Snapping away for a year and a day

Every so often, when I think my small but highly appreciated band of listeners might have tired of my choice of music, I have a request show on #ElectronicEars. Amazingly, I’ve only once been asked to play a song that I didn’t like but I’ve been repeatedly surprised by the number of requests that have not only been brilliant but that are by bands I’ve never even heard of. 

A few weeks ago, my #gigbuddy, @artminx, asked me to play Washignton Irving’s ‘Holy Company’, which I did and very much enjoyed. However, when she suggested we go to see them, I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t know if I fancied a whole gig. However, since she uncomplainingly signs up for whatever I propose, I said yes and consequently, last Sunday, we found ourselves at The Castle in Manchester.

The venue itself was just a room at the back of the pub and I was immediately concerned about the sound, especially with live drums, but I left the Minx to watch the support act while I had a drink with one of my daughters, who is at university in Manchester. By the time the main act came on, I’d had a couple of drinks and I was feeling receptive and rather looking forward to hearing some live music.

Now, sometimes a band is just a bunch of people playing together and sometimes they are a unit, like a completed jigsaw. Sometimes they have songs that are just chords and notes and words, and sometimes those songs are like living things that grab you by the hand and, for a few minutes, pull you into their world. And sometimes the sound is like a collection of instruments and other times it is greater than the sum of its parts and grabs you by the heart and makes you want to roar with appreciation.

Washington Irving are all the good things from the last paragraph.

Towards the end of their set - the penultimate song, in fact - they played a track that sounded like ‘She Moved Through The Fair’, except with the lilting prettiness of the folk song made over into the kind of visceral beauty that makes you want to grab someone’s hair and snog them to death. And then the last track - an incredible instrumental - was even better!

Afterwards, as I bought their CDs from the merchandise table, I asked the bass player which song was the one the sounded like ‘She Moved Through The Fair’. “It was ‘She Moved Through The Fair’” he replied gently. And if I felt a bit of an idiot, I was certainly a very happy idiot.

myhaikuproject:

The eastern side of every minute of mine
is already colored by the light of our impending meeting.
All the rest is dark, boring, you-less.
– Vladimir Nabokov to Vera, 1937



Haiku 170. 

In Nabokov’s house 
I seek Lolita but find 
the wife he adored

Image by Ozlem Baro

life:

Donald Sutherland by LIFE’s Co Rentmeester.

(Co Rentmeester—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

‘Read, Rewind, Replay, Rant’ Apr 02 #mypicwhenever

[Read]

I had a very pleasant day, today. I had a coffee and some sausages for breakfast, made a quick call to the office and then cycled over to the house to spend the day with Dan and Abi.

Dan had a half-term tennis club at 10:30, so Abi and I walked down into Kirkby Lonsdale and had a J2O and a coffee in The Royal Hotel before heading back up to Booths to buy some lunch and also some mince and kidney beans for my dinner.

We’d hoped to go to the cinema but the bus times and screenings didn’t work out so we spent the first half of the afternoon at the house, first eating lunch - sausages and crisps! - and then drawing (them) and dozing (me). At three o’clock, we walked back down into town and Hannah gave us a lift back to the cottage, where we read and played chess in front of the fire, with a short break for a couple of Hobnobs. 

Their mum picked us all up at about half-five and I had a short bout of dealing with three of my older daughters regarding insurance for the car they share before going for a swim and then cycling home.

As I write this, I’m eating the chilli I made myself when I got in, having had a handful of peanuts to stave off the hunger pangs when I arrived home.

All sounds pretty pleasant and innocuous, right.

[Rewind]

[Replay]
I had three sausages for breakfast. They come in packs of six at £2.85, so that’s around £1.40. Let’s call it £1.50 and pretend that would cover the coffee, too.

When Abi and I went into The Royal, that cost another £4.50.

The shopping at Booths came to £10.23, which was for lunch for the three of us and my dinner.

