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ventaWhen I said I was going away this weekend, I got accused of having a social life. Well, kind of - it depends if you count clog dancing conventions in Lancashire as "social life".
Having driven up to my parents' on Friday, I got up at 6am (6! am!) on Saturday morning to catch a lift over the Pennines to Leyland. In theory I'd intended to go back to sleep in the car - but i got distracted. Driving from Darlington to Leyland involves two of my favourite stretches of road anywhere in the UK. The A66 to Brough, and then the M6 down to Lancaster.
To be fair, the roads aren't that special. They're sort of grey and tarmacy, like you'd expect. The views, however, are staggering. The M6 (although it's better going north than south) lays out fold after fold of glacial hills and valleys, all demonstrating the well known Lake District weather-lore: If you don't like the weather, just wait a minute. At one point we were driving along in rain, watching snow fall on one set of hills, and admiring the sunshine on some a little further away. I don't know anywhere else that you get the gloriously changeable light that you see racing across the fellsides up there.
The A66 is, to drive on, a sod of a road - it has fairly permanent cross-winds, and maliciously bends and stops being double carriageway just as you least expect it. And that's if it hasn't been closed by snow. However, for a passenger, it's just long, beautiful stretches of moorland and hills. The seditious might call it bleak, but I won't go any further than a windswept. I'd happily potter back and forth along there all day.
Oh, and there really are windmills on the M6, too. Big wooshy modern ones, though mostly sited reasonably discreetly. They're damn big things and hard to hide (though I rather like them), but whoever chose where to put the things tried pretty hard to minimise the time you can see them.
We arrived at the school in Leyland just before ten, with just time to grab a cup of tea and run round saying hello to people - the clogdancing section of society isn't large, most of it knows the rest of it :) Yes, I'd got a place in the class I'd applied for, and off I went.
Which was where it all went horribly hard. The tutor was someone I don't know at all, and she was teaching a dance in a weird timing (3-2 time, does anyone know the html for writing time signatures?), and somehow I'd ended up in the back row where I could neither see her feet nor hear what she was saying. She handed out notation for the dance, but written using a system I don't know at all (I think it was based on tap notation). Her terminology for different kinds of steps was unknown to me too - my notation is now covered in scribbles saying things like "cramp roll = crunch" and "stomp = shunt". Some parts I've managed to convert to my own notation, most of it just had little explanations added, and the timing written in.
So that involved quite a lot of hard thinking, really. And I have no idea when I'm likely to be able to dance it - usually, if I'm at some sort of folky do and am asked to dance, I can corner some hapless musician and get them to play. This requires fairly specific music that I wouldn't expect someone to know off-hand. However Mel, a fellow Boojum, was also learning it, and we have plans to suborn Boojum's musician and make him learn the tunes.
It was, however, entertaining when it came to the matter of putting on a display of newly-learnt stuff on the Sunday afternoon. Mel was marvelling at my ability to pick the steps up quickly; I let her into a secret. Mel's usually a tutor - it's the first time in years she's attended a class as a normal person. She expects to know what she's doing - I've got just as many years of experience at blagging and fudging my way through classes and making it look as if I'm doing the right thing :)
After that, it was the long slog back down to Oxford. As reported a week or two ago, my car stereo is a little dicey at present and is declining to play tapes, so I'm listening to the radio. I'd observed on the way up that Virgin (which seems to have a much less interesting music policy now than I remember from ten years ago) just wouldn't stay on station in the north. On the latter stages of my journey north I'd switched to local radio, and stuck with it as I set of south again.
TFM, the favoured local radio station when I was 14 or so, was just winding up its rendition of the charts as I switched it on. While I got myself out of Darlington and onto the motorway, it swung into a reasonably rocky show, which seemed to be something to do with Kerrang! However, not long onto the motorway, the previously clear reception started to crackle. Which is a bit poor for a station which I believe claims to serve "North Yorkshire and the North East", since I was barely over the Yorkshire border, but there we are.
I hit the button to seek for the next station downwards, hoping vaguely that it'd find me a better version of TFM. Instead, it found me a completely different station - which was beautifully interference free, so I stuck with it. It turned out to be BBC Radio Cleveland, having their Sunday night Country show, so I went wellying through Dishforth Interchange accompanied by Johnny Cash.
