Author: Mike A

So much for the “winding down gently before Xmas” pipedream, then.

Look, I thought there was an unwritten code that said: IF you’re one of the poor Buggins’ Turn saps left in the office during Holiday Fortnight then FEAR NOT, because it’s basically about providing Emergency Cover and no one will really care if you alternate between last minute shopping and pissing about on the Internet.

Evidently not. But since I’ve got half an hour to kill while waiting for something to happen on Ye Olde Heritage Mainframe, I thought I’d pop in to wish my remaining reader a Happy Holiday.

But if Work Time has been busy, then it it has been as nothing compared to Leisure Time – which for the past week has meant spending every available waking hour looking after the village blog. Three reasons for this:

1. We’re running an online Advent Calendar, which we’ve augmented with extra pay-per-view windows featuring various villagers in saucy Calendar Boy/Calendar Girl poses. To this end, K has stepped – all too easily, I might say – into the role of Smut Peddler In Chief, wielding his SLR lenses with lethal charm before a parade of willing lovelies. Meanwhile, we’ve been featured in the local paper, and I even gave a jolly interview to the mighty media force that is Ashbourne Community Radio last week.

Perhaps it’s a good job our vicar’s moving on in the new year, as our community’s slow slide into moral degeneracy becomes all the more apparent. But as we’re raising funds for the rebuild of our Memorial Hall, all moral qualms must rightfully be quelled for the greater good…

2. Ah yes, the Memorial Hall. Last week, we received the excellent news that our village has been awarded £500,000 of Big Lottery Fund money to assist with the rebuild – the largest such award in the country from the BLF’s Community Building Programme. Having vaulted that particular hurdle, there’s now the small matter of raising the remaining funds needed to make the architects’ plans a reality. And, er, K is on the Fund Raising Team. So, no pressure then.

3. Oh, and lest we should forget, there’s also the small matter of Tom Chambers from our village (or Strictly Our Tom as we now like to call him) winning this year’s Strictly Come Dancing on Saturday night. Down at the village pub, where the landlady had installed a giant widescreen telly for the season, we all went quite potty with delight – especially when Strictly Our Tom thanked us during his acceptance speech. Grown men were crying! Corks were popping! It were bloody brilliant!

And they say that nothing ever happens in small villages? I don’t think there’s ever been a week quite like it.

On a more personal front, there has been a particularly Exciting New Development in the past few days, but it’s still early days and I don’t want to jinx it by going public prematurely. Ooh, but I’m itching to spill. But I shan’t. God, this is the worst kind of blog post, isn’t it?

Time’s up. As you were. Happy Christmas.

1. Diamond Geezer’s Two Minute Silence expanded upon the concept of “Lest we forget” to memorable effect. This one haunted me all week.

2. Clare Boob Pencil’s Fairy Tale series fondly examined her relationship with her grandparents over four decades and five superb, poignant posts. (Follow the “to be continued” links at the end of each episode.)

3. Sarsparilla posted a couple of new dispatches from Darkest Peru. One is a white-knuckle bus ride through almost unimaginably treacherous terrain; the other is a delicious skewering of a couple of hippy travellers.

4. How could I resist listening to this? The first ten seconds of every UK Number One single of the 1980s (via Adrian). (Warning: you may never want to hear a Fender Rhodes again.)

5. It’s been quite a week for my old pal Dymbel. On Thursday evening, he and Dymbellina celebrated 25 years as a couple, K and I joining them at Restaurant Sat Bains for possibly the best meal I have ever eaten. And yesterday evening, we attended the launch event at Bromley House for Dymbel’s first published adult novel, The Pretender. I’ll be posting a review of the book as soon as I’ve read it – but in the meantime, here’s an introduction in the author’s own words.

My GOD. That was such a spectacularly boring day – slow on the work front, heavy on the “sitting in on an irrelevant conference call” front, light on any other potential distractions – that I nearly blogged.

I said nearly.

Phew, close call.

There’s only one possible remedy to today. LeftLion pub quiz, bring it on!

Stocks and shares on my reality index are climbing, whilst my imagination exchange has nosedived and is about to crash and burn. I am creatively bankrupt, and the bailiffs are hammering at the door.

Fifteen reasons and counting, from the ever-dependable (and occasionally comprehensible, which is always nice) Unreliable Witness.

