Life and Times – Page 2 – Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy

Quitting time -a quitter’s raga

Every now and then the compulsive urge to try something new manifests itself in me taking on a new activity. Luckily, my desire to try out the new is equally matched by my ability to quickly see the errors of my ways and to stop the pointless pursuit of unrealized mastery of the new activity. I had shown a keen interest in music as I entered my teens and following in the Britton family tradition my parents thought I should learn a musical instrument. Having studiously ignored the piano sitting in the living room, they kindly bought me a guitar for Christmas and armed me with Bert Wheedon’s “Play in a Day”. I duly practiced “Bobby Shaftoe” solidly for about 4 days until, with my Trumpian-short fingers struggling with the steel strings of the two chords, I decided that maybe guitar was not for me. I spent more time electrifying the guitar with a small mike attached to the body and recording my echoey guitar effects on my reel-to-reel than I ever spent playing songs.

My only other musical venture was singing, we sang hymns every morning at school assembly and whenever we went on the bus to an away sports match to play another school I was one of the ring leaders of the back of the bus impromptu choir treating the compliment of the 3 or 4 teams to our cheery terpsichorean efforts. The songbook at that time included childhood favorites like “3 Wheels on My Wagon”, “Do Re Mi”, “My Old Man’s a Dustman” the inspirational “Jerusalem” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and the classics from our parents like “New York, New York”, “Chicago”. As we got more into music we added “Feel like I’m Fixing To Die Rag” from Woodstock, “The Boxer”, “Pinball Wizard”, and some Beatles – “Rocky Raccoon” and “Back in the USSR”. I kept some of those into my rugby playing days, adding ‘actions’ to the Swing Low and Jerusalem songs, picking up some new and far more tasteless ditties along the way. Into our late twenties, we serenaded packed pubs on our cricket tours with many of the same songs. (If you would like to hear what those songs were supposed to sound like, listen here). My only formal effort at singing was I joined the choir for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, which was fun but not something I was going to find a lot of time for in a busy teenager’s life.

I am sure on hindsight that joining the choir was more an ironic act than a genuine desire to improve my singing. In the same vein, one day when we were signing up for the local East Somerset sports tournament we all thought it would be hilarious to enter the 3000-Meter Walk. When the final entries were registered it turned out that as much as the hilarity at the time was communal I was the only one who had actually registered, so alongside my modest efforts with the discus I now had to learn to speed walk. I duly practiced walking in large circles and on the day I triumphed in a field of 4 and qualified for the County sports event, something my discus throwing did not qualify me for. At the County Event I scraped second and went on to the Regional Championships, which was getting embarrassing as the other athletes at this point were serious, focused and making an effort whereas I was not. In the Regionals I came a respectable 3rd out of 8, but that was the end of the line for my speed walking and the peak of my athletic career.

Over the years, I have tried my hand at various other sports out of curiosity or a desire for some fitness. Games with balls and rackets, tennis, badminton, ping pong, squash and the far inferior racquetball. Rolling ball games like boules, bowling, both Crown Green and 10 pin. Couple of efforts at the martial sports, boxing and judo. Team sports like football or rugby, cricket, field hockey, basketball (although years of playing rugby created habits of movement that proved bruising to my lunchtime pick-up compatriots) and Ultimate Frisbee. I have studiously avoided golf as I have neither the patience nor the desire to dedicate the time necessary to get any good at it, and the peripheral displays of male conformity and snobbery interwoven into the game alienated me from the get -go. I have held positions where it was obligatory for me to play, and I would happily hack around as part of a fun best-ball game, however on one occasion I was paired up in a four that was teeing off early in the draw and I had to take my tee shot in front of the gathered group of senior Japanese customers and serious American golfing colleagues. I was dressed correctly to look the part, but I gamely completely whiffed twice before shanking the top of the ball, for it to roll slowly and drunkenly down the side of the tee box. Before it got any worse, one of my Japanese colleagues smartly moved me to a different group at the back and spared everyone further embarrassment at my flailing efforts to kill the ball with a #1 wood.

I tried yoga while dating a yoga-loving Californian, but if ever there was an activity that smacked of temporary suspension of disbelief under the guise of a foreign and superficially spiritual activity, yoga was the poster child. I gamely accompanied her to her fave Sunday class in SOMA, only to be disdainfully rejected for not having the necessary experience for a class of this level. I think the guy could see that I would probably fart and would most definitely laugh and kill the serious vibe they were after. So my yoga career fell to the mat and never sprung back.

Another equally serious and ultimately annoying sports activity is skate skiing. It’s a revenge sport for the skinny and the short who were bullied in main stream team sports. The physics of the skis work against weight and height as they come in a basic size and surface area, the smaller and lighter you are the coefficient of friction is in your favor. If you are not, the ski is harder to move while propelling yourself on the flats and up hill, and insufficient to give you much control in the odd moments of relief down hill. It’s basically an unpleasant way to run fast in freezing cold weather with sticks on your feet.

One of the benefits of maturity is gaining a modicum of knowing one’s self, the self actualization process, knowing more accurately one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Logic then would suggest that we focus more on the things we can do well and enjoy, rather than persevering with those things that we ultimately will struggle with. The problem is that life throws challenges at us, especially in the work environment where it is harder to admit that we suck at something, especially if the thing we suck at is part and parcel of the job. I have spent a lot of time in customer facing environments, I have headed sales organizations yet the one thing I am terrible at is the networking gathering, the mixer, the early evening conference cocktail party, the schmoozing free-for-all amongst a large gathering of people. The goal of these events is to meet new contacts, introducing yourself, making polite small talk, sipping your drink politely cradled, as it always is, in a small paper napkin. Firstly, I have been doing what I do for such a long time, I struggle to get intrinsically excited about any industry event, it’s slightly more interesting than reading the minutes of the Chinese Politburo Central committee report on rice production but less interesting than watching reruns of the Simpsons. Secondly, I am just not that extraverted, I’m happy to wallflower or talk to the 3 people in the room who I know quite well rather than make the effort with the 297 I do not. I sit at lunches where it’s free seating and as much as I am French enough now to always say hello individually to everyone at the table, I marvel at the easy way some guys lean in, introduce themselves and chat as if they have known each other for years. With aging eyes I struggle to make out the name of the person on the name card, let alone the company name, so I am not going out on a social limb to introduce myself to someone who it may turn out is a vendor selling ‘insurance solutions’ or yet more software. I usually quietly eat my lunch and move on, same with the ‘cocktail events’, I meander around, drink one beer and desperately find someone I know or give in, and take my ball home.

Knowing when to quit is a learned skill, one I think I have mastered.

