Seb Palmer

A beautiful portrait of Frank Zappa, by the wonderful Robert Crumb. One great artist pays homage to another. Lovely!

In the pictures above and below, you can see how grim this bath trim had gotten. Especially right in the corner.

We inherited this ‘solution’ to sealing the area ‘twixt bath and walls/tiles from the previous owner/occupant.

It had been ok for a few years. But it stared to come away from the walls, and discolour. I took it off, cleaned it all up, repainted the wood, and reinstalled it all.

I used a sealant that was supposedly bathroom friendly, waterproof, and anti-fungal. Yet in practice it deteriorated far more quickly after my ‘maintenance’ than prior. That sucks!

So I’m going a different route (to be said American style, like ‘grout’!) this time. I’ll be using some white adhesive backed tape. I just hope it goes on easily, and doesn’t get all ‘orrid n manky!

LATER ON…

Aaaargh!!! Sometimes I hate this DIY shit. Esp’ when trying to make silk purses from sow’s ears, and with very limited skills.

For starters the walls and the bath are not in parallel alignment. This is particularly bad along the short or ‘top’ side of the bath. This doomed this job – at least in terms of neatness and simplicity – from the outset. Although I didn’t quite realise until this late stage.

This was the most annoying part. But actually the product I used has issues. In order to do the job properly, I ought to have used painters’ masking tape to mark out an alignment edge, all around the bath. Then, at least on the long edge, I might’ve used just one layer of this tape, and maybe stood a small chance of getting it in position reasonably accurately.

I tried to remove half the backing (length-wise – along the fold line), and position just one half in situ. But, whilst that had seemed like. Good idea, it didn’t work at all. In fact it made things worse.

And the tape? Once the backing is removed, it’s both so incredibly sticky, and also very stretchy, that proper alignment utterly eluded me.

Really the best thing would be to gut the bathroom entirely. Start from scratch, and get everything ship-shape, from the ground up. But this whole house is one bodge on top of another.

My only comfort, after this disappointing result, is that, shite as it is, it still looks a lot better than it did afore.

I have to confess to being something of a Trunkophile. Johnny Trunk seems to be on my wavelength. I’ve bought quite a few groovy items of apparel from him, and a fair bit of music, as well.

And his interests range much wider. For example he wrote the introduction to the beautiful Small Films book, by Four Corners. Which, interestingly enough, in terms of synchronicity, Tim Oliver, who visited today, gifted me some years back (thanks, Tim!).

The title Audio Erotica is perfect. The only reason I knock off half a star is that I’ve been spoiled rather, recently, by numerous books about music that I’ve acquired being both beautiful and big. This is more medium to small in size.

Organised as an A-Z, from Acoustic Research to Zenith, some companies – Bang & Olufson, Sony, for example – get several pages, whilst others get only single entries.

I rather like B&O’s rendering of the ol’ £ symbol (below). There’s a delicious irony, or just aptness, in that their gear is also known for being very expensive.

There’s a lot of design stuff in here that I don’t feel is worth sharing. Inc. lots of dated but delicious use of ‘dolly birds’ to flog audio gear. I’m not really showing any of that, as it’s more cheesy than compelling, to me.

Chickens, on the other hand? I love this BASF promo’, with the cockerel! Very old fashioned looking. It could be something from the 1940s!

‘I hear you’re mad about Brubeck…’ Never heard of Bogen before. But if it’s good enough for Dave?

The future? It ain’t what it used to be. I didn’t realise Braun did hi-fi. Some pretty sci-fi hi-fi, at that. And they’ve produced some fab promo’ stuff as well.

There are, dotted throughout, little gems, such as the above. And the spread below is straight out of an Austin Powers wet-dream bachelor party pad.

There are lots of familiar names. Pioneer, Sony, etc. And lots of obscure stuff, as well. And from all over: many Japanese, American, German, even quite English brands.

I love reel-to-reel machines. My dad had one (or two?). I recall a TEAC reel-to-reel. It was a four track recorder. Or was it Tascam? I wonder what became of it? Wish I had it!

The above is another of those occasional design nuggets I so love. Some, such as the above, of these remind me of Saul Bass’ work, in their bold simplicity.

One of the biggest hitters in this market, Sony smash numerous design aesthetic home runs. Strong stuff!

