All along our days

For far too long, it seems, I've been staring at a blank piece of paper with no particular inspiration to write. That's not to say that I've not written anything at all, but as someone who takes an active stance against both the endless commentary of microblogging and the rather relentless accumulation of what Mr Zuckerberg rather zealously describes as "friends", and yet who subsequently poked her nose into the whizbang new replacement that xkcd so accurately termed "Not FB!", the more short paragraphs, or even shorter one-liners, that I dash off there through such convenience the more it rankles that I'm serving a network in precisely the manner I never intended, and even worse, not spending time here. Here is where I'm supposed to write about stuff: the music I listen to, the trips I make, the thoughts I have. And yet it's that convenience of not writing a lot that is half the attraction. Of course, both this site and New Social Network are of the same parent so my allegience is already misplaced; but my time and my energies are drawn in other directions too much.

Progressive rock, as a genre, was tied strongly to the new technology of the day, and sought to combine musical styles in new, unthought of ways, through the raw talent of hairy young men. But to carry on performing 30 or 40 years later the product of those early years is not properly progressive, as much as it may pay the bills. It's regressive rock, Mister Emerson. Music evolves even within bands, but other artists of the time made a conscious effort then and now to change as much as possible and to always look forwards, experimenting constantly with influences both personal and prevailing, which is why Wendy Carlos tried out reinterpretations of classical pieces and moved onto microtonal composition and ambient records and scores, and why Rush has taken itself from bluesy hard rock to full blown sword-and-sorcery prog to intertwined sythesiser rhythm heaven to grunge and back to hard rock. More than ever, and perhaps not entirely unconnected with one too many setbacks, I'm becoming aware that I'm not the progressive, forward thinking, forward living creature I want to be, ought to be. It's as though I'm stuck in the past, somewhere, whence my life ... stopped. Sometimes it feels like I've been a passenger, slightly disconnected from the world around me and forever mindful of what once was, as though I haven't achieved all the grand plans in my head while the rest of me makes a good enough go of everything. One might be forgiven for thinking that has all the signs of a mind and body always busy doing and being, never taking enough time to reflect; a whirlwind of ideas never fully realised and filed away in the corners of the memory, or yet another notepad and sketchbook.

My day to day thoughts are no longer full to overflowing with a singular goal, and perhaps that's the problem. I can write, if I put my mind to it, and if I have something to write about. And therein lies the paradoxical beauty of constructing entire paragraphs about it.

I ought to be writing about the ongoing task that is the repair of the rusting piece of junk in my garage that serves as a reminder of both a more foolish and cheap me and the event that still haunts me two and a half years later. At the same time the more recent stablemate, old enough practically to be its Mother, has never properly settled in, forever sounding just a little too notchy on the downshift; unappealingly loud to the idle, with a muffled raucousness in neutral; it's the whisper of a clonk when taking a handful of front brake. The increasing eagerness to ride after taking so very long for that confidence to return is being tested sorely when one is always afraid that something else will go wrong. Gentle and infrequent commutes in the dry and the wet cannot build confidence in a rider, nor of her steed. The project to return the big machine to the road has become a black hole of time, money, enthusiasm, and misplaced ratchet straps. I fear that only when the lazy twin finally coughs into life after sleeping so soundly will that spark return. Meanwhile I carry on raiding the parts counters, electronic and bricks-and-mortar, and chip away at the work that remains. By the vice a new pair of those massive forks sits shiny and reassembled, gaiters scrubbed clean, stanchions polished, while the patient sits ever longer propped on its hydraulic jack and, canted over slightly because its fairing frame is twisted, its huge innocent eyes look forlornly towards the workbench.

I ought to be writing -- indeed I made a plan, subsequently ignored -- about trips across to Glasgow to explore the canal and the railways and the River Kelvin, and to meet friends for lunches and a 30 mile cycle here and there. To take the train through lands unknown, to stations rarely tried; the girl with wheels awaits alone the company her counterparts provide. A social gathering certainly, with a participant at once athletic and effusive, yet tired and shrinking. "Friends" is perhaps the wrong word in this particular case, or at the very least perhaps, not the best word; while "acquaintance" fits the situation, to me it still carries a more impersonal overtone than I feel is desirable. At any rate, a guiding hand to what is still a relatively new community will inevitably mean more exposure to newcomers who, with the occasional exception, by definition one doesn't know. Forever welcoming and meeting becomes taxing to those whose energies are recharged in quiet. But simultaneously the sheer need for small doses of that company is a driver that I find difficult to ignore and also difficult to act upon.

