Starting Over

 Hello again!

I've decided to pick up the blog again. It's been a while for sure but then again we've had this Covid time, the various lock downs, restrictions and the rest and well, it was uncomfortable for sure but then again both Viv and I have been OK and despite things remain so. I am aware so many others were not this lucky so didn't really feel I wanted to blog whilst others weren't as lucky as me.

However, after nearly a couple of years we decided to head away from Penang. To start with we couldn't decide whether we would start in England or Bermuda but plumped finally for Bermuda. These are the only two countries we discovered where we had the 'right' to enter but mainly choosing Bermuda was because we felt being smaller, things would be better controlled. And they were.

What a palaver traveling is though.

I find it amazing to think that only two years ago I considered myself a sort of citizen of the world. Travel had become pretty much a right, not a privilege. We could travel practically anywhere in the world at any time without let or hindrance. The internet made it incredibly easy and fast both to plan trips, even extended trips, and pay for them, unlike in the pre internet era which sad to say I only just about remember. In some countries, there may have been some more onerous paperwork to assemble, but that was pretty much it. No longer. Controls the world over came slamming down. Border restrictions that had not been there before appeared with dramatic force. Travel has again become a privilege. Borders are back.

And those PCR tests!

At one point, I had 4 or 5 (my bad memory is trying to help) tests within a 10-day period and even though the kindly people inserting that long Q-Tip and twizzling it around comforted me that I would get used to it so long as I breathed in and flared my nostrils, nothing of the sort happened (even though I did as recommended). It remained consistently invasive and horrible. 

The first was the biggest shock and the most curious as I sat in the front seat of our car and the doctor applied the Q-Tip through the open window (he insisted Viv should sit in the back seat). I didn't realize that twizzly thing had to go quite that far up and I both jumped and yelped quite a bit making the doctor apologize profusely.  

Thankfully all negative though.

To celebrate I bought a new motorcycle!

Nerds and Geeks

You don't just have to be a techie to be a nerd or geek, although many are. Just today for instance I was reading that the UK's version of the coronavirus track and trace app didn't work that well and they'd abandoned it in favour of the one jointly developed by Apple and Google. I don't know about anyone else but derrrrr. I did wonder at the outset why the UK government would bother trying to outdo the nerds and geeks from two of the biggest and in my view best tech companies going. It was always going to be an uphill battle but I'm glad at least they've now seen the light. What was it Churchill said about the Americans? He said you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.... after they've tried everything else first. Sounds about right for the UK too.

Just this week we had some friends over for lunch (first time since the lockdown was eased) and somehow the conversation got around to accountants (spoiler alert I have an accounting qualification). Apparently they are all OCD (I think that's the correct acronym but in any event it means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is just about what our friend meant). Our friend therefore asked me if I am OCD. Tricky question actually. If I said no, any subsequent display of anything approaching compulsive behaviour would be highlighted no doubt. If I said yes, it would simply prove the point. Of course I said no... just before I wiped the kitchen counter 5 or 6 times. 

That isn't why I started this post though. I have been watching lots of You Tube videos in the past few lockdown weeks. What a choice! I started out searching for interesting things but quickly homed in on the daily broadcast from 10 Downing Street (I know, quite painful at times), some history podcasts about WWI in the main, but mostly live music from the bands and artists from the 60's and 70's that I like. It has become something of a compulsion for me now.... there I have acknowledged it... but what a wonderful journey.

I don't know how it has happened but as I type I am watching a 3 hour special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Rory Gallagher. 

Not a well known name I know but Rory was a fantastic guitarist. I remember watching him many times in the 1970's and he was always great. He was one of those guys who had no idea or interest about the business, just about playing. He was very good indeed. This special has some people playing who I have never heard of and they are also really good. It made me think that you have to be really lucky to make it in that industry. Skill alone just does not cut it. But how on earth did I get here watching this?

It came about because I also found several channels on You Tube from people who assemble these wondrous clips and in some cases long segments of live concerts from the 1960's and 1970's ... the era that I listen to. I imagine there is the same for other interests and times. One guy I have now subscribed to has dozens of such long segments on his channel and only a couple of days ago I started looking at the dates when he/she put them together. Many were at random dates over the last 3-4 years but a growing number are coming every other day now. Clearly someone else has lots of time on their hands too! The fact that one of the segments I watched yesterday with Janis Joplin, Cream and Pink Floyd was premiered only 3 days before and had been watched by 20,000+ people already says lots I think. 

