What happened at the car doctors

I took the car to the garage this morning. You may remember reading exactly the same opening sentence to yesterday's blog. There's a reason for that. I had exactly the same opening sentence to my day. This is because unfortunately, despite my mechanic being both very good and very reasonably priced, he has a limited grasp of scheduling.

The way it works in his garage is that he says "yes" to any work that appears on the horizon and then proceeds to handle them sequentially. If it transpires that he's taken on more work than can be done in a day, the ones left over simply get shunted to the next day. Which is fine (I suppose) if you can leave your motor with him overnight. I can't. So when I call up towards the end of the day I get "sorry, I've not even looked at it yet."

Which has now happened on four out of the five occasions I've taken the car to him. In any other circumstance this would be grounds for me to take my business elsewhere (with a level of huffiness dictated by my grumpiness at the time), but he IS cheap. And the garage IS within walking distance.

Anyway it turns out all this enginemanagementpoorperformancelumpyrunning business is my own fault. I haven't been checking my oil regularly enough. He actually said that. "I get the impression you don't check your oil very often." Yeah, that would be right. Well, to be entirely honest, "at all" would be closer to the mark. I usually leave it until the oil warning light flickers when I'm taking a hard corner, and then think "ah. Must get some oil next time I fill up."

This, apparently, is not the best approach to take. Especially on modern engines with hydraulic tappets. Because, well, being hydraulic, they need - you know - oil. If the oil level drops all their little reservoirs go dry in a kind of homage to the state of the country's water supply a few weeks ago, the valves don't open properly, and the engine management unit registers a misfire and turns on its little light to tell me all about it. Occasionally the whole situation gets so bad the misfires become audible, and affect more than one valve, which explains last Friday's (and Sunday's) journeys.

He cleaned it all up, reset the EMU codes, and topped up the oil. For my part, I'll be doing weekly oil checks from now on. Me ol' Dad would be proud of me. Exasperated, but proud.

The smell of green

I took the car to the garage this morning. Its 'Engine Management' light had been glowering at me for some days. In recent months this hasn't been cause for concern as, before I could (be arsed to) organise a visit to the garage, it would go out again. And then come on again, a few weeks later.

This time it came on and stayed on.

Worse than that, on long journeys (such as last Friday, and again on Sunday) the car would give a worrying lurch, the light would start flashing, and the performance of the car dip alarmingly, as if it's only firing on two cylinders. Which, given it's the Engine Management light, is entirely possible. So I booked it in yesterday, and dropped it off this morning.

The garage I've used since the demise of the garage I used to use before I started using the one I use now, is only a short walk away, which is the main reason I chose it. That, and the fact that it comes highly recommended on the local community forum. It's wedged between two semi-detached houses on a bend in a normal suburban street, so "dropping the car off" entails hunting down a parking space before walking back to the garage to leave the keys.

I started to explain where I'd left it. "I'll find it," he breezed. How are you going to do that when you haven't even asked me for the registration, I wondered? I offered him the registration. "You wouldn't believe how many people don't know their own registration," he mused. Well actually mate, given my penchant for examining the human condition, I would.

Walking back from the garage through the leafy streets of Whalley Range on what was a sunny morning following a rainy night, the smells of fresh grass, early hints of autumn, and rain-dampened pavements evoked many memories. Something smells are known for, but for some reason this morning the memories were more powerful than usual. Maybe it's because I don't walk anywhere very much any more, whereas as a boy I walked the 2-3 miles home from school every day. I should do it more often really. But not, I hope, on account of having more car trouble!

Blog fodder

There are times when I have absolutely no enthusiasm for blogging. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. And then there are times when the urge to write is so strong it's like a physical ache. Not ever having experienced withdrawal symptoms, thank God (well... not counting caffeine withdrawal which I've gone through on three separate occasions. I don't suppose a mild headache really cuts it as 'withdrawal'), I imagine that this nagging emptiness combined with the need to do something without really knowing what is about as close as I'll ever get to dependence on 'substances.'

The fates often play a cruel joke on me by giving me lots to write about on those days when I don't feel like it, whereas on the days when my enthusiasm knows no bounds there's nowt to write about. So during those Times of Limited Energy, when subjects present themselves, I make little notes under the general heading 'Blog Fodder' so that I'll have some material for when Mr Muse returns.

And then, being a disorganised sort of chap, sometimes those blog fodder notes get a bit lost, and don't turn up 'til months later. Now you begin to perceive where this rambling is taking us. Back to November 2009, when I made a note about a daily horoscope that was particularly apposite:

"In the midst of a sea of change, you decide that the more routine you can make your day, the better. Doing some tasks in a familiar manner now helps you relax, while only last week they made you bored and restless."

Which I found passing strange at the time, as I was engaged in the TENTH recasting of the deployment schedule for the project I was working on. Dates had kept slipping, and obstacles kept presenting themselves. Servers weren't ready, or had disappeared owing to incorrect DNS entries, or the admin password had been lost or corrupted, or the patch levels were wrong, or the management priorities changed and now we needed to do applications BEFORE firewalls, etc, etc, etc. Only the week before, as the horoscope rightly reminded me, this constant change had been doing my head in. But on the day in question, I distinctly remember thinking that the only thing I really wanted to do was sit mindlessly shifting rows about in a spreadsheet because it was a simple, familiar task too close to therapy for comfort.

Italian Night

The latest safari night on the street kicked off at "new girl" Helen's place, where the antipasti were delightful and the Peroni and wine flowed freely from the very first ring of the doorbell. Yes, it was Italian Night this time round, and having managed to find a stripy shirt, a straw boater, and - courtesy of one of the many local charity shops - a single red curtain suitable for ripping into a rough cravat, sash, and a replacement band for the boater, I'd cobbled together a passable gondolier's outfit.

My imagination is clearly as limited as the majority of the neighbours: I was one of three gondoliers. If you think that's bad you should have counted the number of mafiosi in attendance! But as always, it didn't matter. The costumes are only there to get you into the spirit of the occasion, and there was more than enough spirit to go around.

Lasagne may have been a predictable menu choice, but it's all in the execution and this particular lasagne was murdered with relish by just about everyone. Everyone who had room left after scoffing the pizza and focaccia that followed the antipasti, that is. Thankfully the portions were small enough for me to enjoy a helping of spaghetti and spicy meatballs at the fourth house (add obligatory cod Italian accent when reading "spicy meatballs" of course. Something like this: sPIE-see meat-a-BALL!). By the time we hit the last house I could only just manage a single portion of tiramisu. Followed shortly later by an even smaller scoop of trifle. Not sure how Italian trifle is but by that time it didn't matter.

As always the conversation and the company, rather than the food, drink, or costumes, were the highlights of the evening and even though we were one house down due to illness our sojourn to la bella Italia was a great success and another fine chapter in the annals of neighbourly revelry.

Enthusiasm for safari nights remains undiminished too. At one point, when conversation turned to the topic of the next event, no fewer than six ideas for the theme were suggested. Enough to keep us going for another two years at least.

HOW many?

I bought Nikki a new Lumix camera for her birthday - she's been hampered for a while by the limited zoom on her old Ixus and envious of the 12x optical zoom on my (older) Lumix, so I thought I'd treat her - and I noticed the other day when copying some photos off her (new, 16GB) card, something that should have been obvious right from the start: the two cameras use identical file naming formats.

This could have been an issue leading to all sorts of photographic clashes and mixups, but for two things. Firstly, we file all our photos chronologically, in top-level folders named 2005, 2006, etc, so unless there was a chance of her "catching me up" it's unlikely that two pictures with the same filename will end up in the same folder. We just have to remember not to change the filing system to be, for example, topic-based.

The second factor is the precise extent of the remoteness of that chance that Nikki will catch me up. I have something like a 6-year head start with my Lumix and I was astonished to find, by comparing recent file names, that in those six years I've taken around 110,000 photos. The wonders of digital photography, eh? If I'd taken that many with my old 35mm film camera it would have cost me something over £25,000.

