Playing the blues...

That said, I wasn’t in too much of a reflective mood as I was on my way to the Chertsey Radio Station to do my weekly ‘Noughties and Nineties’ show. It was on leaving my car that I first heard it – the regular thump of the drum intermingled with the steady hiss of the lighter percussion, backed by the sounds of a saxophone and accompanying string instruments. The net result was pretty good, though the loudness made it hard to miss! There was definitely no doubt about its source – it was coming from the Chertsey Radio Station Studios.

I met my mate who had arrived a bit before me, and he said that the music had been going strong since he got there. We both found this a bit puzzling as according to the schedule a radio play was due for broadcasting. Also my show was to start in less than half an hour, and there was no indication that the full blown live Blues session going on would stop in time. When I went into the Studios my initial assessment was proved to be correct. There was indeed a live blues band playing, but the session was being recorded for a Blues show to be broadcast later on in the week. The assistant presenter asked if I could do my show from the smaller secondary studio, as there was a bit more recording to be done in the main one.

I had used the secondary studio before. The equipment there is actually better configured as the faders on the mixing desk are in a more logical order. The lack of familiarity with the kit was less of an issue than the lack of space, as my mate, who does a bit of co-presenting on the show, had just enough room to stand, using the guest microphone karaoke style. Whilst not a major problem, it did make the broadcast seem a bit surreal!

It was only afterwards, whilst enjoying a couple of post show pints back in Surbiton, that the realisation kicked in – I’d forgotten to find out the name of the band who were playing. This was a real shame as they were very good.

Cheers!

How did your celebrations go? Mine turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag.

I started things off with the family where we were joined by a couple of other people who came around for a bit of food and a drink, and then a few hours before the Big Ben chimes were due to ring in 2012 I headed off to join my mate and his wife in the rain soaked climbs of Worcester Park.

This annual event was back on the social calendar, but this year there was a difference – the venue was the house of one of his neighbours, who we all joined for dinner. The food was in abundance and was very good, but I didn’t manage to do it justice – the grub I had eaten earlier and the remnants of a cold took the edge off my appetite. The company was good though, and time passed quickly over a beer and several tequila shots. I made it back to New Malden at around 2am.

In terms of resolutions the only one I really made was to join a new internet dating website. At least that is fairly achievable!

Have a very happy and healthy 2012 everybody!

Xmas Chilling...

The last few days has been spent planning and recording an Eighties show for the Kingston Radio station – I basically played a few great 80′s tracks such as ‘King in a Catholic Style’ by China Crisis, ‘Kid’s in America’ by the lovely Kim Wilde, and ‘Night Boat to Cairo’ by Madness around a few scripted links. In theory, I thought this should probably sound OK, but the recording was a bit flaky when I  listened back to it. I found out later that this is due to some computer problems so I may have to do the recording again.

I have also been looking into the prospects of me being able to buy a home of my own. I went into a well known estate agents in New Malden to find out details of what I could realistically afford, and the news wasn’t as bad as I thought, though I’ll have to do a bit more saving by the sounds of it.

My squash playing has gone up on a bit of an exponential curve. At the moment I am leading the other players in the league, but I still have one more game to play. The aches in my hamstrings probably mean that the enforced yuletide break is much needed!

Tomorrow should be a relaxed affair as well, but I did sign up to do an evening Boxing day show on the Chertsey Radio Station, so hopefully I will catch a few of you then.

Take care, and I hope you all have a very healthy and happy Christmas, and when it comes to those sprouts, just say no!

Before then, my broadcasting experience there had mainly been co-presenting on an early evening Sunday show, which initially involved reading out the weather forecasts and other bits and pieces, and then progressed to doing more and more presenter cover when other Radio Station staff were away. Then, all of a sudden, completely out of the blue, the management did a reshuffle of the Programming Schedule, which meant that the early evening Sunday two hour slot needed a presenter. I was offered the job, and the rest is history!

At first I stuck with the format of the last presenter, which was playing 70′s and 80′s music around the speech based features. Much as I love those 70′s and 80’s sounds, I wanted to make the show more of my own. Since I was a huge fan of this kind of music, and felt that there was a bit of a gap in the Schedule for it, I changed the type of tracks played to 90′s and 00′s (that’s nineties and noughties),  and introduced some new features. To date, as well as this 90′s and 00′s playlist my show includes the following:

• A music based quiz
• A film based quiz
• An Entertainments news round up
• A request track
• Two light news stories
• A ‘What’s on’ feature for the local area

I have got to know the above format well, and am now used to finding the material in respect of the preparation. The thing is, when presenting the show, it still seems to be a bit feature lite – in some parts I’m finding there is an over reliance on music tracks to fill air time.

