A week in Winter

It’s supposed to warm up a bit tomorrow, thank God. I had to walk over to the store for a meeting today and I was shaking with cold despite wearing  four layers of clothing. FOUR LAYERS. It’s the end of April, for God’s sake. I want to be cycling, gardening and walking to the pub for a pint; not shivering, contemplating suicide and sitting indoors hugging a radiator. 

RC 27-4-17

Bleergh!

I have to be honest and say I am really struggling for motivation right now. It’s not just with writing the blog, it’s with everything. Hasn’t happened for a while but I’m going through one of those spells where absolutely anything I try to do seems too hard to even think about starting. I think it’s because the weather’s turned again. This week has been like mid-February, but with more sleet. Plus, we’ve got the pain of another General Election to go through. Six weeks of ploughing through a turgid shitstorm of mind-numbing heart-wrenching bullcrud before the British public yet again get to pretend they’re taking part in democracy by being directed into a piss-smelling curtained booth by a senile retired ex-Primary School teacher or an overenthusiastic A-level politics student before making a tiny little mark on a pathetic sheet of paper that will make no real difference to the wider world. We’re doing it AGAIN.
Thanks, Theresa.

RC 25-4-17

15 reds; 15 years per frame

I’ve been trying to think of a way to sum up how slow and boring snooker can be. I have a few suggestions and I can’t decide which is the best, so I thought I’d just let you see them all:
Snooker is like watching two slow golfers play the same hole over and over again.
It’s like boxing, but without the punches, fitness, finesse or excitement.
Watching snooker and waiting for it to get interesting is as futile as standing at a bus stop thirty minutes after your bus was due and staring down the road hoping it’ll come round the corner.
It’s like chess, but without the intelligence, strategy, time limits and pretty board.
It’s the only sport that is made better by having to go for a shit while there’s a match on. 

RC 24-4-17

Week off done then

I didn’t plan to bugger off and disappear for a week, it just kind of happened that way. I missed a couple of days and then it got easier and easier to be lazy and harder and harder to motivate myself to type anything. I got lost in evening walks and late night film marathons and the next thing I new, it was now.
It didn’t help that our big Easter Monday gig didn’t go too well. I’d been building up to it for so long, then suddenly it was over and I felt all weird and as if I’d climbed into limbo. And, as I might have mentioned before but feel obliged to admit again, the gig didn’t go too well. We only really had six songs rehearsed and not one of them went as planned. A few tips for any boys and girls reading this who might be preparing for a charity appearance with a band you’ve only recently thrown together:
1. Don’t waste time at rehearsals talking about what you’ll be wearing instead of practising songs.
2. Don’t let the bass player spend the six hours before you start playing drinking Stella.
3. If you DO let no.2 happen, don’t let him have a go at the drummer halfway through the first verse of the opening song, so much so that the drummer throws a drumstick at his head.
4. If you DO let no.3 happen, make sure said drummer has a spare set of drumsticks with him, so he doesn’t play the rest of the first song with only one drumstick, before leaping into the crowd to try and find the other one. 
5. Say ‘No’ to any gigs that are offered before you’ve got your set list chosen, rehearsed, perfected.
Three weeks ago we were talking about trying to get proper pub gigs over the Summer. Now I have to think that Silver Lights may have come and gone within a season…

RC 23-4-17

ABC/OCD

I wanted to write about my recent tendency to either throw loads of blog postings at you frequently or simply ignore you for days on end. I couldn’t decide whether to call it “All or nothing” or “boom or bust.” Then I thought “oooh, those two phrases mean the same thing, and they start with consecutive letters of the alphabet. I wonder if I can come up with a similar phrase for every letter from A to Z? I wonder if that’s possible…” 
It seemed like a lovely reason for distraction, so I rolled with it.
And then, just for a laugh, I decided to make it rhyme…

All or nothing
Boom or bust
Champagne or cherryade
Diamonds or dust

Everything/nothing 
Full up or free
Gardens or deserts
Heaving/empty

In or outnumbered
Jam-packed or tossed
Killed it or kissed off
Landed or lost

Massive or tiny
Nubile or neutered
Over-ripe/unpicked
Packed/uncommuted

Queenly or commoner
Rollable/rigid
Sellable/stuck-on-shelf
Torrid or frigid

Used or discarded 
Voluptuous/void
Wanted or wasted
XL/unemployed

And Z can be Zippee!
But also be Zzzzzz
This alphabet ode
Gave me blues, and a buzz

RC 16-4-17

Good Friday gem

I love eating walnuts. If you’re having a bad day you can imagine you’re eating little baby brains and it makes you feel better.