I'm guessing that there'll be a low-level option somewhere to adjust the file name convention but in light of the above we probably don't need to bother. Let's hope those aren't famous last words.

Vinyl: If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: n/a

Caravan's second album, and for me, and many other fans, one of Caravan's finest hours. Ever since I first heard it, the melodic soft-rock organ of Dave Sinclair exhibiting total synergy with the guitars and drums of the other band members have epitomised summer. Playing it at any time of year will always evoke summer, but actually saving it for a gloriously sunny summer's day with the smells of new-mown grass wafting in through the window in counterpoint to the sounds of superlative prog rock wafting out, is an experience guaranteed to have me smiling from ear to ear while I sing along with the familiar lyrics. Anyone who has never understood the hold prog rock has on us who came of age during the 70s only has to listen to this.

More bad news on the carpet front

Looks like we'll be camping out in the study even longer than anticipated.

The irony is not lost on me, that I put together a detailed plan to ensure that we'd be on the sofa bed for as short a time as possible. The plumber, the plasterer, and the decorator (me) were planned and scheduled to the nth degree, every day for four weeks, and we all kept rigidly to that plan.

Then, on Monday of this week, the plan fell apart. And today the carpet suppliers inform me that there is no stock of this particular carpet left anywhere in the UK (something I find hard to believe, since they are one of the UK's largest floor covering firms) and we'll have to wait for more to be imported. Due on September 6. I'll believe it when I'm walking on it.

Book Review: Stuart - A Life Backwards

Young volunteer at a Cambridge hostel for the homeless meets young homeless man and they decide to write the story of the latter's life. Backwards. Only it's not entirely backwards, since it ends, rather than begins, with his death, having shortly before the end discussed his childhood and its attendant traumas.

The chapters deal with blocks of time from Stuart's life, and these are taken in reverse order, but within each chapter time flows in its normal direction. So the narrative takes the form of a kind of running stitch - leaping backwards behind the scenes to start at a point several years before the previous stitch, but then moving forwards during the course of the chapter.

Masters is neither totally absorbed by, nor totally aloof from, Stuart. Their partnership in the creation of the work leads to what appears to be a "real" friendship - possibly, even, the only one Stuart has ever had - and indeed this is perhaps one reason for the criticisms that this isn't a "proper" biography. But the author skilfully avoids the traps of sentimentality, solutionising, or preaching when recounting the problems that Stuart deals with daily, whether these be internally or externally generated.

Perhaps the single most important thing this book taught me is that there are no simple explanations for why someone becomes homeless, or remains homeless, and similarly there are no simple solutions. But there are other lessons too. That it can happen to anyone, for example. Both homelessness and injustice. There's a lot of "there but for the grace of God" in this, but it is never mawkish, boorish, or overly focussed on the often horrific facts of Stuart's existence.

It's one of those books that, while it's occasionally an uncomfortable read, also occasionally has you laughing out loud. It certainly provoked one of the most interesting debates we've had for a long time at book club.

Family milestones

A little while ago I wrote a proud Dad post about my elder daughter, and today it's the turn of my younger daughter. For today is GCSE Results Day and all over the UK year 11s are opening envelopes, or reading notice boards, and either slumping or jumping.

In Blythe's case, there was much jumping involved I suspect. There certainly was here when she revealed her results - all passes with a highly creditable smattering of As and A*s in all the important subjects.

That's her passport to college, and her future mapped out for the next two years, which in these uncertain times is a welcome wedge of certainty. One other certainty is that there'll be a celebratory meal happening next time we see her.

What a difference a foot makes

Having spent the weekend tidying up the loose-endy type of jobs on the front bedroom - refitting the power sockets; replacing floorboards; checking for squeaks; pushing the lighting cables back into the ceiling void and refitting the light; caulking the skirting boards to avoid draughts; etc - we sat back this morning with excited expectation to await the carpet fitter.

He arrived mid-morning and within minutes of dropping his tool bag in the bedroom was wearing a worried frown.

"It's 570 this."
"That's right"
"I've only got 540 on the van."

Those being linear measurements, in centimetres, of the room and the carpet respectively.

Now I've made many mistakes in my life, but one of them definitely isn't measuring a room and getting the length out by 30cm. That's very nearly a foot. An inch and I might have accepted responsibility, but a foot? No way. So what's gone wrong? Seems to me either the salesperson made a mistake converting my Imperial dimensions to metric, or (more likely) when keying it into "the computer" she's hit the 4 instead of the 7.

But as you might expect, no-one is owning up to that, so we have two options:

1. Accept a join in the carpet, a foot from the window end of the room, using a piece cut from the side which would therefore have its "grain" going in the wrong direction. Not a very attractive option. 
2. Wait for a replacement piece of the right length, and pay for the (slight) extra yardage, plus a cutting charge for the mistake. Their mistake. Earliest possible return visit by the fitter? Friday. Might be next Monday. Also not a very attractive option, but slightly less unattractive than #1.

So that's what we've done. Guess we'll be on the sofa bed for at least another four nights. >sigh<

Vinyl: For Girls Who Grow Plump In The Night

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

After four albums, all of which by this time I had in my hot, sweaty hands, Caravan's line-up changed. Bassist Richard Sinclair left to be replaced by John G. Perry, and perhaps more significantly from my point of view - because initially I hated the effect his viola had on the music - Geoffrey Richardson joined from Spirogyra.

My reaction to the new boy meant that it took me longer than most to reach the conclusion, shared by many of Caravan's long-term fans as well as those who discovered them later, that 'Girls' is the band's finest hour, even if it never quite displaced my first love (Grey and Pink - still to come in these reviews) in my Caravanny affections. Sad to say it is also notable as being their last really great album, for while they continue as a band to this day, everything that came after failed in some respect to measure up to it. There were a few moments of magic and intervals of inspiration, but mostly... not.

Beware the painted hair

Had the new radiator fitted in the bedroom today - one large double to replace the three smaller singles that were connected in series beneath each of the bay windows. A positive side-effect of this is that I can now get to those final small sections of skirting board that were previously hampered by the old pipework.

Whoever installed the heating in this house originally had some funny ideas about plumbing. Like running the pipes as close as humanly possible to the skirting board, which meant when it came time to fit thermostatic radiator valves they had to chisel out part of the plaster to make room for them! And that there was no room behind the pipes to get to the boards for painting.

With the new rad sitting proudly beneath the central window and the old pipes removed, around nine inches of skirting board on each side needed sanding down, undercoating and glossing, and that small area of wall required a spot of filler and some Gentle touching up :o)

While I was on my knees with the undercoat, I noticed a paintbrush bristle painted into the wall. I usually spot these and pick them off while the paint is going on, but this was close to the top of the skirting boards and had escaped my attention. Since one end had dried sticking up it was easy to slip a nail under it and remove the offender.

Or so I thought.

The paint-hardened bristle had achieved unexpected strength, and stabbed me under the fingernail, drawing blood. Ow! Next time I'll be using a blade!

Everything stops for tea

Remember that old ditty about the English penchant for afternoon tea? It covers a lot of ground, talking about various activities that all stop for tea, and the final verse goes:

Now I know just why Franz Schubert
Didn't finish his unfinished symphony
He might have written more but the clock struck four
And everything stops for tea

We have it all wrong in this house at the moment. Everything stops for painting.

Yesterday: undercoat. Today: gloss. Picture rail, windows (three of them, with it being a bay), and skirting board. Takes between six and seven hours to get round the whole room - longer than doing the walls because by this stage I have to be careful with the edges, and there are a lot of edges - so it's no wonder I feel like I've done a day's work by the time I'm finished.

As for tea, well I don't stop for it. I drink it on the go. Mind you, that doesn't have to mean a break with tradition. I've been picking up my brush around 8am, so by the time "the clock strikes four" I'm done with painting for the day!

Wyrd or Woubt?

