An A-blog-pology!

Yeah, so it didn’t quite work out like I had planned . . .

As I mentioned a while back, my intention was to blog about the various steps and recording sessions involved in making my album . . . photos, video clips etc.
Unfortunately, after the last blog below, I did three or four sessions which were really productive and interesting but, during which, I completely forgot to take photos or make videos; this was compounded by the fatal mistake of thinking, ‘ok, I’ll get round to blogging about all this later . . .’

I read somewhere that there is a Korean proverb about procrastination which goes something like, ‘saying you will do it tomorrow means you will do it in ten years’. I’ve just been looking for it on Google but I can only find:

오늘 걷지 않으면, 내일 뛰어야 한다
This translates as, if you don’t walk today, you must run tomorrow.

And this one:
오늘 한 시간이 내일 두 시간 보다 가치있다
One hour today is worth more than two hours tomorrow.

Or, as it says on the paperweight which Renate (in Piano Session below) gave me, ‘Übermorgen ist auch ein Tag’ – the day after tomorrow is also a day.

There is also a really great TED presentation about the subject by Tim Urban.

Anyway, you get the point . . .

Then there were also lots of almost never-ending sessions which involved me, sitting all alone in front of the computer, just working on a few bars here, a couple of notes there, a guitar part somewhere else. Highly absorbing and satisfying for me, but really difficult to photograph or describe in a way that would not bore you, dear reader, to distraction. This is the nitty-gritty work you have to do to make sure the recording is as ‘correct’ as possible (and I am always surprised by how much I enjoy doing it) – correcting little bits of timing you missed in the recording session, cleaning vocal tracks of nervous throat clearing or coughs and sneezes, taking out extraneous noises which the sensitive microphones pick up if you are recording in a living room – DHL ringing the doorbell insistently to deliver a package for a neighbour, a dog barking outside at the bloody DHL guy, irritated DHL guy slamming the door of his truck, etc etc.

However, there were great sessions with Gabe and Hector where they played some amazing fiddle and mandolin on Set Me Free. Then Paul came along and did the critical harmonica for the same track.

I did backing vocal sessions with the highly talented Tanja-Maria for Wendy and Love and Understanding.

There were sessions with Katie who played some beautiful viola on Before It’s Too Late and somewhat more aggressive strings on Wendy.

I went to the Express Brass Band’s practice room to record some amazing brass with Teresa, Michael and Simon under the conductorship of my old mate Neil; extra trombone was recorded at Neil and Angelika’s, played with the perfect emotional tone by Teresa.

Then it was again down to me . . .

I did lead and backing vocals, completely redid the bass on Wendy, re-recorded from scratch part of Diamonds for a Dime (ARGHHHH), put on guitar fills for Crab . . .

Then I set myself a two-week deadline to have the final mixes ready to send off to Ruairi in LA for mastering. The deadline was a deliberate tactic on my part to force myself to do all the last little bits I had been leaving till ‘tomorrow’ (see above). That turned into a week of pre-procrastination, where I hadn’t even started procrastinating, four days of medium, rising gradually to pathological procrastination, followed by three days of panic-fuelled intensive work during which I repaired and altered much more than I’d expected (and I think for the better) and in a strange way discovered all these songs anew.

And so, I sent them off to LA – and found that I was utterly unable to even contemplate listening to them again. I had a physical aversion, a stomach-churning dread of having to listen to the final mixes again. This, I am told, happens a lot and it is a very valuable process because it means when you finally get back the mastered tracks, they come as a complete surprise (in my case, thanks to the amazing work Ruairi did on the mixes, a very positive surprise).

So, I have the music! Now there is the cover to do and the ‘paperwork’ stuff with Gema etc and then we will be off to the press!

So, how do you make a multitrack recording..?

It's been a while but I have finally managed to make the video I promised about multitracking. Please feel free to comment . . .

Too late . . .

With a truly heavy heart I have to sit down and write my tribute to Bernie Bigler . . . it’s been hard to take it in that he is gone.

I’ve know him for over 10 years. We spent many hours together playing, travelling and talking and what I loved most about him was his love of music and harmony; how music fits together and how it works.

Bernie had a great sense of humour, he was outgoing, always interested in others, he was considerate and caring and, something which is very rare, he was able to listen. I guess that’s connected with his musicality.

