Gawd bless the internet and all who sail on her! Last time I (briefly) owned a sax I don’t think I even got a proper note out of it. I sold it to buy a motorbike. Priorities. This time around, twenty years later, I have t’interweb! Straight on to YouTube where there are posts on how to wet and fit your reed, embouchure (how you hold your gob, if you’re not down with us saxophonists) and which buttons make which notes. I was giving it all a go today. First impressions are: by god it’s loud! Obviously it’s a lot to take on board, and it’s really tricky, but not impossible. I was stringing together a couple of notes at a time and I’ve been practising fingering the sequence B,A,C,G,F# (never thought I’d get to use that on my keyboard) D, B (I think). I’m loving it. It’s been a splendid day off; Wendy’s mum and dad have been staying with us but they’ve buggered off to Wales for the weekend and it’s lovely to have the place to ourselves again. I had a good Taekwondo work-out this morning, sax in the afternoon, and chilled ‘twixt and ‘tween. Lovely. I’m going to have to price up a soundproof mini-room tomorrow. Apparently making a big box lined with egg trays reduces the sound emissions to a whisper. (According to one source on the never-wrong internet.) I can get the requisite 140 foot square cardboard egg trays for about twenty three quid, but I will have to find the price for that much plywood/ hardboard and sixty four foot of 2"x2". Really I suppose I should research further the efficacy of the proposed project before I commit to further spending. I’ve re-applied to our local music shop to set up a starter of four, hour long, lessons (after Wendy thoughtfully tidied the tutor’s name and ‘phone number into the bin). They way I’m progressing I’ll probably have mastered it by then! Anywho, just to say I love my sax! I have a new obsession. In the old days that would have meant ‘flavour of the week’, but as the driving and martial arts have shown, I can stick at things now. OK, so the Russian has slid off the radar for the moment, but that is a lifetime’s commitment to learn (well, it is the way I go about it!). And it is just a whim. Hmm, better not go there with that argument, everything I do is on the basis of a whim or impractical desire. Some yuppie shop was flogging it’s elitist tat with the slogan ‘Desire, aspire, acquire’. That is how my life goes! As I’ve said before my teen dreams were to be a black belt, play the tenor sax, and ride a really nice Harley chop. When the telly sells you these dreams they don’t mention the years of graft you have to put in to get them. Harley is pure cash, that isn’t quick or easy […]
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Not a ‘no’
Just a quick a update before I trot off to work. I went into the office four times yesterday to try and see Tony (the site manager) and each time he was in a meeting or doing other important stuff. On the fourth attempt I saw a middle manager I know (Murray) and he said he’d go into the meeting and ask Tony what the news was. Tony came straight out and saw me in person. He said that we are getting new rigid (class II) trucks next month so, subject to them being able to sort out the insurance (which he saw no reason why they couldn’t as they’d run warehouse-to-wheels on other sites with the same insurance) his plan was to send me out in an old rigid to do deliveries. His reasoning being it would get me used to driving a laden truck (up to eighteen tons on the back, as opposed to the empty ones you learn to drive in), get used to the stores and doing the job, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I put the odd scratch on an old truck whilst getting the hang of it. This is brilliant in several ways; it says that they have been thinking about me and how best to get me trained up, not just saying ‘we don’t know yet, come back again next week’, they are not expecting me to start off perfect, so I don’t have to think that one scrape and I’m sacked, and it would be days! This would be fantastic news for Wendy. Also the pay is the same whatever I’m driving. He said that they’d see how I went on, then upgrade me to artic’s in January if I was OK. At which point Murray chipped in that where he was they had w-t-w, and to get the new drivers good at reversing they put them on shunting for a week. That is just picking up trailers from one place in the yard then reversing on to a dock at some other point. Then repeat. For twelve hours a day! All in all I found his immediate response, and credible plan quite encouraging. I wasn’t just being told what I wanted to hear or being kept in suspense. Hope springs. In other news here are the promised photo’s: The suit, twenty or so quid off eBay, perfect fit, natty as a spiv’s ‘tache. The hand made to order winklepickers! Words cannot express the coolness. The rented sax (so she thinks! It shall be mine!) the ensemble! Tres Bleeding chic! Oh yes! Cooler than a penguins chilly bits! What with being able to blow a C already (apparently that is the note you produce if you blow down it without depressing any of the keys) I only have seven more notes to learn and I’m fluent! End of the week I’m predicting. Gotta go, Buck.
Continue readingIt’s all about now.
Hi. I’m nervous now. Today is supposed to be the day. I have to go in and see the site manager, my bezzie mate/ total bastard, Tony Simpson today. This is it. My future hangs in the balance. If he says I can go driving then I’ll be ecstatic but terrified, if he says I can’t I’ll start applying for jobs in earnest. The third, and worst, option is that he says ‘I’ll get back to you’ (again). So far this has been a happening week; Wendy and I compromised on the sax, I’m initially renting it for four months to see if I can take to it and stick to it, but I now have a sax! (Pictures to follow, got to go to work in a bit.) I even got a noise out of it! I wouldn’t go so far as to claim it was a note, but it was better than the breathless wheeze I seem to remember achieving the last time I owned one. My shoes finally arrived today, six days too late for the do to which I intended to wear them, but stunning none the less. Hand made to order, which explains the delay, but not the claim of a ten day turn around made by the website. My 0% interest credit card came yesterday, I’ve transferred that huge debt I ran up for my driving lessons (for which they had recently upped the interest repayment to ninety pounds a month!) and we will easily be able to settle that before we start incurring interest again. So now it’s just the job. I’m scared if he says ‘yes’, as when I said I would like to go out with a driver for a week to build up my experience safely, he changed it to ‘an assessor, yes’. If that is the case I’d feel like I was on my driving test for a whole week! If he says ‘no’, then the panic subsides until such times as I can actually get someone to give me an interview, never mind a job. If, as I’m expecting, he says ‘I’ll get back to you’, I’ll be miffed, but I have no choice but to hang in there. Well, good, bad or indifferent, I’ll let you know tomorrow. Also I’ll post pictures of my eBay bargain suit, so-cool shoes, and unspeakably cool sax. Fingers crossed, Buck.
