I’m not a big fan of selfie culture. But that said, sometimes it can have a value for me. In this post I’m musing on this latest bout of ill health I’m currently undergoing. The pic above was taken just now, still in bed, at about 6.45am.
Yesterday, feeling somewhat better.
The next pic in this series is me on the lounge couch yesterday, feeling substantially better. I think it shows! And the latest pic, at the top, is therefore a bit depressing; looks like I’ve been crying all night! I haven’t. But I have had a rough night of neck pain and extreme headaches, in addition to the Strep A throat.
This was Saturday night, in bed at Hannah’s.
And the third pic, the furthest back in time of the three? That reflects my annoyance, more than the physical toll illness is having. Whereas the image right at the top captures both, to my mind. Sometimes when you’re unwell you hit a plateaux of being sick of being sick. I’m there!
During the first three days of this throat infection I went from ‘business as usual’ on the Friday, which I’m assuming is the day I caught it, whilst teaching in two primary schools, to a 50/50 mix: bed rest most of the time, but still doing Amazon Flex delivery shifts (Saturday and Sunday), to more or less complete bed rest, yesterday and today (Monday and Tuesday).
Yesterday I had a blood test at the doc’s in the morning, and I cooked dinner in the evening. But outside of those two things, I was mostly in bed, sleeping or reading.
This could be very useful!
Today I ought to be working on a Grade 7 drum piece I’m doing with a pupil (Tower of Power’s terrific ‘What Is Hip’). And I’d also ideally like to do a shift for Amazon, as I really need the income! But from a health and well-being perspective I probably ought to be having complete rest. Hmmm!?
Spoke to an out of hours GP today (got nowhere with 111 by phone or online; tho’ to be fair 111 did provide the out of hours doc’s line), who remote diagnosed me with either laryngitis and/or pharyngitis, plus tonsillitis. Gaaargh!!!
No antibiotics, instead regular warm salt-water gargling! Apparently I’m already about halfway through – three days in – the worst of it. And it should be totally gone in 7-10 days. I sure do hope so. It’s horrible! Apart from the pure discomfort, esp’ when swallowing, it’s making me feel exhausted.
I started feeling a bit better this afternoon. But now I’m feeling much the same as I have for the bulk of the last three days… shite! Time to get a-gargling again, with warm and very salty water.
I did another shift for Amazon Flex, despite being ill. That’s modern life; economic ‘necessity’ trumps healthy living. Could be a metaphor for our times!? Saturday’s shift was utterly awful; Sunday’s was, workload wise, the exact opposite. Saturday I had over 30 packages to deliver (roughly 30% more than normal), Sunday, just three! But obviously I should have been having – according to doc and online advice – complete bedrest.
Williams, eccentric but still dazzling.
And the Master’s Snooker mirrored the upturn in certain aspects of my experience. After the dull grind of Trump vs Bingham, Judd’s much closer Final battle with veteran Mark Williams (48!*) was far more engaging and entertaining. Mind, I missed a massive chunk, thanks to work. But I caught the evening sesh. And that was enjoyable.
I’ve had a sore throat for a few days now. Symptoms are very Strep A like, and I believe that’s running amok in the UK. Teaching in schools, I guess, may make me more likely to be exposed? It seems more virulent amongst the very young. And I teach in two primary schools.
But I can’t find any particularly helpful maps of known cases. Something I thought might shed light on whether this might be Strep A or something else. And then there’s the various varieties: Strep A, Scarlet Fever and IGAS may all be caused by the same bacteria, but (I believe?) each manifests in slightly differing ways. So, for example, I don’t have any rashes, so I don’t have Scarlet Fever.
… and Scarlet Fever.
But without proper medical advice – ironically I had an over-50s NHS health check last Monday, before I got this damned sore throat – which is increasingly hard to get as the Tories grind the NGS into the ground, how do I know what’s causing it, or indeed even what ‘it’ is!?
BTW, the info-graphic map images I’ve used here are from my researches, and usually the webpage (if not always the image itself) adds more info, such as when the statistics were gathered, or the time period they cover, etc.
I guess I was after this sort of thing, for our area.
