Reasons To Be Cheerful.

It’s Friday and the sun is shining again. I’ll get outside in a bit when I’ve written a little blog. I had a nice afternoon yesterday. It was the first time this year that I have had my kitchen door open. When the sun is shining at the right angle my little yard is quite a heat trap. I put some music on which was Reasons To Be Cheerful, The Best Of Ian Dury. I really like Ian Dury, he was a national treasure. I would put his album New Boots & Panties in my favourite twenty albums of all time. I had a sweep up of the yard and planted some bulbs in pots. It said on the box that they were 2 Centaurea Dealbata, 1 Aster, blue, 1 Phlox white, 1 Eryngium Planum and 15 Liatris Spicata (Blazing Stars mixed). I’m not sure what all those are so it will be interesting to see what comes up.

 I noticed that my bench in the yard was looking a bit weathered and distressed, so I gave it a coat of varnish to cheer it up. I was pleased to see some buds appearing on my camellias which was encouraging. I was out there about two hours and came back indoors feeling quite pleased with myself.

I had a nap and woke up about 7.00 and went round to the pub which is only about 30 yards away. It was quite pleasant. Later on, I watched Question Time on the telly which always makes me angry. I’m not going to watch it any more. Because of having a nap earlier I was wide awake at past midnight. I was reading about the author Elizabeth Smart and how Morrissey of The Smiths plagiarized her work for his lyrics. I never knew that before. I ended up going on eBay and buying a copy of her novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. I read it about forty years ago, but I want to pore over it again looking for Morrissey links.

I might not do a blog tomorrow because I’m going to Bath to see Robert Plant and Fairport Convention. That should be memorable and worth writing about, so I’ll write an in-depth story and tell you all about it on Sunday.

Alicia Keys - Fallin'

Thinkin' 'Bout Alicia Keys.

Thursday morning at 10.36 and all is well. The sun is streaming through my kitchen window and I’m listening to The Diary Of Alicia Keys. Who said I don’t like soul music? Ha!. This is the album I bought in a charity shop the other day. It  doesn’t look like it has been played before. It is a special limited edition and also contains a DVD but I haven’t played that yet. I first heard of Alicia Keys when Bob Dylan mentioned her in a song called Thunder On The Mountain (See Below)

I was thinkin' 'bout Alicia Keys, couldn't keep from crying

When she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was living down the line

I'm wondering where in the world Alicia Keys could be

I been looking for her even clear through Tennessee.

I never gave her any more thought until the other day. Like all genius musicians she was incredibly precocious. This was her second album which came out in 2003 when she was only about 22 years of age. She is a classically trained pianist and you can hear that from the opening notes of the album. I think my favourite song after two listens is You Don’t Know My Name but the whole album is great. It is a providing a very nice soundtrack to this sunny February morning. I’m going to get dressed in a minute and get outside for some fresh air. I bought a box of bulbs yesterday in Morrison’s and it says on the box that you can plant them from February onwards. That is my plan for the day, to do some planting and tidy up my tiny little garden. Carpe Diem !

Bob Dylan - Thunder On The Mountain.

Dig My Mood.

Good morning world, it’s a brand-new day. I am listening to Dig My Mood by Nick Lowe. It’s a great album. Nick is playing near here in a couple of months’ time. I must get a ticket for that.  It’s quite spring-like out there today, so I’m going to write a quick little blog, then go for a walk. I never wrote one yesterday because I got led astray. The day started well. There was a knock on my door and there was the post lady with a parcel. It was a nice hardback copy of The Remains Of The Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I have been meaning to read it for ages. I saw it on eBay and put in a bid and got it for £2.99, so I was well pleased. That was a good start to the day.

I caught the bus over to Warminster and hit the shops. I went in The Lions Bookshop, RSPCA, Blue Cross, Dorothy House, British Heart Foundation, Barnardo’s, MS, Red Cross and Help The Aged. I found Catch A Fire, the biography of Bob Marley, The Confidential Clerk, first edition 1954 by T.S. Eliot, I found a nice hardback copy of Born To Run, the autobiography of Bruce Springsteen and finally a book signed by James Brown (No, not that James Brown!) This is another James Brown and it’s about football and called Above Head Height. I’ll put all those books in my bookshop this evening.

I was quite pleased with my little haul of books because some days I don’t find anything worth buying. 

Then I repaired to Wetherspoons to meet S. I wasn’t going to drink but I succumbed to temptation and bought a bottle of chardonnay. That was the first time this year that I have had any wine. It was good fun and the time flew by. After a couple of hours, I said cheerio and caught the bus home. I went to bed and had a nice nap. When I woke up, I watched Pointless and went to the pub and had two pints of cider, so it was quite a boozy day. I’m not going to have any today unless I get summoned to the pub. Anyway, have a nice day, I’ll try and think of something interesting to write about tomorrow.

