All things must pass

I have an announcement to make. This is the last post at Shades of Grey here at Blogger.com.

What? I hear you cry, has the old fool thrown in the blogging towel?

Not at all. As one door closes, another opens. I’d like to introduce the new, improved, Shades of Grey hosted at its own domain using WordPress.

I’m still getting the hang of it in my new home but I’ve managed to import the old Shades and Morleygate posts more-or-less complete. (What we IT people describe as a Partial Success).

Thank you for reading. Please update your hyper linky thingys to http://iangrey.org for your further enjoyment.

My Boomerang won’t come back

Ozzie Scot Colin Cambell says they are going to race Camels down under. He also comments that the impact of horse flu is still being felt.

As well as exporting an Arabian Derby there, how about importing an Australian Derby here? You could race Wallabys, the prizes could be soft cuddly Koala toys and the stall holders could all dress like Crocodile Dundee and wear Bush hats with corks on strings.

Elton Games could give us another opportunity to hear the “popular theme of the popular theme…”

We’re racing on the Australian Derby, it’s here so play it now.
Roll the balls to get the scores,
Ride the winner the prize is yours,
We’re racing on the Australian Derby, it’s here so play it now.

In the meantime, more snaps of the Blackpool version:

Alone again… (un)naturally

The house is strangely quiet. Karen and David have gone off to Chessington World of Adventures, (which is in halloween season) with an overnight stay tonight and tomorrow. I was tempted to join them, but I really need to get my teeth into the Accounts for the Mercia Cinema Society which close on the 31st and need to be audited by the 1st of December.

So, thirty six hours to do whatever I want. I can leave dirty dishes in the sink,eat Spam Fritters, wander round in my underpants, play the music I want suitably loud. No-one to complain, except the Guinea Pig (& maybe the neighbours for a couple of these activities). I’ve failed miserably on the first one, I’ve had the Spam Fritters now.

I was going to link in to Gilbert O’Sullivan singing “Alone again, naturally”, then I remembered that I have done that before, HERE.

Instead- here is a tenuous link. I have a Halloween Album from Andrew Gold (available on Amazon) who also performed with Graham Gouldman as Wax.

This is a fine video.

A couple of postscripts:

I went into the tyre slashing garage again today, as I pulled up a large angry beeping noise started. After a short while, the cashier pressed a button- and the traffic lights next to all of the stinger systems went off. It must have off days…

The story of the Duchess and the slightly offensive labyrinth:

“Visitors, you have seen everything.
We thank you.
Now happily piss off”.

The Duchess originally wanted it to say “Now happily fuck off” (well, this is implied in the book as in “even stronger language”) but she was talked out of it.

She got an eminent Latin teacher to translate (who wished to remain nameless and ergo blameless).

And another Blackpool snippet:

The Arabian Derby Camels are an Institution at the Plesh.

Apparently visiting Arabs keep the stall concession operators in suitable headgear.

These machines are made by a Company called Elton Games of Southport. You can hear the Arabian Derby jingle here (MP3).

LEA-DER! LEA-DER! LEA-DER!*

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Hat tip: Devil’s Kitchen (& lots of Blogpower regulars)

(* as people with a strong sense of irony (or sometimes stupidity) used to chant to Garry Glitter before he was “Forgotten but not gone”…)

Celebrity Heretic

I blogged about meeting my first celebrity a few months back as a Young Scientist.

He has a good piece on Times Online with a blast of climate change healthy scepticism. I have to say that I pay more attention to a hairy scientist like David B than a politician like (say) Al G.

You can read his piece here. Check out the comments as well.

(Image attribution: Wikipedia Commons)

Everything reminds me of something

This is a great book. Ian Clayton was in the Morley Literature Festival and is a well known “professional Yorkshireman”, a term he resents. The book is about the music of his life and it all gets brought back to his own home in Featherstone, a mining village in the Wakefield/Pontefract/Doncaster triangle. Rather than attempt to review it here, I’ll link to a better one on the Beeb here.

The show consisted of readings from his book interspersed with a few stories and music. He featured a blues band put together from a selection of musicians he was friendly with and also a banjo player who was also a Publican. Ian Clayton even sang in the last song, pictured here.

We got him to dedicate a copy to David after the event and he suggested we don’t let him read it for a few years yet! More reviews and how to buy on Amazon.

His book suggests an eclectic list of his top 40 recommended Albums and I’ve found it online on the Grauniad here.

Through a process of random connected thought and erratic surfing after reading his book I have now found out that the well known Dexy’s Midnight Runners song Jackie Wilson said (I’m in heaven when you smile) was written by Van the Man. (I also now know who Jackie Wilson is as well). That reminded me of the first time I saw this episode of Top of the Pops (aired in 1982 but I was abroad at the time) and laughed like a drain when I got the in-joke. (Watch the vid below without clicking the in-joke link to see if you can get it if you don’t remember it).

Remember you’re a Womble

I found out at work that someone else is a blogger today. I was wandering past his desk at lunchtime and was several paces further on when the hindbrain prodded me and whispered Blogger posting template in my ear. Womble is pseudonymous (or at least he was until I caught him today!) and has been posting for three months. He described his style as controversial but I felt that the posts I have read so far are all in my comfort zone. He doesn’t have much of a readership yet but I think that could change. He blogs because he loves to write and I have seen his comments before on Iain Dale’s Diary.