As I see it I have to ways of dealing with this. The first is too re-jig the existing features by having them at different points in the show, for example, one feature every quarter of an hour, which would distribute them more evenly over the course of the two hour broadcast. The second method is definitely the more difficult option, which is to think up some brand new features to add to the ones above – at the moment my inspiration level is annoyingly low!

I’ll probably end up doing some sort of mix of the above methods. If any of you out there have any (polite) suggestions please let me know!

Xmas meal - a social minefield?

This year I have been volunteered to help organise it, which no real problem as I’ve done this kind of thing before. Past experience has shown that the hosting of a successful Radio Station meal is a bit of a dark art, as there are many things that can go pair shaped at the first opportunity. One year, everyone found the food at a popular eatery near the Kingston Hill locale to be totally unpalatable. The news that the restaurant went out of business shortly afterwards came as no surprise!

At another meal, many years ago, I witnessed the only radio station fight – we had invited two representatives of a local commercial radio station along in an attempt to forge links with the community – it was something like that anyway. What happened was that one of them got incredibly drunk and was getting out of control – at one point he licked the bald head of an increasingly uncomfortable radio volunteer who had definitely had not signed up for this! Things came to a head (see what I did there!) when the representative’s colleague, after taking a whole evenings worth of his abuse, punched him in the face. It certainly calmed him down a bit though!

Another far less dramatic incident occurred when we all went to a remote restaurant that formed part of a hotel in Esher. Towards the end of the evening, myself and three other radio station members, all of us slightly the worse for drink, had just left the main building with a view to getting back to Kingston. A car pulled up and stopped in front of us. We all piled in grateful for the shelter from the winters chill, and waited politely to be asked where we wanted to be driven. After about five minutes the silence was starting to become uncomfortable. The driver suddenly piped up, and informed us that he wasn’t actually a mini cab, and that he didn’t have room for us and his family. We took the hint and went back to the bar to arrange a proper taxi.

That said, there have been some very good Christmas do’s, such as the one held at the function room of the Fountain pub in New Malden. Another aspect of these events is timing – December is a terrible month for trying to organise a social gathering as people are usually busy with their own yuletide preparations, which is why the mid January date has been favoured in more recent times.

Venue is another of those variables in the mix – trying to find a place which is easily accessible to all members is trickier that you’d think. At the moment I am considering the Rotunda in Kingston. This has quite a few restaurants within the complex, a couple of which do the Italian/English fare that tends to suit most people. Also, it has very good train and bus links.

At the moment I am just testing the water, trying to find out how many members would be prepared to commit to a meal. About a week ago I issued a memo asking for people to sign if they were interested. To date quite a few people have added their signature to it. These early signs are positive, and the fact that we are even thinking of organising a Christmas meal serves as another indicator that the Radio Station is turning the corner, and is coping with the difficulties that have beset us over the last eighteen months or so.

None of the above even remotely relates to what’s been happening to me for the last few months though – I’ve re-started something that I used to do a lot of in childhood. It can’t really be described as regression – it’s more a case of going ‘back to basics’ – I’m reading books again. It may not seem like much of a revelation, but up to about three months ago the only thing I could be bothered to read in the printed form was the newspaper sports sections when I had the odd five or ten minutes to spare.

tome-riffic!

This was not always the case. As a child I was a real book worm – I used to love reading.  Although I never could claim to have been much into the acclaimed literary stuff, I did read an awful lot of books. It all began with the ‘Cat in the Hat’ by Dr Seuss, and from then on the number of books I read increased exponentially. As a child I used to latch onto to certain authors and characters. I remember a series of books about the schoolboy adventures of  ‘Jennings’, who was pretty much in the mould of Richmal Cromptons ‘William’. Other childhood favourites were ‘Danny Dunn’ who was from the States, and there was the detective series ‘Agaton Sax’ created by the Scandinavian author Nils Olof Franzén. The works of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl got a look in, and I read tomes by countless other writers such as Jules Verne, John Mortimer, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie – just too many to list really. I just worked my way through the fiction section of the local New Malden library.

