…death. Over half a century later it is still a very vivid memory. Perhaps as a consequence I have little sympathy for the live animal trade. Over the years, we have seen sheep by the thousands die in ships on the way to the Middle East in hot and inadequately ventilated ships and now the…
..the easement – I think we might’ve even gone home for lunch on occasions. Our home’s proximity proved crucial in one particular incident when, in my self-appointed role as boy-with-the-tightest-belt-in-school and in the middle of a game of bar-the-door in the school yard I suddenly felt my belt snap and my shorts come dangerously close…
that there is a world where you could travel where everything looks much the same, where there is no sense of place. Just the same experience. The perfect model is the airport where pretty much no matter where you are it is deliberately the same experience. Many travellers must wonder whether the plane merely flew…
.. nylon-string guitar for instance sounds unnervingly ambivalent and jangly as a result, especially in the top three strings. Not to mention that my right ear is so shot to pieces that I prefer to wear an ear plug rather than a hearing aid when I’m playing or listening to even slightly amplified music, as…
..graced either the stage, or the bench. The reception afterwards turned into the party of the year and threatened never to stop. My aged mother was persuaded to dance or at least bob slightly in the same spot, and the music, highlighted by Mike singing “I’ll be Gone” unaccompanied, was non-stop and loud. Relatives were…
..my objections, and I think it’s more likely she might mention them to somebody now that I cold-heartedly aborted the call. Not that it will make the slightest difference to the quality of questionnaires in the short term. Flouting the convention of poll questions being couched in neutral language is just one of the downsides…
..are hotly contested, in the same sense that having the first case of syphilis might be contested. Was it the Market Square in Lake Forest built in 1916 or the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City in 1922? Perhaps Highland Park Shopping Village built in 1931 in Dallas, which turned its back on the street…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
‘I won’t be fooled again’, I muttered to nobody in particular, knowing full well that I will be fooled again – and again – by a relentlessly and pointlessly changing world. However, there are small victories to be had for the vigilant observer. School children don’t need to have our attention drawn to them, but…
Dick’s Toolbox cont. ..whose pecking order was determined before we arrived, and that survived, indifferent to our presence, after the year or less that we spent there. The law of the jungle was demonstrated on the monkey bars, and the odorous boys’ toilets, that had green high water marks from incontinent seven years old trying…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. ..the sushi bar in the arcade and had some sushi rolls and miso soup before finally heading to the carpark and my date with the supermarket. When I got to the carpark I was astonished to find the lone busker still baying at the sullen sky, so I walked up…
Dick’s Toolbox cont. .. Finnish or Urdu for a moment longer. Not only that, their TV, books, magazines and newspapers are all in a foreign language. And whilst the canon of English literature is vast and strewn with masterpieces, such as Peyton Place and Harry Potter, we only really know the literature of other languages…
.. advised me there might be a good twenty minute wait as there were a few patients ahead of me. Indeed there were, but it was actually over an hour later that I was finally called into the surgery. In the meantime I’d read The Australian (thoroughly), sent elaborate texts to various people, written an…
..late twenties, early thirties, dark complexion and some variation of Asian ethnicity. There’s a cheerful bespectacled Asian chap who also mans the counter and who converses with her in whatever Asian language whom I suspect could be her father, except for his entirely opposite disposition. Everything is too much trouble for this woman. I’ve tried…
..the resting of containers and consumed beer by glass – or in New Zealand by the jug. I can still remember a bar in Sydney with white tiles on the floor and sawdust on the floor for the same reason as abattoirs had them – it made it much easier to hose the blood and…
Which is all very well when this surveillance is being supervised by a force as benign and reassuring as the cast of The Bill, but what happens when the slightly darker cast of, say, Spooks is in control? It seems to me there’s an awful lot of trust involved here, because it appears that all…
..arrived in England courtesy of the English soldiers who were then campaigning in the Lowlands as part of the Thirty Years War. Gin almost became the national sport. It was estimated that every fourth house in England was a gin mill and employers provided gin as part of their pay to workers. It is alleged…
..Fiddling Fool from the Spectrum Part One album, which he’d apparently opened the first Pojama-People show three or so years ago. It’s an extreme example of a very small song idea I’d written being taken by the band and expanded exponentially over time – notwithstanding in a quite disciplined way. The result is a very…