He was such an easy person to be with. Just last year we had a fondue together at ours. My kids were telling him he’s like a member of the family, calling him ‘Uncle Bernie’. I think he was pleased about that.    

We had planned to do some recording for my album in the New Year. There’s a song of mine I really wanted Bernie to play the flute on. I knew he would have just the right sensibility for it. We said, ‘ok, we’ll do it after Christmas . . .’

I find it somewhat shocking that the song is called, ‘Before It’s Too Late’. Now, sadly, Bernie’s flute will never grace it.

Squeezebox ahoy!

The Shabby Road branch of NewTones Studios was on the road again this week.

Hector Gubbins has been a friend for well over 20 years. He is an immense talent - artistically and musically. He is a great guitarist and mandolin player but he is also one of those people who can pick up almost any instrument and get a sound out of it.

I really wanted to get some of his squeezebox talents onto one of the songs on the album, 'Love and Understanding'. So I popped over for a very enjoyable afternoon last week and we nailed it.

This is an out-take where, suddenly, the spirit of English folk music takes over the song . . .

Hector at work

More from NewTones Studios in the coming week!

Piano session . . .

NewTones Studios was on the road this week. This was session to record piano tracks for the song 'Before It's Too Late', which will feature on the - as yet unnamed - album.

As you can see, it was a hard, hard session. Proof that musicians don't just sit around drinking coffee and cognac and eating doughnuts all day...oh wait . . .

My thanks go to Renate Dienersberger for really hitting the perfect note (and notes) for the piano parts on the song.

It's fascinating to hear the music develop bit by bit.

For the next blog I will do a video on how you build up the tracks to make a complete 'sound'...

For example . . .

There should have been a recording session today with my long-time musical collaborator, and highly talented pianist, Renate Dienersberger, but I had to postpone it due to unexpected work commitments.

We would have recorded piano tracks for the song 'Before It's Too Late', which will be on the album.

To give you an idea of what it sounds like when we play together, here's a video of 'Brooklyn' - a song by Steely Dan.

There are two acoustic guitars, one on the left and one on the right which provide the rhythm and a basic bass line. The piano is spread behind the lead vocal and I did some multi-layered background vocals which permeate most of the recording.

I spent quite a long time (hours and hours - in the studio 'long time' really means 'l o n g   t i m e'!!) mixing this and when I was done I saved it to my DropBox folder - however I forgot that these files are really big and switched off the laptop before the upload was done...and when I opened it the next day it was GONE!!! Horror of horrors!! 😱

Fortunately - and this is the point I wanted to make: ALWAYS make backups!!! - I had saved the mix as a WAV and that is what you listened to up there (actually it's an mp3 made from the wav).

Phew!! 😥

So, how do you make an album . . ?

Yeah, good question.

First you have to write songs. I wrote my first song when I was about 15. And it was a big surprise. Up until then I had firmly believed that it was IMPOSSIBLE to write a song - I know there was a lot of evidence around me which should have proved to me that people could indeed write songs, but I considered it simply IMPOSSIBLE!

So, suddenly, somehow, I had written a song. And this simple fact that it was actually possible to write songs, disproving as it did that my previously held belief that songwriting was IMPOSSIBLE, was a great help to me for future songwriting.

For this album, I plan to go through old material and choose around 10 songs which have been knocking on the door for years to be finished. Some of them are featured on my solo album in a basic version, some you can hear on my YouTube page and some will be new to you.

I would like to go through the process of creating the recording here with sound tracks, photos and videos - still have to work out how to do all that 😉 - and I thought maybe the best way is to take one song as an example. The one I am working on right now is 'Low Ground' which I wrote so, SO long ago, and it also turned out to be my first ever experience in a recording studio (in Liverpool) back in the 70s (the NINETEEN 70s). It was truly a mind-blowing, life-changing feeling to emerge from a studio with a proper recorded song...wow!!

Ok, so 'Low Ground' - what's next? Record it!

I use Audacity, in the NewTones Studio, which is an open-source recording software. It's free and it's really good! The main thing you need to do is spend hours and hours using it to get to know what you can do. I'd say I have a fair idea now how to use it.

