Video Saturday – My Dad

No, its not my dad, its someone else.

Being thrown out of the house by our daughters last night as they wanted to host something called “a birthday party”, the woman and I debated at length where to go, we don’t do “going out” very much these days and some of the pubs around here can be, how can I put this, shit.

So we went to a local swish hotel, to sit in their Brasserie bar and lose all our money.

It was even swisher than usual last night, as we walked across the car park we could see lots of christmas lights and lots of people milling around in evening dress, and here was me in jeans and a jumper, but the Brasserie bar was empty, completely empty apart from a group of three businessmen sat in a corner, and in that way that you can’t help I found myself listening to their conversation instead of the wife – they were talking about Frank Sinatra.

And then one of them stood up and told the others he’d better go get changed and ten minutes later he arrived in a dinner suit, entered the function suite beyond the bar and started his routine – he was a Frank Sinatra tribute act.

So for our £4.20 for a small glass of wine and £2.70 for an orange juice we got to listen to, if not see, a Sinatra tribute act for an hour or so.

He was ok, you can tell though when you are a secret Sinatra fan by recognising not just the songs but also the phrasing from the songs and which album they are from dependant on the phrasing and the little one-liners that Sinatra would slip into his songs – the tribute act took his repertoire exclusively from the “Live at the Sands” album, how sad am I ?

He wasn’t as good as this bloke, pictured here at Cayton Bay, though…

 

See the looks of despondency on the faces of the other talent competition contenders ? They sit there thinking, “Oh shit, they’ve let Frank Sinatra enter this year, and here’s me with my Connie Francis act that sounds more like Hilda Baker…”

21 Years Ago Today

…So after a few hours waiting in a holding pen in the maternity suite during which the boredom was only relieved by listening to the bitching and whining coming from an Australian woman in the next cubicle who thought that she was about to drop a baby any minute now despite the nurses telling her it was currently physically impossible for anything larger than an ant to drop from her womb, we were finally told “You’re ready now” and taken upstairs to the rather appropriately named “Delivery Rooms”

I have to say, I was totally underwhelmed by the whole thing at this time, I had heeded the warnings at the ante-natal classes and had brought with me a large coat into who’s pockets I had secreted several bars of chocolate, a good book, and a Walkman (remember Walkman’s ?)  and headphones so I didn’t have to listen to the woman if I didn’t want to, of course I explained the Walkman to my wife as an aid for her labour, soothing music all that guff, it was for me really, it had all my cassettes with it.

21 years ago today…

21 years ago today…

Twenty one years ago today it would be a Saturday, we’d be living in a new two bedroom house on a new housing estate close to where we live now.

We had Samantha our German Shepherd dog to guard the house, of the twelve houses in the cul-de-sac that was our street our house was the only one that wasn’t burgled in the time that we lived there.

I was working for my dad and bringing home a pittance in “official” pay but more than making up for it with “Naupins”, cash fiddles every week that made it possible to survive just on my wage.

We had a new Nissan Bluebird, a very swish new model with electric gadgets on it, a car that was also “fiddled” as the rep at the dealer had done the lease paperwork deliberately wrong to keep the payments down, in order to comply with the hopelessly inadequate 6000 miles per annum that the lease stated we had to disconnect the mileage counter for ten months of the year.

We went shopping to Asda during the afternoon during which we met two of our friends and Suzanne mentioned to them that the baby was moving around a lot and she wasn’t sure but those might be contractions that she could feel…

…and those two friends rang us later that evening to check on her to find that we weren’t home, so after seconds of deliberation and a wonderful brain deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes they rang the maternity suite at the Leeds General Infirmary, to find the pair of us there, sitting patiently, awaiting the arrival of our first born.

21 years ago today we were still a two person unit, sans responsibility for anyone other than ourselves, on the morrow all of that would change and life would never be the same again, 21 years ago today neither of us slept at all through that night and then something miraculous happened early the next day.

to be continued…

 

Childrens Radio

1. There was this man, and he had a dog, a big dog, he said it was a Great Dane dog although we could never see it, not even when he did newspaper interviews and they took his photograph they would never photograph the dog as well, even though it was a very big dog, a Great Dane indeed, it would have been difficult to keep a Great Dane out of any photograph I would have thought, but no, the man was never photographed with the Great Dane.

But he brought the dog into the radio studio with him every day and every day, on cue, the dog barked while he was playing his introductory jingle, “Woof-woof” went the dog, just two barks, two barks that fitted exactly into the radio jingle that the man used, there was a slight pause in the music and the dog would speak, “Woof-woof” it went, never missed his cue,  that was a Great Dane with exquisite timing.

Other than that the man was excruciatingly poor on the radio, sycophantic, condescending, and just downright crap, and every time his show started flagging he’d bring the dog in again, “Woof-woof” the dog would say, just the two barks again, “Thank you Arnold” the man would say, “Thank you Arnold” he’d whisper off-mic, “you’re the only reason why the kids listen to this piece of shit that they call The Tony Blackburn Show in a morning”

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2. There was this other man who only worked on weekends, two hours on a Saturday and two hours on a Sunday, very early so that no grown-ups would hear him, just the kids listened to him for his show was for kids, young kids, young kids who should only be listening to songs that had been  produced specifically for young kids to listen to, songs about elephants who lived in circus’s but one night slipped their chains and ran away to Mandalay, songs about a policeman who laughed so hard that he couldn’t do his job properly, songs about a king who walked the streets naked and none of his subjects dare tell him apart from one small boy, we never learned what happened to the small boy after he told the barmy king that he was naked.

