September to December 2007

September 2007

Cheshire Constabulary had an open day on the 9th and I thought I would go along. Took mum and dad and nephew George to see the various stuff on display. For me this was the impressive line up of classic and modern police cars, for George it was the bouncy castles! Amongst the police cars I found one to which I have applied Holy Icon Status - the 1970's Rover P6 3500, and also the car that I would buy every surviving example of if I ever won the lottery. To see the pics please go to the gallery and look at the holiday picture set. A nice free day out - and the nice new Nikon camera played a blinder.

Emma took me to see Atonement in Runcorn. This is the big British film that everyone has been talking about since it came out, part of the latest part of Keira Knightley and James McAvoy's quest for global dominance (Keira is desperately trying to get the world to forgive her for selling out to the Pirates franchise whilst James is getting some cool roles and turning in top performances). This is the book into film of Atonement - this was a big seller only a few years ago and everyone who has read it raves about it. It is the story a young girls overactive imagination and the impact it has on the lives of those all around her - in particular the relationship between her big sister (Keira) and the housekeeper (McAvoy). This film has a lot going for it - not just the 5 minute tracking shot around the Dunkirk beach that everyone is raving about. A tragic story, possibly a new update of Brief Encounter. Just don't expect the usual Hollywood ending.

In a move designed to do something other than just hang around in bookshops on a Sunday, we went mobhanded to Snowdon - that is Emma, Mark and Gee as well as the dogs. Our climb was from the Miners' Track at one end of the Llanberis Pass, up to the summit, following the slightly kinder route, the one alongside the railway, down. This is a walk of.....9 miles! Now I have not done long walks for quite a while so I begin to feel it pretty early on - as well as getting rained on. No complaints, though. What a place. Photographs are in the holiday set of the gallery.

After several years now of drinking coffee in Starbucks and near enough nowhere else, I have discovered a coffee shop that has a good go at coming close. This is MoCoCo in Middlewich. Now, I don't to come out and say that they are a blatant rip off of Starbucks - I mean Starbucks has the Caramel Macchiato and MoCoCo has the.... Caramel Macchiato, whist Starbucks has the Chai Tea Latte and MoCoCo has the....... Chai Tea Latte. Well, I will keep my mouth shut, it was a nice little place and worthy of a visit.

October 2007

Martin and myself went to see Control at Cheshire Oaks. Control is the story of Ian Curtis, lead singer of Joy Division (later to become New Order). Filmed in grainy B&W, it is the story of Ian from meeting his wife Debbie, his affair with Belgian journo, Annick Honore, ending with his suicide in 1980. This is a great little brit-film (though depressing in a way that only a film about Joy Division could be). The filming is brilliant with Nottingham standing in as Manchester and Macclesfield - though I suspect they had the phone number of the set dressers and car restorers from Life on Mars as not a single detail is left to chance. The cast is good - Sam Riley (who, according to Empire Magazine, played Mark E Smith of the Fall in 24 hr Party People), Alexandra Maria Lara (she was in legendary German WWII film, Downfall) and Samantha Morton as Ian's wife (she was in Band of Gold and was one of the empaths in Minority Report). The attention to detail is brilliant - they even got hold of what I suspect is the same Pug 504 estate as driven by Tony Wilson in 24 hr Party People. The B&W makes it feel like you are watching the 1970's. It is a good companion piece to 24hr Party People and contains some of the same scenes (including the signing of the contract in Tony Wilson's blood scene that many people have agreed to be mythology and also the Sex Pistols gig in Manchester that Tony Wilson described as an epiphany), though it is far darker. Whilst 24 hr Party People is the story of Joy Division and Factory Records, this is just the story of Ian's marriage to Debbie against the backdrop of Joy Division and Factory Records. Go and see it.

