Lacrimosa Moves In - Peace And Quiet Move Out

If there's one thing that might finally force me to keep a post short (Speaking of posts, if you want to skip right to the actual content, please click  ^[1] . Otherwise, please carry on!) it's having to type it on my laptop. No laptop keyboard is ever going to feel as natural and comfortable as my mechanical. 

Today, though, it's 35c out, which "feels like " 38 according to the ever-reliable Weather Underground. And it certainly feels all of that, at least upstairs where the heat rises, at the front of the house where the sun hits, which is where my study, if that's what we're calling it, is.

So here I am, downstairs at the back of the house, in the room we'll call the lounge for the sake of having something to call it, which is the coolest room in the house and likely to remain so until the sun comes round to shine directly through the windows around six in the evening. Typing on my lap may not be comfortable but at least I can see the keyboard without sweat dripping into my eyes. 

And because I'm down here, Beryl is too, which is good for her. You can tell it's hot. She stayed down here for a couple of hours on her own earlier on today, which is something she never likes to do. One more day of this, with tomorrow possibly being a degree or so hotter and then a gradual slip back to more normal summer temperatures over the weekend, at which point I will be at work anyway, where we have do have some sort of (Not very efficient.) air conditioning.

I like hot weather generally. I don't even mind it as hot and humid as this, these days. Humidity used to make my brain stop working but age seems to have tempered that. It's not good for Beryl, though, so I'll be glad when it drops a few degrees. I just hope we don't get any more thunderstorms in the transition. 

On Monday we had the biggest storm we've seen in thirty years, living here. It was like those news clips you see of tropical rainstorms or the tail-end of a hurricane. The drain at the back of the house was completely overwhelmed and we had three inches of water in the so-called conservatory, which is the first time that's ever happened. The conservatory roof leaked, too, although that's nothing new.

I had to stand ankle-deep in water, soaked to the skin from the torrential rain, constantly pulling the debris that was sweeping in out of the drain-grill to keep it clear for about fifteen minutes and then we spent an hour going through all the stuff that had gotten soaked to see what could be salvaged, which was most of it although some of that is never going to be the same again. 

 

Fortunately, water would need to rise more like six inches to get in the house itself. We got off lightly. Down the hill from us there was some more serious flash flooding with some damage to the streets that caused them to be closed to traffic next day. Never live at the bottom of a hill is my advice.

As well as the influx at the back, the storm brought down our giant rosebush at the front, blocking the path, so after I was done bailing out, I was out there, cutting it up and tying it back, still in the rain. And just to put the cap on the day, before any of that happened, while it was still hot and sunny and we had no idea what was coming (Absolutely no thunderstorms were forecast - they were supposed to miss us by twenty miles...), I managed to break the fridge, trying to force-defrost it. 

Never do that. It's the second time I've broken a fridge by removing ice build up too vigorously.

So that was Monday. But by Tuesday afternoon we had a new, improved fridge (This is why people still use Amazon despite complaining about them all the time.) and the conservatory was clean, dry and in better order than before. And of course, with it being so hot, everything that was wet is now dry and you might never know it happened. Although I bloody know, I can tell you!

Hmm. That's one long-ass intro to what I said was going to be a short post. I do like talking about weather. We just don't often get any weather worth talking about here, which I'm now seeing is a bit of a blessing. I suspect we might get more anecdote-worthy weather as climate change tightens its apocalyptic grip. Something to look forward to...

What I thought I was going to talk about was Neverness To Everness. I might have to go back to the top and put in a warning so people who might be interested in that sort of thing don't tab out before they even get there. Like this...

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[1] Readers with no interest in my home life but who would still like to read about the home life of my imaginary friends, please carry on from here! Everyone else who just clicked out of curiosity to see what would happen  ^ back to top

Last time I posted about NTE I was saying how Flora wanted to get a bigger apartment and maybe ask Lacrimosa to move in with her. Both of those things happened. Flora's delighted with her new flat. Her new flatmate, though...

I love Lacrimosa. She's sweet and funny and charming and honestly you couldn't ask for a more co-operative housemate. If you remember, though, two of the reasons Flora was finding life with Mint a little trying were all the little sighs and strange noises she makes and how she keeps sleeping in Flora's bed. Or, rather, on it.

Sometimes you just don't know when you're well-off, do you? Lacrimosa makes a lot of strange noises, too, and she also talks in her sleep, which means she's making some kind of noise pretty much 24/7. And even though Flora's new apartment at Skyview Halls is enormous, somehow you can hear Lacrimosa all-too-easily, no matter where she is. 