All told, this is just what the title suggests. I don’t know the exact time frame as yet. Just that it’s retro gear. So far – this came earlier today – I’m mostly just perusing the imagery. I have been reading snippets of the text. And it’s fascinating. But I’ve yet to have a full read through.

An excellent little book. Thank you senor Trunk and the folk at Fuel.

Hannah, the girls, and Tim came over today. They brought with them a home-made Simnal cake, which was delicious.

We had tea n’ cake, snacks n’ drinks, some Easter chocs, etc. Even a bit of non-alcoholic beer and Nozecco!

A walk along the river to the park, in the Spring sunshine was lovely. Then back home for more drinks, nibbles, and socialising. Very pleasant!

Our buddy Pat arrived in town, before we’d got back to the house (Hannah & co had arrived later than initially planned). So we met him at the park. And all walked home together.

Around 7.30 Hannah and co left. We had a lovely time with them. Family and friends. So important!

I was looking at some of the Guardian’s ‘Book of the Month’ articles yesterday, and stumbled on a number of titles I’d like to read, such as these:

On the Wikipedia page about him, he’s quoted thus: ‘there is no free will, or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters.’

I’ve yet to read his book. I think I will read it. But in the meantime, I’d like to put down my reaction to just a few of the basic ideas that strike me, as a reaction to purely learning of the books existence and central theses.

But first… I like a number of things about Sapolsky, including this statement: ‘… around age thirteen or so. In my adolescent years one of the defining actions in my life was breaking away from all religious belief whatsoever.’

That chimes so well with my own experience. Brought up in a very Christian (of sorts) household, I’d say that between 11-13 years of age, possibly earlier, I started to transition from occasionally wondering if all this religious stuff was just nonsense – as soon as I could think I had started to suspect as much – to seriously questioning it for myself, and finally abandoning it altogether.

Having read a couple of reviews of Determined, my immediate reaction is that the old bugbear of semantics, or definitions, might (as it so often is) be a crucial matter.

On one immediate and, I would think, blindingly obvious (to the point of redundancy), level… of course everything is determined what immediately precedes it. But there’s a grey area between the possibilities every moment creates, and actually realised eventualities, as brought about by human agency.

I can well imagine, from both intuitive perspectives, and also my limited reading in the area of cognitive science, that our consciousness is both much more limited and yet way more powerful than popularly understood.

I’m anticipating that Sapolsky and the specialist research he might cite will look at what’s going on in the brain when we believe we’re making conscious decisions. And that’s an area whereof I do not know, and therefore shall not speak!

Having said that. On the everyday lived level of human experience, I would argue that there has to be free will. It’s perhaps a bit like the way physics might tell us, if we burrow sufficiently deeply, that solids are not in fact solid, after all. On some very deeply investigated level, that may be the truth. But if you drive into a brick wall…

So it becomes, possibly – I really ought to read the book! – a question (or whole field of questions/inquiry) of what we mean by or understand as ‘free will’.

I could waffle endlessly about what I mean, in common everyday terms, about my idea of what free will is. I might choose to look at recent issues in my life, like the choice of whether or not to drink alcohol. And, as far as the term free will has any ordinary meaning to me, I’d say I’m exercising some in this respect.

Are the factors that lead me to stop determining, or merely influencing?

Another angle I might come at it from would be that ol’ chestnut about the wide range of differing responses to the same events that different folk evince. Now of course you can unpick it all – and I suspect that’s exactly what Sapolsky does – and say trauma survivor A handles it better because… whereas B succumbs because their history… etc.

But it can also surely be argued that one can learn and cultivate an ability to choose how to react to things differently. You find your natural reaction to X is causing difficulties, so you adapt. Potentially choosing to change how you react (or adopting some other strategy).

Well… I find I’m compellingly intrigued by all this, and that rather than speculate too much about it all, I’ll try and get around to reading Sapolsky’s book, and see what exactly he’s saying.

I got this book on an unexpected whim, in circumstances I relate elsewhere. At the time I was watching the Apple TV/Playtone (Hanks/Spielberg/Goetzman) Masters of The Air miniseries, which is about much the same subject.

Although this book is titled Big Week, most of the book – the first two thirds, at least – is about the American and British bombing war against Germany. Only the final third or so is actually about the titular Big Week drive.

