freezer exhaling dry-ice fog into the air, every bright red lamp heating an empty outdoors causes me insane amounts of worry. I need to get somewhere to live so I can hide away from all these smoking guns at the scenes of our suicide. I hate feeling like I am being bought and sold in the marketplace, and I hate being the trader too.</span></span></div>
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bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-15973002493247996772017-11-13T12:33:00.000-08:002017-11-18T11:10:24.925-08:00A Capital Idea<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255 , 255 , 255 , 0); color: #454545;">Rocket Man, it transpires, actually did manage to get out of the car before it went off the cliff and exploded. It's just that we didn't see him doing so last week. Misery Chastain was allergic to bee stings and in some kind of a coma, not dead, when they buried her, so she was able to come back and save Paul Sheldon's life. And motorhomes reflect light off their rear end in a way that bamboozles speed cameras with surprising regularity. </span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">It's somebody's job in the police station to look at the photo, and bin incidents where large vehicles have been clocked at ridiculous speeds, but occasionally one slips through. If you get a letter, all you need to do is call up and they'll re-examine the photo and quickly put the matter to bed. Whether this means you could soup-up your motorhome's engine and drive everywhere at insane speeds like a total arsehole without ever getting in trouble remains unclear.<br /><br />I tried to blame my dad's easy submission to authoritarian language for our 500-mile round trip to the South, but in the end I was glad for the break. Sorting out the speeding business took about five minutes, and also gave me the chance to play a guitar I'd won at auction, by telephone from the top of Loughrigg Fell. It's likely I'll be playing it if and when you ever walk into my record shop, but I promise I'll put it down when I see I actually have a customer for once, and stick some John Renbourn on instead. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Having made an emergency return to the South, and with Halloween looming spookily, we realised this was the right time to return to Sunny Nunny, SE15. I'm frankly disgusted by what my kids have come to expect of what was only a very minor date in 1981, but it was clear that they would resent having to spend it anywhere else, so this visit was an opportunity to catch up with some friends and see if we could stomach a taste of the life we've left behind. The boys duly managed to acquire and consume a half-bin-liner of confectionery each, M spent some quality time with former colleagues, and I a</span>chieved one of my great ambitions for this trip, parking the van with the door immediately opposite that of the <a href="http://ivyhousenunhead.com/" target="_blank">Ivy House</a>. For a while I contemplated winding the awning out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">E also bumped into the nice lady who bought our house, and she very kindly showed him around. He came back to the van a little tearful, but saying ridiculously grown-up stuff like 'They've made some very interesting changes.' In truth, neither of his parents would have handled it so well. I had an opportunity to play some records to a reassuringly empty room at <a href="https://www.ratebeer.com/p/howling-hops-tank-room/55162/" target="_blank">the UK's first tank room bar</a>, and the crowded tube journey gave me a chance to reflect on how little I'd seen of 'London' London in the last decade or so, as well as to wrack my brains for when I'd last had a wash.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><br />We've realised that what we were living by Peckham Rye was not an Urban Existence. <a href="https://bluesnightontour.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/who-needs-estate-agents.html" target="_blank">Despite how little respect I've shown for Estate Agents and their work elsewhere in this blog,</a> I'd now agree that we were effectively living in a village on the outskirts of London. When I was first sent (as a supply teacher, from my Bermondsey flat) to East Dulwich fifteen years ago, </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">I would ask myself <i>Why would anybody want to live all the way out here?</i> <i>You might as well live in Kent. </i>And this is what we always do - perceive a place to be remote and uninviting until we have made several visits. </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">We are all cutting new tracks in the part of our brain that stores our personal geography, and having done this in London over a quarter of a century, we are finally extending it to the rest of the country. A nice place to visit, like a good film or book, needs a second or third rinse for the subject to see beneath the surface.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Indeed, the first time we park up somewhere for the night, we are still sometimes a little insecure, whereas our old neighbourhood felt perfectly comfortable - we didn't even feel we were treading on the toes of the people whose house we parked outside on our final night there (the sideways slope right outside the pub having rather spoiled our enjoyment of the exclusive location), despite sitting up late into the night with half a dozen beer drinkers in the van.