Prog and self loathing

There's nothing like prog rock. Punk was supposed to kill off three disc concept albums, seventeen hour guitar solos and drum solos so long that the rest of the band could not only get a blow-job during them but in fact get in the tour bus, go to another city, play a gig in that city and then come back to finish the set and STILL get an ovation. That's how good the music scene was back then. All of which leads me to mention that I have been to the library and have borrowed heavily of The Pink Floyd.

Oh my suffering Christ alive but they're good. Stick your three minute thrash effort right up your arse because this is how to write music - a twelve minute guitar intro - a verse of sub-teen angst poetry/lyric and then another few minutes of guitar. Oh yes.

The great thing is, of course, PF are still going, albiet in reduced circumstances having shed a members to, you know, acid and tiffs but having borrowed my nephew's Live 8 DVD of their set, I can confirm their set was AMAZING. Why do you have a load of 50something prog rockers closing the gig? For the simple reason that they are, as Big Bryan pointed out 'fucking great'. Also they can play a stadium but mostly because Waters and Gilmore together was like the Beatles reuniting, but without the necromancy.

So glutting on prog on the iPod is a tremendous feeling. In reality I'm on a train or walking through the station but between the headphone speakers I'm back in my room aged 17, listening to led Zep again and discovering for the first time that there is music like this out there.

But it's not all buying into the sort of bands that by now have about as much artisitic integrity as Nike (discuss) (but it's not the band's fault that the producers of Top Gear have the Best of Pink Floyd on their CD players and every time J Clarkson steps out from behind the bonnet of a penis extension and wanks on about 'this car isn't fast...it's very fast indeed' you get three chords from Floyd).

Music choice is currently also about instant market gullibility. The excellent closing ceremony of the Commonwealth games had some hillbilly Australian outfit plucking banjos and singing about boxing booths. Top. Ten minutes later, song downloaded. Half hour later, played about 6 times. It rocks. And twangs.

Oh, and the self loathing. trrying to beat level seventeen of Jedi Outcast. There's an afternoon I could have better spent writing a stained glass window, designing a symphony or painting a novel.

'He always called me Tommy'

Of course, one cannot expect the pasrt to be pickled in Aspic but if they can put together those 'living museums' where geography teachers dress up like Victorians at the weekend (though I note they don't catch typhoid for real authenticity) then surely Trevor's shopcould be preserved, possibly with an animatronic Trevor behind the counter? Let's face it, the chap stood on a box most of the time and was mainly made of sports jacket - prime material for being brought to life by Jim Henson's creature shop.

This was where I bought my first D&D set, the start of a hobby that makes a crack habit seem cheap by comparison and it deserves preservation. At the very least, the windows should be a) dusty b) full of D&D boxes and c) have a space where the game you were going to buy sat that morning, before it was sold just before you got to the shop!

Bandwidth

Visiting darkest Midlands, and imagine my surprise and delight when booting up the laptop and discovering that one of Mum's neighbours has wireless broadband! Oh the wonder! Oh the (shudder) pleasure of it all! Not only is it broadbaand, but it's free and it's not mine. Immedietly wonder which one of the neighbours it is. Bets are on the people opposit as they have flash cars and 'look the type' but you never can tell if the pensioners either side are hiding under a veneer of respectability and are actually running some sort of internet based garden gnome porn business or have a web cam pointed at a cupboard full of Thai girls or something unsavoury.

Certainly I put on me patch, hoised me parrot and pirated bandwidth like there was no tomorrow. The only problem was that, even though the wireless network was not password protected, the outgoing mail server is of course unknown. So it was back to licking the back of the queen's head.

Yesterday once more

Bloody hell it's cold. Here in the Midlands the temperature never seems to climb above 'bloody cold', or at least has not for the last couple of days and it's raw. Forget day-glo-got-tex or whatever, what you need is a couple of boy scouts to rub together, a consequential fire to toast against and some scones to top the whole thing off.

So what else does one do apart from visit a garden centre. Mid-weeek, these places are filled with the limp and the lame, those in wheelchairs, those in powered wheelchairs anhd those who are presumably dead and whose keepers are driving around in wheelchaairs until the next series of 'Robot Wars'.

And me, trying to keep warm by hanging around the patio heater exhibition, oh, and finally getting my hands on a box of 'silent roar'. This is petrified puma pee and is supposed to put the wind right up yer cat who thinks that my garden, with all the new plants I've bought today, is is own personal loo.