Inasmuch as today I'm lacking inspiration, we'll finish with a joke. Actually we won't, not because I have no joke to tell, which is in fact true, but because these were the toe-curlingly cringeworthy words of a lecturer whose name I would have to look up, and, sounding not a million miles away from Seven of Nine's flat instruction, "Fun will now commence", which I intend never, ever to use. The need to put something down on paper however began several days ago but was prompted today by the desire to put into words some thoughts on one of the loveliest pieces of music I've ever heard. It's not another damn prog thing, is it, I hear you ask? Yes, it is, although strictly it isn't Yes. After the first Relayer tour in 1975 the band faffed around for a time, each member working on a solo project. Alan White made Ramshackled, Patrick Moraz made I, Steve Howe made Beginnings, Chris Squire released his tour de force, Fish Out Of Water, but unsurprisingly it was Jon Anderson who stole the show with the beautiful Olias of Sunhillow. Although radioio and laut.fm tend to play one or another individual song from Olias, to me the album only works as the whole. Anderson may or may not have had help from Vangelis, and may have been completely out of his mind with the concept and the harmonies, but his outlook on life -- then as now -- of the sharing of love and happiness was so carefully wrought that the narrative often becomes another musical instrument in the production. It's the textures of the music I find so appealing: unlike Wakeman, Anderson didn't simply wheel in the old Mellotron for the flutes and violins we all know and love; his toned sounds were mostly the gentlest synthetic kind with a flute-meets-string-meets-oboe, along with his trusty acoustic guitar and beloved harp, and only occasionally did he bring in the rasp of a Moog on sawtooth with the filter cranked up. Anderson layered percussion upon multitracked chants of himself in the vein of We Have Heaven, with accents of glockenspiel and bell trees, all wrapped up in lots of echo. But it's the melodies themselves that are so absolutely gorgeous. Late in the album, Moon Ra segues into Chords, into Song of Search, and the exposed flutey string plays a simple, slow, slightly ethereal line, accompanied by a just-audible stethoscope heartbeat. Bum ... ba bum ... bum ... ba bum. The quiet of the piece is in such contrast to, and so well timed after, the rousing climactic Solid Space and the majesty of Moon Ra and Chords that one is caught in sudden reflection while the music washes over and around. The last minute and a half of the album is a reprise of sorts, with just the sparsest of arrangements that finally bade the listener goodbye as though the music was floating to the sky itself.

Workin' them angels

I don't know how to start this entry. My mind right now is such a jumble of big things and little things, half-baked ideas for a thread of discussion, half-forgotten ideas of introductory paragraphs because I didn't note them down when I thought of them...and I'm also suffering a little bit from tiredness and having spent too much time inside a car with a still-dodgy heater hose that's doing its best to poison me. And when it's dark and the M6 traffic is trying to average 90mph it's a bit much. In the past few weeks I've also been finding I have next to no time to myself. I've been religiously doing what the doctors told me to do each day, and I've been trying to gradually re-establish my original working pattern, although I'm still not quite there. I'm just so damn tired a lot of the time. Last night I slept - notwithstanding brief interruptions of caterwauling and errant 6am alarm clocks - for almost eleven hours.

I suppose it all started last Friday. Last week at work in fact was pretty busy with some once-a-year stuff needing my undivided attention. I think I might've made myself indispensible by being both detailed and complicated, and not quite transparent enough, so I had to be on hand. So on Friday after a morning of brainstorming ideas with the others and an afternoon drafting documents and waiting for contributions to land in my inbox, I then had to navigate myself across the water and through hitherto unknown lands to my friend's house for tea. In the event I'd practically memorised the entire route so it was only the on-the-fly reading of signposts and grappling with brand new motorway junctions that nearly threw me. Oh, and the frustrating half an hour I spent trickling along at walking pace might not've helped. But I still arrived in good time and only felt slightly worse for wear, and had a nice evening with her and some other friends who were coming. I've never known anyone who had quite so many pets; I thought the lady who had six cats and lived along the road from me was going some. We all had a bit of a trek home so we called it a night a little earlier than last time and I headed home. I can usually reverse-navigate without any maps at all. The air inside my car was beginning to affect me though and I went to bed with a headache and feeling a bit rubbish. For Saturday I had no particular agenda and had thought about going into town to look for leather trousers and things but a combination of sunshine which was too good not to just sit in and absorb, followed by a load of drizzle for the rest of the day which didn't inspire me to go outside, meant I didn't really do anything except pore over maps.

