Bits and Pieces

It is alot cooler and we have  had rain in the night. Slept quite well too.

The Co-op in the  village closes down today at 6 pm for eleven days for a re-fit. That should make the Costcutter further down the road rub their hands with glee.

 The Co-op ATM is now totally out of commission. So it is either the one in Costcutter which charges you for withdrawals or the Post Office when they are open at 9 pm. 9 am.

Tomorrow ,after a morning in the Office, an afternoon in Ashford for a visit to the hospital - just a coffee shop visit though -  and then i might as well do the Cineworld visit afterwards.

A Sailing Morning

I must admit, i did not know what to select for the usual Sunday morning music post, and then it hit me, metaphorically speaking. I was listening to Radio 4 last night from the Round Britain quiz onward, and i was in a semiconscious state after that until this music came on.

Ronald Binge and Sailing By

It was composed in 1963, and performed by the Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra, and is the version used by the BBC for its late night shipping forecast.

Sailing By is played every night on BBC Radio 4 at around 00:45hrs before the late Shipping Forecast. Its tune is repetitive, assisting in its role of serving as a signal for sailors tuning in to be able to easily identify the radio station. It also functions as a buffer — depending on when the final programme before closedown finishes, Sailing By (or part of it) is played as a 'filler' as the shipping forecast starts at 00:48hrs precisely. The initial reason for its introduction was because of the indeterminate finish time for the preceding Midnight News, leading to filling music being played until the Shipping Forecast was due to start. Sailing By was added to allow for a clear break between the end of the music and the start of the forecast.

It is still being used today.  Also, this track was on a double CD compilation called "The Trip"  curated by Jarvis Cocker, ex-Pulp lead man. Enjoy.

Book 74 - Simon Reynolds "Retromania"

Simon Reynolds "Retromania : Pop Culture's Addiction To Its own Past" (Faber & Faber)




Fittingly, there's a lot in "Retromania" that will strike many readers of the Wire magazine and here too as pretty familiar. Reynolds engages in some righteous boomer-hating, asking if we'll ever be free of sixties-era musicians and their needless, endless nostalgia tours. He also goes neo-Luddite for a while, bitching about newer technologies' reduced fidelity and disregard for the album format.

Though Reynolds presents his arguments well, you can get this stuff elsewhere. "Retromania" really gets interesting – perhaps even vital – when Reynolds posits that artifacts and music of the past function as a species of cultural capital and examines how rock scenes look to both their own pasts and society's collective future for inspiration. In doing so, he neatly turns some well-worn rock narratives on their heads. He's not afraid of the obscure, either, examining the role that vintage clothing and record shops played in the development of both the punk and hippie subcultures and delving deep into the history of Northern Soul.

The problem – as Reynolds sees it – is that the technological and stylistic obsolescence that drove this economy is, thanks to YouTube, MP3s and torrents, now itself a thing of the past. Are new things, or even fresh takes on old things, a possibility in a world where the entirety of the past is available to all of us?

Reynolds doesn't really have an answer, of course, and I think he might have done well to include a clearer definition of what constitutes "newness." As Reynolds is not himself a musician, so much of his discussion, like so much rock criticism, seems to be a discussion of musical style rather than content. His arguments seem to chase each other around the text, too, perhaps even contradicting each other, but that is part of the book's appeal: the past, as Reynolds sees it, can either trap musicians in a permanent yesterday or provide inspiration for forward-thinking projects.

In the last chapters of the book, he examines how some retrophiliac acts like Broadcast and Boards of Canada have used the twentieth century's own ideas of the future to create hauntingly personal music that takes advantage of modern technology's ability to preserve large chunks of the recent past more or less indiscriminately. He also seems to argue that pop culture, and perhaps people in general, have lost faith in the future: while we get excited about techno gadgetry, most of us no longer believe that the future will be better, or substantially different, than the present. Still, when he examines the astonishing quantity of bravely experimental electronic music that followed the launching of Sputnik in the late fifties and the nineties' explosively creative, ruthlessly futuristic rave scene, he seems to conclude that a link exists between creativity and the belief that our tomorrows will be better than our yesterdays.

I can't say that I always found the author's case entirely convincing – indeed, I found myself arguing with him throughout the book – but he's provided some genuinely fresh ideas about pop music's relationship to its past and future that people who take their music collections as seriously as their mortgage payments won't want to miss. Recommended!

Book 75 - Carol Ann Duffy "The World's Wife"

Carol Ann Duffy "The World's Wife" (Picador)




It’s a collection of poems all on the same theme of overturning male-centred history, literature and myth, and looking at familiar stories from the neglected wife’s perspective. So, for example, we have Mrs Aesop tiring of her husband’s constant boring fables, and Delilah explaining why she cut off Samson’s hair (he’d complained to her that he didn't know what it was to be gentle, and so she’d done it to help him change, to take away the pressure of always having to be strong). There are also more modern characters, like Frau Freud, the Kray sisters, and Elvis’s twin sister.