And if that don't work, it's super soaker time.

Have also come across old diary from when I was 16. Reads just like my blog except, if memory serves, all the women discussed were thinner.

Hard labour

While forced labour migght call to mind chain-gangs in the deep south working on trenches while gun-toting guards on horseback look for any opportunity to bag a brace of convicts with a single shot of wide-spread pellets, foir sheer sweat and hopelessness, one can't beat prep for decoration. Bathroom has finally passed thorough stages of not to our taste, past untidy, past tired, part repulsive and finally arrived at point where it resembled the bathroom in a Turkish prison after a bout of food poisioning had swept D wing. Time for action.

Have now been prepping for two days. This is mostly because removing old paint has uncovered 50 year old wallpaper that can onmly be removed by either a wrecking ball or, my method, a scraper and a selection of blue language from The Docker's Big Book of Swearing.

It means that you scrape, you drink tea, you sacrape, you drin k tea, you scrape, you drink tea...you note your pee is brown from all the tea!

Still, driven half mad by the tanin and caffeine means that all the radio you listen to is just about bearable. Also good fun is the rolling news and traffic updates, from Ministers on the ropes to traffic stuck in scotland, all of human life is on FM.

Still, it'll look great when it's finished. Projected completion date...2012, or maybe closer to nine o' clock.

Sports and passion

Rugby is fantastic. It's like some gladiator movie crossed with a national sport. There's singing, nationalism and blood blood blood. Players appear to be allowed to stamp on each other's heads, receiving points for artistic impression as well as brute force. The players appear to divide into two groups - huge men with their ears taped to their head, broken noses, not many teeth and size 87 chests and blokes who use hair styling products.

Watching is great fun - unless Scotland are losing - and good exercise. What is required, along with replica shirts, beer, ham sarnies and a masochistic streak, is some sort of guard for the telly screen to protect it from the spittle and sonic wave generated by screaming 'come onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn' at the sort of volume normally only experienced by those who live close to Heathrow, more specifically those that live on the final approach of the really big runway where the jets full of fat-arsed tourists land, the engines straining, the bilges sloshing and the duty-free already consumed.

Final game on Saturday. Scots way-hey!

What to give up for lent

It's all about lent at the moment.

After stuffing themselves full of pancakes stuffed with sugary goodness, chocolate, or lamb, or goose (cough cough) or whatever the hell else it is that Christians put in pancakes (the blood of our lord Jesus, in the form of a holy black pudding?) we enter the season of abstinence.

As I sit here with my bottle of beer I wonder what to give up. Certainly not alcohol or anything I enjoy, and certainly not anything that is good for me. When i was a teenager I used to wonder if i could give up pleasuring of the self during lent but I learned one undeniable fact, the more you think about flogging the bishop, the more likely you are to spank the monkey.

No doubt the idea is to deny yourself something you enjoy, such as a fag or that seventh whopper, and then feel all good about yourself because you have made a 'sacrifice' just like Jesus did in the desert.

I don't think so. Much as McDs would like to conquer the world, I'm pretty sure they didn't have a fecking branch open in the desert about 20AD.

So, whittle away a bit. Give up something that you usually do and, in the space that occurs in your head, think of something wholesome and spiritual.

I suggest, strongly, that people give up making mind numbingly dull 'phone calls on the train next to me.

My iPod has packed up and I am once more re-immersed (like a baptism) back into the world. This has underlined all the reasons I had for getting the thing in the first place, it's a sonic screen against the sheer stupidity of modern life. the result is that I am now exposed once again to people making calls in close quarters.

For instance, this chap tonight was either deaf or special - nothing else could account for his braying voice and once he was on the phone he engaged in a monolog and treated the rest of the carriage to his thoughts and anecdotes. this is the sort of chap you might even consider not going to the pub to avoid. His conversation was like having nails of boredom battered into the coffin of my well being.

The punch line is that when he finished, he turned to the poor sod next to him who he had been talking to until they had both been interrupted by their separate phones, and began the whole thing again with 'I don't know if you heard that?'. i focused on a cold beer and refrained from screaming at him 'yes, the whole f**king carriage heard!'.

Enough ranting, no matter how therapeutic.

So that's my lent suggestion. Give up mobile 'phones. Giving up food is immoral until everyone has enough to eat. Giving up sex is immoral until everyone gets enough tail, and giving up beer is immoral until hey stop taxing it to fund the NHS - remember, every time you don't drink you deny a hospital an incubator.