A short word about my social life.

We have people coming over for dinner tomorrow night. For many of you out there in the Blogosphere this will not be anything of note and will be saying: “Ant, we do that nearly every weekend!” or “Yeah, so what?!?” Well the thing is that I don’t do having people round for dinner – never have done but Mrs Gruffsdad aka my ace and lovely wife Emily has met a lady called Jenny at a craft club* that she goes to on a Wednesday and they’ve have become firm friends so much so that we went to her house a couple of weeks ago for a meal and a game of Scrabble. I’d not met Jenny or her husband before that night and much to my surprise I liked them and had a lovely night – I don’t really do socialising or meeting new people – I am a very shy person** and either go way over the top and came across like a complete tool or I retreat into my shell and appear to be some unresponsive sociopath.

That night though I was a combination of the two and I think I did okay; I didn’t get any criticism on the way home from Emily, I didn’t make any rude comments about the CD and DVD collection in their house and I ate all that was put before me without even asking if there were any crisps available. Anyway we had a good evening and tomorrow night is the return match – Jenny and her husband Simon are coming over to ours for a meal and for me this equals a big deal. I started tidying the house this morning and thank God all the PS3 games are in alphabetical order on the shelf where they live so if nothing else they’ll not be able to fault us on that.

We have got the food sorted in that Gruff went into the Chinese takeaway (China Express in Dorchester on the High Street – I can’t recommend it highly enough.) on Wednesday and picked up a menu for us and we’re going for option G on the banquet section which looks really good although there is a lack of crispy duck which option H has but that is a tenner more and that unfortunately rules that choice out. I’ve not addressed with Emily whether we need a pudding but now I’ve thought about it that’s all I can think about – cake, ice cream, an ice pop, something with suet – what the hell should we do?!?!?

Then there’s the ambience. Jenny and Simon didn’t worry about background music but I feel that we should so have been thinking about it – do I go with some jazz – music that to be honest I can take or leave so why would I choose that? I’ve been enjoying Boards of Canada a lot this week and found that most relaxing or what about the new Primal Scream album that I’ve just got – okay be honest with me, I don’t need music do I? Surely the days when I wanted or indeed needed to look cool are gone aren’t they? I listen to the music that I want to these days and not what my achingly cool friend Dom thinks I should be listening to, I don’t really care what my friends listen to or get angry when they wax lyrical about the new Kenny G album:

 “Ant, he just nails that Crocodile Shoes cover – I’ll send you the MP3 of it.”

 “That would be great, thanks.”

I have but two band t-shirts these days that I got off Ebay – one is an ancient PIL one that I was wearing when Nye was born seven years ago and the other a Pop Will Eat Itself one and I do get a warm glow when people comment on them: “Oh man, I loved the Poppies!” Anyway I know that trying to be cool should be the preserve of the young and the foolish, I’m not the former but possibly the latter applies to me more often than I’d like to admit to and secretly I am hoping that I get to talk about my Beatles in Mono*** and Blur boxsets tomorrow evening.

The rather vague point of this blog post that I’m kind of getting to in a roundabout way is that over the last year I’ve changed my life considerably and this is the latest stage of that and I’m doing it because it means a lot to Emily and she means everything to me. The truth is that I’d be quite happy sitting in on a Saturday night watching crap on the telly with a Coke and some crisps and when we got invited round to Jenny and Simon’s house it went against everything that I held dear in my comfort zone to accept the invitation and go out but knowing how much it meant to Emily I surprised myself by saying yes. I surprised myself by then actually going and by having a good time and I’m really looking forward to tomorrow evening and having thought about it some more I will be going for some Purbeck ice cream for our pud. 

Hmm…reading back through all that I’m not actually sure that I made any point at all.

* You can follow Emily on Instagram and see some of the amazing things that she makes – Knit_with_Neville is her username. I am on Instagram as Gruffsdad and seem to take pictures of records I’ve bought and the cat – Emily is far more interesting than me.

** No really, I am.

*** If you want to know why The Beatles sound better in mono than stereo then either Google it or drop me a line.

 

Fur

Neville

I’m sat reading with Neville asleep next to me. It’s one of my favourite things.

Neville is cold

Nev is a bit strange today. That is all.

Snack of the day

On offer in Londis – they are scrummy!

Stereolab

I probably have more Stereolab related releases in my CD and vinyl collection than any other artist and it’s seemingly a love that will never die despite my wife’s continuing hatred of them. I first read about Stereolab in a Coleg Glan Hafren library copy of Melody Maker back in 1992, they had two releases out at the same time, their debut album Peng and a compilation of previously released seven inch singles called Switched On. I read the review, thought that I liked the sound of that, and truth be told I also thought their singer Laetitia Sadier was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen* and so off I popped into Cardiff’s city centre to buy both CDs at Spillers and that was it – I was hooked on Stereolab.**

Since then there have been 15 album releases, lots of eps, and way too many singles released for various tours and collaborations some of which have been on 7” vinyl, 3” mini CDs (my favourite is a collaboration with Nurse With Wound on CD single which came wrapped in a foil sleeve), flexi discs and so on and so on. I’ve got Laetita’s spin off band Monade’s releases which I really like and her solo albums are pretty darn good too. The Lab’s guitarist Tim Gane has made some soundtrack albums and I’ve got them too, oh and I bought the box set of singles that I already had when they first came out because it came with stickers, a DVD and a previously unreleased version of one of my favourite Lab songs ‘Ping Pong’ which let’s be frank here reader, I really struggle to hear any difference in when compared to the original version. I even have the e.p. of music made by band member Mary Hanson which was released after she died ten years ago and that is still sealed. Actually no, that’s not strictly true – I carefully unsealed it, ripped the tracks to put on my computer and then resealed it and you really can’t tell that it’s been opened – it’s in mint, like new condition.