Chorlton Players' latest effort - a dramatisation (by Stephen Briggs) of Pratchett's sixth Discworld novel - that I spent Wednesday evening struggling to take photos of, at their dress rehearsal. It'll be the second (of three) nights tonight.

I say struggling, because being at least in part a spoof of Hamlet, it's all medieval and witchy, so the set is very dark to start with. When you combine that with the fact that  they've chosen (quite resourcefully, I thought) to handle the multiple scene changes using a series of slides projected onto the rear of the set, which means flash is out at least for shots taken head-on, and it all adds up to one big headache as far as photography is concerned.

So I threw away pretty much half of the ~300 shots, and wasn't all that happy with quite a few of the rest, but in the end I managed to salvage 98 half-decent ones which you can now see in the gallery.

There aren't any pics of the last five minutes or so, as my battery light started flashing red and I'm still a bit paranoid about continuing to shoot from that point on after that "memorable" night when I corrupted the card on the last photo and lost every one of the shots I'd taken. I keep threatening to invest in a second battery, but I only ever think about it on dress rehearsal night and by then it's too late.

Vinyl: Cunning Stunts

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

Caravan's sixth album, and the second one to feature Geoffrey Richardson on viola. By this time, I was warming to him a bit, although I still found his live performances a little... theatrical. But in spite of any personal antipathy I felt towards him (having, obviously, never met the poor guy), there was no getting away from the fact that he could play, and several of the tracks on this album are warmed and made more melodic because he's on them.

I note that some reviewers bemoan the fact that with this album Caravan strike out in a more commercial direction, but for die-hard fans like me it was just good to have another record of good Canterbury tunes to add to my swelling collection. Their, by now traditional, single long track this time around is Dabsong Conshirtoe, which ranks in my mind among the very best stuff they ever did. It's worth buying the album just for this.

It's the future!

I have a Slashdot widget on my iGoogle home page. Along with most of the other widgets on there, except Google Reader, I don't often pay it much attention, but today it displayed a tantalising headline: Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs. Having worked on VME for many years, I still retain an amused, distant interest in the activities of today's virtual machine enthusiasts. Here's a quote from the article...

"Their method is based on a combination of lightweight VM cloning (sort of like fork() for VMs) and on-demand paging. Seems like the 'other half' of resource oversubscription for VMs might finally be here."

Good grief. On-demand paging! Imagine that. Something we were doing in the mainframe world at the end of the 1960s. Next they'll be telling me they've invented a subsystem called Virtual Store Manager.

That's the trouble with the computing industry today. It's staffed with twenty-somethings fresh from college who like to think they're original thinkers and have no concept of, or interest in, history (or reinvention of the wheel). Even if they could be bothered to read up how we did it on mainframes they would probably not think it relevant (as a commenter on the article points out). Sad, really. The truth is high-end PC systems with massive amounts of memory and virtualisation technology look more and more like mainframes every day. They have the same problems, and those problems have the same solutions.

(If you're *really* interested, you can read the original Slashdot story here.)

The mask of doom

Masking tape and I have never quite hit it off.

However, since my worst experiences from years gone by have been with the older, traditional "beige" tape, the more modern painter's tape is specifically designed for the purpose and supposedly does a MUCH better job (quote from the main website: "This is the advantage of using low-stick tape: you can press it down very hard without worrying about the tape pulling the paint up."), and Nikki had expressed a preference for edges that were considerably less wobbly, I put my reservations to one side and applied a few metres of the tape - as reported yesterday.

I should have known better.

It's my own fault really. For not sticking to my guns in the first place and, worse, for not abandoning the idea after a very early indication of likely failure (I'd had to reposition the second piece of tape, and it took off some of the ceiling paint when I moved it).

So after slapping a second coat of Armagnac onto the chimney breast at lunchtime, I spent an increasingly frustrating 40 minutes this evening removing the tape, and an even more frustrating 45 minutes painting over the holes it left in my lovely white ceiling. Not a single piece of tape came off without some damage, and at a guess I'd say around 90% of the total length of tape used came off with some ceiling attached. Even more annoying, much of the paint removed was right on the edge, so repairing the gaps - sans tape - meant the reintroduction of wobbly edges, thereby rendering the whole exercise a complete waste of time.

I spent much of the rest of the evening with my grumpy face on.

A search of online information sources reveals a possible reason for the problem: "Normal Blue Painter's tape should not be used on faux, delicate finishes, lacquer or new paint finishes that have been done less than one month." What? Who in the world suspends a decorating project for ONE MONTH while one half of the job cures to the point where masking tape can be used? Tch!

It's a record

Achieved superluminal velocities after work while belting around the 'Gentle' walls, completing the task in under two hours thanks to (a) it being the second coat and (b) the judicious application of masking tape around the ceiling and chimney breast.

A straight edge was required by the Mistress of Ceremonies so I'd been round during lunchtime with the ScotchBlue™.

Colour my world

The good news is that yesterday morning saw the second (white) undercoat go on with no damage to the initial coat. I got away with it.

But if the undercoat turns a decorating project from a building site back into a room, then the next phase - applying the colour - brings that room to life. After a considerably shorter painting session than either of the previous two days, on account of having Nikki's help doing the low-level cutting in while I was working on those parts only accessible from a step ladder, this was the result.

The picture doesn't really do justice to the colours. It's the first coat so still a little patchy, and the full effect won't be brought out until the picture rail and skirting get their fresh new white paint, but it gives an idea of the final look. The lighter shade, which covers all the walls apart from the chimney breast, is Crown's "Gentle" matt emulsion, while the accent colour is provided by their "Armagnac." Yeah, I know. We had that conversation about "who chooses the names of the colours" too.

Second coat tomorrow night after work, and then "only" the woodwork remains. Radiator fitting booked for next Monday. Carpet fitting booked for the week after next, but I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to bring that back three or four days and give us a weekend to move all the furniture back in.

When a room becomes a room

It's been a quiet week on the bedroom redecoration front as we watched the damp patches receding, and worried about whether they were receding quickly enough. My plan had me applying the first (sealer) coat of white emulsion to walls and ceiling today, and it was touch and go whether the drying would be complete or not. Other activities during the week (including the famed monthly curry night) were suspended in favour of preparation - mainly sanding of windows and skirting boards - which was hampered on account of having fingers permanently crossed.

This is a self-imposed deadline, it's true, but the plan is designed to avoid this job hanging on longer than necessary. No-one enjoys having the entire house turned upside down, and one of the best ways to keep up the pace of painting is to book the carpet fitters and work to that date as an immutable fixed future point. Even though it's not really.

This stage of the proceedings is always one of my favourites. It's the moment when a room in progress turns from a building site, with its bare plaster and woodwork splashed with dried PVA, back into something that's recognisably a room.

The finish may be patchy (I always apply two coats of white before the colour) and the woodwork still has that post-sanding mottled aspect that makes it look vaguely diseased, but it's no longer just a newly-plastered room. It's visibly on its way to becoming a bedroom once more.

I took a risk, in the end, with the dampness. There were still one or two small patches of plaster not entirely dry. I won't know until tomorrow whether this will be a problem. The last time I started painting too early the second coat ripped the first coat off in places, leading to all kinds of patching up and rework issues. Very frustrating, not to mention physically demanding, as it was the ceiling causing the problem. This time the trouble, if there is any, is restricted to small areas of wall. Fingers crossed I'll get away with it, but for the moment at least, the deadline is safe.

Watching plaster dry

It sounds like it should be as boring as watching paint dry, but I can tell you watching plaster dry is much more interesting than that. Every time I walk into the room, the pattern of damp has changed. Receded. It's fascinating, in its own way, and every centimetre of changing colour, from the deep maroony-brown of wet plaster to the clear shining almost-alabaster aspect of dry, brings us that much closer to the day when painting can start. Which, according to my plan, will be Friday.