Normally the first thing you want is a click track. For Low Ground I actually had an idea for a basic drum track.

And here is is, the very basic drum track (15 seconds of it). I'll be working on that for a while. In the meantime, I will also have to work out what comes when, intro, verse, chorus, solo, outro, etc . . . that's it for now!

New Album News

After years of wondering which studio to record my songs in and who to do them with and wondering how to pay for it all and waiting for the perfect moment and procrastinating and going round in further circles, I have finally reached the point where I have decided to do it myself, NOW!

The plan is to make one new album with my own songs and possibly a second album with cover versions of some of the songs I love.

NewTones Studio

The songs will be recorded mainly at NewTones Studio. As there is no way I can make perfectly polished professional studio recordings, there will be some rough edges but I hope to end up with music which has an intimate and human feel to it.

I also hope to feature on the various tracks some of the brilliant musicians I have worked with over the years and, of course, the fabulous NewTones.

The other aspect of this project, which for me is completely new, will be to share the process here and on my FaceBook page: https://www.facebook.com/PhilNewtonia/. I will be posting news, photos of sessions and video clips as the project goes on...

I hope we all enjoy the experience!

A Winter Solstice Thought...

I was just thinking about the memorable JFK quote "My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" and I thought, "hmm, y'know, that could be extended...".

So, instead of texts from holy books and scriptures, popes' proclamations, ayatollah's admonitions, chief rabbis' recommendations and  so on, what about if we all simply said to each other, "My fellow Earthlings, ask not what other Earthlings can do for you, ask what you can do for your fellow Earthlings"...?

Something, perhaps, to ponder over our puddings.

How About Thinking for Ourselves?

This latest atrocity, the beheading of Alan Henning by the Islamic State, is another example of concentrated barbarism carried out under a religious banner.

The fact that world leaders have condemned it is good. The fact that religious leaders have condemned it is also good. However, the way some of these religious leaders have condemned the killing is, in my opinion, not so good.

To say this act is “contrary to the teachings of the Qur'an/Bible/Torah/Vedas/etc and that it is a crime against religion x, y or z is not so good.

If you need to go scrabbling through an ancient text to find out whether beheading someone is a moral or immoral act, then there is something seriously, seriously wrong with you.

I am sure the IS would argue that they are only following the words of their religious book whereas other religious leaders are interpreting these words differently or incorrectly.

And this is the problem when you tie your moral values to some “infallible” sacred text of yours. You are going to be confronted by stuff you don't like and so you have to start interpreting the text, but then there are other people who see that text in another way - and then there are people who hold a completely different text to be holy and infallible and who think yours is just a load of tosh.

We humans know intrinsically that killing others is wrong, that killing others in a barbaric way is..well, barbaric. We don't need a fucking book to tell us this.

As a first step, how would it be if we consigned all these conflicting, holy, sacred, infallible religious texts to the literature bookshelf and started accepting that we need to derive our moral code from our own basic common human values...?

And in Other News...

...I have a brain! And here it is (well, slices of it)

That is just SO WEIRD!!!!!

Evil in the Cutlery Drawer

Singers are hypochondriacs (ah, here I must insert my standard "joke", sorry: I don't know what hypochondria is, but I'm sure I've got it...). They are hypochondriacs about their voices - which is fair enough, seeing as their voices constitute their livelihood. But there is something deeper too; a singer's voice is an extension of his or her being, it's like an extra limb or an extra faculty which defines their essential identity. If you are a singer, losing your voice is equivalent to a footballer losing a leg, or an artist going blind.

If you don't believe me, ask a singer!

In fact, you can ask me...

YOU: Neutron, is it true what is written above?

NEUTRON: Yes!

So, having established, by elementary Socratic logic, that, if all singers are hypochondriacs about their voices and I am a singer, then I am a hypochondriac about my voice, I can then add that, being a guitar and bass player, I am also, and for the same basic reason, paranoid about fingers; cutting fingers, bruising fingers, breaking fingers, losing fingers...

There is a knife, in the kitchen. A bread knife, a very efficient bread knife. This knife knows it is too good to be a mere bread knife. This knife has ambitions. It longs to cut more than just bread. It thirsts. It thirsts for blood. This knife oozes malevolence.