Down and out in San Francisco and Las Vegas

There is an apartment frenzy in the Dogpatch, the scrappy former industrial dock area of San Francisco but there is no one around except food delivery people trying to find obscure addresses and pick ups of laundry, because even thoug your $1m apartment has a washing machine and drier you are just too busy. Incongruously there is what appears at first sign to be a large luxury hotel, or is it a member’s club, there is security at the door and two valets for parking. No, its a furniture store in a building the size of the White House, its “The Gallery at the Historic Bethlehem Steel Building”, of course it is, this is San Francisco.
There are lots and lots of new buildings around The Chase Center and mix of bioscience and residential- still no shops or bars so the desert is soulless. The old bars like Rock Island Resort and Ramp must be killing it after the Warriors and the concert crowd arrived, their land was worthless when it was empty shipyards and broken windows but its the pulsing heart of Mission Beach now.
Where I am staying, in the old residential heart of the Dogpatch, wine bars and brew pubs abound on 3rd and some old dive bars still survive like the Dogpatch Saloon and The Star Bar from when I was living in SF and dating Rachel. Magnolia Brewery is gone and is now Souvla which is a Greek cum Mediterranean, I missed their beers and bbq on metal tins like at War Pigs in Copenhagen.
The inhabitants are classic Bay Area folk: Earnest young white men with large but trimmed Mormon like beards, lots of Carhartt and shiny brown leather boots still. Just as many cool young active Asian kids, predominantly in work out gear. The homeless tents and camper vans have self agglomerated on wider access roads and in SOMA so as much as it is deserted it is not overrun like some end of days movie.
The spontaneous food truck gatherings are now in controlled fenced entertainment zones near the apartments around UCSF.
Also spotted The American Middle Aged Male – nominatively casual above the ankle, hoodie, jeans, clunky wallet chain clip on belt loop. But where did they find those brown slip on casual shoes so effortlessly matched with branded black sports socks – usually a minor brand like Reebok or ASICS bought in a 10 pack at Target or Walmart? Cocktails are in but we are no longer in the Age of Cocktails. These are artisan cockertales, hand crafted and as such are sipped referentially and veeeery sloooowly so you can get from sitting down aperitif to the main course with one and then relunctantly add another to cruise thro to post-check escape.
Unwritten class divide continues…well-educated white graduates are waitresses, taking orders, doing the recommendations, enjoying the jokes and land grabbing the tips. The Latino guys bus and work the hot iron in the kitchen, the Latina women do some food and drink delivery and bus. And this is at a women owned and managed place with a Latina head chef.
Face masks are the new backpack – having a heavy fabric base mask on while walking the dog in March 2023 is the equivalent of the Herschel backpack of 2014 to establish your cool credentials in a post anti-vax world, you are woke and you are post-Covid-sensitive individual. Or you are wearing a crappy cheap blue Chinese-made mask and are part of the poor working class who is just scared shitless of getting sick and losing pay, again.
But it was noticeable to leave a Europe of large reported Covid deaths and arriving in the land of the free to see how traumatized the blue part of the country still is by the ‘civil’ discourse around how to manage a public pandemic or at the least how to score political points. I went to see Tortoise, the ne plus ultra of post rock at the Great American Music Hall, an establishment as venerable as the Fillmore. The audience was obviously mainly male and white and a touch of grey abounds, as well as the young and hip. And there was a fair spread of masks, some which ended up as chin bands after a couple of beers but it is part of the standard attire here. The GAMH is, as it says on the can, an old music hall with balcony and ornate gold trim. It has its regulars who sit up in the balcony with their twin stereo mikes and camera on a stand openly recording each and every gig, a dead head tradition. It’s marginally in the Tenderloin altho technically Union Square. It’s the shittiest part of Union Square and to get to it you have to pass through the tenderloin and my Lyft did the full dystopian tour crossing 6th in SOMA. There is a sad and dangerous world covering an area of 4 blocks by 6 blocks where the desperate live and die on the streets. Hostels, liquor stores who all cash money orders behind their armored tills, functioning bars and eateries dotted amongst them but all with heavy security. Multiple variations of crazy are on display, the naked, the shouting, a plethora of wheel chaired usually in the road, the dazed and the hustlers, male and female all trying to make enough to score. Trash on the streets, literally and figuratively.
The new Chinatown station is open now. It is the final link of the above the ground T line on Muni that snaked south through the Dogpatch and former industrial lands of the south side of the San Francisco Bay down to Hunter’s Point and Sunnydale. Now it goes underground at Bryant to new stations at the Moscone exhibition center, Union Square and stops on the top of the hill on Washington street smack in the middle of Chinatown. Real Chinatown, not tourist shops and lanterns Chinatown. Stores selling boxes and boxes of roots, ginger or ginseng I have no idea, store after store with all signs in Chinese characters. Stores selling everything you would find in a Safeway but compressed into a space the size of two phone booths. Lots and lots of restaurants, snack shops, coffee shops, bubble-tea shops. Most with frayed and faded pictures of their proud culinary offerings with bad English translations. Crowds of generally elder Chinese with wheelie shopping bags, a blue and white striped plastic bag of some food treat hanging from one wrist. Always wearing sneakers, not for any desire to suddenly sprint away but because they are the cheapest shoes available. Chinatown is not wealthy or aspiring it is where people who have no English language skills or any other skills survive in their own community, cheaply. There is a communal square off Kearney called Portsmouth Square for some reason. It has a quasi temple shelter and raised beds and benches. It is populated with mahjong playing old Chinese geezers, occasional Tai Chi exercises and social events. Like any open space in downtown SF it is shared with some homeless men, with their worldly possessions in a shopping cart and their woes on display. Portsmouth Square sits on the border of the Financial District where my office is. The FiDi has seen better days. The remote work option combined with awful prior commutes has killed the area, stores have not reopened since the pandemic, windows are boarded up and there are more signs saying To Let than there are toilers in the now dark offices. There is a shoe to drop soon as the leases – which the super greedy and sharp landlords kept short so they could keep jacking up the rents expire and the rents come tumbling down at the same time as the loan financing costs of the commercial property market are going up. Maybe a good potential outcome from this debacle is that the offices get converted to cheap apartments, something SF desperately needs.

Cheap rooms are not in short supply in Las Vegas. As the plane circles over what is left of Lake Powell and banks towards Vegas the context of its desert surroundings is in your face, flat scrub in all directions until the salt flats run up against the Sierra mountains to the west. From the air the urban sprawl is evident which provides the cheap housing for the worker bees that keep the facade of the wonder of Las Vegas humming along. I was staying at the Mirage, an appropriate metaphor for Vegas, aging, a bit battered and down at the heel, unloved and relying on its former glory. The Hollywood entrance to a Vegas hotel is that you drive up in the convertible to the shiny loud entrance foyer and valets rush out to take the keys, grab the bags and the beautiful couple sashay into the bright lights of the lobby to join the other beautiful people. The reality is the arrival in a line of cabs fighting through the baffled Ubers being turned away in the direction of the parking garage, the families discharging from minivans and the harassed dads trying to work out where to park. The hustling porters are juggling the departing and the arriving with equally cheery calls of “Welcome to the Mirage” and “Come back and see us soon” and for every seasoned business traveler on convention duty in control of their wheelies there is a family with mountains of bags, strollers, pillows ( seriously who travels on a plane with their own pillows?) and backpacks.

