Night Hunger

It's nearly 4AM and I've woke up absolutely starving, with a craving for Sausage Rolls, well Ginsters Ploughmans Rolls, to be precise :)

If it wasn;t lashing down, I'd be making my way to ASDA now, to satisfy my craving.

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Some Ramblings

My life is a bit boring. . . Well OK it's very boring.
Everybody else seems to have a cool existence doing exciting stuff and going to exciting places. All i seem to do is; Go to work; come home to eat and sleep, go back to work, go to ASDA, go to work, go to bed . . . you get the picture.

Anyway, here's a little rundown of what things have happened to me in the past four weeks or so. OK when I say happened to me, what I really mean is things that have happened. . . and I just happened to witness them. Most of the exciting stuff doesn't really involve me.

This next bit did involve me, I was actually there. I was invited to a Secret Gig a few weeks ago by Stephen Langstaff. It was in The Mocha Lounge in Sir Thomas Street, Liverpool. It was a great little acoustic gig, Just Ste and his Drummer Ste who used to drum for Mesemenie (one of many great Liverpool bands that just faded away, when they should have really went somewhere). Mr Langstaff was great, as usual, performing most of the old favourites and a few new tracks. It was like a mini MTV unplugged session, without the TV cameras. Linzi took a few photo's. The light was pretty bad and got worse when they turned out the lights. . . Ever the perfectionist Linzi has decided that all her photo's from that night are not worth looking at and to date she has only shown me one frame. The night ended with me meeting up with a few people from work at The News Bar and then a Kebab.

The following evening Sense of Sound were through to the final six in Last Choir Standing on BBC1. Being totally unbiased :) I can honestley say that SOS were the best choir on the night. The other fve choirs performed to backing tracks and did dance routines. Only Men Aloud (Who incidentally won the competition last night) Actually performed a routine that I could only describe as a Black and White Minstrels number. It measured Gorgonzola on the cheese-o-meter! Sense of Sound performed "Smiley Faces" by Gnarls Barkley.

They were the only choir to perform completely a-Capella. They were that good that it actually sounded like there was a backing track. (Maybe that was the problem). At the end of the show. It went to phone votes. I voted about 100 times for SOS but at the end of the show Sense of Sound and Revelation had both got the LOWEST amount of votes and had to go into a sing off on the next show, the following night. OK with a bit of TV magic the show was recorded straight after the Saturday night show and the judges made a decision based on one song. SOS performed Gabriel by Lamb and Revelation did Lovely Day by Bill Withers, again with a backing track.
Judge who's best yourself. Here's the vids.




Jo phoned me at about a quarter to eleven to tell me that they had been knocked out.
I lost all interest in the competition after this. It was definitely a fix.
Even last night's fnal was a farce. Ysgol Glanaethwy out-performed Only Men Aloud by a mile but OMA won. When they performed their B&W minstrel act as a closing for the show. "Don't Rain on My Parade". . . Sparkly silver ticker tape rain fell onto them. Seems the BBC already knew they would win and had it waiting in the studio ceiling.

Back to my boring life. . . Work has been a bit weird. I've gone from being a hands on , manual worker, running a Spray Drier, to an office waller. spending 8 hours a day doing Excel stuff which I've had to teach myself seeing as the training matrix is a bit of a farce. Anyway I'm back on the drier for the next few weeks.

Another exciting (not) thing that happened was my Huey Pro decided to stop working.
So off I went to Apogaeum in Warrington to return it. True to form It worked perfectly in the iMac they plugged it in to. So off home I went and yep, it's still working.