Not just me then.

Flanelled Fools

I miss cricket. I miss playing it. I miss watching it. I miss talking about it. I miss having ridiculous conversations about the game.

This is personal. I've played cricket since I was 6 or 7 when my mum would bowl to me in the back garden. Something clicked.

I love the smell of linseed oil (this is what you oil bats with). I miss the sound of leather on willow (bats are made predominantly of willow). I miss the buzz of insects on the lovely green cricket field. I miss the fantastic teas (every club would pride itself on the quality of the teas which was a huge highlight as well as a major factor in how you rated the opposition, definitely it was not skill), I miss the cricket fields themselves: when I was younger, virtually every village had a green in the middle of the village with a church, maybe two pubs, a memorial to the fallen and a cricket field upon which people would play football, hockey or rugby during winter. My cricket club's ground was in the middle of a park. The clubs would rent the fields but the cricket strips themselves would often be maintained by the parkies (sorry, the park keepers).

The strip at Cup Match in Bermuda

I miss the beer afterwards; the jugs if you made 50 runs or took 5 wickets. I miss the fines for transgressions during the match (more commonly these would be on tour). I miss the fact that after 12 hours on a weekend afternoon, the captain would come around and ask for your contribution to the match in the bar after the game was over (ridiculously cheap), most of which would go on beer shared with the other team. I miss the fact that most matches ended in draws (the best matches often ended in draws. Wins/losses were usually more one sided so less dramatic and certainly less enjoyable for one of the teams). I miss the bad umpire decisions (I could go on and on about this). I miss the scoring and the scoring books which required the skill of ... I don't know what the equivalent would be these days. Einstein couldn't have managed, that's all I'm saying. In short, I miss a lot of things.

The last match I played with Indy and Dee Dee: I miss this too.

In March usually, there would appear curious roped off areas in the middle of the larger open green spaces. Within this roped off area would soon appear the signs of a roller and more care from the mower for this was the strip; usually a number of long strips of grass side by side which during the summer will become the wicket upon which matches will be played. Care devoted now is essential for the slightest imperfection could result in the wicket becoming 'sticky'. All cricketers know what I mean for this is the language that all cricketers speak. These are the classic signs of approaching summer in England.

Cricket arrives in early April and leaves with regret in late September or early October, depending on the weather. It should be there now. No, it should be everywhere now in the northern hemisphere.

Our cricket season in Bermuda strictly followed the English season (for no very good reason as the weather outside of this time was perfectly good for cricket. Maybe the clocks going back cut off some time, but it certainly wasn't the weather). This meant that in July and August, if you were unlucky you could stand for hours on end under blindingly cloudless sky in monstrous heat and humidity. Personally, I stopped playing at the weekend in the longer format of the game some time in my 50's after getting out first ball of the match around 12.01 pm (LBW to a terrible decision which made it worse), standing as umpire from the end of the 2nd over for the remainder of the 50 overs (around 3 hours) and then taking my place in the field for another 3 hours whilst our opponents had their innings. I was a basket case by the end of the match. Nobody sympathised.

Moving to only after work evening games (I'd played evening matches since I was in my 20's as well as at weekends), I played until 2017 when we left Bermuda and there has not been a day that I haven't missed it. But, that is due to my choice not through regulations enforced by law (courtesy of coronavirus).

The upside of right now is that the BBC for example is re-running great old matches on both video and radio. The media is writing lengthy screeds eulogising matches, times and players from years gone by.

I read a terrific Guardian piece recently linking great players together throughout cricket's history via the Yorkshire great, Wilfred Rhodes. Mr Rhodes played in one of the greatest of Ashes test matches at the Oval in 1903 when England beat Australia by 1 wicket (this is known as Jessup's match) with the immortal words at the end from Mr. Rhodes being "we'll get 'em in singles".  He did.

Wilfred Rhodes

Every cricket enthusiast knows this catch phrase and will use it during their cricket careers, guaranteed. I have used it many times, not always successfully. In fact most often unsuccessfully but then again I wasn't Wilfred Rhodes. Mr. Rhodes played his last test match when he was 52 which was the basis of the story (first class cricketers playing past 50), the year before the incomparable Don Bradman played his first test match in England in 1930, and he had played his first test match in the same game as the great Victor Trumper played his first test match (he was Australian but I won't hold that against him) but more importantly this was the last test match of the even more legendary and incomparable W.G. Grace.

