Mnemonicus

It's the 4th of November again - which means that in six days time it'll be the 10th. Ha ha! Just kidding! Bonfire night tomorrow, though really this year it's been celebrated on the 3rd - being a Saturday. There have been loads of fireworks going off already; for several nights there have been the small explosions of rockets, bangers and the like going off outside. It'll be a miracle if there will be any left over for the actual 5th! I have a mnemonic (an aid to memorise certain things) which I have partially ripped off from this time of the year. It goes: Remember, remember, remember, remember, remember, remember Wednesday. Or was it Tuesday? Another one goes: Fireworks are alright On bonfire night But if they set your clothes alight It's shite

A POSTCARD FROM CACOPHONY

I live in a lovely little room in central Bristol; I've been here for about twelve and a half years - having moved in here in January 2000 - it's handy to town, all the shops, the bus station and Temple Meads railway station. My room looks out over the beautiful Brandon Hill Park - a magnet for tourists in the summer - and I am lucky to have many friendly neighbours living the length of the street. I've been a fully paid up member of BHRA (Brandon Hill Residents Association) for the past three years or so and, being a Bristolian, I consider myself to be extremely lucky to be living here. The history of this city fascinates me, and I am building a collection of books on the subject.
So why, do you ask, is this post titled 'A Postcard From Cacophony'?
Well, the problem is that I live in a shared house - or an HMO, as my fellow BHRA members refer to it (House of Multiple Occupation) - and, unfortunately, my room is currently sandwiched between an alcoholic below, and a young chap above.
The aforementioned alcoholic frequently comes in in the middle of the middle of the night - slamming his door repeatedly and playing his records very loud. This often wakes everyone in the house and, rather unsurprisingly, makes him very unpopular!
The young chap who recently moved in above my room has one recording - and one recording only - which he plays over and over. It's the sort of thing that you'll quite often hear being blasted from boy racers as they pootle about in their motorcars. The bass is very loud and intrusive, there is no tune, and there is an emotionally disturbed robot on drums.
Last night I had boy racer 'music' coming through my ceiling, and a truly sorry mixture of what I can only call 'total & utter shite' coming up through my floor at the same time. After I banged on my floor the alcoholic came up and knocked my door, asking why I was banging on his ceiling. When I pointed out that it was because his stereo was so loud I had hoped that he would take the hint!
Not only did he not turn it down he INCREASED the volume and played many of the same stuff over & over & over again. This went on into the small hours.
I'm a musician myself, and I am sure that there is a law against USING MUSIC AS A WEAPON.
I'm sure that it must be awful for the poor chap to be so terribly afflicted with alcoholism, but I do wish that he would find a nice hole in the ground to crawl into and leave me alone. I don't like having to bang on his ceiling, but I won't be dictated to by a total dickhead. It's as simple as that.
The young chap upstairs is also a bit of a lost cause. Myself & Martin (an old friend of mine who works at the theatre) have spent the entire duration of the young chap's tenancy cleaning up after him and, when I pointed out to him where the dustpan & brush and the broom were located, he got very upset, swore at me, and then threatened me with physical violence!! The funniest part of this was that he threatened me and behaved badly while Martin was present - so I have a witness!
It's Saturday, the 29th of September, 2012 as I write this so, if anything should befall me between writing this and sometime in the near future, you can rest assured that my assailant would have been either Tristan (I don't know his surname) from upstairs, or Adam Martin, the poor, deranged alcoholic from downstairs - or maybe even both!
Ironically, what with my constant backpain and the sometimes unending duration of the NOISE POLLUTION, it is I who is having murderous thoughts! I do not, however, want to have to go through the unpleasant, sticky and complicated business of killing these assholes myself; it would result in the loss of my freedom, and I wouldn't be able to live in this wonderful neighbourhood anymore.
Ooooh! It's just gone quiet!
How lovely!