Guess where she mostly is, though? Yep. In Flora's bed. Lacrimosa's favorite thing in the world to do is sleep so she's there a lot. Talking to herself. OK, fair enough, it's a big bed. There's plenty of room for both of them. But it's a big apartment! There's plenty of space for them to have a room each. Plus, I thought she slept in a coffin. Maybe she forgot to bring it with her in the rush...

So, having Lacrimosa move in was a bit of a mixed bag. Also, have I now effectively sublet my old apartment to Mint? She's still living there as far as  know, even though I'm not. Should she be paying rent? 

The really weird part was the way inviting Lacrimosa exactly coincided with a bond quest Flora got at the same time. You need Bond Level 4 to invite someone to live with you, which is also when you get a little bonding quest so you can get to know each other better.

Lacrimosa's quest involves helping her choose a suitable gift for her "Grandpa", who's had to go into hospital. I could write a dissertation on the subtext of this short quest but I'm going to restrict myself to a third of a blog post because it's important to retain a sense of proportion. 

Lacrimosa's "Grandpa" is no blood relation although he is a kind of tomato relative, since he lets Lacrimosa grow the plants in his garden, which is probably the same thing as far as Lacrimosa's concerned. Skia arranged for Lacrimosa to move out of dorm accommodation at BAC and into an apartment he found for her, in a block managed by an elderly couple, who he also asked to keep an eye on her. 

Lacrimosa calls the couple Grandma and Grandpa but as it transpires from conversations with her, she doesn't know them well. Grandpa has gotten ill suddenly with some unspecified ailment and Grandma is mostly absent, visiting him in hospital. Lacrimosa wants to visit too and she knows it's expected that a visitor brings fruit to a patient's bedside but the only fruit she knows anything about is the tomato.

Which is where you, the Appraiser, come in. Lacrimosa, like everyone you meet, seems to value your advice so she asks you to come help her choose a fruit for grandpa. And yes, there is discussion of whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Whichever it is, it's deemed inappropriate for the purpose.  

 

Flora ended up having to choose between I think it was apples, oranges and strawberries. She went for strawberries and Lacrimosa was happy with that although I got the impression she'd have been happy with a house-brick if that's what flora has suggested. Lacrimosa toddled off to catch Grandpa before visiting hours ended and that was the end of it.

Except, since I'd just asked Lacrimosa if she'd like to move into my new apartment, the timing seemed very much to suggest she was moving in with me because her current carers weren't able to give her the attention she needed and I was stepping in to help. That's absolutely how it went in my head canon but I can't help wondering if it isn't there in the writing as well.

It's quite firmly established that Lacrimosa isn't entirely capable of looking after herself and probably shouldn't be left on her own for too long. She's unworldly, to say the least. She knows very little about life outside the strict confines of her job and her extremely limited interests. 

She also talks about herself in the third person, always a sign of concern. And I just noticed that the Appraiser follows suit, always saying "Lacrimosa" where it would be more natural to say "you". I'm reading that as empathy or at least compassion on Floras' part. 

The Appraiser is of exemplary character, highly emotionally literate, or she is if you choose those responses. You could, if you were one yourself, play her as an insensitive jerk, but who'd do that? Not me. I'm pretty sure she has Lacrimosa living with her because that's what Lacrimosa needs right now.  

 

Whether there'll ever be a good moment for her to move back into her own place depends, I guess, on how Grandpa does. I suspect he might be in the hospital for a while. I imagine Flora's going to have to buy yet another bed.

And that, I think, is where I'm going to leave it for now. I've had about enough of typing on this laptop. I was going to do a whole thing about the Ghost Train Ticket quest but that's just going to have to wait. Good quest, though...

 

Notes about AI used in this post

I asked Gemini to do me some html code for the footnote. I've done footnotes before. I could have looked it up old school but why bother? Gemini did the basics, I did the rest. I'd have had to. If Gemini ever had a sense of humor, it seems to have lost it. I remember being mildly irritated by how chatty the AIs used to be. I kinda miss it now.

Good Grief! It's Blaugust! Again!

 

Now there's an image we're going to be seeing a lot of over the coming month, with or without checkerboard squares behind it. Yes, it's August so it must be time for that long-running festival of the written word, hosted by Belghast and known to all as Blaugust - which, as one of this year's new Blaugustians, samjc, points out, is a pun that works best (Or possibly only.) when read in an American accent.

Speaking of new participants, this time around we have no fewer than thirty-four, out of a total starting line-up of seventy-four. Belghast has all the details, as always. 

Without wanting to come across as a Debbie Downer (I'd say that ages me but since I was already well into in my forties when the character first appeared on SNL, that really isn't saying much...) I do feel the need to point out that if we had a record one hundred and three participants in 2023 and in 2024 we have seventy-four, thirty-four of whom are new, that must mean well over half of the Blaugust Class of '24 has opted out of a return engagement.

