I’ve just opened WordPress and it looks like some alien landscape that I’ve never seen before, such is the length of time since my last blog. If you’re reading this, I’ve been successful in navigating the various options and may even have stuck a photo in there (or here, if you’re reading).
I was as shocked as my regular reader to find out how long it is since I wrote a blog, but there have been mitigating circumstances. For one, I’ve started writing on a regular basis for the rather excellent Eighth Day Magazine. Album reviews, features and interviews have all been submitted and published over the last 4 months or so. I’m thoroughly enjoying it and, I think, gradually finding my way, my method when it comes to writing about music and talking to musicians. I just wish I could type a bit faster. I’ll continue writing for them for as long as they want me, knowing I can always fall back on this blog until Rolling Stone Magazine comes knocking on my door. To be fair, it’s not likely and I’d probably turn them down anyway.
I like the Eighth Day Magazine for its mix of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, but most of all because they’re happy for me to write about whatever I want. Which is liberating, in the same way that Cambridge 105 Radio was when I presented the Smelly Flowerpot show. Also, it gives me an opportunity to sing the praises of the local music scene, something that I personally find quite vibrant and exciting.
I can’t say my blogging was regular anyway. There’d be little bursts of activity, then periods of radio silence, largely down to the fact I have a busy personal life with a demanding day job and even more demanding children. But every blog I wrote was full of music that made me sit up and take notice, and I just had to find a way to tell people about it. As with the radio, writing becomes a bit of an obsession; once you start, you just can’t stop. Hence the other reason I haven’t been blogging of late, which is all down to the weekly phone calls I have with my 84-year-old Dad, who lives in Hull, the best part of 200 miles away from where I am on the Cambridge/Essex/Suffolk border.
It’s not that the phone calls take that long- they usually last an hour or so- but more that I scribble down notes from our conversations and then later write them up. I first started doing this a couple of years or so ago, just before the pandemic. I’d been travelling up to Hull to see him on and off for twenty odd years, ever since he’d got in touch with me some thirty five years after I’d last seen him. The details around that gap aren’t really important, other than to say he and my Mam divorced when my younger brother and I were toddlers. In the intervening years, Mam remarried and had two daughters, while me and wee bro were brought up by her and a Step Dad who treated us as his own. Anyway, it turns out Dad was (still is) a talented painter, sculptor, wood carver and model maker, so on my visits I would take photos of some of his works and post them on social media. There was quite a response, people fascinated by this gentleman who loved the outdoors, his arts and crafts and growing bonsais and had filled his day with these activities ever since his second wife had died at the beginning of the noughties. I started posting a few comments relating to the photos to flesh out what he’d been doing. Eventually, when the pandemic arrived, I ended up posting weekly about our phone conversations and what we chatted about. What started as a call to check if he was ok, if he wanted any shopping getting in, became a real journey of discovery for both of us. I’ve learnt more about him in the last couple of years over the phone than I possibly could have with twenty years of visits and popping out for a bit of lunch with the kids. I know all about his past, his adventures and narrow escapes, I know what books he likes and what TV he watches. Each conversation became an education as he told me in great depth about artists he admired, about rare exotic woods he’d worked with, about the people he’d known and admired, the characters he’d encountered along life’s journey. I like to think he found out a little about me, though my life is nowhere as interesting as his.
Anyway, over the last couple of years, I’ve gathered many notes and stories about him and been heartily encouraged by a significant number of people to gather those stories together, for posterity’s sake and for my kids to remember their Grandad by. So, that’s what I’m doing and that’s the other reason behind my lack of attention to the blog. So, sorry. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time.
Here’s a slice of one of our conversations, which I hope you’ll find of interest. I have plenty more, maybe 30,000 words or so, and lots of pictures, so if any of you know a publisher that might be interested, send them my way…
28/04/21. “Bit of an epic Dad chat the other night. It all started with a short pause while he took a swig from his glass of San Miguel. He’s an occasional drinker and really fancied a bottle after walking to Asda to deposit some unwanted items in the clothing bank, so he picked up a four pack on his way home. He informed me the beer originated in the Philippines, which led to conversations about other places he regarded as quite exotic. He talked about eating a fish khobz (like a baguette with a whole fish in it, complete with stary-eyed head) in Tobruk. The nearest I could come to that was eating freshly caught prawn sandwiches (to clarify, only the prawns, not the bread, were freshly caught) on a commercial fishing boat sailing out of Pittenweem on the Firth of Forth estuary. They were definitely moreish, though the propeller falling of the shaft and rendering the boat un-sailable in a stiffening wind was rather less tasty. The talk of fish also led to me reciting the tail of the most expensive but effective diet I’d ever been on. I call it the Egyptian Diet and it’s simple to follow. You buy an all-inclusive holiday in Sharm el Sheikh- I believe other resorts are available- and eat some dodgy looking red snapper on the first night. The result is food poisoning and the loss of a stone in weight due to not eating or drinking any of the already paid for food and drink for the rest of the holiday. It really works, but like most diets, it’s not really recommended and has too many side effects. Such as severe depletion of funds, partly due to the cost of the holiday but also down to the extortionate amount of money I was asked to pay for some medication to ‘get rid of the parasite’. We really are lucky to have the NHS and we should treasure and protect it as much as we can.
Another exchange resulted in tales of woe when travelling on two wheels. Dad’s story related to a trip he and his second wife, Dot, took on his Harley Davidson Goldwing (yep, I was surprised to know he had one too) along with friends Terry and Margaret down to the south of France. Apparently, on the way back, T & M were involved in an accident in which the gear lever went through his foot. Despite the obvious issues with riding a motor bike with a hole in his foot, the resourceful Terry struggled on home by tying a sock around his ankle and attaching it to the gear lever to enable him to change gears. My tale was rather less glamorous, involving a bunch of teenagers cycling from Dunswell, where we lived, to Hornsea on the East coast, a round trip of 30 miles or so. On the return journey, my brother somehow managed to snap the pedal crank on his bike, rendering it pretty much unrideable. We soon sorted it, borrowing a bit of rope from a garage near the Mere and taking it in turns to tow him home on our bikes. Boy, were we all knackered when we arrived home. Except for my brother.
We waffled a bit about books, how he likes a variety of reading material and how, in general he never seeks to do the same thing twice, always wanting to experience something new. So, I asked him why he wanted to paint the cupola in Pearson Park again. Ah, was his reply, that’s not repeating as he’d be looking at doing the painting at a different time of year, when the lighting would be different, as would all the colours. Fair enough. He then told me about how Monet painted the front of Rouen Cathedral many times at different periods of the day and year to capture the building in all the shades and colours presented by the changing light. When you get him on the subject of art (and wildlife, the countryside, walking etc), his enthusiasm for the subject shines through. I learnt about how the pre-Raphaelite painters and Impressionists were at odds with each other, one being a reaction to the other. I likened it to the difference between prog rock and punk and he quite liked that analogy. It tickled him when I said that Johnny Rotten was the Monet of the punk world.
He reminisced about one of his art teachers, who would often take them for a pint before doing any work, believing it made them bolder when it came to painting. He also remembered when one of his secondary school teachers asked him what he wanted to be when he left school. Knowing all his mates would come up with stock answers like ‘join the army’ or ‘work for the council’, he told his teacher he wanted to be a commercial artist, mainly because he wouldn’t have a clue what one was.
I’m sure we could have chatted well into the early hours, but I had children to get to bed and he had another San Miguel to pour.”
The Smelly Flowerpot 