On The Threshold of a Dream

So it had come to this. All his life, it seemed, had just been nothing more than a protracted preamble to this. He tried to search his memory for a clue, but the oxygen was low. So very low. He peered through the little window with glass so thick that it distorted the view outside. Just visible was a range of curiously-sculpted mountains in a colour that made him think of the sweets he bought when a child - four for a penny. And that was an old penny. Two hundred and forty to a pound. A thought idled its way through his mind; what would those mountains taste like? Would they be sweet? Four-for-a-penny sweet? A spacecraft. That was it! He was in a spacecraft. He was in a spacecraft on a distant planet. Something had gone wrong, but he couldn't for the life of him remember what it was. His memory was bombarding him with sights, sounds and tastes of his childhood. But his recent recollections were hidden from him. How long had he been here like this? He listened to his breathing as it struggled inside the confines of his space helmet. Then he recalled one of his father's Moody Blues albums that he used to listen to in his teens. He recalled the feeling he got whenever he heard the opening track of this album - this old vinyl record album. He remembered that he fancied that the long, even electronic drone that began the first track would sound like being in a spacecraft on a distant planet. Was it In Search Of The Lost Chord? His father had that one as well, but it didn't seem to fit somehow. Blinking away a trickle of sweat from his eye he looked wearily around at the interior of the spacecraft. What he was hearing didn't tally with what he was able to recall of that music from so long ago. All he could hear was his own laboured breathing as he slowly suffocated in the tiny little room on this nameless world so far removed from his own. He realised, somewhat abstractedly, that he was hungry. Very hungry. And thirsty too. He thought of a glass of sparkling limeade he'd enjoyed so much as a child. He tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was a piece of old, cracked leather; his mouth an equatorial tomb. Glancing again through the window at the candy mountains and the drear, alien skies - devoid of any meaningful sunlight - he sighed, the sound reaching his ears like some early Pink Floyd sound effect. From the Atom Heart Mother album, perhaps. The window suddenly rose upwards, being replaced by the dull, featureless expanse of grey that covered the walls as his legs gave way beneath him. His breathing was drowned out by the roar of his helmet scraping down the wall. Huge, purple flowers blossomed in front of his eyes. Just before he died he remembered the name of the Moody Blues album. It was On The Threshold Of A Dream. The first track was called In The Beginning. How appropriate, he thought to himself.

Dare2connect

Thanks to the ceaseless efforts of my friend Francis Kirkham I now have a new blog thing where I'm hoping to be able to post some of the music videos that I'm uploading to YouTube. It's called dare2connect and, although it doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with my iPad at the moment, I'm confident that I'll be able to get it to do the things that it's meant to do. I'm absolutely amazed at the millions of things that it is possible to do with computers! If you'd told me a few weeks ago that I would soon be able to upload my photographs and videos to a website I'd have looked at you as though you were completely bonkers in the nut! So please visit my new bloggy thing at dare2connect, look at my photographs, see my videos and, above all, enjoy!

Deus ex machina

June has been a wet and miserable month and, now that it's almost done, I've realised that I've been neglecting to add to my blog. By the way, I now have an iPad, so if this is in a different font or something it's because of that. That having been said, here it goes... My dear Mum bought me this truly wonderful piece of kit recently (it's a birthday/Christmas present combined for the next five years as it was so expensive) and I'm striving to get the maximum amount of use from it. It's about a million times better than my old steam-powered laptop, fast and, after an hour-long free lesson at the Apple store, I've already learned quite a lot about what it is possible to do on it. And I've even managed to use it to film myself playing tunes - and posted said tunes on YouTube! It did take quite a few trials, and a whole plethora of errors, but I did it in the end! Am I chuffed to bits? Well, actually, I am! Well chuffed! Of course, it took me so long to successfully post the videos that I haven't really had any feedback yet. When I (mistakenly, as it transpired) thought I'd posted the videos onto my Facebook page some of my friends got back to me to say that they weren't able to see them. As it is now two days later and I haven't had any more feedback I'm assuming that my friends maybe aren't expecting me to have mastered the technology yet. Can't say that I blame them really. It'll be July soon, and I hope the weather perks up a bit. It's the start of Wimbledon this week so, for the love of blithering crikey (thanks Hils), let's have some sort of Summer this year. Was going to add an image to this post, but I don't think it's going to let me. That's something else to try to figure out. Watch this space...

Welsh National Opera pictures

More pictures of the crew from daze of yore...

Mothers Day

Though I never saw any of his live shows, the legendary & amazing Frank Zappa used always to play a gig on Mothers Day. I more or less grew up listening to his music; I'll never forget the time that my Dad (the equally legendary & amazing Johnny Randall) brought home a copy of Hot Rats that a colleague at the Bristol Hippodrome loaned him.

I was quite used to finding strange records on the kitchen table during my early-to-mid teens; Hendrix's Band of Gypsys; the Moody Blues' In Search Of The Lost Chord; the Rolling Stones' Through The Past Darkly to name but a few, but seeing the picture of the demonic looking lady peering out from the edge of an empty swimming pool was startling - to say the least! But when I put this big vinyl disc on the turntable of our old Ferguson mono record player and listened to it I think that I can honestly say that that was a life-changing moment.

It blew me away.

And it still does all these years later. Having already heard quite a lot of Jimi Hendrix I was always going to learn to play guitar because of all the really interesting planets that his music took me to. When I heard Frank do his stuff I realised that there were several large and fantastic universes available to tour. Just pick up your guitar and off you go!

Of course, I had to learn to play first; and I always will be learning because there's so much to learn. Forty-one years later and I'm still doing it.

Thankyou, Jimi. Thankyou, Frank. Happy Mothers Day!