It's not surprising. Blaugust does take its toll. I'm mentally preparing myself for the onslaught. It's not writing the thirty-one posts that takes it out of me each year - it's reading the other several thousand.

The high attrition rate is also the main reason I've decided not to add every single new entrant to the blog roll over there on the right. It's already unfeasibly long, with a downward-sweeping tail that droops far out of sight into a void where no-one's posted for years. 

Worse, if I'm brutal, I have to own it has quite a few entries even at the more active end that I have only ever visited during Blaugust itself, when I try to be as assiduous as I can in reading everything. I finally decided in the run-up to this year's extravaganza that I'd quite like my blog roll to reflect the blogs I do in fact read, so this time I'm going to wait to see which ones stick with me before I add any.

Instead, I updated the tab no-one ever notices, the one that's sat there for five years or more, unchanged. Back when I added all the entrants to the 2019 Blaugust I called it The Crew, a reference to the Whole Sick Crew from Thomas Pynchon's V that I don't imagine I ever bothered to explain. I have renamed it with a much more user-friendly title this time, so perhaps it will be of use to someone.

Dall-E 3's take on The Whole Sick Crew

I also added every last one of the new blogs to my Feedly feed, a process made infinitely more manageable by means of Belghast's marvelous OPML File. Thanks a mil, Bel! Saved me literally an hour or more of tedious googling, cutting and pasting. 

If, like me, you have no clue what an OPML file is or what to do with it, don't fret. As with everything on the internet ever, trial and error is your friend. (Really bad advice - do not take it!) I just copied the link and pasted it into Feedly's "Follow" tab then all I had to do then was click each entry to approve it and and boom! Every new blog added in seconds. 

That's my prep done. Now for the introductions.

This year, for reasons best known to himself, Bel has been quite insistent we all begin with something he's calling "The First Post of Blaugust". We already had "Getting To Know You"week but apparently that wasn't enough. Now we have to do that bit you dread at the start of every training course, where you go round the table and tell everyone two interesting facts about yourself. 

One of those facts about me, as you can plainly see, is that I can be unecessarily sarcastic at times. Might as well get that out in the open right away. Also, I think I'm funny even if no-one else does. There! That's two!

Bel introduces the idea in a post that also includes everything you need to know about the event, so if you haven't already checked it out, now would probably be a good time. The gist of the First Post is that "for your very first Blaugust post you take a bit of time and introduce yourself and your blog." As I imagine anyone who's visited Inventory Full before will not be surprised to hear, I don't need a lot of encouragement to talk about myself, so that's kind of like pushing at an open door.

Of course, that does also mean I've done this sort of things a few times already, so rather than repeat myself I thought I might just link to a few of those posts. 

Inventory Full started for real over a dozen years ago, back in 2011, but I think the very first time I gave myself any kind of formal introduction was for the much-missed New Blogger Initiative (Now itself incorporated into Blaugust, of course, lest we forget, which I had until I typed this.) In a post called How The Bhagpuss Came To Be. I summed things up like this:

"Inventory Full is my first and so far only blog, but I come from a very long background of writing for relatively small, obsessive, responsive audiences. I co-published my first fanzine back in the punk wars in the late '70s, moved to co-publishing a comics fanzine in the early '80s and went on to contribute to many more comiczines in the U.K. and U.S.A. throughout that decade. I was also heavily involved in the APAzine scene right through to the late 1990s.

Then I discovered Everquest and all that stopped, replaced by endless posting on countless forums, primarily EQ's long-gone but never-forgotten original TNZ. I used to post under a different name but sometime in the mid-noughties, for some reason I now forget I needed a new identity. I was sitting at work listening to the radio and two news items came on in quick succession, one about the Oliver Postgate children's TV character Bagpuss and another a report about something terrible going on in Bhagdad."

And conflated the two to get Bhagpuss, obviously. Which is all very well and quite true but doesn't really say much about who I am now. 

I fleshed things out a lot more in a series of posts that got published as part of Blaugust 2019. That was the year I was on chemo after having had bowel cancer (Way to go to lighten the mood... I'm fine now, touch wood, cross fingers.) so I had plenty of time on my hands, as can easily be seen from the forty-two posts that month, my all-time Blaugust record.

That series of posts, to which I naturally neglected to give a meaningful tag (Because why have one that might be useful when you can have eight hundred that aren't?) purports to cover my musical tastes but actually works quite well as a mini-bio. Perhaps not so mini, since it must run to at least ten thousand words...

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

The most surprising thing about those posts is that most of the links still work. I might go back and fix the ones that don't but then again I might not. As the final line of the fifth post has it, onward and upward!