I didn’t see anyone scream to a halt in the Red Shark on its over-inflated tires and Hawaiian shirts seem to have been replaced by dark hoodies as the de rigeur costume of choice, partly to deal with the freezing A/C. Once inside the hallowed halls of this gambling paradise it is never bright and airy, thats not the vibe. Its permanently 2 in the morning. Its dark but illuminated by the non stop wall of flashing betting machines, pinging, ringing and strobing us with enticements to take part in every game of chance, every TV show game, every cartoon character’s demonic gambling twin encouraging us to just try our luck. It is also a journey back into the 70’s as people are smoking all around you. They cannot smoke in the restaurants, common areas or non-smoking floors but in the gambling areas and bars. Those A/C systems run on overdrive trying to suck the cancer our of the air for the majority who do not want it. In Vegas’ defense there are 4 or 5 smoke free ‘resorts’ but most business events take place at the run of the mill for whom smoking is still part of the code of malpractice.

The casinos throb with people for 20 hours a day. People on the move from the rooms to the food outlets to the pools and theaters and convention spaces. People checking in, people checking out, people passing through, there is no room to run and you sure can’t hide.

If you missed it Vegas is now a place for families. Why anyone thinks children really want to be inside a behemoth smoke filled gambling machine surrounded by the old and desperate is an interesting question but they have been successful. At least in terms of persuading vast numbers of parents that the pizzazz will wow the tots. There are random kids characters around the Strip, Goofy-like giant dogs hi-fiving the kids to reinforce the “Fun!!” vibe. However they seemed to be outnumbered by the semi-naked young women in platform boots and giant headdresses offering selfie photo-ops and free passes to Clubs scattered around the rim of the city where more nakedness and intimate entertainment is offered. They are technically clothed but in a classic Vegas move having large artificial boobs protruding from a bodice covered in repurposed pantyhose is ‘clothed’ but walking towards you in broad daylight it is more an act of display than one trying to dissemble. Outdoor speakers along the strip blare out Uptown Funk and half the strolling holiday makers are carrying a drink as they amble from one shopping mall to the next, as they boulevardier from Paris to Venice.

The family groups look predominantly recent immigrants of all hues, Vegas is America writ large and they have come to celebrate their success in being there and having the money to enjoy it. Las Vegas is not in anyway a cheap experience. The rooms can be a deal for sure. I was staying at corporate rate of $149 for a room that was larger than most European 2 bedrooms apartments, in fact my bathroom was larger than a San Francisco studio currently renting for $3500 a month. But….everything is Vegas priced. Breakfast was $50, drinks are $15, dinner main courses start at $45 with the median $80 and when the bill arrives the tip choices are laid out for you 22%, 25% or 30% with the correct amount shown to help you if the drinks have slowed down your mental arithmetic.

There are lots of entertainment options which is part of the draw. From the never aging kings of magic like David Copperfield, the never aging kings of pop like Donny Osmond and Rod Stewart and the never aging kings of rock like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon. Big acts continue to bolster Las Vegas’s reputation as an entertainment center for the aging boomers but you have to be really big for the numbers to work, Adele is there now in residency, which surprised me but in a way it encapsulates her fame, she is a global star. Muse will be there for a two week stint, I was less sure about that but I am sure they know what they are doing. There is a rotating roster of ‘global’ DJs headlining sets at the clubs and the EDM scene is alive and kicking, but there is less surprise about that with middle America being the biggest market for the big beats and easy access to the drugs that make that repetition more ecstatic than tedious.

As you leave the airport is well manned and efficient. When you get through the super quick security you understand why as the casino experience continues in the concourse. Surrounded by more of the 21st century versions of the one-armed bandits, people are desperately stuffing notes and credit cards in to make that last winning bet that will wipe out all the losses, the luck will turn if only one you take one more chance, imagine if you stopped and the next person sitting down at your machine wins the jackpot? So with all that they don’t want people stuck in long security lines, time is not a wasting in the Harry Reid International Airport. Which Harry would have been happy with, after all Harry was a man who famously took every dime the government could be persuaded to shovel Nevada’s way or his way for that matter. He was also a believer in UFOs, and why not, its Nevada.

As a not quite stranger in an increasingly strange land I was happy to take off and head back to the old world, I was afraid of it and yes, I loathed it.

Ch-ch-changes

And these children that you spit on As they try to change their worlds Are immune to your consultations They’re quite aware of what they’re goin’ through

Change is one of those words that has suffered reputational decline over the last 20 years, primarily due to overuse but also because it became code for bad shit happening for some people, and not for the others. This corporate change was often positioned as merely being strong medicine to swallow down. The only constant is change, the present changes the past, even TayTay gets in on the act with “This is a new year. A new beginning. And things will change.” As someone nominally leading businesses during a period of untrammeled capitalism and the pursuit of reduced costs and higher shareholder value (or more importantly higher piles of cash for the very senior guys, and yes, always guys) I watched how those shed along the way to glory town were told to embrace the change as an opportunity. I entreated those who remained to consider the change of having half your colleagues disappear as being for the very best. I was of course complicit because the senior guys spread the wealth a little and we all have families and mortgages to keep our backbone stiffened. Human Relations, which was one of the few places you ever saw a female senior executive in a large financial corporation, seemed to have lots of ready-to-go letters and offers of career counseling for the poor humans for which the company had decided they no longer wanted to enjoy a long term relationship with.
Society always reflects only a snapshot in time and the temptation is always to see the existing status quo as better than what came before and to be more comforting generally than the unknown future. The problem is that we rarely get to choose which bits we change. We would all like the world to be a fairer more equitable place and we would presumably all like the world to cease being destroyed by our human efforts and those are great grounds for change.
Sadly the only change that we seem to be presented with is a variant on something new to consume. We cannot seem to change the rampage of industry and its emissions and the breaching of the climate thresholds, we cannot change the political system that is cosseted and supported by the various industry interests to prevent us changing how we drive, fly, work or eat. Its not an occidental thing either, China, Korea and Japan are hardly the bywords for enlightened change although in their own quiet way the hard working women of those large, mainly homogenous, patriarchal societies are bringing a long and sustained change, they have all stopped having children.
I like change. I have a personality that treasures the novelty, seeks out the new. New treats is top of the list. New foods to enjoy, new wines to drink, new music to listen to. New places to visit. Do I want imposed change? Maybe not, but in principle I understand that we simply cannot continue as if nothing has to change significantly. Is it then a question of who is imposing the change, we have two recent examples of democratically elected governments whose judgement was at best flawed and based less on the common good and more on the wishes and peccadilloes of a select group. The Tories in the UK, or the thankfully short lived (so far!) administration of Trump imposed their vision of change. Brexit and the new Supreme Court will be around to haunt us for many years. These type of governments, primarily reactionary in nature, will never seek to drive major change for a common good, like climate change or resolving homelessness. They generally stand for and ascend to power as representing themselves as bulwarks against change rather than progenitors of systemic change, protection from someone else’s efforts for change, Obama’s effort to bring universal healthcare was a poster child for rallying the forces of fuckwittery.

