More of wot I have heard...

I got some new music for Christmas which I have been enjoying.

Arrogance Ignorance and Greed by the Show of Hands


Side Show by The Burns Unit


Sky at Night by I Am Kloot

Ho Ho Ho...

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year and that you and yours are happy and well.

We had a typically busy time running around family and friends having decamped from our home due to weather concerns. Snowy landscapes are all well and good on festive cards and the TV, but not so much fun when you are trapped at home or have to tramp miles through the frozen landscape.

But we managed to get everywhere without incident and only a little amount of inconvenience and we saw almost everyone we wanted too, including some of our antipodean friends who were visiting.

We had a fun family celebration at Sue’s Mum’s house where we gave out a DVD to each of Sue’s family that was a copy of a VHS copy of original Cine films recorded by her grandfather. There was much fun seeing the siblings as young children at Xmas, birthday parties or even in the bath. Although the cine film is silent the process of copying it to VHS was done such that you could hear the reels running and comments from the guy doing the copying, this was only really evident when the last reel was being copied and it became clear that this was an early black and white porno (naughty granddad), and we were amused at the copyists comments as he too realised what it was.

Santa brought me a nice new (almost new) Digital SLR camera which I have to learn how to use before we go away on our next holiday (more on this in a later blog).

More of wot I have wrote...

One of the reasons I have been lax in keeping this blog up to date was that I was busy writing my second novel for a competition that closed at the end of the year. It was a tough order and the final draft was 108,000 words long and could do with a large amount of editing and rework, nevertheless I enjoyed the process though not so much how pressured the timescales were.

The book is called Space Race and it was originally envisioned to be a graphic novel, but the theme fitted the brief of the competition so I turned it into a novel. It is a composite of seven stories spread throughout the history of space craft development, from the V2 rockets developed by the Germans in 1945, to Cold War Russia, 70’s America at NASA, a tracking station in the Australian outback in the 80’s, an altered reality of a floating space launch facility in 2010, Artificial Intelligence lab in Japan in 2035 and finally on the eve of the first manned space craft journey out of our solar system in 2100. All of the stories are interlinked and have a story thread running through them and each is written in a different style (anti-war story, spy story, adventure story, personal development story, sex story, crime story and classic sci-fi story).

I plan now to work on some other stories before a revisit this one and tinker around with it. The results for the competition are announced in March, so if I have the nerve after that I might send it out to publishers for their opinion.

Living the High Life...

As a birthday treat for a close friend we joined them at a fancy hotel in the Cotswolds one weekend not too long ago. The Lygon Arms in Broadway is a very fine establishment with a history that goes back to King Charles 1st time and is frequented by the rich and famous alike. It was not cheap but we certainly made the most of the luxuries and indulged ourselves greatly. Sue got an extra treat as she mistakenly went into the wrong changing rooms after her glasses fogged up in the sauna, and our friends only realised that the complimentary bottle of champagne was for a different room after we had drunk it.

The area was in full Christmas spirit with the town and others having their festive late night markets with mulled wine, horse drawn carriages and other treats, also in town was a shop entirely dedicated to Christmas decorations. We also sampled spirits of another kind in the local hostelries as we fortified ourselves against the cold air as we walked around.

Hot Food on a Cold Night...

A recently regular occurrence in our street is several of the ‘boys’ get together near Christmas time and go out to the local curry house for some food, drink and general gossip. It is a nice opportunity to catch up with some of our neighbours and indulge in a little male bonding.

Titanic Musical...

Billed as a musical tribute to the famous ship complete with giant porthole and iceberg and without a single reference to the film or Celine Dion, this was an entertaining night at our local theatre with the three ‘plucky’ musicians putting on a great performance (with occasional slips from the ‘special effects’).

Pluck the Titanic Show

Angels Sing...

Although we did not see Jenny Agutter in the Railway Children stage show, we did see her at Guildford Cathedral where she joined acclaimed children’s author Michael Morpurgo in an adaptation of his nativity story, Angel Wings. They both narrated the tale which was accompanied by music and song from Coope Boyes & Simpson with Fi Fraser, Jo Freya and Georgina Boyes. It was a lovely performance and the venue was spectacular, we might have appreciated the snowy landscape more if we didn’t have to walk through most of it to get there and back.

My Daddy, My Daddy...

We recently went to see The Railway Children being performed live at Waterloo Station on the tracks where EuroStar used to terminate. It was a great performance with the audience split into two and facing each other across the tracks seated on the two platforms. The actors used part of the platform and an ingenious moving stage on the tracks allowing them to have a very flexible performance area and allowing a real steam train to enter (to rapturous applause) as required.

The actors were very convincing and there was not a dry eye in the house when that famous line was uttered.

An Enigma...

We went with my uncle to visit Bletchley Park the site of the code breaking centre that was where the Enigma code was broken among others using machines developed by Alan Turing and the first electronic computer, now rebuilt and working again. The site is huge and we only managed a few quick diversions from the guided tour and are keen to return to see more.