The Garden Of Jane Trelawney

It's Monday afternoon and quite a nice day for February. I've just been for a walk up town. In the Air Ambulance shop I found a nice hardback copy of  As I Walked Out One Midsummer's Morning by Laurie Lee published in 1969 with a very attractive dust jacket. It's one of the best books I have ever read so it's nice to get another copy. In the Dorothy House shop I found Reasons To Be Cheerful, The Best Of Ian Dury and The Diary Of Alicia Keys. They were only 50p each, so I was well chuffed. I'll tell you more about them at a later date. In the meantime I am listening to The Trees, BBC Sessions which a friend gave me years ago and I hadn't played for a while. It reminded me that I wrote a story about The Trees ages ago, so I thought I would dust it off and show it to you. Sorry if you have read it before..............

Back in 1974 I was living in a little village called Summerhill in North Wales and worked at a place called The Metal Box Company. My friend Dave worked there as well. We were quality control inspectors.We had to go on a weeks course to learn how to use all these instruments such as micrometers and we learned it all in about half a day. The lady teaching us couldn't believe we could learn it all so quickly. Although the company was called Metal Box Company what we actually made at this place was plastic bottles such as Fairy Liquid and Domestos. We had to do hourly checks on the bottles to make sure they were alright. We did this in about two minutes. This left Dave and I about 58 minutes in every hour to throw plastic bottles at each other and mess about. It was mad working there, we used to call it the 'Mental' Box Company. Everyone who worked there was bonkers.
Dave and I got sick of the sight of each other because we were living in the same house and working together. One day I kicked him in the leg and we walked to work ten yards apart from then on.
To cut to the chase and get to the point of this story, Dave started going out with this girl called Sula who came from Dolgellau or somewhere up there near Snowdonia near the place where the Tipi people lived. She was a student at Wrexham Technical College. She started coming round our house all the time. Sula bought this album round that she kept playing. I asked her what it was called and I thought she said, The Garden Of Jane Trelawney.

That name struck a chord with me because when I was a kid one of my favourite books was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson and one of the characters in it was Squire Trelawney who is in the very first chapter if I remember. I liked this album because it was in the folk/rock idiom and I was already a huge fan of Fairport Convention and this was more of the same. The band was called The Trees and I think Sula actually knew them. The singer was Celia and she eventually married a famous DJ called Pete Drummond. The album had songs such as Nothing Special, Silkie, She Moved Through The Fair, I Am A Road And I Know Where I'm Going To. Sadly the days at Summerhill ended and I left, never to return.

Forty long years went by until one day I was on the phone to a friend of mine, and we were talking about old rare albums and I said, "Have you ever heard of an album called The Garden Of Jane Trelawney?".

"Heard of it?, I've got it, I'll make you a copy if you want".
A few days later I was listening to an album I hadn't heard for decades and all the memories of the days in Summerhill came flooding back. When I looked at the cover I had a real shock though. The album wasn't called The Garden Of Jane Trelawney at all, it was called The Garden Of Jane Delawney. I don't care though, for me it will always be Jane Trelawney.
That is not the end of the story though because a friend on the internet called Richard offered me a CD called BBC sessions by the Trees which I snatched up and also Richard sent me a CD of demo's by The Trees. So now I have three albums by the great but short lived Trees.

Gardens In The Rain.

I never wrote a blog yesterday because I didn't do anything worth writing about. I did venture out into my sad little garden for ten minutes between showers to feed the birds and check on my fishes. There wasn't much to see but I was pleased to see a viburnum in bloom and my clematis looks like it will flower in a couple of weeks. We can't expect too much, it's still February. I watched Ireland beat Scotland in the rugby and in the evening I watched a documentary about David Bowie followed by his performance at Glastonbury in 2000.
It is Sunday morning now and I am listening to Nocturnes and La Mer by Debussy. It is my only Debussy CD. I bought it in Help The Aged for £1.49 quite a few years ago. I wrote a little piece about it at the time. I bought it because Van Morrison mentions Debussy in his song 'On Hyndford Street'

And tuning in to Luxembourg late at night
And Jazz and Blues records during the day
Also Debussy on the Third Programme
Early mornings when contemplation was best.

I looked on YouTube for more Debussy and found a piece called Gardens In The Rain. It is a wonderful piece of music written for piano. Sweet Thing, In The Garden, Cold Wind In August, When The Leaves Come Falling Down spring to mind where Van uses the imagery of gardens in the rain. Did he get the idea from Debussy one wonders? Maybe not, because when we saw Van perform the song On Hyndford Street at his concert on Cyprus Avenue Belfast in 2015 when he got to the bit about Debussy he said, "I don't know why I put that in there". I was quite miffed about that because I listened to Debussy because I thought Van did. It doesn't really matter though because it's still a nice piece of music. You can hear Debussy play it himself below in a recording made in 1912.

Debussy plays Debussy: Jardins sous la pluie