Last weekend was The Mathew Street Festival. This is the first time I've been ever. I'm ususally away in Scotland or Wales up a mountain, on my bike. But this year I haven't been out on my bike at all. So I decided to go and see, what I have been missing. Sunday was great. I can't believe it was so well organised. I wandered between the stages with Dave D and Gill, Neil, Wardy and Claire gradually getting drunker and more sunburned on my head. Highlights of Sunday were Kappa on the Superlambanana Stage and Chas & Dave on the Tunnel Stage. I danced like a dirty Cockney while making dirty Cockney noises, all of which I can't spell otherwise I'd have written them here. We ended up in the Metro Bar. By this time everything was becoming a blur.
Somehow I woke up at the right station on the train home. I was in bed by half nine. At about 1 in the morning I was wide awake. My sunburned head, had given me sunstroke. Hot and Cold sweats and the shivers in the middle of the night is not fun. Especially when you have got to be up at 7 the next day. I took a couple of Nurofen and drank a couple of pints of water and went back to bed. By 7 I was feeling great and it was back to the station and on the train to do it all again.
I took it easy on Monday I drank only Lucosade and water and put factor 30 sunblock on my poor head. My legs were killing me from all that Dirty Cockney Dancin' the day before. Amy Wynehouse and God Save The Queen were fantastic. Finally we went down to the Water Street Stage to see Vogue a Madonna tribute act. She got changed about 20 times in 45 mins wearing every madonna outfit you could imagine, from the pointy tits thing to a little pink swimsuit. And that was it. End of the festival. Liverpool town centre was full of drunks and heaps of rubbish and amazingly I didn't see one fight or anyone unconscious on the floor. :)
I had one of those moments when I thought I recognised someone in the street and then thought it wasn't him, so didn't say hello. then I thought that it was him and felt guilty for ignoring him. This happens to me a lot. i really should wear my glasses more often.
Claire decided that we were going to the Metro again, She said she had noticed a poster announcing that, Kappa were going to be playing there when we were in there the night before, or she had dreamt it. . . She was right. Kappa made me deaf! My ears were still ringing the next day. I think The Mathew Street Festival is on my list of to do's every August bank Holiday from now on.

This weekend I've done nowt. I'm totally skint and I still haven't paid my mortgage.
I definitely need to start selling stuff. Anyone want a print or a painting?

Just a Quickie

I was going to make this a rambling blog about the last few weeks but I just saw the time and I'm going to have to leg it to work . . . . So See ya later

I actually went and used my camera!!!!

Yesterday was an historic occasion! I actually took some advice and got out ant took some photo's. I got a text off Jo, asking me to come down to Liverpool ONE and take some photographs of Sense of Sound. They're trying to get as many people as possible, to vote for them in Last Choir Standing, next week. They were amazing, as usual and the crowd really took a shine to them. Later on when SOS had gone off to perform at the Brouhaha festival. I could hear various bods suddenly breaking into "Cry Me A River" :)

Then I went on a little walk around town and took a few more shots.


By the time I got home, last night, I was in photographer mode:)
I spent most of the evening editing shots and uploading them to Flickr.

I don't do that many "People" shots so I was pleasantly surprised that most of my "Sense of Sound" shot's turned out so well.
I could really get into this photography lark. . . . Pete Carr, LOOK OUT! :)

A bit of web building

I updated Jo's site this morning. And that's about the limit of my creative output this week :)

and Linzi, if you're reading this. . .
DON'T GIVE UP! You know how good you are, you know you can make it work, if you really want it bad enough!



Links: Joanne Roberts Photography - Studio Silver

I wanna do more paintings

I'm in the mood to do some painting again. I can feel a creative spurt coming on. . .

Gigs, Birds and My Magic Bag

I know i should have been Blogging more, but I have had a bit of a mental block. So here's a biggun to tide me over until next time.
Last week i went to see The Bangles at the Carling. They were great. They were all pushing 50 but looked fantastic and the sound was spectacular. The bass player was a bit on the scary side though. A proper Stepford Wife. The fixed grin was almost as stiff as her boobs, which didn't move at all, even when she was really going for it. Well when i say going for it. I mean she actually took a couple of steps forward from her mark on the stage. The support was Stephen Langstaff and he was great as usual. He was hoping to be signed up by the manager of the Kooks but he never turned up at the gig. Hopefully he'll realise the error of his ways. . . If you're reading this Ste, I'll send you the cash I owe you next Friday (payday) as I'm skint until then :) Afterwards We strolled down to the Cavern to see some Beatles tribute band The Mersey Beatles. They were beatle-tastic.

