John Burke's a-Musings

Fast Track To Edinburgh

2008-05-13T21:38:00.010+01:00

Here's a first!

Updating the blog from a moving train! I'm on my way to Edinburgh and so far there seems to have been hordes of rugby fans travelling today. (Sorry!!! Footie fans - I don't follow it as you can tell!) Thankfully they all seemed to be in a good mood, though I'm not sure that the young lady felt all that tranquil getting off the Blackpool train at Preston for what sounded like a very raucous male voice choir singing or chanting "Bouncy, bouncy!". Herd mentality - everyone of them would have been appallingly affronted had the young lady been their girlfriend or wife or sister...

Anyway, all quiet on the Western Front. Or West Coast line anyway.

We played a gig at Witton Park, Blackburn on Sunday, setting up in our usual spot in the courtyard which was set out with straw bales for the audience to sit. Quite a number turned up. It was a nice day (until later - see below) and we ran out of straw bales but thankfully not out of songs!

There was a lot going on besides us. There was some chap dressed up in a duck outfit collecting entries for a duck race. I couldn't resist the temptation and called to him over the mic - "Collect a bit for charity, there's a duck..."!

From lunchtime we kept hearing thunder rumbling in the far distance, though it remained warm and sunny through the afternoon. Then as we were considering calling it a day and just as we were halfway through the last chorus huge raindrops started to fall. We finished, yelled "Thank you, goodbye!" and yanked plugs from sockets and dragged the equipment into the shelter of the ex-stable that we use as a base.

Almost immediately the Heavens opened and thunder, lightning and hailstones the size of marrowfats were bouncing all over the place.

A great day with none of the usual requests for "just one more", as the audience dived for cover too!

Up until then though it had been so sunny I couldn't read the LCD display on the keyboard which led to this rather unfortunate necessity...

For now we are still rattling on. Carlisle has just faded behind us, a mass of greenery against blue skies and sunny enough for a man to be sunbathing in just a pair of shorts on a grassy bank against a wall.

There's a relaxed air on the train. In fact I've been having to put up with the barely restrained antics of not one, but two sets of lovers in the seats before me and diagonally opposite. I noticed them first (the diagonally opposite ones) as his hand slid casually down the (admittedly splendidly inviting) rather loosely fitting back of her jeans.

Then there was a somewhat frenzied slurping noise coming from the seats directly in front and the sight, between the seats of two sets of lips locked in mortal combat. Lucky sods.

Only once have I undertaken a long train journey with a member of the opposite sex who was mutually attracted to me by way of being something of an item. There's something about the motion of a train apparently that makes couples who share an attraction experience deeper feelings.

On that journey long ago, my friend and I sat across a table, holding hands whilst both reading. Without stopping the reading every now and then she would raise my hand to press it against her cheek whilst I would occasionally pull hers towards me to gently kiss the fingers, knuckles, armpit...

This teasing continued until she came to sit cuddled next to me and it was a dreamy wonderful journey that really train companies should anicipate and provide a drop down set of curtains, sound-proofing and a plushly cushioned horizontal surface.

As we cross the border into Scotland (it could be just in front, just behind or a long way away right now) the view is of rolling low hills and bright green grassy fields with rows of trees or hedgerows hinting at streams and rivers that remain out of sight.

A herd of cows - heard of cows? Of course I've heard of cows! - is sitting in their field chewing the cud and probably passing polite conversation amongst themselves. "Mildred dear, you're drooling" or "What's wrong with Daisy? Off stomachs?"

Does it mean rain if cows sit down? Or just that they're fed up of standing?

The first set of lovers got off at Carlisle, walking out under the arched exit, locked in each other's arms to an extent that looked as if it made walking difficult.

The second set in front of me have disengaged and from the faintly heard conversation I've deduced she is an Afrikaaner and he is not. She trotted off towards the end of the carriage and I half expected him to follow after a discreet interval - though sex in a train toilet can't be all that satisfying I would have thought. Anyway to my surprise and possibly to his, she returned with a little food bag. "That's not what I was hoping for!" he could have protested, but he managed instead to look as though that's what he had had in mind all the time - so now I'm back to the slurping noises...

