A New Low

Yesterday I did about 1100 steps, that's 2K under the national average and the lowest I've done since starting my rolling three month Million Step Challenge. For the first time since I can remember I never left the house, and virtually never left  my bed apart from to have a hot bath the ease my aches. For the last three days I've been suffering from cold and 'flu' like symptoms. It's not real 'flu' because I can actually move.

It's three AM and as yesterday was spent sleeping and resting I thought I could just write a blog post to say what has been happening to me.

I was looking through my digital music collection and noticed I hadn't ripped any of my Cracker albums so I will extract them from the box tomorrow and ad them to my digital collection, so I have shared the brilliant "Teen Angst" with you for this post.

I am finding Simon Singh's "The Code Book" extremely interesting about the history of code making, code breaking and the ingenious ways of passing secret messages from the time we actually started to write.

It is amazing how much time we spend online these days, when I switched the computer on it was 2.22 it is now 3.02, and I will soon be going back to bed, though I really do hope that getting up and writing this doesn't knock me back, but it's Saturday morning so I can have a day of relaxation, though hopefully won't hit another all time low on the step front.

Some Lines

Suffering from a cold, runny nose , headache and the like, what certain softies call 'flu' or man 'flu' . It's a cold, a head cold, it's unpleasant and I want it to go away.

Sitting downstairs this popped into my head for some reason. It has before, but I thought I would formalise it as one of my Non-Poems, just thinking of what we have that we will probably never use, but we still collect:

We have films

We will never watch

We have books

We will never read

We have records

We will never listen to

We have devices

We will never use

........

Or Will We?

What we have

Gives us choice

We Justify it

As Planning

For The Future

..........

I Will

Watch That Film

Read That Book

Listen To That Record

Use That Device

I Will

I Will

I am going through tissues and headachey so will leave you with "Legend of A Mind" by The Moody Blues from "In Search of The Lost Chord" which references Timothy Leary the LSD guru.

Morning Darker

Looking out my window the sky is full of grey clouds scudding across the skyline. Yesterday I was feeling very down, I'm not sure why, but I'd run out of some of my tablets unexpectedly and they were are related to blood pressure so maybe that was something to do with it. Also valious friends are suffering from physical and mental pain and barring supportive texting there is absolutely nothing I can do for them.

Added to this I had various meetings and things that needed to be sorted at work and an, at times, painful hacking chesty cough.

When I got home I got by drugs stash replenished and loaded up with chocolate to ease my throat and started watching "Spectre", which is rather enjoyable but the title song is half decent but ruined by the strangled cat vocals of Sam Smith. Still that was just a couple of minutes at the beginning.

I also finished "The Fourteenth Letter", the debut novel by Claire Evans, I didn't think it was my cup of tea, it wasn;t it was the whole teapot, highly recommended despite recommendations on the back cover from Heat and Good Housekeeping which would have put me off. I suggest to you get yourself a copy.

That's been replaced by "The Code Book" by the excellent Simon Singh, the choice may have been influenced by me watch the brilliant "Imitation Game" the incredible story that showed how the British Government drove the genius Alan Turing to suicide and it's the sort of thing that would happen under today's US and UK governments.

Looking out of the window and there is now blue sky appearing and the clouds blow away.

Spo what to play, maybe Jonathan Richman's "I'm A Little Dinosaur" which is a cuteness injection for a fairly downer post, but I know today wiill be an improvement on yesterday for me, I hope it is for all my friends.

Have a great Wednesday.

Morning Dark

When I left my bed this morning it was dark. I had to put lights on. It was 6AM. Autumn and grey skies are here.

In the shower I seldom want to come out, hot water on your body feels so nice, knowing that when it stops you will be cold and wet and have to dry yourself off.

The other thing is you know it's Monday and have to go to work. Will I walk or will I take the bus? I will start walking but my give up and get the bus eventually.

Yesterday I did 18K steps so that was a bit more than I expected to do, but it was fairly.

I must say I am very impressed by Claire Evans novel, "The Fourteenth Letter"  and although the clues are strewn throughout I didn't see the endgame coming and I still have 25 pages to go, so I'm well impressed with that and I only bought it to get myself free delivery on something.