I love my country but I hate its government. I love freedom and I hate those who restrict it. I love AFC Wimbledon and I utterly hate the franchise. What I want from my government is far less of it, and the chance for personal freedom and responsbility (sic) to take flight again. This blog will talk about many things, but one of its common themes will be a fervent desire for the State to get off the backs of the English people.

Womble on Tour is well worth a look, he makes the Shades List and he could be worthy of the Blogpower one if he keeps it up.

Give my compliments to the Chef

I’ve just finished reading a book which starts (and finishes) with the words: Everything reminds me of something. This is a great blogging metaphor- if you sit and rack your brains for something to write about you can sometimes struggle. But if you just let the muse take you, something will set the mind off on a flight of fancy.

Sometimes the results are equivalent to a First Class journey on Singapore Airlines, other times the substitute bus rail replacement service from Bolton to Chorley.

Today’s mental meandering was inspired by Terry Wogan who was on Radio 4′s A Good Read this evening (click for listen again, although it may still be playing last week’s programme or be long gone if this is an old post). Talking about Chefs, Terry described the type of person who becomes a senior chef as “madder than a box of biscuits”, an odd metaphor, with no Google hits (yet).

This got me thinking of Chefs I knew moderately well and I could only dredge up two. The first was in a posh Restaurant/Hotel in Jesmond Dene, back in the mid 70s. My friend Keith had a casual job there dishwashing and I helped him out on a few occasions. Our dish washing station was in a corridor between the restaurant (which was in an old country house) and the actual kitchen so we could hear all of the chatter, shouting and tantrums. It was silver service and the serving platters came back with encrusted piped mash scorched onto the edges. We weren’t supposed to put the cutlery through the dish washer because it wore out the silver plating but we did when there was nobody looking! For amusement, we used to throw carrots through the window Vent Axia fan and watch them come out the other side, sliced. (They were uneaten cooked ones, not raw!) The head chef was fairly young and used to be friendly but mischievous. He once said we could eat what we wanted and when we suggested chips he said “fine, get on with it”. After we had peeled, chipped and fried a number of spuds he pointed out the buckets of ready peeled ones in water! He give us a lift home in the early hours and used to enjoy floorboarding the car, going round roundabouts the wrong way, squealing the wheels, going through red lights and so on. However, he did it very carefully as safely as possible, being fully aware of the road conditions. (This was in contrast to Keith who used to enjoy handbrake turns and got endorsements on his (not even issued) license when he was still fifteen!)

The second Chef was in complete contrast. He was called Colin, a bit of a miserable git and he worked in the Slough Golden Egg so production line worker might be a more apt job description. He was married to an equally curmudgeonly girl called Anne and they lived in Maidenhead. I met them at Maidenhead Eighteen Plus and it was the antitheses of the fun that 18+ was supposed to be. Aligned with another couple, they were caustic cold water to any fresh idea and took pleasure in upsetting others. They had an accidental catchphrase that we used to mock them mercilessly with behind their backs:

“What’s the point of having kids if they’re gonna get blown up?”

Of course, we all know and love a genuinely whacky fruitloop Chef but he is just a comic creation of Jim Henson. For your enjoyment, I give you (possibly Tom) the Swedish Chef.

Is the treaty/constitution anything to get bothered about?

I’m rather puzzled. Some people are telling me the Lisbon constitution treaty means the end of Britain as we know it, whilst others (including the Prime Minister) say it is nothing at all to worry about. It isn’t entirely even on partisan lines; a large article in the Mail on Sunday denouncing it as a severe loss of sovereignty was written by a Labour MP and the all party European Scrutiny Committee say it is “substantially equivalent” to the Constitution we were promised a referendum on. Then again, we get Bob Piper laying in to Thunderdragon saying it cedes very little, whilst others say this will be the last treaty because it gives Brussels the power to amend it without ratification.

Some people are being economical with the truth here, but which ones?

If only we could be bothered to actually make the effort to read and understand it, along with all of the previous ones. A few do, but tend to cherry-pick the bits they want to comment on through rose (or steel) coloured specs. The rampantly Europhile (scornfully known as Federasts by Europhobes) appear to think that lack of sovereignty is a reasonable (nay welcome) price to pay and avert their gaze when the difficult issues of waste, corruption, patronage and cronyism repeatedly bob to the surface. Conversely, the rabid Europhobes often seem to hark back to some imaginary golden age when the sun never set on the British Empire.

I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m a Eurosceptic and think that on balance, we would probably be better off out- I was too young to vote in 1975 (just) and see no evidence whatsoever that the EU sees any benefits in small government. We pay lots of money to the behemoth and whilst we get lots of it back, it isn’t for things we would necessarily want to fund from general taxation. Have you noticed that it is much easier to spend other people’s money (badly) with impunity when there are more than two degrees of separation?

Last week’s course of events certainly seemed to follow the course suggested by Civitas, in what they called The Illusionary EU Battle.

One thing is certain: this is…