Congrats to Salvadore Vincent of Smaller Than Life for coming up with this ingenious little stocking-filler-slash-toilet-companion:

Needless to say, Venn That Tune has My Sort Of Thing written all over it, being:

a) A book which isn’t really a “book” book, as I’m too lazy and shallow to read many of those.

b) All about the Pop Music.

c) All about the Stats, mmm, Stats!

A fab idea. I commend it to the group.

(Re-posted from Freaky Trigger’s Popular)

“I don’t think it mean anything to you.”

This song’s four-week stay at Number One coincided with the first (and second, third, fourth, fifth…) occasions where my passions were – at least in the strictly physical sense – requited. He was fair, athletic, pretty-boy handsome, and frankly well out of my league in the normal scheme of things – but in the cloistered all-male confines of the English public school, one took one’s pleasures where one found them, and I took considerable pains to signal my availability.

Darkened hallways, knocks on doors, cigarettes, shadows on bedside walls, sly touches, white lies – these were the symbols of our encounters, which eventually and inevitably brought far more suffering than pleasure.

Running simultaneously with all of this nocturnal furtiveness, my daytime existence had never been happier. Once our A-levels were over, our school in Cambridge became transformed from prison to boarding camp. Seemingly endless days were spent lounging by the river, or drinking in The Anchor, The Mill, The Fountain and The Granta, where we pumped our pennies into the jukeboxes, soundtracking our first tastes of freedom and independence with selections from the best singles chart since… well, since the last time I was in the senior year, five summers earlier.

For all of these reasons, the singles charts of June and July 1979 remain my absolute favourites. Dance Away, Boogie Wonderland, Pop Muzik, Shine A Little Love, Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, Boys Keep Swinging, Hot Stuff, Number One Song In Heaven, We Are Family, HAPPY Radio, Masquerade, Roxanne, Up The Junction, The Lone Ranger, Say When, I Want You To Want Me, I Fought The Law, Love Song, Accidents Will Happen, Light My Fire/137 Disco Heaven, Silly Games, Babylon Burning, Space Bass, C’mon Everybody, Good Times, Girls Talk, Born To Be Alive, Breakfast In America, Bad Girls, My Sharona, Chuck E’s In Love, Death Disco, Playground Twist, Can’t Stand Losing You, If I Had You, Voulez-Vous, Beat The Clock, The Diary of Horace Wimp, Kid, Morning Dance, Harmony In My Head, Reasons To Be Cheerful, After The Love Has Gone… hell, even the also-rans such as the Beach Boys’ “Lady Lynda” and (most especially) Voyager’s “Halfway Hotel”… I’d challenge anyone to find a better soundtrack to teenage life, love, laughter and longing.

And topping them all: only Tubeway Bloody Army, if you please! Having previously dismissed them as bunch of third-rate fag-end-of-punk chancers who had been lucky to get a Peel session, nothing could have prepared me for the template-setting WTF Future Shock of “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”, whose length and lack of chorus didn’t stop it from being THE defining pop record of that early summer. Everyone I knew loved it, a good half of them owned it, and you couldn’t spend more than a few minutes walking our corridors without hearing it (or its excellent B-side “We Are So Fragile”) booming out of somebody’s study.

Of course, and like most of us, my interest in Gary Numan rapidly waned – and it took a full 29 years and a freelance assignment for me to re-assess both the man and AFE’s parent album Replicas. Numan turned out to be one of my favourite interviewees: frank, forthcoming, perceptive and grounded, the worst of his demons long since laid to rest, happy to see his influence finally acknowledged, and – on the eve of his fiftieth birthday and his thirtieth anniversary in the music business, profoundly grateful for his survival within that business.

By way of a thank-you to his fanbase, Numan broke his anti-nostalgia rule and toured the Replicas album this spring. I had never seen him live before, and was astonished by his performance. As for his rendition of AFE, “ambushed by unexpected emotion” scarcely begins to cover it, as the the symbolic significance of those lyrics coupled with the overall mood of alienated longing hit harder than they had done in decades.

“It meant everything to me.”

Monday.

You know it’s Autumn when the Monday morning journey back to Nottingham takes an hour and twenty minutes. I blame Derby. More specifically, I blame the University of Derby – who have installed queue-building gatekeepers, checking everybody’s ID upon entry – and the dreaded traffic lights at Five Lamps.