The first time I saw this knife, I knew we were destined to be enemies. And so it has proved.

We had some early encounters, some sparring matches where this knife revealed its intentions to me. It would slip, accidentally, from a thick crust and swish towards my hand, it would slice through a pretzel more easily than I expected, bearing down on my palm.

"Why did you keep on using it???" you ask in perplexity...

Well, quite simply it was the best bread knife and there is that thrill of slicing effortlessly through a loaf of heavy, dark Bavarian bread which would normally need half an hour of sawing with a boring standard bread knife. To quote Herodotus, the father of history, "great deeds are usually wrought at great risks", or, more briefly, "no risk, no fun".

The inevitable happened, about a year ago. I had become less vigilant, familiarity had bred contempt for the bread knife - I was slicing, someone spoke to me, I was distracted, I looked away and it struck! Slicing into my index finger...brown bread and red blood!!

This taught me to be on my guard whenever I was slicing, but meanwhile this knife has become devious. It has gone underground and may have received schooling from Al Qaeda knife terrorist cells.

It's yesterday evening and I am clearing out the dishwasher. Plates here, glasses there, cutlery in the cutlery drawer. I start to put in the knives and forks and notice that the middle section of the wooden cutlery tray has come out. It fits into slots in the other sections. So I press it back into its slots, only to notice that the front side has also slipped out of its slot. I press down on that side with my thumb, waiting for it to click into place when suddenly there is a cold searing pain in my thumb...

The bread knife. This bread knife of evil has managed to conceal itself between the front side of the cutlery tray and the side of the drawer, blade up!!! So, as my thumb presses down on the wooden front of the tray, the steely blade presses up thirstily into the flesh of my thumb and pierces it mercilessly, slicing joyously through the skin and sending a shockwave through my body.

This is one of those moments when time runs s l o w l y and you seem to think a thousand things in a millisecond, "whichthumbisit, isitmyfingeringhandormyplectrumhand, whenismynextgig, whichinstrumentdoIhavetoplay, isthecutinthemiddleorattheside, canIstillplaytheguitarwithaplaster..."

The bread knife is now confined to a separate cupboard, but I sense the final battle is yet to be blade out...

And on the Subject of Good Words/Phrases...

See temperature at top of screenshot

We have now had over a week of double-figure minus degree C temperatures here in Deepest Bavaria, all thanks to a Russian high (if that's a high, I'd hate to experience a low). The most minus last week was on Monday with a stinging minus 20°C, plus the gentle breeze chill factor = -27°C. I missed my tram that day and decided to walk the 4 km to the lesson I had. This was an error. It was like pushing your way through a rarified form of ice. The air felt frozen solid.

Now, I mentioned "bleak" last time but that wouldn't have fit in this case. However, there is a fine expression in German for this kind of cold, klirrende Kälte.

Translated into English you have something like "freezing cold" or "biting cold" but klirrende Kälte has much more going for it. First of all, there are the alliterative Ks which lend each word an onomatopoeic "crack" and then the double R in klirrende which, if you roll them slightly, elicit a similar effect to the universal human vocalisation for cold "brrrrr!!"

Klirrend normally means "clashing/clattering" so it also gives the cold an acoustic value - the coldness of crystal shattering on a cold stone floor - I suppose "clattering cold" or "jangling cold" would sort of approximate it, if we said that, but we don't. And anyway, klirrend even has something slippery and skiddy about it when you pronounce it; your tongue slithers from the front of your mouth to the back and then forward to your teeth again...

So, great descriptive expression, "klirrende Kälte".

As far as I am concerned though, to be rather more Saxon about this, this cold weather can fuck off!!

Bleak, bleak, bleakity bleak. If ever there was a morning which defined bleak then this was it out in the railway-bus exchange suburb Feldmoching...a thin layer of evil snow, leafless, lifeless puny newly planted trees, white tower blocks with feeble early-morning lights dimly glowing through some of the windows, cloudy anonymous sky, cold air...well, not just cold, more like fucking freezing air... -15°C and a little whiplash of wind to chill that minus 15 to minus goodness knows what...

Bleak is a good word though; only 5 letters but so evocative...it's a good-value word - there's a whole load packed into that one little syllable.