This larger context was the Allied effort – a mirror image, really, of the initial German attempts to destroy the RAF, prior to the mooted Operation Sealion – to annihilate the Luftwaffe, as a precursor and precondition (total air supremacy) to Overlord, the Allied opening of a second/Western land war front.

I can hardly call this a spoiler alert, as we all already know the outcome! But of course whereas Hitler/Goring and Germany failed to destroy the RAF, and in turn abandoned plans to invade/subjugate Britain, the Western Allies – Britain with her Commonwealth resources (Canada, Australia, India, etc), and the mighty US of A – succeed in their goal of grinding the Luftwaffe down.

It’s interesting to read that it wasn’t just Germany – lead by a man losing touch with reality – that struggled with unwieldy command and control or conflicting goals. For Germany the switch from destroying the RAF to ‘reprisal’ raids on cities was a mistake that would cost them the war. For the Allies, they could ride out these issues, with manpower and materiel to spare.

This is a very different read to Paul Overy’s The Bombing War. I read the latter some years ago. It’s a huge brick sized door-stop of a tome. Holland’s style is more ‘popular history’; still very well researched, but more focussed on the action, and individual stories. Whereas Overy’s work is a drier more academic look at the subject.

Holland’s book is, as a result, both gripping and enjoyable to read. I was in the middle of reading another book (on the battle of Trafalgar) when I started this, and it took over completely.

We live in East Anglia, in The Fens. So many of the air bases mentioned in the book are local names/places. And, rather poignantly, we are very familiar also with The American Cemetery, at Madingley, which is mentioned here. Memorials to those killed in war are always more affecting when you’ve read of the individuals’ lives.

I won’t synopsise the contents in great detail here. Other reviewers elsewhere have already done that. I’ll just say that I really enjoyed it. Holland covers both the Allied (British and American) and German perspectives, using a great deal of firsthand accounts, making for a very vivid narrative.

He also addresses the strategic as well as the tactical day to day stuff; both sides were to some degree hamstrung by issues arising from the guarding of jealous fiefdoms, and conflicting command and control aims.

The biggest thing ultimately was that Hitler, and Goring, Luftwaffe chief and fawning acolyte of The Führer, lost touch with reality. They bit off more than they could chew. There’s an inevitability to it all. Germany simply didn’t have the resources, either manufacturing, logistical, or manpower wise, to take on Russia, England (and her Empire/Commonwealth) and the US.

One of my favourite aspects of this excellent book is not ‘The Big Week’ part, with which it ends, but how it starts; the story of how America geared up for and met the challenges of producing men and materiel with which to defeat Nazi Germany.

The development and production of the B-17 Flying Fortress and P-51 Mustang are key elements in this story. As also is the training American pilots got. The Allied philosophy – in stark contrast to the way Germany and Russia waged WWII – of metal not men, using technology to conserve lives, was (as well as being morally superior) a winning one.

If I was being hyper-critical, I might say that this book is occasionally a bit repetitive, or sometimes get’s a bit Commando Comic in its efforts to convey the action. But the truth is, I’ve loved reading it. Here, on my own blog, I can and do give a four and half star rating. But elsewhere, e.g. goodreads.com, I give it five.

An excellent book. Highly recommended.

When you do DIY, esp’ as an amateur/newbie, you’re always making mistakes and learning. Well, I am.

We need to build some storage stuff in The Blue Room, which is our guest room. We’ll be letting it out to our brother in law, Antonio, very soon.

So we don’t have long to do this work!

In order to construct a built-in wardrobe cum whatever it’s going to be – clothing storage, essentially – I didn’t want the coving interfering with construction.

I watched a few YouTube vids of folk removing coving. And of course, they made it look super easy. I find that whenever I do this sort of thing, other unforeseen factors come to bear.

So, for example, the main video I watched, whose technique I used, was in a more modern house. And it looks like the coving wasn’t super-strongly attached. I used the same technique; a rubber mallet and a flat scraper type thing, hammered ‘twixt coving and walls/ceiling, to prise them apart.

But I needed to use far for more force to get them to separate. And instead of the coving coming away in long complete sections, it would break into smaller pieces. But the worst thing was, that unlike the stuff in the video, where wall and ceiling meet in a nice neat 90° angle, in our home the coving covers yawning and very messy chasms, ‘twixt wall n’ ceiling!

