overlap

Or at least give them a break for an hour. This whole clocks going back thing seems to have been slightly more pronounced in its effect this year than I remember it being previously. Nevertheless, I appear to be a) getting a bit more sleep from feeling tired earlier in the evening and b) reaping the benefits of my abstention from the office vending machine's coffee supply. I had been trying to restrict myself to two cups a day, but I haven't touched one yet this week. And suddenly it's bedtime again!

Ask me which bands I have not seen and still want to see, and it's a very short list. But every so often, something hugely appealing comes up, either because of my own research or because someone tips me off to something I might otherwise have missed. This year I have seen a number of people that for one reason or another I'd never had cross my path at the right time, and the newest addition to that number is The Icicle Works. There were a couple of things they released in 1986 which just reached through my natural trad rock influences to become among the first singles I ever bought when they were a new and current release rather than some sort of back catalogue antique. I don't believe that they really registered with me much beyond those four vinyl singles from twenty years ago until I started looking for the hard to find CDs of their albums three or four years ago. All the same, the news of half a dozen shows under the Icicle Works name for the first time in many years was enough to see me on my travels again, and boy was it worth it. They were excellent, and I very much enjoyed the show.

Bit by bit, my fleet of bikes is reducing to just the ones I can and will use. One of those in this picture is already gone, and there is a chance another will find a caring new home in the next week or so. Much better that they get put back into use than that they sit around collecting dust in my house for years!

Through a combination of circumstances, this last weekend saw me collecting one more carload of historic artefacts - there now remains next to nothing of mine that isn't already in my own house, beyond a last couple of boxes of books. So now I can put my hands on all my secondary school exercise books, and a few more loose bits of paper from my earlier schooling, and a number of my childhood Blyton books, as well as a handful of toys in various states of batteredness. Some of this stuff I know before I open the box or the bag exactly what is in there, and happily I know there's a couple of things best left alone until a day I feel especially ready to start going through them. Last night I restarted reading a book I was given for Christmas in 1981, a book I don't believe I've laid a hand on for a good fifteen years. It's a funny experience, digging through this stuff that I know intimately and instinctively, and yet which feels like it belongs to someone else. And while I'm glad the little boy all this stuff belongs to is a very long way away these days, it's also vaguely comforting to know he hasn't gone completely. One of the things I was particularly hoping to dig out came out light rather readily - there's a certain irony in how keen I was to find the piece of paper that's the result of a somewhat earnest twelve year old me asking my grandparents, of whom only one now remains, about their parents and grandparents, so I do have names going back a couple more generations than I ever knew, and as far as great-great-great-grandparents in one case. Some things I can live without, but it's good to have information I've already worked for once still to hand if I do ever get round to investigating the family tree.

I'm a few days behind, so this is going to wrap up a bit too much in one hit! * Monday night I saw Jonathan Richman. Now, it would be easy to stick JR in the pigeonhole marked novelty act, but anyone who can do half his songs in a variety of languages - we had bits of four, I think - and who can put down his guitar and start dancing around like your second favourite drunken uncle at a wedding when the rest of his band is nothing but a guy playing drums probably needs a category all to himself. Sure, he's a bit quirky, but he's also desperately endearing and remarkably funny, so the evening goes down as fabulous entertainment and a warm feeling half the way home. Getting in in the early hours hasn't helped the rest of my week, though that's nobody else's fault but mine. * Tuesday night I saw Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman doing their acoustic Yes songs show. The idea apparently came about after Rick was booked to do a show somewhere like Cuba, and turned up to find a grand piano instead of his usual rack of piano electronics. Rick said he couldn't do it and they should cancel the show, they said he would do the show or they would cancel him in a rather serious way. So like the old pro that he is, he did the show, liked the experience, and wanted to apply the idea to slightly different things. Squeaky Jon Anderson comes across like Fotherington Thomas by way of California - he sa hello birds, hello sky, hello everyone I wanna do a song about the power of the spirit of love that surrounds us every day. I've always been a big fan of skill, of talent, of capability. In fact that's always been my trouble on a different front, I fall for people's intellectual capacity all too readily, but that's another story. Anyway, the fact remains that Rick Wakeman can play anything, sometimes in a way that even watching his fingers I struggle to follow. So his Nursery Rhyme Concerto is especially good fun, as are numerous classic Yes songs, and the sprinkling of good humoured repartee and impeccable comedy timing made for another good fun night. * Wednesday evening I've had the pleasure of seeing Martyn Joseph and Show Of Hands. Now, SOH came to me fairly recently via a radio show, but they've been out there doing their thing for decades, from what I can gather without bothering to research properly. I may have missed a trick somewhere along the way in their case - it's been a long time snce I saw someone do something that put a shiver down my spine, and a lot of people get the chance to try, as you may gather. I may well come back to Show Of Hands when I don't have my bed calling me quite so loudly, but they are on tour around the UK for the next six weeks and are well worth seeing. If you like the sound of a mixture of modern and traditional folk music, of the odd sea shanty with a contemporary attitude, of at least two of fiddle, guitar and mandocello, and double bass, and some exceptionally powerful songs, of the average working person and of places and tales from their Devon origins, I can thoroughly recommend them. In fact if you are even remotely interested I can point you to where you can have a bit of a listen for yourself, I'm that impressed. And as to why I may sometimes feel I have reason to be concerned about my diet, I've made an egg and bacon sandwich since I came in, but other than chips from the shop yesterday, that's the first hot food I've had since saturday and even that was a pizza. It's part of the problems that come with trying to pack too much into the time, that cooking some healthy, nutritious meal while I'm on the M4 on my way to another show is somewhat out of the question. And that's just not a sustainable way to live in the long term, I know.