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">But the striking thing about this Wild Camping (if that term means what I think it does) is how easy it is. When we set out to do this, we didn't really find anything to encourage us, so I would like to contribute this wisdom to the web: if you have a campervan or motorhome, nobody is going to stop you from parking up and sleeping wherever the hell you want, unless you're on private property. Parking up by the roadside? Well, how many times have you approached a vehicle near your house to ask them what they think they're doing there? Town council car parks? Sure, the sign says No Camping or Overnight Sleeping, but how many people do you think are employed in the UK to enforce this? My guess is fewer than one. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">Even if somebody did knock on the window of my van at three in the morning, I expect I'd ignore it and leave them with little evidence that there was anyone in the vehicle at all, what with all the blinds down and the curtains behind the cab closed. And if I did, irrationally, stick my head through these curtains to see what they wanted, would I really accept their charges of overnight camping? No, I'm just sitting in my vehicle in my pants waiting for daylight because my lights aren't that great. I'm not sleeping, as you can see, because I'm talking to you at three in the bloody morning.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Of course, any Sherlock-Holmes-types could tell at a glance whether there are people in the van now the weather has turned colder. A thick layer of condensation clings to every window, obscuring any parking ticket we might have bought as a token gesture of having kept our ends up, and gradually feeding and watering those little spots of black mould that are so hard to shift if you don't wipe them away the moment they appear. Now we are using the heating, there's sometimes a cute little wisp of vapour curling out of the chimney at the back, too. But who is going to knock you up, even if they do know you're in there? </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">When the weather is this cold and you're spending the bare minimum amount of time outside, paying for a campsite is an even bigger waste of money. Unless it's a tenner to park in the grounds of a good pub, of course. But if it gets much colder than this, we might have to shelve the project for a while, so we've been zipping around checking off places as quick as we can.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br />Norwich is, as the sign says, A Fine City, with <a href="https://www.brewdog.com/bars/uk/norwich" target="_blank">my equal-favourite (with Liverpool) Brewdog bar</a> of the fourteen I've visited, but I fear that it may be just a tad too familiar and close to my roots that are still unpoisoned in the fertile East Anglian earth. I feel inclined to break new ground, to plow a new furrow in a field far from home, to cut new tracks in the topography of my cerebellum.<br /><br />Holt (Norfolk) isn't a place that will allow this either. A nice little town filled with old people, I would struggle to get comfortable there. My previous visit was one of exactly two occasions that I've found myself telling a stranger to fuck off. E was about eighteen months old and screaming blue murder as I strapped him into the buggy and put the rain cover on. Each time I looked in there, the screaming intensified exponentially, so I decided to ignore him at about the same moment a well-to-do older woman began watching me. I'd been pushing him along for one very noisy minute when she approached me and said, meaning well I'm sure, "You should talk to your children, you know." But I've already ruined the punchline.<br /><br />Almost completely out of character with the rest of the town, but seemingly happy and successful within it, is <a href="https://www.facebook.com/Holt-Vinyl-Vault-494214790647999/" target="_blank">Holt Vinyl Vault</a>, a well-stocked and interesting record shop that does more than just open the doors and hope somebody will come in. When I was there last Wednesday, an enthusiastic man even older than me was actually DJing - not just spinning discs but weaving a musical tapestry, or at least sewing together some really lovely bits and pieces to make a smashing patchwork quilt. I was sold my records in a big plastic Recorded Delivery mailer, left over from the shop's recent past doubling as a Post Office. M's local friend says it was a curious scene to watch not long ago - senior citizens queueing up for their pension cheques with a soundtrack from the Velvet Underground.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">From Holt we rolled all the way back up North to look at Richmond again, beautiful in sunshine and cold air; Darlington, which is a much nicer town than I'd always assumed, and has a fabulous pub in <a href="http://www.villagebrewer.co.uk/our-pubs/number-twenty-2/" target="_blank">Number 22</a>; Heaton Moor in Greater Manchester, a pleasant and diverse suburb not dissimilar to Dulwich; and the ever-lovely Shrewsbury, via a freezing night in the Peak District near a village called Tintwhistle. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: large;">We are working our way South-East again as we have an appointment with the van doctor. In addition to the little leak above the shower room, the electric switch in the kitchen tap has given up and the leisure battery lost all of its charge in one evening in London (although it hasn't been a problem since.) Our teenaged van passed forty thousand miles in North Yorkshire, ten percent of which have been added to the clock in the three-and-a-half months we've been living in her. So actually she's been incredibly durable, I think, and I shall repeat here what I've said in person to anybody who will listen: wherever we end up living, whatever form the shop eventually takes, you will have to pry my cold, dead fingers from the wheel before you take this van away from me.