A pack of Hobnobs costs a pound and I think there’s probably around fifteen in a pack so, let’s say it was 25p for the four we ate.

I swam at the local heath club, at which I’m a member, but let’s say it would have cost £3 at a leisure centre (it would have been £3.60 in Kendal).

That’s £19.48 for the day.

[Rant]
I could have bought cheaper sausages, that’s for sure. Maybe we do want people eating cheap food and keeping that market buoyant with all the health scares, cattle destruction and horse meat that goes with that. Maybe we do want people eating those foods linked with obesity and diabetes. 

Abi and needn’t have had coffee and a J2O at The Royal. That’s beginning to look like the real luxury of the day, although Dan’s tennis also qualifies.

And, of course, there’s no real need to go swimming and keep in good shape is there? The NHS can pick up the bill for that in the long run.

So I could have done the day on £11.98 even without resorting to cheaper food.

Of course, I didn’t feed the kids in the evening, or indeed, give them their breakfast this morning, so there’s that cost to be added.

It all makes IDS’s £53 a week look a bit bloody stupid, doesn’t it?

And I’ve not included the fact that my house was lit and heated (roughly £3 per day) or taken my broadband into account (about a pound a day) or the firewood that we burnt. Today we didn’t need to buy any clothes, so that was lucky.

We’d also talked about going to the cinema, which would have come to over £30 for our bus fares and tickets, never mind the cost of popcorn.

And having spent an hour talking about insurance and taking into account the cost of petrol, I’m damn sure you couldn’t run a car on £53 a week. 

In conclusion then, if you’re one of those people who’s faced with living on £53 a week, I think you’ll need to give up your car and doing nice things with your family. You’ll have to stick with the clothes you have and get used to wearing a lot of them at once in the winter. If you are lucky enough to live in an area where there are jobs and there’s nothing preventing you from working, you’ll have to put some of your money aside for the bus and maybe borrow some smart clothes. 

It’s all a bit pathetic, isn’t it? I see IDS is dismissing the petition for him to live on £53 a week as “a stunt”, claiming that he has been unemployed twice. Ah, beware anecdotes from this man who lied about his degree on his CV. 

Here he is in today’s Guardian talking about finding himself unemployed:

“It was a shock - absolutely awful. I felt pathetic. I remember telling my wife. We looked at each other and she said: ‘God, what are we going to do for money?”

So how did our plucky little soldier with the “can do” attitude manage? Read on: 

“Duncan Smith’s wife, Betsy, is the daughter of the 5th Baron Cottesloe who served as lord-lieutenant of Buckinghamshire in the 1980s and 1990s. Duncan Smith and his wife, who sent their children to Eton, moved into Lord Cottesloe’s 17th-century Old House in the village of Swanbourne in Buckinghamshire in 2002. His in-laws moved into smaller accommodation to make way for the Duncan Smiths and their four children.”

You couldn’t make it up, could you?

I understand why the LibDems went into the coalition: I’ve heard it first hand from MPs and senior people in the party. Maybe that decision was based on good faith and maybe it was - at a stretch - the right thing to do at the time. BUT IT WAS THE WRONG DECISION. It’s time to face up to that, dissolve the coalition and tackle these vile bastards head on.

‘Inequality’ Apr 01 #mypicwhenever

The bridge in the picture is on the Underley estate, just north of Kirkby Lonsdale. The estate - built, I understand, on “China tea money” - used to stretch for miles to the north and is perhaps now a third of its original size. It still owns a huge amount of land around here, and property, too. The cottage I live in is rented from the estate and, twenty years ago, I rented a farmhouse that was actually on the estate.

That meant I could use the bridge to get across the river, opening up running routes on the east side of the Lune. I cycled down to the bridge last night to take this photo. Despite the fact that there is a public foot path just over the other side, the bridge is private and large signs make this clear to walkers (and, I infer, runners). 