My weekend has been largely spent getting to grips with this little beauty. With a few hundred more permutations of controls and settings than are really required, it may be a while before I can claim to have a full mastery of its ins and outs.

In an uncharacteristic bout of decisiveness, I've gone from being very fond of my digital camera to having partially dismantled my newly unco-operative digital camera, to having given up on repairing the impossible to repair, to a swift bout of research and having ordered my replacement camera. Sometimes my speed of movement surprises me, and this is very much a case in point, though it's just as much a sign of how accustomed to the convenience of a digital camera I have become. And of course I really do need to have a replacement just in time for the clocks changing and my commuting being done in the hours of darkness!

I seem to have had an awful lot of stuff to say about bikes and cycling of late. It's fair to say that my bikes and my riding are pretty important to me - I'm really glad I ended up getting back to riding due to moving here, and it is true that when I was deciding to buy this house, a test ride up here to see what sort of commute it would be was the clinching factor. In a similarly clinching manner, there was a turning point for me where an enjoyable activity became as much a political subject, or a cause. These flowers were left to commemorate the latest anniversary of the sad death of a cyclist who was hit from behind and killed by a driver who then left the scene. The driver who finally went to the police the following day, and admitted having been drinking before the incident, was eventually given a fine, and enough points on the licence to make another offence likely to incur a driving ban. Fortunately there have recently been moves towards changing this ridiculous legal situation, where a person's life is merely worth a few hundred quid, as long as you kill them with a car. But it's not law yet, and every day I go past the place where this poor chap died, and I am reminded how far we still have to go.

Or at least, I shouldn't have got quite so carried away about my progress. It turns out that the new components on the bike don't quite work together as well as they might, so it's back to the drawing board on that one, and in the meantime I'm continuing to ride it in a less than 100% state. Not fun. Meanwhile, someone appears to have bailed me out of a minor mistake I made somewhere else on the internet, which threatened to become a potential liability for me, so it's not all doom and gloom, and those frosty autumn mornings are always a delight, so I need to rebuild the <100% bike, and get out of here!

Of the two halves of the picture above, some of these teeth have done 5,000 miles, and I guess I'm overdue for replacing them with the shiny new ones. So among the fruits of the weekend's labours, which also include a small amount of damage to the palm of my hand and an equally worn out pair of brake blocks which are now in the bin, I can safely claim to have done a certain amount of preparation for the coming winter months and look forward to getting my nice silver chain thoroughly coated with road dirt in next to no time. Next up, adding the extra bright front light, but that can wait another week or two.

It's been a little while since I did this sort of post. It's funny how many things and how much effort can go into aiming for looking like very little effort has gone into a look. No decent pictures came out of the finished effect, but some things look better in the imagination anyway!