</span></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-37399029892966654852017-10-31T04:15:00.000-07:002017-10-31T04:15:10.767-07:00I Wish I... I Wish I Was In...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<st1:city style="font-size: x-large;"><st1:place><span style="background: white;"><span style="color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Richmond</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial; font-size: large;"> is the most replicated
English place name. There are fifty-something (sorry, I couldn't be bothered to
Google it again) examples worldwide, but the original (English) </span><st1:city style="font-size: x-large;"><st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial; font-size: large;"> (in </span><st1:place style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial;">North Yorkshire</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; color: #212121; font-family: Arial; font-size: large;">, at the North Eastern
corner of the Dales) isn't very well-known. This is an awful shame, as it is a
super town, with a huge cobbled market place, an imposing castle, beautiful
houses and a military museum that claims to house Hitler's Carpet. It also has
sure signs of a real community - the railway station, in the absence of any
trains, has been developed for small businesses and </span><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial; font-size: large;">includes a little cinema, and the
<a href="https://www.georgeanddragonhudswell.co.uk/" target="_blank">George and Dragon</a> pub (which is admittedly in the neighbouring village of
Hudswell – geographically the Richmond upon Thames of Richmond, North Yorks)
was saved by its customers in much the same way as the Ivy House, and is a
tremendous place for a pie and a pint, with a real-life record player spinning
liquorice pizzas behind the bar.</span></div>
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<span class="contextualextensionhighlightms-font-color-themeprimaryms-border-color-themeprimaryident9181388"><span style="background: white; border: none windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: none windowtext 0cm; padding: 0cm;">Throw in a few decent shops, a swimming pool, a
secondary school that the kids didn't look too unhappy to be walking to in the
morning and a tiny hospital that once sewed up my knee halfway through a
Coast-to-Coast bike ride (and then gave me an anti-tetanus shot that I got drunk
in defiance of, but nobody wants this blog to end up being known as <i>Places Where Tim Has Shat Himself</i>) and
you have a town that fits all of my own personal criteria as a Good Place To
Live.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;"> </span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white;">I don’t think I want a city, or even a big and busy town any more.
</span></span><span style="background: white;">But then I grew up in a village
with a population of larger mammals that was more porcine than human. Neither M or the boys enjoy the benefit of such humble beginnings, and so they're unsure of whether Richmond is a bit too sleepy, or a bit too In The Middle Of Nowhere and Nearly In Scotland.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Exercises like this tour sometimes force you to
ask yourself difficult questions, such as <i>Am
I Just A Selfish Greedy Bastard</i> and <i>Why
Does My Life Partner Seem To Hate Me So Much?</i> But nobody said this was
going to be easy, and as we pass the three-month mark, Nobody has been proven
wrong. On our way from Rothbury to </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">, the van was clocked at 80 mph in a
30-zone during what was left of the hurricane. The letter that arrived at my
folks' house in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Suffolk</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;"> says I could get a thousand-pound
fine and 6 points on my licence, but I reckon that's peanuts for driving a huge
ugly truck through a built-up area at almost three times the speed limit during
a former tropical storm or whatever it was. Makes me almost wish I had.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">It is obviously a computer error, caused, I
would guess, by the gusting hurricane-force winds. This van has only once gone
over sixty with me at the wheel, and that was on a mile-long steep downhill
stretch of motorway. In </span></span><st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Devon</span></st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">, if I remember correctly. But will I have to go to court to
prove it? Will a magistrate agree to ride shotgun with me while I put the pedal
to the metal and show him just what a lot Vanny's not got? Stay tuned to find
out.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">In order to open this letter and answer these
charges, we've had to return to </span></span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Suffolk</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">, 300 miles from where the crime