Yes, I have a plan. We don't want to be camping out in the study for any longer than we can help, so to bring the schedule in in the minimum time requires that things like radiator and carpet fitting are booked in advance, which it turn means we need to know when the wall painting will be complete (for the rad) and when the woodwork will all be done (for the carpet).

Still, no photos yet. I may be sad enough to get some small frisson of excitement from a visibly decreasing patch of damp wall, but I wouldn't dream of suggesting you are too :o)

Warble

It's been a long time since I've sung karaoke, so when I heard that Chorlton Players had organised a karaoke fundraiser, I was among the first to sign up, and the first (apart from DJ Annie, and Simon who was playing the part of doorman for the night) to arrive.

I was conditioned from a very early age to turn up right at the start of events like this. My parents were always the first to arrive at (and usually the last to leave from) any parties, weddings, or family gatherings to which we were invited, so naturally I grew up thinking this was the way it was done. I don't recall any pithy phrase of my mother's that accompanied these early arrivals, so this story won't feature in "shit my Mum says"; it just was. As I  got older, I soon realised I was in a minority in this respect, and sure enough with a posted start time of 7pm it was after 8 when the first of the "real audience" turned up, by which time I was champing at the bit to get going with the song I'd had cued up almost since I arrived.

A traditional starter for me - Gerry Rafferty's Baker Street - an easy melody to get the pipes warmed up. As I progressed during the course of the evening through a series of my most favourite karaoke staples, I realised just how long it had been since I sang any of these in public, and how easy it is to get out of practice with the nuanced phrasing of songs like Vincent, Desperado, and Englishman in New York.

Still, you know, it's karaoke not the Royal Opera House, so who cares? We all had a lot of fun and some good choons got sung. Not sure it was much of a success as a fund raiser - I think they needed 30 people to break even and I counted 29 at the busiest point - but if *almost* 30 people can have such a good time for a whole night and not actively lose money, it can't be that bad.

Vinyl: Canterbury Tales

Artist: Caravan

Owned on digital media: No

Want to replace: Yes

As a general rule I don't like (a) live albums and (b) compilations of "best of" tracks (especially when I already own all those tracks on their original albums). In the era of MP3, playlists have pretty much eaten "best of" albums' breakfast, so this is very much an album of its time and you may think with all of that said, it stands almost no chance of a place on the want list.

And yet... and yet... I can feel my inner completist bleating about how good it is, and demanding that I head over to Wikipedia and make absolutely sure there's *nothing* on here that I don't already have/wouldn't already have if the want list were all fulfilled. We'll see.

Construction Complete

Compare this photo with the one taken four days ago. The phrase that springs to my mind is "new rooms for old" but then I always was a sucker for The Arabian Nights as a child.

The chimney breast looks the dog's bollocks with its new length of skirting perfectly fitted and a rather high-quality plaster vent in place of the crappy repro fireplace. The wall to the left of that is one that was plastered yesterday. Drying nicely. In fact as I type the ceiling is almost dry already, so  my allowance of seven days for drying before I can start wielding the roller is looking generous. I will wait the full week though. Experience tells me that plaster which LOOKS dry can still be sweating a bit, and the first coat of paint either won't go on properly, or it will blister when it dries as the last vestiges of moisture struggle to get out through the paint, which can lead to all sorts of problems with the second coat.

The drying time won't be wasted though. We'll be sanding woodwork and doing other prep this weekend. Oh joy.

A drop in the ocean

The 'drop' in question being, as you might have guessed, our bedroom ceiling, which I guess makes the 'ocean' the vast sea of home improvements that stretches before us with no land in sight!

After the initial horrendous mess on Day 1, when our builders sealed themselves into the room, and then sealed themselves into those suits that forensic pathologists wear on the telly, with heavy duty breathing masks and elastic around the extremities and proceeded to make scary rumbling noises for four hours, fetching an estimated ton of sooty insulation, slate, brick, wood and other assorted bits of detritus down from the ceiling void, along with the lath-and-plaster ceiling itself of course, came Day 2. The reconstruction phase. Tying the somewhat flimsy original ceiling joists to the much more substantial flooring joists of the loft room floor, installing a steel beam to replace the original wooden beam across the bay window and screwing this to the wall plate and finally, once a stable, level surface was established, boarding it all out with plasterboard.

Here's how it was left at the end of yesterday. Today will see the final "construction" jobs - like attaching angle iron to corners, etc - completed, ceiling plastered and maybe some of the walls too. Good thing is, most of the really bad mess is done. I'm already looking forward to the weekend, when I'll be able to get going with my bit!

Book Review: Timolean Vieta Come Home

The book club choice for July, and I think it received most votes on account of being the smallest of the three selections on offer, and also having relatively large print. Everyone knew that, even if it was crap, it would be a short and easy read.

I nearly didn't get past page seven. The sentence "His then boyfriend, a middle-aged Austrian music publisher whose name had slipped from memory but whose big, grey moustache and fierce, hooded eyes lingered on, had just announced that he was going to sleep in the spare room that night, and that Cockcroft could suck his own stupid penis for a change." brought me to an abrupt stop, wondering whether I really wanted to read any more like that (assuming there would be some more). But I was reminded of the reaction of another book club member from years back - she hasn't been to the meetings for about three years - to a line in a book I had recommended. May's The Many-Coloured Land. One of the minor characters says something about "having to get himself some gash" on his return from a long space mission, a sentence which had had a similar effect on her, back then, as Dan Rhodes' line had just had on me. I resolved to plod on.

Only it wasn't really plodding. The book did indeed turn out to be a very easy, if somewhat unstimulating and unsatisfying, read. Its online reviews frequently make much of Rhodes' beautifully crafted prose. A shame, then, that someone with such talent for the written word should use them to say not very much of any interest. The book is a series of short stories masquerading as a novel, with the stories thinly connected by the meanderings of the eponymous dog, who has been kicked out on account of the antipathy of his owner Cockcroft's latest lover. Cockcroft himself, his life, loves past and present, and many failures - as a composer, friend, lover and even human being - feature large in those parts of the book not devoted to the many characters the dog meets on his travels, but as Rhodes gives us little or nothing to like about Cockcroft, his reminiscences and liaisons never get under the reader's skin. Since the dog himself is little more than a narrative device, he elicits no sympathy either, and the people he meets and whose stories we read about in the aforementioned lambent prose, are come and gone in an instant far too brief for empathy or identification.

So once again, a book club read has left me with a huge feeling of "so what?" It's true that it is far more enjoyable to read a well-written book than a poorly written one, but no matter how well written it is, if the subject matter is nothing more than a loose agglomeration of everyday people doing everyday things, what IS the point? I may as well have been watching Emmerdale.

First night camping

Well, I say camping. We're on the sofa bed in the study - "camped out" for the duration of the work that's going on in our bedroom. The ceiling is due to come down today, for reasons explained earlier.

Our new IKEA sofa bed "LYCKSELE" (??) proved remarkably comfortable. To say we've left a 6-foot bed and moved to what is effectively a "put-you-up" that's only fractionally wider than a traditional double (4 foot 6), the experience felt nowhere near as cramped as I was expecting. We both agreed that it will be fine for the expected five-week hiatus, and more than adequate as an occasional guest bed. The mattress is firm without being hard, there are no creaks or wobbles from the frame, so all in all the camping is going pretty well on the evidence of one night.

Even the eerie blue light from the PIR detector that clicks on whenever either of us moves has its uses. With dark-adapted eyesight, it illuminates the room very well for those essential nightly sojourns to the bathroom.

There is one blue light that I'll have to do something about though, and this will raise a hollow laugh in at least one young lady reader. That flashing blue light from my PC when it's in sleep mode will have to go. But that's OK. I found the BIOS setting for it this morning. I have the power to change the power down mode :o)

Preparing to drop

Today we cleared out the last of the furniture from our room prior to the ceiling coming down tomorrow.