I sometimes wonder whether there is a secret cabal of rich men, who all look like a cross between Jacob Rees Mogg and Mr Burns, that sit in a room in a Gentleman’s Club in Mayfair or some mansion in Greenwich, CT and agree to keep the distractions going, to stop the unknown future world of degrowth, an end to consumerism, just to maintain their fortunes in coal or oil. Then you think about all the fun that everyone is having in North Korea, how Mohdi’s vision of India includes unbreathable air for at least 60% of the population, as in 60% of the population of the largest country on earth. You think about how Ergodan’s Turkey is just now working out the downside to making concrete buildings without bothering to put in any steel reinforcing. Then think about Mr Xi or President-Chairman-Leader for Life or whatever he feels is appropriate currently, I am sure God-Head or Emperor cannot be far off, after all his very thoughts, not just his words, but his musings are sanctified and taught to all school children in China. The final death nell for the old white men cabal conspiracy is Uncle Vlad, the man with the longest tables and the biggest rallies where they have to lock the doors so no-one is seen to be leaving or not enjoying the grand gathering, where the cheering attendees are either government employees told non-attendance is a firing offense or students paid to attend. They all gather and wave the mass produced flags for his spectacular celebrations of some glorious day from Russia’s history or at least Putin’s version. The fact that these two self proclaimed “Leader of the People” met last week in a love-in to proclaim their undying mutual support a week after the ICC issued warrants for Putin’s arrest for crimes against humanity is the perfect display of how little they care about the rest of us.

Its no wonder we cannot get some positive change going when globally we seem to have enabled a fuck-wits olympics, where leaders compete with each other as to who can be the most spectacularly evil and destructive, who can do the least for their millions of citizens. The propaganda tools that have been there forever: othering, compliant religions, nationalism, are now ably assisted by those gifts that keep giving, You-Tube, Farcebook, Tik-Tok. Add in levels of oversight, supervision and incursion into the daily lives you can only think about in your worst Ai assisted nightmares. The common play seems to be building more stuff, even it does not really help in the long run. Its just to keep the inner circle happy, perhaps one of the building contracts slips their way or you keep building coal fired power stations to keep the chaps from the coal producing regions on side. China approved the construction of another 106 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity last year, of which they already started building 50GW of capacity. That will be popular in Australia too as those ecology-loving Aussies supply vast amounts of coal to China, the very ships that carry the coal sail through a gap in the barrier reef. The Great Barrier Reef was going to be named a Unesco Heritage site but the government actually campaigned against this honor, which fits with it being destroyed through global warming particularly through burning of coal, something you would rather support than stopping the tiny warming problem we all seem to be enjoying.

The problem is that we will probably trigger a turning point where the ocean currents shift or the ice-cap accelerates into a slushy of its former self and suddenly all these exciting ’50 year’ weather events, loved by TV stations around the world, become monthly events and the food chain breaks down. We will of course have to change then or will we? I can’t help wondering whether the rich and powerful, at that point, just double down and argue whats the point? its too late to save everyone so we will just look after our own people. Then the definition of who exactly is ‘our own people’ may have to be tweaked.

Well that went dark quickly! Time for a rest and as they say, a change is as a good as a rest. You can change your listening habits here.

Je bosse

I think being the eldest child teaches you to be bossy. My brother Bob arrived home from the hospital with my mother when I was 3 and a half, already precocious I immediately enquired when he would be able to play cars with me. He duly became the dastardly Jerries to my plucky Tommy hero, the noble Indian to my brave cowboy, the dastardly Japanese to my Chindit. He was my goalkeeper when I later decided to be a footballer, so I could fire my dream shots into the top corner, or at least into the garage door and annoy my long suffering grandfather whose workshop was behind the goal. As our games outgrew just the two of us I recruited the Twohig brothers from across the road to our gang, then the Cornish brothers moved in around the corner and we had two opposing armies to work through our wars, raiding parties and bloodthirsty campaigns which were played out through the wooded world that was Tardis-like enfolded into our back garden.

I was the major general in charge of the maneuvers, the head coach making the tough calls and the CEO responsible for the division of labour. I was the oldest by one year from Kim Twohig and Neil Cornish but it was less a function of the height giving authority rather than desire for taking the authority, giving direction and leading the group off on our adventures. Whether foraging a path through the jungle of the bamboo thicket in our garden or trekking down the back lane of Webbs Hill to Vallis Vale and the overgrown former quarries that regularly became more strange lands to be explored and conquered.

My first formal interaction with a superior, other than dealing with my teachers, parents, grandparents and a much older sister, was Mr Wells of Wells Coaches. He ran the school bus services in the mornings and afternoons and day trips to Weston-Super-Mare, Bournemouth, Weymouth and Longleat. Children, sweet eating old ladies, smoking pub groups, travel sick as often as not, all his regular clients kept his coaches filthy. Myself and an everchanging cast of characters emptied the ashtrays on the back of every seat, swept and mopped the floors. We also got to clean the outside of the coach with a brush and a hose, I got to clean the outside until Mr Wells caught me cleaning my colleague with the hose and was told to clear off and never come back.

My next boss was a little more understanding but in her own way a little more intimidating. Barb Roberts was a bespectacled Yorkshirewoman adrift with her portly little husband in our little Somerset market town. She and George were friends of my parents and drank together at the Royal Oak, next door, every Friday evening. My mother and Barb did most of the talking, working through their packs of Silk Cut while my Dad and George punctuated with nods, chortles and knowing looks. My Dad’s pipe fulls of Condor tobacco completing the recreation of the great smogs of the 19th century while George, the non-smoker of the group, sipped his half of bitter. Barb was the manager of the Spar supermarket on the corner of Gore Hedge and Keyford. I worked for the going rate of 3 shillings an hour Friday after school and Saturdays stacking shelves and packing groceries. I moved on to other jobs that paid more or fitted around my school and, latterly, my sporting commitments better but I would see Barb and George with Mum and Dad on their Friday evening socials as they came back to our place for a night cap. This was the era of dressing up for an evening out so both the men wore suits, and the women in full make up, jewelry and dresses. George developed an increasingly large swelling in his groin that was never discussed, even as it became the size of a small football, more and more visible in his suit pants. He died suddenly of testicular cancer and it was still never disucssed. Barb went grey completely over the next few months and then died herself of a broken heart within a year. I looked to see on Google StreetView if the Spar was still there in some form but it has also disappeared under what is now a small housing development.