By now the streams and rivers are coming close enough to see - The Clyde I imagine is the tranquil stretch flowing lazily by. Not now - quite fast this train! There's a half dome of moon up in the deep blue sky. Somewhere... Perhaps we've changed direction? Ah yes, there! I knew it wasn't my imagination even with all this romance on my mind.

The cows have now turned from black and white to brown or brown and white from which I deduct, Watson, that we are indeed in Scotland, even had I not seen a river that could be the Clyde. I'm ignoring the fact that due to the lack of handy signs and information hoardings it might well be the Severn, but if that's the case then the train has most definitely changed direction.

Ah, the last set of cows had a red plastic bucket to drink from. "Ermentrude! Come and look at this! What sort of bloody pond do they call this then???"

Now we have entered a land of endless Christmas trees and a large lake or loch or tarn stunningly blue under this reflected sky and complete with a couple of boats with fishermen/poachers. We swept by too quickly to see if they were using rods or dynamite...

Well, I'll pack the laptop away in happy anticipation of arriving at Edinburgh, where hopefully Clive will be joining me to run a workshop tomorrow. We must be getting somewhere close. Just passed through a small station called Kinkerton or Kinworton or even possibly King's Scrotum - something beginning with "Kin" anyway. Train stations just weren't named with trains in mind that might speed through at over 100 miles per hour without stopping!

The cows have now turned into horses - which in conclusion I have deduced is no mean feat...!

HMS Victory and Sketches

2008-05-08T22:03:00.008+01:00

My God, it's like buses! No blog entries for ages and now three at once! So, I'm just in the mood I guess.

If I've not been writing the blog what have I been doing?

Well those of you who keep an eye on the Flickr account will have seen a few
sketches appear recently. That was prompted by a posting on the Billy Fury website.

Also on that site, it's my month to be included in the Hall of Fame. You'll find my musical biography there linked from the main index linked above. My entry in the Hall of Fame also includes two songs, both from Creeping Bentgrass albums, although one (Great Balls of Fire) is one of my solo pieces and the other one (Up Around The Bend) features David and Bob also.

Our entry in the Billy Fury Sounds Special feature this month is a live recording of Johnny B Goode and a few of the residents and holiday makers at Larbreck Hall Caravan Park may recognise their whoops and hollers and general joining in of the chorus!

I've also gone back to scanning the still massive pile of negatives from pre-digital days that still need to be scanned. This example was taken (despite the blue sky and sunshine) in February(!) 1996 and shows the famous warship, HMS Victory.

Not Nelson's ship, as Captain Hardy should have that honour, but it was on this ship that Nelson received a musket ball in his shoulder that passed down through his lung and broke his spine. He was taken below where he knew full well that he must die from his injuries.

"Not the side, Hardy," he said, forbidding Captain Hardy to perform the traditional ceremony of burial at sea. With the problem of how to keep the body from rotting and smelling, the ship's surgeon had the body placed in a large barrel which was then filled with port wine.

The spot where he died, in the ship's orlop below the waterline is as close to a shrine as the Royal Navy has. A ceremony is held there every year on the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar at which Nelson was killed.

Oh yes... and the Sally Geeson photo has gone on to new levels of fascination for the Internet public as it has now reached a viewing count of 1473, racing for the 2000 target and achieving daily viewings that peaked with an amazing 66 views on the 3rd of May. All of this without a single comment on it!

A Stupid Name For a Caravan

2008-05-08T19:52:00.008+01:00

As part of the new slower more restful me, I was sitting snugly in a deserted railway carriage (just me and a young chap opposite shouting "fuck!" into his mobile phone every two seconds) whilst I headed from Blackpool to York.

The Trans-Pennine Express is what the train company lovingly call it but I sometimes think they are the only people who lovingly call it anything... (I do like it actually - see here)

Anyway the train ambled its leisurely express way past a couple of caravan collections. I presume they were at a place of sale rather than the collection of a collector but I caught a glimpse as we crept (sorry - flashed!) by.

The model name was printed on each caravan and it was "Chastity".

Now call me cynical if you want, but I would have thought that caravans were the sort of places where your wife hardly ever wanted to go so either you meet your mistress or lover there or your kids go with their boyfriend/girlfriend for illicit sex. So "Chastity" is probably the last name you would ever go for in a caravan...

PS - I don't have one... (I don't have one called "Lust" or "Nookie" either...)

PPS - At last! A blog entry with "sex" as a tag!