As usual, I dozed off from the minute we hit the A52, the new Lindstrøm album (beautiful, atmospheric, custom-built for travelling) ably soundtracking my dreams.

An interview opportunity with Kim Wilde materialised. I’ll be talking to her next week. Perhaps I’ll ask her for some Autumn gardening tips.

The usual Monday night telly: University Challenge (there’s usually at least one contestant per week with “Just K’s Type” written all over him; he likes them pale, skinny and earnest); Only Connect (a delightfully old-fashioned lateral-thinking panel game on BBC4, of which my late grandmother would have approved – especially since it’s hosted by the daughter of her beloved Alan Coren); the last part of that police thriller with Juliet Stevenson in it (CBATG the title, but K loved the book).

Tuesday.

For various reasons (a poorly Plus One; no room in the newspaper; a declining interest in the band), I gave the Hot Club De Paris gig a miss. Another telly night ensued. Not the most memorable of days.

Oh, but wait! I forgot! Today was the day that I discovered the Best Bottled Beer Ever: St. Peter’s Golden Ale, which is brewed near Bungay in Suffolk and comes in rather beautiful oval bottles. I’ve been going through a major Bottled Ale exploratory phase lately, and this really is the best that I’ve tasted.

Update: Having just fished the empty bottle out of the recycling bin, I now realise that it was the Organic Ale, not the Golden Ale. Please accept my apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Wednesday.

After much diddling around with calendars, I finally sorted out the rest of this year’s holidays: a series of long weekends, stretching from early November to the start of January. For nine consecutive weeks, I’ll be working four days or fewer. There may be trips to London. There may be podcasts. I might even buy some new clothes; my trouser situation borders on the disgraceful.

Subscribed to a couple of new blogs: Advanced Style (a photo-blog dedicated to snappily dressed senior citizens in New York City) and Musicophilia (absolutely superb extended MP3 mixes, compiled with skill, passion and exceptional attention to detail).

As has become customary, our team (myself, LB, Sarah, Suburban Hen and SwissToni, aka The Shadowy Cabal) thrashed the competition down at the LeftLion Pub Quiz, romping home to victory for the sixth week running.

(If truth be told, it has all got a little embarrassing – but what can we do? Accept bungs to throw the match?)

There was, however, one question that no-one in the pub guessed correctly.

“What eight-syllable word will get you automatically fired from the BBC if you use it on the TV or the radio?”

I’ll stick the “answer” in the comments.

Thursday.

Thursday was not the greatest of days. Work-wise, it was a day of chasing impossible deadlines, of trying to accommodate shall-we-say challenging last minute demands, of fevered instant messaging, dizzyingly complicated phone calls to the US, hold-your-mouth-right conference calls, of cock-ups averted, of managers placated… in short, the sort of day which would have stressed me to breaking point a few years ago, but which I seem to be able to cope with pretty well these days. Keep calm, take notes, don’t be afraid to ask questions, hold your mouth right, adopt a tone of unflappable authority, and you’re halfway there in this job.

(Sidenote: I was browsing through some of my archives this week, and was surprised to find several references to a tendency to self-subordinate in work-related or semi-formal situations. Surprised and also rather gladdened, as it dawned on me that, somewhere along the line, self-subordination has ceased to be a problem. 46 years old, and I have finally mastered the art of self-confidence! Such progress!)

The day’s biggest disappointment: having to turn down a last-minute interview with Mary Wilson of the Supremes. Dammit, I just know she would have been good value. Always the most “real” one, the tell-it-like-it-is one, and the best singer to boot. Instead, I had to content myself with feeding questions to Simon, chasing that “additional research by” credit.

The day ended on a suitably crappy note, with SwissToni and I – hot, tired, bored, pissed off – bailing out of Rock City fifteen minutes before the end of the Seasick Steve show (see below), only to stumble into an ugly drunken brawl outside the Rescue Rooms. Once inside the bar, we observed a couple of trendy student DJs on a retro-ironic kick, playing George Harrison’s “Got My Mind Set On You” and Dire Straits’ “Walk Of Life” to their equally trendy mates.

I always swore that Dire Straits were ironic-revival-proof. Clearly, I was wrong.

