Straight talking

So our handsome and talented eldest grandson Sam and his great friend Chizz have started a podcast called Straight Talking where they interview other young people about their ambitions and motivations etc. It’s quite new but will hopefully lead to some fascinating conversations. Now they clearly felt the need to balance all this youthful vitality with some hefty experience from a hefty old sod and I was humbled that they asked me to fulfil this role.  What the hell do I know after all? Well if you want to find out, check out this link below and I’m sure Sam and Chizz would love it if you socialised their podcast…

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Knick knacks

I’ve mentioned before that I head to the paper shop early each morning and I pass by a whole area of boarding houses most of them with punny Shakespearean names. Hamlet House is just one of the more imaginative examples.  Anyway I’m quite a Nosey Parker and I can’t help looking in the windows to study how the Stratford upon Avon landlady styles her rooms compared with her Blackpool equivalent. It’s quite illuminating (see what I did there?)

Green vegetables; the good, the bad and the ugly

Gosh I’m writing a lot for my client. It’s enjoyable and stimulating but It kinda stalls my enthusiasm for blogging a little bit. But I became a little bit enthused as I was just reading this book my daughter bought me for Fathers’s Day entitled ‘New Yorkers, A City and Its People In Our Time’. It is brilliant. It’s about a Canadian guy who spent time in an English village, then in London before moving to NYC and recording hundreds of conversations with the locals about their views on their ‘town’. Subsequently writing them up and drawing some conclusions. It takes him years and it’s a real opus. I am very tempted to give up everything and produce a book like his. So inspired by his work I thought I’d write a blog post about vegetables. When inspiration hits….

A dog’s tailpiece

I thought I’d add a postscript to yesterday’s dog story… just to show I can be nice about our four-legged friends.  We are early risers and every morning around 6am I head to my local shop to get my I paper. The shop opens at 5.30am so they are always ready for me and as I’ve mentioned before, I just pop in, pick up the paper and settle up each Saturday. As you can imagine it’s very quiet at that time with hardly any traffic or people around. But if the weather’s fair I do have two characters who share the morning with me. It’s an older guy like me and his old shepherd dog. They use the lovely little park at the end of our road and it’s always completely vacant save for the odd vagrant. It houses a lovely pagoda and lots of big old trees…

And every day I see this sheep dog  run around then stop deadly still staring up into the trees. Then off he shoots to across the park to another tree staring upwards. After many early morning nods of the head towards his owner I stopped this morning to ask what the dog was doing. He explained that he was a working sheepdog until his retirement and shepherding is in his blood. So every day he sits beneath the trees looking out for squirrels and once he fixes on one he follows it swiftly across the ground as it leaps around the tree branches. It’s actually very satisfying to watch the dog – just as it is watching a sheepdog doing its thing in a field of sheep. It’s clearly not lost any of its alertness nor short distance speed. I think these must be the most intelligent of all dogs and I have to admit I’m a bit of a fan. I also really enjoy watching the owner patiently watching his dog with evident affection. They are a real team. I wonder if they worked with sheep together in the past. That’s a conversation for tomorrow.

But I am becoming very fond of this one man and his dog.

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Me, dogs and big strong men

I’ve been helping a company with its marketing activity recently, involving quite a bit of content writing, which has kind of diluted my creative juices a bit for my pp stuff. But I thought I should get back in the ole saddle before I forget what it’s like to write completely without a direction/brief. Anyway my subject this evening is back to an old shaggy dog theme. In fact it’s about shaggy dogs. Well actually it’s about little dogs. And men. Big old macho men. Or so I thought.

Days off…and all that

So  a couple of weeks ago whilst Caz was having an eye op in a clinic in Milton Keynes I popped down the road to IKEA to buy a picture frame to house some poster images I’d found online of a few of the best concerts I’d ever witnessed; Led Zeppelin playing at Aberystwyth (it’s so true), Springsteen at Villa Park, Tina Turner at Woburn and Hendrix at Blackpool’s Winter gardens. I know it sounds as likely as Hancock apologising for being such an arrogant twat, but it truly happened. And he shared the bill with Pink Floyd, The Nice (EL&P), The Move, Amen Corner and Eire Apparent. What a line up.