Bedside tables slid into place in the study alongside the chest of drawers, and our 6-foot sleigh bed followed them, disassembled into its constituent pieces which we distributed around the room where they will be most stable and least hindrance in the coming weeks. The mattress was the hardest to find space for. In the end we decided it would have to go on the last few square feet of visible carpet on Nikki's side of the study, meaning she won't be able to reach her curtains until we move back into the bedroom.

This left just enough room on my side to deploy the new sofa bed in preparation for our first night's "camping out" tonight.

The empty room echoes eerily, as empty rooms do. Although we weren't planning to do this room next, the unexpected chance say goodbye to the final example of the previous owners' décor - the once-ubiquitous rag-rolled flame colours - is definitely welcome, and the room will be much warmer once the fireplace is removed and bricked up. Those wanting to return houses like ours to their former Edwardian glory may hiss and make the sign of the cross at the thought of ripping out an original fireplace, but the fact is that this one is not original. It's not even a good reproduction.

Curreh!

Travelling to experience the delights of eastern cuisine is nothing new for us. When I first came to Manchester as a student we'd think nothing of piling six of us in a car and driving from Nottingham to Manchester for a curry, and then driving home again.

Last night, we made the pilgrimage in the reverse direction, the only concession to age being that we stayed over for the night rather than driving back in the same evening. These days, a whistle stop in Bridgford has the added bonus that we can, as I put it, "reset the visit flag" with mother without spending too much time trying to think of news to tell her that she'll forget again five minutes after we've related it, or insisting for the fifth time in half an hour that we don't want a coffee, thanks.

The restaurant of choice this time, at Ian's suggestion, was the Bombay Bridgford, just opposite the cricket ground. Traditional décor and seating, but those were the only aspects of this venue that could be considered run-of-the-mill. We enjoyed a much warmer than usual welcome from the smiling greeter, and the interesting and eclectic menu mixed some exciting specials among the more usual fare of kormas and jalfrezis. Having insisted before we set out that I wouldn't just go for the hottest thing on the menu, in the end I plumped for the chicken Jai Puri; the... er... hottest thing on the menu. So hot, in fact, that it came with a health warning.

"Have you had a Jai Puri here before?" asked the waitress.
"No," I smiled back, "but I have thirty years' experience eating very hot curries."

As it turned out, I needed every year of that experience to weather the waves of extreme chilli in this dish. Every mouthful tasted like boiling water on the tongue, among the more subtle flavours of coriander, cinnamon, vinegar, lemon and so on that make very hot curries such an irresistible choice for me. Absolutely delicious, and I made sure the owners knew how much I enjoyed their hospitality. Even the Peshwari nan was above average.

We don't eat out in Bridgford very often these days but it's a sure bet that we'll be returning to this place.

Windows 7

We've been running Windows 7 at home for some time, but yesterday I was scheduled to have it installed on my work's laptop as part of an internal pilot. There's been a few horror stories floating around from those who have already undergone the transition, so I wasn't expecting the upgrade to be glitch-free, and I wasn't disappointed. What should have taken a little over three hours turned into an overnight job as the rebuilt machine failed to get its encryption keys from the central server - the request stuck in a queue 11,000 items long with no way of reprioritising. Poor design, which has resulted in me having to go back in (thereby wasting an hour and a half from an already packed day) to collect it this morning.

I can only hope the works build is more stable than that on my home PC. Since upgrading I've been suffering regular blue screens (three or four a day sometimes, but usually at least two on the main occasions I wake it up from a sleep) in a video driver - atikmdag.sys. If you can be bothered, you can Google that for yourselves. I have. Pages and pages of forum entries bemoaning the problem, stretching back as far as Vista's first release in 2007, and still - three years later - no fix. It's a problem with a feature introduced with Vista known as TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) which was intended to allow the OS to recover from video card/driver timeouts without blue screening but which, when it fails, er... blue screens.

The failure has been attributed, at various times, to having two memory sticks instead of one (which can increase the risk of memory timeouts), Windows Aero features, hardware overheating (seems strange, because I always experience it either immediately after boot, or on wakeup, when the hardware is cold), hardware fault, or graphical driver errors. I've disabled Aero, but I still have two 1GB memory sticks and I may well have a transient video card fault, but I'd be willing to bet on the driver being the real problem. I had some similar issues on XP before upgrading the driver. Unfortunately I'm already on the latest W7 driver, so if that is the problem, at least for now, I'll have to put up with it. :(

At least W7 loads a heck of a lot faster than XP! (lol - but it's a humourless, hollow lol)

Vinyl: Better By Far

Artist: Caravan

Owned on digital media: No

Want to replace: Yes

Another of those albums where the years have ticked by and left me with no recollection of (almost) any of it, with the possible exception of the title track. Amazon reviews (there are three) of the digital remaster vary from thinking this is an overlooked masterpiece to disbelief that the band could have so badly lost their way and released an entire album of duff tracks. 

While it definitely will never count as my favourite Caravan collection, now that I know it's available I can't do other than add it to the want list, even if it remains quite a way down.

Beeb under fire

The culture and media Secretary has recently announced a review of the BBC by the Audit Office, which potentially may result in a reduction of the licence fee. Cue the predictable whining about "Tory cuts" from socialists and luvvies both within and without the Beeb, and the raising of spectres of shredded drama budgets and how we need to "protect our beloved and sacred Beeb from the wicked Tory axe."

I'd like to peer for a moment behind the curtain of party political bollocks and bring some calm rationality to the debate. Before we start I should nail my colours to the mast: I'm a firm fan of the BBC. I willingly pay my licence fee, and am happy that for the princely sum of 40p per day I get access to a load of quality, ad-free output, as well as a load of other crap I wouldn't watch, or listen to, in a million years. But hey, there are 26 million households also forking out their 40p a day and they're perfectly entitled to watch crap if they want to.

But that's not what this is about.

1. Every publicly-funded organisation, government department, local authority, or whatever is coming under financial scrutiny right now. To suggest that the BBC, which is effectively (if indirectly) funded by public money, should be exempt from this scrutiny just because it's in the "arts and entertainment" sector, is patently ridiculous. We're paying for it, we should be assured that we're getting value for our money. We can debate how that value is perceived in the BBC's dramatic or entertainment output, and I don't for one second believe the government should (or even can) impose any controls over that, but on the business side Auntie should be as well run as possible, and should be able to prove it.
2. Every large organisation embodies a proportion of waste. It's as inevitable as a thunderstorm in an English summer. Some are better than others but ALL will have some waste in them somewhere, and the longer the time that elapses between audits, the worse that waste will be. Whether it's more efficient procurement, industry standard benchmarking of costs and remuneration, better management structures, more effective administration and on, and on, every business can benefit from close scrutiny from time to time. The Beeb is no different in this respect, and a lot of the savings could, I predict, be made without impacting the core BBC business - radio and television output - at all. (Whether or not they WILL be implemented in this way depends on how much the implementers have a political axe to grind. I wouldn't, for instance, put it past some people to try to trash something like The Archers to give "the cuts" the maximum profile and impact among the listening public)
3. While we're on the subject of "core BBC business" - what is it that we actually expect from the BBC? What is the BBC FOR? Because as time goes on, simple focus on that key question can be lost, and corporations of the size of the BBC can easily fall into a mindset of "here's how much money the licence fee generates, now how can we spend it?" Which will usually lead, over time, to growth in non-core sectors of the business, leeching money from the pot and generating apparently legitimate business cases for ever-increasing licence fees. It's good every so often to take a step back and examine what direction the Beeb is moving in: what business, what outputs, what is really important? What do we - the people who pay for it - want it to be for? 
4. I hope the auditors will examine the thorny issue of "competitive salaries". No matter how much the corporation's leaders bleat about it, the BBC is not in competition with commercial media. They should exercise some discretion and play on the cachet of working for Britain's best-loved entertainment provider. The most high profile example of a hyperinflated salary deal was Jonathon Ross's £6million-a-year wedge, but he's gone now, so who's next in the firing line? Whoever it is, they don't need to be paid that much. Other recent examples of well-reported leavers - Brummie tosser Adrian Chiles and his vacuous sidekick Christine Bleakley - have been gone for a while. Do we miss them? No. Are their replacements paid as much as they were? No. Has that made a difference to the "quality" (*cough*) of The One Show? No. I rest my case. Anyone - and I use that word advisedly - anyone can present a TV programme. Assuming they can read. They are not "celebrities." They are not "stars." In a way, they're a bit like receptionists. They sit at the notional front desk of TV programmes and show people where to go. And we all know how well-valued receptionists are, don't we? TV presenters deserve similar wages. There, that's a few million lopped off the budget right there.
5. Finally - because this is turning (has turned?) into a lengthy diatribe and you'll be wanting your lunch - on the subject of licence refunds. It's been said that if and when the audit finds significant savings, these will be given back to the licence payer as a refund. No, thanks. I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I suggest that the overwhelming majority of licence payers can do without the couple of quid a year they would probably get back. Keep it. Make some good programmes with it. Don't give it to Ross, or Norton, or Wogan, or Chiles or anyone like them. Don't set up a new department. Don't buy a new manager, director, or executive. Make more programmes. Make better programmes. That's all we want from the Beeb, really. Isn't it?