wasn't committed. After </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">Richmond</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="background: white; font-family: Arial;">, we visited...</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Ripon - a big cathedral in a little city,</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">York - a big cathedral that for some reason
isn't called a cathedral in a great city,<span class="apple-converted-space"> full
of pubs and at least one good record shop and animatronic Vikings who are quite
impressive the first time around,</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Harrogate (again) - where some friends made
their home available for a few days in their absence which was very kind,</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Knaresborough - where some strangers did their
best to make Mother Shipton's home seem even more inhospitable in their
presence, which was great fun,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Huddersfield - where my pilgrimage to the
Magic Rock Brewery Tap left me a little disappointed, but <a href="http://www.vinyltap.co.uk/" target="_blank">Vinyl Tap</a> made up for
it,</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background: white;">Sheffield – where I snapped off part of the
awning by driving too close to a telegraph pole. It was just the cover of the
hooky bit, but this may have now compromised the aerodynamics such that we will
never break the sound barrier. I realised I'm doing what my dad always accused
me of with cars - taking the vehicle to the scrapyard, bit by bit.</span><br />
<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--><br />
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">In the newly-exposed,
tuppence-sized hole that I briefly thought may go as deep as the width of the awning,
there was some mouldy-looking, fluffy white stuff. I poked it. A lethargic wasp
crawled out. I made an alarmed burbling noise. It fell on my face. I screamed
like a 1970s Mid-Suffolk piglet. It landed on the ground. I stamped on it. Another
came out. I swore at it. It flew away drunkenly. I thought of that book called
The Wasp Factory that I haven’t read. I thought that the author was probably
Scottish. I thought, again, about how the Scots’ strong and admirable sense of
National Identity was inextricably linked to religion, despite the fact that religion
is the cause of so much division and unpleasantness within the Scottish people.
I thought about the huge and grand cathedrals in English cities and watched the
wasp just about stay airborne as it departed. I wondered about whether American
cities had to have cathedrals and whether the decline of Christian culture in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">England</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial;"> has had any effect on my feelings about where I want
to live.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">Sheffield</span></st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;"> is a great city, and I would be perfectly happy
living there and selling records and coffee and beer. It seems that I have only
ever tried to go to <a href="http://recordcollectorsheffield.co.uk/" target="_blank">Record Collector</a> on a Wednesday before, which is pretty
stupid, because that is when it is closed. But this time it was open and it was
fabulous. Also the wonderful <a href="http://www.wizardguitars.com/" target="_blank">Wizard Guitars</a> sold me a little amp that made me feel much better about how far technology has come in
the last few decades, after the crushing disappointment of the Blackpool Illuminations.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: large;">I stopped worrying about
sleepy wasps and started worrying about my speeding ticket again.</span></span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1607345855669921930.post-22929303458793604542017-10-21T02:52:00.000-07:002017-10-21T02:52:17.485-07:00Coast to Coast Across the North<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">"I fucking hate Manchester. Everybody's miserable there, and they're always going on about being from Up North. It's not even Up North! Scotland is Up North. Manchester's just Over To The Side A Bit. And it's always fucking raining."</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">Not my words, of course, but the words of Jerry Sadowitz, at the Leicester Square Theatre several years ago now. Personally, I really enjoyed Manchester when we went there recently (but I was a little surprised to see that a house on a nice road in Chorlton costs about as much as a comparable one in Lewisham... right, that's enough about house prices for another six months). But Sadowitz was mostly right about the rain (at least on the evidence of the week we spent there) and about the latitude.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">After a cosy night in Carnforth cuddled up to the canal we were miserable in Morecambe where the amusements were banal. In an empty seafront car park near the statue of old Eric we were tossed about in high winds and said, "It's going to be hard to sleep in anything worse than this."