Reaper

I thought it was the wolf in the garden, but it feels like it might be the grim reaper.  Sonia and Jonathan gone in 2 weeks, and waiting for M's results.  Mogh a few weeks ago.  L & M having irregular heartbeats.

Feels like Death is using my facebook friends list as a To Do list.

I am become death the destroyer of worlds.

Season of doom

It is peeing down, autumn is here, money isnt and it is hard to keep a positive thought in your head.  Into this mix we are thrown the bombshell that the breadcrumb's little helper, M, has a tumour the size of a grapefruit.  We are all still in the denial and keeping on going phases.  But it is a gutter for a very important person in all of our lives.  More tests and then surgery.  Let us hope it is still in time.

Woof

here comes the black dog.

And I miss my white cat.

Here comes the rain again

After a late burst of summer the rain and cold are back with a vengence.  My shoulder is aching, its chucking it down, and we are out of money.  I can feel the winter depression gathering strength before it launches at me.

Going to  the gym has helped me be physically in better shape for this winter (the shoulder is nothing to do with that), and I should have plenty of work in the next 2 1/2 months - but the black dog is back sniffing at the picket fence again.

Still, I'm not down yet.  And I'm still alive, in the game, and have got grounds for optimism about the next 3 months.

It’s Ed

Personally I went for David.  I hope we don’t regret this.

Meanwhile, with the other reds – roll on next season (yes, already).

and that's the season

So, we lost to Chelsea, and that's the season over. I could hardly watch, but realistically we were not up to the job.

Summer's gone

It feels like autumn already. Apparently the coldest summer for nearly 20 years.

Still the breadcrumbs are off to tennis camp.

a week or so ago I couldn't face the thought of football - England were still beating India at Cricket. Now it feels right. The reggae CDs are coming out of the car until next April - they just don't sound right.

The black dog is still prowling the garden, but I'm trying to keep it at bay.

The cat is dying and that is not a good thing for the family, or the poor brave warrior himself.

Times are hard. It is the strain that kills

Still, at least Liverpool's season has extended past August. Which is not always the case. And for once Arsenal and Spurs are the teams suffering. Which means there is a chance we can make the Champion's league again. The two Manc teams look too strong for us to have a chance of the title. But you never know.

Outside it's Blade Runner

For what seems no good reason I find myself in Kuala Lumpur. It is night and raining. And indeed, it appears to be Blade Runner. Ok, there are no flyers and I have not actually seen Deckard hunting replicants, but apart from that this is it exactly. Constant rain,

Enjoy Every Sandwich

Warren Zevon's advice to us all.  Our small group is one fewer this week.  A reminder that the worst things in life come some idle Tuesday.  Even when things are going well, bad things can come out of nowhere.  And no matter how bad things are at the moment for many of us, if your worries are only financial then things could be worse.

Film reviews

Been watching movies recently.

Some good ones - 4 Lions, Scott Pilgrim vs the World, All that Jazz.

All that Jazz is a classic. They dont make them like that anymore. Hadnt seen it in a couple of decades, but it is still great. Off the wall, and for me the best film about showbusiness outside of the Producers.

Scott Pilgrim did not dissappoint. My GLW hated it and turned off. For me, steeped in comics, it was brilliant. Extremely funny, visually inventive, and generally wizzbang. I can see why it bombed though. It veered between comic book and realism far too much for anyone but geeks. Can't wait to see it again.

4 Lions is a work of genius. Anyone with an interest in islamic terrorism should see this film. As the director Chris Morris said, it does for Al Queda what Dad's Army did for the Home Guard. Should win an Oscar. Funny, empathic, surreal, satirical, grounded, sad. Everything you need.

One that was disappointing was Inception. Very Pretty but no emotional content, and the twist is only a twist if you dont watch a lot of SF.

And this early in the season Liverpool vs Spurs is going to be pretty important. If Spurs lose it will be easier for us to finish above them.

Summer's gone

2 days back at school, and it feels like autumn. And what is with the need for Astronauts costumes?

The link about covers my views on the US Republican party - see here

Mogh

Pooch. The Boy. Himself.

Mogh died in the garden last night, aged 11, after a short illness. There was no pain or discomfort. He just stopped eating and faded away rather rapidly. The vets could find nothing wrong with him, so we must assume it was just his time. Though far sooner that we hoped.

I hope that, being named for a Klingon warrior, he is in StoVoKor now with his sister B'eti, and old friend Dax. That many prawns are being eaten, and much catnip rolled in. And that tall tales are being told of the birdies hunted, the mouses caught and the days when he brought in rats.

His garden will soon become other cat's territory, but he will live on in our hearts. As I type this I expect to hear his chirp, and to see him padding through to sit on the keyboard and then amble hopefully over to the fridge.

Rest in Peace dear friend. K'pla

too early

Once again it is too early for football. I am still waiting for my summer.

