Bah Bah Bah... Ba-ba-ba Bah Bah....

Just watched West Ham 5 vs 0 Newcastle (Div 2 - 1979) with Charlie....

Yes we should have been doing spelling or reading I suppose... but.. it's Friday.. and... er...

Brooking, Devonshire, Bonds, Lampard.... Pop Robson.... standing on the terraces... jumpers for goal posts... Brian Moore... marvelous.

Even the Cardif City fans singing "We'll see you all outside" during their game with Stoke City had a bit of a nostalgic ring to it. A young Garth Crooks poaches a goal.

Interactive/User-generated content in 1979...?

Brian Moore holding the original letters sent in by viewers asking "just what was Alan Ball doing at the end of last week's League Cup final" (Answer - nicking a piece of turf as a souvenir)

The Big Match Revisited (The Big Match - Wikipedia)

Great Nostalgic 80's football video

The Guardian's online sports pages have a weekly selection of sports video clips (plenty of football) with a mix of nostalgia and current weirdness/sensational stuff - usually decent picks and worth a look.

This week's:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/mar/26/youtube-bbc-liverpool-lewis-hamilton

is a corker...:
"Featuring a Brian Clough left hook, Manny Ramirez swapping baseball for cricket and a belting simultaneous double KO"
And the very nostalgic: "...1987-88, the BBC did a Goal of the Season competition just for Liverpool."

Test Entry

This is a test to see if it propogates via FriendFeed... to Twitter.... then on to Facebook...

Garden Diary #8

We received our topsoil order today.

I also continued work on our raised beds - adding compost then covering over with old newspaper and cardboard (as per instructions from wifey).



The topsoil was delivered by a local company (Farnaby) who deliver via a huge artic. lorry (er... wagon in Yorkshire) with a 3-wheeled fork lift on the back to lift the large bags of soil off the wagon and deliver to the customer site.

Made me think... I wonder how much energy (joules, KW, calories - whatever) will have been used in "producing" then delivering the soil we received... and how much food will we need to produce to generate the equivelent amount of energy. Also... can you imagine the idea of shipping topsoil around the country - even relatively locally - without the aid of fossil fuel based transport and "mechanical muscles"? I guess I'll find out what it's like to shift 2 tons of soil about 30 meters at least... by wheelbarrow!

Garden Diary #7

The topsoil arrives Tuesday pm. I imagine Steves biceps are protesting already at the prospect of barrowing that lot down the garden path !
I am doing remote support by reading the latest 'Garden Answers' mag - free asparagus ! I wish Id known about that a month ago.

Garden Diary #6

Mothers Day :-)
Ordered 2 tons of topsoil from Farnabys, just down the road near Scotch.

This will come next week sometime, mainly to start building up the asaparagus beds once Steve has put in layers of compost, cardboard and any other organic stuff we can get hold off. I am now officially talking horsesh*t !

Recent Photos

Some recent photos sets [see ALL OUR PHOTOS AT FLICKR]

CVJFC Matches

Charlie as Four Arms

Christmas at the Mee’s

In the Snow - Dec 2008

London - October 2008

Garden Diary #5

TO DO #1 – dismantle the old raised beds, rebuild as 2 x 2m instead of 3 x 1m squares. Use the old site near the lawn to prepare for the two trees. New beds will be for root veg and/or salad, not sure which to do first, must check planting plan.
TO DO #2 – order topsoil for next weekend.
TO DO #3 – make a list of what to sow/plant and when, by month.
Ordered a starter pack of Gripples, mainly for the raspberries.

Garden Diary #4

Ordered some fruit from Blackmoor Nurseries: A ‘Family’ apple tree, this is a dwarf tree with 3 varieties of apple grafted onto it, courtesy of Dr Frankenstein. It grows to 8-9’. Bountiful is a cooker as we don’t have space for a Bramley. Raspberries: 10 canes of Prosen & 10 canes of Polka for extended season and finally a Cherry Maynard - 2 Year old tree on a dwarf rootstock, about 6’ max. That’s the 'orchard' sorted.
Picked up a bunch of free pallets from the local garden centre, to stand the potato sacks on – keeps them a bit further away from the slugs ! Also, will help keep weed fabric in place over the wild patch at the southern end of the lawn.

Garden Diary #3

I planted the gooseberry bush and blueberry bush which were previously in pots, at the south end of the plot, next to the shed and next to one of the rhubarb crowns, all in an east-west row. They will get lots of sun there, from mid-late morning for the rest of the day. These are all straight into the soil, not in beds but with good soil and compost added to the stoney mess of the original ground.
Blueberry is not looking very happy – it needs ericaceous fertilizer asap.
Rhubarb already has shoots appearing ! Must resist urge for rhubarb crumble – they need to be left alone this year to help the new crown establish.

