Seb Palmer

I got set of silver-plate stuff, free, off a Freecycler. It’s heavily tarnished now. Just from contact with the air. No wonder posh folk needed servants.

There are two or three more silver-plate items lurking about our home. Need to find and clean them all!

A casualty of war, above. Sad!

Woah, Nelly!

Phew… a maelstrom of funky soulful neo-psychedelic grooviness! Most definitely not music for all occasions. But if you’re in the mood for out of body astral-travelling?

With Reggie Workman on acoustic bass, and thx late great Roy Hayes on drums. This is a power trio! Make no mistake.

After the full on sonic assault that is the title track, Alice moves over to acoustic piano. And plays a beautiful shimmering track, One For The Father, dedicated to J.C.

This arrived today. I love Alice. But i also bought this in memory of Roy Haynes, who passed recently, and plays on these recordings.

Track three, Prema, features an uncredited overdubbed string section.

Somebody digs Alice in the above garb enough to do this:

We have our pal Patrick stopping over with us. Antonio is away in Spain for several weeks.

Last night, after a beer and a wee dram o’ brandy, I went to bed around 7.30 pm. I’m typing this at roughly 7.30 am.

I used to have a lot of problems around sleeping. These days? Less so. I did have a wakeful spell around 11-12 pm. So I read some Betjeman…

Several chapters on old churches did the trick! Calming my troubled mind, and getting me back off to sleep.

The small but regular consumption of booze is a worrying development. I can’t claim to be tee-total any more. And, although I’m currently ‘getting away with it’, I don’t think it’s a good or sustainable development.

It seems my mind and body chemistry is so volatile nowadays that I must of necessity adopt almost monkish levels of restraint and abnegation.

I have a thing for the colour green. And I love the albums featured in this post.

The cover art and design perfectly complement, to my mind, ears and eyes, the music.

These albums sound as beautiful as they look.

What a great time for music and graphic design.

If I can, I’d like to have decent life size (i.e. record cover sized) prints of these and other similar albums covers adorning our walls.

Needed to finish this polishing malarkey.

With these bits cleaned and polished we now have three such candlesticks.

Teresa put the ol’ faithful Bach CD on. Gorgeous! I cooked us an omelette lunch. It’s been sheer bliss having Teresa off work at home with me, for the last two weeks.

We looked at and talked about the art studio model, together. Teresa had various comments on it. We’ll need to agree a few things, and work out the budget/costing of raw materials.

It’s hard work, cleaning silver! I’ve just finished two candlesticks. I still need to do the little doodads that actually hold the candles.

In the above pic they’re out, awaiting cleaning/polishing. Below, they’re temporarily in place, altho’ still dirty.

Even as they are above – i.e. not quite finished – the candlesticks are massively better than they were a couple of days ago. They’ve gone from grim and sad looking, to rather lovely.

Well, another one joins the jam session in the sky.

Roy Haynes died yesterday, Nov’ 12th, 2024, at the ripe old age of 99!

His resume is a who’s who of jazz, and even extends to pop, soul, r’n’b, etc. He’s on countless classic recordings, with the world’s greatest singers and musicians.

Usually I get those East European car wash guys to douche Flo’. But I can’t afford it now (never really can, truth be told). So I did it mice elf. Not up to their standards. But it’ll do for now. And it was lovely n’ sunny whilst I was working.

I’m also attempting clean up a couple of our (three in total) nice silver plate candlesticks.

I bought some silver cleaning stuff from Boyes. But, of course, I cannae find it.

I’m totally wiped out by exhaustion. Which is fairly normal for me. We’ve returned Roxy’s little kitten. Bit of a shame, I s’pose? But it wasn’t working out.

The several days of trying to entice him out of the floor/ceiling void took its toll on me. And I’ve now got a redundant net-on-a-pole – Teresa caught him before it arrived – coming from Amazon! Well, never mind. I’m sure it’ll have other uses? Or I can return it.

I’m due to work later. And I’m keen to get another earlier shift, if poss’. It’s almost all I do at present, really. I’ve just got no mojo. Or, less melodramatically, very little.

Some time later…

Today’s work turned out to be mostly in some very picturesque villages, towards Bedford. And it was a very lovely clear bright sunny afternoon.

I passed several churches I simply must visit. Including one in either Upper or Lower Dean. I forget which, now. And, of course, the two pictured above.

Now I’m back home, in bed. I love going to bed early! Before turning in we watched a bunch of episodes of Rising Damp. Very funny! But Teresa wanted to watch just one more…

Whilst I enjoyed the other episodes, this one was decidedly not the right choice for me, right now! So I bailed, and climbed ‘the wooden hill to bedfordshire’.

*A rare moment during the kitten’s sojourn with us where he wasn’t in hiding.

I’ve sprung the above trap on the kitten three times now, and every time it does t work; yes the lid closes, but in doing so it also moves towards me, and u covers the hole. Which the kitten goes straight back into.

Okay, so this time the tap is taped to the angle twixt skirting boards and floor, and help up by a prop (aka a drum stick!). Hopefully the next time he ventures up into our room – which he’s doing regularly – I can spring g the trap on him successfully.