1. Book deals. 15
2. Blogging ain’t dead! Get with the programme, Grandad! 14
3. The death of the blogroll. 13
4. Facebook. 12
5. RSS feeds. 10
6= Twitter. 9
6= Weight of numbers / critical mass. 9
8. Blogging awards. 8
9. Spammers. 7
10= All of the above ( give or take the odd one or two). 6
10= Perez Chuffing Hilton, and all *that* lot. 6
12= Assimilation by Old Media. 5
12= Blog ads. 5
12= The Web 2.0 dis-aggregation effect. 5
15. Farming your links out to del.icio.us. 4
16= Other (please specify). 3
16= Permalinks to standalone posts rather than bookmarks on the archive page. 3
18. Post titles. 2

Discuss.

The Death of Blogging Poll.

What killed blogging? Post titles. Permalinks to standalone posts rather than bookmarks on the archive page. Farming your links out to del.icio.us. RSS feeds. Blogging awards. Book deals. Blog ads. Spammers. Twitter. Facebook. The Web 2.0 dis-aggregation effect. The death of the blogroll. Assimilation by Old Media. Perez Chuffing Hilton, and all *that* lot. Weight of numbers / critical mass. All of the above ( give or take the odd one or two). Other (please specify). Blogging ain’t dead! Get with the programme, Grandad! Current Results

Our village pub has become quite the Local Media Hub this year.

Firstly, when our local TV celebrity opened our new village shop, conveniently situated up the passage from the lounge bar…

Secondly, when freak flash floods devastated the ground floor and the car park…

Thirdly, when it won “Best Community Pub 2008” and “Best Midlands Pub” in the national Great British Pub Awards…

And most recently – and if you tune into BBC1’s East Midlands Today at 18:30 this evening (Monday), you’ll be able to see this for yourselves – when a few dozen villagers crammed into the bar on Saturday evening, in order to cheer on the aforementioned local TV celebrity as he danced the jive on Strictly Come Dancing.

I do keep forgetting to mention this at the right time, but for future reference:

Troubled Diva says: VOTE FOR TOM CHAMBERS!

Update: For the Flash-enabled, here’s the village pub footage on the BBC website. Please note that K and I are discreetly hidden by the landlady’s mum (in the pink cardie) and the chap with his arms in the air. As regular readers will be aware, we do like to keep a low media profile.

The tiny cluster of readers who still arrive at this site by typing the address into their browsers (ah, bless!) will already have noticed this, as I have temporarily re-instated my Flickr feed at the top of the page… but for the rest of you (*), might I direct your attention to K’s splendid photo gallery, taken at the third annual Sotheby’s Beyond Limits sculpture exhibition in the gardens of Chatsworth House?

The exhibition runs until Sunday November 2nd, and we can highly recommend it – particularly on a clear, bright afternoon, when the sunlight displays the works to their best advantage.

The same images can also be viewed on the village blog, where I’ve squashed them all together onto one page. You might find this a more convenient way of viewing them.

(*) Unless you’ve already picked up K’s Flickr stream via RSS, or via the link which I posted on my Facebook profile, or… sheesh, this brave new “multiple points of entry” paradigm doesn’t half get complicated at times…

I’m a little hazy as to the respective dates, but Gary Numan’s “Cars” is one of three candidates from the charts of September 1979 to qualify as the first record I ever danced to at a disco. (If we discount Cockney Rebel’s “Mr. Soft” in a marquee at a traction engine rally in 1974, and I rather think we should.)

The other candidates? I’m glad you asked.

Candidate #2: “Gangsters” by the Special AKA, after a half-term gig by The Jags at Retford Porterhouse. “Back Of My Hand” was in the charts, and the band were staying a few miles away in our local village pub.

(A popular rock and roll stop off point, as it happened; my step-sister once spent an evening chatting to a pre-fame Billy Idol, and the Psychedelic Furs scandalised all and sundry by smoking weed on the landing.)

The post-gig disco took place in a separate night club area, complete with a totally authentic Saturday Night Fever style dancefloor, laid out with the statutory multi-coloured illuminated cubes. Thrust into the midst of such sophistication, I felt a little out of my depth.

Candidate #3: “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson – in its first week on the Top 40 – at the Friday night teenage disco at the Cambridge YMCA. We blagged our way in without paying while the trendy vicar’s back was turned, nipped upstairs, and soon found ourselves quite the centres of attention.

“You’re the new John Travolta!”, beamed a starry-eyed fifteen year old (curly perm, horizontally striped sweater dress, thick black belt), as I galumphed around the dancefloor in my ghastly tweed sports jacket.

