Happy New Year and Celebrating The Year Just Past

Happy New Year to all my readers! According to the stats, on average the blog is read 200 times a day, that's a bit awesome from my point of view, so a very huge thank you to all of you for helping make it a success and for allowing me to think it's worthwhile!

Whilst it's a time for looking forward - and there are some great things to look forward to in 2014, of which more later - it's also a time to look back over 2013 and celebrate all the things we got up to.

The year started with the release of my book, Blackpool Then And Now and I spent an afternoon in Waterstones, signing copies and enjoying meeting a few people from various Blackpool-related websites and Facebook pages.

I was also getting to grips with a new guitar - looks great, sounds.... well... let's say it had a few peculiarities about it that has since caused me to revert to the red Stratocaster! This was taken down in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, at the "Remembering Sunnyside" event in March and we are looking forward to going down this year too to meet up with our Billy Fury friends.

Later in March we had a great day up in the Lake District, with snow on the hills and a wonderful meal waiting for us in Kendal at the home of David's sister and brother-in-law, Elaine and Dave. A great night and a very cold and icy getaway around half past midnight, slithering down the roads!

The cold spell lasted ages. The year before at the Northampton do we had walked to the venue from our hotel in shirt sleeves. This time it snowed all the time we were down there. This photo is from Witton Park in May, usually a warm family day out, yet we were layered up and the proceedings came to an end in the late afternoon with a downpour. British weather!

Luckily the weather just a week later was absolutely fine on the Mediterranean as we went off for a week's cruise with Jeannie and David, taking the band on tour to visit Corsica, Italy, France and Spain and sample a few cocktails along the way! This was a glorious week - just don't mention olives to Fran...

June is always the band's busiest month and 2013 was no different. We were featured in this newspaper report of Myerscough's open event, which was just one of several events which drew large audiences for us.

Miss Franny kept up the pressure until I eventually cracked and we added a conservatory to the house. It's a nice quiet place to sit and read and we left things like computers and televisions out of it. The only time it gets noisy is when it rains... oh... it is now in fact...

In August we took a trip to Norway and although the dreaded rain came with us for half of our time there, the other days were glorious and more than made up for the wet days with some beautiful scenery of mountains, fjords and waterfalls. We loved it and a return trip will have to be done at some time or other!

Of course we enjoyed our home town of Blackpool also and there was lots going on this year as always. The Air Show was spectacular and changes in the town centre gave us plenty to watch and photograph. We went to a few shows and continue to delight in the good food and atmosphere in Quilligan's thanks to Sean and his team.

We had an extra trip this year and what a trip it was, taking us to the Holy Land for some unforgettable sights and tours. This really was an experience to remember. The detail of all the travels can be found on the blog, by looking at the navigation in the left hand panel, so you can join us to see more of our time on the Med, in Norway and to the Aegean and Holy Land.

The Holy Land trip also gave us a chance to meet up with our friends, Tomas and Maris who perform in the Horizons Bar onboard Thomson Celebration. This was our third meeting and we look forward to seeing them again in 2014.

Creeping Bentgrass continued to go from strength to strength - we have had strangers recognising us all over the place and have been told were are folks' "favourite band". All very pleasing and ego boosting - we think it must be the way we laugh off mistakes... lol. Christmas 2013 saw us rack up 13 years as a band and we have no intention of giving up yet!

Miss Franny embarked on a massive craft project, to make a quilt for our granddaughter's bed. This took ages and she press-ganged me into helping cut straight lines in material. In the end it all came together after we had to make up a few bits due to some incomprehensible or missing bits from a pattern translated from some obscure dialect of a tribe in the wilds of a hidden forest on top of a plateau somewhere... Grace seemed to like it anyway.

Fran and daughter Gill along with Miss Jeannie have taken stalls at several craft fairs and Gill's "Little EGG Craft Company" (named for her immediate family Edward, Gillian, Grace) has gone online and started to attract a following.

For the second year running we went to see Andre Rieu on his tour of the UK and had a great night just before Christmas, bouncing up and down, swaying and clapping and singing along in half made-up German and Italian that the natives of those countries definitely would not have understood!

