Please forgive me if I indulge myself in a slight rant about garden furniture.
I like sitting out on the decking at the back of our house. Some years ago, we bought a cheap picnic bench in a B&Q sale, and it’s done fine. But time, and Scottish weather, have taken their toll, and it needs to be replaced. So this morning, God help me, I started looking for garden furniture on the internet.
As it happened, I had an idea of what I might be looking for, and it was a style of furniture I’d seen in America. In fact, it seems to be one of the bog-standard designs available pretty much anywhere in America. Surely I’d find something similiar here? What I found instead was that almost all of the garden furniture on sale in the UK is either boxey, boring and cheap or boxey, boring and expensive. There is no middle ground of attractively designed stuff, that’s built for the British climate (photographs of stuff in the sun on a Cotswolds Terrace doesn’t tell me much, lads) and is reasonably priced.
So I did what I’ve often done before when stuck: I went on Amazon France. Al fresco living in France is de rigueur and so, I reasoned, they might have a better range of stuff. Which they did. I didn’t find what I was looking for, or at least not yet, but what I did find was some furniture manufactured and distributed by a British company, on sale via Amazon.fr for £300 cheaper than on Amazon.co.uk. £300. That, it seems to me, is prima-facie evidence right there of rip-off Britain. As it happens, it wasn’t what I was looking for, but I kind of wish it was so I could order at the lower, French price and see what they said.
£300.
Bastards.
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Music: the greatest band to come out of Wigan were Tansads. I wrote about them here: Hello, Hello, Welcome To Your Bright New Future. The last song on the last album issued under the Tansads name was Drunken Serenade, sung by Janet Anderton. In time, Tansads had some reunion concerts, which I found out about afterwards, and out of that came Merry Hell. The first track on Merry Hell’s first cd is Drunken Serenade. It’s one of my go-to songs if I want to sing along in the shed.
But wait! That’s not all! The second video is the mighty Tansads from 1994 and Iron Man mashed up with footage from Marvel movies. Get it before Marvel’s lawyers take it down. Closing time in Accrington, indeed.
I went to sleep last night to the sound of rain on the roof; it was still raining when I woke up, but there was also airport noise, which was an unwelcome intrusion. It was amplified somewhat by bouncing off the low clouds. According to the app. on my phone all the flights in and around Edinburgh at the time, three of them, were operated by Ryanair.
My mood was brightened by a lot of activity at the bird feeder. I mentioned at the beginning of June that I’d stopped using the ‘wild bird’ food mix that the jackdaws all scarfed, and switched to sunflower seeds. Since then the effect has been dramatic, and I’m getting increased numbers of small birds to the feeders now. This morning I had greenfinch, chaffinch and goldfinch at the feeder, with blue, great and coal tits, all including juveniles. We also had a sudden influx of juvenile blackbirds and there’s a juvenile raven that’s been around a lot.
Finches have been scarce since the harsh winters of 2009/10 and 2010/11, and there’s a disease hitting greenfinch numbers in particular. It could be that the upswing in numbers is a cyclical resurgence after a series of mild winters; I suspect lockdown has had something to do with it, though.
Finches make a lot of mess, and I was steeling myself to go out in the rain to sweep up after them, when a young fox came by and hoovered up most of it (pic on Instagram). Sucker for punishment that I am, I went out this afternoon and restocked on sunflower seeds, and bought another bird feeder to join the rest.
Later, I added another 650 words to the work in progress.
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Music: the death was announced today of Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac, and one of the great British guitar players of the 1960s blues boom. Most of that stuff doesn’t do much for me now, but Green was special. His life went off the rails somewhat in the early seventies, but he re-emerged to find his audience hadn’t forgotten him, although Fleetwood Mac had changed beyond recognition.
I’ve had quite a productive day today. I made a start on applying woodstain/preservative to the sleepers that frame the patio at the back where the shed is sited and the greenhouse will be sited (sleepers being railroad ties for my North American readers). There’s more to do but it depends on how the weather holds up.
I also produced 1500 words of fiction for the work in progress. I seem to be making up for ground lost in the early weeks of lockdown when I couldn’t concentrate. It is all first draft, but I’d rather have too much first draft to edit down than too little.
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I subscribe to New Scientist which means I also have access to their news articles as they appear daily. Two caught my eye today that relate to things I’ve blogged about here.
Elimination is worth aiming for if all we want to do is put an end to covid-19 […] But lockdown has already significantly affected other areas of healthcare provision. In the UK, elective medical procedures have been delayed, cancer screening has been put on hold and thousands of people have avoided seeking care for serious health issues, including for heart attack symptoms.