If you're British and a product of my generation, or one before or after, you probably made the acquaintance of bleak in the Xmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter" when "frosty wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone..." Aye, that's bleak alright...and made tangible at 7.00 in the morning by a little insignificant suburb in Deepest Bavaria.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

I wrote here about Christopher Hitchins having been diagnosed with oesophagal cancer, well, he has now sadly succumbed to this evil disease.

It's hard to believe that the great voice is now still, that the mind so erudite and acerbic, profound and witty is gone, the brain, so crammed full with learning, literature, history and experience is now just so much meat.

I think the only other occasion when I was so moved by the death of someone I had never met was when John Lennon was shot in 1980. And maybe it's for the same reason.

Reading Hitch or listening to him speak, you had the feeling that you knew him. He was honestly stating his truth with incredible eloquence and facility - maybe you agreed, maybe not, but you knew where he stood.

The above is a short compilation (credit: SETH - YOUTUBE - THETHINKINGATHEIST) of some great Hitch moments, but I would urge you to search the web for more.

Life is Life

We gathered on Friday at a beautiful funeral service on a beautiful day to pay our respects to Helmut and take our leave. There were over two hundred people there and I am sure many more would have liked to attend. Helmut's parents were there, his sister, his wife, his children, his best friends, his work colleagues. Some of us spoke, some played music; we all shed tears and then smiled, laughed and grieved.
It was a celebration of Helmut's life but also a celebration and an affirmation of life itself. A confirmation of how precious it is, how good it can be, of how tenuous our grasp on it is, how it can vanish from one heartbeat to the next; a kick up the backside to get those things done which we really want to do, to get those things said that we really want to say, a reminder to make sure that those we love know that we love them.

See you, Helmut...

I'm trying and failing to reconcile two concepts or entities: Helmut and death - the two just don't go together in my head. And yet, in harsh, uncaring reality, sadly, unbelievably, they must.
I first met Helmut in 1983. We were expecting our first child and being in deepest Bavaria, far from grandparents, had decided to look for a couple in a similar position to share a house with, and share the experiences of parenthood. We met a few couples but hit it off with Robin and Helmut. We found a house where we could share the ground floor, living room and kitchen and where we would each have a floor for ourselves with bedroom, bathroom and children's room.
Amazingly, given that we had only met via a newspaper advert, and seeing that I am a cantankerous bastard who doesn't really like people at the best of times, it worked really well, and we ended up living together for 7 years, by which time there were four and a half kids, Andy, Nicky, Michelle, Biddy, and Christopher on the way.
I went to football games with Helmut, he introduced me (as anti-sport-playing as you can be) to squash, a game I came to love, we shared jokes and stories, he was honest and straightforward, generous and helpful, simply a really nice guy who loved being alive and who knew how to enjoy life. In thousands of little and big ways Helmut touched and enriched the lives of people around him.
Well, now Helmut is gone, he is dead, in the blink of an eye the finality has enfolded him; Helmut and death are one. We are using the past tense for him, we are speaking about a funeral for Helmut - a what?? A funeral?? For Helmut???
And I don't know what to say, I don't know how to grasp it.
Everyone is helping, everyone is grieving, everyone is doing their best to help everyone else but now everyone also bears an empty, black, Helmut-shaped hole inside them.

The Sevvie; Oh howe are the myghtie ouerthrowen

The Sefton Arms Hotel was once a proud drinking establishment, built on the very entrance to Aintree Race Course and less than 50 yards from the train station which was named after it, "Aintree Sefton Arms". The hotel would reach its apotheosis each year during the Grand National racing meeting.

It was also our local pub, the place where my mum and dad spent almost as much time as they did at home. (There was also, just 20 yards along Warbreck Moor, the Queen's Arms but that was 20 yards too far and its only claim to fame was as the punch line of the joke which the regulars would tell, "what do we have in common with the Prince of Wales? We've all had a drink in the Queen's Arms!")

The Sefton was a big rangy pub with rooms upstairs for racing punters to stay and rooms downstairs, snugs and lounges and the bar, where various groups would gather to chat or play cards. As a kid I passed it thousands of times on my way to the bus stop; of course I never went in, there were no children's rooms in them days.When I finally was old enough to go in, more or less legally, I managed to go in about 5 times.

Then they knocked it down.