I was, however, heading rapidly away from Cleveland, and soon it was time to seek a new station. I forget whether I hit up or down (the LCD display on my radio is cracked, and the numbers can't be read - however I was upping and downing from a base point of 96.60, which is TFM). I was greeted by a slightly reedy rendition of All I Ask Of You, which rapidly came into audio-focus and revealed itself as BBC Radio Humberside's Westenders show.
So, until eight o'clock I sang along cheerfully to show tunes, and accidentally heard a round-up of this week's theatre in Humberside. It's all going on round there, believe me. Then the news, and into Henry's Swing Club. BBC local radio appears to be a haven of randomly arranged specialist music shows on a Sunday night, and so I swung on down past Leeds and Rotheram in the company of Charlie Parker and BB King.
Sadly, I didn't get very far south of Sheffield before Henry and his swing were drifinting in and out of signal, so I bid him a fond farwell and sought a new station. I was greeted by the slow wail of what I think of as "Indian Restaurant Music". I'm not particularly fond of that as a term, but you know what I mean and I'm really not sure what the correct term would be.
My finger hovered over the seek button again, but then I thought no, it's time to be fair. I've been sticking with the first station I've found, this one deserves its fair chance. I'm suspecting that this music was fairly Westernised, and featured fairly heavy, saccharine string sections sounding like 50s film soundtracks. I think from something the announcer said that I was listening to music from Bollywood movies, which would explain the soundtrack-sound.
I eventually discovered that I was on BBC Radio Nottingham, with a program of "news and music for the Asian community". I was promised the news in Urdu, but disappointingly it never seemed to arrive - 9pm saw a fairly standard BBC newsbreak. I stuck with BBC Radio Nottingham even when it devolved into an interview with a liason officer trying to increase the number of people from "black and ethnic minority groups" who were training as teachers, although I'm afraid I still don't feel like I have much more of an appreciation of the music. Somehow it all just seems to sound formless and scribbly to me - I don't get it at all. If anyone has any good recommendations for accessible examples thereof (or indeed a better term than "Indian Restaurant Music") I'd be pleased to hear about them.
By this time I was heading out of signal again. I had a brief, rather unsatisfactory, liason with BRNB (commerical radio broadcast from Birmingham), which seemed to be playing bland pop and R'n'B, and crackled horribly. It took a number of skips around again before I managed to find any station which would even consider playing without interference.
Eventually, I settled on what turned out to be BBC WM (West Midlands), which was having Gospel Hour (see what I mean about BBC local radio?) The music mostly seemed quite nondescript - sounding more like 80s pop than what I know as Gospel - and the presenter had an irritating, smug, gosh-I'm-a-Christian delivery. He managed to talk about the prayer-list for the Late Night Prayers in a way that made my toes curl. And he talked too much when I wanted music to listen to.
He crackled out of existence before we got to the Late Night Prayers, and I skipped to the deeply unpleasant Northants 96.4.
By this time it'd become a point of principle to stick with whatever I found. Within about seven seconds of Late Night Love on Northants 96.4, I was sincerely wishing I'd stuck it out with the off-station Late Night Prayers.
Northants 96.4 is proper commercial local radio - singing jingles for local financial advisors, lots of adverts for ringtones, a call-signal that makes you cringe and - of course - a phone-in. Now, they don't do phone-ins on Sundays - if they had, I might have felt myself justified in skipping channels since I was after music. No, on Sundays they pass on loving messages from person A to person B, take requests, and play you the highlights of the preceding six days phone-ins.
They played Natasha Bedingfield, and Craig David, and Nelly Furtado and I rejoiced - because while they were playing music they weren't playing excerpts from Thursday's phone-in about the impending royal marriage of Prince Charles and C P-B. If you want to know where the strong UK camp of those anti the wedding is, it's in Northants. Ifyou want to know where the strong UK camp of people who can't string an argument together are, they're in Northants too.
Northants 96.4 proved disturbingly tenacious, and was still dripping Late Night Love into my ears as I came down the A43. Then suddenly, the presenter made an Awful Threat. "Sometime after eleven", he was going to replay a "very special archive call" from Nicky who, at 16, was "addicted to sex". I really didn't think I could face that. I looked at the roadsign: Oxford 21. I looked at my watch: 10:42. Suddenly I was driving against the clock.