Bill Lewis was another outsider in Frome. He had been in the army but was a cockney who married a local woman. He had started a small cleaning business from scratch. He drove around town in his little van with ladders on the roof, hustling window cleaning when larger jobs were scarce. He managed to get a couple of contract cleaning jobs and then needed help and with my coach cleaning experience I was a shoe in to help him sustain his growing enterprise. I cleaned the floors of the large supermarket in the new West Way Centre every morning at 7.00am using a new fangled wet-vac. I balanced atop his highest ladders cleaning office windows. We cleaned windows of the houses on the new estates. We cleaned PVC storage silos during the factory shutdown at Wallington Weston, where my sister and her husband had worked before setting off to darkest Essex for him to be a programmer. We also cleaned the canteen at the Express Dairy in Oldford, I did the cleaning and then Bill would help himself to chocolate bars and sweets which he smuggled out in the wet vac. Oldford is full of odd memories, the Vaughn family farm at Park Farm, home of first serious girlfriend Jude, The Ship pub where I ended up working as bar man and outside of which myself and a friend spent an afternoon mooning cars as they drove by. The Express Dairy is now owned by Bonne Maman for some reason and in the early 2000’s my brother Bob ended up in charge of HR for whoever was the owner at the time.

Time moved on and I stacked more supermarket shelves, I was a White Hunter at the Lions of Longleat for 3 summers, worked bar, was a cook in a Good Food Guide listed restaurant, did shift work in a carpet factory running looms, was a fitter’s mate in a factory in Newport South Wales where I broke my toe, as Zappa would have been happy to see I wound up “working in a gas station” and before leaving for France after my final summer after graduation, before starting a real job, I worked in an early waste recycling project at a cement factory in Westbury, where I broke my little finger on my left hand while rebricking the immense kiln. So much for health and safety.

My first few months with Unilever were typical of the ‘graduate trainee’ scheme. Weeks of training in the SPD’s head offices in Watford interspersed with weeks in branch operations. My attempt at getting into the shipping part of Unilever failed and I ended up in their distribution business appropriately named Speedy Prompt Delivery. There were various companies all in one way or another moving raw materials into or finished goods out of Unilever businesses in the UK. Romantic intentions of being in a global world of shipping and exotic ports in foreign climes were dashed by the day to day reality of managing warehouses and delivery trucks in Warrington, Eastleigh, Doncaster and other lifeless towns in England enduring strikes and power cuts of the 3 day week and the famous ‘winter of discontent’. So when I was offered a market research project in the Potteries for a newly established international freight subsidiary I had little sense of what path I was headed down. I arrived on the train in Stoke late on a cold Monday morning in February and was picked up by the General Manager’s secretary, Carole. A woman, it saddens me to say, that having worked with her for 3 years my enduring memory is that she was prone to severe constipation and had to be reminded by her father to do something about it when she was starting to look ‘peaky’. She was engaged to a milkman, who because he got up at 3.30 every morning was not exactly the life and sole of the party, she referred to him as Bert, even though his name was David, it was if she had decided remembering boyfriend’s names was too much like hard work so for short hand they all became Bert.

I was asked to wait as my new boss, the GM, was not yet in. At about 12.05 he exploded through the office door rummaged through his in-tray and then came back out, all without taking off his mackintosh. “Lets go and grab lunch!” he said and off we went, me trailing him in an attempt to make small talk, as we jumped into his brand new gold Ford Capri 2.0 GLS and headed off to a pub. As this was late 70’s England pub lunch was a sandwich and a couple of pints of bitter consumed while my new boss, Pete Meyrick, in his broad Swansea accent, explained that there was no project but if I was interested they needed a salesman to cover Britain, the Benelux and France. If I did that for him I would get a company car and he would fight the political battles to make it a long term job. So with a very used maroon Ford Cortina complete with 8 track player and the promise of international travel I was bought. I became the Marketing Development Manager for the Powder Tank Division of Unispeed Intermodal. Meyrick was a hard driving pugilistic manager. I am not sure I learned that much from him as communications were not his forte; he was a team builder in so far as he put effort into the group socializing after long hours. He developed an esprit de corps by belittling the other two sister divisions, their efforts, their GMs especially came in for his withering disregard and the support staff who we shared the offices with in Newcastle Under Lyme. He ultimately left two years later to set up his own operation and became rich by stealing the core contracts from under the nose of the Unilever business. He took two of my colleagues with him and the fact that he didn’t invite me to join him ultimately showed how little he thought of me. I, meanwhile, was sent to another sinking ship of a division in Southampton, whose whole management team upped and set up in business to replicate what they had been doing for the by now embattled Unispeed group.

I have had 14 jobs since then, some were a lot of fun, some less so. Some I am embarrassed about in hindsight. I did learn something from each of them, even if the lessons were simply to never do something again. Some were very financially rewarding and some I spent more money than I earned. I have managed or lead teams as large as 300 and at times as small as me on my own, some of the those colleagues have become life long friends. I have a couple of times joined a completely different industry with differing mores and ways of doing business, that is tough and ultimately not easy to do successfully. So the one conclusion is that you probably need to be thoughtful about making a commitment to a job when you are young, as it tends to direct you down a path that guides or constrains the future career options. I always wanted to work internationally and escape the rainy little island of home so on balance when I sold my soul for the used maroon Cortina that was the bargain that I made and I am happy I did.

On the 8-track this shoulda/coulda been playing.

Malaise

Malaise, a very current sensation.

Every week I write one to two newsletters for work that I then spam out into the world with the help of a small mail monkey. It has been a salutary experience to have done that over the last couple of years. Every week I start with a potted update of what the world has been up to for the prior few days; that has been a constant parade of unpleasantness, as you can imagine.

I try and find some gallows humour amongst the pestilence, gluttony, famine and war that now makes up what has become our very own post Biblical age. Remember those heady days of the late 90s when the good guys could and did win? The End of History by Fukayama had made it clear that neoliberalism had triumphed and the last remaining autocratic regimes like China would go the way of Russia, Levi’s, i-pods and Nikes would be the out-riders of democracy as it swept across the globe. I remember waking up early one morning in a boutique hotel in southern Denmark and watching on the TV news the shiny happy version of Tony and Cherie Blair walk through Sedgefield, savoring his stunning victory over the sclerotic Tory regime. I spent many weekends amidst the hustle and flow of unflappable Hong Kong as the rich of China washed their ever-growing billions through the banks and buildings there, ever ready proof, if proof was needed, that China was accelerating towards democratic normalcy on a bus fueled by commercial frenzy.

I lived for most of the last ten years in the at the time, searing hot cradle of high technology, San Francisco and the Bay Area which, together with the peninsula to its south, forms the amorphous Silicon Valley of legend.

The hubris of these days probably helped bring about the global clusterfuck that life is now. The very closeness of the impending success, so close we not only read and talked about it, but we could literally smell its approach, it of course smelled like pinot noir. This much fan-fared triumph of the supposed rule of liberalism brought about the subsequent decline and fall of the rumoured empire of hope. You could make a pretty good case that in fact it was nothing but a charade, that the liberal social democrats chose riches for themselves over true egalitarianism, that they never committed to solve the prevailing inequalities and just undermined the left as a viable option for a very critical 10 years or so.