“You should have been in Saturday Night Fever, or Grease, or something!”

(I am quoting this strictly verbatim. As I suspect was she, perhaps from some “How To Pick Up Boys!” guide in Mirabelle.)

As the strains of “Bitch” by the Olympic Runners started up, another all-to-easily impressed chancer (dark crop, pencil skirt) tried to muscle in.

“Oy! Get off him! He’s MY boyfriend!”

A tussle ensued. Fingernails flew. Five minutes on the dancefloor, and I was quite literally being fought over.

Oh, this was the best night out ever! It was like being in a photo-love story in my sister’s My Guy, or something!

Eager to stay in role, I leant between them and uttered these immortal words:

“Now then, girls. Break it up.”

The effect was instant. Oh, the power! I swear they both simpered.

Nothing like this ever happened to me again.

At least, not where the ladies were concerned.

The professional bit:

For anyone impatient to hear more from all-star folk band Bellowhead, the past few days have been a rare treat. Following Thursday’s Playhouse appearance by Benji Kirkpatrick and Paul Sartin as part of Faustus, last night saw the Maze play host to Bellowhead’s key founder members: singer and violinist Jon Boden, backed by John Spiers on melodeon and concertina.

Where Faustus focus on finely balanced three-way counterpoints (*), Spiers and Boden take a more straight-up traditional approach, with Spiers providing a solid, unflashy backdrop to his partner’s resonant vocals and amazing fiddle playing.

Clocking in at over two and a half hours, the duo’s marathon set showcased many numbers from their fifth album Vagabond. As befits its title, these were songs of rebels, wastrels, pirates, beggars… and even a certain Mr. Hood, whose conception and birth in the “good green-wood” provided the subject matter for a fine epic ballad.

Amongst the many splendid jigs, the irresistible Sloe Gin – as recently popularised by Bellowhead and The Imagined Village – made a welcome appearance.

The evening finished with a surprise non-traditional choice from the Tom Waits songbook: a lilting, yearning Innocent When You Dream, which had the crowd softly singing along, almost to themselves.

---

The amateur bit:

(*) The eagle-eyed reader will have noticed that this is the third consecutive gig review in which I have used the word “counterpoint”. Are counterpoints the new curveballs? Perhaps they are.

(In truth, I filched the observation from K, who described Faustus as “more contrapuntal” and Spiers/Boden as “more chordal”. I love it when he talks dirty.)

Boden, it has to be said, looked physically knackered – pasty-faced and red-eyed, in the manner of a new dad who hadn’t slept for a few weeks – which made the two and a half hour set all the more remarkable. To further emphasise the already significant height difference between his lanky frame and Spiers’ altogether squatter construction, Boden performed on top of a wooden box, which K reckoned was miked up, in order to add resonance to his all-important foot-stamping.

(Faustus were all about the feet, as well. I may be new to the folk scene, but I’m learning fast.)

The professional bit:

Two years on from the breakup of Gorkys Zygotic Mynci, former leader Euros Childs continues to plough his gently idiosyncratic furrow. Seemingly impervious to the normal aging process, his demeanour remains cheerfully relaxed, and his solo material continues to blend whimsical pastoralism with understated tunefulness.

The Dodos have been steadily gathering critical acclaim since the release of their remarkable second album Visiter. Their music is both brutally primitive and impossibly complex, with drummer Logan Kroeber the undisputed star of the show.

In place of a standard kit, Kroeber pounded out his dizzyingly syncopated rhythms on a semi-circular set of four drums, balancing his breakneck tempo with an extraordinary lightness of touch, and displaying a technical accomplishment which frankly beggared belief. (*)

Over to the left, a seated, floppy-fringed Meric Long added plaintive indie-boy vocals, sometimes using two microphones to build looping effects. His equally unique guitar style combined bottleneck blues and oblique thrash, providing a mesmerising counterpoint to Kroeber’s ceaseless energy.

Meanwhile, Joe Heaner drifted on and off the stage, alternating between an industrial-sized glockenspiel, an ancient miniature organ, a giant cymbal and a vast, ugly-looking metal bucket.

