Yes, I know, I'm not a pop song, but I am in an unusually Francophile musical period, what with me transforming M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming into the most listened to album of the last 5 months. At Christmas I was given some Amazon vouchers and I bought two further M83 albums, meaning that I now had all but one of the band's official releases as proper CDs. The only one I'm still to get is M83, their debut album. So, I shoved it in the car to listen to for the first time since I downloaded it about 2 years ago. Roger was more impressed with it than he is with the latest album and I have top say that it is a very very strange fish indeed - a bit like Jean Michel Jarre meets Norman Collier meets ET.
However, I've been swayed away from M83 this last few days and have been listening to the magnificent Air's new album Le Voyage Dans La Lune, which is just an absolute gem of an album. It is packed full of prog, jazz, lounge and mood influences and has rather blown me away, especially considering Air's output has dipped considerably since their first couple of albums. Listen to it on line - it's weird - and I'll bet real music lovers out there will listen again and again. Or my music taste just might be getting even more eclectic.
Barrel Scraping
My policy of writing stuff down to return to in blogs has rather gone the way of the pear and the only thing I had written on my pad this week was... Coates.
I just thought it was funny that Liverpool had bought a footballer called Sebastian Coates, who hails from Argentina. Tracing the Coates name, it is most common in the North West of England and along the northern Welsh borders; former Burnley and Spurs legend Ralph Coates had a Welsh grandfather. So my mind extrapolated that at some point when a whole bunch of people from Wales emigrated to Argentina that they took the name Coates with them.
So when this young South American played for the Red Shite against Spurs earlier this season, I was rather bemused by the pronunciation of his name: Co-Art-Ees. Huh? I don't put my winter coartees on in the morning. Does that make outspoken Stoke City chairman Peter Coates a coartees?
I still remember Ian Botham playing for England in india many years ago and the Indian commentator on TMS referring to him as Ian Bottom...
Just Because I Eat Worms
Something happened at work that I can't go into in great detail, for obvious reasons, but it involved one of my clients telling me that nobody liked me and that everybody hated me (like that would be a problem in my job); presumably designed to make me feel bad and leave. However, before I could come back with some witty retort about anything, three of my other clients informed the other that he was wrong and everybody thinks I'm 'good', 'cool' and 'standard', thus putting said accuser firmly in his place and leaving me sitting there quietly feeling pretty good about myself. It was made slightly bizarre by the guy who claimed no one liked me telling me that when he leaves he's going to 'take a shit on my car'. In this current spell of weather, he's more than happy to try.
Great Expectations
I have a week off. I'm sitting here with the rather prominent remnants of my last holiday still sitting heavily on my chest. I have no had 'this cough' for 8 weeks, which is a lot, but if it last until the wife's birthday then I will have had it for a quarter of a year!
The last couple of days, I've been walking around on tenterhooks; what with working in a Petri dish of disease, I've had icy conditions, snow and over-cautiousness to contend with. I have been literally praying for a week without being ill, having a bad [insert part of body here] or my week being ruined by anything. As I said to the wife last night, even if all I do all week is keep the house tidy and take the dogs out every day then I will be happy. I shall also add having a few lie ins and maybe a few pints to that list, but I just want an uneventful week of reasonably mild weather and for the following 6 or 7 weeks to be quick and Easter to get here as quickly as possible.
And there's me telling people not to wish their lives away...
Principles
I don't like John Terry. I think he encapsulates everything that is wrong about lad culture in football and I believe that when he was stripped of the England team captaincy the first time, he should never have been given it back. I also don't believe that Terry is anything but a passive racist - the same kind as people who use terms such as 'coloured' 'darky' or 'half-caste' - and I also believe that Fabio Capello was right to walk on a matter of principle. I was also glad to see him go because I don't think he advanced the cause of the England team an awful lot, but I would have preferred him to go after our ignominious departure from Poland and Ukraine. Capello is dead right, a man is innocent until proven guilty and if anything, the man - Terry - should have been 'persuaded' to step down on his own rather than cause the ructions it did. unless, of course, the FA were fed up with their anything but role model captain and the manager who seems to have less of an idea how to run the team than Beaker from the Muppets.
Now, because John Terry is essentially a twat, my football team are possibly... possibly? Who am I kidding? Definitely going to lose their saviour and be left with a rebuilding scheme under a new manager, just as we are on the verge of becoming, justifiably, one of the Big Four teams in England. It is a depressing dichotomy: I want what's best for my team, but I would like to see England become a force to be reckoned with again on the world football stage and if Harry Rednapp can get an England team playing like Spurs then the future isn't just bright, it's positively nuclear. If 'Arry can get England's misfiring bunch of overpaid prima donnas playing good attacking football, with verve and fair, then I think we'd be disappointed if we didn't win a trophy, but would be happy with a team trying to win it.
Now, if only Daniel Levy could tempt someone like Jose Mourinho or Gus Hiddink to coach my team, then I might just be inclined to be optimistic about the future.
Snippets
I burnt my finger on porridge!
Someone I know got run over.
I had my first Kingston Topaz since September.
I'm trying to help a mate get a job.
I was convinced on Thursday that I had TB.
After December 2010, you would have thought the country could have dealt with 3 inches of snow a little better and less dramatically.
We need a plumber.
That is all.
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