[…]
The Independent SAGE group suggests that having one case per million people in a population could be used to define having the coronavirus “under control”, but group member Gabriel Scally admits that this figure isn’t based on hard evidence about how the virus spreads.
Even this goal would mean significant, prolonged changes to behaviour in terms of social distancing, personal hygiene and mask wearing. “From what I’ve seen so far, I’m not hopeful,” […].
A few days after Belgium introduced stay-at-home orders to help contain covid-19 in March, Thomas Lecocq, a seismologist at the Royal Observatory of Belgium, noticed that his instruments were detecting far less noise than normal. He contacted colleagues in other countries and found they were observing similar things.
They analysed records from 268 seismometer stations around the world and found a sudden quietening of seismic noise that began in China in late January, then spread to Europe and the rest of the world in March and April, in line with lockdown implementations.
I’m interested that the quietness I often commented on was more than just a drop in the ambient noise levels but was something much more profound.
I should add that I’ve taken the title for tonight’s post from an opinion piece in the current print edition of New Scientist discussing the benefits of lockdown for the environment and particularly with reference to rewilding, a subject in which I’m increasingly interested.
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Music: Here’s Wilco Johnson and Roger Daltrey with a cast of thousands, including three of the great English bass players–Norman Watt Roy, and glimpses of John Entwhistle, and Sparko.At 1’16 there’s a guy in a suit who’s having a great time and who reminds me of 1970s Glasgow. Also, strong vibes of every school disco I can remember.
More Sparko in the Friday twofer bonus clip, playing a Gibson Grabber bass if my eyes don’t deceive me.
I’m happy to say I slept quite well last night. It was a bit disrupted towards the end, but I’ll take what I got.
I was going to write something about the ship of Theseus yesterday, so here we go. For those who don’t know, the ship of Theseus is a philosophical problem: Theseus sets sail in his ship and, over the course of many voyages, gradually replaces the wood of the hull as it is damaged. By the end of the voyages, every plank has been replaced. Is it still the same ship?
Hold that thought.
I’ve written before about about flashbacks triggered by music (for example In My Private Universe, 4 August 2010). This generally happens with two specific albums: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark and Focus’s Moving Waves, particularly the track Focus II. When these flashbacks happen they are very real; it isn’t just memories that are triggered but a strong sensation of moments in time being connected, of being in a particular place at a particular time (my bedroom in Glen More, East Kilbride). The sensation is not unlike deja vu, but somehow more real.
What has this to do with the ship of Theseus? Well, they reckon that the cells in our bodies are replaced on a seven year cycle. In the 45 years or so since the time to which I flashback, by whole body must have been replaced. So how can I have flashbacks if I am not physically the same person? What does that tell me about memory and continuity of consciousness?
Continuity of consciousness is, by the way, a problem I have with the transporters on Star Trek.
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850 more words written today, and the story is going in a distinctly Hammer House of Horror direction, at least for this chapter. I’ll be interested to find out what happens next.
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Music: in the last year of primary school and first years of high school, the charts were dominated by T Rex, the Osmonds and David Cassidy, plus associated other glam acts. It was an article of faith amongst the boys that Marc Bolan, the Osmonds and David Cassidy, the subject of a thousand gushing features in Jackie, and the favourites of most of the girls in class, were ‘poofs.’ I have to add that, as Hamish Imlach once said, in the west of Scotland, any man who prefers the company of women to a pint of heavy is neccesarily homosexual. It didn’t occur to us that abusing their heroes was a poor strategy for attracting the favour of the girls we fancied.
Anyway, this is the record with which, in late 1970, fey hustler and desperately-wannabee pop star Marc Bolan, ditched the hippy image of Tyrannosaurus Rex to become T Rex, and achieved his dream. Ride A White Swan. It’s brillliant, of course, something the girls knew and we little twerps didn’t (except Tom Clark, who had long hair).
Apologies: I’d been planning a post tonight based around flashbacks to childhood triggered by music and the notion of the Ship of Theseus. Alas, I’m really tired tonight and it will have to be held over until tomorrow. I’m sure you’ll all be waiting with bated breath.
In my defence, I’ve blogged every day since the middle of May; I think I’m entitled to be knackered once.
Music: here’s a cheery Scots ballad, Clyde Water, aka The Drowned Lovers. You don’t get out of a Scots folk song alive, unless you’re lucky. Nic later reckoned this version was a bit too jolly, given its subject matter, and a more considered version appears on live releases, but I like this version–I like the juxtaposition of the jaunty tune and the story of the the doomed Willie and May Margaret.
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