I like my maps actually. So the evening was when I realised I had stuff to do and my energy levels jumped up a level, and I was busy with the UK atlas and zooming in on Google Earth to examine motorway lane procedures. I had to be down by Manchester for Sunday afternoon and although I'd done a similar journey once or twice before, I was going to use a different route. I really don't like driving anyway and I tend to get a little nervous when it comes to motorway junctions at motorway speeds. At least on the bike, you're going much slower and you can always stop if you want. But I was ready and armed with two Post-It notes the next day, knowing precisely which lane I'd need and when, and when to manoeuvre into the right lane in time. And it worked like a charm. I pulled into the Travelodge car park just ten minutes ahead of schedule and I was relieved to get out of the car and breathe huge lungfuls of (fairly) fresh air. I found my room, dumped my bags, closed the curtains and conked out on the bed for an hour.

I hadn't slept but at least my mind had slowed down a bit, and just a short time later, Liz and Nick stopped by the service road to pick me up. I hadn't seen Liz since the Rush concert in 2004, but we'd spent that many hours talking to each other since then that we more or less dispensed entirely with the pleasantries and the catching-up. I think "Hello!" was all it needed. Then I discovered there was a slight change of plan due to rather unforseen circumstances, so we stopped by her brother's house to pick up his wife, whom I hadn't seen since Rush either. So, after a bit of time chatting to her brother about his new bike project the four of us left for the middle of Manchester. It was a nice change, staying at a Travelodge en route into town, rather than in the middle of town like last time, because it meant everything was a bit more relaxed all round and more convenient for later.

The first thing to do was find somewhere to have tea. Of course, we'd already tossed ideas around and decided that burgers might be a good safe plan, so we headed over to a building that looked to me to be half studio set and half computer game environment. Apparently it was the old newspaper publishing building, now "The Printworks" and it was huge. Before long we were installed in a cosy corner table in a restaurant and tucking into some exceptionally good cheeseburgers. No pickle either! But almost before we knew it, time was pressing so we headed outside and over to the MEN Arena and joined the queues.

Rush. 2007. They've been at it for 33 years now, who knows how much longer they'll go touring around the world? We headed over to the main hall to find our seats; I bought myself the Snakes and Arrows tourbook, to go with my R30 tourbook and my precious Permanent Waves book. I was only five when they toured that one, but it's interesting the way my musical tastes behaved. There is one tune I remember very clearly hearing a few times in my early childhood: a slightly spacey sounding, uptempo piece with heavy synth punctuation and slashy guitar chords. For a long time I had no idea who performed it or what it was called, until much later I saw the history of The Nice on TV. The band of my memory was Emerson, Lake and Palmer, with, of course, Fanfare for the Common Man. Well, perhaps my prog-leanings were instilled right from the very start.

I'd vaguely planned to note down each song as they played, but I think I can pretty much remind myself just by looking through the CD track listings. They opened with 'Limelight', which was nice to hear. Alex had a really clear electric guitar sound this time, due in no small part I think to sticking with his Les Paul rather than one of his thinner sounding PRS instruments; Neil's drums were sharp and nicely tuned, and though I wasn't much of a fan of his early forays into DW, these ones sounded good. I thought the bass was almost totally lost in the mix though; I could make out the lowest notes and some of the high frequencies in Geddy's now-traditional overdriven twang, but mostly I watched his fingers on the video screens and imagined the notes, since I know them off by heart. The set order escapes me right now, but anyone can look it up elsewhere, and someone else will have remembered it better than me anyway. They delved into some of their early works and pulled out a few songs I hadn't heard on any of their live albums to date; I was especially pleased to hear 'Between The Wheels' and 'Circumstances', and 'Witch Hunt' which made it onto A Show Of Hands back in 1988. From the new album they ran through 'Far Cry' and the groovy but short 'Malignant Narcissm' - the only two songs that have gelled with me so far - but they played 'Workin' Them Angels', 'The Larger Bowl', 'Spindrift' (which I didn't recognise at all!), 'Hope' and 'The Main Monkey Business'. Naturally, they wheeled out some of the big guns, like 'Tom Sawyer', 'The Spirit Of Radio', and 'Freewill' which really was spoiled for me by not being able to hear the bass. I was surprised when the lapping waters began, signifying the start of 'Natural Science', and ten minutes went by very quickly; it's one of my favourite songs to sing and play. Alex sneaked in a few bars of the Exit...Stage Left introduction to 'Jacob's Ladder' at one point which no-one else seemed to notice. They also played the melodic 'Entre Nous', so most of that album got a look in, which was fine by me. What else? "Booom Booom Booooom, Booom Booom Booooom..." sang the synth at the start of 'Subdivisions', always one of my favourite songs to listen to, simply because of the chunky synth sound and the boggling drum pattern. They rattled through 'The Analog Kid', 'Digital Man' and 'Distant Early Warning', and even played 'Mission' from the Hold Your Fire album. I was wondering how Geddy's voice would handle the high intro but I needn't have worried. They touched on 'Dreamline', but amazingly, they didn't play anything from the Presto, Counterparts or Test For Echo albums. Perhaps they'd played enough of them in the last couple of tours, though I'd've liked to hear 'Dog Years'.