Continue readingHurry up and wait
I’ve calmed down after my last impotent rant. When I returned to the Independent’s story later on the problem had been cleared and there were several cynical and informed replies posted. The story is getting out, and people are aware that want to be aware. If one chooses to subscribe to the evil Murdoch’s promulgation pawns that is a choice. Less of a choice when you consider how many local radio stations all cut to Sky for their news updates, and the unadulterated propaganda that is Sky telly. Enough! Was it one of those ‘use this word in a sentence’ deliberate misunderstandings on the word ‘horticulture’ that ran: you can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think. Not independently valid on any level when you break it down, but if you accept that reality is objective, its interpretation subjective, and its reporting selective, it follows that a person who fails to question probably just wants a simple answer. As they say of being a biker ‘if I have to explain, you wouldn’t understand.’ Not you, imagined and implicitly clever reader, but the Sun reading herd. Not even that broad a category, Sun believing herd. Anywho, believe it or not I have actually calmed down. All the above was just a way of saying that I probably won’t be writing up my manifesto piecemeal, defining myself by what I oppose. People believe what they want. The evidence that informs my views is equally available to all. To think that only I can extrapolate the truth is verging on megalomania, and is at best patronising. You are all spared. Do your own thinking and don’t blame me when you get it wrong! (Joke!) Over myself now. Now we’ve thrashed that one out lets move on. Potentially good news about my driving, I went in to see the HR chick yet again on Friday (the latest date when everything would be resolved, obviously it wasn’t, again!) but this time the main woman wasn’t there so her minion said she’d go and see her. I waited a few minutes then out came the site manager. I ignored him, thinking he was about his business and it wouldn’t relate to mine. He came up to me, sat me down, and had a five minute chat with me. Perhaps I should mention in passing that the perception is that he is more than just the site manager (although that is at the top of the food chain as far as everyone on site is concerned), the feeling is that he is a troubleshooter. Sent to sort out sites, then move on. He is, it’s felt, a company hit-man. Since he took over there have been lots of changes (such as we de-kit lads being chucked out of our department and Eastern European agency lads being given our jobs). So when I say he was talking to me, I mean a chap with some clout. He said he was still looking into it, […]
Continue readingIn the land of the blind…
…the one-eyed Buck is king. I was angered into nearly changing the direction of my blog this week. I never used to watch the news when I was young out of rampant apathy, then I became political as I grew older and watched with a critical, analytic eye. Recently, however I have become so disillusioned that I have been too saddened to watch. Everything is either too trivial and inane to be of any but the most superficial of interest or too predictably cynical and evil. Everything I watch or read just confirms my world view. Even the knee-jerk idiot-fodder only shows what those in influence want the great (!) unwashed to think. In other words, they confirm my world view by denying it. Which is pre-amble to my point, that out of boredom the other day I clicked on the ‘news; heading on my Firefox browser jobby. There upon I saw an article about ‘NATO’ bombing two of it’s own petrol tankers in Afghanistan, killing 90 people. There was no immediate link to The Independent (the quality paper for the tree-hugging, free-thinking, Lib-Dem voting, yoghurt-knitting, sandal-wearing, elbow-patched, be-blazered, beardy-weirdy) so I clicked on The Times article. According to their trite propaganda piece the evil Johnny Foreigner scum had stolen two tankers, one of which got stuck. They were then spotted by a ‘NATO’ ‘plane that radioed back to base confirming that all ninety people surrounding the tankers were terrorists, so was given the green light to bomb the hell out of them. The local villagers who claimed to have spotted the stuck tanker and had their relatives rush to get free hand-outs off the hi-jackers were all seriously bereaved, but patently liars and terrorists to man, woman and child. And even if there were a few civilians present, the hi-jackers had started a fire-fight amongst themselves (at the exact moment the got the shit blown out of them by that ‘NATO’ ‘plane presumably) and probably caused the explosion themselves, an official ‘source’ claimed. Not being completely stupid, I filled in the comments page. I urged an enquiring mind. I noted that the first rule of authority in cases of error is obfuscation. That in the instance of the police murder of Charles De Menezes, the media was immediately informed that the suspect was wearing a heavy winter coat in summer, that he had wires protruding from it, that uniformed armed police officers shouted ‘Stop! Police!’ This was allowed to sink into the herd consciousness, only to be found out to be total lies years later. (As it turns out eye witnesses saw him stroll onto a tube in normal attire when a bunch of men in civvies ran on to the train, threw him to the floor and put eight rounds through his head. The jury wasn’t even allowed to return a verdict of ‘unlawful killing’ and had to leave it as an open verdict. Justice in a country without the death penalty.)The bit in brackets is my rage […]
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