Let's Have a See - Whoa! I Don't Like The Look of That!

2008-05-08T19:42:00.003+01:00

Ah yes, catch up time again!

Well it's been a funny old few months really and other things have contrived to become more important. Health for one.

Now here's a comedy of errors for you.

I've been asthmatic since the age of seven and it's been well controlled for so long that if there's even a hint of a wheeze Miss Franny's head shoots up to fix me with an accusatory stare. "What are you wheezing for?!?" she'll say, as if it's something I've done deliberately to wind her up.

Anyway, once a year I have a medical where they do various things like take my blood pressure, ask me about my general health and lifestyle (there's always some surprise at the latter for some reason) and measure my breath output and send me away for another year.

At the asthma test last year they called me back and said "Your blood pressure is up." I didn't even know it had to be renewed...

Heck, with a lifestyle like mine I need my blood pressure to be up! But I went back and am now happily on pills for the rest of my life. They took a blood sample.

From the blood pressure tests they deduced that my thyroid was underactive. Aha! An excuse for the weight, the tiredness, the generally being just plain bloody dopey on some days. I was relieved to find it wasn't the onset of early dementia and was booked into a specialist who would do further tests for the thyroid.

At the thyroid test they weighed me, measured me (height, pal, don't get silly!), asked me lots of questions, did an ECG, sounded me, tested all the reflexes (stop hitting me with that thing!) and said out of the blue "You've had a heart attack."

So now I have even more tests lined up and am wondering what the heck they will find at those!

A few people have said "How could you have a heart attack and not know?" Well in my opinion if you have to have one, then they are the best sort...! Although I can probably remember the incident but I thought I'd just pulled a muscle in my chest (really badly I have to admit!) and I was on the verge of wondering but then it cleared up and didn't recur so I just got on with things.

Now though I have to endure everyone saying "It's a warning!" and "You'll have to slow down..."

I've cut down the driving so now I don't have to worry that this huge queue will mean it could be midnight when I get home and instead can let the train take the strain and just worry about simple things like "will I make that connection?" which is the same as "will I get home at all tonight?"

Tests over the next few weeks so will see whether there needs to be any life change I suppose. It's hard being a rock 'n' roller... Can you pass me the remote, Darling, I can't quite reach it and mustn't exert myself!

Sally Geeson

2008-04-20T08:21:00.003+01:00

A couple of months ago I told you about a photo of two penguins that had passed the 1000 views milestone on my Flickr account.

Well for some reason this one has been racing up the viewing charts behind it and has now overtaken it with a score of 1,165 to 1,129.

Sally Geeson, you may remember, played the daughter of Sid James in the long-running TV sitcom Bless This House and also appeared in a couple of the early 70s Carry On films: Carry On Abroad and Carry On Girls.

There are not too many photos of her on the Internet which may account for the views of my photo - which in the eyes of any of her fans can hardly be enhanced by having my mug on it! Every day it attracts anywhere between 6 and 40 views!

It was taken at one of the Memorabilia shows at the National Exhibition Centre, in November 2004.

Comments

2008-04-17T07:47:00.002+01:00

I've turned comment moderation on now to cut down the spam appearing on comments.

You can still comment on the posts and I'd encourage you to do so, but they won't appear until I've cleared them. A bit of a nuisance but safer than having all these "click here" messages that have been cropping up.

Grow Hair Fast!

2008-04-14T19:52:00.004+01:00

I got into the office today after a full week on the road to find this attached to my coffee mug.

"Grow Hair Fast!" it says and on turning it over it reveals a strangely attractive person...

No idea who may have perpetrated this deed at all, but you may remember that on losing a yoghurt, the first place she looked was inside her boots...

Cor! The yoghurt! Wonder what happened to him???

Enchanted

2008-04-13T13:54:00.006+01:00

Last night we settled down after tea to watch this, the latest Disney DVD to hit the shops.

I can't tell you the last time I watched a Disney video really. I remember watching Nemo and yes, it was the fish, not the Captain, and I remember enjoying The Incredibles, but that's more Pixar than Disney.

I know I got a bit bored with them and missed a whole load of them after watching a couple of films that I thought had no magic in them at all. Treasure Planet was one and ...er... Hercules? Something about Greece anyway.