Ok, let's continue with the Manchester theme for a little while. 2007 saw the 33rd year of Rush as a band. Since 2003 I have been going to the annual National Midday Sun European Rush Convention - 2003 at the Limelight in Crewe, 2004 (a big year as it coincided with the R30 tour) at the Birmingham NEC, 2005 at Leeds University, 2006 at Limelight in Crewe again and 2007 we landed at the Manchester Academy (part of Manchester University). Like 2004, this year coincided with another tour that surely must be the last (although they have been saying that since 1987). This followed the usual format of Rush Idol, raffles, a charity auction and a guest speaker. Rush Idol is not as nerve racking as it once was (way back in 2003 I found the prospect of getting up on stage to be the best laxative I have ever known) - I have played at Rush Conventions so many times that it is just like singing for aunty. I chose to play drums on my two strongest pieces: Working Man (difficult to make a mess of!) and Bastille Day (chosen as it was one of the first Rush tracks I ever listened to and is thus stamped into my DNA). I was also due to play on Freewill but was absent for that one as I was talking to Phil Campbell who I used to work with at Shell (thank's for standing in, Hazy - Freewill is a bloody toughy). If you go to set 03 of the gallery then you will see the pics taken that day.

After the convention, there was always the real thing to keep me occupied. This year Rush are embarking on another massive tour that includes the UK. I had feared that once again (like they did in previous tours) they would give us the elbow and bypass the UK and Europe completely (this they did several times - most notably in 1987 on the Power Windows Tour - and three bloody times in the 1990's!). Having read the various writings of Neil Peart, it would appear that Neil is not all that keen on Europe. I also took along Mark, Gee and Andy H so they could find out what the fuss was all about (I think they were suitably impressed but they are not prog-heads just yet). The band played some real surprises: Digital Man being the biggest surprise. The new album gets quite an airing as well, which is an indicator of how much confidence they have in it. Like the last time (Sept 2004), the visuals were brilliant (including South Park introducing Tom Sawyer), the performances were fantastic and the famous Neil Peart drum solo was another nail in the coffin of me thinking I was any good on the drums. What a night - there are also some pics on the website in set 03.

Took Emma to see Michael Moore's latest documentary. This is called Sicko (and not Sick as the ticket above states) and is about the health care system in the United States and how it not only fails those who are too poor for health insurance, but also has a pretty good go at completely failing those who are well off enough to have health insurance. He does this in his usual style - he starts by looking at a few people who are too poor to take out health insurance. This is one guy who has to stitch his own wound (not very nice at all as he takes the time to film himself doing this) and another who took off two finger tips using a circular saw. Then he looks at some people (in fact, a lot of people) who took out Health insurance and were convinced that they would be OK...... until the company found ways to deny their claim, which is where anyone who has seen the Rainmaker will find this bit very familiar. You see, health insurance has always been a hot potato in the USA, with ridiculous claims that universal health coverage would be the first step to socialism and oppressive state control. I suspect, along with Mr Moore (who once sent me an e-mail you know), that the real reason is that it would stop people (like the companies who make the drugs and insure the people) from making oodles of cash. Moore goes on to look at Canada's health system, before he moves on to my very own home country and praises the NHS to the sky. The masterstroke is Moore also looking at two countries who the USA have a bit of a downer on at the moment: France and Cuba. In fact it was the trip to Cuba that got Moore into real trouble as this was in contravention of the decades old travel ban... you see only the defender of democracy would need to prevent its people from being exposed to other political systems. I thought this was another great piece of film making. Those of you reading this in the UK should go and see this just to remind yourself how lucky you are to live here. Hardly any wonder that people wish to discredit him (such as Rupert Murdoch using his Sky and Fox networks) - what sort of world would we live in if the truth about how this world is run started to come out?

November 2007

Took Emma to see Our Friends in the North in Sheffield. Many of you may be aware of the television drama Our Friends in the North - this was on BBC2 in the mid nineties - though less people are aware that this started life as a stage play by the RSC in 1982 - which is the version that I went to see at the Sheffield Lyceum. The story is that of four friends who grow up in Newcastle from 1964 to 1979 and the corruption in the public institutions around them; the 1960's new house building corruption scandal (that gave rise to the high rise flats around our country - many of which have been torn down), the Rhodesia question (which is where the title of the play comes from) and Metropolitan Police corruption. I had always loved the series (which you can take a quick look at on the You Tube link above) so was well pleased of a chance to see the original article on stage.