</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">We then spent a relaxing couple of weeks in Cumbria, at first on an excellent caravan site called Skelwith Fold, right near Ambleside. I've always loved the Lake District, and now it seems to be a much better place to live than it used to be, at least for people who like beer and food. I'd pretty much expected the Hawkshead Brewery to be one of the only places I could buy a heavily-hopped, unashamedly-alcoholic American-style IPA inside the boundaries of the National Park, but I couldn't have been more wrong. </span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">A fabulously friendly cafe called Freshers in Ambleside (staffed by a nice bloke of about thirty and a wonderful woman who may well have been his grandmother) led us to the town's specialist Beer Shop, which was one of the best I've seen on the trip so far, maybe even as good as the one in Bath. On the wall they had a relief map of the sixteen or seventeen wonderful lakes and the even-better mountains and fells in between, very like the one I had up in my bedroom for most of my childhood. They'd affixed a little sign saying BEERIST INFORMATION and had marked on all the best places to get good beer, which seemed to collectively form a neat ring covering the whole region. The middle of the circle, Ambleside itself, was left modestly unmarked, but just above, in Grasmere, was a little sign that brought memories pouring forth like a broken beer tap: TWEEDIES.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">We had liked the naffness of the name when we went there in the late eighties, so it's beyond me to say how ironic or post-ironic it might be now. We liked it even better when the landlord not only served us pints of Theakstons Old Peculier without any questions asked, but also gladly took the extra coin for dropping a shot glass of vodka into each, telling us this was called a 'Depth Charge'. Amusingly, I realised as I chatted to a friendly but businesslike member of 21st Century Staff, things haven't changed all that much in thirty years - for the second day in a row I was drinking Hawkshead's Tiramisu Imperial Stout, a gloopy, sweet, black beer almost as strong as wine. The chainsmoking and repeated plays of Baker Street (can that really have been the best thing on the jukebox?) - in fact, the jukebox itself - were gone (which is probably for the best) but this was still a fine pub with a charmingly awful name. I ate my Vegetarian Stack - goat's cheese, avocado, a poached egg, sourdough toast and a bunch of other things I'd've paid to avoid in the eighties - and it was delicious. Then, by careful application of physics, I was able to gently shove legions of seated children out of my way and leave. This would not have happened in Tweedies in the eighties, because we were not only the youngest people in there, but also, many times, the oldest. We also never left before closing time.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">The way that businesses in the Lakes have adapted to the apparently increasing middle-classness of fell walking (or perhaps just everything) is quite impressive. There are probably more outdoor equipment shops than are absolutely necessary, but i</span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto;">s the region ready for a secondhand record shop with the full back catalogue of Nick Perls's Yazoo label? Probably not, at least until they are available in waterproof sleeves with fleece linings.</span></span><br />
<div style="color: #454545;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">The following week, for H's birthday, we went to the Center Parcs near Penrith. This served a number of purposes, very few of which will be part of Center Parcs's business model moving forward. More than anything, H had wanted to go back to London for his birthday and to have a party with all of his friends, but it's still too early for that. We are all looking forward to parking up outside the Ivy House for a few nights at some point before Christmas, but when this does happen it will mark the completion of Phase One of Project Rest Of Our Lives. For one thing, if we were to go back and see friends and familiar settings and say 'This is stupid, lets just move back here,' we could do so (admittedly to a much smaller / less ideally-located / more Stannah-stairlift-and-smell-of-deathy house) and say "Well, we gave it a go!" And for another, if we don't feel like moving back, we could look at London through the eyes of people who've been to dozens of towns in recent months, then go back to places we've already been and take it more seriously this time, or visit places we missed on the first circuit. There's a plan in there somewhere.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">So going back to London wasn't yet an option, and we thought we could distract both boys a little by taking them somewhere else they always bang on about wanting to go. And we needed some time out of the van, with proper beds and a proper bathroom. That relativity of scale of a family's living space was quite striking - a two-bedroom bungalow seemed frankly enormous for the four nights we were in it, and it was difficult to see how or why four people would even need any more room than that. Unless they happened to have thousands of records and a shipping container full of crap to accommodate, of course.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">There was a Top Tip in Viz several years ago that said something along the lines of, "Give your family the CENTER PARCS experience by cycling to your local Swimming Pool every day and setting fire to a pile of fifty pound notes," which is pretty much bang on, but we spent Glasgow-and-Edinburgh-Half-Term-Week in some lovely woodland near Penrith having as relaxing a time as one can have while surrounded by people who sound like Francis Begbie.