Veering between rapturous applause and stunned silence, the uncommonly attentive audience lapped up every note. (**)

---

The amateur bit:

(*) In actual fact, his drumming technique repeatedly brought Adam and the Ants to mind, circa Kings of the Wild Frontier, and particularly the intro to Antmusic. Lots of rimshots, and virtually no footwork, save for a tambourine attached to his left foot. Oh, and can we say CUTE? All lean and moustachioed, like a baby-faced Brandon Flowers.

(**) As my friends found out after the show (getting their posters signed while I chatted to Euros about his connection with Kevin Ayers), the band initially mistook our reverential silence for icy indifference. “We thought you weren’t into it”, they explained. “Then we realised: actually, you were just really into it.”

Luckily for us, this lead to them adding an unscripted second encore (despite the drummer making reluctant “tired” signs at the singer, as well he might) – which turned out to be the most spectacular performance of the whole show. How the hell these things even get composed in the first place, I simply have no idea.

The professional bit:

Boasting a collective pedigree that stretches from Norma Waterson to Seth Lakeman, and from Paul Weller to Bellowhead, Faustus could almost be described as a folk supergroup. Kicking off an exceptionally promising new folk season at the Playhouse, they worked hard to warm up the initially subdued audience, scattered over three rows in the stark studio space above Cast.

The three band members – Paul Sartin on violin and occasional oboe, Saul Rose on an array of melodeons, and Benji Kirkpatrick on guitar and bouzouki – radiated a relaxed, good-natured rapport, interspersing their music with droll asides and a dry banter which sometimes bordered on the surreal.

This easy demeanour masked a remarkable level of dexterity and craftsmanship. On dizzying jig medleys such as Next Stop Grimsby / The Three Rascals / Aunt Crisps, the players perched their intoxicatingly cheery melodic refrains on top of complex rhythms and constantly shifting counterpoints.

While the jigs were largely self-penned, the songs were all traditional: excavated from a variety of archives and songbooks, and given fresh, sturdy new arrangements. A broadly nautical theme ran through many of them. The Green Willow Tree told the story of a heroic but doomed cabin boy, betrayed by his captain and dispatched to a watery grave (*), while The Old Miser recounted the fate of an amorous sailor, sold for transportation by his sweetheart’s jealous father. On The New Deserter, a ballad made popular by Fairport Convention, the familiar lyric was given a haunting and effective new melody.

---

The amateur bit:

(*) This was of particular interest, since I ONCE WAS THAT CABIN BOY! ‘Twas in the year 1974, and I had been assigned an understudy role to the lead chorister in our school’s end-of-term production: The Golden Vanity, a childrens’ opera by Benjamin Britten, which is based upon the same story as The Green Willow Tree. (With certain variations as to the exact manner of the plucky cabin boy’s watery demise.)

Three or four days before show time, said chorister went down with a nasty case of the measles, and I was duly bumped up to Heroic Male Lead – a role I discharged with great gusto (drama being one of my Big Things at the age of 12, and did I ever tell you about the time I played Mole to Jeremy Clarkson’s Toad?), albeit a semi-tone flat throughout (I winced my way through a subsequent classroom playback on the music master’s reel-to-reel).

All matters of pitch control aside, my greatest challenge was miming a convincing dive from the deck of my ship (the titular Golden Vanity) into the tempestuous ocean below (as represented by the floor of the school gym), and then battling my way through the waves until I reached the dastardly pirate ship (on the other side of the gym, manned by a bunch of classmates in Marks and Sparks pyjamas with their mothers’ scarves tied around their heads). As a confirmed non-swimmer, whose irreducible combination of stubborness and terror had broken the will of a long succcession of swimming teachers down at Doncaster Baths, I lacked all semblance of convincing mime technique. Many hours of coaching ensued, after which I was just about able to muster a vaguely convincing upper body breast stroke.

Following the high drama of my drowning (“And then, and only-then, did the crew-throw-out-a-ROPE!”), the opera climaxed with my re-appearance as a ghostly presence (i.e. standing behind a darkened screen with a gauze-covered, head-shaped hole cut in it, a hand-held torch pointing up at my ghostly chin), forever destined to haunt the ocean waves with my netherworldly wailing:

“I AM SIIIIIIIN-KING, SIIIIIIIN-KING, IN THE LOOOOOOW-LAND SEEEEEA….”

It was very moving. If half a tone flat.

I nearly told all this to Benji Kirkpatrick during the post-gig Meet And Greet/Retail Opportunity session – but thought better of it, confining myself to a simple “Ooh, I’ve got all these CDs already, thank you very much, that was great, bye bye!”