Fran's brother Bob turned the big 6-0 on Christmas Eve and we had a surprise party in Blackpool which went off very successfully considering people came from Swindon, Bristol, Belfast, Warrington and Manchester to get there. My niece Sarah claimed to need rescuing and against all expectations he got there all unsuspecting, even to the extent of arriving in the restaurant where she was waiting and seeing our name in the bookings list and thinking "Now that's a coincidence!" before seeing everyone waiting to cheer him!

It will be my turn in 2014 to turn 60 myself. I've taken the decision to retire from my work with Jisc and the University of Northumbria at that time and have more projects lined up, including more books and more gigs and just spending more time with my beautiful granddaughter and family. A few health niggles have proved taxing for the last couple of years. I worried for ages before one was proved not to be too serious and have occasion to grit my teeth more than I used to, so it will be nice to work at my own pace on things I want to do. If they want to call me back every now and then, that will be ok too!

At an engagement party just before Christmas, Grace saw us perform for the first time and we had to try to keep a straight face as she looked, ran away to hide and then kept coming out to peep at us! 2014 will be good!

Peugot Shark

The car hire firm dropped off a car I'd never seen before, when they delivered my works car last week.

It turned out to be a Peugot Shark - named after someone in the trade, perhaps?

It was one of those pseudo 4-wheel-drive things. I'm not a fan of 4X4 cars and can't really understand why anyone who's not a farmer would want one.
"I have a dog!" they cry. Well before I met Miss Franny, one of my girlfriends had a dog - a big one. I had a Mini and old Scamp never once complained that the back seat wasn't big enough... Most dogs fit neatly into the back of an estate car or an MPV.

Anyway, what did I think of the Peugot? For a start, it was designed by someone who had been driving a long time. By which I mean they had forgotten what it is like to be nervous at getting into a new car. I don't mean myself here. I drive around 30,000 miles a year and drive a different car almost every week and have got to know where most knobs and switches are.

But this thing had 4 sticks coming out of the steering column. So one will be wipers and one will be lights... One was to control the sound system - they are not just "radios" anymore! The other was for cruise control.

The problem was that the middle of the steering wheel was so big that it hid all of the markings on these controls. I only found out what did what by experimenting. Not good. The good people at Peugot thought so much about their airbag that they had created a space for it that almost equalled the diameter of the steering wheel. There was room to curl my fingers around the wheel but not much to see through except at the top where they left a gap to allow you to view the dashboard displays. Good unless you were going round a corner and wanted to know how fast...

This is really picky I know, but in the centre of the steering wheel is the Peugot rearing lion motif. It isn't on any sort of plinth and the leather of the steering wheel centre is cut around the emblem. Except it has such little inlets for mouth etc. that a snug fit is impossible and to me it looked really tacky.

It drove fine. The diesel engine wasn't over noisy though it did have the characteristic pause before it revved enough to nip out of a turning, by which time it was no longer safe to nip. The 6-speed gearbox was smooth, though compared with my Mazda you had to be going at a higher speed before you could change up and feel comfortable that the engine was going to cope.

The parking brake is electronic and the toggle sort - pulling the handle up both puts it on and off, though after the initial start you can forget about letting it off and just set off and it will release the brake automatically. With features like this on modern cars it makes me wonder why I have to pip my horn at so many pillocks who can't control their clutch and start rolling backwards at you at the traffic lights...


The speedo was much more accurate than most cars too, when the dashboard said 70mph my SatNav said 68 - the average car seems to be doing around 66 or less. I have, by the way, checked the SatNav against lots of roadside speed displays and the speed shown by the SatNav tallies with those at 30, 40, 50 and 60mph. Quite often to do 70mph the car's speedo will be only just short of 80.

So to sum up, a nice car with a badly thought out steering wheel and control design and one that will cost you more than necessary to put new tyres on. Buy an estate or an MPV. Unless you really are a farmer...

Take a Seat, Leon...

Ooh! A first today! I've been down to Birmingham Airport to meet up with a colleague from just this side of Welsh Wales so we could put together a new workshop on Strategy for colleges and universities.

The hire firm delivered a Seat. No... not just a seat - four of them in a car made by Seat, or "Say-at" as they say in the trade ("Take a say-at over they-air and I'll be with you in a mo-ment...") It's called Leon... Not sure what model it is...

