Week 145, Five things: Gigs; April; Mystery year; Names; This will change your life

While tidying up I unearthed this band related artefact.

Caustic Soup on tour.

Surely this amount of gigs wasn't sustainable given the number of venues within relatively easy reach of our home base.  Distance was no object, as long as it took less than an hour to get there and we could get our PA back in time for midnight, otherwise it would turn into a pumpkin sized excess charge.  I certainly don't remember there being an average of four gigs per month.  Rock and roll excess huh?

My memory may not be accurate, perhaps we supported Guns N' Roses at some point.  Although given the size of Morrisey's Riverside, a regular venue for us, I doubt it would have had room for the provisions for their legendary consumption, or indeed Duff McKagan's exploding pancreas.  No, we wouldn't have supported them, there would have ended up being an altercation with Axl Rose caused by him being an arse.

As for the Slug and Fiddle (proprietor Herbie Armstrong) gig on Thursday 17 April being switched to the Foundry and Firkin, I have no idea, maybe we never played the Slug.  We did at some point play The Boardwalk, or Mucky Duck as it should properly be known, the other one of Herbie Armstrong's pubs, a stage graced by many bands people had actually heard of.

I'm quite prepared to extrapolate from this and believe we played around 50 gigs per year for five years if it adds to the mythology.  A mythology which included us being the first band to play an open air festival on The Ponderosa in Sheffield since Free, which is probably, nearly true - it was definitely the easiest gig for me to get to, I just took the lift down from my flat with my guitar and walked to the stage.

I also found copies of the setlist, and while many songs were easy to recollect I struggled to associate some of the titles with any tune at all - something we had occasionally been accused of, however being an avant-garde outfit this didn't perturb us.

The unknown year?  My skills of Googling tell me that Friday 18 April was in 1997.  Less than a fortnight after the final gig listed here we had a Labour government, heady days where people appeared to know what they were doing and not just blundering about like a bunch of privileged, tousle-haired twats.

Exactly the sorts of things that will change your life.

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Week 144, Planet of the sheds

"Nobody should be denied a shed."

So said Fallacious, the Greek pragmatist, sometime around 400 BC - and in doing so Fallacious managed to predate the US tradition of pragmatism by some 2000 odd years, much to the annoyance of Charles Peirce.  Peirce subsequently steadfastly refused to countenance outbuildings of any kind on his substantial farmland, which severely restricted income and lead to years of poverty.

Why this interest in sheds?

I had the good fortune to see the inside of a decently sized outbuilding the other day, a building which included a cast iron range.  Myself and a couple of others were discussing what a fine construction it was when the topic moved to storage, and how outhouses, sheds and the like, rapidly become filled with items.

One of the party, who shall remain nameless, said he had five sheds.  Five whole sheds.

This makes the 1969 Monty Python sketch "Arthur 'two sheds' Jackson" appear rather tame.

So Gary - let's call him Gary, that isn't his name - Gary 'five sheds' went on to explain that he had all sorts of things in the sheds, wood, more wood, a lot of wood, and other things.  The rest of us agreed that we had a lot of things in our sheds too, wood, a lot of wood, and other things that weren't wood but which were not dissimilar to wood in their property of space consumption.

Having grown up with no male role model to speak of, other than Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise, I found it reassuring and satisfying to discover that the acquisition of sheds, and the propensity of items to expand to fill those sheds, was not a peculiar one.  I refer to a male role model but I am aware that there are female shedees too, perhaps not as many, or perhaps due to a perceived, and very real, patriarchal disdain of female shedees they are not as forthcoming - fortunately these outmoded views are rapidly being discarded.

I am reminded of a number of songs about sheds.  Pat Benatar memorably sang about them and their storage capability, who could forget the line 'We have sheds, wood's not a battlefield' from the song Wood's not a Battlefield.  Pat was at the vanguard, knocking over the male-dominated, external non-permanent structure world view.  Views such as that of King Crimson in their song The Night Watch with the lyrics 'Shed, shed, the light of wood works shed, The struts before the plain sawn gate, now painted new and primed', where they refer to various pursuits deemed manly.

But I digress.

I've only got the two sheds myself, although I'm not called Arthur.

Perhaps there's someone, somewhere out there with two sheds called Martha?

Who knows.

I maybe confused.

Is it too early for a drink?

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Week 143, Red lights, lotto winner, flat out

Foot down, firm not hard, drop the clutch, drop the second clutch.

And we're off.

A few corners to settle down, take in the view, before giving it the beans.

On the straight, flat out, bouncing off the rev limiter.

Coming into the sequence of twisting bends.

Take the rear brake balance back 10%.

Check your tickets.

Spin off.

Wake up a winner.

The raffle - not the lottery, not the race.

The prize is a jar of green tomato chutney, so not too bad.

And here is the prize, in the shadow of a beer glass.

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Week 142, TiTTle Parking TaTTle

Here I am, parking to a T.

Classic manoeuvrability skills.

There's nothing in this location to say a person should park between the Ts.

I'm almost between them, partially over and beyond the edge.

The Ts may be nothing to do with parking - there's a gap between them, why is that?

I'm surprised nobody has popped up with a can of spray paint and inserted a W and an A between them.

One of the shops this car park services is Halfords.

They sell spray paint.

That's why I'm here.

But then the reason this car park is empty is that there's a thirty second walk to the shops - drivers prefer not to walk.

If there's a pavement to park on, which is closer to the store, then so be it.

So nobody but myself and the one other person parked here is aware of the comedy potential.

Weak comedy potential.

Very weak.

Toilet, that might fit as well.

Depending on the font and the kerning.

Tastiest.

Trout.

...

No, I didn't waste my expensive spray paint on the tarmac.

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Week 141, The Walkley crocodile

You can walk a long way in a pair of fancy shoes, but first it is essential that you are able to walk a long way regardless of the nature of the shoe.  My main mode of transport over longer distances has been the bicycle, not fancy shoes - and not that I couldn't walk a long way if I desired, that's not open to question, but mainly that if I was to go a long way then I'd prefer to do it via some means that allowed me to do it sitting down.

Having said that, Walkley, a gateway to Crookes, wasn't any significant distance away from wherever I had started on that particular day.  But I was on a bicycle, more specifically a mountain bike.  Being on a mountain bike is the important part.

While noodling around Walkley on two wheels, I was just about to pass from South Road to Howard Road, I was called to by an old acquaintance.

"Do you know anyone that wants to swap a mountain bike for a crocodile?"

This might appear an unusual request in the general run of things, however from this person it was well within the spectrum of general possibility.  One of their main topics of conversation was that of quantum mechanics, often counterpointed by the intricacies of bricklaying and the optimal trowel method for applying gobbo to headers and stretchers.

So I followed him in to take a look at the beast.

It was about 80cm long and kept in a tank that can't have been much more than a metre in length.  Other than the confinement it appeared to be in fine health, and it had a terrific set of teeth.

We chatted for a bit about stuff, I can't remember anything about where it came from or how he came by it, and I left saying I'd ask around.  I don't recall ever mentioning it to anyone - I wasn't really sure whether it was a crocodile or an alligator, the specifics would have made me reluctant in case a prospective mountain bike swapee was disappointed to discover it was the wrong type of reptile.

I have no idea what happened to this little bit of the Everglades transported to a Sheffield suburb.  Perhaps he gave up trying to swap it and had the poor, small creature turned into a tiny, single fancy shoe.  You wouldn't walk far in one of those.

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