Watch What You Eat

There was a time, I think it was the late pleistocene, when I lived with a woman. She was interested in knitting and spinning, and one night when I was watching the tv she was busy turning a raw fleece into knitting wool. Amongst the fibres she found an intact dead beetle, and when she showed it to me I accidentally ate it. It's not as unlikely as it sounds, I had been eating very dark bitter chocolate with crunchy little cocoa nibs. After I'd finished I swept up the dropped shards and crumbs of chocolate and threw them into my mouth. It was only when my girlfriend asked for her beetle back that I realised it must have been amongst the "chocolate".

I did exactly the same thing, but much worse, over the weekend. For breakfast on Sunday I treated myself to croissants and fresh coffee. The Croissants were so moreish that I swept up all the crumbs and flakes from the dining table and threw them into my mouth. I was sitting at the same place where I had rolled and smoked a cigarette the previous night, and the last mouthful of breakfast contained both ash and dried up tobacco. It wasn't excellent.

Richard "Broken Alarm Clock" B

Relax

The weekend before last was very tiring, I worked last week, and then I stayed up late on Friday doing a show. To compensate I had all of Saturday afternoon and evening to myself. I had a bath in the middle of the afternoon, read, watched TV, ate a Chinese takeaway by myself and went to bed before 10:30. It was luxury. Marred by the creeping realization that I may be the most boring man alive. When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut and a pilot, later I wanted to invent computers, and later still I wanted to be a rock star. On Saturday I had time and money to spend on myself, but my dreams have shrunk to the point where they don't even involve loose cars and fast women, seemingly what I'm interested in is profligate use of the hot water and not cooking my own evening meal.

Richard "Steve Davis" B

Interred

This weekend we buried my dad's ashes in the family plot in the Rosary Cemetery in Norwich. It was a sad and beautiful day, but not without some funny moments. The ceremony was conducted by a Church of England Canon, and that meant I could get a very old joke out of retirement for the day: "He's been fired!"

One of the tributes came from a woman who was a typist in the 60s and had typed up one of my dad's cruising logs. Copy typing is a boring job, and boat logs aren't much more than a list of positions, distances and brief comments about sea, weather, vessel and crew. However she described this particular job as an exciting page-turner. I haven't read it, but I'd like to think it's a kind of predecessor to this bolingblog. If I ever find it I hope to publish it on the internet as "bolinglog".

There was another story about one of my dad's genuine log entries, from a different boat and a different decade. It said "Collected inflatable rubber dinghy from Mr. Reid. Rather old and flabby".

Richard "old jokes home" B

Farewell

Drummers spend years learning a skill called independence. This doesn't mean learning to live away from their mums, or making their own decisions; it means being able to do different things and play different rhythms with each of their (usually) four limbs.

The drummer that I have been playing with for the last six years played his last show with the band this weekend. It was emotional and poorly attended. Over all this time, and during every song that we have played he has been the model of friendly dependability. I have many fond memories of him, and his playing will be sorely missed. However, the best demonstration of his skill came nowhere near a drum kit, it was when I handed him a mug of tea and a slice of cake. I offered them to him at the same time, the wrong way around. With fluid and instinctive motion he crossed his hands (right over left), grabbed the tea and the cake simultaneously, and brought the cake up to his mouth in his left hand without spilling the tea.

Richard "Goodbye" B

Lost Property

The drum kits usually used in modern music tend to have five drums and a few cymbals. You sit behind the bass drum and play it with a beater operated by your right foot. The snare drum is between your knees, and your left foot opens and closes a pair of mechanically operated cymbals. A rack on top of the bass drum holds two tom-toms and a larger tom-tom is placed on the floor to your right. Cymbals hang from stands with increasing proliferation wherever there is room, bells, woodblocks and other effects are attached to the drums and stands like mirrors to a mod's Lambretta.

When a drummer is short of money/time/energy/room-in-the-car/space-on-stage then the number of cymbals is the first thing to be reduced, the first drum to be sacrificed is the second rack tom-tom. In fact a good number of indie drummers usually play with one rack tom and put their ride cymbal in the space left above the bass drum.

My band recently took on a new drummer, and I have been lending him parts of my drum kit to rehearse with. Last week I got home from the practice room and I didn't have all of the drums. I rang the drummer hoping that he had carried one up to his flat by accident. He hadn't. I then had him walk down to the street to see if we'd left it in the gutter when he got his gear out of the car. We Hadn't. I then drove back to the musicians' cooperative where we'd rehearsed. It wasn't their either.

I was furious that I'd lost a drum, but at least it was the second rack tom, and as such was pretty optional. As I drove back from the practice room for a second time, without my drum, I was considering how unlikely it was that I'd lost the only drum that we could easily live without. Somewhere on the journey I remembered that the drummer had said, several weeks previously, that he only needed one rack tom, and that I'd put the other one away safely in my loft.

Richard "forgetful" B

Holiday

I've been on holiday for a couple of weeks driving around the country. I visited all kinds of places friends, family, private gardens, building sites, and aircraft museums, but the most interesting visit was three nights in the 1970's.

I stayed with my brother and his wife at her mother's house. It's a perfectly preserved time capsule of furniture and decorations from about 40 years ago. Among the exhibits, some of my favourites were:

• A kitchen with a chocolate brown electric cooker, and a serving hatch into the dining room.
• A mains powered kitchen clock.
• An electric whisk so heavy and powerful you could kill a man with it.
• Glass corn cob dishes with matching forks.
• Small cut-glass dessert bowls from which we ate yet-to-be-invented Mint Vienetta.
• A wood effect Cathode Ray Tube television with a bulging 4:3 screen.
• A criss-cross knick knack shelf.
• A white melamine dressing table with brass drawer handles.
• Loud floral curtains.
• Blown vinyl wallpaper.
• A ding-dong doorbell with chimes as long as organ pipes.
• Glass fronted wood veneer cabinets.
• An asymmetric York-stone fireplace with a brass chimney hood.
• An entertainment centre that plays records and cassettes.
• Spider plants.
• Artex.
• Carpets with a repeating brown blotch pattern.
• A floral three piece suite surrounding an imitation sheepskin rug.
• Pink velvet curtains.
• A cloth lampshade with string fringes.
• Interior secondary glazing.
• A bathroom with matching beige bath, toilet, and basin, and maroon wall-to-wall carpet, and a moulded plastic medicine cabinet.

Richard "time machine" B