The financial crash of 2008, or more critically the bungled bail-outs of the rich banks and large companies while destroying the lives of millions of normal people in the US, followed by the hollowing out through austerity in the UK and other places breathed new life into the autocrats. The mirror that was held up to Russia and China that was western success and rich lifestyles was shown to be a pastiche; yes, we have corruption but look at them, they are just as bad! Throw in a couple of self-serving wars and mass destruction of poor brown people, and the moral high ground wasn’t so heady. Failing to be the good guys in Syria, Crimea and Libya just showed the bad guys how weak and divided we really were.

I have seen two similar descriptions in the last couple of weeks of the US and the UK being poor countries with a small number of very rich people. This was backed up in both cases with slightly different sets of analysis of standards of living, quality of life, life expectancy trends etc, but both made compelling cases. We continue to provide a very limited example of how to manage our societies to places with less democracy. The role of society is to provide support to the common weal, the tradeoff for the rights of man is ‘I give you power, you look after me`; whether such gift of power may be via the ballot box or acquiescence to the Party.

In both the land of my birth and the country I spent the majority of my adult years, the most distressing change to me is the acceptance of bullshit. You can make a logical and reasoned argument with someone who holds another viewpoint based on their perspectives and judgements about the circumstances that apply to a situation. That is what politics is, the debate and the compromise. If, however, someone is basing their view or argument on bullshit that is simply self-serving, and that avoids logic or the facts and cannot be resolved politically. The whole of the Presidency of Donald Trump was based on such a suspension of truth by not just the MAGA fanatics, but by every republican who turned a blind eye or held their nose and let him and his cronies enrich themselves. The Facebook fueled support for and provided the microtargeting to get Brexit delivered, it was and continues to be supported by the ruling government of the UK, willfully ignoring the facts that their actions have harmed and continue to harm the majority of their citizens that they supposedly represent. The campaign for Brexit was based on bullshit, and its resulting implementation was turbocharged by the same suspension of common sense. The alternative reading of both situations is that people actively chose to support the bullshit arguments because knowing full-well they were flawed in the general case it gave a small sense of expressing their frustration with the status quo, regardless of the obvious fact that they suited and rewarded personally the key elites they were so frustrated with. How is that different from Xi rewarding the cadres loyal to him or Putin and his chorus of oligarchs?

We also experienced a global pandemic. In a cliched way, this showed humanity in its most Dickensian. It was indeed the best of times, with scientists delivering vaccines in record time, nurses and doctors fighting to save the sick. That it was also the worst of times when ‘mates’ of the cabinet were fast tracked to immense wealth for securing contracts to supply the government with much-needed personal protection equipment, without competitive bidding or any oversight. That much of the PPE did not work in a basic sense of providing any protection or any value for its delayed and very expensive provision other than personal enrichment for a precious few didn’t ultimately come as a surprise. It didn’t seem to be that newsworthy either, for some reason, only Private Eye held up a mirror to the wide-open festering sore of the Tories continuing corruption. Who needed functioning medical equipment when you can have a round of applause and bang on a saucepan down the street.

We have enjoyed the recent implosion of the new version of unconstitutional leadership, Liz Truss is not enjoying much support in denial of her own nominative determinism. It seems like years of the same shit sandwich but ‘Margarine Thatcher’, as she views herself in this latest right wing cos-play at government, has actually been fucking things up for less than one month. Biden, thank heavens, is keeping western democracy in shape and supporting the Ukrainians’ effort to bring down Putin. His administration continues to pass meaningful legislation which is a pleasant surprise after 12 years of minor tweaking at the fringes, but we have McConnell and Trump’s real legacy, the Supreme Court as a constant threat, casting its shadow like Sauron over the land, its black heart ready to pump more hatred and bile into popular discourse. Every time I see Joe Biden he looks one step closer to a comfortable retirement at home, surrounded by Labradors and grandkids, sipping cocoa; but in fact he is almost single-handedly fighting for global peace and stability. I am avoiding thinking about what happens in 2024, but quietly hoping by then Putin is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the forest outside of Moscow following a bloody and painful demise at the hands of his own inner circle.

Who knows, maybe by then we may have also seen the last of what used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party as it self-destructs following the landslide victory of the coalition of the sane.

Plus, “My shoe organizing thing arrived. Thank God! I don’t want to go on about it but we are back in business” – I knew I could bring a positive conclusion to the current malaise, after all. Here are some dark songs to listen to as the evenings close in.

Low- “Days Like These” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8QiSZRX8dA

Ethel Cain – “Crush” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu-t3tqDyAY

Arctic Monkeys – “Body Paint” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zgEObNc_-k

Dry Cleaning “Anna Calls From the Arctic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYNwr7wuRHY

Edwin Collins – “I Guess We Were Young” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo

Ian Sweet – “Fight” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tBnrUBPib0

The Beths – “Expert In A Dying Field” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KACt6YhOyY

Linton Kwesi Johnson – “Inglan Is A Bitch” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isMjvRpAckU

Little Simz – “Point And Kill feat. Obongjayar” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvY31eN3gtE

Big Thief – “Not” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAZb7PpVK_g

Viagra Boys – “Research Chemicals” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo

Amyl and the Sniffers – “Guided By Angels” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z–D1flPLnk

Settling into a Saturday

There is a glorious luxury to settling in to a lazy Saturday. Not a Saturday full of tasks around the house, no chores, no pressing need to battle the great unwashed in the shopping center. Saturdays waking slowly, slightly hung over from the relief of Friday evening, drinking in the sounds of the birds, soft light of Spring through the silk of the curtains. Saturdays rituals, reading Blind Date in the Grauniad app, debating whether to get up and get croissants from the bakery down the road, pondering the culinary choices for the weekend. Looking forward to the Fulham game, this year has been odd, not just because we have to get used to the expectation of winning but because success brings the attention of Sky and games moved to Friday nights, Sunday lunchtimes and 1.30Pm kick offs. Today is a treat, a normal British Saturday 3.00pm kick off which fills the end of my French afternoon nicely.

Dressed for an unhalfbricked Saturday morning

I dont want to go all Nigel Slater and confessional but one of the other treats is wandering through the cookery tomes to find inspiration. I have flétan, Atlantic Halibut, from the football loving fish guy at the weekly market. I also have the last remaining cabbage that survived the winter, or survived me harvesting them too early assuming they were struggling, sweet potatoes and a large cauli to do something with. Coffee and one of the French biscuits that they call “Petit Dejeuner”, which are whole grain and have chocolate nibs and nuts, accompany a catch up with Private Eye. I know my biases are just being confirmed but the journalism of the Eye is the one consistent investigative effort holding the despicable and corrupt ruling Conservative party to account as they undermine or destroy what is left of the England I had the good fortune to grow up in. It’s ironic that at this very moment, across the plagued island there are many of my peers reading through their Saturday’s Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph feeling the same disgust and distaste but about whoever their target of their privileged ire is today, likely some part of the woke, liberal elites that are in their eyes undermining their world.

