I took this picture into the sun, completely blinded. Yesterday I was in the London for an interesting study day. It was stickily hot and it would always be nice to have enough extra time to potter around a bit instead of dashing from train to venue to train. Anyway, I learned a lot.
Where are you now?
Sorry, I’ve been on a study day and now I’m on a very hot train. I expect you’re all thirsty. Um… 4th July cocktails, whatever that might mean to you? I’ll have a long Long Island Ice Tea.
Who else is having one of those weeks?
On Monday nobody came to open up my teaching venue, for the second week running.
On Tuesday I went to completely the wrong place to work at a breastfeeding support group.
Wednesday went comparatively smoothly, apart from being socially obligated to drink two cups of tea in the afternoon, which made me unable to sleep. At all.
This morning my teaching venue was locked again.
I could do with a holiday.
In the last week I have again failed to run 8 miles. I managed 7.5 on my feet, but the last two of those involved a fair bit of walking, which is a first for me and felt rather disappointing. This was on Friday. I have been out for shorter runs on Sunday and yesterday, and now I can barely move my aching calves. What’s that about? Do I need new shoes or shall I just GIVE THE DAMN THING UP?
I ran 42 miles in June, so not quite my highest mileage month ever but close, and including two new bests for pace. But I’m not loving it right now and I’m thinking about forgetting the Wokingham Half, which looks terribly serious, and going for the Reading Half instead, which doesn’t feature the threat of the sweeper bus, and probably has more fancy dress. Or maybe no half at all, because 8 miles continues to elude me.
You’d better tell me inspirational tales of your own running, today.
After taking a couple of months off from this project, I have returned! You knew I wouldn’t abandon you.
After completing the review for Heroes, I listened to this album once or twice and thought “oh no, here we go again” but I’m pleased to say that with fresh ears I’m not feeling so down about the whole thing. 
Fantastic Voyage is perhaps a strange choice of song to open the album – whereas Bowie usually chooses something danceable and confident to start with, this one has the feeling of something that had no planned structure and just fell haphazardly into place. While I found this initially offputting, this song has really grown on me, and actually sounds like something that wouldn’t be out of place in a more recent album. It has a delicate sound and a steady pace, and some soaring operatic vocals.
African Night Flight also sounded ridiculous first time round, but like so many songs on this album, it improves with familiarity. Once you can anticipate the weirdnesses, they’re not so weird. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a big chaotic 3 minute mess. The verse is a… well, I suppose the word would be rap, which is a word that I wish I didn’t have to use, and the chorus is a big guitary soup. But it’s all very odd.
Move On starts off with a rather nothingy verse but really gets going once you reach the wonderful chorus, with numerous backing vocal tracks weaving all over each other, each doing something slightly peculiar but all combining to form a very attractive texture. And that last chorus where Bowie’s voice rises an octave and really belts out the words sounds absolutely thrilling, you can hear his voice going ever so slightly hoarse during it. The lyrics are also very touching, the wanderlust comes from the heart.
Yassassin is another quite, quite peculiar song. Though, that said, once you get over the fact that it’s a Turkish reggae song, for goodness’ sake, there isn’t much else in the way of surprises. It’s not unlistenable though.
Red Sails does not do much for me, the vocal performance is fairly weak and the song doesn’t have much dynamic variation. The only bit I do like is the hollering off “the hinterland, the hinterland, we’re gonna sail to the hinterland!” for some unknown reason. That tickles me.
DJ is probably one of my favourites. After re-picking up this album after my hiatus, this is the song that rejuvenated my optimism, and that’s because the chord sequence in the chorus is just perfect. Nothing too spectacular, just effective. Am E7 F7. Back of the net. Nice bouncey disco octave bassline all the way through too. I appreciate the simple things.
I’m not a huge fan of Look Back In Anger – I find the vocals to be a little bit too croony. Sometimes Bowie sounds like a parody of himself, and this is one of those times.
