Death Of A Clown

Blues V Arsenal was a bit more eventful and dramatic than I had anticipated. A great result for the Blue boys, which seems to have been somewhat forgotten, one way or another.

I have been a bad, bad, unenthusiastic wrunner. Thursday I couldn't wrun, for reasons already stated. I could have wrun on Friday but opted to go shopping instead, fully intending to make up for it on Saturday, but on Saturday I was hungover so chickened out, but I did go yesterday, but not today. Now I feel guilty.

Yesterday me and the nipper went out quite late in the afternoon, and the Mrs decided to come along as well, for a stroll down the river, which meant that the other two poor buggers got dragged out too. The daughter has given up on the idea of the wrun. It is boring.

We piled out of the car and the nipper hared off, as is his wont, while I lumbered along inelegantly behind him. It was bad, but not as bad as before, not in the same way, anyway, but my calves and shins were causing me pain again. This pain was nothing though, compared to the pain of finding my Mrs , in her jeans, kinky boots and heavy coat trotting along beside me, with a big grin on her face and not suffering at all. Not to mention the daughter appearing from nowhere and legging it effortlessly ahead. In her diamante bloody slippers.

To add insult to injury, the Mrs reckons she has not suffered at all, all day. I don't believe her.

So, now the whole family will be doing the run, not so much the Royal Tenembaums as National Lampoons Charity Wrunathon. I have convinced myself that I will be able to do it, despite continued pain in the lower legs, and despite not going out again today. I put a bit of effort in yesterday and at no time did I feel like throwing up, nor did I fear a heart attack or imminent death. Perhaps the rest did me good. I still had to apply the deep heat liberally to my neck and shoulders this morning though. I am sure that the ladies of Blaenau Gwent find it very sophisticated and alluring.

Take It Easy

There was good a programme on BBC 4 earlier, on the Scottish music scene since the days of Postcard.............it will be on the i player, I expect. It was a bit sad, seeing Edwyn Collins in all his youthful fey glory and then to see the following programme, which was about Collins, post stroke, which was as inspiring as it was sad, and also, no doubt, can be found on the i player.

Blues v Arsenal tomorrow. It will be shit and anyone who has paid 45 quid to watch it needs their bumps read.

No More Heroes

Day 6 and I couldn't have wrun if I had wanted to. Man, I feel awful, I haven't felt this bad and sorry for myself since I stopped smoking. A long soak and a laze on the settee watching the two shouty Masterchef men and Curb Your Enthusiasm and I am starting to unravel a bit.........proof that lazing about is better for you. I shall start again tomorrow though, probably.

It hasn't all been indolence. I now park miles from the office and walk up a bloody big hill and lots of steps to get to it, and this afternoon I decided to walk from where I park to a meeting at the other end of town. Christ, it's a hilly town, I should have taken crampons and oxygen with me, the hill was vertical, and they have put houses all up it and an old folks home on top of it. As it plateaued, in the car park, I was going to take a well earned breather, but some young lady was looking out of the window at me, so I had to plough on, up the bloody steps. When I went in she came to greet me and I literally couldn't speak, I was so breathless, then someone asked if I was the afternoons entertainment. Dignity ain't in it.

Halfway up this bloody hill, I came across a raggedy arsed sheep scavenging in an overturned dustbin; this was after seeing a herd of the buggers stroll across the car park as if they owned it. It's like being on another planet, working up there.

It hasn't all been wrunning, either, I have finished the books I mentioned last week; the Peter Carey disappointed in the end, becoming very boring, the other two were superb though.

I am struggling now to get into anything, but I feel obliged to read the new Ray Banks, seeing as the publisher sent me a free copy. Initially, I didn't think it was as good as his others, and actually gave up at one point, but returned to it the following day. It has grown on me now, and as with his others, it moves along a bit quicker than I do in the park. The plotting seems overly contrived to me, but I am only half way in, so shall reserve judgement. The quality of the writing is superb, though it is hard to warm to Cal, but that is one of the great merits of Banks, he does not shy away from allowing his hero to be flawed and at times, the prose makes your heart sing.

One Way Ticket To The Blues

Day 5 and I didn't do much, but I did do something. I must be getting serious as I invested a whole 6 quid in a pair of jogging trousers, the sort that make me look like one one of my own clients, who has to be dressed by someone else, someone with absolutely no class. I'm not prepared to humiliate myself on a public highway, so it's difficult to fit any time in before it gets dark, and I really didn't want to do anything today, everything hurts, everything aches, I am weary to my very bones, deep into my pith.

