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I love England, and I love being British.

Of course nowadays I can’t say something like that without needing to explain that I’m not a jingoistic nut.

I haven’t travelled that much, compared with a lot of folk I know. But nevertheless, I became most acutely aware of both of these facts -I love England, and I love being British – when I was abroad, whether I was in Canada, or the various parts of Europe to which I’ve had the pleasure and good fortune to go.

I love the places I visited, and, for the most (just as here at ‘home’) the people and their cultures, etc. Given that I’m writing this during Covid restrictions, I can’t wait to have the freedom to travel more widely again.

And to reiterate… my love of home, which became so much more apparent when I wasn’t there, was never even remotely jingoistic. It was and still is really just about simple familiarity, for the most part; recognising my rootedness in where I came from.

I mention this as a preface to saying how appalled I am by the current public face of Britain. Or Toryland, as I now frequently call it. Bojo, aided and abetted by his circus of appalling crony clowns, is convinced he’s the caped crusader of Capitalism. That’s not me indulging in satire, he’s actually said as much, in front of cameras!

Brexit, his terrible mishandling of Covid, and now this Yemen stuff. Friends were posting about this latter issue on FB when I drafted this. And indeed it’s the latter that prompted me to make this post. A Tory MP, talking in Parliament, has the brass to say Britain cares about the crisis unfolding there, having just approved a massive arms deal to Saudi, the aggressor, whilst simultaneously halving our aid to the Yemen!

By their works ye shall know them, eh? Not in Toryland. There it’s by their words ye shall give them the benefit of the doubt (tugs forelock). Tory confidence in their propaganda disinformation system is truly Goebbels-esque! They couldnt gove a sh*t that ‘the chattering classes’ might know what they’re up to. As long as the hoi polloi buy the the lines peddled in the Mail/Sun, etc, they’ll continue get away with murder. Literally.

Tory hypocrisy is so totally out of control. It beggars, or rather, I prefer to say it buggers, belief. (Remember all those peers creaming their loons over that word some years back?) It makes a mockery of the adage that actions speak louder than words. Apparently not if you have enough of the media working as your unofficial propaganda dept  

And all this nakedly contemptuous piracy flows, like stinking pus, from the same septic poisonous ‘philosophy’. Unfettered Capitalist greed trumps (how horribly apt) every other value. It’s truly and deeply sickening.

And with enough of the UK population seemingly in the grip of media dominated by right wing tycoons, will the ‘decent ordinary folk’ of Britain ever wake up? Indeed, to what extent do they even exist any more?

Have they really been replaced by xenophobic brainwashed little Englanders? So dumb they’ll give away their own rights to piratical freebooters? The proverbial turkeys voting for Christmas. Willing to throw everything that was once good about the UK on to the pyre of deregulation that the right is relentlessly stoking? And all for the benefit a tiny super-rich clique?

The whole procurement thing that’s been going on around Covid, for example, with huge sums given to cronies with no due process, reveals this to be as far from ‘trickle down’ capitalism as you can get. It’s ‘tidal waves up’ capitalism, in which massive amounts of public money gushes from the many to the few.

And all of this at what cost? What further austerity and butchery of the Commons are we to look forward to, in the wake of nosediving off a cliff with Brexit, and completely fucking up our collective response to Covid?

Where will we wind up? These are crazy times, and the immediate prospect doesn’t look too good.

A mate of mine has had most of these albums on vinyl for years, and I recall listening to them many, many moons ago. It’s not that I didn’t like them then. But sometimes you only really get into something when the time is right for you. I think I needed a set like this to arrive, so I could easily get into Ian Carr and his Nucleus band.

The boxed set is a nice clamshell affair, with five CDs in card covers that cover nine albums. There are some very detailed and knowledgeable reviews of this set elsewhere on’t interweb (I’ll link to the best one when I get a round tuit).

So I’ll confine myself to a more personal response, here. Ian carr was – as is very obvious when you hear this music – a major Miles Davis fan. And in this music he takes ‘late’ electric Miles as a starting point.

Miles himself did relatively little in this vein, in the context of his entire and very prolific career, before semi-retiring. And some of this stuff, whilst interesting, isn’t the easiest to appreciate, especially where it crosses – mostly thanks to his musical cohorts – into ‘free jazz’ type territory.

Ian Carr and Nucleus take the Miles type influences, along with many others of the times, and combine them in such a way that it’s both very similar, and the influence is very obvious, and yet the music itself is actually more focussed and, in all honesty, palatable.

Nor is it so derivative as to be redundant. Indeed, it’s basically someone taking up the musical torch and carrying it on and into further territory. So I don’t really want to (but probably already have!) overstate the whole Miles thing.

What this is, is great early ’70s fusion, blending jazz, funk, rock, even a bit of folk and prog, into a heady blend, both typical of its time, and yet pretty unique in its exact flavour combinations.