But last night I really was enchanted with this! What a superb film - the animation was excellent and multi-layered and once the characters appear in the real world you realised how well they were animated to look like the actors. Later CGI effects were superb also.

The film poked gentle fun at earlier Disney films and as such was genuinely funny. The part where the Princess in the real world calls up animals in modern-day New York to help clean the flat of her rescuer was laugh out loud funny and the songs were excellent and if you have any attention to spare to listen to the words were extremely witty and funny in themselves.

I'd never heard of Amy Adams before, but am sure I will again - she played the part of wide-eyed innocent to perfection. And James Marsden as the Prince was excellent - let's face it, he was great as Cyclops in the X-Men movies but it was a morose character wasn't it and the only other role I've seen him in was in Gossip, where again he is hardly meant to endear himself to the audience.

Susan Sarandon makes a great wicked stepmother-cum-witch a la Snow White or Cinderella and Patrick Dempsey makes a believable confused then - yes - enchanted and captivated if reluctant suitor.

Oh, enough already! Just go and buy it for some kid's birthday present and insist on being there for the first viewing!

London Postcard

2008-04-12T08:10:00.003+01:00

I love this postcard of Regent Street, London.

It's a great photograph for one, which shows a snapshot of the past with many bits of interest. There are the old cars, the early motor bus, the window blinds advertising the London Stereoscopic Company and the fantastic hats of the two ladies in the bottom left hand corner.

Unfortunately this postcard was never posted, so there is no postmark to give us the date. But it looks from the style of the motor cars (you can't just call those motorised carriages "cars" can you?) that it must be somewhere around the end of, or just after, World War I.

It was bought by a man from Colne in Lancashire, to take back home for the collection of his son. Whilst it has a message and is fully addressed on the reverse, there is no sign of a stamp having ever been attached and, as I mention above, no postmark.

The message is lovely though, as it gives another snapshot, this time of language and sentiment that would sound very out of date to us now.

Dear Harry, just another PC of London for you. I hope you like it. My word, you will be a swank when you get your new suit on. I hope you are a good boy for Mammi and pals to Jack. From your dear old pal Daddy.

The Lady Wulfruna

2008-04-12T07:42:00.004+01:00

Sounds as though it should be a song by Lindisfarne or some similar group, but I found this small roadside memorial a long way from Newcastle.

It was in Wolverhampton down Gorsebrook Road, leading to the racecourse and it unfortunately gave no clue as to who the Lady Wulfruna was.

Thanks to Google I now know that Wulfrun (Wulfruna is the Latin translation of her name) was an Anglo-Saxon noblewoman, the granddaughter of King Ethelred I and his Queen Aethelflaed, which also made her the great granddaughter of King Alfred the Great.

She gave her name to Wolverhampton through the phrase "Wulfruna's Heantune" or "Wulfruna's high town".

The site is apparently known as Lady Wulfruna's Well and is reputed to sit over a spring, though there is no sign of any water there now. The memorial (but not the wall or railings) dates from 1901 and used to be a drinking fountain with tap and cup, but they have disappeared also.

I've noticed it before on previous visits to run workshops at the nearby Science Park and this time had a camera with me!

A Tale of Willy Wobble

2008-04-09T18:53:00.002+01:00

No, I'm not being rude.

I'm at a conference for a couple of days and the delegates in the first session of the day were shown a film of a one-year-old baby who had learned to swipe her finger over her father's i-Phone to cause a progression of photographs to appear. This is how youngsters these days are brought up to have no fear of new technology and to interact with it from as soon as - no let's make that before - they can walk.

Someone else suggested in a session that it may be taken as proof that the human brain now learns in different ways from the way human brains learned in those dark dark days before computers. I disagreed.

In a room full of strategic managers from colleges and the great and glorious from government funded support agencies I told them about the rattle toy I had as a baby that was called Willy Wobble... I kid you not.

I pointed out that as a child with a rattle stuck by a suction cup to the tray of my high chair I learned that :

(1) by striking it sideways it made a noise that I found pleasing

(2) that it didn't hurt, and

(3) if I did it enough my Mum got annoyed at the row and removed it.

Therefore I learned to draw a balance between how often and how violently I wanted to make it rattle and how little I needed to do it in order to keep the use of it. This caused much hilarity in the room...

Since then people have come up to say how much they enjoyed my input.