With WG at Lords

And then there are the insane rules... which of course everyone somehow intuitively knows. Or rather they used to. If you read the autobiography of Peter Ustinov (who? shows my age!), he made the wonderful comment that somehow if you went to school in England (he was Russian), you would absorb the rules of the game by osmosis even if you didn't play the game, and be able to talk intelligently about the LBW rule, how many different times a batsman can be out, the amazing varietals of the leg spin bowler in particular the googly, demonstrate with an orange how to swing a new ball, and a whole host of other wonderful arcane cricketing things.

Can other games do this?

How can summer be the same without this wonderful, wonderful game? Let's hope things loosen up before too long.

E really does equal MC squared

I don't suppose that many people will spend 100 years or more proving that something I either said or wrote was true. That I suppose is because I was never a patent clerk in some deathly dull small Swiss town in the early 20th century, before technology, when all I had to do for hour after hour was prove some mathematical construct involving three things that I called E, M and C. Three things that had never been thought of much before and the purpose of which could never be used for decades if not centuries. But then again my name is not Albert Einstein.

So instead of inscribing into huge books in the patent office endless patents of new Swiss clocks, or chocolate recipes or yodelling tunes.. or whatever it was Einstein should have been doing at work, this shirker came up with:

The equation — E = mc2 — means "energy equals mass times the speed of light squared." It shows that energy (E) and mass (m) are interchangeable; they are different forms of the same thing.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I gave up science in favour of Latin and classics generally at age 11 so I have not the slightest idea why this is important, revolutionary, or even interesting. But it is, for just this week, yet another group of scientists proved it again. Or rather a part of it anyway.

Here's the full article and it really does make me happy to know that something that was done so long ago simply trying to solve a tricky mental hypothesis, and really on the back of an envelope (maybe addressed to the patent office by some hopeful trying to register a new patent for fruit and nut chocolate) is so relevant today. And... and this is the really amazing part to me... using only the most cutting edge technology and equipment that wasn't even thought about when Einstein originally developed his theory.

'It's been nearly 30 years in the making, but scientists with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) collaboration in the Atacama Desert in Chile have now measured, for the very first time, the unique orbit of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole believed to lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The path of the star (known as S2) traces a distinctive rosette-shaped pattern (similar to a spirograph), in keeping with one of the central predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.'

A spirograph. Many planets do have orbits like this.

There's more to it than this of course, but this is the essence of the piece. Relativity has been something that had been doing the rounds for quite a while, but it was Einstein who tied it down.

'When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, he proposed three classical tests to confirm its validity. One was the deflection of light by the Sun. Since massive objects warp and curve spacetime, light will follow a curved path around massive objects. This prediction was confirmed in 1919 with that year's solar eclipse, thanks to Sir Arthur Eddington's expedition to measure the gravitational deflection of starlight passing near the Sun. The confirmation made headlines around the world, and Einstein became a household name.'

Mercury's orbit... just like a spirograph

This is just wonderful! Well done again... no, yet again, Albert!

Binge Watching

Another thing that being in lockdown provides is the time to binge watch TV shows and box sets. Typically we don't like to watch programmes when they are ongoing as once started we just want to go through the whole thing. We recently did this with Game of Thrones (GOT).

What we have noticed with other long running series is that the best ideas typically come in the first season when the budget is smallest and it is when the networks pick them up for more seasons that the storyline feels like its getting weaker whilst the budget is bigger enabling the writer to come up with more and more fantastic set pieces. GOT falls into this characterisation I think.

More and more as we watch through the seasons, I like to go onto Wikipedia and find out not so much about where the story is going, but more to who the cast are and who the writer is and where it all takes place. For GOT the scenery is simply fantastic and even though it says Northern Ireland, I simply don't believe all those scenes were filmed there. OK I do know that it was filmed in other places too.... but I have been to most of those places and for the life of me cannot remember seeing any of them. Anyway that's a side thing but during this Wikipedia trawl I took a look at the writer (one George R.R. Martin) and discovered he's a sci fi and fantasy writer.

One of my favourite all time books is Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien (same middle initials? coincidence??) and obviously it is a book of its time. Written in the 1940's at the time when Britain was on the verge of losing WWII to Nazi Germany and using Tolkien's harrowing experiences in the trenches of WWI as backdrop. Clearly his writing, whilst superbly eloquent and articulate is coloured by his experiences and the time in which it was written.