Despite all this and despite my 21 years of dedication I am however somewhat of a Stereolab lightweight – even though as well as the stuff I’ve just mentioned I also have loads of Japanese versions of their albums which I had to get as they have tracks only available on these releases, I know for a fact that there are Lab fans out there whose collections trump mine several times over. They have the John Cage Bubblegum 7” single that came with an actual stick of bubblegum, every version of the Sound Dust album including the vinyl one which came with a hand painted book and tracks longer on the vinyl than the CD – don’t worry, I have these tracks thanks to a very good bloke called Basil on the Stereolab message board who made me a DVD with hours and hours of rare Stereolab stuff on that I didn’t have in exchange for a packet of Dorset Knobs.***

Am I jealous of these people? I’m not really sure – the old me absolutely, I’d love to have that stick of bubblegum sitting in my record box with the accompanying vinyl remaining doggedly unplayed as I already have the tracks on a Stereolab compilation (the Japanese version of course). But the new me, the one who knows that it’s only the music that matters, that I have all these songs and more on CD, on a lovely homemade DVD from Boris and on bootlegs downloaded from the Internet, is the new me jealous?

Oh of course I am.

* And I still do.

** I don’t feel confident enough in my writing abilities yet to attempt to write about what Stereolab sound like without sounding like a total pretentious muso but here is a link to their song Lo Boob Oscilator (It originally came out on Sub Pop on 7” clear vinyl – like you care!!!!) which is one of their songs that I think encapsulates absolutely everything that I love about them and everything that so infuriates my beautiful wife.

*** This is true.

Why I love reading.

I learnt to read as a young boy sitting on my Grandpa’s lap as he read the Daily Telegraph’s sports pages out loud to me. My parents took The Guardian perhaps as a balance to both sets of grandparents reading The Daily Telegraph and the end result of having newspapers in every family home that I lived in or visited was that I could read by the time I started school and my passion for books and reading has never really left me.

The first things I can remember reading were I guess the usual things for a child of the seventies – Ant and Bee, Topsy and Tim and a wide selection of Ladybird books covering subjects such as Captain Cook right through to a 50 page explanation of how a computer works which apparently is a very valuable book these days.

 Early on in my childhood I discovered Roald Dahl and he became a large part of my reading life but it wasn’t the usual Dahl books that I really loved, not for me Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or Fantastic Mr Fox. No, the one that hooked me and intrigues me to this day is Danny the Champion of the World.

 For me it’s unlike any other Dahl children’s book, it doesn’t have the signature comedic darkness that he is known and loved for, this one is dark in a realistic style and there are there are proper consequences to foolish or bad actions. There is a sense of sadness throughout the book that doesn’t really happen in his other works with the possible exception of my other favourite Dahl work, The Witches. From recollection the book doesn’t even really have a overly happy ending, just a resolution and the feeling that things will be okay but they won’t really get any better than this – there’s no chocolate factory to be had by Danny or his father.

 These days I read a lot, I need to read and my day doesn’t feel right if I haven’t read, even if it’s just one chapter of my book on the go. I like literary fiction, a bit of modern history and books about music but what I really love is a good crime thriller. I’ll be frank, sometimes there are times when I’ll read a rubbish one too just to get my fix of sadistic murders in various locations around the world – America, England, lots of Scottish crime writers seem to be on my Kindle and then of course there is the monster that is Scandinavian crime fiction but last week something really big happened to me and my reading.

 I was reading the first book by Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurdardottir called Last Rituals and it had been on my ‘to read’ list for a while and I thought that the time had come to make a start on it. I’d read good reviews online about the book and the Goodreads feedback was okay and for goodness sake it was a Scandinavian writer so obviously it was going to be great, she is “the next Stieg Larrson”, “as good as Jo Nesbo” and it had a great arty cover promising sacrificial murder, mysterious Icelandic magic and sex – it couldn’t fail!!!

 Well to be honest I hated it. I struggled to care about anything in the book, the storyline, the characters the relationships between the characters were all generic, boring, interchangeable and frankly dull. There was no humour, I basically came to dread picking the thing up and carrying on so I did the thing that I very rarely do with a book – I gave up reading the thing.

I didn’t take this decision lightly, I weighed up on the options, did I need to know “whodunit”? Would my life always have that nagging doubt in it without knowing? What if the book got picked up as a TV series by Icelandic state television and then got shown on BBC 4 on a Saturday night and became the next big thing and I felt obliged to go along with the praise even letting friends and colleagues know that “Well of course I read her stuff a couple of years ago”? Could I cope with this? I even discussed the potential dumping of the book and the ramifications of doing this with my wife:

Her: “You’re not enjoying it?”

Me: “No.”

Her: “Well read something else, it doesn’t matter.”

So I did, I stopped reading it and picked up a book by Adrian McKinty called Dead I May Well Be which had me laughing and caring about the characters straight away. I’m thinking about that book right now as I type this. Last night I was up late reading to the end of a chapter and then had to carry on until the end of the next one too as I literally could not sleep until I knew what was going to happen to the narrator of the story in that particular section of the story. How he was going to get out of the situation that he was in? What was he going to do if what he was planning came off? When things happened to him and his friends I got so excited, I read too quickly and had to go back and re-read sections just to make sure that I’d got all the information on the page into my head and when I reached the end of that extra chapter I still wanted to carry on reading but I needed sleep and so fell asleep thinking about what I’d just read and how the book was going to develop when I carried on reading it during my lunch hour the next day.

That’s what a good book does for me, it consumes me, enters my waking hours, makes me sit on a chair or lie in bed for hours until I’ve finished it and makes me forget everything else that’s going on in the my life.

 That’s why I love reading.