I am for the past but I'm more for the present and the future. Looking back is fine but only in so far as it informs us about where we are and where we go next. It's a resource to be exploited, not a museum to be curated; an indication of where we come from, not a lost homeland to which we long to return.

Easy to say but I reach state pension age in a few months. I have a lot more past than I have future, that's a given. All the more reason to look forward, then, I'd say!

In keeping with that thought, I'm going to finish up with a short list of my current interests and obsessions, mostly related to various strands of popular culture, which after all is the bedrock of this blog. I strongly suspect that almost everyone reading this, assuming anyone still is, will know far more than they ever needed to about my past by now, or at least they will if they've followed those links and none of us can know the future so the present is all we have left to cover here.

This blog started as - and still mostly is - a blog about gaming, specifically MMORPGs. After twenty-five years I have cooled some on the genre but only to the point where I now play MMOs for maybe one or two hours every day rather than five or six. 

I'm nominally still playing one or two older titles, mostly EverQuest II, although I haven't logged in to that one for about a month. My current obsession, which I don't think is putting it too strongly, is Once Human. It's the kind of game that I would never even have considered playing back when I started this blog, when I would have reckoned it would be too fast and action-oriented for me to cope with. Weird how getting older has made stuff like that seem less scary and more enjoyable. Probably a post in there, somewhere...

I'm also playing a lot more non-MMO games these days and writing about them here. I was playing Solasta when Once Human arrived, at which point I dropped it like those friends you make in Fresher's Week. I will get back to it when the frenzy fades. I'm also playing Wuthering Waves, a gacha game I highly recommend. 

By the time Blaugust ends I'll probably be playing something else entirely. I'm fickle with games these days and I like it better that way.

Musically, I'm bouncing around the table in the usual fashion between the fading bleeps and trills of what's left of hyperpop, the autotuned majesty of the avant-garde that somehow passes for actual pop these days (Seriously need to write a post about that...) and the never-ending wonderland of YouTube's recommends algorithm, which is where I developed my growing appreciation for midwestern emo, Mexican trip-hop and Japanese noise-rock. Trust me, there will be examples during Blaugust and you'll wish you hadn't asked.

My album of the year at the halfway point, somewhat predictably, has to be Charli XCX's BRAT. It's likely to be my album of the year at the end of the year, too, unless Lana del Rey gets her country album, Lasso, done by then. Any year there's a Lana album, that album is album of the year. It's a given. it might even be a law.

BRAT, however, is much better to write to than any of Lana's albums, which make me stop and listen far too much to be productive. Half the posts I've written since BRAT came out were done with the YouTube playlist on LOUD. The others were done to Nouvelle Vague, who I also find very conducive to creativity.

For TV, I am somewhat stuck in the past. I'm still working my way through Roswell: New Mexico, which makes ever less sense and that's one of the many reasons I love it. Only a few episodes left and I have no clue how it's going to end. I hope it doesn't just stop in the middle like so many shows these days. (Waves fist at clouds...)

I had to take a break from The Flash after the end of Season Four because I realised I now strongly disliked almost every character in it. I was constantly rooting for the villains to win, which of course they are contractually obliged not to do, even though quite clearly they would, in almost every case, seeing how utterly incompetent the heroes are and how incapable of learning from experience they continue to be. Don't get me started, right?

I have Dead Boy Detectives lined up as soon as I finish R:NM, so at least that's relatively recent. Most of all, though, I'm looking forward to the fourth and final season of Umbrella Academy, which I had no idea was even going to be a thing. I thought it ended quite neatly with Season Three so it shows what I know.

For reading, as always it depends a lot on what freebies I picked up at work. I work in a very large bookshop and have done since the late 90s, which means I've barely had to pay for a book in a quarter of a century and yet my house is so full of the damn things I can hardly get through the door.  

It also means that much of what I read hasn't been published yet and I can't legally write about it, or at least review or quote from it - it says so right on the covers of some of them. Plus I'm contractually restrained from saying certain other things about the book trade on social media and I'm too paranoid about what is and isn't allowed to say pretty much anything, which is why, although I read all the time, there's very little about books on the blog. Just wait 'til I retire...

I will say that I've just finished the proof for a book called Small Bomb in Dimperly that will be published next month. Can't say anything about it although I doubt the publishers will sue me for saying I really enjoyed it. 

Before that I read my first-ever Korean novel, The Dallergut Dream Department Store, a million-copy best-seller in its country of origin, those sales figures being by far the most surprising thing about it. I really enjoyed that one, too, but I find it mind-boggling to imagine it as a mainstream best-seller, which it must have been to rack up numbers like that. It's out here now so it will be interesting to see how it goes.