There’s a playful, humorous tone to the poems, and I enjoyed reading them on a quiet afternoon recently in a sun-drenched beer garden. A lot of them had the same basic premise, of a wife wryly mocking her husband’s posturing and self-aggrandisement, and this got a bit repetitive after a while. My favourite poems were those that truly brought a new twist to a familiar story, imputing new and more interesting motives to the characters, as in the Delilah example already mentioned, or my favourite of all, Queen Herod. In this poem, we learn that it wasn't the King who ordered the killing of all first-born male children after all, but the Queen, who does it to protect her own newborn daughter: “No man, I swore, will make her shed one tear.” I found it a powerful and poignant reworking, and loved the last few lines:

We do our best,
we Queens, we mothers,
mothers of Queens.

We wade through blood
for our sleeping girls.
We have daggers for eyes.

Behind our lullabies,
the hooves of terrible horses
thunder and drum.

Poem Of The Week

From the Carol Ann Duffy selection in "The World's Wife" here is my second favouirte poem Little Red-Cap.



Little Red-Cap

At childhood’s end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud
in his wolfy drawl, a paperback in his hairy paw,
red wine staining his bearded jaw. What big ears
he had! What big eyes he had! What teeth!
In the interval, I made quite sure he spotted me,
sweet sixteen, never been, babe, waif, and bought me a drink,

my first. You might ask why. Here’s why. Poetry.
The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the woods,
away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place
lit by the eyes of owls. I crawled in his wake,
my stockings ripped to shreds, scraps of red from my blazer
snagged on twig and branch, murder clues. I lost both shoes

but got there, wolf’s lair, better beware. Lesson one that night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?1
Then I slid from between his heavy matted paws
and went in search of a living bird – white dove –

which flew, straight, from my hands to his hope mouth.
One bite, dead. How nice, breakfast in bed, he said,
licking his chops. As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.

But then I was young – and it took ten years
in the woods to tell that a mushroom
stoppers the mouth of a buried corpse, that birds
are the uttered thought of trees, that a greying wolf
howls the same old song at the moon, year in, year out,
season after season, same rhyme, same reason. I took an axe

to a willow to see how it wept. I took an axe to a salmon
to see how it leapt. I took an axe to the wolf
as he slept, one chop, scrotum to throat, and saw
the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones.
I filled his old belly with stones. I stitched him up.
Out of the forest I come with my flowers, singing, all alone.

Carol Ann Duffy 1999

Bongo In York

  Here is a pic of my friend Sharpie Bongo from a local festival reading some of her poetry.



This was taken in York at the Royal Oak and part of the Rebellion Punk Festival.


Here is a short poem on taxation by her, and quite amusing and correct.

14p Tax on Tampons- Could they be classed as "protective and necessary items to work"?

Oh government, how far reaching is your greed?
Not only am I in pain, tired and hormonal
YOU'RE FUCKING CHARGING ME TO BLEED!

Could I get a refund on my tax return, I ask of yer?
'Cause they stop my place of work
Looking like a massacre

This is a tax on women and I implore you to rebuff it.
Or like those pricey tampons
I shall tell you where to stuff it.

Ciders I Drunk in Spoons Cider Fest

I found my tasting notes for the cider festival at Spoons that finished last week. I shall list the ones i have tried in order of counties they come from.

Cornwall

Cornish Orchards Farmhouse Cider 4.8 % ABV -  fruity mellow and light

Devon

Sandford Orchards Pear Shaped 7.5 % ABV - bright crisp perry and full strength!

Somerset

Orchard Pig Maverick  4.0 % ABV - very tasty ginger and chill cider that slips down easy

Orchard Pig The Hog Father  7.4 % ABV - a real palate cleanser from this strong 'un.

Sheppy's Farmhouse Cider 6.0 % ABV - a traditional cider of fine quality

Shepton Mallet Cider Mill Somerset Tree Shaker 7.0 % ABV - a medium dry fruity cider.

Hampshire

Mr. Whitehead's Beetroot Cider 4.0 % ABV - strange combination but what a flavour with a red purple feel.

Mr. Whitehead's Boxing Dog 7.5 % ABV  - a strong cider of distinction.

Suffolk

Waddlegoose Lane Woodpsrite 3.8 % ABV - clean tasting cider with a toffee apple flavour yet light.

Leicestershire

The Bottle Kicking Cider Company Cross Farm Perry 5.0 % ABV - slightly cloudy delicious cider,

East Lothian Scotland

Thirsty Cross Cider Whisky Cask 6.9 % ABV  - whisky cask aged cider infused with honey and oak and so yummy.

County Antrim, Ireland

DJ's Juice And Cider Tempted? Summer Sweet Cider 5.4 % ABV -  full bodied and sweet.


And there you have. Who needs foreign ciders when you can have these great British ones.