not sport | Wait until next year

The invention of the Walkman facilitated the end of the social society. Or I’ve read something along those lines, anyway. It is easy to blame some technology, rather than ourselves. Blaming someone else is easier than blaming ourselves. Blaming something inanimate is even easier. Anyway, I like wearing earphones while I’m out and about. It means I can give everyone around me a visual cue that I’m anti-social without all the effort of actually being anti-social. It is a passive form, rather than the aggression of the Loud Person On Phone. You know not to disturb someone with earphones or headphones, if there is someone else nearby to pester who isn’t plugged in. I like that barrier, that shelter.

Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments

Video | November 1, 2013

Weekend

October 26, 2013

The Saturday Morning Shop

View of an old supermarket

I love Saturday mornings. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, but I really love Saturday mornings. I also like routines. So for a while as a kid it was watching cartoons. Then it was going to a local museum’s kids club, where every week I seemed to concentrate on the fine art of brass rubbing. When I was a little older I went to football practice, although there wasn’t an actual football team, which was odd. Then I was a little older still and going out to look around the local record shops, none of which exist now. By adulthood I just aimed to be out the house before the end of Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2. When I achieved that I felt I hadn’t completely wasted my morning. Read the rest of this entry »

6 Comments

Video | October 25, 2013

Weekend

October 23, 2013

Brahms at the Barbican

I begin with a health warning. I am no classical music expert. There is every possibility that I will use the wrong terminology, or the right terminology in the wrong way. I might try to make it sound accessible by relating it to other forms of music and in doing so sound a bit daft. I might even manage to ignore the music and just waffle on about everything else around the music. But anyway, last night I went to a classical music concert at the Barbican from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra playing some works from Brahms, and in brief, it was amazing. Read the rest of this entry »

6 Comments