Ajaccio Corsica, Napoleon's Birthplace

Monday 20 May 2013. The Thomson Dream heads gently towards the berth at Ajaccio, Corsica.

We watched from the Promenade Deck until we were safely at a standstill and then went down to have breakfast and to get ready for the day. We were just going to get off the ship and look round Ajaccio independently.

David took a photo of the rest of us standing on the waterfront with the Thomson Dream behind us.

We started with a brief glance at the marina before heading up towards the building where Napoleon Bonaparte was born. On the way we wandered through a street market where we found this quite impressive display of olives. Not a big fan of olives - but they will play a further part in this entry.

David! No - seriously!!! Why would you do this to me?!? I was taking a photo of Napoleon's birthplace. As it is a tall building I turned the camera on its side to take a portrait format photo and of course the camera banged on the peak of my cap. So I turned it sideways out of the way for a couple of seconds and the dastardly clicky monster takes advantage... I'll get him back...

The home of Mr and Mrs Bonaparte was above a shop - currently a tanning / health type establishment. I'm not sure which window his first wails came from but the building now houses a museum to Corsica's most famous son.

We returned down to the waterfront and took a road train round the town which dropped us off for 15 minutes at the main monument to Bonaparte also seen above. Fran decided to zizz on the train at this point. Jeannie and I watched as David - the one with the bad knees - charged up the steps of the monument as though storming the massed ranks of Wellington and Blucher at Waterloo. The 15 minutes were fast approaching. We waved at him to come down. He waved back and disappeared around the back of the monument at the top...

We got back to find the driver pinioned within the safe grasp of Miss Franny. "I made him wait!" she said cheerfully. Mopping his tears and taking a reassuring bite of his onion, he bumped us back down the hill...

We went back up through the town to arrive at a pleasant and extensive square with a large statue to some general or other and a modern collection of ponds and fountains. At regular intervals we could hear thunder rumbling at us from over the sea. Yet the sky was clear and sunny. The morning was wearing out and we made our way down back through the town, stopping off to buy a few souvenirs - Miss Franny protects the paintwork of the fridge by completely covering it with fridge magnets.

I stopped to try out the hand-wound music boxes in front of the souvenir shop, turning round to see something of a crowd who had gathered to listen. It's all in the wrist action... Perhaps they don't get out much in Ajaccio - though I suspect many of the onlookers were off either our ship or one of the others that had docked that morning.

I suggested a glass of wine at one of the pavement cafes along the front.
"By heck!" cried David admiringly, "Who are you and what have you done with John Burke?" Tsk! Just because I'm not into spirits or cocktails! Anyway we got a bottle of wine between us and the waiter brought a platter which contained some slabs of toast and a dish of what looked like...
"Did a horse do that?" asked Miss Jeannie.

We decided it was crushed olives - see! I told you they would play a further part in the plot! They looked revolting but they tasted quite nice on the toast. There was still quite a bit left in the dish once the toast was gone and none of us could quite bring ourselves to lick it off the spoon...

We waved goodbye to the glamorous restauranteur who waved cheerily to us then turned to say something foreign to the waiter. I'm not sure... but it could have been "Well done with that horse poo, Claude!"

Highlights of The Mediterranean Cruise Index

A Day at Sea and at Posh...

Sunday 19 May 2013. This was to be a day at sea whilst the Thomson Dream sailed from Palma, Majorca to Ajaccio in Corsica.

We had planned a fairly easy day. A bit of exploring the ship and a lot of lazing about. We had gone to bed around midnight, but apparently David and Jeannie had stayed up for one last cocktail - called a zombie, light rum, dark rum, and some other stuff as well - and ended up having a plate of chips at one o'clock in the morning, "because we could!"

Fran stands, coffee mug in hand, whilst Jeannie tries out her tiny pair of binoculars - they were really neat and surprisingly good quality to look through. We stood hopefully at the ship's rail for a bit but the whales were staying well away and the only seals we saw were those around the windows...

The day wound itself along very nicely. I finished the book I was reading and searched my Kindle's contents for something else, settling on the first of the Sherlock Holmes works - the whole collection of which had cost me absolutely nothing.

That night was the Captain's Cocktail Party and a formal meal. Not everyone's thing and it wasn't compulsory, but we enjoyed dressing up for the evening and scrubbed up pretty ok I think!

Manny remembered our names from the previous night and waved us straight away to a table and with his team of Kurt on the wine and Larry helping at the table, they gave us such good service that we returned to them every night afterwards.

Yes we can't let this pass by without another look, can we? Take a good look, folks: you don't see Creeping Bentgrass looking this good all that often!

