Happy Halloween!

From Spider Woman!





And her trusty sidekick Pumpkin Girl!

-- Posted from my iPhone

These are not the Apters that you are looking for...

This van was parked near the shops this morning; the company belongs Keith Apter, who I met many years ago when we were introduced by a mutual friend. We were both amazed to meet someone with our surname who wasn't a family member. We went to the pub, got drunk, and decided that our grandfathers may have been cousins. I haven't seen Keith for ages, but he has a few vans around town so I hope he's doing well.

Keith has a daughter called Sophie, who just happens to go to the Royal High School. Poppy has had to field various questions from her teachers about her relationship with Sophie. They're also astonished that they have two unrelated Apters in the school! The fact that Poppy does have a cousin called Sophie Apter has merely complicated the matter even further!


-- Posted from my iPhone

The Marshmallow Factor

An open fire, a toasting fork, a bag of marshmallows...and the X Factor! What more could a girl want?!

Lobbing rocks into Loch Tay

At dusk. On our holidays. Then back to the lodge and Nina and Scarlett, sat in front of a roaring log fire.

-- Posted from my iPhone

Holiday Outfit!

I'm off to Loch Tay in my lovely outfit from Uncle Mal & Auntie Al.

- Posted from my iPhone

Reckoning

R.E.M. - Reckoning

Side one
"Harborcoat" – 3:54
"7 Chinese Bros." – 4:18
"So. CentralRain (I'm Sorry)" – 3:15
"Pretty Persuasion" – 3:50
"Time After Time (AnnElise)" – 3:31
Side Two
"Second Guessing" – 2:51
"Letter Never Sent" – 2:59
"Camera" – 5:52
"(Don't GoBack To) Rockville" – 4:32
"Little America" – 2:58

I spent most of the 1980's wilfully avoiding REM as I was far too busy being a sullen little English indie kid, despising America in general, and reserving my venom for the American Music Scene. Why waste time on college rock when there was an new EP by another sub-C86 band to track down?

I only got into REM when I started working in a record shop, and decided to educate myself prior to the release of Out Of Time in 1990. This was when Madchester ruled the world, and the record shop was in thrall to the be-flared delights of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses, the excesses of E culture and the rave scene. And Phil Collins. I'm still trying to forget Phil Collins. We decided to treat the customers of HMV Preston to the delights of REM every morning for weeks on end.

The back catalogue was duly raided, and in my opinion Reckoning stands out as their finest album from the IRS years, and despite the world behemoth that REM became in the 1990's, this album still stands up as a coherent reminder of why they became so big - they had the songwriting chops, the musical arrangements are so tight, the harmonies delicious, the choruses are verging on the anthemic grandeur of Green, Out Of Time and beyond. The subtlety of the songs on Reckoning also provide the cues for the more downbeat sounds of albums like Automatic for The People.

It clocks in under 40 minutes, and every song fits together perfectly. I love Time After Time (AnnElise); but Don't Go Back To Rockville remains one of my all time favourite songs of all time. Melancholy, wistful, deliberate, I still change the lyrics and replace 'Rockville' with 'Rochdale'.

I barely listen to REM again these days, it seems as if they're just another band from my youth - they meant so much back then, but they've been cast aside so cheaply, someone else to skip past in iTunes...

...and yet...this album has just taken me back nineteen years to my youth, the long hot summer of 1990, Italia 90 on the TV, promises delivered, opportunities knocked, squandered, seized; Stipe covering some of the universals truths of youth, wise before his time, refusing to waste another year...I listened. I never went back to Rochdale. I've never wasted another year.