I'm also slowly chugging through Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch, my current bathroom book. I nearly did linguistics at college. Dodged a bullet there.

Other than all of that, I'd like to mention our dog, Beryl. She's two and a half and takes about that many hours out of each day to walk, which is time I used to use for playing games. If you want to know why I play less than I used to, that's the reason. 

She's actually Mrs. Bhagpuss's dog but I'm lucky enough to have unrestricted use of her. Beryl that is, not Mrs Bhagpuss. 

Although...

Probably time I stopped. I think I've said enough.

The Boys In The Band

Every once in a while, something so strange happens you just have to share the experience, no matter how inappropriate it feels.  And if you have a blog, that's where you're going to do it. Or at least I am.

I'm on holiday this week, not that it's all that easy to tell, given my regular working week is only two days long. Still, it does make a difference. Mostly, it makes me feel I ought to do something I don't usually do - or at least go somewhere.

As it happens, where I should be right now is in Spain. In January 2019, I booked flights to Porto in the north of Portugal, meaning to fly there in June, hire a car and drive up into the only part of the Iberian peninsula I've never visited, Galicia. The pandemic cancelled that plan.

Since then I've shifted those flights at least four times, from Porto to Barcelona to Lisbon to Bilbao, from June to March to June to September. Maybe a few more I've forgotten. When the world finally shifted back, close enough to where it had been that it seemed we might actually be able to get on a plane again, two things happened: we got a dog and everyone stopped working.

Back in July, I was on the verge of cancelling the flights, something that's a lot harder than you'd imagine. Try it sometime. It's like trying to cancel a contract with AOL. I knew I wasn't going to get a refund. I wasn't even trying. It was so long ago that I'd paid for the tickets I really didn't care. I just wanted someone to acknowledge that there'd be two fewer people on the plane that day and we'd call it quits.

Luckily for me, before I'd figured out a way to get someone at the airline to understand what I wanted, I got an email saying the flights had been cancelled anyway. At the time there was a major problem with airlines in the UK not being able to staff their operations and flights were being cancelled all over. I imagine it was a huge disappointment for most people but it was a godsend for me. I got my money back and I didn't even have to ask.

I'd already booked the time off work so I just let that run. I get more than seven weeks paid holiday a year and since we stopped travelling it really hasn't mattered when I take it. September is often a lovely month where I live so it seemed as good a time as any.

We did think of going away for a couple of days, just to somewhere we could reach by car, but with Beryl the dog to account for we decided against it. She travels very well but I'm not sure she's quite ready for hotel life just yet. Maybe next year.

Rather than do nothing at all, I thought we might at least take a few day trips, if the weather was good. On Wednesday the forecast was excellent. Warm and sunny all day. We thought we'd drive over to the big city down the road and take a walk along the waterfront. 

Everything went wonderfully. Parked right by the water, strolled around in the sunshine for a couple of hours, had delicious crepes for lunch with ice-cream after... Beryl had a great time. She loves people and she loves water. She was in her element. 

It was on the way back that I happened to look in the window of the MShed, Bristol Museum's waterside extension devoted to all things Bristolian. It's the city where I was born and where I grew up so of course I've never been inside. Do I look like a tourist?

Right in the center of the window was a book. The black and white cover caught my eye immediately. I went over to have a closer look. There, under the inelegant title, Bristol Boys Make More Noise, were a bunch of names I knew very well; bands I used to see play live, places I watched them, even faces I recognized.

I handed Beryl's lead to Mrs Bhagpuss and went inside. I was curious to see who might be between the covers. I even wondered if there might be a mention, somewhere, of the band I was in back then. The subtitle of the book was "The Bristol Music Scene 1974-1981". We were there for part of it, at least, even if there's no evidence now we ever existed.

I found the book in the museum gift shop and flipped it open, ready to scan through the text for maybe a fleeting mention and suddenly there we were. The Android Pups. My band. Not just a line in a listing or a footnote. A whole frickin' chapter of our own.

Well, four pages. The chapters are all pretty short. One page of text and three full-page photographs because what the book really is is a collection of the work of John Spink, a guy who thought to do what no-one else back then ever did, which was to take his camera with him when he went to see bands.

I had already seen the photos he took of us back in 1978. They're on his page at Bristol Archive Records. I've actually used the one of me on this blog before. I was fairly stunned to find them there a few years ago but it's a testament to the enduring power of the physical world that the impact of seeing yourself in print in an actual book hits so much harder.

Obviously, I bought the book. I told the woman at the cash desk I was in it and she asked to see, so I showed her. I was that shameless. I am now.