There are of course only a limited number of songs designed specifically for very young children to listen to and so every week the man who hosted the very early childrens radio programme played the same songs but in a different order so that the very young children would not remember that they had heard them all last week, or in the case of the Sunday show, yesterday.

And in between the songs he’d read out requests, requests that young children had made in hand written letters to him, requests for that limited range of young childrens  songs, and in between the requests a young boy would sneak into the studio and interrupt proceedings with two words, “Allow Dahrr-link” he’d say very loudly, “Allow Darrr-link”  in a very raucous cockney voice that grated against the eardrums for someone with a Yorkshire upbringing.

And the man allowed him to come into the studio every week and say “Allow Darr-link”, never tried to silence him, never apologised for the interruption to the show, every week it happened and some of the children who wrote in to the show actually started to request that the young boy say “Allow Darr-link” instead of playing those songs from the very restricted playlist that got played every week in a different order, and soon the young boy was a bigger star than Ed “Stewpot” Stewart, even though “Stewpot” Stewart didn’t know who the boy was and was never photographed with the boy in newspaper articles.

 

A Fine Day For Drying

Click it, it gets bigger

The latest one off the production line, entitled “A Fine Day For Drying” and depicts a scene from the Pennine moorland landscape where old farmhouses like these are scattered on the upper moorlands, long houses they are known as, 100, 200 years old, often older, from the days when a farmer lived in and amongst his animals, often lived out on the moors with his sheep, now many of them are converted to expensive, isolated houses, but you have to be a strange sort of hermit millionaire to want to take on a house on top of the Pennines where its always a good drying day, whatever the season.

Acrylic on primed canvas, 40cmx24cm

No Markets and No Memorial

You see last Sunday we sauntered down to Tynemouth and sought out the fleamarket which is held there evry Sunday morning on the Metro station platforms – all I’m saying is that Tynemouth must have been hugely popular 100 years ago because it has a railway station almost the same size as its own district boundaries.

We also took a wander along its clifftop crescent of regency style houses and apartments and played the game of “I’d live in that one, no wait, that ones got a bedroom balcony, I’d have that one” and then when we got back home to Leeds and checked the prices…

…well actually, some of them are affordable (files away info for future use, its almost inevitable that we will retire up there one day…)

The Sunday Sermon

Todays Sunday Sermon is hosted by the Very Reverend Dudley Moore

Video Saturday – Roy Orbison

Don’t know why I like Roy Orbison, there is no reason why I should like him, he was having hits in the 60s when I was enjoying the likes of The Beatles and a whole phalanx of British pop groups, he was a throwback to the fifties, even though he wasn’t, appealed to a slightly older demographic than myself, sat in a genre that appeared to have no genre, appeared to be a cowboy singer but wasn’t, why would I like his music ?

I just did, just do, its inexplicable.

So do Elvis and Bruce looking at that video, I must find out more about that performance.

Batshit Loony TV

Well that was an hour of my life that I won’t get back, the hour that I bothered to stay up and watch a Question Time audience mentally over-power a bumbling idiot try and dress up his political mantras as believable and workable policies for a government.

The only question left standing from Question Time this morning is “Does the panel think that Nick Griffin is a slimeball with racist, homophobic views, or is he just a bit simple ?”

Fortunately the BBC grew some balls last night and allowed the programme to go ahead with the odious Griffin as a panel guest despite the protestations  outside the studio of those who wished to simply shout him down without listening to his batshit version of politics – I’ve long subscribed to the thought that you should listen to every policy that every flavour of politician has to offer and then decide for yourself whether they are a credible alternative to the flavour currently in power, or simply batshit loony.

The BNP are very definitely batshit loony, but not in the nice way that the Raving Monster Loony Party were batshit loony, more like the way that the Nazi Party were batshit loony in the 1930s

Its just rubbish to me

So the binmen continue their strike after yesterday rejecting the City Councils “best and final offer” and their bullish Union leaders are making noises about continuing at least until Christmas.

Methinks its time to start burning our rubbish in the garden, fortunately I have a very efficient chimenea that roars like a railway engine when you stoke it up well, spits flame from the chimney like a jet engine on afterburn, devours anything that will burn and spreads thick black smoke all across the neighbourhood.

It’ll be just like the 1970s

It also helps that I have a very good friend who lives for the chimenea nights, Steve is the only man I know who can get a fire going with wet paper and two sticks to rub together and at the first flicker of flame will tend the conflagration like a young child until its devouring everything you throw into its belly at which point Steve is usually running around the garden looking for more wood which he usually sources from healthy trees, your shed, and any garden furniture that you were daft enough not to lock up before he arrived – I’ve even known him bring his own firewood to house parties with a hopeful look on his face that says “Are we lighting the chimenea ?”

My challenge to Steve over these next few months before Christmas is to get one of our chimeneas hot enough to burn metal and glass so that we can rid ourselves of the contents of the recycle bin, its a challenge that Steve will accomplish without too much effort at all, he missed his vocation by working at the brewery, he really should have been the worlds best pyromaniac.

Heres to a winter of bonfire parties…