I hope your weekend is going well. I’m a bit tired. Got home from a concert in London at 3 AM this morning. I went to see a band called The Heavy North, at The Old Blue Last, a pub (and former brothel apparently!) in Shoreditch But I’m OK with this kind of tiredness. I used to live my life in a perpetual state of exhaustion. I spent so many of my early years in…
I’ve been listening to a lot of 1970s music this week. On Twitter I follow someone who posts polls each fortnight, asking people to vote for their 5 favourite albums from a particular year. This fortnight people are posting their recommendations from 1976. Most years my decision making is pretty fluid up until the last minute, but this time my choices are pretty much cast in stone. Well, four of them are. A couple of…
I was pinged on Thursday. Apparently I had been in close contact with someone on Monday 29th who had tested positive for Covid. My test results were negative. It’s just a stinking cold then. I’m not surprised I was pinged – on Monday night I was at a Stereophonics concert in Portsmouth. This was, by their standards an ‘intimate’ gig, (they are due to be playing a couple of 70,000 sellout concerts in Cardiff soon).…
It’s been a while (again). I’ve been really busy with other aspects of life over the past couple of weeks. I resigned from my day job, (you don’t think I make a living from poetry do you?), last week, and start a new one on Monday. My old employer seemed surprised that I didn’t want to stay working on a week-by-week contract having been brought back into my old role on a one month trial…
We finally won the pub quiz at our local the other week. Two and a half years of trying, losing on a tie breaker twice and second place on so many other occasions, often by 1 point. Sometimes less. It was a moment of relief, a time for celebration. And also a time for disbelief. Each week there is a news round. I have stopped watching the news. Picking up snippets here and there. The…
I nearly always write to music. Quite often I’ll listen to the same track on loop whilst writing. Plenty of other writers I know don’t do this, preferring to work in silence. But I struggle to write without having music on in the background. The music doesn’t have to be related to the subject matter. Song for Zula by Phosphorescent is clearly a song about broken love, about something that wasn’t as it seemed, but…
Sometimes the past rushes back in an instant. It doesn’t take much. I was on Facebook yesterday, completing a song-title list challenge; Ok music lovers — here are the rules:Answer each category with a SONG TITLE. No repeats and don’t use the internet (it’s tempting but try not to). Go with the first song that comes to mind, change the answers to your own. My list was as follows; * Something to wear – All…
I simply don’t get those people who state that they don’t like music. Surely they just say this for effect? Surely enjoying music is part of being human? Surely they must like something? Mind you, in the old days before the lockdown,(how long ago this already seems), when I was working in recruitment, I’d occasionally get sent a CV in which the candidate had claimed that they enjoy all types of music. Maybe it’s just…
Last Friday I went to a show at the Winchester Discovery Centre Planetarium. Described as an epic fulldome experience, now featuring newly revamped graphics, it was an opportunity to listen to Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon , from start to end. Some of the graphics hadn’t aged well, but despite this, it was still a very enjoyable experience, and something I’d like to repeat with other albums. The same band’s Wish You…
Apart from Brexit and being off work for the tail end of the week – and missing today’s Pompey home game due to having a heavy cold, it’s been a good few days. On Wednesday I headlined at Chichester Poetry, which was great – a nice appreciative audience, and some excellent open mike poems from poets I was unaware of beforehand. I also had a poem accepted for the next edition of South Magazine the…