Tomorrow we make landfall at Corsica. Ajaccio is the birthplace of one of David's most admired historic figures - Napoleon Bonaparte.

Highlights of The Mediterranean Cruise Index

Eighth Year at Heskin Hall for Creeping Bentgrass

Phew! What a night! This event (and the marquee) has got so big now that we had a real challenge filling the place with sound. The soft surface of the marquee tent soaked it up and we ended up with the PA cranked higher than we've ever had it before, which gave us a few moments of feedback.

Add to that the fact that my guitar FX pedal seemed to have lost all of it's settings since we last played and I only had a few of the original codes for the different sounds in my head - we did without any fuzz effects for most of the night!

But we managed to control feedback and guitar wobblies enough to have the audience demand - what, an hour of encores? Fabulous! This event is now the one we look forward to the most during the year. We always have great fun and the audience is always ready to clap and stomp through the Irish join-in classics and then take to the dance floor later in the night.

There was a band playing on an outdoor stage as we arrived and they were sounding good. When we finished somewhere around midnight one of them came over to say in a shocked voice "You've played for four and a half hours!!!" I have to say from the throat - it feels like it too today... At 1:15am we had got everything packed back into the car and were sitting eating jam butties before setting off for home... Rock 'n' Roll!!!

First Night on Thomson Dream

Saturday 18 May 2013. We had our evening meal in the Orion Restaurant on Deck 4. This was huge (and will be shown in a later entry). Then after the meal it was time to go to muster stations.

The safety drill always used to be held during the morning of the first day on a cruise, but since the Costa Concordia disaster of January 2012 it is now practice on Thomson ships to hold one on the evening of embarkation with a further drill the following morning for any passengers who joined the ship from later flights.

Here we cut dashing figures in our orange life jackets. Miss Franny promises she "will never let go, I'll never let go..." Hope she doesn't change her mind as fast as Kate Winslet did... Two seconds after saying it she lets go, prising his fingers off and Leo sinks into the depths...

And here is how not to wear a life jacket as demonstrated by the one who has spent years at sea... One strap under the arm and the other side over the arm... The tapes should be passed around the body and tied over the life jacket to stop it flapping up and whacking you in the face if you ever have to jump into the sea - definitely a "everything else has failed" option! Thank you Mr Macho, you may stand down... You have to understand that the exercise was seriously interrupting his photo taking mission...

Suddenly it went dark. Palma Marina at night is quite a spectacular thing to look upon and the large basilica on the far side of the bay and the old Moorish castle on the hilltop add to the atmosphere. I take this same photo every time we go there to pick up a ship...

Up on the aft deck David shows an interested audience the photos he has taken so far... He is trying to teach me port and starboard and doesn't seem all that impressed with my suggestion of "the landie side" and "the sea-ie side"!

An hour later...

Highlights of The Mediterranean Cruise Index

Highlights of the Mediterranean

Saturday 18 May we were up at some awful time in the morning to pick up David and Jeannie and head to Manchester Airport.

This would be a first. Several firsts... David and Jeannie had never done a cruise before (although David did nine years cruising with the Royal Navy). We had never gone away on holiday together before. In fact Fran and I, at least, had never gone on holiday with anyone but family before. But hey - we spend so much of our time together anyway what could go wrong...? Creeping Bentgrass do Europe...

We call David "The Clicky Monster". Ever since he got his camera he has never had it out of his hands hardly. I struggle to stop him taking photos of the audience at gigs. Unsuccessfully most of the time... So whilst I came home from the week with what I thought of as a respectable 365 photos on my camera - one for each day of the year, you will note! David came home with over fourteen hundred... So there are quite a few more of his than mine. The above two are his, the mountains belonging to the Pyrenees as we flew (thankfully) over them.

It was "Smile and hold your glass up!"
"But you've just taken one of me..."
"You've had a sip since then..."

The plane chucked us out at Palma, Majorca and a short coach ride later we were at the port and going through the embarkation building to board the Thomson Dream. Which is not the little yacht seen here, but the one I was standing on to take the photo!

So here are the protagonists of the week. I'll show the ship in a bit more detail as we go through the story of the week. We were a bit gobsmacked at the ship moored at the next berth to ours on the opposite side of the pier we were on.

The Norwegian Epic looked fairly epic. Looked downright floating skyscraper on it's side really. We agreed we wouldn't want to be on something so big as

1. it wouldn't feel like a ship
2. we'd get lost...
3. it just doesn't look right!

Our opinions only of course - I'm sure the people aboard her had a good time walking up all those stairs and pretending they weren't on a ship.

Anyway Jeannie took one look and spluttered "Just look at the size of that!!!". Unfortunately at the time really, because we were negotiating some sun seekers on sun loungers on the Promenade Deck and at least one looked up indignantly...