How do we learn then? Well I think we leanr from absolutely everything we do. We learn from experimenting, we learn from playing, we learn from people telling us stories; whether in person or from books or now from a web browser.

If anything has changed in the short time that computers have existed it is not the human brain because I don't believe that evolution is as rapid as all that. I think it is more in the way that opportunities are presented to us or kept from us and the ways in which, havihng tried something new, we enjoy it, or appreciate it. That can be a good or bad thing.

In the far away past, before books we were told by people in authority over us - the Church, quite often. We didn't know enough to challenge them. Then when books became the norm it was quite a job to be published and you had to jump through a number of hoops so in the main text books were written by people who were well informed and other people checked content before publication.

Now we can all be publishers because of the wonderful world of blogs. It's easy to learn what we like and therefore we look for more. But it's sometimes less easy to know what's truth or what's accurate and what's twaddle.

I need to get back to another session now though other stuff is bubbling in my mind. More later perhaps, but for now - thanks for reading my twaddle...

Rogue Comments

2008-04-07T07:39:00.003+01:00

I've noticed a crop of comments on some blog entries recently that say almost nothing other than "See here" or "Click here" with a link to another website.

Readers are advised very strongly to ignore the links.

I delete such comments as soon as I find them but sometimes if I'm travelling it can be a few days.

Billy Fury Track

2008-04-07T07:34:00.002+01:00

We have a new song on the Billy Fury web site for the month of April.

Picture of You was a smash hit for Joe Brown in the early 1960s and comes from our third album, Right On The Line.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Billy Fury was billed as England's answer to Elvis. Born Ronald Wycherley on 17 April 1940 in Liverpool, he became one of the Larry Parnes stable of artists, appearing on TV shows such as "Oh Boy". During the 1960s he had 24 chart entries, clocking up an impressive 258 weeks on the Top 50.

The website keeps Billy's name and music alive through an excellent collection of sound and video resources, interactive forums and the monthly "Sounds Special" feature which contains an free album's worth of music recorded by artists from all around the world. During April the website is celebrating its 10th anniversary and is must for Billy Fury fans.

We hope that our fans will have a listen to all the songs not just our own. There are some superb artists amongst the regulars! You can comment on the "Sounds Special" songs using one of the forum entries.

Good (Not Great) Railway Journeys

2008-04-01T18:46:00.002+01:00

I occasionally watch programmes with names like "Great Railway Journeys" and wonder why can I not have some of those?

Today I had a "Good Railway Journey". Which means the trains were on time - one actually arrived nine minutes early, my goodness that must have thrown the station staff into a mild panic...!

There's something about a Virgin train that somehow conspires to take the "Great" out of a journey though. Small seats (or is that just my large figure?) and luggage space for a packet of smarties each. Every seat taken and people walking past glaring at seat reservation signs that since digitisation hardly ever work or (as in my case) have been double booked.

But the weather was fine and made for pleasant views of England's green and pleasant - er... make that waterlogged - land. Streams, rivers and dykes looking full and land at either side showing signs of recent flooding with a water table levelling out around half an inch above ground level. That can't be good for crops or sheep's feet...

Nobody in any of the three trains I've been on seemed to want to inflict their personality on the rest of the carriage. This is frequently not a good thing anyway but very occasionally there is a gem who brightens the journey of everyone else. Today the closest was a lively 3 year old who had been on the train for far too long, travelling to Penzance and even then he did nothing more annoying than run up and down the deserted aisle, smiling wonderfully at us all. In turn everyone else smiled back at him and at anyone else who met their eyes. I can certainly live with that!

And despite a journey with crowded trains and two connections to be made I arrived tonight in Taunton at the time originally planned and to a climate borrowed from Summer.

I jumped straight into a taxi with no waiting or fuss. The driver had an agreeable and totally desirable "Zummerzet ahhhxant" and furthermore had a face full of beard that would have not been out of place on an 18th Century stagecoach and which I could immediately picture streaming with cider later on tonight.

Clive meanwhile is battling the roadworks on the M1 and I can do no more than leave him alone to it and sit down to enjoy a relaxed meal and then wait for him in the bar. It's tough but someone's got to do it.

Tomorrow we treat the colleges and universities of the South West to a Change Management workshop. Then more travelling. I'll tell you about that later! For now, I'm going to go and peruse the menu!

