Na Zdrowie!

Incase you didn't know, we're in Krakow, Polska. Cheers!

Everyone's asleep as it's silly o'clock in the morning but I'm awake, just.

Yeah, we got here on Thursday AM. A quick flight from LGW to Krakow's closest airport and then a 40 min minibus ride through the Eastern European countryside to this old city. It's nice. I like Poland. Growing up with all those films of the eastern borders of Europe it fits exactly with the vision.

As soon as we got to Krakow we hit our hotel and booked a taxi, via a perogi restaurant, to Wieliczka. There's a huge salt mine there, a trip recommended by a good friend who missed the opportunity last time he was here but made sure we stayed on track :) The salt mines are pretty impressive... down 60+ flights of stairs and into 100+ miles of caves... some of them hand-carved and beyond belief... there are chapels down here and a vast underground church...

On Friday we visited Auschwitz; Not your usual holiday destination but really interesting nonetheless. I'm not a big fan of human suffering and abject misery, especially on such a grand scale, but I'm sure the blazing sunshine made the experience a whole lot more palatable. I'd recommend a visit if you're passing this way. The sheer scale of the Birkenau camp is food for thought...

So tomorrow (later this morning, rather) we tour the city itself... Krakow, the Wawel Dragon, the castle... Dobranoc!

The TumbleDown Dick

Sign the petition!

Oh woe is me! They shut down the Tumbledown Dick. In fact, this is old news, they shut down the Tumbly back in February.

For those of you who don't know The Tumbledown, it is (was) the best local pub in the area for live music of the alternative/rock/punk kind. OK, there's The Agincourt in Camberley and the West End Centre in Aldershot (each 5 miles away) but the Tumbledown was ours. The Tumbledown was Farnborough's own unique pub.

Farnborough is a very average British small town, population c. 45,000. Apart from Farnborough Abbey, where Napoleon III is buried, and the Farnborough Airshow, there's not much to write home about other than our once-great music venue The Tumbledown Dick with live bands and the Quarantine Club rock/alt night.

After an environmental health inspection the owners of the Tumbledown Dick, Spirit Group, decided to shut the pub. Now, after literally decades of chronic underinvestment the rumours are that the pub could become a "family friendly" pub... that sends shivers down my spine. All the other "family friendly" pubs in the area are either totally dull and all look the same or the youngest members of the family have to be gone and in bed by 8pm, leaving only the older members of the family to prop up the bar and drink crap lager.

I digress...

The Tumbledown Dick was getting better and better as a live music venue, we even had our eyes on a Smiths tribute band in July and bands booked all the way up until November... until some silly person decided to shut our favourite live music boozer!

If you're from Farnborough or nearby, if you like your live music, if you ever enjoyed a band at the Tumbledown or ever played there, or like me, you wanted to get your first gig at The Tumbledown... then please please please help out and save this pub before it goes down the pan...

Sign the petition to Spirit Group to Save the Tumbledown Dick as a live music venue!

Snow? In April?

Well, as you can see, the blossoms that have been around since February (!) are still here and now we've had snow (Sunday).

For us Brits, and especially us southerners, it was weird to get snow in April. Even more surprising was the rapid change in weather from driving rain ("I can't sleep because the rain's banging against my window" at 7:00am) to a thick blanket of snow ("Look, mummy, it's SNOWING!" at 7:30am)

So rather than curl up and stay snug we all went out in it :)

Regroup

After 37 years of constantly forging onward I feel battle weary, I'm far from home and my army is stretched.

Death and mutiny, souls lost at sea, leadership challenges, cowardice in the ranks, the once loyal deserting their general and a plague amongst them... others have gone before this and endured greater hardships, suffered higher losses and yet every struggle is different for its own peculiar reasons.

And somehow I feel comfort in the territory once occupied, the reek of familiarity... it is there that I find the spoils of past victories an inspiration, moments to be cherished again and reminding me of the reasons to, once again, spill forth.

The world is not black nor white, nor even shades of grey. It is multi-coloured and multi-faceted, an ever-evolving state of flux where one must wait for the tremors to subside before making the next sure step.

And it is surety itself that defies my quicksilver soul. But the flighty, the chaotic, the come-what-may might be my saviour tomorrow or my Achilles today. I choose neither and step back from the plate, survey the scene, await, observe, regroup. Regroup!

Let me sleep, I shall feel better when I am rested. I shall need all my strength to conquer the Leviathan, crush the ravening hordes, wheedle out the assassins. My armour is dulled yet still strong, my sword always sharp yet still sheathed. They will be aired come the morning, either this or the next one.

Dawn cometh, I avert my eyes lest brightness pierce my sleep. Goodnight my friends, I might you see on the morrow.

Senser & Soul Destruction

Having nearly had my foot broken at Judo on Thursday night I strapped my left extremity up in my old German army boots and drove the posse to nearby Camberley. I'd been looking forward to this gig for weeks, the first time I'd seen a band down The Agincourt in 20 years! Last time it was The Sweet and the place was absolutely rammed. This time the bill included Tainted Grace, Primitai and of course the mighty Soul Destruction with Senser topping the bill.