Off the A43, onto the M40. Off the M40, onto, er, whatever that road is. The A34 or something. Down towards the ring road turn off. Five to eleven. Acting on survival instinct, I bailed off at Peartree Interchange with the intention of coming through town rather than round to the Abingdon turning. It's no quicker, but I'm well aware that radio reception in central Oxford is terrible.
Northants 96.4 eventually died on me (well, let's be honest, started to crackle very faintly) as I got to the bottom of Banbury Road, and I gleefully skipped stations. I don't know what I found, but it was presented by calm, staid people who didn't threaten me with junior nymphomaniacs or success stories from the station's dating service, and that was all I cared about. In the time it took me to get home I didn't hear a call-sign, so I still don't know what it was - probably BBC Radio Oxford having its OAP hour, I'm guessing, from the blend of swing and Cliff Richard.
So, in conclusion: channel hopping is dangerous. You never know what you might get. But BBC local radio is a good thing.
Having driven up to my parents' on Friday, I got up at 6am (6! am!) on Saturday morning to catch a lift over the Pennines to Leyland. In theory I'd intended to go back to sleep in the car - but i got distracted. Driving from Darlington to Leyland involves two of my favourite stretches of road anywhere in the UK. The A66 to Brough, and then the M6 down to Lancaster.
To be fair, the roads aren't that special. They're sort of grey and tarmacy, like you'd expect. The views, however, are staggering. The M6 (although it's better going north than south) lays out fold after fold of glacial hills and valleys, all demonstrating the well known Lake District weather-lore: If you don't like the weather, just wait a minute. At one point we were driving along in rain, watching snow fall on one set of hills, and admiring the sunshine on some a little further away. I don't know anywhere else that you get the gloriously changeable light that you see racing across the fellsides up there.
The A66 is, to drive on, a sod of a road - it has fairly permanent cross-winds, and maliciously bends and stops being double carriageway just as you least expect it. And that's if it hasn't been closed by snow. However, for a passenger, it's just long, beautiful stretches of moorland and hills. The seditious might call it bleak, but I won't go any further than a windswept. I'd happily potter back and forth along there all day.
Oh, and there really are windmills on the M6, too. Big wooshy modern ones, though mostly sited reasonably discreetly. They're damn big things and hard to hide (though I rather like them), but whoever chose where to put the things tried pretty hard to minimise the time you can see them.
We arrived at the school in Leyland just before ten, with just time to grab a cup of tea and run round saying hello to people - the clogdancing section of society isn't large, most of it knows the rest of it :) Yes, I'd got a place in the class I'd applied for, and off I went.
Which was where it all went horribly hard. The tutor was someone I don't know at all, and she was teaching a dance in a weird timing (3-2 time, does anyone know the html for writing time signatures?), and somehow I'd ended up in the back row where I could neither see her feet nor hear what she was saying. She handed out notation for the dance, but written using a system I don't know at all (I think it was based on tap notation). Her terminology for different kinds of steps was unknown to me too - my notation is now covered in scribbles saying things like "cramp roll = crunch" and "stomp = shunt". Some parts I've managed to convert to my own notation, most of it just had little explanations added, and the timing written in.
So that involved quite a lot of hard thinking, really. And I have no idea when I'm likely to be able to dance it - usually, if I'm at some sort of folky do and am asked to dance, I can corner some hapless musician and get them to play. This requires fairly specific music that I wouldn't expect someone to know off-hand. However Mel, a fellow Boojum, was also learning it, and we have plans to suborn Boojum's musician and make him learn the tunes.
It was, however, entertaining when it came to the matter of putting on a display of newly-learnt stuff on the Sunday afternoon. Mel was marvelling at my ability to pick the steps up quickly; I let her into a secret. Mel's usually a tutor - it's the first time in years she's attended a class as a normal person. She expects to know what she's doing - I've got just as many years of experience at blagging and fudging my way through classes and making it look as if I'm doing the right thing :)
After that, it was the long slog back down to Oxford. As reported a week or two ago, my car stereo is a little dicey at present and is declining to play tapes, so I'm listening to the radio. I'd observed on the way up that Virgin (which seems to have a much less interesting music policy now than I remember from ten years ago) just wouldn't stay on station in the north. On the latter stages of my journey north I'd switched to local radio, and stuck with it as I set of south again.