An excellent set, filled with great music. If you like music that goes its own way, and at the same time celebrates and venerates its inspirations, and you love the sounds of this period, as I do, this is an essential listen.

The Peddlers are fascinating: superb Hammond organ trio jazz, mostly with vocals, and – much to my delight – bass. They are in a strange hinterland of their era, part easy-listening, part hipster jazz-bos, but all round totally cool! The album title is naff, granted. But actually, in this instance, it’s also fair enough.

The material ranges from exactly what you’d expect of a showbiz group working the circuit, gigging regularly in clubs of the time, ranging from things like Comin’ Home, Baby, and pop hits of the day, such as Nine Miles High, to jazz standards – this comp’ starts with Time After Time, which Teresa and i love from the Chet Baker version – and even a few originals, e.g. the moody after-hours Empty Club Blues.

Jazz style organ trios often made do without bassists, the keys player taking that job over, via pedals. Unless this is done by an absolute master – and don’t get me wrong, The Peddlers keys man is a master – I prefer to have an actual dedicated bassist, looking after the bottom end.

The Peddlers had Tab Martin, who played his electric bass held upright in his lap, almost as if he were playing an upright acoustic bass. At the organ, and singing, was Roy Phillips, a cat so hep it hurts. His voice is superb, if rather of its time. And his instrumental skills are absolutely top-notch.

As a drummer, however, it was a drummer pal – thanks, Ian Croft! – sharing a YouTube video clip of these guys playing live, in which drummer Trevor Morais absolutely slays an uptempo jazz number, bringing an unbelievable energy to proceedings, that brought me back to The Peddlers (I already had the Suite album, which is them plus the London Philharmonic).

And I’m soooo glad! This collection isn’t complete, but gathers together 42 tracks, 21 per disc, into one very nice set. From the slow blues shuffle of Little Red Rooster, to the unusual Where Have All The Flowers Gone (unusual for morphing from a full-on trio instrumental  into a mellow song, with Phillips’ vocal accompanied mostly by gentle acoustic guitar!), girlie b-vocs on That’s Life, and lush strings and more on Girl Talk, this is an incredibly rich and diverse collection, capturing a terrific trio in full and majestic flight, and a bygone era of music, whose genre-bending breadth is a real freath of bresh air, so to speak.

Phew… What a film! Not for the faint-hearted. To say I really enjoyed this film doesn’t feel quite right. The story it depicts is, for the most part, appallingly awful.

And yet I did enjoy Come And See, as well as finding it a whole range of things: sometimes beautiful (the Belorussian landscapes are often almost magically so), sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, traumatic even. There are moments of innocence, and even romance. Sometimes it veers towards the surreal. But the main theme is, as most who have heard of this film will doubtless know, the barbarism of war.

The story of the central character, Florya, played by Aleksei Kravchenko, demands a stupendous performance. He’s a funny looking kid, and does quite a lot of gurning. But with more than adequate reason. Sometimes. although admittedly not always, I like a film that really hits me hard, and really stays with. Come And See did both. It’s definitely got a very bloody axe to grind. But it never feels heavy-handed.

All things considered, and despite the surreal moments, it felt very real. Horribly and unflinchingly real. I’m someone who – it’s hard to know how to put it – kind of loves war, inasmuch as I agree with Thomas Hardy that it makes for ‘rattling good’ reading/watching, whilst peace-time history could be considered, perhaps, as rather dull in comparison. This film, however, serves as a tonic reminder of how ugly, twisted and senseless human conflict can actually be.

The main narrative arc of the film, telling the Florya’s story, is fantastic in itself. But the way it ends adds an incredibly powerful coda, which I won’t give away here. My response to it all is as much visceral and emotional as considered or thoughtful; I just think it’s absolutely brilliant. Both very beautiful and very ugly. And entirely superb.

A longer and more heavily illustrated review can be read on my mini-military hobby blog, here: https://aquestionofscale.blogspot.com/search?q=come+and+see

Well, here’s a post on my first ever electric guitar effects pedal board, which I’ve built over the last week or so.

There’s some irony, perhaps, in the fact that after years and years of playing guitar, often as much and sometimes more than drums, my primary instrument, I’m hardly playing at all right now. I built this in the fond and fervent hope I will resume at some future point.

I did get back into playing a bit when I bought the Ditto Looper. And this pedal board project is part of an attempt to make sure that when I do want to pick up an axe, the sounds I want will be readily available to me.

The Build

I used some scrap wood I got off Freecycle, type and origin unknown. I planed and sanded the very rough and heavily treated lumber down, to get it ship-shape. Far from perfect – rustic, I’d say – it was nevertheless a great improvement, and it revealed the wood to be, most likely, standard modern pine.