Scroll forward to Mr. Martin who is 71 (according to Wikipedia).  That's only a few years older than me so his life influences are pretty much the same as mine, except of course he is American and I am not. That means the Beatles, rock and roll, the A/H bomb, Vietnam, swinging 60's, drugs, feminism amongst other things. Now I haven't read the books which is something I will correct as simply by watching the HBO series, I am amazed how much swearing, basically soft porn and really violent and gory action takes place. The stories have loose similarities but the context is totally different. I am amazed each episode has any story in it at all given the need for multiple sex scenes, ritual dismemberment and generally people standing around swearing their heads off. So I do wonder if that is how the books are written. I'll find out.

I did enjoy the earlier series more than the later ones. In the early ones, the dialogue just cracked along. Every one of the 'hero' men were as a friend of mine describes as being 'strong as horse, dumb as tree' and made clearly massively wrong decisions every step of the way. I am amazed that any survived through 8 series at all. All the women, no actually only most of the women, were far smarter and could easily out think their male counterparts. By the final series I was pretty worn out listening to all of Daenerys Targaryen's ridiculous titles particularly when things came to important moments when she or someone else had to shout out 'you are in the presence of...' and 5 minutes later came to the end. I suppose it did pad out the shows to their full time allotment. And those eyebrows.... don't get me going on that!

The baddies got all the good lines. I did like that however as the series went on and on, the dialogue became more serious and even the baddies' lines ran out of steam and sting. At the start, the most fun characters were Jaime Lannister and his diminutive brother Tyrion but as things wore on, they became far more serious and consequently less entertaining. In reading the Wikipedia entries, I couldn't make out whether Mr. Martin had actually written any of the later series (I know he didn't write the last one) or if it was just the HBO screenwriters talking to him to 'agree where the story line was going'. As an avid reader of Robert Heinlein in the sci fi genre, what made his stories so great was not necessarily the sci fi aspect rather it was the energy that he brought to the writing even when the books went on to very great length. He never let up which is rather in the end what I think happened with GOT.  Anyway, like I said earlier I'll read the first book now.

I'd like to think that left to himself Mr. Martin may have come up with something like this in the later series.

The F Word

Having time on my hands means that I can read much more and as my personal favourite topic were I to be asked onto Mastermind is 'Mindless Trivia', I of course followed an internet string that began with the words 'First Use of the F-word in Recorded Literature'.

Whilst the history is fascinating enough it is what it all portends that made me laugh like I hadn't for many years. And given our present situation in lockdown, what we all need is a darn good belly laugh.  Here's the headline:

"WAN FUKKIT FUNLING" —

500-year-old manuscript contains one of earliest known uses of the “F-word”

The Bannatyne Manuscript is an anthology of some 400 medieval Scottish poems.

Whilst the spelling is not contemporary, the feeling is perfectly encapsulated in those three words which mean.... well, er, this is where it gets tricky for these words came about during a bout of 'Flyting' between two gentlemen by the name of William Dunbar and Walter Kennedy.

Flyting is a poetic genre in Scotland—essentially a poetry slam or rap battle, in which participants exchange creative insults with as much verbal pyrotechnics (doubling and tripling of rhymes, lots of alliteration) as they can muster. (It's a safe bet Shakespeare excelled at this art form.)

Dunbar and Kennedy supposedly faced off for a flyting in the court of James IV of Scotland around 1500, and their exchange was set down for posterity in Bannatyne's manuscript. In the poem, Dunbar makes fun of Kennedy's Highland dialect, for instance, as well as his personal appearance, and he suggests his opponent enjoys sexual intercourse with horses. Kennedy retaliates with attacks on Dunbar's diminutive stature and lack of bowel control, suggesting his rival gets his inspiration from drinking "frogspawn" from the waters of a rural pond. You get the idea.

And then comes the historic moment: an insult containing the phrase "wan fukkit funling," marking the earliest known surviving record of the F-word.

It all sounds wonderful! I wish I had been there but as the manuscript itself was put together when this Mr. Bannatyne was locked down with the plague (rather like as now except that the plague killed somewhere between 30% and 80% of populations that became infected), perhaps not. In any event this brings to mind immediately Monty Python's Oscar Wilde sketch which although really funny also was based (although very loosely) on real events that regularly took place.

Now this is flyting!