TFM, the favoured local radio station when I was 14 or so, was just winding up its rendition of the charts as I switched it on. While I got myself out of Darlington and onto the motorway, it swung into a reasonably rocky show, which seemed to be something to do with Kerrang! However, not long onto the motorway, the previously clear reception started to crackle. Which is a bit poor for a station which I believe claims to serve "North Yorkshire and the North East", since I was barely over the Yorkshire border, but there we are.
I hit the button to seek for the next station downwards, hoping vaguely that it'd find me a better version of TFM. Instead, it found me a completely different station - which was beautifully interference free, so I stuck with it. It turned out to be BBC Radio Cleveland, having their Sunday night Country show, so I went wellying through Dishforth Interchange accompanied by Johnny Cash.
I was, however, heading rapidly away from Cleveland, and soon it was time to seek a new station. I forget whether I hit up or down (the LCD display on my radio is cracked, and the numbers can't be read - however I was upping and downing from a base point of 96.60, which is TFM). I was greeted by a slightly reedy rendition of All I Ask Of You, which rapidly came into audio-focus and revealed itself as BBC Radio Humberside's Westenders show.
So, until eight o'clock I sang along cheerfully to show tunes, and accidentally heard a round-up of this week's theatre in Humberside. It's all going on round there, believe me. Then the news, and into Henry's Swing Club. BBC local radio appears to be a haven of randomly arranged specialist music shows on a Sunday night, and so I swung on down past Leeds and Rotheram in the company of Charlie Parker and BB King.
Sadly, I didn't get very far south of Sheffield before Henry and his swing were drifinting in and out of signal, so I bid him a fond farwell and sought a new station. I was greeted by the slow wail of what I think of as "Indian Restaurant Music". I'm not particularly fond of that as a term, but you know what I mean and I'm really not sure what the correct term would be.
My finger hovered over the seek button again, but then I thought no, it's time to be fair. I've been sticking with the first station I've found, this one deserves its fair chance. I'm suspecting that this music was fairly Westernised, and featured fairly heavy, saccharine string sections sounding like 50s film soundtracks. I think from something the announcer said that I was listening to music from Bollywood movies, which would explain the soundtrack-sound.
I eventually discovered that I was on BBC Radio Nottingham, with a program of "news and music for the Asian community". I was promised the news in Urdu, but disappointingly it never seemed to arrive - 9pm saw a fairly standard BBC newsbreak. I stuck with BBC Radio Nottingham even when it devolved into an interview with a liason officer trying to increase the number of people from "black and ethnic minority groups" who were training as teachers, although I'm afraid I still don't feel like I have much more of an appreciation of the music. Somehow it all just seems to sound formless and scribbly to me - I don't get it at all. If anyone has any good recommendations for accessible examples thereof (or indeed a better term than "Indian Restaurant Music") I'd be pleased to hear about them.
By this time I was heading out of signal again. I had a brief, rather unsatisfactory, liason with BRNB (commerical radio broadcast from Birmingham), which seemed to be playing bland pop and R'n'B, and crackled horribly. It took a number of skips around again before I managed to find any station which would even consider playing without interference.
Eventually, I settled on what turned out to be BBC WM (West Midlands), which was having Gospel Hour (see what I mean about BBC local radio?) The music mostly seemed quite nondescript - sounding more like 80s pop than what I know as Gospel - and the presenter had an irritating, smug, gosh-I'm-a-Christian delivery. He managed to talk about the prayer-list for the Late Night Prayers in a way that made my toes curl. And he talked too much when I wanted music to listen to.
He crackled out of existence before we got to the Late Night Prayers, and I skipped to the deeply unpleasant Northants 96.4.
By this time it'd become a point of principle to stick with whatever I found. Within about seven seconds of Late Night Love on Northants 96.4, I was sincerely wishing I'd stuck it out with the off-station Late Night Prayers.
Northants 96.4 is proper commercial local radio - singing jingles for local financial advisors, lots of adverts for ringtones, a call-signal that makes you cringe and - of course - a phone-in. Now, they don't do phone-ins on Sundays - if they had, I might have felt myself justified in skipping channels since I was after music. No, on Sundays they pass on loving messages from person A to person B, take requests, and play you the highlights of the preceding six days phone-ins.