I had taken my new joggers and the rest of my high tech equipment to work with the intention of running around a local beauty spot, but I couldn't be arsed with that and resolved to have a night off, by the time I got to Croesyceiliog though, I had changed my mind and decided that any effort, however minimal is better than none and can only help in the long short run. So I found a quiet spot in the car park and got changed in the car, which I doubt very much was a dignified sight, and took to the field.

It was beautiful, very close to dark, and a gentle fog had descended, the light was ethereal and I was serenaded by what seemed like a million birds. I managed about twenty minutes of wrunning up, down, across and around various rugby and football pitches. Hardly any walking, but plenty of rests, although not for long. I still had the old pains and the old discomforts, although there was no upchucking, but I also had three new experiences. My upper arms were killing me and I swear I wasn't wrunning on my hands, so what the hell is that all about?

Then there were my calves, both of which endured a deep, yet tolerable ache. What wasn't tolerable, and just about finished me off, was a deeply unpleasant, very sharp pain all the way down the side of my lower right leg. This pain would not be wrun off, in fact the more I tried the worse it got. Stop running, it ebbed away, start running, back it came, with a vengeance. I think my body might be trying to tell me that it is too old, too fat and too underused for this wrunning malarkey. Anyway, tomorrow I rest.

Deep Heat: does the pleasure balance out the pain? I can't make my mind up.

Becoming More Like God

Day 4 and the good news is I managed to drag my sorry self down to the park while there was still some daylight left, no mean feat, given the constraints of working hours plus picking up and dropping off nippers to and from various activities. The youngest, whose idea this is, lets not forget, had a busy end to his day, being taken straight from school to drama to the park. Serves the little bugger right. The bad news is that dinner put in another unwelcome and unscheduled appearance. Plus, everything hurts, despite the day of rest. Double plus, Tiger Balm burns like fuck............it's much hotter than deep heat.

I had mentioned my less than heroic efforts over the weekend to someone at work, and he said, maybe you should try and get it into a meditative state while you are running. This doesn't seem likely at the moment, not when my mind is concentrating on the difficulty of lifting a leg, the searing, heartburn like sensation in my chest, the deep dub of the pulse in my chest and head and the certain knowledge that sooner or later I will be reintroducing myself to a previous meal.

It's an interesting point though. Twenty or so years ago I was a pretty keen cyclist and would cycle from Cardiff to Newport and back almost on a daily basis and would go for much longer rides at weekends. There would always come a point, which might last a minute and might last for many minutes when I would feel at one with the bike and the road. Everything would just feel right and I would bomb along at a decent clip, effortlessly.......... it would be nice to get to a stage where I could enjoy a similar state of transcendence from running. I believe it's called flow. I won't hold my breath.

Don't just take my word for it: For those of you new to meditation, Pratt gives the following explanation of how runners can benefit from the practice:

\"What surprises some people is that meditation is very much a body-oriented discipline. It is not about leaving your body and entering some celestial realm. It is about relating to the here and now which we experience through our five senses. So in meditation we learn to let go of our thoughts and come back to our body. Running and meditation are perhaps the most energizing and ultimately, joyful, activities in my life. Bringing them together is about as good as it gets.\"

Added Pratt: \"The practice of meditation has brought freshness into my running because when I have a meditative mind I am fully in the moment and fully in my body. I am more relaxed and more joyful. When I have this attitude every run is a new and exciting experience.\"

Todays effort was bit bitty, easily the least satisfactory of my wruns so far, and yes, it is still wrunning, I haven't yet progressed to a jog. I thought we would get about fifteen minutes worth in and reasoned that as short as that it is, it is better than nothing, but in the end we were out for nearly an hour, not that we were wrunning for nearly an hour. Much of it was taken up with practising free kicks, corners and penalties on the various football pitches; regardless of the fact that we didn't actually have a ball with us. Does simply being out in the fresh air count as exercise, or are you supposed to actually do something?

Actually, we did a fair bit and I was running a bit further before needing to stop and needing much less rest before I could start again; it wasn't enjoyable though, there was no sense of flow. The nipper was miserable to start with and didn't fancy it but soon got into the swing and became bloody unstoppable; it's good having him around. It hurt though, every step is accompanied by on overwhelming feeling of discomfort and shame. Every breath hurts; you can almost hear my chest squeal and while that is going on I am wondering if the intense sensation down my left hand side is heartburn or the beginnings of a heart attack. Not that I'm a drama queen or anything.