In a fiendishly mocking way it rose again from the ashes as a grim parody of its former self. The new version of the Sefton Arms was thrown together on the site of the old stables; the spot where the old pub had stood became a mere car park. Locals, still shocked by the destruction of their beloved old stately drinking hole, referred to the new incarnation, not unfairly, as "the Rabbit Hutch".

Still, it was a pub and sort of ok and, as soon as the locals drifted slowly back in again, it became a relatively cosy Rabbit Hutch.

For me it became important because I spent many an hour in there with my dad, drinking pints of Higsons - and on more than one profligate occasion, copious rounds of gins & tonics - and I can hardly imagine the place now without the sound of my dad's voice telling me his stories of the war or of his days in the Wine & Spirits trade (you could hear the capital letters when he said "Wine & Spirits"). We talked philosophy, family history and basically set the world to rights as the pint glasses emptied inch by inch, swallow by swallow.

It was also the place where my dad and I drank our last pint together and I still recall vividly how the conversation skirted with intense awkwardness, an awkwardness we had never had before, around the subject of what we both knew was his imminent death. How I wish I could rewind that conversation and broach the subject with him; there was so much left unsaid.

I had lots of great nights out in the Sevvie with my best mates Dave and Neil, other nights when I was trying out a diet and drinking bottles of Carlsberg Special Brew instead of Higgies because I thought I'd be drinking less as the bottles were small, and ended up totally pissed having drunk 3 times more than usual precisely because the bottles were small.

Uproarious nights, drunken nights, cosy afternoons, smoky Christmas lunchtimes, stories and laughs, sadness and jokes and a good few diced-carrot pukes in the bog - everything a local should provide.

I did a few stints there as a barman too, when I got to know the serious drinkers in the bar and their idiosyncratic habits: Bokker, the failed alcoholic boxer who, at closing time, would regularly buy a bottle of the cheapest sherry to have for breakfast, George the toothless mild drinker who would grip the bar fiercely with both hands and rock back and forth and who nearly had a fit one day when someone was standing at his place on the bar, Dominik, the social security bandit, who knew the system better than the civil servants, holding court with his band of dole-fiddling cronies, Harry the papers, Eric the train driver and Jimmy Fish the busman.

In the mid-nineties, by which time many of the old regulars had suffered their final closing time, the Sefton was "renovated", the old lounge bar was moved, the room where the beer tanks and coolers had been was converted to a Family Room. A beergarden was plonked on the edge of the car park. The pub got emptier, the intimacy leaked away, the tables got stickier and the beer flatter.

It became a dump.

I would go in for nostalgia's sake when I was in Liverpool visiting my mother while she slowly died. I even had a very pleasant night in there in 2007 with my older daughter Nick.

Then it closed.

Then it opened again, not as the Sefton Arms but as "The Red Rum Bar".

The concept was: renovate, renew, refill with new young moneyed punters - the reality is that it is even more of a dump; the punters are pale, battered-looking, bronchitic drunks. The atmosphere is that of a pub caught in a time loop where it is always 10 minutes after drinking up time.

It was there I watched the footy on Saturday, drinking, to my shame, pints of Fosters (they advertised Marstons Pedigree outside but when I ordered a pint I was told, "sorry luv, we donave da any more).

At one point in the second half one of the drunken wraiths creaked to his feet and shouted, "how are the mighty fallen!" I don't know, why or who or what his words were directed to but as my dad often used to say - only a few yards from that very spot - "there's many a true word spoken in a pub".

D-I-f-Y

It's probably quite fortunate that people pronounce DIY as "dee, eye, why" and don't say the actual words the acronym is made from -oh, hang on, it's not an acronym is it? Because you don't pronounce DIY as "diy", but it's not an abbreviation either...so what is it?

I could look it up for you but, well, DIY!

And indeed, that is my point - if people didn't go around saying "dee, eye, why", they would be saying "do it yourself" and even if this is said in a totally neutral tone, I just can't help hearing a sort of sigh or groan at the start, an emphatic expletive somewhere in the middle and an exclamation mark or two at the end, which turns it into something more like, "(Ah,) do it your (fucking) self(!!).