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">From there, we stopped off in Hexham, Northumberland, which is a pleasant market town near Hadrian's Wall. For two boys who will cheerfully mimic Donald Trump saying "We Will Build a Wall" from some memey Internet video, my sons showed a surprising lack of interest in its ancient equivalent - the Northwestern Frontier of the Roman Empire and the single largest remaining piece of evidence of that great civilisation. Well, I thought it was surprising. So we didn't even bother going to look at it, to teach them a lesson.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">We moved on to Newcastle, another town I just can't separate in my mind from the memory of the first time I visited it. As we strolled down the fairly-newly-developed riverside, my friend had looked over the edge and saw there was no Fog on the Tyne, but a dead man floating face down in it instead. This is the sort of memory that stays with you, and no amount of pleasingly-orange Geordie-Shore-type ladies posing for photos on the bonnet of a white stretch Audi limo can stop me thinking about it when I'm back in the same spot. </span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">There was also, at the end of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, the best busker we've seen on our tour (my GOD we have heard some dreadful ones) who played The Archers theme on kazoo and a version of Always On My Mind in which the last line of each verse was delivered as an agonised scream. This also did little to take my mind off the subject of death.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">Za Za Bazaar is a temple to globalisation and gluttony that would be wonderful if it didn't make me feel a bit sick. It's about ten different all-you-can-eat buffets of curry, pizza, noodles, and every other national fast-food dish in which Brits have a tendency to over-indulge, and you just help yourself to one after the other (or the same again) until the tidemark reaches your epiglottis. The fact that E was more enthusiastic about Newscastle than he's been about any other city since Bristol was not lost on me - these are the only places where ZZB can be found. We went again, of course (although M decided she'd seen enough the first time around) and got our money's worth again, but I wonder if I would be selling my son's soul to the Diabetes Devil if we settled in either of these fine cities.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">Looked after by terrific hosts, we were fed and watered (or boozed) well, and able to service the van with clean water in and (very) dirty water out. We were shown that Tynemouth is a quite lovely part of Toon (which I didn't expect, probably because of my first Tyneside experience) and then looked to move on further North. I've placed a lot of importance (in my attempts to imagine how this tour will unfold) in getting over the border into Scotland, for a number of different reasons. A disproportionate number of my heroes were Scots, I know it's a really beautiful country, but I've hardly been there. I'm fascinated by their political momentum toward independence, awed by the integrity of their national identity, and intrigued by how much significance religious sectarianism still seems to have. Also, this blog's description says 'exploring the UK' but we still haven't made it out of England. And we were getting so close - already a hundred miles further North than Manchester, but not into Sadowitz's Scotland yet. So we headed to Rothbury, a pretty little town in the right direction, that once saved me on a mountain biking tour when my blood sugar tanked, and was later the scene of a dressing-gown-clad Gazza's attempts to persuade Raoul Moat to give himself up, with offers of chicken and lager.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">The dark road to Rothbury went up and down hill and dale through three fords, one of which was deep and wide and fast-moving between two 20% climbs, but Vanny (as she's known when we haven't time to remember the other more complicated names we've given her) repaid my good faith as she always does, albeit with wet tyres skidding on leaves and gravel as Former Hurricane Ophelia closed in.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">Now we are sitting in a five-star car park a few metres from the River Coquet in what looks a fairly sheltered spot, but away from any trees that are big enough to squash us if they come down. The wind is bouncing our accommodation in all directions at once, threatening to tear the awning (rolled in, of course - we've barely used it) and the now-almost-financially-irreplaceable windows off of the thing, and somehow seems able to loosen the locked side door such that it has to be opened and slammed again every half-hour in a quieter moment.</span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;">Tomorrow we will gratefully observe that no real damage has been done, that the many sets of stone steps in Rothbury have all become enormous bulging piles of leaves, but that the town that once saved me is otherwise pretty but unremarkable, and that if there's any chance at all of more of that weather further North, we'd better head south again like the Southern Jessies we are. </span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span><br style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;" /><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black;"></span></span><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; color: black; font-family: UICTFontTextStyleTallBody; font-size: 23px;"></span></div>
bluesnightorghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08476242194661208893noreply@blogger.com0