Also, as difficult as it was I treated it a bit more playfully. When the nipper got distracted and arsed about, I arsed about as well, and we just sort of wran randomly about, rather than follow a route. So we had about 40 minutes of fairly gentle exercise altogether, although it didn't seem particularly gentle at the time; I am very heavy footed bastard. I don't know if it did any good, but it certainly won't have done any harm, which might not be true of the finch, chimps and mushy bees I had for my tea.

Fat Man In The Bathtub

Day two of the rwunning regime yesterday, otherwise known as a fat gits pathetic attempt to run one measly mile without killing himself. It was better than the day before, but only to the extent that I didn't throw up, and I suppose I managed a few extra yards before having to stop. It wasn't quite as enjoyable and seamless an experience yesterday, not that the first attempt was enjoyable or seamless, but it's all relative, innit.

First we have a new addition to our little training group: the daughter has decided she wants a pair of socks too, so she will run the mile with us, and she has a delightful and endearing tendency to take things less than seriously. We will end up looking like the royal bloody Tenembaums. Then the youngest haired off at 100 miles an hour only to be complaining of stitch about two minutes later. He couldn't get rid of this stitch, but he's a game little chap and persevered, as best he could. Then there was the small but not insignificant matter of the nipper being attacked by a dog.

His owners at least had the grace to look penitent as they explained that the pooch was only being friendly, but it was very large dog, and my nipper is a very small person and was terrified. It's all relative, innit? The owners were not in the first flush of youth and were some way away and the dog simply ignored their shouts to desist. Call me a miserable old bugger, but I think that if your dog is uncontrollable, however friendly he might be, he should be on a lead. So the nipper was having a bad day and I was unlikely to have been mistaken for a little ray of sunshine myself.

We rwan some more, rested, then decided to just leg it up and down a football pitch, the only distraction being a fully grown adult buzzing us with an enormous model aeroplane, whilst steadfastly refusing to let his own nipper have a go. When I say leg it, I am overstating the case, obviously. After about half an hour, we called it a day and spent about an hour playing football instead, which is excercise, I suppose, and half hour of ponderous and aimless wrunning has got to be better than no wrunning at all, hasn't it?

Today is day 3, and I am tired and weary to my bones. Everything is an effort and everything hurts, even my shoulders and neck........how can that be? The nipper came in from school and immediately took himself off upstairs, to return minutes later in his pyjamas, which was a fairly eloquent statement, I thought. So, my routine on day 3 of this new regime will consist of rwunning a bath, and then lying in it, for a very long time.

Blue

So there I was yesterday, enjoying a day off and having bought the seven year old a Beano max, to keep him quiet, when he appeared in the kitchen, clutching his comic and as excited as excited can be, beaming all over his face. The thing was full of sport relief stuff and it had inspired him to really, really want to do it. The poor little chap doesn't ask for much, and he gets even less, so in a moment of weakness, I agreed that we should both enter. Which is how I came to be throwing up by the river in downtown Cwmbran at 5 o'clock this afternoon.

When I tell you that I haven't run anywhere for at least 20 years I am not shitting you. I haven't. I was a member of a gym for a couple of years but I never went anywhere near the treadmills. A bit of rowing, a bit of resistance and a hell a lot of dossing about in the various pools and sweat rooms..............and I only ever went about once every 6 months anyway. And it was years ago. So, while a mile not seem like very much to you, it seems like a very great deal indeed to me.

It was obvious that I needed to get a bit of training in. I don't own anything resembling jogging pants trousers so I had to wear my craghoppers, which at least meant I could carry my wallet, change, phone, etc, etc. Nor do I own anything resembling trainers, so I had to wear a pair of regular shoes. When I say regular, I don't mean highly polished brogues, they are soft walking type shoes, so that wasn't too bad. Incidentally, is there a shop that sell running gear for little fat short arses? The nipper was OK , he had his new sport relief socks on, and that was all the specialist equipment that he required.

So, late this afternoon off we buggered to to the riverside walk. I knew I was going to make a prize tit of myself, so I was hoping it would be quiet, hence the late afternoon start. It's a good place as it is a nice path along the river, but it gets better for us shy folk. Either side of the river are acres and acres of football and rugby fields and further afield there is another long path, along a sort of avenue of trees, by the railway track. If you have ever been through Cwmbran on the train you will know where I mean. It was a beautiful, if cold evening, and the path by the track was empty, so we headed over there.