I actually went with the length, which on the pedal board has become width, the wood already was, and simply cut two lengths in twain, on the Triton table-saw, giving me the top four slats. The sides came from the same stock, but a differently dimensioned piece; this had to give two pedals worth of depth, and have sufficient height to give the board a slight rake or pitch, for a comfortable foot operation angle.

The front face is whole, whilst the back face is both raised off the floor, and has a gap ‘twixt it and the slat directly above it. Like the gaps between the slats, these two voids allow for the passage of leads. In this instance, chiefly for the power supply. The latter is a vexed subject I’ll need to return to and improve, as currently (boom-boom!) I only have a cheap-ish daisy-chain wall-wart.

Having prepped the wood and dimensioned it, I assembled the base elements using hand cut dove-tails. Laid out by eye, and cut with my Japanese pull-saw, these were to my usual poor ill-fitting standard. But with home-made sawdust and glue filler packing out any irregularities, they did the job. The slats were fixed, belt and braces style, with both glue and screws.

I used my Stanley Handyman smoothing plane to get the faces of the slats nearest the base of the board flat and true, which was very satisfying. And then, having thought about a natural wood finish, decided against it in favour of paint, on account of how rough the lumber is. So I filled in the countersink holes and bigger blemishes with wood filler.

On our way home from a day out with the Mrs I bought a few Valspar sample pots from B&Q, all green. I opted for Bohemian Bliss, a name and a colour I love! This is in fact much darker than the sample swatches in my photo suggest. Four coats of this, and then four coats of gloss varnish, with a little sanding. A nice old-fashioned look for me.

Then it came time to put the Velcro on. With that on, soft-side/loops on the board, hooks on’t pedals, some of the pedals themselves needed a little attention. I had to remove a number of rubber feet, clean up with isopropyl alcohol, and make a base-plate for my wah-pedal. What a lot of work! I’ll have to plug a guitar and an amp in, and get playing!

Okay, so having made and painted the base-plate for the wah (necessitated by the removal of the rubber feet and the need to stop the screw-heads and battery cover from preventing Velcro adhesion), I tried connecting all the pedals. I discovered that laid out as I have them – bottom row running right to left, from the Wah, top row running left to right from LPB1 right to the Ditto – the patch cables I have aren’t going to allow me to finish. I need a bunch of longer ones.

I could change the pedal layout. And I may well do so once I start playing with it. But I’d rather buy in some more longer cables – I’ll go with the flat profile type, I like ’em! – for now. I’ve also discovered that my top slat-gaps are just big enough for all the adaptor heads, so long as they point directly downward. So far I’m working round this by positioning the pedals pretty precisely. This low tolerance may cause issues… we shall see!?

The top gap at the back, however, is way too narrow for the cable ends to pass through. So I’ll need to either notch it in places, or widen the whole thing. Or I could ‘hard’ wire some leads in situ? In fact I have a number of ideas on how to solve this.  Wiring the pedals also makes me want to install some stuff under the board to hold the wire-spaghetti neatly in place, and prevent it snagging on stuff.

All told, I’m pretty chuffed. I wound up making this board bigger than I’d thought I might. I drew two cardboard mock-ups, a larger (or rather wider) one, and a smaller one (probably medium, in truth). In the end this one is actually a tad larger than the bigger of my two draft designs. So there’s room for my pedal collection to change and grow.

The footnote to this project, with which, I must confess, I’m very pleased, is the power-supply. I’d like to upgrade to a proper solution; fully isolated, with every pedal getting its proper allocation of power, and probably with a built in female kettle-lead type plug outlet, for the whole board. But that’s for the future…

We live in a house in what sometimes feels like Artex capital of the world. Loads of the houses we looked at in March (plus places friends or acquaintances live or have lived), when we bought our current home, are more than liberally coated with this dreadful stuff. In our home it was on almost all flat surfaces, and in numerous places in a really thick heavily textured impasto. I’m only surprised and relieved they didn’t Artex the floors as well!

Fortunately the guy we bought our house off had already done the walls in the downstairs lounge/diner and kitchen. That left us with the bathroom (downstairs, off the kitchen!), almost every single room/surface upstairs, plus all the ceilings, including the sloped under-stairs area, downstairs.

I read about X-Tex online, having googled ‘how remove artex’. What I found I ncluded some glowing reviews of the product, such as some that appear on Amazon’s UK website. So I opted to try it. In the end I used it on the walls in the bathroom, upstairs-landing, and second bedroom, abandoning a partial attempt at the master bedroom ceiling after a messy neck-crick-inducing hour of hell. But it was so messy, expensive, and such incredibly hard work, that work stalled at that point. So we still have quite a bit of hideous Artex to deal with.