So, it’s frustrating to me that for the sake a hundred yards of private property, I can’t extend my runs from the west side of the river across to Barbon and Casterton. Well, not without running a couple of miles south to Devil’s Bridge, anyway.

Of course, the bridge belongs to someone and if they choose not to share it, that’s their prerogative. We aren’t all born equal and some people have more than others. I have lots of lovely stuff in my life and I don’t want to waste time and energy on bitterness and envy. And, actually, there are lots of things to be envious of other than “stuff”.

Of course, just because we aren’t born equal doesn’t mean society should favour the lucky few. I don’t subscribe to the politics of envy but I do, at the very heart of my political beliefs, believe that everyone should have equal opportunities, fundamentally to health and education.

But I also believe that in a decent society, the fortunate should take care of the less fortunate. I don’t, as a rule, believe in taxing the rich more, just because they can afford it. In a (somewhat simplified) world where everyone paid, say, 25% tax, the better off would, of course, be paying more.

However, these aren’t simple times. We are all sat around a table and some of those with the most food are telling us that we need to tighten our belts. They are telling us that we need to cut back and that we are all in this together. And despite the fact that their plates are overflowing, despite the fact that they have more food than they need and, in some cases, could ever eat, they are taking food from the plates of those with the smallest portions. And then giving themselves more.

It is a disgusting state of affairs. 

I’m not arguing the pros and cons of a free market versus socialism, small government versus a large state, I’m talking about the current Tory government (which, heartbreakingly, includes the LibDems). Even if you are a Conservative, you should be appalled at what the government is doing in your name. Abusing the poor, those who can’t find work, those with disabilities. We need an election and we need to get these pigs’ noses out of the trough and to start looking after one another.

“Green and Black’s” Mar 23 #mypicwhenever

When I buy things, I like to buy good quality. This means that sometimes I can’t afford to buy the things I want - for example, I’d like a new fridge at the moment - but I can’t stand buying things that aren’t made well.

Those of you whose minds tend to logic will thus infer that when I do buy things, things that aren’t cheap, I am anticipating that they will be made well. I also expect them to be good value for money. One of the reasons I have so many clothes is that I buy all of mine from Gap and they seem to last forever. (And the reason I buy from Gap specifically is that their clothes fit me properly, whereas those from, say, Next, make me feel like I don’t belong to the species that they were designed for.)

When it comes to chocolate, I am, at the end of the day (which, as it happens, is when I usually eat chocolate), a Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut man. Not because it is expensive but because I love it and, by association, Frank Muir. But when I buy chocolate for other people, I revert to my reassuringly expensive philosophy and, usually, buy Green & Black’s.

Yesterday, I was trying to persuade Dan and Abi to watch Star Wars with me. (You know, the first/fourth one. The one where Han shoots first.) The kids weren’t keen, so I said I’d buy them an Easter Egg if they agreed to watch it. Dan went off and came back with a Green & Black’s egg which was huge and, also, fifteen pounds, so I sent him back for another. This time he returned with the one in the photo above: £5.99.

We went home, popped the DVD into the laptop and settled down on the sofa to watch it. Then we remembered the Easter egg and opened that.

What a disappointment. 

I had expected the G&B’s egg to cost a bit more than, for example, a Cadbury’s Buttons* one but I had also thought that the price might bring with it some special treat or innovation. A bag of mixed G&B’s chocolates, perhaps, or a small silver hammer to crack the egg. 

But actually, all you get it shell! That’s it. No treat inside the egg, no little chocolates hidden away in the box (we completely dismantled it). Lovely as the chocolate was - which we had, of course, expected it to be - there was a terrible sense of disappointment and, to be honest, a feeling we’d been ripped off. £5.99 for some shell. Pah!

So, if you’re buying chocolate for a loved one or even just to bribe your kids, my advice is to steer clear of the Green & Black’s eggs and stick to companies who understand the Easter formula.

*My personal favourite.