From the last album we heard at least 'Secret Touch', and if there were others, I can't remember. Vapor Trails was a very badly produced album and although the guys in the band acknowledged that fact later, the songs on it are still to settle with me. It wouldn't have been a Rush concert without five or ten minutes of drum and percussion solo courtesy of Neil and it was almost entirely new, with new sounds from the electronic drums too. I would swear that he'd sampled the sounds of all the pots and pans in his kitchen and arranged something with them. We didn't get the customary gong at the end, which was a nice change actually, and the crowd sounded impressed. The encore featured the earliest song they would play that night: 'A Passage To Bangkok'. Geddy brought out his Rickenbacker just for the occasion and I was heartbroken; a bass he hadn't touched in probably 20 years, and I just couldn't hear it in the mix. But for the last piece, and back to his black Jazz for 'YYZ', I was guaranteed some bass listening, because the tune has three sections of bass vs. drums alternate duelling without any accompanying instruments. Hah! I heard those bits! And with the last four notes, that was it. "Thank you and goodnight!"

Thank you chaps. I totally enjoyed the concert, even more so than last time. And a terribly well-behaved audience too; I didn't hear any shouting or anything. Even Yes didn't manage that. I should say a big thank you to Liz and Nick too, for being just as crazy about the music as me, for being generally cool, and for feeding me lunch the next day.

Last time I stayed right in the middle of Manchester and hot-tyred it straight home early in the morning, which was probably the thing to do in those days; this time around I wanted to see my friends for longer. So after a reasonable night's sleep, in which I had a peculiar dream about demolition and a crane transporter whose engine sound was actually the sound of the air conditioner unit outside the Travelodge, and a reasonable breakfast, I ambled over to Liz's house for a bit. True to form, we spent all our time chatting. So much so that we hadn't had lunch and I was supposed to be leaving mid-afternoon to avoid the traffic! Duly fed and watered, we had a big goodbye hug and I aimed Clara at the M62 again.

My road map made no sense other than telling me where the road makers couldn't decide what number to use at this or that junction, but with my Audax-alike notes stuck to the dashboard I no problems. I hadn't (bothered to) bring my Landranger map of Chestershire and once off the motorway, although I had made notes for all the way, I'd spent enough time looking at the maps that I knew where I was going, and once past the shopping centre it was familiar territory. I spent the rest of the day talking with Jodi, we went out for the odd bit of shopping, and had a lateish tea after Sarah arrived. We watched Pirates of the Caribbean which I hadn't seen before, and I liked it a lot. Johnny Depp's nod to Keith Richards was brilliant. The day after, Jodi and I had a nice lazy breakfast and resumed chatting about everything and nothing. I had the same sort of plan for avoiding the worst of the traffic, so after lunch and a second goodbye hug I was on my way home. Mostly it went fine: there are only three major roads to get home and the M6 northbound is one of my favourite roads if I have to be driving. Three accidents (not mine!) put a crimp on my pace, but I was concerned as much about fresh air as time. I rattled up past Lancaster's control tower and pulled in at Tebay for hot chocolate and a toastie, then hurried northwards. When I got home I was worn out.

I'd arranged the following day off work to recover/chill/do washing and I needed it. Fed up entirely with driving by then, I was back on my bike yesterday and desperately trying to get the smell of exhaust out of my nose.

Today I'm in no less discomfort than I was before. It shouldn't have been this way but my appointment for inspection and possible mending didn't happen. I don't know why. I'd been trying to get through to someone—anyone—at the clinic to find out what time I was supposed to arrive as I'd heard nothing, but no-one returned my call. Then Hospital HQ phoned me yesterday with the news. So I have a slight reprieve on that front and a bit more time to heal and become fit with more miles on my bike too (yay!), but it also means I'll have to bump back my vague plans for motorbike lessons. I don't really want to have to learn in the snow and ice, much as it might be useful.