Anyway, it just happened that I was looking idly in the Internet for loft insulation; no real reason except the fact that this old house in Liverpool radiates as much heat out of the back windows and the roof as the profligate son...er...sun of a nouveau riche family of suns.

We have a B&Q and a Homebase just round the corner here, but I decided to check the Wickes website first and duly found rolls of loft insulation with different thicknesses and different other-qualities-which-everyone-knows-about-and-I've-never-heard-of, and then I saw the price next to the picture of a roll: £36.99

"That's not bad," I thought to myself, but then I saw the sort of small print next to the picture, "buy 1, get 3 free!"

This kindled the avarice in my tight-fisted auld bastard heart (can a heart be tight-fisted?) I mean, whatever it is, a "buy 1, get 3 free" offer should quicken your blood, shouldn't it? Well, my blood was quickened and so I jumped into the car and sped off to Wickes. Now, cases like this of rash enthusiasm are normally followed shortly after by a little cool skepticism, so, on the way, I started thinking about it.

"Buy 1, get 3 free" is a bit too good to be true, isn't it? Must be a catch...maybe the quality is rubbish...maybe 1 roll is actually 4 narrow rolls together and so you end up having to buy 4 for the price of 4...maybe the material has been discovered to be dangerous!! Asbestos poisoning...maybe, maybe...

I wandered into Wickes, feeling totally out of place as I always do in these places, surrounded by weird machines for hitting and cutting stuff and strange materials for sealing or covering other stuff and people who knew-what-it-was-all-for, and found the loft insulation material section. There, indeed, was roll upon roll of loft insulation and signs everywhere saying "buy 1, get 3 free" It's no use, I'll have to ask...

I loathe asking staff questions in these places - always assuming you can find a staff member; they all seem to recede from you at increasing speeds whenever you need one, like Hubble's galaxies, blue-shiftedly racing away from our own Milky Way.

However, I succeeded in cornering one member of Wickes staff, who had been determinedly on his way "somewhere" but hadn't seen me lurking, and I blurted at him, "this 'buy 1, get 3 free' offer, does it mean one of these rolls counts as 4 or what?" "No, mate, you get 4 o' dem big rolls..." "Ah, and which, erm, thickness would be..." Too late, I made the mistake of looking away from him and when I turned my gaze back he had already dematerialised and been beamed up to a different section of Wickes space.

Meanwhile, two other lads - customers - had arrived with a trolley and they were also checking the rolls, and looking at the offer.

"I'm a bit wary too," I said to them.

"Yeah, a'know, mate, bu'rar John said dese are berrer dan B&Q!"

"I'm just not sure what thickness..."

"Well, am gettin' dese tin ones, cos it's for a rented 'ouse, bu' ye myraswell get the tick ones if it's for your 'ouse."

Right, bloody well will! Erm...how do I get them to the cash desk? Ah, trolley. Where are the trolleys? Outside. Went outside, got a trolley and trundled back in. Loaded four rolls onto the trolley and trundled to the cash desk. How am I going to get them home!!??

"I'm not sure if I'll get all these in the car."

"S'oright, mate, jus' bring 'em back in, if dee don' firrin de car."

Trundled to the car (rented car). Hmm.. jammed 2 in the back seat. And now?

Brainwave! Fold down back seats!

Brilliant! Jammed them all in. Drove home.

Dragged them into the hall. Mission accomplished!

All I have to do now...

DIfuckingY

Sapphic Apple

Οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ' ὔσδῳ

ἄκρον ἐπ' ἀκροτάτῳ· λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ', ἀλλ' οὐκ ἐδύναντ' ἐπίκεσθαι.

That's a fragment of old Sappho for you...

What?? You want a translation..???

Ok, first here's GoogleTranslate's version:

Quasi the glykύmalon ereύthetai akrῳ on ysdῳ
welding on akrotάtῳ; lelάthonto he malodropies,
My Man eklelάthont 'But owc edύnant' epίkesthai.

No?

Ok...bit more literal:
As the sweet apple blushes on the end of the bough,
the very end of the bough which gatherers missed,
nay, missed not, but could not reach.

Or, with rather more poetry:
At the end of the bough--its uttermost end, Missed by the harvesters, ripens the apple, Nay, not overlooked, but far out of reach,
So with all best things.

(Photo courtesy of neighbour's apple tree)