On Saturday Jo was on TV in "Last Choir Standing" There was only one choir really in the same league as Sense of Sound so I think it will end up with a "Sing Off" between Sense of Sound and Revelation. Watch em this Saturday BBC1 Saturday at 7PM.

Back in 1992, when i was sleeping on my mates floor in his spare room I used to go to sleep to the sounds of birds tweeting. There was a test signal for ClassicFM which was a recording of birds tweeting and other country sounds. I loved it. I'm a bit of an insomniac and there's many a time I've gone to bed and got back up again without a wink of sleep, Only to fall asleep after about 2 pints in a pub. . . When I used to listen to this tweety radio show back in 92 I  had no problem dropping off. It was just so soothing. To cut a long story short, I couldn't sleep on Sunday night. So I turned on my DAB radio and did a bit of a trawl, I tried Radio3 at first but It was too depressing so I just  carried on searching for something soothing. And suddenly there were birds singing. Yay! The DAB people have given a whole station to my favourite birdy sounds. I listened for about 10 mins and i was off. The next morning I woke up to the same birdy sounds and some real ones from outside my window. It's worked every night this week. They'd better keep broadcasting it. It's my second favourite radio station . LINK

I had to take Tuesday off work because of a reallly weird incident. I'm either going mad or I've got a ghost in my flat.
I got home from work on Monday night and put my bag, phone and keys on top of a holdall, in my living room. The holdall has got a load of clean washing in it, socks, undies and the like. . . Well the next morning. I was getting ready to go to work and I picked up my bag and phone but my keys weren't there. I looked in my bag, coat pocket and kecks but I couldn't find them. So I emptied all the washing out of the holdall and they weren't there either. But here's a weird thing. In amongst the washing was a part used ream of printer paper???? How that got there is a mystery. It got weirder than that though. I felt something inside the ream. I found a Wacom Pen, that I had lost about 3 years ago. SEE LINK How did this ream of paper get inside my clean washing bag??? There was also a screwdriver.

So the search carried on. . . No keys on the desk, chairs, couch, fridge, sink, oven, toilet, bed, telly or any of the other 1000 places I looked. Then I thought that I must have left them in the door. Nope! My van was still on the drive and the keys are all on the same bunch, so surely, if anyone had seen them in my door, they would have taken the opportunity to nick my van. There was nothing I could do. I was already late. so i phoned work and explained my predicament and booked the day off. Afterall I couldn't leave my flat without my keys. The search went on for another couple of hours. Nowt was found.

So I started looking for my spares. I found a spare key for my van and i found a spare key for the mortice lock, but no spare for the Yale. My only option was to buy a new Yale lock. . . So I put my Yale on the snip and locked the door with my mortice lock. And it was off to B&Q. Sixty five quid later I was back home with a replacement lock. It's a simple job to replace a Yale lock, you only need a screwdriver. I'd spotted one in my holdall earlier on so I popped upstairs to get it. I put my hand in the holdall and rummaged round and found it. As i pulled it out I felt something else. I pulled out a sock. And INSIDE my sock were my keys!?! How did that happen? I can see how they could have slipped into the holdall, but INSIDE a sock INSIDE the holdall is a bit weird. . . Or have I got a magic bag, that helps me find lost things??? I haven't seen my driving license for a while, I afraid to look. . .

Anyhoo, luckily I hadn't opened the the packaging for the lock, so I took it back to the shop for a refund :) I drove straight to Tesco's and bought a load of food. It's got to last until a week on friday. . . skint again.