The ironic thing is that, other than the photos, the entire Android Pups entry consists of the author, Gill Loats, explaining she has no clue who the band is and neither does anyone else. We get one paragraph and then she goes on to talk about the venue, the Bear in Hotwells, where we played four or five times, at least. We also played at the Dugout, where Gill was the DJ. I guess she wasn't on that night. 

To make matters worse (Or funnier, depending on your perspective.) the one person who does get a name-check is my old friend Martin Skidmore, now sadly deceased, who I went to school with (And, briefly, university - he dropped out after one term. I stayed on.). He also introduced me to role-playing games, co-published a comics fanzine with me and went on to publish my stuff in his prozine, FA, which seems to be where Gill found a quote from him that mentions the band by name.

The Android Pups were, at core, three people: me, Chris, my best friend from school, and his brother, Phil. In the couple of years or so we were active (Phil went on to form another band in the early 80s, for which I was the singer, but that's another story.) There were several other members, including our other friends from school, Paul and Pat, my cousin Simon, Phil's friend Ivan (Playing flute - not a good fit.) and Phil's pal Nigel. I'm sure there must have been more I've forgotten.

I'm not going to give any more details on names because it would piss me off royally if I came across my name being bandied about on some blog by some guy I hadn't seen for forty years, but I will say that the three of us briefly went by the names Dave Id, Phil Pup and S.T. Dee. What can I say? It was punk; everyone was doing it.

The book itself is an excellent record of the time. I remember most of the bands and several of the people, although I never did much more than say "Hi" to most of them. It was always Chris and Phil who got the gigs, did the organizing and talked to everyone. I never really got involved.

The photos make the point that Bristol punks did not follow trends. Pretty much no-one in any of them looks anything like the conventional image of a punk. In the shots I'm in you can see me wearing a safari jacket (It was olive green and had a lot of pockets.), a Cockney Rebel scarf (I bought it outside the Colston Hall when I went to see them in either 1974 or 1975.) and two unfashionably large badges (Howard the Duck and Che Guevara. Now, there's a double act!). You can't see my lower half but if you could you'd probably find I was wearing white Oxford bags.

On the way back in the car, Mrs Bhagpuss, who was momentarily impressed to see my picture in a book but who very soon got over it, asked me if I wished we'd taken it further. I have to say I probably don't, although if we had, that would have been fine, too. We had a lot of fun and that was enough. I'm kind of glad it never turned into a job.

On the other hand, I do very much regret not at least making a record. I mean, every other fucker did! Seriously. It cost a few hundred pounds back then to record and press five hundred singles. We had the money between us. We certainly had the songs. 

Why we didn't do it I have literally no idea. I can't recall it was ever even discussed. Or mentioned. 

Which is why it felt so good to find physical evidence of our existence as a band in this book. It doesn't add much to the record. There's nothing there that isn't already in virtual existence online and none of it actually tells you anything about who we were or what we sounded like. 

A book is a book, though. Somehow it has gravitas and permanence a web page can't match. Or a blog post.

My heartfelt thanks to John Spink, then, for having the determination to cart a camera around all those years. As Gill Loats says in the foreward, "So many of us could have done that but couldn't be arsed." 

If it wasn't for his photographs I'm not sure I'd believe it ever really happened.

Prog, Metal, Glam And The Velvets: A Musical History, Part One

To continue this week's "Get To Know You" theme for Blaugust, and since this blog is currently featuring a number of musical drop-in posts, I thought I might delve into my musical history a little. I imagine most regular readers will by now have built up a fairly clear impression of my MMORPG experience and tastes but I'm well aware that my musical preferences probably seem to have been drawn out of a particularly commodious and bizarrely-stuffed hat, entirely at random.

And that's not so far from the truth. I am something of a cultural magpie, swooping in on shiny things, stealing them and stashing them away in my nest. It's a serendipitous approach, for sure, but perhaps not quite as random as it seems.

I first became interested in music - popular music - at around the age of twelve or thirteen. Before that about the only notice I took was in novelty songs and anything related to TV shows I watched, like Stingray or Dr. Who.

The first proper pop record I bought with my own money was "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down", the Joan Baez cover of a Robbie Robertson song that was a hit in 1971. I had no clue who Joan Baez was, let alone that it was a cover. I just liked the tune and her voice.

Buying that single opened the floodgates. My mother used to buy a lot of things from the Freeman's catalog, a mail order outfit that sold everything from clothes to household goods to records. The catalog was the size of a phone directory and landed on our doormat regularly. From it I bought my first two albums, "Abbey Road" by The Beatles and "Motown Chartbusters Vol. 6". You  can see the eclecticism was there from the beginning.