Ok, we've found our cabins, had a walk round the Promenade Deck on Deck 8 - David insists this was the "waist" not a deck. Actually he insisted on calling the pointy end the "bow" too and loads of other stuff. Honestly I don't think he's all that familiar with boats...

But he was well prepared to get familiar with the cocktails! Cheers everyone!

To come: a day at sea, Corsica, two ports in Italy, Puccini's house and lake, Pisa, Villefranche, an unfortunately unsteady frenchman and a dish of olives, a force eleven sea (the frenchman was on land and couldn't use that as an excuse!), Barcelona, and Fran's attempts to swallow a tree (well a bit of one...) Successfully too I might add - though it was touch and go as it lodged in her throat... anyway mustn't give the game away, you'll just have to come back and read more! Bye for now.

Highlights of The Mediterranean Cruise Index

1960s Rochdale Photography Shop

The other day I introduced my great-uncle Percy Alston. He owned and ran a photographic shop on Spotland Road in Rochdale in the 1960s.

Last night I came across a photograph he took of the interior and counter. Behind the counter are films and boxes of photographic paper. On the left are boxes of either cine films or audio tapes. The magazine Movie Maker and another Cine related magazine are on sale from the stand on top of the counter.

The above shot shows Spotland Road, Rochdale, but unfortunately not the shop exterior. I'd guess at somewhere around 1963, but am happy for someone to tell me otherwise.

Uncle Percy sold tape recorders in the shop and I have a couple of tapes that he must have used when demonstrating machines to potential customers. Using a microphone to record his own voice he counts up from one to ten and then says "This is a recording made on the Grundig tape recorder. Any background noise you can hear is made by traffic passing by outside the window..." A canny lad, my great-uncle!

Singing In The Rain at Witton Park

Today we played at Witton Park in Blackburn. I think it would be true to say that the weather could have been kinder! But we managed to attract a good sized audience at least during the early afternoon before the rain really set in.

We had gone armed with some bin liners to put over the speakers and we managed to stay dry by playing from inside the entrance to one of the old stables around the courtyard.

And we had a bit of help when we took on the Take That song, The Flood!

Percy and Elsie Alston

Introducing my Great Uncle and Aunt. Auntie Elsie was my paternal Grandmother's sister. Her husband Percy was a sub-mariner during World War One and went on to own and run a camera shop on Spotland Road in Rochdale. They unfortunately never had any children and both died within a fairly short time of each other some time in the 1970s.

A while ago a collection of colour slides and a few black and white negatives came into my possession and I've only today started to look at them. Uncle Percy was an enthusiast. He stocked and used both still and cine cameras in his shop and was commissioned more than once to produce films of coach tours on the Continent, which he and Elsie did by taking their saloon car across to Europe and then following the route of the coach, arriving in time to shoot footage of the coach approaching and then disembarking its passengers. I have a couple of these films on 16mm stock and some old Zonophone reel tapes of Austrian music that he used to accompany them during promotional showings of the films by the coach companies.

Above left Percy and Elsie are seen with Elsie's mother, my Great-Grandmother. Few of these photographs are labelled (we don't do it do we?) so I've no idea where many of them are.

So this introduces them. I'll be bringing more photos from their collection to the blog every now and then - though perhaps the photos of my Great Uncle in his seventies, nude in the garden at their bungalow near Morecambe might stay private and unscanned... They did make me grin though as I always remember him as a fun character!

Aberystwyth Evening

This week included a trip to Wales for work, starting on Tuesday evening as I arrived in Aberystwyth on the west coast.

It must have been about the - oh, let's see - the first mild day of the year... I dumped my bags in the hotel and set off to look for somewhere to eat, no coat, hat, mittens or anything!

It was quite pleasant to walk along the promenade - Marine Terrace, they call it there. The pier juts out into Cardigan Bay and I passed by, seeing the unmistakeable walls of a castle in the distance.

Just before the castle was an impressive building that turned out to be the Old College of the university. This had been built as a hotel but the owner had problems and sold it to the then University College of Wales in the 1860s. A most impressive building with a tower and three-panelled frieze. I suspect the crazy golf course is more for the benefit of holidaymakers in the town rather than the students, but you never know!

Two dragons stand guard over the doorway, perhaps as a warning to students. One is named "Error" and the other "Darkness". A trifle harsh perhaps... do we not learn from mistakes? Anyway I had occasion to visit the new campus of today's Aberystwyth University the following day and managed to run a workshop for university and college managers without being shrivelled up by dragon fire!

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Blackpool Debenhams

I've been looking for a chance to take this photograph for a while.