A Seat Leon in startling colour too - Blimey, I've been standing out like a (the next phrase was abandoned in an attempt to appear at least partially politically correct)

First impressions were of trying to get in and realising that once I had sat down the top of my head from mouth upwards was still outside and above roof height... That could say more for the height of the person who delivered it than the car - though I lowered the seat all the way down that it would and moved it backwards and still had to bend backwards to avoid bumping my head getting in. But then I am very tall... 5 foot 4 and a smidgeon... That smidgeon makes all the difference!

Once in and with the seat (that's seet) adjusted to a comfortable driving position, it's actually quite a fun car to drive. The dashboard is unfashionably bare of push buttons but that's a refreshing change really - how many buttons can you play with when you're weaving in and out of traffic in the one-way twists and turns of Britain?

The instrument panel and windscreen seem a long way off - the windscreen is at a fairly shallow angle so the bottom of it is miles away and I had problems getting the SatNav sucker attached without it obscuring my view through being halfway up the window.

The instrument panel itself is a bit strange. The speedo goes up to 140mph but only goes round three quarters of the circular dial. That means that the speeds you can legally do in this country - from stand-still up to 70mph - are squashed, squeezed or squozen into a mere third of a circle and you have to wonder why really...

The fuel guage on the left was also obscured by the rather small steering wheel - very sporty, but the fun of posing would be marred if you were to run out of fuel!

I had the 6-gear turbo diesel option and the engine was responsive and nippy. Like many diesel engines it revs quite low and that was useful because I spent ages queueing on the M6 barely getting into second gear and sitting in the same spot for 20 minutes at one point. Reverse was found by pushing the gear lever down and moving left then forwards.

The other usual mystery features: the boot opens just like a Golf, to lampoon the latest VW adverts. Hardly surprising - Seat may be from sunny Spain, but they are part of the VW Group. You push the top of the maker's logo and it swivels inwards so you can grasp the bottom and pull the boot cover upwards.

The fuel cap is a back-to-the-basics circular flap with an obvious thumb opening, so no searching the dashboard, door recesses and floor in the dark on this car. There's a (surely old-fashioned?) screw on plastic cap over the tube inside the cover.

Not that I had cause to use it, but I noticed that the back doors had no handle...

Instead, it's hidden in the rear edge of the door and there's a recessed opening in the rear quarterlight window for your hand. Don't break that quarterlight then, because I bet that's not a cheap bit of glass!

Most of my day has been on the motorway where it performed well both in fast (well up to 70mph!) and slow traffic. The SatNav reported a low 65 miles per hour though when the speedo assured me I was doing 70 - interesting that the other car I've driven that had the lowest comparable speed (64) was a VW Golf. They obviously consider that the people who drive their cars are going to speed and they take steps to keep them to the speed limit.

From what I've seen though - their drivers all tootle round town with an eye on the speedo - doing 25 miles an hour and slowing down to 20 whenever they see a Gatso camera. Why are Gatso cameras in areas where there are more accidents? Because they cause them...

Ford Mondeo Mk IV

At last! I managed to get my hands on one of the new Mondeos from Ford this week. First time I've managed to drive a James Bond car - Daniel Craig drives one near the beginning of Casino Royale!

My own car is a MkIII Mondeo and I had a MkI for years - it had done 195,000 miles by the time I swapped it in!

So how did I find the MkIV? I was quite taken with it actually, although I did have a couple of niggles. For one, it felt cramped inside! Now that, I think, is only due to the fact that it had bucket seats whereas mine has fairly flat seats and the new ones, shaped more are wider. What it means is that if you want to adjust the driving seat to move it up and down (electronic) or to adjust how reclined it is (a manual knob) you can only do that by opening the door because there just isn't room to shove your hand down between the seat and side of the car to get at the controls.

But the model I had was full of features. The media player was a multi-CD player which took mp3 CDs. This meant I could have taken enough music to have driven right round the country without having to change a CD. The onboard computer has an easy to navigate screen between the speedometer and rev counter that allowed me to use controls on the steering wheel to select any track from any folder from any CD - or do the sensible thing and just start at track 1 on CD 1 and let it do its own thing!