As I got older the stuff I read got a bit more specialised. I was an avid reader of science fiction – Harry Harrison’s ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ series was a firm favourite, and yes, I was one of those guys who bought a lot of ‘Dr Who’ books. In my teens I got really into horror – to this day I have read loads of Stephen King, Richard Laymon, Shaun Hutson to name but a few. I also have a pretty extensive collection of Sven Hassel books, which are war stories of the flying guts variety, but I suppose there is no accounting for taste! This reading habit petered out in adulthood as I ended up doing other things. Work along with the development of the hectic squash playing, Kingston and Weybridge radio broadcasting type of lifestyle meant that I had precious little time to settle down with a book.

This was basically the state of play up to this August. Due to some structural changes at work I was between projects – I suddenly found myself with time on my hands. To fill the void I started reading the Millennium trilogy by Swedish author Stig Larsson that I had bought ages ago from a well known bookstore in Kingston. These provided the inspiration for the ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ series of films, and even though I have seen all the movies, the books proved to be a riveting read.

Even though I am back working full time I still try and find time to read. These days my book time is usually confined to my lunch hour. Once more, reading is back up there as part of my life.

I have literally a shed load of annual leave still to take, and about two weeks back I made a monster leave application that if successful will mean I’ll be off for most of the Christmas period! The only fly in the ointment is that my team leader is away on holiday, which kicks the granting of my mega break into touch until her return. As you can tell, these are trying times indeed.

Troll-tastic!

Like most situations in life there is a silver lining amongst this dark cloud of uncertainty – I have definitely got today off as it was booked weeks ago. The weekend is definitely starting now, and the itinerary is sounding good – I’m meeting an old school mate in London, and after lunch and a coffee, the plan is for an early evening cinema trip to catch a Scandinavian film called ‘Troll Hunter’. I don’t know about you, but the prospect of a movie with subtitles about the pursuit of a mythical being from child folk lore sounds positively high octane! Afterwards it’s dinner in town, followed by the return to Wimbledon for a few pints in the Prince of Wales.

So, in summary then, my day off is all about food, booze and trolls. I think it has potential…

For those of you who don’t know, ‘Proms’ is short for promenade concert, and this refers to the ones hosted by the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall in London, which normally take place over an eight week period during the summer. Although they sound a bit La De Dah, they’re actually OK – I have been a couple of times before with the guys from the radio station at Kingston, and despite not knowing much about classical music, I found the live performances entertaining. My only real Prom bug bear is the price of seats – on previous trips this averaged at around £25.00, which to my mind is a bit pricy.

That said, as I read her email further, this one sounded like a Prom with a difference as the BBC Orchestra were playing scores comprising solely of music from the movies, which would make it very accessible to someone like my good self. Another plus was the ticket price – £5.00 sounded very reasonable indeed!

As with most things in life, there was a reason for the cheap entry cost. The price of a fiver provided admission to a part of the Albert Hall known as ‘The Gallery’, which as the name suggests, is a circular walk way situated above the seating area, following the inner perimeter of the building. Also, unlike the seats, there was no way of making an advance booking for the Gallery, so in order to ensure our place we would have to resort to the old fashioned method of queuing! As this didn’t sound too bad, I agreed to go.

The day of the 12th came soon enough, and on what turned out to be a sunny Friday afternoon, I made my way to South Kensington tube. We had agreed to meet at the steps of the Albert Hall. All I had to do was to find out where the queue for the Gallery was. This was fairly easy to do – a very helpful staff member took me around to the side street where the Gallery queue started. It was all well organised – I was given a ticket number that represented my position in the queue – once this ticket was obtained I could leave the queue for periods of up to half an hour at a time, so long as I informed the people around me of what I was up to. I tried to get a ticket for my friend, who was running a bit late, but was told that they had to be collected in person.

My friend’s arrival revealed that there was a few extra additions to the itinerary – there was a free talk on writing music for films which was due to start in the nearby Imperial College about an hour later. That still left some time to kill so we took one of those half hour breaks and went for a drink in the Imperial College Student Union Bar, which was conveniently nearby. This took me right back to my college days as the beer was so cheap – we are talking 1990′s prices here!

The talk turned out to be interesting – it took the form of a forty five minute interview of two guys who had written music for the film industry, and questions were taken from the audience. On rejoining the queue, the organisers signalled that we had to make our way to the Albert Hall – it was time to get our tickets. Once these were purchased we just had to make sure we turned up to the Prom. Following a brisk meal at the Imperial College Student Bar, which again did not disappoint (I got Scampi and Chips for £5.50!) we were back for the beginning of the concert.