Also in the last couple of weeks I heard a great song on 6Music called "Chevrolet Van" by The Nude Party. The record is great, but you get some interesting results on Amazon,Google and Youtube when you search for Nude Party.

Anyway have a great Monday everybody.

Observations on The Great North Run Finishing Line

Today we went to give a little moral support to our friend Helen who was partaking of her fifth Great North Run (same as Sir Mo Farah) with her friend Suzanne. The weather held and we were thinking of seeing her off at the beginning, but she was one of around 43,000 participants.

I was surprised to see that the wheelchair winner covered the course in 40 minutes (that's an average of 20 mph) and Sir Mo Farah did it in under an hour therefore averaging 13 mph for the duration of the race.

The organisation was excellent with public transport providing egress and ingress for God knows how many people to the finishing line near Bents Park in South Shields. Given that there were 43,000 participants then each one of those must have averaged say 5 well wishers and support staff so you are probably looking at 200K-250K people in the area.

There were many charities represented, and Helen was running to raise money for St Oswald's Hospices and you can text STOS18£5 to donate £5 to them,

The Red Arrows did a start of race fly past over Newcastle as the runners went over the Tyne Bridge and did a full display after most of the runners had finished. You can see my short far away footage here.

On leaving the number of buses for travellers was phenomenal, and the queues for the Metro and Ferry were extremely long. Luckily Suzanne's sister came and picked us up although we walked a fair way to meet her, but she probably saved us about six hours of queueing, an absolute angel.

Although the organisation was excellent I was surprised that there was absolutely no Mobil Phone Company presence. Duracell were sponsoring and had charging points, and I'm with EE who generally have the best Network coverage, but the sheer number of people meant that they shut down data services and calls were limited to Emergency. I don't know if other providers were the same but I would have thought for such an important event there would have been a presence with signal boosting towers, but there was nothing.

This meant that I couldn't post any video at the time and it may have stopped people from texting donations as well, because that sort of thing is a spur of the moment thing and  once you leave then it's forgotten about. So EE and probably all other mobile phone companies copybooks are blotted, but the day was a huge success and charities did benefit from huge contributions.

Blakk and Whyte

Today I shared a couple of posts with The Half Man Half Biscuit(HMHB) Appreciation Society on Facebook, because I'd been listening to Half Man Half Biscuit this week, and the likes and visits on those two posts are like ten times my normal number of visits. I think there are maybe twenty of my Facebook friends who visit my blog regularly and the rest are just robots but the visits today have really gone through the roof for me.

Maybe I don't put myself about enough, although I always hope that my titles and preamble will tempt in visitors, although that's obviously not working.

I love it when people read my stuff and make (ideally positive) comments about my stuff. Yesterday I wasn't going to write about Burt Reynolds and today I didn't expect to be writing about this but I am.

I expect this post to get maybe twenty or thirty hits but that's what I'm used to. It would be nice to have a million followers but I just have three, not very many for a twelve year old blog is it.

Today I saw an amazing young band called Trilogy busking in Northumberland street. I took a minute of Instagram video here so you can see how good and young they are, even younger than The Strypes and General Fiasco when I first saw them. They literally blew all the other buskers off the street very impressive.

So I will leave you with The Strypes covering The Beatles' "Taxman", the opener from "Revolver", in their youth , sleep well my friends.

Eno Collaboration

I was going to write this yesterday but with Burt Reynolds (see last post) leaving us I thought that more appropriate. Anyway I have been listening to a lot of Half Man Half Biscuit this week and started with "And Some Fell On Stony Ground" through "Achtung Bono" to "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Road".

The first album is is an excellent ragbag collection of non album songs including a banjo driven version of "Trumpton Riots" retitled (appropriately) "On Finding The Studio Banjo".

However it also contains the single version of "Eno Collaboration" and the last album contains, well,  the album version. Nigel Blackwell's dexterity with lyrical apposition is so brilliant on this singalong classic that I had to share it with you as one of the #SongsYouveNeverHeard and if you take the time to listen to it you will love it. Lines like:

"I know Bono and he knows Ono and she knows Eno’s phone goes thus:

Brian’s not at home, he’s at the North Pole

but if you’d like to leave a weird noise”

You can read the full lyrics here.

Enjoy your Saturday everybody