Obviously, the fact that the series has more in the way of scope (particularly that it runs from 1964 to 1995) makes the play possibly a bit of a let down, but it was nice to see it in the original stage form - in fact, many of the scenes made it across into the television programme word for word, and others just hint at how they will evolve into something bigger and better. The Rhodesia scenes have been completely removed from the television series so it was nice to see how they link into the play as well. Several of the actors in the stage version (Rod Culbertson, Neil Armstrong and Tracey Wilkinson) had parts in the television series so it was very strange to see them in different roles (in fact, several roles as the full production requires a seriously large company and a few actors have to double up). The numerous sets that were required are taken care of by a large container that swings around on stage - it opens and has bits swinging out of it. Nice little slice of culture, but for my money, the televised version is perhaps second only to Life on Mars as the best thing ever on telly. The stage version will be touring again next year in the spring.

Martin and myself, and only because this was the only place that was showing it, went to see In the Shadow of the Moon at Manchester Cornerhouse. This is a documentary, as you may imagine, about the Apollo missions that took place from 1968 to 1972. As you may be aware, I am a big fan of documentaries and I also love looking at stuff about the moon landings (and before you ask I do not think they were faked - it's one of the few conspiracy theories that I don't subscribe to and I am content to be genuinely inspired by it now - 35 years after the last mission). This is a great little docu-film, mainly using talking heads from the main astronauts (but not a word from Neil Armstrong who refuses to take part in such things) and lots of great archive footage - in particular that brilliant footage from inside the Saturn V booster stages as they separated on the way up (click the You Tube link above to see what I mean). It's such a shame that the act of sending man to the moon is considered the last optimistic act in our history - but at least we have velcro and non-stick frying pans to show for it. When can we go back? Well, NASA reckon we will be back around 2018 - which sadly means I will be too old by then for a seat flying the Command Module so I won't bother with an application form - bummer.

Took Emma to see Elizabeth the Golden Age in Runcorn. Basically this is the sequel to Elizabeth from the mid 1990's - a film that we are both big fans of. There was a strong connection to Our Friends in the North with the first film as Daniel Craig, Christopher Eccleston and Rod Culbertson all turned up in that one - along with Eric Cantona, Cathy Burke and Angus Deayton! As the first was the story of Elizabeth, a protestant monarch, making it to power against the wishes of most of the powerful men in the nation who were mainly devout catholics (and surviving an insurrection to hang on to power), the sequel is about her remaining in power when threatened by Phillip of Catholic Spain (and his bloody great armada). Again, she is also threatened from within (mainly from Mary Queen of Scots who is poised to seize the throne) and a host of catholic traitors. Kate Blanchett again takes the role of the virgin queen (and she is again sexy and menacing at the same time) and Samantha Morton is Mary Queen of Scots. This film, whilst good, is not a patch on the first - it sorely needed an equivalent of the Christopher Eccleston to sneer and make a menace of himself. Sadly, all that this film got was a half assed love interest in the shape of Clive Owen who played Walter Raleigh. The sound I could hear was Sir Francis Drake spinning in his grave when the film decided to have Raleigh as being the man in form when the armada sailed up the Channel. Watch the first one instead - if only to discover that Eric Cantona can actually act.

