So I was sitting on the garden wall watching the traffic go by and a fat wood pigeon lands in the middle of the road. I think: “He’s going to get run over” and lo-and-behold a car goes over it, breaking its neck. The pigeon is now thrashing around and I think “I’ll go and move it out of the road”. Before I could get to my feet a 4×4 burst the pigeon as if it were a feathered-filled balloon with a gut-wrenching pop.
Category: Diary
Listening to The Roches – ” Moonswept” in bed. This how life should be… However, the VAT man cometh…and I am afraid…
Got a cheque from the insurance company today. I’m off to go spend it on booze and whores… (not really – I got debts to pay instead)
Sales appear to be up. We are buying more stock. Not up to old levels but something is happening and seems to be related to us moving back above the shop…thanks fair-weathered shoppers for your non-support in the hard times.
Another terrible, disjointed night’s sleep. Everytime a car speeds past the house, I wake with fear, my heart racing at a million miles an hour. The noise = the crash = fear. I’ve never woken with my chest so tight and my left arm tingling…and that’s not a good sign, is it?
The insurance company wants me to “re-open” the shop, which is tricky as the shop has been open since Nov 5, just over a fortnight after the accident. So how do you “re-open” something that’s already open? They want advertising, they want leafletting, they want the Lord Mayor. I want dancing girls and an elephant… The cost of a half-page advert in the local rags is just shy of £4000. Will they be so keen now?
Pray you never have to claim on your business insurance if you are VAT registered. If you claim, they give you the NET value of the claim and expect you to find the rest of the cash for the VAT, which you can reclaim later. Of course, if you have a small business it can be difficult to find £5000 here or £1000 there. Anyway, they are giving me a budget of £5000 to spend. Heigh ho!
Just had a recruitment consultant contact me about a job. Not sure if anything will come of it, but lobbed my CV in their direction and scared the moths away from my new suit.
Yorkshire Square is an old mucker from a music discussion forum I run. He very kindly bought a copy of EchoNET and has decided to review it for me. Below is his review and it nails the album to its core. It’s very perceptive.
You may be aware of this album, as a certain member of the board never seems to stop banging on about it (now who would that be?)
Anyway, my CD+DVD arrived in the post from CDBaby just the other day and I’ve been immersing myself in its delights ever since.
Aficionados of Mr Lock will already know where his styles lie and EchoNET continues, what for me is, his most successful genre. This is a wholly instrumental of guitar based music with additional percussion and effects. The lack of vocals is a real boost as Mr Lock sings like my granny farts; roughly and out of tune.
The music on the whole is undemanding, but has sufficient variety to maintain interest throughout; its a bit like easy listening for the left-field generation. The one thing that strikes me is that over the years Darren has really started to develop his own style (or lack of it in some tracks from previous outings). On earlier albums the influence of other well known players was more apparent but on EchoNET the artist plays very much in his own unique style. I did detect a hint of some of Yorkshire Square’s brilliant tracks from the Projekction CD in there, but then realised that all of the actual music was played by Mr Lock, so that probably explains that then!
This album should be in any self-respecting music lovers collection. If you haven’t got it yet, get it now. If you’ve downloaded it (especially if it was an illegal download), buy the CD+DVD set for the glorious surround sound and the sight of Mr Locks cheesy grin in the video of the last track. Go on; do it now!