Garden Diary #2

Steve and I made up the 2 new linkabord raised beds, 2m x 1m each.
Steve dug pits 6-8” deep, so we can put sharp sand and compost into the bottom, before adding the raised bed sides and filling with topsoil. End result will be about 12” deep beds of which 6” will be raised. These run north-south along the western edge of the plot. Lots of sun but also lots of wind so we plan to put a windbreak screen up along the wire fence.
These beds are for the 3 varieties of asparagus crowns which arrive end March/April. Asparagus fern gets to about 5’ tall !

Garden Diary #1

Received a large rhubarb crown from Uncle Tommy, variety unknown. Divided it into 3 parts, rather unscientifically with a spade, but making sure each segment had some shoots. Planted one in each southern corner of plot, 3rd one is for mum. Put lots of home-made compost into the hole first and backfilled with growbag soil from last years tomatoes.
They need a FYM mulch when the leaves die back later in the year and poss some nitrogen before then.

Garden Diary

I am going to document our work to transform a patch of former agricultural land into a working fruit and vegetable garden, providing the majority of our produce, hopefully within about 12 months.

When we took ownership, the good thing was that it had been grazed by both cows and sheep so was well manured and not too out of control. The bad bit was the soil level varied by about 6 feet with a big 'basin' in the centre of it, and the only thing slowing down the couch grass was the rocks.

The basin has now been levelled but with fairly low grade filler - lots more rocks, just a bit of soil, not good enough to grow anything except more couch grass.

The fence is up, so we are now taking control and starting to lay out the raised bed areas. A little bit later than I would have liked for this season, but we should have time to get a good range of crops in, even if its not everything - like we probably wont have a greenhouse until next year.

Happy 5th Birthday Charlie

Our boy Charlie was 5 years old yesterday. It's his party today in the village hall with lots of friends.
What a smasher... here's a recent picture.

Red Nose Day

I'm a bit (ok, a lot) of a grumpy-old-man when it comes to charridy events like Red Nose Day. A mixture of political views (charity replacing social duty etc. - I won't rehearse the well worn arguments here) coupled with manufactured (and joyless?) organised-compulsory-mass-participation-fun!!! and all that it entails (TV, Radio etc.).
However, Charlie has been counting down the days as they are allowed to wear red noses and red T-shirts at school. Bless.

Bowie on working in a record shop in the 60's

These could be heroes . . . one day-Arts & Entertainment-Music-TimesOnline:
This is to promote DBs involvement as a "Nokia Music Recommender".
Some nice recollections about a time I don't really remember, yet can associate with.

"A record shop was just about the coolest place one could hang out in back then — perhaps not quite as cool as a coffee bar or the burger-selling innovation known as the Wimpy Bar, but it ran a very close second. People who were “aware” were attracted to record shops."

does it suck or rock?

does it suck?
Just in case you can't decide if something in your life is good/bad (rocks/sucks) these nice people have provided a simple tool to help you :-)
High scores are good.
Here's a few things that are clearly important to me - it seems the Gruffalo rocks all our worlds and I am entirely average.
The West Ham result clearly shows this system doesn't work!!!

the gruffalo 10.0
bowie 9.8
sylvian 9.5
west ham united 9.4
northstar 9.4
marmite 6.9
linux 6.3
steve adams 5.0

ARTO LINDSAY Photos

Stumbled upon these great recent Arto Lindsay photos... (dig the beard!)
DARIO VILLA - ARTO LINDSAY
whilst I was attempting to see what he is up to since his last solo CD.
Not much it seems - though he did produce this interesting sounding CD on Matthew Herbert's label: MICAH - Everything.
The photography site has some other nice jazz musician sets too.

Ask tries U.K. guerrilla marketing campaign

This News.com article reports on an attempt at an edgy, guerrilla marketing campaign by Ask.
It seems fairly lame to me, both in the approach (trying toooooo hard to be cool and edgy) and in the arguments it makes about "information freedom". Yes, we need to be careful about handing any company a monopoly.... but what makes Ask such a great alternative?
Their site seems laden with more obtrusive advertising per results-page (than google), and less relevant results (than google or yahoo)

Ask tries U.K. guerrilla marketing campaign | News.blog | CNET News.com
More here: http://valleywag.com/tech/advertising/a-botched-revolt-against-google-244111.php

Blue Peter fakes phoneline winner

Blue Peter fakes phoneline winner | The Register:
This has been covered everywhere, of course... but I had to laff at the wonderful subheading from the Register on this:

"Here's one we made up earlier"