It is always nice to have a connection between articles - like Eric Cantona the footballer. Talking of football, I watched in despair as our nation reached perhaps the lowest ebb ever. Yes, I am of course talking about our failure to qualify for Euro 2008. Myself and Emma watched, shouted and screamed at the telly and ultimately watched our team sink lower than I can ever recall. Even the quite horrible Graham Taylor years have a sort of Alf Ramsey shine to them by comparison. I think this has taken us back to the dark days of 1973 when a very talented England side failed to beat Poland at Wembley and thus missed out on going to the world cup in 1974. As if that was not bad enough, they repeated the feat in 1977 as well. So, this is so bad that I feel like going back to the 1970's and wearing beige flares and trading the Micra in for a Mk3 Cortina - I might even go on strike a few times. This is so low...... I don't see how the nation will survive and surely must fall. Just in case you are not depressed enough already, the above You Tube link will take you to the footage of that dire day in 1973 when it was actually a genuine surprise to see our nation humiliated - the You Tube link on the right will take you forward 34 years in time to a sadly familiar scene. The third You Tube link on the far right is really just rubbing the salt into the wound - it is from 1981 and it is perhaps not all that fair as we did qualify for the World Cup the following year in 1982, but it is indicative of just how often our nation is humiliated at football (for those of you who know what I am talking about it is the legendary Maggie Thatcher, can you hear me? clip).

Emma took me to see..... a Chick Movie. I suppose I have earned a chick movie with all of the stuff that I make her sit through. OK so it was not like being caught going into Dirty Dancing or any one of a dozen horrible 80's films, but it was clearly a chick movie - a movie designed to tug on the heart strings of girlys. Basically this is the story of a young lad who is the son of a cellist and rock musician who is put up for adoption. Eventually, he sets off in search of his parents - who have no idea he even exists (this being Hollywood). It was OK I suppose (it must have been good cos Emma was crying) - and a bit strange to see Robin Williams as a bad guy as well.

December 2007

Went to see... deep breath... The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I have a real weakness for westerns - especially the Jesse James story - The Long Riders is one of my fave films of all time (despite being a little known 1980 Western that is only otherwise notable for three things - starring real life brothers in the brother roles in the film, being the first film ever shown on European British Armed Forces Television and having perhaps the best gunfight of all time in it). Obviously, Hollywood has a thing for the guy as well - he has been portrayed in film nearly twenty times (!) - this says a lot about his place in American folklore. In case you don't know, Jesse James was an Outlaw who learned his trade during the American Civil War. After the war he threw his lot in with the James and Younger gang and set about robbing banks and trains. Eventually, the Pinkerton Detective Agency had to send an army of men to try and catch him. They rode their luck until they went to Northfield Minnesota only to alert the townsfolk to their presence who waited outside the bank armed to the teeth. The story picks up after James forms a new gang and sets about his usual pattern of robbing and moving around. However, one of his new guys is a chap by the name of Robert Ford... well the title is a bit of a plot spoiler in itself. Like most well made Westerns, I really liked this. Despite the 3 hour running time, what is there is brilliantly filmed and acted. Brad Pitt takes the James role, Casey Affleck is the deeply dissaffected Ford. The use of blurred lenses (like old fashioned photographs used) adds to the sense of authenticity. And, that brilliant story telling tool - the narration. If long Westerns are your thing then this is the film for you.

No, I didn't go - if you are looking at the pics above wondering how and why. However, I know a man who was there - it's like knowing one of the Apollo Astronauts or knowing someone who was present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Andy gleefully phoned me a couple of days before to tell me that he had somehow acquired tickets to see Led Zeppelin at the O2 Arena (I knew that it was him phoning as his ringtone is Immigrant Song by Led Zep!). Well, he is a lucky bugger and he says the gig was brilliant. I'm not totally beyond reproach as I have seen Page and Plant twice (once with Andy!) - so that is 50% of Led Zeppelin. Pretty much since the start of this site, Andy has been an occasional but important presence - you will find him in the old days pics, the more recent pics and also he has his own page in the guest section (if you click on the Apple logo above it will open that page for you) . He also has a regular gig! So he has been to see Led Zep and he has a regular drumming gig. He annoys me.