27 club

On the BBC radio programme "more or less" yesterday they did some quick number crunching on the deaths of rockstars. They assumed there would be a confirmation bias about the age of 27, and there possibly is. However, they found that most rock stars become famous or successful about the age of 25, and that in the following 5 years they had a 2.3% chance of dying. That is ten times the chances of a normal person, and higher than a soldier serving 5 years in Iraq (1.9%).
So the 27 club will probably have more members in future.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b012x12m

Tough week

I lost my nerve after feeling that after working like a Dervish for 4 months all I have done is kept us financially in the same place. Without it we would have lost everything, but after it we are still only a couple of months from the wolf knocking on the door.
This has led to panic attacks and an inability to focus and concentrate.
Meanwhile the bills are appearing at horrible frequency -the breadcrumbs birthday party, breadcrumbs sports camps, the Purple People Carrier having one of those months all cars have.
So far it is a new tyre, 2 new windscreen wipers, 2 windscreen washer nozzles (thanks to the baboons at Knowsley), petrol and coming up soon a big service with a change of timing belt. Ouch.

But the long term worrying thing is that the littlest breadcrumb may be suffering from glaucoma. Which means that she will be in treatment for the rest of her life, and has risk of damaged or lost sight.

The treak is to keep breathing, is a great novel by Janice Galloway. And the only advice possible.

This week's hotel room - Radisson Edwardian Bloomsbury

And jolly nice it is too. Room is pretty spacious by London standards and quite comfortable. Food is good. No doubt it is staggeringly expensive, but I am not paying so I don't know. The best thing about it is that is about 20m from the British museum on Great Russell Street. This makes it easy to just slip over the road and amble round. Yesterday was the Minoan rooms, which followed on a recent In our Time on Minoan culture. Also got to see more of the "history of the world in 100 objects" - the very first was a hand axe that is 1.5 million years old. 1.5million. Wow. Difficult to think that at that time there even were humans.

Crash of the Elysium

Great fun. The twins were alternately terrified and engaged for an hour. Surprisingly there were no merchandise opportunities - we would have shopped!

Manchester International Festival in Salford Quays - if your have kids aged between 8 and 12 you have to take them

The next day's room

The Wednesday night brought a rather different room - effectively a student room. In fact I thought it was as student campus, but it turned out to be a NUS training camp.

This was Yarnfield Training and Conference Centre, which is the former GPO and BT training centre. A Massive complex - very much like a student hall of residence. It seems so large that bits of it are now getting run down through disuse.

A little bit of a blast from the past.

Last week' hotel room Tuesday 27th

The Marriott Victoria and Albert in Manchester. Jolly nice. I really do like Marriotts. In fact I think I would like to live in one.

Internet was not free which is an irritation - do hotels not realise that this just causes aggrovation with guests?

Food and drink good and not especially expensive for a hotel

The first thing I want to say is....

mandate, my ass.

Last night I watched Don Lett's documenatary about Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution will not be televised. It was on BBC Four, but is not available on i-player (presumably for rights reasons), but with luck it will be repeated.

Gil was on himself - clearly suffering from his cocaine addition and HIV. His teeth were poor and he looked even more gaunt than usual. But his humour and intelligence shone through. It is tempting to say what a shame it was that this man suffered from such a terrible and debilitating addiction which deprived us his talents for most of the past twenty or twenty five years. But he seemed to accept it, and his story deserves to be about what he did rather than what else he might have done. After all plenty of people never reach his heights in the first place.

As an aside, few people swear as well as Gil - the timing and usage of a poet. Never just for the sake of it, always for judged effect.

I saw him live twice. Both in his missing years in the late 80s and early 90s. I don't know whether the drugs came first, and lead to his decline, or whether as suggested by the programme the music world decided he was old hat and his decline lead to the drugs. Only last night did I realise what a comedown it must have been from touring the world with Stevie Wonder to touring the backrooms that I saw him in.

The first was in Boston, USA. It was my first trip to the USA and I was extending a business trip to take advantage. I have no idea what made me go to Boston, apart from the fact that I could stop there for free on the way from Cincinatti to New York. In the rental car I heard that Gil was playing at a club. I changed my plans immediately.

I'd loved his music since "B-movie" was on an NME tape, starting off with the quote above. Secrets, not one of his best known albums, was one of the soundtracks to my first serious relationship. But he was mythical - not the sort of person who ever toured. It seemed impossible to imagine ever seeing him live.

To give you an idea of how important it was, while waiting to go to the club a perfectly nice attractive young American girl offered to take me back to her place. I turned her down. Just so I could go to see Gil. Seriously, I've never done that for anyone else.

And then he let me down. He bad mouthed Britain, saying what a cold grey place it was. I was probably the only Brit there, and why would he think there was even one. He got big laughs, but it disappointed me.

I still went when he played the Riverside in Newcastle, and I got to meet him backstage when he signed a book of poems for me. He was polite, but clearly keen to get on to other things. But that time it was ok for me. I realised he was a man, not a hero - and indeed he would have laughed at people seeing him as a role model, or any kind of perfect creature.

It must have been tough going from big gigs to the Riverside, which was only about 250 people.

The documentary made me realise that there is music of his out there that I have not heard, and I want to. That is unusual for this sort of programme. Normally you just remember the hits. This made me want to go deeper. So it was a success. The thing about Gil was that the combination of poetry (because he genuinely was a poet, not just a lyric writer), jazz and politics was pretty rare - and still is.

When I was younger I would have thought he had a good innings dying at 62. Now I am creeping up on 50 I realise how young it was, and how young he was when he started doing all this great music. We were practically contemporaries.

RIP Gil Scott Heron.