We made our way to the top of the building. The Gallery turned out to be a pleasant venue – although it was crowded along the railing where you had to stand to see the orchestra, it was wide enough to allow people enough room to sit or even lie down. The amenities like toilets were easily accessible, and you could take along your own refreshments. That’s exactly what my friend did – she bought along some water, soft drinks and a bit of food which we had during the interval. The atmosphere up there was very informal and laid back.

The music was impressive – the orchestra belted out loads of film scores which I recognised instantly, including the one from ‘Star Wars’. The Bond Theme medley was especially good. Time flashed by, and it didn’t seem long before it was all over.  After leaving the Albert Hall, the rest of that warm summer evening was spent in the garden of the trusty Imperial College Bar. All in all we had a really good, reasonably priced night out, which doesn’t happen a lot in Central London!

Food for the mind...

It was one of those places I had passed by many times before without noticing. Why it had suddenly blipped up on the old personal radar now is anyone’s guess – perhaps I just had a bit more time to take things in. This all happened during a walk through Leatherhead town. For such a small place there a quite a few good walks to go on, and at that precise moment in time I was making my way down Church Street, and had got to a point before the Church itself, but beyond the parade of shops around Leatherhead Theatre.

Leatherhead Library was located amongst a number of establishments housed in an admittedly very elegant building called ‘The Mansion’, taking up the right wing of the manor house. The library entrance was very close to the opening of the office complex, and a brief check of the schedule of times meant that, on this afternoon, as it wasn’t a Monday, the place was open for business.

I have always liked libraries – from my initial childhood literary fix of Dr Suess, through my school time reading and study, they formed a very regular feature of my life. When I started working full time any library based activities were pretty much squeezed out of my routine. I still like visiting them though, so I popped in.

The Leatherhead Library was longer and narrower than my local branch at New Malden, with the central concourse providing the gateway to many smaller sections which housed stuff like the Internet PC’s and various different categories of books. Since my days of library going there had been a major IT influx, and this branch even had a bit of kit that allowed borrowers to scan in the details of the books they were taking out themselves! That’s one way of avoiding the more po-faced librarians! I had better say now that there was nothing at all wrong with the staff at Leatherhead. It was encouraging to see so many people using it as well – it was pretty packed that afternoon, which augers well for a period threatened with Library cuts and closures.

Another new development that caught my attention was the presence of DVD’s. These seemed to be pre-owned, so I guessed they were probably donated by a local DVD rental store. Some of the titles were very recent. What I wasn’t sure of was whether they were for sale (like a nearby section of books) or for rental.

I saw copies of films  that I had paid full price for in a well known entertainment shop in Kingston with a price tag of a mere £3.00. I also found a film that I hadn’t seen before and didn’t own, which also had the bargain price tag of £3.00.  It was a teen horror flick by the looks of it, and the plot didn’t sound half bad according to the sleeve notes. The nearby librarians were busy, and I didn’t have time to wait around to find out about the status of the DVD’s.

My job for today is to go back to the library and find out. If things go well I could be the proud owner of a cut price film!

You may recall my past ramblings about a cafe in Leatherhead that I used to frequent very regularly – it was my preferred lunch time spot for a latte, and the great tasting coffee coupled with the very pretty Eastern European waitresses gave the whole place a nirvana like feel. The woman who owned it was also very nice. She was a former IT worker who opened the cafe after discovering that she liked working with humans rather than machines. She ran the cafe for about three years before selling up to take advantage of other food retail opportunities.

I had to say I was saddened when she eventually closed up shop. The visits to the cafe had become an established part of my daily routine, and I had got to like its atmosphere and the people, even if I didn’t really know them that well. A new owner came on the scene who was also the patron of a local Italian restaurant, and he changed everything, right down to the brand of coffee sold.

I never went back to the place – it was too different to how I remembered it before. I ran into one of the waitresses in Leatherhead high Street, and she confirmed that all the old staff had moved on, including herself. For me, the writing was on the wall – I definitely didn’t want to go back.

Full of Eastern European promise?

That was the state of affairs up to yesterday afternoon. I was wondering around a very hot and sunny Leatherhead town centre, when I passed near the site of the cafe on my way to the newsagent. By the looks of things it has changed hands again – there is a shiny new awning above the door, and the legend it displays also looks new. I checked out the menu – it still sells pretty much the same cafe/deli kind of fare, and I didn’t recognise any of the staff behind the counter.

As I didn’t have time to pop in yesterday, that’s my mission for today. I don’t expect it to be as before, but if things are agreeable I’ll have another lunchtime latte option. I will keep you informed.