Enjoy your Easter 

RC 14-4-17

Happy frickin' Easter

How does electrical equipment know it’s a public holiday? I got up this morning, went to wash some work shirts, and the washing machine started making a horrible noise, like a broken bike chain being dragged behind a lawnmower. So now we have to call someone out…. and it’s a long bank holiday weekend… so it’ll be extra pricey…. so we either suck it up and take the expense or put up with it til Tuesday when it won’t cost us an arm and a leg and a kidney. Do we save the pennies but be surrounded with a pile of dirty undies, that’s the question.
On a more positive note - I like to share the discovery when I find a new and satisfying food combination. So…. those new coconut & raisin Weetabix are pretty special, aren’t they?

RC 13-4-17

A weekend to savour

Wasn’t yesterday a glorious oasis of Summer, nestling in the long desert of a British never-ending Winter? 22 degrees in our back garden. TWENTY-TWO! Celsius! If we had that in the middle of August we’d be happy, surprised and elated. To have it in the first two weeks of April was wonderful. And what an effect it’s had. Everyone is in a better frame of mind today. Our usual Monday morning moan-a-thon from customers has given way to cheerful, bouncy ‘Good Mornings’ from most, and I’ve seen more smiles today than I saw in the whole of March combined. Don’t ever try and tell me human beings aren’t programmed to love sunshine or I’ll kick you in the tweeters and call you a liar. 
It’s hard to believe I only had two days off, such is the buoyancy of my mood and the glee in my heart. You’d think I’d been away on holiday. You’d also think I’d had a week at home spring cleaning and sprucing up the garden, such is the degree of difference in our abode. It looks like a different place now. We weeded, we mowed, we hoovered, we hedge-trimmed, we dusted, we polished and we tidied. And we still had time to squeeze in a walk, a lunch out and some good old Sunday lovin’. A great time together, and a great amount achieved.
And with regards to the obsession-level cleaning, don’t you dare suggest we’re ‘nesting’ or I’ll poke you in the eye with a daffodil.

RC 10-4-17
1233 BST

Can a linguist help?

A quick thought on Fridays poem: By the time you reached the bottom of it, hadn’t the word ‘Another’ ceased to mean anything? I’m sure there must be a name for this phenomenon, but whenever you use a word over and over in quick repetition, especially if it’s written down, you start to get some kind of word blindness and find it impossible to decipher what it means. It’s like that word has been removed from your vocabulary. It’s just a jumble of lines and curves on a piece of paper or on a screen with no discernible meaning. It happens to me, anyway. ‘Phantom’ is a great example. Say it in your head a few times, write it down a dozen or so times on lined paper and it starts to look nonsensical. 

RC 10-4-17

At last, Spring.....

What a day it’s been today. Glorious sunshine, WARM in our back garden, and it’s supposed to be even better tomorrow! Good times, indeed. I’m looking forward to a morning cycle ride and then a meal out somewhere in the Sun with my beloved. We might even head for the coast and get some beach between our toes, who knows? It can be a nice reward for our hard efforts today - clearing out the crap from the garden in anticipation of making a proper go at making it look nice by Summer. It’s much easier to get enthusiastic about keeping the lawn trim and planting nice flowers when you know it’s your OWN property you’re sprucing. 
God I sound middle-aged! But I don’t care. 

RC 8-4-16

Chain of Events - a poem about our band

Another Wednesday, another rehearsal
Another rehearsal, another argument
Another argument, another atmosphere
Another atmosphere, another mistake
Another mistake, another discussion
Another discussion, another decision
Another decision, another alteration
Another alteration, another addition
Another addition, another restart
Another restart, another confusion
Another confusion, another conflict
Another conflict, another meltdown
Another meltdown, another breakdown
Another breakdown, another walkout
Another walkout, another whisper
Another whisper, another explosion
Another explosion, another explanation
Another explanation, another acceptance
Another acceptance, another teabreak 
Another teabreak, another reset
Another reset, another song
Another song, another triumph
Another triumph, another hug
Another Wednesday.

RC 6-4-17

Foolish

I wanted to come up with a good bullshit story to put online yesterday to see if I could convince anyone it was real. But then I remembered that I hate practical jokes and think April Fool’s Day is a load of old shite, so I didn’t bother.
I did like this one idea though:

The Japanese phrase for “April Fool,” when written phonetically in English, is “Jack Dee” 

RC 2-4-17