Exam Season

The pressure's on, and make no mistake.  I had a rehearsal yesterday with the band I play lead guitar for.  My attitude to musical endeavours is the same as the one I adopted at school, i.e., do as little actual work as possible and get by using a combination of obfuscation and charm.

This strategy is okay up to a point, but we've a gig looming and yesterday left me in no doubt that there are serious holes in my knowledge.  I've just made a revision timetable to start plugging these, and it can be summarised as: learn all the songs properly for once.  I honestly believed that I did know the set reasonably well, but that's bullshit it appears.  And given that I hadn't actually studied any of the written music, how could I have learned them?  Via some sort of rock n roll osmosis?

So I've three weeks until the next rehearsal and a ton/ne of work to do.  It's like being a student, except that I have boring full time job to hold down at the same time.  Tiresome.

Demos Rousseau

There's a general election afoot in the kay-of-yu, and the absence of excitement is palpable.  We, the electorate, don't want to have to make life-changing decisions.  That's the politicians' job.  We just want to vote in alignment with our prejudices, like our forebears, and then wash our hands of the consequences.  Is that too much to ask?

I'm almost minded not to vote, for the first time since my teens.  It's too intimidating.  No-one, not the politicians, the pundits, the academics nor the public, knows what's for the best.  They might as well get an astrologer to present Newsnight.  "As Venus is entering Sagittarius, you might want to think about opening a mini-cash ISA and voting UKIP."

The trouble is I can't spoil my ballot paper.  I'm 48 years old.  That kind of thing is fine if you're 19; it comes across as committed, passionate and charming, albeit cock-headed and simplistic.  At 48, you just look like a dick.  It's the political equivalent of a feather cut and a tight Fred Perry polo shirt on a twenty stone plasterer.  Everyone you happen across thinks the same: sober-up, mate.

How d'you like your eggs? Easter.

Well, hello there.  I've allowed another sizeable gap in my postings to emerge.  Sorry about that; I'll do better from now on.

The bee-half and I are just back from an Easter jaunt to the Netherlands.  I've posted before about why I love the low countries: they're just so well-run and sensible - a pleasure to be in.  Yes, Holland lacks the raw drama of Andalusia or the Amalfi Coast, but I'm a 48-year-old homeowner from south east England, not Peter the Great, tsar of all the Russias.

We didn't take our bikes with us this time as the missus had a squitty tummy in the days before we left and didn't want to spend Good Friday squatting in ditch behind a windmill.  This turned out to be an inspired choice.  We travelled by train instead and hired town bikes when we got there.

You really get to know a place when you've visited at least half a dozen of its neighbourhoods.  Without doing this, you just hang around the middle of town, like a giant pigeon.  Utrecht for example, a city we've visited several times previously, opened up its charming hinterland to us once we had put in a few miles.  On bike touring trips we generally arrive there having already done 50kms, and all you want to do then is try and get the crease out of your arse before the next day's exertions.