The power outlet is set to the left hand side under the stereo unit and caused no problems with gear shifting and trapped fingers - definitely a point scored over Vauxhall's Insignia! The gear lever has a nice solid chunky feel to it and reverse now has a lift-ring before swinging the stick to the left and forward. The 6-speed box coupled with the 2 litre diesel engine was smooth and reliable, though an experimental quick start made me purse my lips at the delay before the engine started to rev - had I been trying to nip out into fast traffic I'd have been frightened at the lack of movement for a couple of seconds!

But I don't drive hard and fast much these days and definitely not at the beginning of December! As I drove out of Blackpool almost every lay-by had a small group of hopeful traffic cops, none of whom were in the slightest embarrassed at my stolen VCR never having been found and returned after all these years...

So once on the motorway I whipped it up to 70 and engaged the cruise control. As the speedo reached 70, my SatNav showed 67-68 which is not so bad. My own car shows 67 on the SatNav at 70 on the speedo and the VW Golf I had last week showed only a measley 64 mph!!! That's why so many people are driving about at 25 these days!

At 70 (or 68 depending on which you believe) the Mondeo is so smooth you think "Surely I'm only tootling along?" The clock goes all the way up to 160 and at 70 you believe the car would do it without any problem. Certainly the once or twice I dipped the pedal to go past someone doing a mile-an-hour less than me had the car leaping forward rewardingly. I nipped past them and let it slow back down to the cruise control - a very nice car to drive!

The cockpit had independant left and right temperature control. I set them in tandem and it kept me happily at a constant comfortable temperature whilst outside the temperature dipped and rose with the weather.

Had I had any passengers in the back seat, they even had face-level ventilation from the side strut between the front and rear doors.

I drove from Blackpool to Taunton on Tuesday, from Taunton to Brighton on Wednesday, from Brighton to Oxford last night and then back to Blackpool today. After starting with a full tank I just put in a coupe of gallons at Warwick services on the way back then filled up when I got home. I'd used 76.44 litres to do the entire trip of 720 miles and I make that almost 43 miles per gallon which isn't bad at all! Bear in mind I've driven on cruise control at 70 (or 68!) most of the time so I haven't been taxing the engine at all!

The petrol cap was a surprise - Ford have gone for a simple push from the outside and it will spring open. There is no unscrew cap inside, it has the new style spring-loaded flap that you push open with the nozzle from the pump. I presume that the petrol cap locks as you lock the car to avoid tampering. Locking was another of my niggles - the buttons on the key are not the small circular buttons that I have on my MkIII. They cover the entire width of the key and as you grip the key to pull it from the ignition - you lock the car. I did it every single time I took the key from the ignition. The first time I set the alarm off by opening the door. After that I learned to unlock the car after taking out the key! The actual key is a flat blade too, unlike my circular shaft with a broader end. The ignition slot can't be seen at night - no light shines on it and it was fiddly putting the key into the slot. I never thought there was anything wrong with keys dangling from the dashboard myself...

Other snippets? Locking the car swivels the wing mirrors inwards automatically which is a nice touch and this morning I got in a deep frozen car with thick ice on all windows - the heated windscreen and rear screen were clear in a short time and all side windows not long after.

The hire guys just came round to collect it. As I opened the door they started singing Christmas carols. I told them to bog off... I want to keep it...!

Vauxhall Insignia

Yesterday the hire car firm dropped one of these off for me.

It's Vauxhall's replacement for the Vectra, the new Vauxhall Insignia. Well it's certainly more stylish and good looking than the Vectra, which was a bit of a box, though I'm not sure I'd want to be a back seat passenger - the shape of the door looks like an invitation to crack your head open...

I did have a couple of niggles with it to be honest.

Why do designers not think about the practical side of things? Sure, the gear lever is great looking and the power socket when not in use is better hidden underneath a smart flush pop-up plastic cover. But when it is in use and you change into 5th gear you trap your fingers against the plug of your Tom Tom... Quite hard...

Given that many of us use a Satnav these days, you'd have thought by now that car designers would install a couple of power sockets and one of them would be up there on top of the dashboard where it's needed, rather than right at the bottom where there isn't enough space to plug anything in. Even the old house of power sockets, somewhere near the handbrake was better, even though then the cable from the socket to the windscreen tended to foul up gear changing altogether...