Now, I haven't run for years, and I am small and fat............5"7 and around 15 stone, which is a fair load for my little legs to lump around and this could kill me. I read in a supplement a few weeks ago that when starting to run, you should do two minutes running, two minutes walking and so on, building it up bit by bit. Two fucking minutes! What planet was the guy on? As I jogged across the rugby pitch, past the clubhouse, the terrace of which was well populated with fit young men, I put in a supreme effort. I doubt if I manged 30 seconds, and I can tell you I felt quite ill.

I think the theory is that after a little run, the walk is a power walk. No chance. I dragged my miserable arse over to the path by the tracks, panted, gobbed, swore, and had another go. Maybe another 30 seconds, followed by at least two minutes of very heavy breathing and feeling sorry for myself. However, the good thing about the path I was on, as well as its solitude, is the number of markers you can use, trees, benches, bins.........so I would use them. Run to that bin, then walk to that bench, then run to the last tree. Then back up the same path.

It was that last tree that saw my dinner come up, after about 15 minutes of exercise, most unpleasant. Meanwhile, the nipper was skipping about like a spring chicken and gleefuly vaulting over every fallen tree, of which there were many. In the end, I don't think I was either running or walking, I was sort of "wrunning", neither one thing nor the other, and in the intervals I was not walking, I was sitting, and coughing, and gobbing, and thanking the lord that I have given up the fags.

I suppose we were arsing about, wrunning about for about 40 minutes and after the upchucking, it actually started to feel OK, although I still couldn't gather any speed, or wrun for more than about a minute at a time. I remembered that I used to love running when I was kid and that during my long summer holidays, spent with relatives in Devon, me and my cousin would run for hours every day, up and down lanes, across fields, on and on and it would feel great. He was a competitive runner, I wasn't, I would amble around the cross country course at school, with frequent stops for a fag, but I could always keep up with him, and enjoy it.

Everything hurts now, as I sit here, and the initial experience was profoundly unpleasant, but I've had a glimpse of the potential pleasures of having a run. It was great being out on such a cold day, but feeling aglow with the effort of the exercise, and the long wallow in the shower when I got home was righteous indeed. Still it feels like a long and hard road ahead, even it is only a mile. And the bloody nipper only wanted to do it for the socks! You can sponsor us if you like, there is a handy link to the left.

If you go to the BBC I player and listen to any Bob Harris show, at some point you will hear the Felice Brothers, and then you will be happy.

One way or another, I have acquired the new Gary Louris album, (hear it, the whole of it) and while it is not going to change your life, it is, without any shadow of any doubt, brilliant. If you like that sort of thing. I became aware of the Jayhawks and Wilco , I dunno, about ten years ago and instinctively, I disliked them.

I spent my early teens feeling distinctly odd because I didn't like any of the music my mates liked, and I thought there was nothing out there for me. Glam, prog, pop, metal all left me cold, and then came pub rock, and then came punk and then came Pete the taliban. Everything I owned went to Oxfam. Cat Stevens, Dylan, Don Mclean and lord knows who else........binned. Year zero. I hung on to my Cockney Rebel and Split Enz though.

So I was bit intolerant, and a bit po faced. Punk died in childbirth: by the time everyone was wearing spiky hair and pare clips through their noses the game was up......but I retained my pathetic insistence on authenticity.....not that I was deprived, there was loads of good stuff coming out, although now we looked for a punk "sensibility", whatever the hell that is. Neither Wilco not the Jayhawks fit this template, so I was more than happy to dismiss them as generic American guitar bands, without ever having heard them.

As I say, I became aware of them both at about the same time, dunno why, and I was surprised by both and bought a couple of albums and at the same time as being sniffy about them, I kept playing the buggers, until I had to admit that I loved the pair of them. The Jayhawks, were, quite simply, sublime; perfect literate pop and then Mark Olson left and they weren't as good. Then I saw Olson live a few times and just about fell in love with the bloke and came to regard him as a genius..........obviously, he was the driving force in the Jayhawks and the reason for their brilliance. Wrong.

This Louris album is something else. If you liked anything that the Jayhawks did you will love it, it is far better than anything the Jayhawks did and far better than anything Olson has done, and I love both............that's how good it is. Don't expect anything groundbreaking, expect a superb set of beautiful songs performed by a master craftsman. Gary Louris, Mark Olson, Jeff Tweedy, we have lived through a golden age, but hardly any bugger realises it.

