6 February 2014 (Thursday) - Music

Another relatively good night’s sleep; I woke up shortly before 6am, watched a couple of episodes of Family Guy over brekkie, and then took “Furry Face TMfor his walk. We went probably an hour earlier than usual, but he was itching to get out. He’s never done this before, but he was woofing at me and running to the front door; obviously asking to go for our walk.
The weather forecast had said it would rain later so we got going. We went through the park and on to Singleton Lake, and apart from “Furry Face TMtrying to pick a fight with a swan the walk was relatively uneventful. We got home after a walk of two hours; just before the rain hit. I washed the mud from my dog and gave him his brekkie.

I had intended to tidy up in the back garden, but once again the rain put paid to that idea. So instead I listened to the latest news from Total Ashford dot com; a podcast of local news and interest. The ones up till npw have been really interesting. Today’s was also really good, but this podcast did seem to be very biased towards local live music. I was intrigued by the indoor eighteen-hole cyber-golf course, but that was really the only non-live-local-music item on the pdcast.
I got cross listening to the updates on Ashford’s Create music festival; I’ve been to it a few times. The event would be helped if the council organised the thing so that all the participating bands wasn’t all playing at the same time and playing *at* each other. There are four or five stages all facing into a central arena where the public hears all of the bands at the same time.
And the event suffers from the security staff they employ; spotty oiks who feel they have the god-given right to treat everyone like the sh*t on their shoes.

I also found out that there have been all sorts of council-organised music events going on in the church in the town centre. The chap being interviewed about all of these activities was billed as the arts manager for the local council. All the chap could speak about was live music. I can’t help but feel that there should be far more to “The Arts” than subsidising local bands, but what do I know.

It’s been said that I don’t like live music. That’s not true. I like live music when it is done well. But for every band that can play well there are several hundred that are just awful. And if bands want the opportunity to play, then that’s fine; give them the opportunity. But the chap from the council was talking about the costs of hiring some of these bands. I’m not sure that spending thousands of pounds of rate-payers’ money on third rate noise-mongers is a sensible use of resources. Certainly not when I have heard from family members that local council-run nursing homes are having their budgets slashed.

Over a spot of lunch I watched the latest episode of “The Tomorrow People”. It was quite good really. The plot does seem to be going somewhere now. I then put some washing in (dull), and seeing that the rain was still pouring hard I had another look on the Internet. An email – would I submit meter reading to the leccie company.
I did so - I was £400+ in credit with them before I put in the new meter readings; I gave them new readings for leccie and gas; I was then one hundred quid in debt.
They sent a message saying they were increasing the direct debit. Oh dear… Perhaps I should start using night rate leccie more often.

And with the rain showing no sign of abating I spent much of the rest of the day sleeping through episodes of “Jeeves and Wooster”. Whilst I like the show, there are twenty three episodes all of which have exactly the same plot…



No comments:

Post a Comment