And talking of handbrakes, why is it so close to the driving seat? They used to be nicely in the middle of the between-seats console and easily reached without embarrassment. Now they are either right over on the passenger side, giving a nice opportunity to grope your passenger's leg - not as exciting as it used to be, but maybe that's the nature of my passengers these days. I don't include my missus in this disgraceful slur, but I can grope her leg in more comfortable surroundings if I so wish (though it may still invite a slap). Or - oops not a word to use at the start of a sentence, but I started the previous one with "either" and didn't get round to the alternative before the end of the sentence - or the handbrake, as in this case, is so close to the driver's seat that your hand automatically overshoots it and if you are wearing a jacket or coat it will have disappeared inside the folds of the jacket anyway.

Same with the seat belt socket - look at it! It's impossible to get hold of, you can only touch the very top which makes it almost impossible to find quickly and without looking. Put the bloody thing on a stalk!

All this is because in a modern car, designers think we should have somewhere to put a mug of coffee or tea and invite accidents due to hot spillage down the groin at 70mph. In the meantime the incidence of fines handed out to people for eating and drinking whilst driving are rising.

The dashboard layout is ok but I wanted to move the wheel up a bit more than it would go. Perhaps because the seat was too high but again the number of levers and buttons to adjust seating is getting ridiculous. Pressing one made the lumbar support move in and out and then up and down as I realised the button was a joystick! For Heaven's sake!!! The only thing a lumbar support has ever done for me is give me backache. I crank them in as soon as I get in a car that has one sticking in my back.

And why can there not be a big user-friendly standardised way of opening the petrol cap? Ford has the lever on the floor. Some cars have them under the dash as though you were opening the bonnet. VW hide it away in the door. The number of times people have come up to me in a motorway petrol station and said "Do you know how to open the petrol cap on this please? It's a hire car and I don't know..."

On this, despite the cover being flush to the body and with no indentation for fingers, you press the cover in and it then springs out. The person in the queue behind me was not delighted to wait whilst I searched the car interior first.

So did I like driving it? Well it was alright, but to be honest I'd rather be in a Mondeo.

Large versions of the photos: exterior, gear lever, handbrake, dashboard

The Lancashire Hotpots - Pot Sounds

Trogging round the sales today during a brief break from the tiling.

Anything worth having has already gone from most shops but then this gem caught my eye in HMV...

It would have been worth the money just for the laugh of the cover, but it's playing now and the songs are quite funny too. With such gems as I Fear Ikea, The Beer Olympics and The Girl From Bargain Booze this will tickle the fancy of any Lancashire lads and lasses! Worra bunch o' nutters! Reet good!

Great Music

I thought it might be fun to show some of the albums I've collected over the years which are not exactly mainstream. I have a huge collection of music including some 400+ 78rpm records, a thousand or so vinyl 45s and around 300 vinyl albums plus lots and lots of CDs.

I've digitised a lot of the music myself - particularly the 78s which can be hard to find on CD. So here are five of my albums which you may not have heard of, starting with the one that you are most likely to have heard of. It's possibly true to say that any readers over on the US side of the Atlantic may have a better chance of having heard of some of the following.

But we start with this one- The Beat of The Brass by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass.

I was still a teenager when I bought this and the music from the record was featured in a TV special recorded by the band. It's a very laid back record that starts with a version of Cabaret and ends with Herb's only vocal hit - This Guy's In Love With You. One of my favourite tracks is a jazzy thing called Slick. And a bit of trivia for you - Herb Alpert is the 'A' of A&M Records.

The Cactus Brothers

What can I say about this album? It wasn't even available in the UK when I bought it. We were in Florida on holiday in 1993 and I wanted to bring some of the music back that we were hearing on the car radio. I plucked this one off the shelves purely at random but have never regretted it and I play this album as much as any of the others in my collection. It is a country hillbilly group with a large collection of motley characters playing fast driving country rock and with a couple of finger pickin' instrumentals thrown in for good measure. It starts with a hard smacking version of Sixteen Tons and there's loads of superb tracks to savour.

Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen

I was introduced to this one by John Briggs, who was bass player with a group I was in called Spiral, way back in the early 1970s. He played it to me after we had listened to our traditional playing of his 78rpm version of the Everly's All I Have To Do Is Dream c/w Claudette and it knocked my socks off. There's a track called Boogie Man Boogie with some of the best boogie piano playing I have ever heard. Again though, this is an album without a single mediocre track!

In Search of Amelia Earheart by Plainsong

A strange mixture this one. It looks like a concept album but only two of the songs are about the titular flyer and her probable doom at the hands of the Japanese. The rest are a mixture of songs of the soft folk rock type. The band featured Ian Matthews, of Matthews Southern Comfort fame and Liverpool Scene guitarist Andy Roberts. I bought it after hearing them on a BBC radio In Concert programme.

Songs From Wasties Orchard by Magna Carta

Now if you like modern folk music or even just nice gentle sounds then this album has to be one of the ultimates! Best known for their concept album Seasons, which was their second album, this was the follow up with soon-to-be Elton John's guitarist, Davy Johnstone replacing Aussie Lyell Tranter full time. (He had played on Seasons as a session musician). I went to see them at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester as this album was coming out and they were absolutely superb.

Extreme Dreams

We've watched Extreme Dreams this week, (BBC2). Ben Fogle leads a team of ordinary folks to one of the most inaccessible places on Earth, some sacred lakes high up in the Himalayas, a ten-day trek from civilisation.

They were ordinary people but it's amazing just what ordinary people can achieve. One of the team, Yonna was a lupus sufferer and yet made it through the trek to the end goal. Not without a great deal of pain and suffering but that made her achievement all the more sweet.

Another of the team was a 51-year-old hairdresser called Paul. A bit younger than me but maybe there's hope yet! Ha ha! Where's the nearest mountain...?

They suffered exposure, landslides, tummy bugs, pulled muscles, sleep deprivation and altitude sickness. Watching the final programme where they reached the lakes, it all looked to have been worth it.

Mark Redfield - Cold Harbor

A while ago, you may remember I bumped into actor and director Mark Redfield in Manchester at the Festival of Fantastic Films.

Mark is currently involved in a film project The Tell Tale Heart, an Edgar Allan Poe tale.

Whilst we were chatting in Manchester he very kindly gave me a copy of a Tom Brandau film, Cold Harbor, which he not only starred in but also produced.

I watched this quite late one night and this turned out to be an excellent move as the film draws you in. It deals with four brothers who have just lost their father through suicide, as they journey to the quiet seaside community where he lived and set about emptying his house.

As they do so they must each come to terms with their relationships to each other and their different recollections and relationships to their father. This is most certainly a reflective drama not a gung-ho action blast and it just suited my mood as I watched.

The film has a realistic gritty feel to it too. There are some quite atmospheric moments where I thought I was being set up for a "horror moment", but then in real life things like that don't happen too often. Even in the scene where the brothers decide to symbolically burn their father's boat, the temptation to go over the top with pyrotechnics is resisted, leaving a far more realistic scene and probably my favourite moment in the film as each of the brothers reflects and you can't help but be there with them, sharing - even helping create - what is going through their minds.

There are moments of humour and tension particularly as the second brother determines to steal the suicide note from the police station and the others create a diversion.

Described as "intense and moody" this film won't have you on the edge of your seat throughout, but you will be involved!

Harry Potter 6 Filming

I see that filming for the 6th Harry Potter film has started in Laycock. I was close by in 2006 and went to have a look. The village in Wiltshire is wonderful. Although there were a few cars parked when I went, there are no yellow lines, street lamp posts, television aerials so it has the look and feel of an olde English village - which of course it is.

At Laycock Abbey, Fox Talbot was one of the pioneers inventing photographic processes - anyone who takes photos today does it because of the work of men like him. The National Trust own the place now.

There's plenty of action in the 6th book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, so much information came out in that book that we wonder whether the film will be about 5 hours long if it's going to have a chance of being understandable to people who haven't read the book.

But then again I thought that was one of the faults with the 5th film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. There was so much information to get across it ended up being full of dialogue and not enough action.