Triple decker

A couple of years ago, I blogged about the night we woke up to find water dripping into our bedroom. Since then we've had the roof (and the gutters) replaced, and the downspout cleared of tile shreds, and there's been no repeat of the leak.

Unfortunately that's not the end of the story, as we learned recently when discussing other works with our builder. He pointed out something that must have crept up on us while we weren't looking. In that stealthy way things that you see every day have, of changing imperceptibly over time so that you believe they've always been like that.

Fact is, when wooden beams get wet they lose more than 50% of their strength. The beam in our bedroom, that holds up the bay window, is a wooden beam. Saturated by the leaking roof, it sagged under the weight of the ceiling (an original lath-and-plaster job), and then dried out in its bowed state. When examined closely from most angles, the ceiling can be seen to have adopted a dangerous curve vaguely reminiscent of the radio telescope dish at Jodrell Bank.

So the whole lot has to come down, the beam replaced (or at best braced and pinned) and a new ceiling put up. Being an old house, we know the ceiling void is full of sooty, filthy, pumped asbestos fibre insulation (because we experienced it on a small scale when the toilet wall came down), so when the ceiling is "dropped" (see how fluently I insert real construction terms into the story) the room has to be cleared. Totally. Including... the wardrobe.

This beast has never negotiated the bedroom door. Or the landing. It arrived in five (count 'em) boxes and was assembled in situ, so to move it out of situ will require some disassembly. And that, gentle reader, was this weekend's project.

In the end, and entirely predictably, the single wardrobe section proved not to be a problem. Much. Undoing the bolts that hold the two sides together did result in minor chewing of the veneered chipboard, but nothing that's visible in everyday use, so that's OK. With its pelmet removed the single side slid happily through the door, across the landing, through the study and now sits in its allotted slot beside the window.

The double side was not so easy. It proved literally a millimetre too wide to turn the corner into the study, but that was the millimetre that counted. We couldn't lift it over the skirting board either, as that meant it hit the top of the door. The only thing to do was commandeer some space in Nat's room for the duration. It makes an already small space even smaller, but it should only be for a week or so. Once the construction is complete the wardrobe can move back in and sit under a sheet while I decorate. Or we may decide not to bother until the carpet is down, to avoid too much toing and froing. So, a few weeks really then. Sorry Nat.

Our room doesn't half feel big without it though.

Wish in one hand...

I wrote recently about shit my Mum says, and I've just remembered something else she always used to trot out regularly when I was a kid. It was a memory of her grandma - whom she called Gram - and the old lady's reply whenever, as a girl, Mum would wish for something.

This homespun philosophy was passed on to me when I in my turn would make some wish, of the sort kids are wont to do. "I wish I had a bike," or "I wish I had someone to play with," etc. Round she would spin, eyes sparkling brightly at this new-found opportunity to pass on her worldly wisdom. "Wish in one hand," she would declaim, "and shit in the other, and see which hand gets full first."

And as I've remarked many times in the past, my mother's mind often works like some kind of fleshy programmed text which is incapable of independent thought. So this Epithet of Astonishing Profundity would inevitably be followed up with the observation: "that's what my Gram used to say, and she wasn't being rude."

Which, clearly, she was. She was revelling in the chance to be slightly naughty and use the word "shit" where in fact almost any other physical activity which could possibly have resulted in the filling of a hand would have served as an alternative. She could have said spit, for instance, although admittedly it would not have had the instant memorability of the mental image of someone actually shitting into their hand.

I did wonder occasionally what effect it would've had on my Mum if I'd taken her advice literally. If I'd walked up to her with my handful of shit stretched out in front of me and said something like "look Mum! This one got full first!" I mean, she would only have had herself to blame for putting such a mad thought into a kid's head.

Incidentally, the irony of referring to this stuff as "shit my Mum says" has just hit me since, occasionally, she did say "shit." Q.E.D.

The remastering starts

Having spent almost five times as long on the recording of our second album as we did on the first, and being much, much happier with the result, we decided it would be a good idea to go back and apply all the lessons we'd learned in the last five years to the older work and bring it up to the same standard. Remastering is, after all, a well-tried activity in "proper" music circles, and as that first album never enjoyed an official public release we figured we'd prefer to make it as good as it can be before letting it loose.

Suburban Nostalgia contained 10 tracks written by Beresford & Wallace, but we also each did a cover of a Genesis track. Retaining these covers would lead to all sorts of copyright complications and royalty payments (which we avoided first time round by not selling any of the small number of physical CDs we created for family and friends), so the remastered album will only contain our original work.

I've already redone the artwork in preparation for the new release and tonight we got together at Annie's place to start re-recording tracks, beginning with one of the ones I'd always been least pleased with. Old Love was written with a key transition in the middle which really stretched my range. Half of the song was either too high or too low, depending where I started, and the result that made the final cut of the first album sounded painfully thin and reedy in places. Happily, with new vocal warm-up techniques and some minor transpositions, the new recording is much stronger and includes some nice harmonies too - something Annie is becoming famous for. I have to admit I totally hate recording the harmonies. Although my musical memory has improved over the months, it still takes me several... takes... to "get" what she's trying to achieve. There's no denying it makes the final sound much richer, so it's something I have to put up with, but I don't have to like it!

Anyway, one down and nine to go before Suburban Nostalgia is re-released - this time for digital download.

I Write Like...

Apparently...

I write like
Dan Brown

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

but there again, earlier in the same novel,

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and later in that same chapter,

I write like
Stephen King

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

So all in all I reckon either (a) I'm unwittingly suffering from multiple personality disorder, (b) I haven't quite settled into "my voice" yet, or (c) I Write Like is just another one of those crappy Facebook apps that doesn't know wtf it's talking about.

The Graduand

I always remember it being "The Graduate" but I guess that means someone who has already graduated. What I learned today, and the first time I'd ever heard the term, is that someone in the act of going through the process of graduation is a graduand.

And how do I know this?

Because I attended Nat's graduation ceremony this morning.

I always hesitate to say that any one particular event or occasion has made me proud of either or both of my daughters, because the simple fact is that never a day goes by without me thinking how proud I am of them. I used to get really pissed off when someone would say to my mother "oooh he's a credit to you, Kath." I remember thinking "hang on, this is me. I've done this, not her." So I'm not going to fall into the trap of taking any credit for the wonderful people they've turned into. They're a credit to themselves, which is way, way more important than being a credit to me. In everything they do, write, or say. In every joke they crack, every kind word or deed, every mistake corrected or lesson learned, they fill their old Dad with wonder and pride and joy.

