HEY, how you doing? It’s been a while, what you been up to?
Hopefully, the return of this blog is rather more an encounter with someone you have been hoping to catch up with rather than bumping into someone you haven’t seen for ages and quickly remember exactly why.
Like most of those e-mails, phone calls or get-togethers you really have been meaning to do for ages, this blog was never supposed to take this long.
Yes, the plan was supposed to take a bit of a break and come back refreshed with a new look and a few fresh ideas. Just not this long.
That break was started back in January so it has lasted most of 2016 and the observant among you will notice that not that much has changed. Precisely nothing to be exact.
There has been plenty of fiddling around in the background and even a couple of abortive redesigns which were so close to making the grade. Right up to the point when something techie stalled everything or the new look which seemed so attractive one day, suddenly lost its charm at the next log in.
And having spent large chunks of the intervening 11 months involved in redesigning part or all of a couple of newspapers, believe me what looked good one day or in your mind, can look far less effective, eye-catching or user-friendly when you go back to it. For user-friendly, read it creates more work.
There will be a new look. By the time you read this, even by the time it is posted, there may be be a new background picture. By the time you look again (hopefully not that long), it could well have changed again.
Suggest that could be what happens in the next couple of months, trying out a couple of designs and seeing what works.
So what’s happened during almost a year of blog silence? Anything interesting? Has 2016 thrown up anything worth talking about? No, thought not.
There have been a long list of events since the blog went on a break which have had me sitting at the laptop ready to type or composing articles – rants in a fair amount of cases – on the way to and from work.
In a rough sort of order… David Bowie, Farage, Gloucester’s poor form, Trump, unexpected brilliance from Gloucester, Hereford at Wembley, Boris Johnson, Trump, Muhammad Ali, Farage, Brexit, Farage (getting the rant bit?), being told to stop complaining about Brexit (no, that’s democracy), the Olympics, Gloucester’s poor form (new season, same story), more issues with tenants, the taxman talking rather more about money owed than poetry, Trump (more rants), more out-of-the-blue brilliance from Gloucester (reliable only in their unreliability), Leonard Cohen, Farage again, any number of other dead celebrities who were part of my childhood… all nearly got the keyboard tapping away. We will get there in the coming weeks.
To say nothing of what has been going on nearer to home (including why a lack of time and, frankly, surplus energy has also been a factor for the longer than planned break), music and travel. You know, the subjects which this blog is built around.
There has not been that much in the way of travel. After spending most of 2015 observing a fascinating chunk of the world on the road (well, the dirt tracks for large chunks – if we were lucky), 2016 has been spent largely observing a mystifying world from the comfort of my sofa (now the cheap one bought out of need has been replaced by the one my latest tenants didn’t want).
There was one trip Stateside, introducing my nephew to the delights of Boston and New York – thankfully, he seems to have come down far more on the side of the Red Sox than the Yankees – but travel has mainly been confined to honing the bucket list and planning future trips. More to come on that after a new idea was planted in my brain a couple of weeks ago.
So what of music? After all, this is in the A-Z iPod Challenge section.
It’s not been a bad year, a few new discoveries and some old favourites rediscovered (The Wedding Present live in Bristol tomorrow for the second time this year after a gap of nearly three decades) and enough decent stuff in the last 12 months that a rundown of the best could form an upcoming post.
Which is all good as there has been plenty to listen to with the task of listening to the contents of my iPod from A-Z on a hiatus with the blog – it had to be really or there would have been too much to catch up on.
But when the break was still looking like a short one, there was a fairly lengthy chunk from Don’t Stare At The Sun by Richard Hawley, via Downtown Train by Tom Waits at number 2,700 and the longest track so far – all 27.37 of Driftin’ Back by Neil Young and Crazy Horse – to Dynamo by Johnny Marr, at the time track 2,799, at the end of the Ds.
Along the way were a couple of tracks which would certainly make the long list if Desert Island Discs decided a travelling production journalist was a suitable guest – Driver 8 by REM and the wonderful Dry the Rain by The Beta Band (you know, the one John Cusack tries to sell to unsuspecting punters in High Fidelity).
And there were plenty of other great tracks of varying vintages, topped off with Don’t Talk by 10,000 Maniacs, Don’t You Fall by The Be Good Tanyas (who always bring back memories of sitting on the banks of the Yukon on a lovely summer evening, inevitably being bitten by mosquitoes), The Door by Turin Brakes, Down About It by The Lemonheads, Drunken Butterfly by Sonic Youth, Duel by Propaganda and Duet by Everything Everything, with some Jam, Nirvana, Buffalo Town, Belly and Lloyd Cole thrown in for good measure.
So normal service is resumed – bar a catch-up of the A-D tracks bought in the meantime. More of that next time, once I’ve worked out how to get the photo library plug-in to work again after all this time…