Three years have elapsed since I first used it;I’m posting this in 2020, having originally used X-Tex back in 2016-2017. Just recently I’ve considered buying more, and trying again. We would dearly love to be rid of what remains, the very worst of which is in the stair-well area (literally inches thick!). But recalling the horrors of working with it, and then finding it ‘currently unavailable’ when I searched online (Amazon, for example) has saved me from that fate.

In theory it’s a good product. And perhaps on very thin layers of Artex it’s viable? This said, the thinnest Artex-coated area I worked on with X-Tex, our downstairs toilet/bathroom, was still very hard work. And the results were very far from perfect. But I think that was partly because that was the last area I did, and by that point I was exhausted, and heartily sick of both Artex and X-Tex.

Why then would I even momentarily consider trying again? Well, for the same reason I originally went this route, economics; expensive as X-Tex is (or was?) it’s still cheaper than getting a plasterer in. If one opts to plaster over the godawful abomination that is Artex, and I’m thinking here of the areas in our home where Artex was very thickly applied, you’re actually looking at losing appreciable space! That’s why removal of the Satanic substance seemed appealing; gain a little room, don’t lose it!

The Artex under our stairs was on plasterboard sheets, fixed to the underside of the staircase. Having reached the end of my tether with both Artex an X-Tex, I ended up opting to simply tear it all down. Our stairs have remained in an open/gutted state ever since, as I continue to ponder how best to proceed. Anyway, having ranted long enough… in conclusion: this X-Tex stuff does kind of work, inasmuch as it does soften Artex. But in our experience the product was A) too expensive, and B) given the thick impasto Artexing perpetrated on our home, incredibly hard work, and horribly messy.

So, better than one (or no stars). But I couldn’t honestly recommend it. Unless, perhaps, you’re a DIY-sado-masochist? I suppose I’ll have to learn to skim plaster myself?

For the most part I prefer to post on stuff I love, and keep things positive. That said, I’ll not shy away from posting critical stuff, if I feel like it. Teresa just watched The Fountain on Amazon Prime, meaning I was more or less forced to watch it. Anyhoo… so, here goes…

The Fountain

Eugh… just dreadful.

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz embody the vacuity and self-centredness of modern western humanity. And Aranofsky weaves a web of portentousness around them based on aesthetics, emotion and pseudo-mysticism, all of which has the intellectual integrity of a micron thin wafer of, well… nothingness.

Like so much contemporary culture, this aspires and doubtless believes itself to be deep, but winds up being all about surfaces. The two central characters – let’s just call them Izzy and Tom, to keep the overblown pseudo-complexity at bay – are petulantly flighty, and I don’t believe in either of them, for even a nanosecond.

There’s really only one character, Jackman’s. Everyone else is just an adjunct to his egotism. And all the settings are triumphs of form over anything and everything else. 96 minutes of overblown set-dressing!*

The only levels on which this film might conceivably work are, one, aesthetically – on the surface level (and to me it’s all surface) – and two, poetically or metaphorically. It fails on the first as I don’t like the aesthetics, as impressively produced as they may be. As for the second? For me, ideas such as are obviously signposted here – life and death, love and loss, etc – need to be couched in terms I can relate to, or that engage me. And in these respects this film fails totally and utterly, personally speaking.

I loathe the narcissistically self-involved ‘characters’, Tom in particular; I’m not a fan of pseudo-religious cod-mysticism. I don’t even like the much vaunted music, which attempts to give the onscreen action a gravitas it never attains. Weisz is really just a cipher, whilst Jackman’s Tom is a bizarre Richard Madeley lookalike himbo, whose solipsistic ‘love’ is nowt more than a pretext for throwing tantrums.

Just as I was pleased to see the ‘characters’ in Ridley Scott’s similarly awful Prometheus knocked off, it was a relief when Tommy, having indulged in yogic flight, walking on water (groan), and finally gorged on the white sap of the father tree – truly symbolism to gag on – got composted.

Awful drivel, perfectly suited to our shallow self-regarding times.

*If this film were to be nominated for any awards, it ought to be ‘interior design’. Mind you, I wouldn’t hire Aranofsky or any of his hirelings to decorate our home.

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Find missing Review & insert here!!!

Count Arthur Strong, on his superb BBC R4 Show (never liked the TV version), talked about the ancient Chinese art of ‘Flung Shoe’. Or, more specifically, ‘bad flung shoe’.

I’m always put in mind of this when I see drum kits set up in a room facing the wall. Been there and done that myself, naturally. But I’m convinced that it’s not a good thing.

I include a few pics randomly found via Google. Some up against just one wall, some in a corner, and one crammed in to a blind alley of three walls (big kit/small room, poss unavoidable?).

Just as I find living in the country and under open skies with access to or views onto a garden liberating, inspiring and so on, I find staring at walls cloying.

What are your thoughts on this subject?