overlap

It's been a long day, and it's not over yet, and nor is my drinking so now is a good time to put finger to keyboard. Having started getting ready some time around noon, I've had a very relaxing day of doing my make up and three hours of breaking my lifetime duck on drinking cocktails, and of course being stared at in public for striking a noticeable profile with a bright peroxide bob, and standing at the better part of six foot three in my lovely new dress and favourite heels. But that's the benefit of going out in a big city that's not the one I live in. It's not long ago that the prospect of going out in daylight, never mind in a public place thronging with tourists would have been unthinkable without battalions of people providing moral support. But I've done my best with the hair removal cream and all the make up you can see in the picture below, I'm happy with the way I feel about how I look and I've had a lovely time. Which is good enough for me.

This is my current answer to the question!

Thinking of the witty retort you should have offered when you're halfway down the stairs and the moment has already passed is hardly a new phenomenon, but I've had a couple of moments of it this week. Most notably when I was involved in another encounter with a motorist intent on breaking the law and endangering me in the process. I'm big enough to take care of myself on the roads, and in this case I definitely gave as good as I got, but immediately after the event there was a very tiny part of me wishing I'd chased the guy up the road and tried to reason with him about driving more sensibly, though I suspect that would have merely prolonged the confrontation. I's not big, and it's certainly not clever, but happily it is a reflection of my nature that I'm generally slow to react to most stimuli. Partly down to deliberate efforts to avoid the sort of hair trigger temper that is common across the generations on both sides of my family, and partly down to the fact I'm frequently lost in thought or otherwise less engaged in whatever's going on around me. Fleeting reactive moments aside, and knowing what the volatile alternative brings with it, I have no good reason to wish I was any other way. But while I'm on the subject of reactions to circumstances, I should point out that I'm now listening to the new album by the Cosmic Rough Riders, who I saw a couple of weeks ago. Which isn't relevant in itself, except that today I went in to my local independent record shop at a moment where they were playing one of my favourite albums on the shop stereo, and having stayed for over half that album, I had to buy something just so I could get out of there, so I'm not completely insensible to the world I live in!

This was a funny gig, in several ways. The keyboard player is a longstanding musical partner, and conducts the band like an orchestra, and from the thick end of twenty metres above the band I can see every bald spot and everything that goes on below. Gentle On My Mind, Galveston, By The Time I Get To Phoenix, that's some opening to a set. We get a mix of the familiar biggest hits, and a selection of other stuff which lurches from madness to genius, sometimes within the same song. Daughter Debby Campbell does her bit, and that bit's a bit of a con - if she had some interesting material of her own to do or something interesting to add it would help, but standards like Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue, Stand By Your Man and You Don't Have To Say You Love Me make this more nepotism karaoke than the cutting edge of a radical new world. Hearing a father and daughter duet on Jackson is an acquired taste, there's something mildly iffy about the two of them singing the 'we got married in a fever' line, for example. Nevertheless, she gives the old man the chance to go offstage and change his shirt, and come back for more good stuff. I mentioned the madness/genius interface. While he clearly struggles to play continuously at length, he's still hits the guitar solos fine. As if to prove it, we get a version of the William Tell Overture which he leads on electric twelve string, soloing away for the last two minutes of the song with the guitar behind his head. Whether that's because he can't get it down again, I couldn't say! So we go from the sublime - Roy Orbison's In Dreams, hitting every vocal note spot on, to the ridiculous of demonstrating his prowess on the bagpipes accompanying an entirely straight cover of Mull Of Kintyre. A very tight band obviously helps, and the well-worn ad-libs come over as if scripted at times, but after that long in the game you can understand where the familiarity comes from. And now I've seen both Jimmy Webb and Glen Campbell do Phoenix, Wichita Lineman, Galveston, The Highwayman and a few others besides. Now where I come from, a bloke of 70 playing electric guitar solos behind his head is infinitely more rock n roll than a two album tinytalent that's spent more days in jail than he's played gigs in his career, and Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind is a great finish. Cracking gig, Glen!

Mickey Spillane has died at the age of 88, a greater age than would be expected for almost anyone in his books. Famous for the Mike Hammer stories in particular, the other stuff is almost all just as good. One of the memorable points of my adolescence was the discovery of a stash of Spillane paperbacks in the loft, which had presumably originally belonged to my father, and a long period of reading my way through them. To me he was a great weaver of personal mythologies around all that gangster honour and respect cobblers, with no hiding from the brutality of violent crime and the hoped for eventual triumph of good over evil. My understanding is that we might not necessarily have enjoyed much common ground in our personal politics, but there's not one of his books I failed to enjoy for an hour or two. And for that I say cheers Mickey, time to dig out some of those fading paperbacks again.