So, before this turns into a total gushfest of fatherly sentiment (too late! LOL) I'll bring it back to today, which if you like was a crystallisation of all of that, and more. The ceremony was relatively short, which was a blessing. A little of the Vice Chancellor and his soporific tones goes a long way, and on top of that I had... er... company. It was... not exactly comfortable, but, well, let's just say it could have been worse. Before we knew it the first of the 204 graduands was mounting the stage to collect their faux certificate (yes folks, that's a fake scroll they collect - it has to look good for the cameras) and I knew Nat would be concentrating on one thing - getting up and down those stairs without having a pratfall in full view of the assembled throng and those darned cameras.

I soon worked out that the ceremony was proceeding in alphabetical order of degree which meant we'd have the longest possible wait for the Zoology grads, but they zipped through the other 180-odd in record time and pretty soon I was on my feet trying to get a decent shot of The Handshake. I'd been practising with burst mode on my camera expecting that to give me four or five decent shots of the crucial moment. Big mistake. Rather than the one decent shot I would have been guaranteed had I stuck with the tried and trusted method, I ended up with four blurry snapshots on which Nat is barely recognisable. I redeemed myself (somewhat) later by capturing on video the replay of the "graduation DVD" footage that was being repeated on a loop in the other building.

And then suddenly... it was all over. Mother jumped a cab back to the train station and as neither Nat nor I really fancied sticking our little fingers out at the champagne reception, we drove home, stopping on the way to collect a celebratory Sub sandwich, which I reckon must taste even better when you're eating it as a fully fledged Bachelor of Science :o)

Water boy

We have a hosepipe ban here in the North West of England, as of last Friday. You might remember I blogged on United Utilities' incompetence a while back, and now the predicted ban is in place.

Information on how to save water, and how to keep your garden alive without a hosepipe (save the bath water, the washing up water, use a watering can, etc, etc) abounds. Businesses that rely on hosepipes, such as the dodgy five-minute car wash places that have sprung up all over the place, largely unmonitored and, I suspect, not paying an awful lot of tax beyond what they're forced to pay on account of their water supply being metered, are exempt. This is understandable. We wouldn't want people thrown out of work just because we're running out of water, would we? No matter what tax avoidance scams they're getting away with.

But even so, I'd expected (in my naivete) that most businesses would at least be doing their bit to avoid wasting water. Not so the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive, apparently. I drove home this morning past a man with a van, and a handy hose-and-spray attachment, giving our nearest bus shelter a quick squirt. Because let's face it the one thing everyone needs in the middle of the worst drought since 1929, is a clean bus shelter.

Shake your booty

For reasons I won't bore you with, we're doing a fair bit of sorting out at the moment. It means we've uncovered a lot of boxes marked "eBay" - more out of a desperate hope that they might somehow list themselves and walk out of the door, than with any expectation that we'll ever actively engage in their sale - as well as making life-changing decisions to finally throw out that box of bubble wrap and the futon base that's a bit split.

Having (almost) confronted the eBay demon, we started considering other options for tat disposal, the most obvious and convenient being a car boot sale. There's one held every weekend at Bowlers, so we decided to pop along there today for a bit of a nose, suss out the competition and get some idea what second-hand books, CDs and DVDs sell for these days.

This short visit was a revelation on many levels, the first being that in the approximately thirty years between my last car boot sale (as a vendor) and this (as a browser) Nothing. Has. Changed. Except perhaps that, here at least, some indoor pitches have power, and vendors plug their tat in to prove it still works. Oh, and it's £15 for a pitch now, when it used to be a fiver. But broken down pasting tables? Check! Dog-eared paperbacks? Check! Unrecognisable bits of kitchen paraphernalia? Check! Old clocks, mirrors, grandma's teeth mug, scuffed toys, jigsaw puzzles in broken boxes? Yes, they're all still there. Might be exactly the same stuff as I used to pick through thirty years ago as far as I can tell, apart from the DVDs of course. We didn't have DVDs in 1980.

Most DVDs look to be selling for a pound or two. Some vendors had attempted to arbitrarily apply a range of pricing based on some vague perception of rarity, popularity or whatever, in 50p increments starting at £1. Others just applied a tatty notice stating "all DVDs £2" to a boxful. But whatever pricing was in operation, we never saw anyone browsing the movies. We later discovered this particular venue has a bit of a reputation for carrying snide merchandise, which was a bit disappointing as we've a couple of dozen to shift. It wasn't just films - no-one seemed to be in a buying mood. Punters in general were a bit thin on the ground; surprising for such a sunny Sunday. Maybe having such a large sale every week in the same place suffers from the law of diminishing returns. Certainly, on the face of it, we'd be hard pushed to make back our pitch price, which kind of defeats the object. Anyone want to buy a model Ferrari?

Silver Light

We attended a silver wedding event this evening for some friends, who also happen to be neighbours. One of the nicest families you could hope to meet, so it was an honour and a privilege to help them celebrate 25 years together, and a laugh to see all the old photos projected on the wall of the function room. That hair! That suit! That moustache! Etc. Well, it was 1985, and the eighties weren't exactly renowned for their fashions.

It occurred to me as we sat at the table and the conversation flowed around and through us, occasionally stopping to pick up some words and move on, like a verbal tram with an unpredictable timetable and a driver who may well have been R.P.McMurphy, that 1985 was also coincidentally the year I got married for the second time. Which means that, had I stuck it out, we too would be celebrating our silver wedding next month. Of course it's also true that, had I stuck it out, I would probably have been driving that tram, assuming I could have escaped the funny farm, so I think it's safe to say things have turned out for the best.

Our hosts being (reasonably) devout, we were "treated" to a blessing from "the father" at one point. Far be it from me to impose my beliefs and prejudices on anyone (although I hear fellow heretics shouting from the back "it never stops them!!"), but I could have happily done without hearing the message that the success of their marriage was actually nothing to do with their own efforts, but largely down to the beneficence of The Lord, who smiled down upon them from on high, probably on account of their having attended His Place of Worship on a regular basis.

Thankfully this drivel didn't go on for too long, as I was on the verge of converting to Dawkinism. I did wonder though, and not for the first time, exactly what credentials one requires to be a priest. Beyond the obvious predilection for... well... you know what I mean. By the look of the guy he must have been priesting for easily as long as our hosts have been married, and it wouldn't have surprised me to learn that he'd been at it twice that long. Yet in all that time he never found the time to actually learn the words of the blessing he delivered to the happy couple. Only a short passage, at most half the length of my introduction to this year's hotpot, which I learned in two weeks and delivered word-perfect on three occasions, and with many fewer polysyllabic utterances, but his years under the cloth had not provided sufficient opportunity to commit the simple homily to memory. He read it, falteringly it has to be said, from The Book, in a bored monotone utterly lacking in charisma or even any apparent interest. Apologies to Woody Allen but it made me think "those that can, do. Those that can't, teach. And those that can't teach, join the church."

Vinyl: Blind Dog at St. Dunstan's

Artist: Caravan
Owned on digital media: No
Want to replace: Yes

And so we reach the first (alphabetically) of the Caravan albums in my original collection. The default position for "Want to replace" for the next 8 entries will be yes (apart from the two I already have), which is not surprising when you learn that for many years Caravan were my favourite band. Hard not to tell the entire story in this first post but I guess I should save some of the interesting bits for later.

So what to say about this one? It's notable in that it is the only one in my Caravan collection I didn't pay for. It's the first (and so far only) prize I won in a radio phone-in contest. I happened to be listening to Radio Nottingham (not a frequent or regular occurrence) one summer's holiday when the competition question "who are the only two members of the original line-up still with Caravan." To a fan of my calibre the answer - Pye Hastings and Richard Coughlan - was a doddle, so I phoned up and left my message. I was back at Uni when the result was announced and had it not been for my mate Pete being an avid RN listener (at the time) I would never have been able to claim my prize.

As it turned out that may not have mattered too much because, to put it politely, this is not one of their better efforts.