While I'm on a pop theme, the Times had a major interview with Cerys Mathews today. Never liked her band, but when she buggered off to Tennessee, I liked that album and saw her live and it was pretty good, then she made a tit of herself in the jungle and lost all her credibility. The point is, the interviewer took a train with Cerys from Londinium to Port Talbot (why not Swansea?) and Cerys then drove them both to Solva; the journalist made a big point of mentioning the lunatic speed at which Cerys drives and said even then it took 90 minutes to complete the journey. Cobblers, I can get to Solva from here in 90 minutes while observing the speed limit, and Port Talbot is a long way down the road.

You Can Never Hold Back Spring

I have dozens of recipe books but rarely actually follow a recipe..........I use them to get ideas or for advice to cook a particular ingredient properly and also for just a bit of light reading. It seems to get on peoples nerves when they ask where the recipe for something I cooked is and I can't tell them or when they ask how much garlic or ginger or somesuch is required and I say, "I don't know, just about enough". This is not because I am a culinary genius, but because I am a lazy bugger and can't be bothered to do things properly, which marks me out from Mark Booth, who has also turned up his nose at recipe books but has learned to do things properly.

He has written a good, lengthy article in the Independent on how he learned to cook after throwing all his recipe books away. There is also the small matter of spending a year at a cookery school in Paris, an option that isn't open to most of us, but, generally, I like the cut of his jib. My advice, which you can have for free, is this: look in the fridge, see what you have and make it nice, with whatever you have to hand. If a recipe calls for a strange ingredient that you don't have, omit it, you probably won't notice the difference. There are a thousand and one things you can do with a potato.

If you read the article, which is good, don't follow the link to his website, which is crap and literally, has nothing on it, other than the opportunity to buy his book. If you buy his book, do it via Amazon and go there via this blog; that will net me about 0.001p towards the camping trip to France fund. There is a link, on the left!

Talking of cutting corners, my eldest likes to cook, a bit, it's not a passion......... but he likes it, so he was looking forward to cooking lessons at his new school. His Pizza consisted of a Pitta Bread, topped with a generic, bought sauce and some grated cheese, which then went under the grill. Several corners cut too far there, I think.

Easy spud recipe of the day
Easy Dauphinoise
Take about 5 biggish spuds. Peel and slice, really thin, stick in a saucepan which contains about a pint and a quarter of a mixture of milk and cream, with a sliced clove of garlic and salt. Cook for ten minutes, chuck it all in an oven proof dish and bake for about 40 minutes at about 180. Voila.

The Blues beloved chairman, David Gold is in the news again, having described Gary Cahill as selfish for joining Bolton, rather than us. Who is Gary Cahill? You might well ask. Apparently we offered him a better deal than Bolton, but he chose to go there, only Chairman Dave can explain how taking less money can be construed as selfish, because it is beyond me. Yes this Dave, is the same Dave who has been all over the media loudly supporting the notion of the 39th game. He supports it for purely selfless, altruistic reasons, obviously, because he is not a selfish man.

The new(ish) Camilleri is brilliant, but is a lot darker in tone than we are used to, concerning as it does illegal immigration and the hardship and cruelty that is endured; he also has some harsh things to say regarding the government of the day. The overall feel though is as you would expect, Caterella, the best literary idiot since Schweik, is prominent and the wit is lacerating.

I am also reading "Out Stealing Horses" by Per Petterson, another book which I can recommend without reservation. Not much happens, but it is one of those books that you sink into, become immersed in. The writing, or the translation, is beautiful and I suppose it is a bit of an existential meditation on life..........who we are, what we are, and how we come to be who we are. It has some fairly profound thoughts on the way in which we see ourselves and the way in which others see us, and how none of it really matters. It won't raise many belly laughs, mind.

Also, I am reading Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey. I picked it up to flick through, get a flavour, and found myself 80 pages in. Carey's 12 year old nipper develops an interest in manga, so th old man takes him off to Japan, (as you do), where he meets several masters of their various crafts (as you do)ponders upon Japanese culture and enjoys a classic, slightly fraught relationship with his son. It rang many bells with me.

Believe it or not, I am also dipping in and out of a big biography of Joe Strummer. The jury is very much out on this.........the author seems a bit too fond of telling us how much Joe loved him, for my liking.

So Round So Firm So Fully Packed

Iraq seems to have fallen off the news radar a bit, unless we are being told how the surge has worked and everyday life is returning to something like normality; then, buried somewhere deep inside our daily paper, way after all the pages and pages devoted to the minutiae of an election in a far away country, we will see that 40 Iraqis have died in a suicide attack in a market, or a roadside bomb has killed dozens of innocent civilians. The slaughter continues, but so long as it is Iraqis being mutilated, we don't much care.