What I really wanted was a map with ‘pins’, something rather like the above image, but showing cases in my living/teaching zones. Maybe then it’d be easier to see if there were recorded cases where I’m teaching, for example? Anyhoo, calling 111 has (so far) got me nowhere.
Teresa and I are back to childminding at my sister’s. And we’ve been roped into an extra night over, as my mum backed out of her usual Sunday commitment. She did so partly due to dad having Covid (so I hear!?), and me having this sore throat.
I also booked two Amazon delivery shifts: one today, another tomorrow. Todays was a real nightmare. First off they had approx 30% more stuff to deliver – 30 bags as opposed to he usual 20 or so – than I normally have, and yet supposedly to be delivered in the same (two hour) time frame!
My Flex shift today was hellish!
On top of this, even before I’d left, the scanning and naming/numbering of the deliveries didn’t tally correctly. There were extra bags, numbers/names/codes didn’t match, and, well, more on this later…
I’d also very much like to opt out of making any deliveries to Cambridge. Most trips to Cambridge involve dropping deliveries to at least one ‘block of flats’ or student halls of residence. In theory I can contact the customer. In practice this doesn’t always work. Today I had a whole slew of Chinese students in multiple occupancy residences , none of which had sufficient info to locate the customer, that made the entire shift a total nightmare.
Supposedly 2-4pm, I didn’t finish till 5pm. And when I did I had two bags of undelivered stuff left over! I had to call the Flex driver support line several times. To their credit, they do try to help, and sometimes they even actually sort things out. But, as ever in modern life, there’s far too much interacting with automated robotic systems. And they can’t always resolve stuff satisfactorily.
I anticipate negative feedback from Amazon on this delivery run. One particular order initially took over 45 minutes to ‘complete’ (or so I thought), putting me seriously behind schedule. And in the end this was – or so it seems – the order to which the two extra mystery bags that were left over belonged to. So adding that in, as well, at the end, means that one stop accounted for about an hours work!
How all this makes me feel!
Add to this my sore throat, the bigger than usual load, that for much of the shift it was cold and very rainy, and, nearly all of it being in town, there was heavy traffic congestion to negotiate… Bah! Not fun at all. For the most part I do enjoy doing Amazon Flex deliveries. Not so today! As already mentioned, I’d like to decline any further delivery trips to Cambridge.
Back ‘home’, at Hannah’s in Northstowe, I’m mainly staying in bed, as I don’t feel at all well. The right hand gland in my neck is swollen and painful, swallowing hurts, and I’m on a diet of liquids, paracetamol and lozenges.
Missed (again!). Bloody awful.
Thought a bit of snooker might help. So I watched the Trump vs Bingham Masters semi-final. Trump won, 6-1. But, my sweet lard, was it ropey! It was excruciating at times. I like fast heavy scoring snooker. This was low breaks, tactical grinding (and wailing and gnashing of teeth), and, frankly, quite boring . Both players playing well below their best.
The Youngbloods best known hit, Get Together, looks and sounds like a hippy anthem, in the rear view mirror of music history. And so it was. Although it had a more convoluted history than its light and happy vibes might suggest.
I’m not sure if it’s a false memory, or, indeed, what it is, but I have these dim and distant memories of a mixtape cassette a childhood friend made for me, purporting, in one lengthier segment, to be The Youngbloods jamming with Jimi Hendrix. Whatever it actually was, that was some great music.*
The same pal introduced me to early T Rex (Jewel) and Beefheart (Pachuco Cadaver!). So I feel I owe him a debt of gratitude. Thank’ee, Edwin, wherever ye may be now? I last saw him (Ed’) in Ely, looking a bit like a mental health casualty of war. I rather fancied his sister Eleanor, back in the day.
But back to the present. And presents – Amazon gift vouchers – are what allows me to indulge, as I have just done, in a musical gamble: I just ordered two ‘3-in-2’ sets, both by BGO. The first collects The Youngbloods, Earth Music (both ‘67), and Elephant Mountain (‘69), whilst the second gathers together Rock Festival (‘70), Ride The Wind and Good And Dusty (both ‘71).