That would have been towards the end of 1971, by which time I was thirteen. The teenage revolution was beginning. Within weeks of my thirteenth birthday popular music blew up to become my primary and overriding interest in life.

I began buying the weekly music papers, specifically The New Musical Express and Sounds. Occasionally I'd try Melody Maker but it seemed very stodgy and old fashioned compared to the NME, which was at that time becoming the home for all kinds of exiles from the collapsing underground press, and Sounds, which was very much the new kid on the block with young writers to back that up.

My best friend, Chris, was every bit as obsessed with music as I was and together we competed to find and introduce each other to new bands, artists and genres. We both went through a short but intense heavy metal/hard rock phase, almost inevitable since that was the genre of choice for most of our peers at our all-boys private school.

Black Sabbath were my favorite band of that period, closely followed by Deep Purple. I liked a handful of Led Zeppelin songs but most of their output seemed plodding to me. In retrospect it's obvious that what I was responding to in metal and rock was speed. I loved "Paranoid", "Highway Star", "Fireball" and "Immigrant Song", which all either sound like pre-punk tryouts or have a relentless motorik.

Heavy metal and hard rock soon gave way to prog. I was a big prog fan until about 1974 or '75 and I still like some of the bands even now. By 1972 I was going to Live gigs. Yes, unaccompanied by adults, at the age of thirteen. It truly was, as Lana del Rey unforgettably describes it in the magnificent "Brooklyn Baby, "the freedom land of the seventies".

The first gig I went to was Hawkwind, supported by Noel Redding's (ex of The Jimi Hendrix Experience) new band, the unfortunately-named Fat Mattress, plus a German band whose name I forget. Fat Mattress didn't turn up, supposedly having broken down somewhere on the M4 motorway, an excuse I was to hear a few more times when bands didn't make it to the gig on time.

Their slot was filled by local folk-comedian Fred Wedlock, who came onstage in front of a an audience of hippies, rockers and random degenerates (Hawkwind at the time being almost as famous for their "exotic dancer" Stacia as for their booming space-rock). With just an acoustic guitar, a laid-back stand-up comedian's polished patter and a set filled with genuinely funny and catchy songs, he went down a lot better than Fat Mattress ever would have. I bought his album the following week and it still amuses me on the odd occasion I remember I have it.

The eclecticism and randomness of that, my first ever live gig, set the standard I would both expect and get for the next 25 years, before I finally retired myself from the live scene in the late 1990s. Live performance should be vital, strange, unexpected. I have never had much time for the gig as worship or confirmation of expectations. Go see people you don't know because they have an interesting name and you're as likely to have a great time as you will if you see a band whose material you know inside-out.

My second gig set the lessons of the first both in context and in stone. I owned several albums by Yes by that point, "The Yes Album", "Close to the Edge" and particularly the triple-live album "Yessongs", which I played incessantly. I sat in my second-row seat at the Bristol Hippodrome, a proper theater occasionally used for rock shows, excited by the prospect of hearing all my favorites.

Jon Anderson, Rick Wakeman and the rest opened with three selections from Close to the Edge, which was great. Then they launched into their unreleased double-album, "Tales from Topographic Oceans", an epic eighty-minute conceptual work in four suites.

Almost no-one in the audience had ever heard it before, unless they'd been following the band on tour. Yes played the entire thing, in full, without a break. It was awesome. Those two gigs convinced me that, while the familiar could be fun, the unfamiliar might be thrilling. I've carried that belief with me ever since.

Even as I was buying prog albums by Uriah Heep, Gentle Giant and Emerson Lake and Palmer, my musical taste were changing. I put some of it down to the music press but the most significant lever of change was the Johnnie Walker show on Radio One.

Johnnie Walker, who had a very rocky relationship with the BBC, leaving under several clouds then returning years later each time, was never taken particularly seriously as an influencer along the lines of John Peel or Steve Lamacq but he had a habit of playing tracks on daytime radio that weren't on the notorious playlist. He introduced me to David Bowie's back catalog, particularly "Queen Bitch", and more importantly to Bowie's influences on that song, Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground.

Hearing "Waiting for the Man" on national radio at two o'clock on a weekday afternoon was a seminal event for me. It was the first time I'd heard something that sounded so utterly different from anything I'd heard before, an experience that was to be repeated infrequently but with enormous impact, many times over the next 45 years.

At the time, music radio, which meant BBC Radio One, was ruled by the charts and the charts, while wildly eclectic by today's standards, were dominated by glitter and glam rock. I loved hearing this on the radio but I didn't buy many of the records. As a peer-presssured teen it wasn't quite the done thing in my all-male school environment to confess to a love of mainstream, throwaway pop.

