Jan 29, 2011 | Uncategorized
frosty morning
The temptation was strong this morning to do another of my regular early morning posts in a quiet house, with music on, pot of tea by my side and catching up on The Economist, and indeed I did precisely that.
However I did eventually go out to try to seek inspiration for tonight’s meal. I’m not sure about inspiration but I currently have some venison casseroling in a low oven in an oatmeal stout marinade. I also have some dough proving which will eventually be baked quickly into rolls to mop up the gravy. I’m typing this in the kitchen and the aroma is starting to permeate my consciousness – if it tastes as good as it smells then I’ll be more than happy.
It has been a busy week: I don’t often talk about work here and I’m not going to break that rule now except to say that I have been kept busy with trying to make sense of several sets of accounts while also attending assorted meetings.
Regular readers will know that I have for some time now been making cryptic comments about changes which I was expecting this year. Colleagues at work and my Facebook friends and acquaintances now know that a major change in my circumstances is now public knowledge.
sisters
After 27.5 years in the Civil Service and at the grand old age of 51 and a bit, I have taken an early retirement package and leave the Civil Service on 11 March, although my actual last day will be 3rd March.
I could write quite a lot about this and in due course I probably will given that this is a blog and it seems an appropriate thing to do in a blog. For now let me just say that I have taken the decision for a number of reasons, that a number of factors have coincided which make it seem to me to be the right thing for me to do at this stage in my life. It is not a decision I have taken lightly but I have been thinking about doing something similar for a long time now (by which I mean several years) and when the circumstances and factors came together last November I took the opportunity very quickly.
There will be a point when I will put some thoughts here about my time as a public servant but as I remain one for another 5 or 6 weeks it is not appropriate just now.
As to what I will be doing after the fateful day: the first thing on my mind is a short holiday to celebrate Kirstin’s birthday and then there are some tunes that I really must learn to play properly on the guitar and the second half of March looks like being the time that I do just that.
Jan 23, 2011 | Uncategorized
While the house sleeps on, I’ve had an early morning all to myself, working my way through a pot of tea, listening to early David Bowie and reading the latest edition of The Economist.
Yesterday, on a friend’s blog on Facebook, I noted that “my musical tastes, like my dress sense, were formed around 1974 which seems to be the mean to which I unfailing revert.” I had that meme running through my head earlier while listening to Aladdin Sane and reading the Economist’s special report on the world’s wealthy elite.
Back in 1973 I would not have been writing this on a laptop computer and, had I wished to share my mental meanderings more generally would have had to post out multiple copies or found myself a publisher. If I wanted to phone a friend I would have used either the landline in our house or a callbox if I had any spare change. I was aware of the notion of a personal communications device from Star Trek and, equally prescient, any one of Gerry Anderson’s creations: neither I nor anyone else would have really thought that forty years later I would have a mobile phone which likely has greater computing power than was aboard an Apollo spacecraft and which could have put me instantly in touch with a worldwide audience.
The notion that I could fit all of my record collection onto an ultra-portable device would have been surprising too. The most advanced technology in my possession then was probably an early Commodore pocket calculator which was pushing the sliderule out of the classroom (and yes, I had a sliderule).
It has become fashionable to knock the early seventies as some sort of horrible urban and cultural wasteland but that isn’t how I remember it. Of course I was a young teenager then and viewed the world with a less world-weary and sceptical eye than I do now but even so my memories of the time are good (except possibly for the wallpaper designs!) Has the world advanced since then? Well in many respects yes, especially technologically, but I am not convinced that in other respects it is that much different particularly in terms of emotional and social maturity; in fact I rather think that technological change may well have masked a regression.
One important change that has definitely occured – and which has consequences that are unappreciated and as yet unexplored, is that we now live in a massively and ubiquitously interconnected world. It did occur to me, though, that there is one other important change: it may well be true that my mobile phone is more powerful than anything which was around then on the space programme, but back then we had a space programme and men were walking on the moon.
Jan 22, 2011 | Uncategorized
Many, many years ago when I was a spotty adolescent at Claremont High School in East Kilbride, David Mooney, with whom I only really became friendly towards the end of my schooldays and with whom I have completely lost touch, bought in an album the likes of which I had never heard before and I was hooked immediately. The album was Roxy and Elsewhere by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. To this day it is my favourite of all of the Zappa albums which have come through my hands – which is quite a lot although I am by no means a completist.
Frankly, my dear...
I later found out that I had heard Zappa and an earlier incarnation of the Mothers previously a couple of years earlier when Radio Luxembourg had played, uncredited, Live at the Filmore 1971 and I had struggled hard, nonplussed and disbelieving, to hear through the atmospheric distortion and intermittent signal fades the bizarre tales of mudsharks and groupies.
While I was a student I bought and still have a bunch more albums from his later bands. Some I liked a lot and some not so much but over the years I stopped listening to his music, not out of any conscious decision but just because time moved on and I just seemed to stop (more or less).
However of late I have been rediscovering his music anew; big time. Oddly enought the ’73 Roxy Band has been reconfirmed as my favourite and not just because Ruth Underwood was a premier league babe, but a heap of stuff that I missed or had forgotten has been giving me a lot of pleasure. I’ve mentioned recently Bongo Fury, which featured Captain Beefheart on some vocals and I have also heard one or two other tracks from that tour as they have cropped up on YouTube from bootlegs. Incidentally, if anyone happens to google this and has a copy of the second show from the Music Hall, Boston on 27 April 1975 (the one with the extended version of The Torture Never Stops) I would really like a copy….[updated 9 Feb – got one!]