The only official release album I won’t have will be 1972’s High On A Ridgetop. There are some other related recordings of interest, such as drummer Joe Bauer’s Moonset (1971), and something called Crab Tunes/Noggins! Which seems to basically be The Youngbloods, sans Young, and under a different name.**
I hope this first foray into what is, for me, basically uncharted territory, proves better than my recent Harry Partch experiment. I bought The Harry Partch Collection, Vol 1, and have listened to it a couple of times. I got it ‘cause Iggy Pop mentions getting stoned and listening to it with his Stooge bandmates, and I’ve kept ‘hearing about Harry’, in relation to Beefheart and Tom Waits. I found Partch’s music really doesn’t do it for me. The ideas are more interesting than the actual sounds, which, frankly, wind up irritating me.
Reckon I’ll be returning this…
But as to The Youngbloods, in a day or two I should have the discs. And I’m hoping to bask in what I anticipate being an eclectic hippy-era melange of folk, blues and whatever else they might serve up. The cats certainly look pretty cool:
Drummer Joe Bauer was intending to be a jazzer…Multi-instrumentalist Lowell ‘Banana’ Levinger, and friend!Jesse Colin Young.The early years group was a quartet: Young, Jerry Corbitt, Bauer and Banana.
* Every now and again I look into it, and usually I come up with naught. But just looking again now, I found a load of stuff with Hendrix playing with Lonnie Youngblood. That must be the Hendrix/Youngblood connection? But it’s not the music on my friend’s cassette!
Best avoided, apparently!
** After a bit of digging I’ve discovered that Noggins was the nominal group, and Crab (Crap?) Tunes was the title of the album. The album artwork and personnel make it look intriguing and inviting. But apparently it is an appalling musical turd, and very deliberately so, as it was fulfilling a ‘contractual obligation’ to the band’s record label. But this doesn’t quite stack up with the chronology: their first three albums are with RCA, then Corbitt left. Their next four albums were for Warner. And the last of those, High On A Ridgetop, came after this. Weird!?
This, on the other hand, might be worth checking out.
Teresa recently bought a washing machine off a chap on FB. Fannily emuff the seller is a drummer I’ve depped for many times, albeit many, many, many moons ago now! A chap called Stuart Braybrooke.
Turns out that not only are we both drummers. But we both also play bass, guitar, etc. We both have upright basses, and we even share an interest in stargazing.
He would appear to be much wealthier than we are – poss’ a more lucrative ‘day job’? – and consequently has much better gear telescope wise (and probably in every department!); motorised/computerised, tracking, and much much more powerful.
I hope we might explore these shared interests at some point? In the meantime, I just hope his old Bosch wasching maschine is not a dud!? finally connecting it proved a lot easier than I thought it might be.
The only downside is that the power supply lead is much shorter than on our old one. But that can easily be solved at some future point. It’s a bit late for an inaugural test-drive wash this evening. Especially as tomorrow’s my first day back at school, teaching.
Anyroad, finally getting the Bosch connected is good. Like the toilet seat, very unglamorous, but one less very necessary chore to get done. Hopefully we’ll find an online manual easily enough, and maybe from tomorrow evening onwards, we’ll be back to laundering at home again? We’ve been taking all our laundry to my sisters, for some time now, and doing it when we childmind Ali and Sofi!
Now I must get my sh*t together for tomorrow’s teaching. Checklist: brain, limbs, sticks, food n’ drink, car keys, ear-plugs, will to survive… etc!
Iron Maiden didn’t trouble my recent top five post. But back in my mid-teens I was listening to them a lot. And I still do, occasionally. Power Slave was my favourite album back then, with Piece of Mind coming next. I’m not so keen on their pre Nicko/Dickinson stuff, and I haven’t followed their later releases. By which I mean everything after Live After Death!
Still, though I’m not their biggest fan, it’s nice to see them being honoured by the Royal Mail. They have their beers as well. So they’ve really gotten into the bloodstream of the nation, and now the postal service as well!
Well done fellas! You’ve earned it. Read more about this here.
PS – Not that I give a sh*t for anything to do with royalty/monarchy. Butt… shouldn’t it be Charles’ head in profile on stamps now?
For sheer innocent sentimental sweet beauty, this is a corker!
Wow!? How hard is this!? It might be easier to pick my top few artists? Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits are no brainers. After that it gets tricky.