My cousin, however, who went to a mixed comprehensive school, had no such qualms. He lived a minute's walk from me and we spent much of our teenage years hanging out like brothers, but brothers who could get away from each other whenever we got on each other's nerves. Through him I heard a lot of the glam stuff that wasn't on the radio, the album tracks, and also, weirdly, some Krautrock he was into, particularly Faust.

When Lou Reed released the Bowie-produced solo album "Transformer", featuring his biggest chart hit "Walk on the Wild Side", I found a legitimate entry-point for glam. Lou became my favorite artist and something of an obsession for me for more than a decade. He was the first artist whose every album I bought on release, from the indescribably brilliant "Berlin" all the way through to "Mistrial" in 1986.

The only exception was Metal Machine Music. I went to Virgin Records the week MMM was released and asked to hear it. I put on the headphones and sat in the comfy seat provided. The record began and my head exploded. I lasted about five minutes. I was sweating, my heart was racing, I felt like I was having a panic attack. I tore the headphones off and ran out of the shop. Lou would have cracked a sardonic smile, I'm sure.

I can appreciate Metal Machine Music now. I own it and I have listened to it. The girl I was equally obsessed with in my teens as I was with Lou Reed did buy it back then. We used it very successfully to clear stragglers out at the end of a party.

Through 1973 and 1974 my tastes were a peculiar mix of prog, hard rock, glam and underground experimentalism. Some folk in there, too. Increasingly, though, my preferences were moving to the faster, the more driving, the more repetitive, the more musically simple but conceptually complex. I loved the relentless drive of The Velvets, of Iggy and the Stooges, of Sparks and Alice Cooper and Roxy Music and Hawkwind. Two or three chords and a lot of drone, with a singer who intoned more than sang. That was my bag back then and still to large extent is now.

And then came punk. Which is a story for another day.

When You Get Out Of The Hospital

It's been a bit quiet around here for the last week or so, which usually means I've been away on holiday. I was indeed lounging around, doing not very much, but I was doing it in a large hospital, not some pensión in the back of beyond.

As I briefly mentioned earlier in the year I had an investigative procedure that turned out to be positive and last week I went into hospital to have 30cm of my upper bowel removed. Everything went well - the surgeon's report described the operation as "uneventful", which is, I guess, exactly what you'd want your surgeon to say.

There was an interesting moment a couple of days into recovery, when they thought I might have had a heart attack. I was surprised to discover you can have one without noticing. It was a false alarm, fortunately, and I was judged well enough yesterday to come home.

If my ongoing recovery goes to plan, I probably have a month, maybe a month and a half,  before I go back to work. Then, all being well, I really will be on holiday for two weeks in June!

When I go on holiday I usually take a complete break and avoid looking at any blogs or gaming news but in hospital I was often looking for something to keep me amused and entertained so last week I read everything as normal. The hospital wifi, which I was piggybacking (they hadn't bothered to password it) didn't permit any kind of uploading or downloading so I wasn't able to reply to any of the interesting posts.

It's probably a bit late to start now. If you posted something in the last week, just imagine my reply. I would almost certainly have said exactly what you think I would. I usually do.

Since I'm supposed to be taking it easy and not overdoing things I should have plenty of time for blogging and also for trying some new MMORPGs. If I can find any.

That's about all I have to say on the matter except to do the thing everyone always does after they've had some potentially life-threatening condition diagnosed and (hopefully!) averted.

I really had no inkling I was seriously ill. I felt fine. I had some minor pains but they were occasional and familiar. There's no way I'd have gone to a doctor about them. It was just good luck that I dinged 60 in real life last November and because I'm fortunate enough to live in a country with a National Health Service one of my rewards for leveling up was a free test kit for bowel cancer.

Even then, I might easily have ignored it but because I tend towards Lawful Neutral I went along with what I was being asked to do, even though it ended up taking three goes and six weeks to get a definitive result. As a result, the operation I ended up needing has been smaller and less impactful than it would have been had I waited until symptoms appeared, always assuming that by that stage it would have been operable at all.

In countries with socialized health care there are generally a lot of free checks you can get. Medicine is all about proactivity these days. I don't really know how it works it countries that base healthcare on insurance but I imagine insurers would generally prefer to pay less earlier than more later so there are presumably options there, too.

Without getting all political about it, I'd just say that whatever checks you can have, you should have. If they offer them, take them. If you have to ask, then ask. Yes, it's annoying. We all have better things to do with our time than take an afternoon out to go to some clinic and have holes poked in us. Until we don't.

When I'm fit again I need to take my own advice and follow up a couple of other, less urgent, flags that popped up in some other precautionary testing I got free with my 60th birthday. For now, though, I'm going to sit back, drink tea and play games.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.