Went to Manchester Cornerhouse to see the latest release of Blade Runner - a film that I have seen many times since it first came out in 1982. It was released as a directors cut most recently in 1992, and I went to see it that time as well (in Swindon!). This looks like Ridley Scott is having the last say, as this is the first time that the film is being released as he wanted it in the first place - the first directors cut being rushed through and largely without his input. For those of you that have seen the original, then surely you must be of the opinion that any release of this film is quite special. The original had a happy ending sellotaped on the end (famously using offcuts from the opening of The Shining) as well as having that famous narration added in case anyone was confused (Ridley Scott hated the narration but most people agree that it does give the film a certain Film Noir atmosphere). By the time the directors cut was discovered in the early 90's (by accident as it turned out - an old test audience print being supplied to a sci-fi convention by mistake - unique amongst director's cuts as it is actually shorter), the film had gathered a reputation as a classic and possibly the best sci-fi movie of all time. This version only reinforces it, some scenes being retouched and restored (the famous killing of the snake-dancer in the shop windows actually reshot using the original actress - there is also meant to be a scene with a cameraman that strayed into shot - but I have never seen him). It's nice going into a cinema and knowing that you are going to love the film - and I got to see it on the Oxford Road Screen 1 (the BIG screen) as well. I don't care how big your LCD TV is, Debby, the cinema is the best place to see some films, and this is one of those films.

Starting your x-mas shopping eraly is nice in that you can go and laugh at all of the people who are nowhere near completing their shop in places like Liverpool. Did this just before x-mas and took some pics. Returned during the sales with my bother and sister-in-law (who is the general of the sales) and this was hell on earth. You can see my Liverpool pics in the holiday gallery (set 09).

Christmas came again. Without sounding too partisan, I was well pleased with my haul of prezzies this time round. Emma had asked me for a pair of posh hair straighteners - Good Hair Day if you know what I am talking about. Emma got me loads of goodies - including the Rush T that you can see me wearing above. Also, my two nieces came over from Ireland so that was pretty cool as well (my nephew certainly thought so). Other highlights were the Gene Hunt Guide to Modern Policing, various DVD's and far too many Jelly Babies for one person. Best of all was not having to rush off to work first thing on Christmas Day - but I was on lates. Nephew George also got what I consider to be the coolest prezzie ever - a reissue of the old Evel Knievel toy from the 1970's! It seems that some company bought up all of the old Ideal ™ moulds and sold it via the Internet (but there are other places that do it). Sadly, the great man dying in November was a bad omen as my nephew's mum and dad have decided that Evel is just too loud (at least as loud as a real bike) for daily use and he has already fallen into idleness.

Could not have just got Emma the hair straighteners so I was very sneaky in buying her an Apple 3rd Generation Nano iPod off ebay. Emma was well pleased with this - especially as she now has 8 gigs of space to put her songs on. Naturally, she has filled up her allotted 4 gigs (no matter how big your space seems to be you always end up filling it) and was reduced to deleting stuff in order to put new stuff on. With this in mind, I jealously eyed the new pod (especially the superb cover flow feature which is the coolest thing ever - just imagine fingering your way through those old LP bins at record fairs on a screen). I was always a bit miffed that I was not able to fit all of my fave stuff on and having to delete stuff that I had liked. After getting all of my x-mas money together I decided to solve my iPod problems and bought myself the mighty iPod Classic (the black one above). This was a prezzy for me for being such a good and well behaved boy all year. This has a lunatic 80 gigs of storage. Now I can put all of my massive (some 45 mins!) Tangerine Dream stuff on, as well as some nice new CD's - including a wee smattering of Tamla Motown - this is a new one for me and another example of how my musical taste has got wider as a result of the iPod. I can also put all of the Rush tracks on that were too big for inclusion - like the R30 medley that they opened the 2004 with or the 2112/Xanadu/Working Man medly from the close of the gig. So I now have possibly the only iPod that has Rush, Iron Maiden and Diana Ross on it. Makes shuffle play a bit strange and unpredictable.

Anyway, hope you all had a nice year and x-mas. I worked most of it, as is usual. But it was still a nice one - would be nicer to get the extra money and not have to work.

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