Well, there’s a novel experience. Watching music. In the actual outside. In a place.

For the first time since March last year I was a actually in a live venue, watching real live music, and it was a conflicted experience. After doing an LFT yesterday afternoon (negative, obvs), just in case, and taking the short walk to the Pavilion, I had a minor diversion when I realised the top entrance wasn’t open (and blocked off), and had to wander down the hill to get in. The signs on the front door were telling people to use face coverings inside, but…

SPOILER ALERT: I WILL BE TALKING ABOUT PLOT

At points in the past I have had a personal and professional interest in the problems of archiving, and simply how best to properly remember things. When a friend who knew about my interests said they’d read this book and that I may be interested, off I popped to speak to Ian Amazon. Soon a copy was in my grubby little mitts, and here we are.

The book is divided into three volumes, Fiat Homo (Let there be man), Fiat Lux (Let there be light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (Thy will be…

Right. I’ll nail my colours to the mast here. I’ve watched one England game in the last decade, and that only because, for the first and only time in my life, I actively wanted them to lose. That was the infamous Iceland game in 2016, just four days after the EU referendum. But I’d really stopped paying attention to the England team after the World Cup in 2010. The endless cynical cycle of tabloid antagonism, hyping the side to ludicrous lengths, then finally the blizzard of recriminations when it all inevitably falls apart all got too much for me. Life…

Just before the Great Lockdown began last year, I was rooting around my Dad’s loft. I was looking for something specific, which in the end I didn’t find(1). What I did find, however, was an interesting little surprise; well, it was interesting to me at least. There were some old photos of course, including some particularly horrific ones of me in primary school, as is the way with the school pictures you used to get back in the 1970s. You’re not getting to see them here, I can promise you. For my sake as well as yours.

I came across…

I first saw advance publicity for this book earlier last year, at the start of the first lockdown, but for some reason getting hold of this book took me a little longer than I thought; it had simply fallen off the radar until the last couple of weeks, when I decided I really did need to do something about it. So, courtesy of Ian Amazon, here we are.

By the author’s own admission, this book is less a guide than an instrument of propaganda, as well as being something of a call to arms, serving both as an historical summary…

So, the scores are in for another year, and once again we finished dead last. Quelle surprise. It would of course be really easy to make this a long screed about our performance as a metaphor for Brexit. To be sure there is something to be said for our international reputation being a bit whiffy at the moment, but that’s not the main reason why we haven’t been doing well in Eurovision for some time. …

It felt like the end of an era today. I finally handed over my dad’s place in Easington. There was a tug of finality as I signed the receipt to say I’d handed the keys back, and then pulled slowly away from the house for the last time, bathed in spring morning sunshine. As I came down Lythe Bank, Sandend was bathed in mist, with the Abbey in the distance just poking over the tops of the clouds. I wish I’d had a chance to stop and grab a quick picture because it was rather pretty, as it happens. …

I saw this on twitter this morning

I wonder if,
as they wheeled their trollies around the shop, mask-free and chuckling,
did they think about the little casters, wanting to go their own way,
but yanked back in a direction they didn’t wish to go by an angry tug,
forcing some poor skittering wheel to go the way they chose.
But not its own.

Did they wonder what the staff,
mutely stacking the shelves as they passed,
thought of this glorious charge for freedom? …