Faster than a speeding email

It never fails to amaze me how fast email is.

Nat's sat here with me in the study today, and we're both surfin' and browsin' and generally being good netizens when a writing opportunity pops up that I think she might be interested in.

"You know that site I was telling you about before?"
"Yeah?"
"Well they're recruiting new writers, I'll send you the link"
"Okay, thanks!"
*copies link into email and sends*
"Thank you!"

The time that elapsed between me clicking 'send' and her saying 'thank you' could only have been measured by the kind of chronometer you might find in a physics lab. It appeared to be instantaneous. Certainly an order of magnitude faster than I could have walked over and handed it to her, and she's sitting less that six feet away.

In't t'Internet brilliant?

Missing the festivals

We had a surfeit of festivals in Chorlton this weekend. The ZestQuest BeerFest - which we have been known to visit in years past - on Friday and Saturday; and the Beech Road Festival - which to be honest we've missed more than we've hit over the past ten years - on Sunday.

This year, we contrived to miss both. Couldn't really summon up the enthusiasm on Friday night, Saturday afternoon was never really an option (I can only do afternoon drinking if it's immediately followed by evening drinking), and I knew, based on last year's experience, that there'd be no beer left by Saturday night so there was no point going. In this at least I was proved right when a contingent of Chorlton Players were turned away at 7pm as most of the beer had run out. An organisational nadir for Chorlton's favourite (i.e. only) beer festival, it has to be said.

Sunday was forecast rain and in any case we had plans to begin the long task of tidying up the attic space, not to mention meeting our new neighbour, so we made an early decision to opt out of Beech Road festivities again this year. In this case it may have been the wrong decision, as the rain held off and a good time was (allegedly) had by all. But we had a good time too, so it wasn't all bad.

Not only did we greet our new neighbour, we were invited round to imbibe a few glasses of wine in the company of her and her parents. All very nice people and another fine addition to the community. 2010 is going to be a big year in terms of changes on the street, as the guys further along finally put their house on the market this week too, so assuming they have any luck selling we'll be welcoming yet another new arrival before the year's out.

Stuff my Mum said

We've all heard of "Shit My Dad Says", right? Well, you can Google it if you haven't. What? You want me to do everything for you? Good grief. Alright: here.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Well my Mum doesn't say much these days that's worth reporting. It's not like she's as clued up as that guy's dad. But way back when I was a kid she used to say a bunch of weird shit. I mean, I was fifteen before I discovered who "our Side" was. I thought he was some fat bloke my Mum used to know. Whenever she saw a really fat person she'd say he (or she) was as fat as our Side.

Who was he - a long lost relative or something?

No. It was me not hearing properly. What she was really saying was that they were as fat as a HOUSE side.

The Excellent Eight

In response to several (well OK, two) comments wanting me to come clean about which tracks in the Storm the Charts top 40 I'd rated "excellent" I thought I'd make them the subject of a post in their own right, rather than hiding them away in the comments. They are, after all, excellent. According to me at least. And according to several thousand other people too, if their current positions in the Amazon chart are any indication.

I've called this the "excellent eight" but as it happens the top 40 has been subjected to some last minute adjustments on account of a couple of acts not managing to make their work available through the required outlets in time. As a result of this, one of the tracks I didn't consider excellent was replaced by one that I did, so it's actually an "excellent nine" now. Oh well. I'm lucky enough to be able to afford the extra 49p.

49p you say? Don't you mean 79p? Well, maybe. But there's a good chance (I haven't checked) that this extra track is one of the 32 whose price Amazon has dropped this week. Are they supporting the Storm? Who knows, but as they say in retail "every little helps."

Anyway enough of this waffle, here are the tracks I'll be downloading later today, with their artists:

Emily Barker and the Red Clay Halo - Nostalgia.  [listen here] [buy here]

The Lovedays - House of Cards. [listen here] [buy here]

Woodpigeon - ...and as the ship went down, you'd never looked finer. [listen here] [buy here]

Pocket Satellite - Toy Train. [listen here] [buy here]

Olivia Broadfield - Don't Cry. [listen here] [buy here]

Rubika - Robots. [listen here] [buy here]

The Portland Authority - A New Year. [listen here] [buy here]

Penny Black - Green. [listen here] [buy here]

My Luminaries - Parasol. [listen here] [buy here]

Vinyl: Moonmadness

Artist: Camel
Owned on digital media: Yes
Want to replace: N/A

The last Camel album on my list, their fourth album and the last to feature the original line-up. In listening to their stuff over again, I find it quite hard to decide on a favourite album of theirs in my admittedly limited collection (they released eight albums I've never heard).

Their third - Music inspired by The Snow Goose - was a favourite for some time even though it doesn't appear in this series of posts on account of me never having owned it on vinyl. It was the first Camel album I owned but I bought it on cassette tape and replaced it directly with the CD almost as soon as it came out. But now I find the typically haunting melodies and lyrics of Moonmadness are bewitching me again. This, along with Mirage, is rapidly becoming the Saturday morning music of choice, and particularly good for winding the wick up so I can still hear it over the sound of paper being scraped off the walls.

Back in the saddle

Seems like a long time since I did any serious writing. Novel #2 has been in the starting blocks for almost nine months but with only a little over 2000 words written it can hardly be said to have got started yet.

So I was grateful for a link from a mate at the end of last week, pointing me in the direction of a Manchester-based writing competition that closes on Friday of this week. Luckily - in view of the extremely short deadline - it's a *short* story competition. No more than 3,000 words and on any topic at all as long as it reflects city life in some way, and the city of Manchester in particular plays "a central role" in the story.

Always a good sign when an idea pops into one's head straight away, which is exactly what happened to me as I flicked through the competition rules. I'm on to the second draft now, and really pleased with the idea I've come up with for the ending. The short story is a form I'm entirely unfamiliar with, as a writer not a reader, although I have read the odd article on the particular challenges faced by short story writers. I refreshed my memory of those over the weekend in a couple of stints of Internet research, interspersed with actual writing. I know myself well enough not to fall into the trap of spending all my time reading about the good practice and no time on the actual doing.

Winners are announced at the beginning of August so that's another bonus - I don't have to sit around for weeks wondering how I've done. Always the worst part.

Blattered but not Broken

Sepp Blatter has been conspicuous by his absence since Sunday afternoon. Calls for his resignation, or at least a reconsideration of his ridiculous policy not to allow goal line technology to be introduced in international competition, have been legion.

His arguments - that football is "a human game that contains human mistakes" - sound like something you'd hear in an Amish community hall. Tennis too, is a human game, but the number of human errors has been greatly reduced with the use of HawkEye electronic line judging to supplement - not replace - its human counterparts, and avoid the kind of glaring error of judgement or momentary lapse in concentration that marred Sunday's England v Germany fixture. Cricket too has seen HawkEye deployed to assist the umpires. So why is football - the most ubiquitous game on the planet and a multi-billion-dollar industry - kept in the dark ages by a ruling body who remain inexpicably and embarrassingly unmoved by two examples of refereeing incompetence in a single dismal day.

Closing your eyes, ears and heart to the march of technology in the name of keeping the game "pure" is like saying that writers should continue to use quill pens, or DNA evidence can't be used in criminal law, or policemen should continue to rely on whistles and truncheons, eschewing radios, tazers and patrol cars. Technological advances are there to help humans achieve their highest ambitions, not replace them.

It's simply beyond belief that we even have to have the debate. The correct decision is so obvious. I'm not saying we would have won if the half-time scoreline had been, correctly, 2-2. But there can be no doubting that the decision to disallow a perfectly good equaliser took the wind out of England's sails. Even though they were outclassed for most of the game by a fitter, younger and far hungrier German side, we had already proved we could score 2 to match their 2, and the demoralising effect of having one of those two snatched away simply because the officials could not do their jobs properly should not be underestimated. At least, if we're going to get totally slaughtered, let's have the scoreline reflecting the number of goals actually scored.