And I’ve never liked Boys Keep Swinging. It’s just a bloody annoying song, and again Bowie sounds like a Bowie impersonator doing an impression of Bowie. Do you have just one funky sequinned spacesuit Bowie, or do you have many ch-ch-changes? The guitar solo is utterly appalling too, sometimes tunelessness is entertaining in its own right, but this ain’t one of those times.
Repetition is a song about domestic abuse, and is apparently intentionally monotonous for effect, but I have to say that it ends up doing nothing for me as a listening experience. The lazy bass riff starts to grate after a while too. That’s enough.
And finally we have Red Money, which has a fabulous sleazy sound reminiscent of Win. There’s so much to like about this song, the vocal performance has the right amount of edge, the guitar parts are subtle and appropriate, the bassline is funky and raw, and it has a magnificent ascending five-way harmony in the “chorus”.
Hits from this album: While a few of the songs were released as singles, Boys Keep Swinging is the only one that attained a decent chart position.
My favourite song from this album: My choice here is DJ, though Red Money and Move On are pretty good too.
Next up: Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps).
We need to redecorate in here, since the clientele has virtually disappeared. A facelift. A theme? New furniture, comfy chairs and so on. You are the world’s most opinionated people, so you must have some thoughts on how to perk up the virtual bar. If you would like to share them, I’ll buy you a virtual drink.
I don’t exactly have a hangover, but I did have maybe some cider, and maybe also some wine, and maybe a curry and a late night. I didn’t really fancy the three hour antenatal class in a windowless room this morning. I do, on the other hand, fancy lying down on the sofa with my book but there’s no time for that.
Better order your drinks with your best hangover cures today, please chaps.
When I spotted the topic for this month’s Skeptics in the Pub, I immediately started casting around for babysitters so that Pete and I could go. Not because I felt we were experts, or indeed because there was anything else for us to learn about internet romance, but just because it made me smile so broadly.
Despite having met in a comments box, looked into each others’ eyes at a blogmeet, and flirted for weeks by email, I’m not really sure you could ever have called this an internet romance. Sure, it was spawned on the internet and facilitated by the internet, and the internet was one of the main things we had and continue to have in common; but when you say “internet romance,” don’t you mean either a) online dating site or b) chatroom roleplay?
Ten years ago, if you asked us how we met, we might have glossed over the internet part and told you we met in the pub. Well, not you; you’re internetty enough to be cool with this. But Real Life people were less comfortable with the idea that you could pick up some stranger online, and meet them in real life. Much less go out for pizza, accidentally-on-purpose go to bed with them, and live happily ever after. Now we usually tell the truth, either because we know we’re talking to someone else who did the same, or because we like to shock where we still can. It’s quite possible that I still haven’t told the entire truth to either of my parents.
Then, and perhaps still a little bit now, online dating seemed a bit more seedy than the entirely wholesome thing we did. A bit more dodgy. People do both intentionally and unintentionally misrepresent themselves online, but that’s not restricted to dating or chatrooms, and not all weblogs tell you the unvarnished truth about a person. Pete’s probably did; it was mainly photographs of snails and posts about computer stuff. I love that he hasn’t changed one bit. But that wasn’t the whole Pete. It’s probably true of most bloggers that the part of yourself you put online isn’t your whole self; it’s your edited self, whether you want to make things look better, or worse, or you just don’t feel the need to share it all. In addition to that, the reader interprets within their own frame of reference, so my assumptions on reading Pete’s weblog before I met him were quite wrong.
However, my assumptions on first meeting him were also wrong (I thought he was sweet), and it was the lengthy emails that we both wrote while we were supposed to be working, in the weeks following our first date, where all the dark depths of his personality were revealed (I’m talking dark depths like chocolate with high cocoa solids, not marshland full of buried corpses). Yet email was still a medium in which we polished up our best sides, played to our strengths, and built a wonderful fantasy relationship that flourished both online and off precisely because there was very little mundane reality. Okay we had to eat sometimes but no-one ever had to put the bins out when we only had weekends and emails.
And then blah blah blah all that stuff in the middle & our son turns 8 next week, etc. Thanks for listening.