And not only that, but an absolute ton of really disgusting dirt, debris and very fine dust was sat in the hollow area – usually an empty void – behind the coving. This has coated the entire room in a fine layer of cack!

With a mask on, and using dustpan & brush, hoover, etc, I managed to clear up the area below where I was working. The next step will be buying and mixing what the Yanks call ‘mud’, known here as plaster.

But I’ll need to further clean up the voids, and I might even need to put up some plaster board or wood, to fill the empty spaces. Trying to do it with ‘mud’ alone would probably require several layers being built up. And we don’t have time for that.

This is of course massively annoying, because it is all prior to the actual construction of the wooden shelves and whatnot. I.e. the actual storage space I was trying to create. It’s these sort of unforeseen things that seem to constantly bedevil any and all DIY that I attempt.

In the photo at the top of this post you can see that on the left I took away all the coving. Whilst on the right I only went as far forward as the unit I’m building requires. I prob should’ve done the latter on the former. But you live and learn! Plus I still have left-over bits of coving I took down. Poss even enough to do the bit that’ll need re-installing?

Tomorrow we’ll head to B&Q, get some mud, and some framing timber, etc. Who knows, I may even have the carcassing done by the end of the Easter weekend?

Actually… thinking of tomorrow, it’d be good to get all the waste from the box and laurel bushes to the dump, and post the LPA docs as well. Must remember all these things!

I decided to go to Wisbech, specifically to Peckover House, and sit and read a bit there, in their rather more salubrious surroundings. So I did.

I’d been trying, without success, all day long, to book some work. But in a way I was happy none came up. I was shattered, and still needed to start recovering from the psychological exhaustion of yesterday’s events.

There are many lovely old buildings – possibly mostly Georgian era? – on North Brink, which runs along the north bank of the river Nene, in Wisbech. And there are lots of lovely little details, such as the cute built-in bird houses in the above photo.

I walked from a car park, north of North Brink, adjacent to Wisbech RUFC grounds. And saw all the above en-route to Peckover House. The weather was a bit cold and windy. But also occasionally sunny, at this point.

It started to cloud over whilst I sat indoors, reading. I moved from room to room, as I finished another segment or chapter of Big Week (an excellent book!).

I love the area around the upper reaches of the hall, landing, a s stairs. Lots of very grand and ornate plaster work!

I love the pale blue walls against the cream coloured plasterwork.

I sat on a chair at the top of the landing, which looks out to wards the gardens at the rear of the property. A lovely spot. Rather spoiled at one point by a workman with a very loud pneumatic nail-gun!

Looking out: this – above – was the view from where I was sat. Absolutely lovely.

I moved rooms again, after a while…

I’m wondering if any online search tools might help me find a close match for the above patterned fabric… we shall soon see.

There was an exhibition by a local artist. But I wasn’t too taken with that, to be honest. And of the art in the house itself, whilst there’s an awful lot, not a great deal of it is that good. I do like this little Dutch landscape sketch.

It was lovely, as ever, to visit. Many NT properties have what I find to be a refreshing reinvigorating affect, on me. And the book I’m reading is great as well. A good combo’.

Back at the car it started pelting down with rain. My timing was good!

I don’t always like Charles Bukowski’s poetry and/or philosophy. I almost always admire and respect it. But it can be a bit dark and brutal at times. Mind you, so can life/the world. And as his poetry is a reflection of those things, I respect him for being a ‘soothsayer’!

This one cropped up in my FB feed today. And I really do dig it!

nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your self as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.

only you can save your
self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.

Acc. to the interweb this is taken from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way, 2002

It’s interesting, to me, that he remained an unapologetic and determined smoker, drinker, and womaniser. From these perspectives, he might say that I’m already one of the zombies, the walking dead.

And I do find that a disturbing possibility, or challenge. Has life already beaten me into submission? I have very often thought so. Or am I just being sensible?

Lyrics by Sting and Beck leap to mind: ‘I’ve spent too many years/ at war with myself/ my doctor has told me/ it’s no good for my health’, sang Mr Sumner. And Beck has sung about being ‘tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause.’

So how does one square authenticity to one’s own ‘true’ self, and the zombie-fication inherent in much of our contemporary society? I’d have to agree with Chuck B, that, at the very least/best, it’s a damnably tough fight!