This is Debenhams in Blackpool on the corner of Albert Road and Coronation Street - no not that one...! Yesterday morning was bright and sunny with a good sky and I nipped away from Miss Franny for a while to take a few photos. On taking photo number three, the camera acted dead apart from a message flashing "Batteries need replacing..." Grrr... Luckily I managed to find a shop that sold them!

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Creeping Bentgrass, Elgin Hotel, Blackpool

On Friday we played at the Elgin Hotel, Blackpool for a luncheon gathering of ex British Gas staff.

This was the third time we have played for this group and they make a great audience and - so they tell us - we have increased the numbers of people attending since we started playing the after lunch spot.

Glad to be of service...

Large version of photo: available at my Flickr account

Surprise Birthday Party Gig

Friday 5 April 2013. We were booked to play at a surprise birthday party.

Surprise birthday parties can be a risky thing to accept bookings for as the last one we were booked to perform at was called off after the birthday boy - who knew nothing about it - booked a holiday instead! But here everything went according to plan.

We were at the Raikes Hotel in the centre of Blackpool - a nice change for us as although we live there, most of our gigs tend to be out of town! The birthday boy was a biker and there was a fine collection of tattoos in the room!

A great night all round!

If you would like live music at your party or event, please find our contact details in the left hand panel and give us a call!

Blackpool Gateway Construction

A set of photographs from Saturday 30 March of the current construction on and adjacent to Talbot Road. This is the area being described as the Blackpool Gateway.

This is the soon-to-be Sainsburys store. This is going up over the site of Seed Street, recently cleared of housing and the only bomb site in Blackpool from World War II. The Luftwaffe managed to knock down several houses resulting in deaths and injuries to residents. The housing was never rebuilt and the site had been a car park for years.

This heap of steelwork will be new council offices. It replaces a number of buildings including a nightclub, shops and a car showroom. In the more recent past an indoor bowling establishment had been put up where a road (extreme left) now runs, but had not lasted long before being closed and now demolished.

This view looks from Talbot Road down Topping Street towards the junction with Church Street where the old Regent Cinema is just discernable as the white building with a tower visible (well it is on my larger version!) through the steel structure of the soon-to-be Council Buildings. The multi-storey car park over the old bus station has also been getting attention and new cladding is being added to the exterior.

Looking down Talbot Road towards the seafront, the open space of the passenger entrance and bus exit of the bus station is hidden from view from street level by a large fence. Whilst the work is done buses are terminating at different stopping places all around the town centre streets. Confusing for local as well as visiting passengers, although the bus station, whilst being home to most buses, entailed passengers standing in a large dark area, shaded by the ceiling and building above with buses passing either side of most stands which were not particularly well signposted anyway. At the time of expanding this article (ten years later in 2023) the situation is still the same with no bus station and buses operating from stops around the town centre.

The street and pavements are being laid with cobbles. Attractive once laid but a mess once dug up and patched. Roman roads were cobbled and long lasting, but they seldom had to lay new pipes or power cables under them...

The photos were taken from the top of the car park above Wilkinsons store.

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Remembering Sunnyside - Part 2 The Final

Saturday 23 March 2013. Friday was just a warm up, a chance for a bit of a jam session. Tonight we had a few more acts and a tight and fixed schedule.

Steve Reynolds got us going with a few numbers played with the distinctive Shadows sound - shudderingly good!

Tony Harte, lead singer with The Honeycombs gave us a great set including a blistering version of Friday on My Mind and of course the Honeycombs hit Have I The Right.

Dave Wilcox has appeared several times at Sunnyside events now and gets better every year.

Geoff Howlett had us crossing off a few songs from our playlist as he displayed an uncanny - or sinister - foreknowledge of our intended act!!! Hmmm.... We let him off as he played the Blackpool Football Club anthem Glad All Over!

Alan Wilcox (no relation to Dave Wilcox) is making a name for himself as a Billy Fury tribute artist. Billy's memory is assured for another generation!

Two old geezers took to the stage and did their best, bless them...

Apologies to all those who we didn't get photos of, but we'll finish with this shot of Michelle Gibson who brought a feminine touch to the proceedings with hits from Brenda Lee and Connie Francis amongst others. Apart from Shelagh joining us in our set to sing a three-part harmony version of The Rose, Michelle was the only female act of the night.

And then once all the acts were done and all the equipment had been cleared to make the room ready for a wedding fair the following morning, we retired to hold the now traditional post gig party with a bottle of bubbly and, thanks to Peter, a bottle of whisky! We were as quiet as we could...

Then goodbyes were said at breakfast the following morning and we loaded the car and headed home through a bit of a winter wonderland at least until we crossed over to the west side of the country.