Italy and Skipton

2008-03-29T17:11:00.007Z

Oh dear, another week has gone by!

Well, I've found enough to keep me busy without venting my spleen at anyone or feeling the urge to rave about something or let off a few quips of humour.

I've spent most of my spare time this week trying to finish a project that's been ongoing for far too long. I've been creating a set of digital montages to create a year book. You'll understand what I mean about it having taken a long time when I point out it's a year book of 2005...

I've got as far as our Sorrento holiday from that year and the resulting montages have been being uploaded to my Flickr Account at the rate of a couple a day.

I have just about finished the holiday photos now and moved on to the rest of 2005 but it will take approx a couple of weeks for the photos to appear on Flickr - unless I get fed up or find something else to post up there in which case there could be a flood of photos uploaded at some point in the next few days!

Today we had a run out in the car to Skipton, taking the long way round, via Lancaster then Ingleton and back down.

We passed through some lovely little villages that are a definite for a return visit some day and the weather was really great until we got just a few miles from Skipton, after which it has poured down all day...

So here's a rather dreary photo of Skipton Castle just to prove we were there and I'll try to drum up some sunny weather for our next trip out!

Now - see if you can find a blog entry anywhere else that gives you Italy and Skipton in one entry!

A Most Unlikely Record No.3

2008-03-23T08:23:00.004Z

I've never heard the record.

I've never even heard of him.

But you can tell, just by looking at the cover that it's going to be class, can't you?!?

Ladies and Gentlemen... Lord Buckley - taking the pith...!

The Postcard Fixer's Art

2008-03-22T16:13:00.004Z

I love this!

On the back of this postcard it says "This is a real photograph". In actual fact it's a bit of a pre-digital mash-up. There's at least two photographs plus a great deal of a painter's imagination here!

I can confirm that it's the tower at Pisa that leans, not Blackpool Tower, and the tram in the foreground is smaller than the tracks it's supposed to be running on! That's the other photograph sitting under all that paint. All the illuminations are painted on, in fact, as are the rather fanciful headlamp beams of the cars. A shame the beams are not all pointing in the same direction the cars are travelling in, but...

I suspect the main photograph was originally taken during the day when the sun was shining. There's too much detail otherwise and the area in front of the row of hotels is a bit of a giveaway. Come to think of it so are the shadows! Not every lamp post has one and the shadows of the cars are in a different direction to those of the illuminated laburnum trees!

The card was sent to an address in Hertfordshire on 9 July 1945. The war in Europe had finished 2 months previously, but in Japan, the guns would fire for another month.

The writer packed so much onto the card that he or she had no room left to sign it! So unless the recipient recognises it then we'll never know who it was that sent it.

The card says (spelling and grammar as is): Dear Annie just a card to let you know we are having a nice time the weather as been good to us this time, been nice, we have got about a bit but it is so very crowded every were it tires you out. We are going to South port to morrow, for the day, all the shows are booked up, but we managed to book for the circus last Monday fro Wed. afternoon this week. Hope you are well, love to your sister.

Rock On Rock-Ola

2008-03-21T07:33:00.003Z

I thought it might be fun to choose a photo at random from the many thousands I've taken over the years and see if I could dredge up a memory about it.

This one turned up. It's a Rock-Ola jukebox of the 1960s and we came across it at the Jukebox Madness Show in late 1995.

Jukeboxes are hugely collectable. Even then, thirteen years ago, this jukebox was for sale at 4,250 pounds. It's the fact that it's a "visible mech" that makes it so pricey - you can see the records being selected and played.

Compare that to my 1979 Rowe-Ami model that I bought in around 1992 for 250 pounds and you can see there's a bit of a difference. I've never really understood why jukebox manufacturers moved away from having visible mechanisms because it was such an obvious draw. But if you have a collection of 45s it's a great way of playing them!

Once properly restored a jukebox (I've found anyway) gives very little in the way of problems. Unlike pinballs where the game revolves around the various parts being battered to hell by the silver ball, jukeboxes don't have much in the way of internal impacts to make them go wrong. I've had mine repaired once in the sixteen years I've had it and it sounds as good today as it's always done.

It would be great, however to have a visible mech in the front room wouldn't it? Perhaps one with bubbles...

