Jan 27, 2010 | Legs!
Ratho in winter
I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had gone back into the gym to begin the process of regaining lost fitness. I’m pleased -and a little surprised- to report that on Monday just past I succesfully ran a 5K, albeit on a treadmill, and today ran for a comfortable 40 minutes. At this rate I’ll be at 10K distances within a week and back on track to longer distances thereafter.
I’m a bit taken aback by this as I had assumed that it would take longer and be more painful than has turned out to be the case so I’m optimistic about being in half marathon form for May. Of course with my track record an injury is probably lurking just around the corner
I took the picture to the left a couple of weeks ago when Kirstin and I tried to go for a walk by the Union Canal at Ratho. The walk didn’t go well because of the ice underfoot but I got some nice photos. This one was taken in black and white but I’ve added some toning in Photoshop. Generally I prefer not to use Photoshop if I can help it except for re-sizing but with Black and White I don’t mind doing things which I might once have done (clumsily) in a darkroom
Jan 24, 2010 | Books, Music
I got the Corstorphine Hill Delta Blues...
I have been reading Honeyboy Edwards’ excellent autobiography “The World Don’t Own Me Nothing” of late. It is an excellent read and captures well his early days based in the Delta, hoboing around the US, playing guitar and harmonica, drinking white whiskey, stealing other people’s wives and generally having a wild time. While doing so he gets to meet Robert Johnson, Son House, Lightning Hopkins, Peetie Wheatstraw and many, many others. He’s still alive and performing too at nearly 95.
So what’s a poor boy to do ‘cept find his guitar and a suitable titfer and play the blues?
Jan 23, 2010 | Uncategorized
I was reading through the Blog of an acquaintance this morning and found myself thinking about hats and the wearing thereof by men. One of the things which is immediately noticeable when watching archive or newsreel footage from before WW2 is that the men and boys are always wearing a hat. In the UK this seems predominantly to have been the working man’s cloth cap, with Bowlers and Trilbies for the middle classes, and the American urban footage has plenty of Fedoras on show (and could you imagine Phillip Marlow without a Fedora)?
Why do we no longer do that? Why did it stop? There remains the ubiquitous baseball cap of course – easily the best thing invented for keeping the rain off one’s glasses – but this does not, in the UK, have the same cultural feel about it.
Although Kirstin mutters darkly about it I like hats and I like wearing them: caps of course – baseball or my favourite grey Fisherman’s cap (I have a dark blue Breton one too but Lindsay keeps stealing it), my Panama in summer, a Fedora when out dancing, all good. I used to like cloth caps too but it became expensive when I kept leaving them in taxis or on buses. Floppy summer hats are always good and I have my Barmah soft and floppy sun hat still, bought in Darwin, NT, Australia in 1998.
It doesn’t seem to be like this elsewhere in Europe where the wearing of a hat continues to be taken seriously. I remember in Vienna in late 2008 being struck by the number of hat makers in the City and their window displays of top-quality products; you have to love a city which gives so much time to the art of the noble Fedora!
In Rome or Paris to wear a fine hat is a sign that the wearer is saying yes to life and yet in the UK wearing much beyond a baseball cap is taken to be de facto evidence of eccentricity and to invite sniggers and giggles.
Sad.
The photos here are of yours’ truly modeling the new Mons Meg t-shirts by the way. Every rapper team should have one.
Jan 19, 2010 | Legs!
After the blood pressure scare of late last year and the indolence of Christmas and New Year, I went into the gym today to start the fight back towards the fitness I had when I ran the half marathon back in September. I had no intention of maxing out, just gently reintroducing my muscles to the concept of exercise. Given that relatively straightforward aim, the session was successful.
I based the session around three sets of twenty lateral pulldowns with a hard ten minutes on an exercise bike and ten minutes on a treadmill in between. The time on the treadmill was mostly running but also with some walking and a final sprint. A final wind-down was on the exercise bike.
I had mixed feelings at the end of the session – partly pleasure at getting back into the gym again but equally in part trepidation at the effort which will be required to get up to my previous fitness again. I do, though, have a hard target in that I am entered in the Edinburgh Half Marathon on 23rd May!
My aim is to condition the muscles again and then retake to the streets to run at lunchtimes and weekends. Running outside is much better than inside for many reasons. One is, of course, the fresh air and the feel of the breeze/wind/rain on your face and another is that you do actually feel that you’ve been somewhere even when you’ve just done a big loop: on a treadmill you stay where you are staring at the wall for the whole time!
By happy coincidence I found the attached in this morning’s Guardian – http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/18/running-brain-memory-cell-growth . As ever the comments are as entertaining as the article and the serious ones make some valid points about exercise in general. The basic principle seems to be reasonably well established, though, and it all adds to the motivation to keep going even when there is a little voice in the back of your head trying to persuade you to stop.
The photo is a grab shot taken on my mobile phone on the way to work this morning.
Jan 16, 2010 | Music
Eliza Carthy
I finally managed to get to see The Imagined Village last night, in Glasgow, as they kicked off their tour in support of their new cd Empire and Love. They were on great form and I enjoyed it, although there was an element of the “first night” about it and some aspects of the pacing of the show as a whole didn’t quite gel I thought. They didn’t play anything at all from the first album except Cold Haily Windy Night and the band is now more tightly focused with no guest vocalists except on The Lark in the Morning by Jackie Oates who was also the (very good) support act.
Chris Wood, Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy were all on fine form though the latter was slightly low in the mix at times. Sheema Mukherjee’s sitar was well to the fore and I think I appreciated for the first time what she brings to the party.
Sheema Mukherjee
I bought the new album last Monday so had a good idea what to expect. The new material stood up well and on a couple of occasions was stronger live than on the cd – Eliza Carthy’s performance of Seeger and MacColl’s “Space Girl” in particular. Conversely the reworked Byker Hill worked better on the album I thought. The arrangment of Scarborough Fair with Mukherjee’s sitar and Chris Wood’s vocals was outstanding as was their reworking of the Napoleonic War song “My Son John” to encompass Iraq and Afghanistan.
Their encore (just before midnight) was Martin Carthy’s world-weary reading of Slade’s Cum On Feel The Noize which turned into an audience singalong of genuine warmth when it could have been cheesy and it obviously took by surprise anyone who hadn’t heard the new album.
It was a very good gig (although Tam Lyn would have been nice).
Chris Wood
The bonus was picking up a copy of Chris Wood’s new cd Handmade Life which he has been selling at gigs but which isn’t available in the shops yet.
Those with relatively short memories will recall that I had his last cd, Tresspasser, in my top 10 cds of the last decade: this one is well up to the same standard with beautifully crafted songs about, well, just about everything. And just when you think you are in the territory of a contended man writing about his life and his Englishness, he slides the scalpel in. In one song he muses on the occasional sound of Spitfires heard from his garden, then muses on their adoption as an emblem by the cretins of the BNP and others before recalling wryly that
when I hear them Merlin engines in the white days of July/ It’s the sound/ they sing the song of of how they hung a little fascist out to dry
Hollow Point has been playing for a couple of minutes or so before you realise that his subject is the killing by the Met. Police of John Charles de Menezes. Parliamentary expenses are metaphorically skewered in Caesar (There’s no more mandate for your soiled institution/We’re all praying here for Divine retribution…) and the origins of the collapse of financial institutions are pinned where they belong (And don’t forget “The Iron Lady” as if we ever could/ The vicious old spiv who taught us how greed was good/ How she sold off our nation and how she started this nonsense/ How you bowed down and worshipped her avarice and her ignorance./ Now let the grand correction begin).
An outstanding album
ps, all photos by me!
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