They played Natasha Bedingfield, and Craig David, and Nelly Furtado and I rejoiced - because while they were playing music they weren't playing excerpts from Thursday's phone-in about the impending royal marriage of Prince Charles and C P-B. If you want to know where the strong UK camp of those anti the wedding is, it's in Northants. Ifyou want to know where the strong UK camp of people who can't string an argument together are, they're in Northants too.
Northants 96.4 proved disturbingly tenacious, and was still dripping Late Night Love into my ears as I came down the A43. Then suddenly, the presenter made an Awful Threat. "Sometime after eleven", he was going to replay a "very special archive call" from Nicky who, at 16, was "addicted to sex". I really didn't think I could face that. I looked at the roadsign: Oxford 21. I looked at my watch: 10:42. Suddenly I was driving against the clock.
Off the A43, onto the M40. Off the M40, onto, er, whatever that road is. The A34 or something. Down towards the ring road turn off. Five to eleven. Acting on survival instinct, I bailed off at Peartree Interchange with the intention of coming through town rather than round to the Abingdon turning. It's no quicker, but I'm well aware that radio reception in central Oxford is terrible.
Northants 96.4 eventually died on me (well, let's be honest, started to crackle very faintly) as I got to the bottom of Banbury Road, and I gleefully skipped stations. I don't know what I found, but it was presented by calm, staid people who didn't threaten me with junior nymphomaniacs or success stories from the station's dating service, and that was all I cared about. In the time it took me to get home I didn't hear a call-sign, so I still don't know what it was - probably BBC Radio Oxford having its OAP hour, I'm guessing, from the blend of swing and Cliff Richard.
So, in conclusion: channel hopping is dangerous. You never know what you might get. But BBC local radio is a good thing.
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no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 12:04 am (UTC)ewww, and people wonder why I thought of Northampton just as somewhere conveniently close to London, Cambridge, Birmingham and Nottingham, rather than somewhere to actually *live*
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 06:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:03 am (UTC)Yup, this morning revealed that it had indeed been BBC Oxford.
According to the BBC website, Sundays from 10pm " Bill and Angela take you on a nostalgic journey from the 1920's to the present day."
So there we are.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:19 am (UTC)But bleak is a good thing!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:40 am (UTC)BBC Radio Merseyside is populated by what sounds like ex-dockers living in a faux "Irish immigrant slumdwelling 'We had it 'ard bak den livin in Tokki but we wuz 'appy my next track is molly malone'" millitant permapast, Billy Butler (Liverpools own Terry Wogan] and the ever nauseating Debbi "How hard can I smile" Jones [Liverpools own Isla St Clair] . Listened to by middle class climbers aged 55 plus in their suburban palaces bedecked with souvenir Charles & Diana plates and mugs, faux stone clad fireplaces, smoked glass divides and Ashtrays on vinyl coated stands. Playing Daniel "Oh my God isnt he dead yet" O' Donnell, the occasional dodgy local folk singer (probably Jackie and Bridie) and anything that has at least 2 chords and was written in Liverpool before 1995.
It offends the ears! Thank the Empire for Radio 4!
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:42 am (UTC)Radio 4 is a fine institution, but in a noisy car which drowns out speech it's a bit of a dead loss. Music programmes on R4 are pretty few and far between.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 07:12 pm (UTC)Failmaster, I have a strong suspicion that that's the sort of programme that is only broadcast in Your World. The rest of us can't hear it ;)
I don't think I can spell suspicion. But if I try to bung another s in it it looks worse.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-15 07:26 pm (UTC)When the idiot eventually got a question right, they got to play on a kind of virtual slot-machine to determine what they would win. The sole purpose of this slot machine was to give the hosts the opportunity to make crap innuendos like 'hold your plums' (if you got three plums you got the star prize, iirc) and 'the nudger's out' (don't ask!).
So there you go.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-17 05:01 pm (UTC)Also! Nine! Ty! Six! Six! Ty! Tee! Eff! Emm! - sadly that jingle is far too late-'80s-early-'90s to live today, and TFM is now a stately ninety-six point six.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-17 05:54 pm (UTC)Yes, I noticed that at the weekend. Boo-hiss.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-16 09:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-16 01:02 pm (UTC)*shudders*
no subject
Date: 2005-02-16 03:35 am (UTC)Although I guess the latter might have just been making me think that he was a reasonable DJ. Ooooh.