There is a good article relating to this in the Independent. As is pointed out there, Blair not only walks away scot free, he continues to better himself. He should be thankful he didn't take drugs to win a race, then he would know what opprobrium is. It still baffles me how Blair and Bush can reconcile their Christian beliefs with their actions, I still wonder how they ever manage to sleep at night; surely they can't be so self righteous that they never have a troubling thought, a moment of doubt, the odd night lying awake, staring at the ceiling, contemplating what they have done. Do they ever wonder how history will judge them...........and despair?

Meanwhile, a top Taliban bloke who was rumoured to have turned and had gotten into bed with the good guys (that's us) has been nabbed by the Pakistan secret police, who don't seem to be very good at being the good guys. It's a murky old world.

Bloggers thrive on fragmented attention and dole it out too—one-liners, samples of songs, summary news, and summary judgments. Sometimes they don't even stop to punctuate.

 

Row Fisherman Row

Happiness is a new Camilleri

I don't watch England much but when I have done is has always been painfully similar to watching the Blues, with all the frustration and disappointment which that entails and the sinilairty continues. We have a new man who professes to like a passing game and so do England, and I think both men are going to find it very difficult to realise their lofty ambitions; although old Fabio will have the easier task.

Fabios mate Baldini has said that as a nation we are obsessed with hoofing the ball skywards after one or two passes and either he or Fabio has said that it is easier to play with the ball on the ground, the key is to practice, practice, practice. So they made the poor wee dabs train twice each day before the game the other night. I have read that some of the prem managers have objected to this criminal overworking of their little darlings.

Mr Eck should follow Fabios lead and have the Blues in twice each day. It is obvious that probably only two of our highly accomplished and highly paid professional footballers can actually pass a ball with any accuracy. His assistant has said that we will persist with a passing game because that is the best way to win games.........well not if we keep passing it to the opposition it isn't, so they should have 'em in, and make them practice until the bloody pips squeak; with the money they now earn surely they can't object to putting in a full days labour?

The money men have come up with the bright idea of inflicting the likes of the Blues and Blackburn on unsuspecting populations the whole world over. Our chairman has predictably come out in favour of it, the bottom line being, as ever, the only line.

Can we now have a prolonged period of silence concerning the Munich air crash? Is that possible? Unless someone wants to tell me how much money Manchester Utd have banked from the city's nations worlds mourning.

"How good was that", has joined my list of cack phrases, a phrase which has caused Billy Bragg Harry Pearson to write a piece which made me piss myself, at least once.

Man, do I empathise with this bloke! Blues message boards are full of people who use the word "of" when they mean "have" As in, "he would of scored if he hadn't been a useless great berk". I made that up, obviusly, because Blues have never employed a useless great berk and even if they had, we wouldn't mention it, because, well, he is Blues and it is compulsory to love him. Anyway, it has become so ubiquitous that I no longer know if this is a mass attempt at irony, or a mass attempt to lend the message boards some local authenticity, or, Blues fans, in large numbers, really do believe that they are using the word in its correct context. There, I wouldn't of dared mention it before reading that piece.

The life cycle of a blog post.

Why we kiss

There are some natural phenomena whose wonder only deepens upon scientific investigation. Take the orgasm............

Songerize will play you song if you know the name of it and who sung it, and it has it..........it seems to have plenty though, so long as you don't get too obscure.

Trouble Been Hard

You will have read about Shelby Lynnes album of Dusty covers, because you can't escape the bloody thing and everyone seems to love it. As do I. Love might be putting it a bit strong, but it's a damn fine piece of work. the best thing about it is, as you will know, because you will already have read about it, is the fact that it isn't a straight copy.............she stamps her own personality on it, and there are no horns. At times, it seems a bit too understated, a bit Eva Cassidy, but it is always redeemed by the glorious, soulful, unutterably saucy sensuality of Lynnes voice. She made a great album a few years back, which is possibly the sauciest record I have heard, and she can still do sauce.

The transfer window has closed. Boo. Blues signed 3 new players, Mcfadden, who has some talent, Zarate who looks to have some serious talent (the new Jose) and Murphy, a left back from a faraway country of whom we know little. So we are better off than we were 4 weeks ago, yet many Blues fans are in despair, because we didn't sign all sorts of mediocre centre halves. Mind you, after our performance in the week, maybe we should be in despair. At least we aren't Newcastle fans.


A mulitalented man.