All of the cliches about Frank are true – fantastic bands, arrangements which are as tight as a tight thing in a confined space, seriously intelligent and fun music interspersed with the hardest of hard rock and, over the top, a guitar hero of the first rank unleashing powerfully dextrous playing. And that’s before we get to the jazz noodlings, his orchestral and chamber compositions and his doo-wop.
I’m not really going anywhere with this in terms of critical appraisal or insight, I just felt a need to share!
Jan 16, 2011 | Dance!
yours truly at 21
It’s been a quiet week for the most part although it ended with a rattle last night when we ran a Rapper Workshop to see if we could find any new dancers for Mons Meg.
It was a successful evening in that we had 25 folks show up and I think that a goodly number of them will take their interest further. We also had a good fiddler whom we met last week on our pub tour come along and play. After the workshop most of us dropped round to Bennets Bar where, suitably rehydrated, we did a decent dance. Certainly a better dance than last time we were there when we snapped a sword! It had the desired effect which was to show the new recruits where Rapper has its true home.
And we put the hat round and made a few quid as well.
I wonder what my 21 year old self – pictured above right, would have made of it? I like to think that I would have appreciated it and been interested enough to have joined in, but there’s a decent chance that I wouldn’t have. It’s hard to remember really. My interest was eventually caught by sword dancing around 1985 which was still four years away from this picture being taken – although I didn’t actually do anything about it for another 20 years. Maybe if I was interested at 25 I would also have been interested at 21 and could have been involved with the legendary but now no more Beltane Rapper of Edinburgh.
light and shade
Just before Christmas I posted here about Arthur Berry and particularly his magnificent Lament for the Lost Pubs of Burslem. For the benefit of anyone who is googling and finds this post then I am pleased to say that I received a copy of a cd with it on this morning from BBC Radio Stoke.
The cd is called “Lullaby of Queen Street” and cost £6.50 plus £1 P+P. The cd contains eight of his broadcast monologues and they’re all good.
Surprisingly, given that it has come from the BBC and is on their own label, the sound quality is erratic as though the broadcasts were put on without any mastering or balancing; so they are at different levels and there is the occasional distortion, almost as though they were recorded off air.
Be that as it may the Lament is as wonderful as I remember it and it is lovely to be reunited with it after many years.
Mind you, the book I ordered in December hasn’t appeared yet.
Kirkburton Rapier Dancers, Holmfirth, 2006
The title of this post is taken from Trevor Stone’s booklet from 1980 about Yorkshire Longsword dancing. I said above that I first got interested in sword dancing in 1985 which was when, I think, Channel 4 in the UK showed the Bill Bryden production of The Mysteries (Sadly unavailable on DVD).
In the course of the play, the story of Abraham and Isaac, which concludes with the foundation of Israel, is marked by a simplified longsword dance (making the obvious use of the six-sword lock) and it made a big impression on me. I didn’t encounter the dance again, somehow, until The Jake Thackray Experience made our first visit to Holmfirth Festival of Folk in 2006 when I first saw the Kirkburton Rapier Dancers and I was floored. It was after that experience that I looked to see if anyone was dancing Longsword in Scotland and thus got involved in the first workshop from which Mons Meg emerged.
I subsequently danced some Longsword for a while in Biggar but that is dormant for a while and I’m itching to try and get a proper Longsword side started in Edinburgh. Time will tell.
Jan 9, 2011 | Dance!
Mons Meg were out for a tour last night, our first for a while, and we stuck to our familiar stomping ground of Leith Walk.
Although the dancing was a bit rusty, it was a good crawl with enthusiastic punters and, I think, decent takings in the hat. We did eight dances overall in
Mathers
The Theatre Royal
The Elm Bar
The Brunswick
Priscillas
The Victoria
The Boda and
Sophie’s
with two of those fine establishments treating us to free aquavit as a reward for our efforts.
Mons Meg has come to mean a great deal to me. It is more than an brand identity or a set of people in kit who happen to dance Rapper in Edinburgh. It has grown with a core group of individuals who have developed a team identity which expresses itself most fully when dancing together of an evening. Mons Meg consists in the people who have pushed and pulled it to where it is now which is to say that Mons Meg consists in the people who are part of it or who become part of it over a period.
No room at this inn last night
Around that group of individuals there is a membrane which has grown which is intangible yet real and, when on a tour, it puts us in our own defined world even as we interact with others.
Once that membrane is punctured it can not be repaired, you just have to plug away and hope that a fresh one grows.
Although it is a while since we have managed to get together to practice thanks to weather and injuries, it was apparent to me the minute that we kicked off our first dance that this felt right. As the evening went on I realised that this – Mons Meg out dancing together and drinking beer – was why I like this so much.
Which was a very timely reminder because, prior to last night, I had pretty much decided that once we had fulfilled some engagements later in the year I was going to leave.
Today started feeling a little rough but that has passed with a short walk through the snowy slush to the shops and a pot of tea. To aid recovery further I can smell supper cooking through the way – shoulder of lamb slowly cooking in rosemary, garlic and red wine. Unfortunately I couldn’t get hold of fresh rosemary and am using dried but what the heck. Just as soon as this is posted I’ll go through and prepare some veg and, I think, some yorkshire puddings to round things off.
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