Sandwich Weaving

2008-03-19T08:08:00.008Z

A hand-coloured postcard showing a decidedly ancient lorry is my offering for today. The caption reads "Strand Street and The Weavers, Sandwich".

Which probably means the shops and cottages were originally weavers' cottages from the times when cottage industry was the main source of income for many of England's population.

A sign painted over the window at the near end of the row says "Sandwich Weavers" and that sent my (admittedly weird) sense of humour off on a tangent!

I've only been to Sandwich once. It was during a holiday in 1999 when we stayed for a week in Hastings and toured around the Cinque Ports and the south eastern corner of Britain.

There's a lot of England's history to be found in that part of the country and some lovely countryside too. One of my websites is devoted to that holiday if you want to see what we got up to.

This is one of the few photos of Sandwich that I took and it gives a totally different view and impression of the place. I took it from an old toll bridge that was a controlled way into the town. The gatehouse still exists with a list of tolls for various forms of conveyance.

First Gig with New Keyboard

2008-03-18T08:02:00.002Z

We played a charity gig in aid of Sports Relief last night at Bispham Conservative Club arranged by the ladies from Sainsburys store next door. They raised over two thousand pounds for the charity altogether so a tremendous effort.

We did a couple of spots, starting and finishing the evening and there was a performance by Britain's Got Talent contestant Tom McLeod.

The new keyboard sounded good, but I'm still not totally familiar with it yet and there was a moment's panic when I couldn't find an entire folder of rock and roll songs. It took a while before I realised there were too many folders to show on one page and there was a page 2 button lit up! Duh!

Anyway we got everyone up dancing, which we were told was a most unusual feat!

Carrying all the gear down a very steep fire escape in the dark was a bit hairy!

Unlikely Records No.2

2008-03-17T07:57:00.004Z

Rosa Kleb sings...

Lotte Lenya, the actress who played the deadly Rosa Kleb in the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love, did actually start out her career as an actress and singer in early roles.

She married Kurt Weill twice, in 1926, divorcing him in 1933 after fleeing the rise of Nazism but then remarrying in 1935 when they both emigrated to America.

She is mentioned in both the Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin versions of Mack the Knife.

Today in Blackpool

2008-03-16T14:32:00.005Z

"We're doing a charity walk," Fran said.
"What???"
"It's only a mile..." she added hastily. Ah, well that's not so bad perhaps!

Mind you, walking for a mile along the cliffs at Bispham, north Blackpool is akin to walking ten anywhere else.

Utter the words, "We've had fifty miles per hour gales!" to anyone from Blackpool and they'll look at you in contempt and say "That's not a bloody gale!".

So off we went to find all Fran's mates from work. They had either all sensibly stuck a wet finger in the air and decided to stay at home or Fran got the wrong message about meeting place, time or day.
"Let's just go for a walk on our own then," I suggested as the wind whipped tears out of my eyes to the extent they were dripping off my chin onto my coat.

So we walked from Red Bank Road (where the illuminations finish at Bispham) down to the Gynn (the roundabout on the Promenade road) and back. This is about 2 and a half miles altogether perhaps, half of it done at the trot with the wind behind us and the return with us leaning forwards at an angle of 45 degrees, enjoying the sudden but thankfully brief downpour.

All along the way there were little groups of men in high visibility jackets working on the tram tracks. Given that Easter is next weekend I can with confidence say there's no chance of seeing a tram in Blackpool unless you nip up to the tram shed. They do seem to be getting on with it though.

From the cliffs we also had a good view of the stricken ferry, Riverdance, that as every Blackpool resident predicted, has stubbornly refused every attempt to re-float her and has now rolled over to an angle of 110 degrees and is busily engaged in burying her head in the sand a few more inches every day.

Several weeks of being battered by the hefty winter seas as the tide comes in twice a day have had their toll and the structure of the ship is starting to get damaged. So presumably now they will start to draw up plans for dismantling her and hope to keep any leakage of oils and fuels to a minimum. Not an easy task I should imagine. It will be easier though to keep contamination down whilst it is above the sand than it would be if it sank down much further! Every time the tide comes in it washes sand away from around the hull, letting the ship settle a bit more then filling the gaps back up with sand.

Talking of disasters... Down at Uncle Tom's Cabin the long disused boating pool which had had some recent use as a go-kart track now looks even more attractive. Yes, this'll bring the families back!