This one is etched into my being; melancholy beauty, at its most powerfully maudlin.But I love For The Roses as well!
This all came about when I wanted to pick a ‘top five albums’ list, to illustrate a private posting on cataloguing my CD collection. it rapidly became clear that it was not going to be easy! Perhaps not even possible?
J-Fusion at its slick funky glossy and melodic best.
If it were my current top five that’d be different. My most listened to CD right now, for example, is Casiopea’s debut(pictured above). But I’m also listening to a lot of Sons of Champlin, right now, and I’m not as sold on them as the other artists that I’m featuring in this post.
I know it might seem weird, but as a historic top five disc, Trout Mask Replica is definitely up there (with Lick My Decals Off in hot pursuit!). Not music I’d listen to all the time. And my honeymoons with these discs were many, many moons ago. But I have an abiding love for them.
Slabs of sound, wafting through space and time, all floating atop Leibezeit’s incredible grooves.
Can’s Future Days also has a special place in my musical heart, closely pursued by Tago Mago!).
Memories of this on constant rotation are bittersweet.
And whilst I’m thinking in the longer term, like this, then I suppose Steely Dan and Donald Fagen figure very large. Aja, Katy Lied and The Nightfly all being rave faves.
Ah, The Don. An almost perfect record!Mad cover! Great album.
Apart from the Casiopea one, so far these are all song-based albums, of a broadly speaking Pop nature. If I were to pick some Rock albums, Thin Lizzy, Zep and Van Halen would be right up there (poss’ even Slayer’s Reign in Blood, perhaps?).
It’s close with Lizzy, ‘twixt this…… and this. Still In Love With You is Divine!!!
Takes me back to my childhood. After Status Quo, and with far more earnest interest, Lizzy were the first group I really got into.
Likewise with Zep, is it this one…
And, thanks to both my dad, and my first drum teacher, Bernie ‘Boogie Man’ Pritchard, Zeppelin soon followed Lizzy on to my dad’s ol’ (then new!) Technics Stereo.
… or this one?
With Zep I was equally taken with all of I, II and III. I only got into IV later, and – as brilliant as it is – (Stairway alone is priceless), it didn’t have the same visceral impact the first three had.
And then there’s Jaaazz…
This was massive for me in my mid-teens. Still love it.
I could go on like this. Should I go with Caravanserai, or Welcome, for Santana? With Herbie, is it Fat Albert, Headhunters or… Coltrane’s Love Supreme is up there, as is Davis’ Kind Of Blue (or back in my late teens, ESP).
And what about Brazil? Jobim, Joyce, Marcos Valle… and on it goes!
I got lost in the deserts with this one!This ought to be a guilty pleasure. But I have no shame!
I’m finishing with one that really isn’t anywhere near the top. But to be fair to Slayer and the album, I’ve listened to it tons. Rather like true crime and serial killers – the kind of dark subjects with which Slayer themselves were obsessed – I find it hypnotically compelling. If Van Halen’s 1984 is a ‘guilty pleasure’, this is a ‘dirty secret’!
A dirty little secret…
Anyway, I can only conclude that picking my top five favourite albums is pretty near impossible! I mean, The Beatles Rubber Soul, a biggie for me around 16-18, didn’t even get a mention ‘til right here, at the very end!
Conclusion? I can’t pick just five albums. Just too limiting!
The Cat… Gene’s buff, a speccy nerd obsessed with jazz!
How I feel sometimes when transcribing drum parts!The neighbours disapprove of The Cat’s listening habits.
Non Jazz stuff…
Not sure what he’s up to here. But look at all that fab gear!
Myeah… back to his primary love, good ol’ Jazz Music!
I love this pic; bassist looks after his bull fiddle in the rain.Ok, so I’m featuring this one again… but I just love it!Ditto this one!
If anyone’s interested, I found this, a page with an interesting selection of record changer magazines for sale, featuring the cover art of Deitch and others.
I just replaced our loo seat. The old faux-mahogany one was never good. It looked cheap and nasty. And eventually it fell apart. I’ve no idea how long this one will last. But it’s better made, was easier to install, looks much nicer, and wasn’t too expensive. So I’m crap-happy!
