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A Handel on Something Baroque

A Musical Interlude

If you asked me to list my Top 10 “go to” classical music pieces, I’d start by opening up iTunes and taking a gander at what I’ve listened to the most. High up the list you’ll see Bach (Chaconne), Tallis (anything), Pärt (Magnificat), the incredibly romantic middle movement from Chopin’s piano concerto #1, and Beethoven’s violin concerto –in short, a real mix from across the centuries and all stuff that I go back to time and time again.

One genre that’s under-represented is Baroque, a style probably most closely associated with German (Bach) and Italian (Vivaldi) composers. Bach’s the best known and the most accomplished composer of the Baroque era, rightfully revered as an astonishing musical innovator. Whilst I love much of his music, particularly the solo violin and cello works, I couldn’t listen to the entirety of the Goldberg piano variations in one sitting; there’s a bit too much mathematical twiddling around for me to maintain focus for more than 20 or so minutes.

Tour Guides Gone Bad

A Thames Odyssey

Billy Beefeater. He’s funny and he knows it.

A good tour guide who can educate, amuse and engage all at once is a rare beast. Take Billy Beefeater, for example, a former combat medic with the Royal Army Medical Corp. who insults large groups of tourists at various scenic spots around the Tower of London. The man is a comic genius. He knows his audience; he knows his subject inside out -lopped off heads and disembowelled traitors- and his delivery is split-second. He’s so good, I’m guessing he could make a useful living as an in-demand after-dinner speaker if he ever decided that professional tourist-abuse was losing its lustre. If you ever decide to visit the Tower, find out what time his tour starts. You won’t regret it.

*Serves you right for being pro-Brexit.*

A bad tour guide can turn any tourist attraction into 30 minutes of living hell. Fascinating history can be rendered anemically dull, and amazing architecture becomes mere detail, lost in the background as you’re herded from one boring stop to another, learning nothing in the process. But every so often, I’ve come across guides who are so spectacularly bad, so completely uninformed, you can’t help but admire them for trying, even though you know full well it’s going to go hideously wrong at some point.

A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The 80s

Hands up if you’ve ever hitch hiked anywhere? You know, the old-fashioned thumb up, side-of-the-road-have-back-pack-will-travel way? We’ve all thumbed a last-minute ride into town to go drinking, but that’s not what I mean. No, I mean long distance stuff, going hundreds of miles, at the mercy of truck drivers, motorway service stations, and dodgy slip roads.

In the early eighties, I was hard up geology student in Portsmouth and I hitch hiked regularly. It was a rite of passage for a lot of fellow students who were strapped for cash. Train ticket, or beer and food?

Do You Have Wind?

My friend Brent posted a link on Twitter today to an article about the inexorable growth in wind power capacity in the US. It reminded me that I’d been sitting on this piece about wind power for a month or two because I couldn’t figure out how to finish it properly. But ending be damned… the stats speak for themselves. They’re an interesting counterpoint to the Trump government’s continued idiotic obsession with bringing back carbon-heavy fossil fuel power generation. His antiquated energy policies look dafter and dafter as every month passes.

Sandbanks and Seaweed.

Growing up in southeast Kent, we spent our summers on the beach, assuming we could get past the great piles of stinking, rotting seaweed washed up on the tideline. When the tide is low, a large sandbank –the Goodwin Sands- emerges a few miles off shore; a 10 mile long yellowish-orange strip of sand rising up gently out of the sea.

*Low tide on the Goodwin Sands, 3 miles offshore.*

It’s Crop Circle Time.

Spring is here in its inimitable, slightly-sodden Vancouver fashion. Growing up in Kent, in southern England, I loved it. Every year, the warmer weather brought profound changes to the ancient agrarian landscape around the cathedral city of Canterbury. To a bubbling soundtrack of larks high above, the farmers would sow their fields, bringing a riot of green and yellow to the chalk downs. And then, in another timeless annual rite, crop circle time arrives; the first circle is found smack in the middle of a wheat field in Wiltshire, and suddenly every idiot and conspiracy whack job in the country wakes up sporting their alien-spotter hard on, looking for 15 minutes of fame.

Best Not To Hang Around.

My Iranian sojourn in the mid-1990s has become a rich source of travel stories for me. I spent the best part of a year in the country, over about a 3-year period, travelling extensively in the north, based in the small farming hub of Takab in West Azerbaijan province, 5-6 hours drive northwest of Tehran. The people of Takab are Turkic and Kurdish. The Kurds are easy people to spot, dressing far more colourfully than the Turkic or Persian people. There is also a small minority of Zoroastrians, one of the oldest known religions, who worship at fire temples and sometimes still leave the bodies of their dead in high places for scavenging birds to eat.

*A “volcano” close to the Unesco site, Takht-e-Soleyman.*

The Joy of Sex Books

In the 1990s I spent quite a bit of time in Iran, exploring for gold and copper. Fun times. It’s a beautiful country and we saw a lot of it, mainly in the Turkic north which stretches from the capital, Tehran, up to the borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey. We worked with a small team of Iranian geologists. One of the guys, a key member of the team who I’ll call Bob, was newly married. I’d met his wife in Tehran. A very pretty woman, she was quite religious, as was he, hence in true Islamic fashion, their hospitality to visitors such as me was overwhelming.

I Met A Drug Smuggler

Western Pakistan is a fascinating place. It’s remote, arid, tribal, and these days a Taliban stronghold; not the friendliest of spots for westerners planning on coming home still attached to their heads. It was slightly safer when I was there in 1997, although it still had its moments (see My Project Went Boom).

*The Chagai Hills. Not sure I’d call them hills if I got to name them.*

The Joy of Birthdays

Today’s my birthday, and I hate birthdays. Ok, I really have to stop writing “I hate” in the first sentence of my blog pieces. Anyway, to quote George Carlin, so far, this is the oldest I’ve ever been.

Famous dead people I share my birthday with include Ronald Reagan, Bob Marley, Eva Braun, Babe Ruth and Rick Astley. I’m exaggerating slightly. Technically Rick Astley’s still alive but his music is getting a bit stinky.

Lost Footballs. The Saddest Sight.

The Twitterverse is a wondrous thing. So many creative people out there who work hard to provide totally pointless news feeds for our amusement, compiling all sorts of shit you didn’t know you needed. I’ve stumbled on a few gems since signing up and accumulating my mega-total of 46 followers. But my favourite has to be Lost Footballs (@Lostfootballs).

They post photos of lost footballs (no rugby balls please!) from around the world, sent to them by sad spotters like me. You find them everywhere. Back alleys, parks, roof tops, under cars and we all carry smart phones so taking a picture is easy. The twist is, subscribers are asked to pair their images with song lyrics that might reflect some aspect of the photo: as they say, “the saddest sight in the world – lost or discarded footballs.”

Category: Other stuff

A Handel on Something Baroque

A Musical Interlude

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Tour Guides Gone Bad

A Thames Odyssey

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A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The 80s

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Do You Have Wind?

Sandbanks and Seaweed.

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It’s Crop Circle Time.

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Best Not To Hang Around.

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The Joy of Sex Books

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I Met A Drug Smuggler

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The Joy of Birthdays

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Lost Footballs. The Saddest Sight.

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A Musical Interlude

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A Thames Odyssey

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Sandbanks and Seaweed.

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