Tomorrow France goes to the polls to elect the President for the next 5 years and by the time you read this we hope that we are not reliving that sense of bewilderment that we felt when the desperate and angry elected Donald Trump and voted to leave the EU. There are many desperate and angry French people who Marine Le Pen has spoke to with resonance about their cost of living, their frustrations when they fill up their battered old Peugeot 208’s with diesel to drive the 40 minutes to their poorly paid job. They blame Macron. They blame the establishment. They blame them for their lack of the piece of the western liberal pie they feel they deserve, they blame the dark skinned people for taking their jobs, for causing crime, for not being French and Mme Le Pen nods along with them and smiles in agreement when they vent their spleen. She promises France Unicorns like all populists, “tous et n’importe quoi’, no taxes for the under 30’s, reduced VAT on diesel, no hijabs, no benefits for foreigners, standard stuff. The divisions across Europe and the Western World that are exploited by the Populists are thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr Putin aided and abetted by the uncontrolled greed which powers social media to be such a sustained force for evil. However, globalisation and capitalism has failed all but a moderately sized slice of French society and that is reflected in the polls where over 60% has voted for either far left or far right candidates. If there were such options in the USA we would probably see that kind of reflection too.

Saturday is also a day to reflect on what music have I been listening to or newly discovered this week, new vinyl arrivals have been slower of late as I am trying to be less compulsive. I got the quite lovely Wet Leg album this week and its no surprise they are the darlings of the rock media currently, as well as the new Jack White which is a nice and quite surprisingly good return to form. It’s also a day to dig through the back catalog and revisit old favorites. I consume vast amounts of music but quite a lot of it blends into itself. I definitely have different preferences for different moods and contexts.

As my Saturday moves sleepily at first it gathers pace and then late morning the coffee kicks in and energy levels go up so this playlist brings its game from folky to funky to just fun, enjoy!

Listen here to:

Who Knows Where the Time Goes – Fairport Convention
Cigarettes out the window – TV Girl
VCR – Antlers
Furry Sings The Blues – Joni Mitchell
The Melting of the Sun – St Vincent
Debris – The Faces
White Rabbit (remix by Marcel Dettman) – Jefferson Airplane
Superman Lover – Johny Guitar Watson
Cosmik Debris – Frank Zappa
Who The Cap Fit – Bob Marley & The Wailers
Slipping Into Darkness – War
Could Heaven Ever By Like THis – Idris Muhammad
Bicameral – The Range
Magic Mountain – Eric Burden
Ooh la la! – Goldfrapp
Into the Twilight – Jack White
Ohh la la (Mexican Institute of Sound remix) – Run the Jewels
The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore – PJ Harvey
The Turning of Our Bones – Arab Strap
Fluorescent Adolescent – Arctic Monkeys
Feel Like A Girl – Coach Party
Ur Mum – Wet Leg

A Promise

Buxton in Derbyshire is what is laughingly referred to as a spa town. The English do not really do spas like here in France, where taking of the waters is not only normalized but forms part of the basic health care system. Nor like the Germans where, in combination with self flagellation with particular shrubs and bushes and rolling naked in the snow, spas are a much loved healthful activity. For a gallant few years in Regency England the upper classes went to towns like Buxton, Cheltenham, Lymington and of course the longest running show in spaszle-dazzle, Bath. I can confidently assert that after the fall of the Romans the baths in Bath were an underused resource, the English not being overly fond of water or strong on personal hygiene. So when the Regency court decreed that “taking the water” cured all ills the fashionable ‘ton’ took off to stay in these genteel sleepy country towns, see and be seen, and drink the naturally occurring waters that flowed from the local springs. Like Bridgerton, but with mineral water and less multicultural sex. Note that ‘taking of the waters’ was to drink it, still at this point we were not too keen on getting into it and cleaning off any accumulated dirt and detritus.

Buxton in January 1981 was a sleepy forgotten town, this predated the English rediscovery of drinking bottled water so the spa element of the town’s history was reduced to the public rooms like the hotels and council offices forming the original Crescent, a copy of the one in Bath, and the Pavilion Gardens. I had recently discovered the latest thing to come out of Liverpool, Echo and the Bunnymen, through their remarkable debut album ‘Crocodiles’. The closest place to where I was living at the time to see them was Buxton and thanks to the NME and a special invite off we forayed. They played under a camouflage net and had this serious nothing can touch us attitude, part Scouse, part being on that crest of acclaim that comes with Peel sessions, positive noise from NME and Sounds. Their sound live back then was driven by Pete de Freitas machine gun drumming, fills and rolls and the bass and guitar chugging the rhythm along, this was not a band to come to see if you wanted long guitar solo improvisations. At this point in their career Ian McCulloch’s voice was reasonably strong, before the booze and cigs ripped out what little range he had. Live, they drove a hard sound anchored in the drums but with the ‘Heaven Up Here’ album, which they were starting to play tracks from, the bass heavy Echo of their best period was to the fore. The closed the set with Over the Wall and All My Colours (or Zimbo as most of us know it as). McCulloch loved to improvise the endings with snippets from hits by the Stones, Del Shannon and the Velvets sprinkled among the original words. The audience laps that shit up as you all know the words and sing along. Will Sergeant wore sunglasses throughout the whole gig.

‘Heaven Up Here’ even now is a regal album, full of confidence and brimming with creative energy. They knew they were good and enjoyed showing off. ‘Porcupine’ was the follow up, more doom and less pop, They were tired out and starting to get tired of each other, Ian Broudie was guitarist Will Sergeant’s flatmate and his upbeat production could not make it a happy album. Iceland was the ideal backdrop for the album artwork and the videos that supported it and they look miserable, cold and lacking inspiration amongst the stalactites and frozen waterfall backdrops.

They released some great 12″ singles over this mid 80s’ period and you got an interesting sense of where and how they were experimenting on the B-sides. They somehow got over their creative hump and ‘Ocean Rain’ the 4th album did good box office and creatively expanded their sound to a richer more symphonic swell. Whereas the debut ‘Crocodiles’ was all scratchy guitars, ‘Heaven Up Here’ hard bass and drum driven anthems, ‘Porcupine’ was the angular peaks and troughs of dark days, ‘Ocean Rain’ was acoustic guitars and string sections, brushes not bass drums, it even included glockenspiel and xylophone . They still maintained the elemental graphic image, this time on a boat in a cave in Cornwall. The album produced two classic singles, The Killing Moon (much abused in every werewolf movie and tv show but they obviously need the royalties) and Seven Seas.