This was my home from home over a very hot weekend at Guilfest, and yes that is my dinner cooking there. For a return to festival camping, it was rather a sedate business but it made a pleasant change to have some quiet tent time away from the thousands of people everywhere on the performance part of the site. There's something to be said for being a little more choosy in my old age, and picking the bands I really wanted to see rather than trying to see some of everything, though I did get a bit caught between two stages at one point. Now that I've seen Blue Oyster Cult do '(Don't Fear) The Reaper' though, I can consider myself truly qualified to rock!

It's something I've commented on before, just how much fun it is coming into the first date of a tour or a set of shows, even for a band I've seen several dozen times before. And it remains the case that even though the last show was only in March, the novelty of getting up early today and looking forward to tonight and the weekend means the day in the office is flying by, to the accompaniment of the live commentary on today's stage of the Tour de France.

It's not just the sunshine making today a bright one. And I hope that's true wherever you are too.

Sometimes interests cross over in an unexpected way. My cycling caps are mostly a bit battered, that's inevitable after a bit of riding in the rain and repeated drying out. So it was time to treat myself to a couple of new ones. Either my head's shrinking or standard sizing is increasing slightly, and looking up at the wrong moment in a cap which isn't fitting snugly is a good way to lose it. But quite by chance I have some hair grips, and enough hair for them to attach the cap to. Come the day I forget about the grips and just pull the cap straight off, you'll probably hear it from wherever you are!

It's been a long week, and just as the new dress has finally made its way upstairs instead of being something that catches my eye in my living room, so it's time to move on a little. It's also been a long first week for the riders of the Tour de France, and much as Lance Amrstrong's efforts speak for themselves, there seems to be a refreshing amount of unpredictability this time around. Even if that's for a variety of reasons, few of them much for anyone to be proud of. On which note, Zinedine Zidane, way to go out with a bang! Now in something of a return to summers past, I'm looking forward to my first episode of music festival camping since I think 1994. Which is quite a lot water under quite a few bridges!

Even the casual observer may have noticed that pictures of me on here are a rare event. Sure there's the odd shot of an eye or a couple of fingernails, but I've put a lot of time and no little effort into protecting my anonymity or at least pulling back the curtain to limited degrees that pushes me no further than I'm comfortable with. Equally I'm not rushing to become a poster child for any particular cause, nor willing to limit myself to just the one subject.

But the time is right, for a number of reasons that don't matter to the point of being worth telling, and something's sort of changed. Suffice to say that stuff doesn't happen entirely in isolation, and I've had some help along the way, which is much appreciated.

Despite the frustrating elements of its arrival, and hard as it is to get a decent shot of oneself in a mirror, I'm really quite pleased with this shot of my new dress and my new bag.

Well, sort of. Ten minutes after the delivery window ended, I phoned to ask what was going on, and got an apology and not much by way of explanation beyond an offer to attempt delivery on monday or tuesday. Given that the object of the exercise is to avoid my neighbours taking receipt of my new dress, I wasn't entirely impressed. Then five minutes later, a van pulled up outside. While the national football team was contriving to fail yet again and the delivery man had been failing to turn up, I'd been unable to start on my make up or preparations for going out, and so it was that my putative trip to the theatre got written off. So be it, it's really not the end of the world, and the going would have been far more important than the seeing. There will be another time. In the meantime - yes, I'm sure you may be able to tell where it's from - I'm pleased to say that colour confusion notwithstanding, I'm happy enough with my new dress and very happy with the lovely bag.

This post comes with a nervous knot in the stomach, a feeling some people may be experiencing prior to this afternoon's important football game, but significantly less for that reason in my case. even if there is a tiny bit of that too. Last week I ordered a new dress and handbag off the web; the dress was never in stock in the nearest shops in the colour I wanted, and the only one of the bag went by the time I went back for it - for once this is not a case of shopping by proxy to avoid the facing till staff, and I really would much rather have done my own shopping and brought the stuff home with me then. As it is, I'm sat here somewhere in the middle of an eleven hour delivery-times-can-not-be-guaranteed window, unable to go out and get a paper, nor concentrate on much else. And why does it matter? Well, I've preferred to pay the extra to get a delivery on a chosen day so I can avoid the delivery going to a neighbour thing. And then through a fairly rare combination of factors, my aim is/was to go out in my new dress this evening. The specific details that make this a good evening for it are of lesser importance, there are hours to go yet, they have my number so the driver can ring up if there's trouble finding me - always possible, it's one of those difficult kinds of address - but in the meantime I'm jumping up every time I hear a diesel engine outside. To be continued...