You know with all the hotels and the council bemoaning the fact that families don't come to Blackpool any more you have to look around and wonder what they would find to do that doesn't cost money. Yes we have one of the best beaches in the country, but when I think of all the things I loved to do as a kid, once away from the beach, pushing my toy yacht around a boating pool came high on the list. All that new expanse of tarmac on the new Promenade - I'm sure they could have included a paddling pool and a model boating pond.

A Good Night

2008-03-16T10:08:00.003Z

Last night I was looking forward to an uncomplicated night and a meal of sausage egg and chips. I thought I might push the boat out and shake a dollop of brown fruity sauce onto the bangers but then when Fran got home from work she decided I was going to take her out for a meal instead.

"But there's nowhere I know of that does sausage egg and chips that'll be open at that time..." I said, plaintively.
"You'll have to take me for something else then, won't you?" was the response.

So we left the car wondering what it had done to offend us and walked - sorry let's give that some emphasis - walked to the local Beefeater which is called the Red Lion.

There is nothing remotely historic looking about the Red Lion, though regular readers may recall me mentioning it as being the place where the crew of the shipwrecked Abana were taken to after being rescued in 1894.

Anyway, these days they do less of the peering from the doorway with a burning lantern in case the lifeboat comes back their way and more of the relaxed dining with what we in Lancashire might call a gradely-slab-of-cow-on-a-plate.

We had fillet steak and a bottle of merlot to go with it. Then we happily set off to walk/sway home, whoops, it's over that-a-way, feeling full, a little tipsy, giddy and full of bonhomie! Grand as owt! The Red Lion is just past the Bispham roundabout on the road towards Cleveleys. I didn't take any photos so you get one of the aftermath...

A Definitive Hobby

2008-03-15T07:08:00.004Z

Do boys, I wonder, in these days of computers and Nintendo, still go through a phase of collecting stamps?

My old stamp albums are still knocking about up in the attic, though it's many years since I had a look at them. The last time I bought a set of stamps was in 2000 and then I only bought it to serve as illustrations on the pages of a website about our holiday in Austria that year.

Before that it must be around 30 years or more since I bought stamps specifically with a view to keeping them. I had sets of the commemorative stamps for the launching of the QE2, the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales, and the set released with Concorde on them. After that I don't really remember anything sticking in my mind. Just on envelopes...

It was always seen as a good hobby for a young developing mind. All that sorting, collating, cataloging and conserving. It did have its messy side too which appeals to young boys. It was far cheaper to soak old used stamps off envelopes than buy new ones so most of the time my brother and I would sit cutting the corners off envelopes and plunging them into a cereal dish of water that by the time we finished was the consistency of gloop and only half full because the other half had gone over the floor or over ourselves.

Then there was the tricky bit about stamp hinges. We would take even our brand new mint condition stamps and apply liberal amounts of spit to a stamp hinge then plaster it onto the back of the stamps.

Anything would do as a stamp album. We had bought ones for a while but they filled up and then when you had Australia on one page and Brazil on the next someone would unthinkingly buy you a set of stamps from Austria and you realised you had no page to put them in alphabetical order.

In the end my stamps all ended up on loose sheets in ring binders. They are still there. Next time I go up in the attic I must have a look and see what I've got. In fact somewhere, I'm absolutely sure, I have a large brown paper bag stuffed full of the corners of envelopes! Where's that cereal bowl?

Painted Postcards

2008-03-14T08:23:00.004Z

I used to make a point of buying postcards everywhere we went and have quite a large collection, but recently I realised the bits of the house we live in have been getting smaller and smaller as shelves surround us and I've cut back a bit!

It didn't help I suppose that some of the collections were of quite large objects such as jukeboxes and pinball machines, but anyway, I digress.

Instead of just buying any old postcard these days I look for something more unusual. Postcards with photographs that I could (and do!) take myself are definitely out and so I look for something like this.

It is one of a set of six (yes, I couldn't resist buying the full set!) of watercolour paintings of Riva del Garda at the top of Lake Garda in Italy. The artist had chosen their viewpoints carefully and they make a really attractive set.

Oops!
Thanks to the anonymous comment for pointing out this is the castle at Sirmione on the southern end of the lake! Have had my glasses changed but must do something about the eyes...