And then it all went a bit pear shaped. Any band that records, tours and plays nonstop for 7 years gets tired. They all react differently to the fame, the pressure for repeat success and the underlying hard work takes its toll. As I said as much as McCulloch’s voice and lyrics, his world view, whether dark or romantic, was the sound of Echo, the anchor was Pete De Freitas’s drums and Les Pattinson’s bass. De Freitas had major mental and drug issues by the time they were pressurized to record a new album by Warner Borthers (WEA) in 1987. And not just produce any old album but to do their version of Gabriel’s ‘So’, Will Sergeant was apoplectic that Warner executive Rob Dickens played them Gabriel’s album, declaring “I want you to sound like this!”. So not much of a surprise then that the next album was crap.

They could not even be bothered to come up with an interesting title. I couldn’t be bothered to buy it, I got the cassette at some point of “Echo and the Bunnymen’ but it was released in 1987. They got two hit singles off it in the US, ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’ and ‘Lips Like Sugar’. They got some movie song exposure and then it became the last real Bunnymen album. McCulloch was sick of it and left the band. The other three tried to continue – which was ironic in that De Freitas was a paid employee rather than in the band for the last year due to his drug and health issues. They brought in another singer and made a terrible album.

And then De Freitas got killed in a motorbike accident so it really was over. Will and Ian made an album in 1995 as ‘Electrafixion’, which was pretty rubbish, they then worked with Les Pattinson again and made another 7 albums, not one of which I have bought or listened much to. They obviously worked out how to co-exist as creators together for the long haul, they both have done solo projects and Will Sergeant has done lots of atmospheric instrumental stuff. There have been several remixes and numerous Echo compilation albums and they still play live, usually for the summer festival and 80’s revival crowds.

For me though, they will always be the dark heroes under the camouflage net in Buxton Pavilion Gardens in January 1981. You can hear how great they sounded that night yourself as 4 songs were released as the live EP ‘Shine So Hard’. I owned this as a Cassette single in a cigarette box style packaging and had no idea where it had been recorded. Later it got re-mastered in 2003 and the credits listed the location and I realized I had actually been there.

Here then is my selection of the best of Echo: Listen here.

Pictures on My Wall [Original Single Version] 1979. The original Echo as in the drum machine, catchy little pop number!

Rescue – 1980. The spiky guitar sound appears first

All That Jazz – 1980. That drum sound first appears (Shine So Hard live version from Buxton)

The Puppet – 1980. …and it all comes together on this single

Show of Strength – 1981. Heaven Up Here opener.

A Promise – 1981.

Over The Wall – 1980 (Shine So Hard live version from Buxton)

All My Colours – 1982 (the best version is Live at Womad with Burundi Drummers but too random for Spotify so this is also from Buxton)

Broke My Neck -1981 B-side to A Promise single

Fuel – 1982 – B-side to The Back of Love

The Cutter – 1983 Opener to Porcupine

The Back of Love -1983

Clay – 1983

Heads Will Roll – 1983 yes, they added strings to their bow

The Killing Moon – 1984 ( John Peel session version without strings)

Angels and Devils – 1984 (B-side to Silver)

Nocturnal Me – 1984 ( John Peel session version without strings)

My Kingdom – 1984

Seven Seas – 1984 “Good news they’re bringing”

God will be Gods – 1983 -Alternative version

Like Regular Chickens

In a period of 4 years from 2012 to 2016 I shared 138 photos of home made meals, 156 restaurant dishes, 38 bottles of wine, 389 pictures of variously blurred musicians in flagrante, as in caught in the act of making music and other records of my newly divorced life in San Francisco. Pictures of my increasingly more and more adult children and the new love of my life annotate that period. As all hip and connected San Franciscans I shared, liked and upvoted my way across Darth Zuckerburg’s Empire. And then I realized what Facebook (and YouTube) were quietly doing to democracy with Brexit and the equally vexatious election of the Mango Mussolini, and they continue to this day to support and succor Russian bot armies.

I have shared innumerable pictures at an exhibition, family snaps, shots of gardens and sunsets. More recently pictures of immense Charolais bulls in their bucolic majesty. My parents shared pictures with their friends but they fell in love with slides, family holiday pictures changed from. being Kodachrome rectangles and became tiny white bordered dark squares only revealing their contents when held up to the light. Slides, stored in plastic cases until put into the projector carousel and proudly presented in a darkened room. Slides, where you took a small 3×3 picture and blew it up to cover the living room wall or another bit of 70’s essential man-cave material, the standing screen. My father, the engineer and former instrument maker built his own projector and my mother the former seamstress made the screen from white vinyl material. They were not the most slick polished equivalent articles but they were functional in a good old ‘Heath Robinson’ way and the magic of the slide show allowed our family to group, to gather, share, like and upvote on our most recent holiday.

Slides were superseded by dirt cheap duplicate sets of 4″x6″ prints and Super 8 was soon replaced by video, its main advantage being you didn’t need the lumbering and precarious screen, you just plugged the camera into the ubiquitous TV. I never got the bug to be constantly filming your young child’s every action so happily avoided serially following another temporary technology. Then the I-phone arrived and the world changed.

We share. It’s a human activity. Before any technology we shared stories, gossiped about our friends, family and foes. The various forms of the captured image, from daguerreotype to the black and white photos that annotated much of the twentieth century, derive our sense of much of the major events. History is evidenced and embroidered by these images. Staged family portraits of families in their Sunday best were one of the proofs of rising wealth, proof positive that perhaps we were succeeding as much as we were working 60 hours a week underground digging coal to do so.

Putting a camera in everyone’s hands we can lay firmly at the feet of Steve Job and within 10 years he had ruined the experience of going to any art museum or major tourist attraction. I suppose I cannot hold him directly responsible for the selfie-stick, nor for those sweet examples of humankind who insist on using their pad devices the sizes of small trays as cameras in the Uffizi. This was followed shortly after by the diminution of music concerts to being a room full of people holding up their phones to record the act on stage, while blocking the person behind them’s view of the stage. I sure we all enjoy the frisson of schadenfreude whenever we hear of yet another unfortunate falling to their death in some scenic spot while straining too far for that ultimate selfie. Social media is obviously the cement that has embedded the action of recording every event of our lives by a photo. On an individual basis they capture the moment in a way that we hopes fixes the emotion, bottles the essence of the dish, meal, restaurant, holiday, honeymoon or other point of punctuation to quotidian life, even though we know that one sense truly cannot capture the others.

If I look through Apple’s Photos app retrospectively, using what they ironically call Recents, which in my case starts in 2009, by using the scrolling bar it’s a fast forward replay of my life over the last 12 years. I have been grabbing at the moments flying by, capturing what impresses me or inspires me, fixing reminders of wines or beers or dishes I want to revisit. I have my screensaver set to that folder and I often walk back into my office to see the random kaleidoscope of those images and the memory comes back. A sweaty dark club illuminated by stage lights and blurs with guitars, works of art squatting in the bright light of a gallery, faces beaming full of love, cartoon like still life of golden stone against green fields under blue skies. As much as I shun social media I understand the place that Instagram occupies in the hearts of people and as much as I abhor Meta people gonna share.