Rockers Class of 2019... RIP

Each year I write a short post remembering those rockers who made a musical difference to me that passed away the year before. I am very late this year, I know, but here goes for 2019.

Neil Innes

Neil wasn't a real rocker but has a significant place in my memory because he wrote so many great songs for the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (who can forget Urban Spaceman?), Rutland Weekend Television and of course Monty Python. If you remember the 'Holy Grail' movie, Neil sang the 'Brave Sir Robin' song amongst others. A wonderful story surrounding his time in the Rutles (with Eric Idle of MPFC fame) was when struggling for a musical interlude in a show, they asked George Harrison from the Beatles to come on. He agreed but refused to play his then Number 1 song 'My Sweet Lord' on the show, which ended up in total disarray. Wonderful stuff.

Iain Sutherland

Back in 1971, I went to a day concert at The Oval in South London to see a host of different bands but mainly to see Frank Zappa who had his orchestra with him for that tour. The opening act was a band called Quiver and they were terrific. A year or so later they joined forces with a Scottish duo, the Sutherland Brothers, and I went to see them in Southend at the Queens Hotel, a dark and dingy basement club that always had great music. You never knew if they were open, or who was playing, but you knew if they did it would be on a Sunday night and this night they were open and the Sutherland Brothers and Quiver played. They were tremendous. Their big song wasn't even a big song for them but for Rod Stewart (Sailing), a song I never really liked, but they had tons of other great songs. Great band, great songs.

Ginger Baker

I first heard this maniac drumming I think in 1966 and wondered what the hell was all that noise about. He just kept on going and going and going in all directions at once. Powerful, yup. Melodic, yup. Played with the best group of ALL time, yup. That was Cream, by the way, but he also played in Blind Faith. I saw him first in Southend with a band called the Baker-Gurvitz Army. Lots of silly stories about his previous band Air Force but this one played all the old Cream songs. The band were actually pretty terrible but seeing Ginger was a pleasure all by itself. What a player.

Robert Hunter

It was my brother Jan that got me first to listen to the Grateful Dead. The LP was Live Dead, in retrospect a magnificent record and great intro to the Dead. I wish I realised at the time that even though the songs were 24 minutes long and seemed connected one with the next all through the record, that that was a pretty good thing. Many years later I managed to listen to the show all the way through without having to turn the record over every 20 minutes or so and it was fantastic. Robert wrote the lyrics to most of the tunes the band wrote, mostly with Jerry Garcia but also with the others if they needed it. So Trucking' with Bob Weir and Jerry, Box of Rain with Phil Lesh. Many others too. Great lyrics. So much more than girl meets boy, falls in love, etc. Made the songs sound interesting and also in many cases downright weird. Just what do the lyrics from Dark Star mean --- 'transitive nightfall of diamonds' -- or Box of Rain, or...

Gary Duncan

Before the Monterey Pop Festival brought Jimi Hendrix and The Who to America, US rock bands had a different edge to them. Listen to the older Big Brother and Quicksilver albums and you'll immediately know what I mean. They played and sort of played in a classical manner. Then came Jimi and The 'Oo and everything changed. Among my first introduction to San Francisco music prompted by the Dead and Jefferson Airplane, I found 'Happy Trails', a live album by Quicksilver Messenger Service. What a record. What a band. What great guitarists. Yes John Cipollina of course but also yes Gary Duncan. Great player.

Peter Tork

It was only the really young teeny-boppers that liked the Monkees but OK yes some of us others also liked them but didn't really admit to it. I liked the songs. I thought they were really good, catchy tunes, really nice harmonies, all the rest of it. I didn't care if the actors really didn't do the playing. I still don't know what instrument Peter Tork played. Some episodes had him on keyboards, others some sort of guitar, others still nothing just that goofy grin. Peter Tork was definitely my favourite Monkee.

Others

As the years pass and I acknowledge how old I am, I then have to add on a few years and pretty soon it gets to three score and ten, 70. Lots of the old rockers who are left are comfortably past this landmark. Mention goes out to Larry Wallis of the Pink Fairies (just listen to The Pigs of Uranus, that's him), Larry Taylor of Canned Heat, Ian Gibbons of the original Kinks, Dr. John and Dick Dale, the original surfing guitar guy. Also Peter Fonda of Easy Rider fame which movie brought the world Steppenwolf and many other great classic rock bands of the 70's. RIP all.

Anyway I'll leave the last word to Neil Innes and George Harrison from Rutland Weekend TV.