Well, one doesn’t like to monopolise.

…but William B. Swygart’s just-published piece on Rocktimists is so bang on the money, that there scarcely seems any point.

In short, then:

If Rachel Unthank and the Winterset win, I shall be beside myself with joy. Look, one of the token specialist genre acts (folk/jazz/classical) has got to win the thing sooner or later, or else what’s the point in including them in the first place?

If Elbow or British Sea Power win, I shall be very very happy. Because they’re both bloody wonderful albums, that’s why.

If Estelle or Burial win, then I shall smile broadly – because both albums are more than worthy, and it will be a nice change from the usual skinny white boys with guitars.

If Radiohead or Plant & Krauss win, then I shall think: fair enough in terms of quality, but what’s the point, and what purpose has been served?

If Laura Marling wins, then I shall smile fondly, and resolve to listen a little more closely.

If the Portico Quartet win, then I’ll be all like, huh? Pretty but unessential, that’s my verdict.

If the Last Shadow Puppets win, then I’ll be all like, sigh. It’s an interesting but flawed project, and Alex Turner certainly doesn’t need the award a second time.

If Neon Neon win, then I’ll be all cross-armed and resentful and frowny and BAH.

If Adele wins, then I might require oblivion-hastening medication, with some degree of urgency.

The Guardian are live-blogging the whole thing, by the way. As of now.

Update: I am very very happy at Elbow’s well deserved win. This seems like a good moment to link back to my interview with guitarist Mark Potter, which I conducted on the very morning that The Seldom Seem Kid hit the shops.

I am now onto, let’s see, DAY NINE of my viral infection, with no end in sight – and frankly, it is all starting to get a little boring. Yesterday in particular was a complete write-off, which saw me up and about for not much more than ten hours – most of them spent groaning, mithering and angrily breaking wind. I’m generally quite good at handling illness – at least when it provides me with a justification for doing sod all – but one can only hold self-pity at bay for so long.

However, this was as nothing compared to the problems faced in our village over the weekend, as a freak downpour on Friday night/Saturday morning caused flash flooding, wreaking unprecedented havoc. (I’ve written the episode up on the village blog, accompanied by photos from K.) The village pub in particular was hit hard, but a concerted collective effort saw it back open for business on Saturday night. Our local pub singer performed a free set; couples danced on the newly exposed quarry-tiled floor (a distinct improvement on the ancient and now ruined carpets, if truth be told); everyone affected to ignore the pervading smell of damp; and the whole evening displayed the sort of Pulling Together In Times Of Trial spirit that Made Our Country Great, Spirit Of The Blitz, etc etc etc.

Turning to lighter matters, I’m pleased as Punch to have received this beautiful and extremely tasteful hand-crafted trophy from Guyana-Gyal, which will nestle in nicely with the contemporary ceramics on us cottage mantlepiece:

It’s an understated little thing, isn’t it?

Now then, the rules also state that I have to pass the award on to “five other blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also for contributing to the blogging community“. (Oh, and I also have to credit the award’s originator. There, ’tis done.)

In which case, I shall firstly make a posthumous award to the much-missed Tired Dad, who rather abruptly shut up shop in April. TD’s contribution to the You’re Not The Only One blogging anthology (“Truce or Scare”, page 98) is not only the best thing he’s ever written – a masterpiece of controlled exposition, which saw me swerve from hysterical laughter to a full-on sobbing fit in a matter of minutes – but it also serves as the missing final post from his blog, for reasons which should become apparent.

My second award is also a posthumous one. Peach did a fantastic job with the aforementioned blogging anthology, and she has also done a first-rate job at keeping Post of the Week going this year. (And she’s dropping her first Babby soon, so Yay for that.)

My third award goes to Gordon McLean, both for long service (he’s been at it more or less continuously since 1999), and for generally being helpful, supportive and an all-round good egg.

The fourth and fifth awards go to two relatively new blogs, which have been my favourite discoveries of 2008: Todger Talk (especially for the disarmingly honest and unfailingly hilarious reviews of sex toys for men) and Bête De Jour (back in business after a nasty flooding incident, which rather neatly brings this post full circle).

I hope that all recipients feel as aesthetically blessed by this sumptuous piece of craftmanship as I do. Oh yes indeed!