Tainted Grace? Well, not my cup of emo/goth tea, sort of like Evanescence, but they're from Farnborough so I'll not hear a bad word against them (quiet, Becky)

Primitai? Musically very good, old skool metal but flying-V style guitars look so friggin' uncomfortable to play in anything other than the upright "my guitar is my penis" style. Seriously though, Primitai were good, and being local lads I'm sure we will see them again soon. OK, Becky won't, I will ;)

Soul Destruction. We love 'em. Except tonight something was amiss, not their best gig. Whether it was nerves or what, I don't know, but the sound was a bit ropey on all but a handful of songs. When the mixing desk got it right, the sound was superb, but otherwise it was not a patch on their West End Centre gig where we took our 6 year old along :)

Senser. Man, they took me back to the nineties but they're still SO relevant today. Soundwise it was right, they were tight, but why was the guitar drowned so much? They played their classic tracks like Age of Panic, Switch, States of Mind for the old-skool crowd but I was disappointed there was no Return to Zombie Island or Bomb Factories. Overall they seemd to have a really good live dance beat but lacked the visciousness that the guitar work can often add.

Yeah, that'll do. Good gig. Could do without the tinnitus though ;)

Sci Fi Geekery

Another blog post? So soon? Take the man's temperature! (Yeah, they took my temperature yesterday, just so they can find out WTF is wrong with me - heart, lungs, temperature & blood pressure are all normal but the claret they took out of my arm now needs to be analysed...)

So, as I watch with interest my friend Nigel's "progris riport" on Flowers for Algernon, I realise that the book he's reading is some 40 years old and a previous Nebula Award winner, along with other prestigious titles like, er... Dune!

Oh dear! As much of a pseudo-geek as I can be it suddenly dawns on me that I am so utterly lacking on my sci-fi novel geekery. Granted, I know some of the titles in the Nebula Award winners' list like Dune and Rendezvous with Rama and yes, a lot of author's names I know so well, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke (who died yesterday), even Le Guin, Silverberg, Niven and Pohl.

But have I read any of these prestigious titles, have I immersed myself in the words of these award-winning writers?

In a word... NO!

That's so incredibly sad because as a child I was raised surrounded by these tomes. In the beige world of the 1970s the promise of the future was epitomised in the amazing allure of the Sinclair calculator, the digital watch, the ZX-81 and by the artwork on the covers of all the sci-fi novels...

And THAT is precisely my problem. As a small child I judged a book by its cover, I revelled in the joys of a Chris Foss spaceship on the front but I could not be bothered to trawl the big words of Asimov in order to see that vessel fight its way through the galaxy. That's where George Lucas came to my rescue...

In the summer of '77 I queued at the Odeon in Chelmsford to see Star Wars. The floodgates opened... In the town's other theatre I saw Battle Beyond the Stars and The Black Hole, I braved the ridicule of my uncle to watch the Empire Strikes Back, had my dad take me to Return of the Jedi. At home the three TV channels would occasionally show Logan's Run, Westworld or Silent Running...

OK, so maybe these aren't sci-fi novel/novella classics of the Nebula Award winning ilk, but 2-hour shows were better for a kid's attention span than a sprawling pseudo-intellectual paperback. But now that I realise I have missed out on such shining stars of the science fiction genre I feel that I need to renew my interest in sci-fi books, just as I'm recently rebuilding my E.E. Doc Smith collection...

But wait... I lie... I DID read *one* Nebula Award winner... I still have my copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer (Ick... New Romancer... get that thought out of my head) I cannot remember much of it but it was good, it was fast, geeky, techno, YES! Is it anything like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash that I just started reading? Mick Jones, guitarist of The Clash, wrote the song Buckethead about Snow Crash for his Carbon/Silicon project with Tony James and it's my guitar hero that inspired me down the sci-fi reading route again...

Gah, I digress yet again... There's no time to digress, I must finish Snow Crash before I launch into 40 years of missed geekery, and that's not to mention all those Philip K Dick (he of Bladerunner et. al.) novels, I didn't realise there were SO MANY!

Anyone else here dig sci-fi? Got any books to add to my list of 40?

About Me(me)

I got tagged, well at least it gets me blogging again, aye BulbBoy?

What was I doing 10 years ago?
> Blimey, that was March '98... I think I was living in Fleet, Hampshire, in a rented house with a fat curry-eating lager-drinking German and "The Crow". I was back at college too, doing a part-time course in Graphics & Design whilst doing a full-time job driving a forklift truck...

Things On My To Do list
> Make sure littl'un's OK (she's off school - ill)
> Have a bath
> Make another cup of tea
> Call the boss
> Work.Work.Work
> Get well soon
> Call Grandma, she fell and broke her hip
> Call my Aunt and congratulate her on her wedding plans
> Wash the car
> Get a new exhaust for the Subaru
> Return the Nintendo Wii I bought a month ago but have never opened
> Send this cheque for £205.63
> Find a good dedicated server
> Finish building the bathroom
> Pass my motorbike test
> Fix the Mini
> Fix the XT350
> Finish reading Catch 22
> Call the plumber
> Blog like I used to
> Pay off the mortgage & the credit cards
> Go to Poland
> Make more money than I currently do
> Find time to do/pay for everything in my "To Do" list

Bad Habits
> Getting sidetracked
> Thinking too much
> Doing too much
> Putting people in their rightful place - I should let them do that themselves

Places I have Lived
> Scotland
> England
> A Hotel
> A Conservatory
> A Hayloft
> Above shops

Things Most People Don’t Know About Me
> I am a lesbian trapped in a man's body
> I'm a nice soft virgo on the outside with scorpio rising on the inside. Misjudge me and I might just unchain the restraints on my impulsive nature, being far more sincere to you than you could probably handle.
> I still don't have a fucking clue what I really want to do with my life

I will tag somebody soon... just give me some time, OK? I'm ill and I'm working...