Buttons of Brixton!

When I lived in Brixton I bought a blazer from the nearby MacMillan charity shop for about a fiver. It’s royal blue with red stripes.(Pictured left.) If the shop obtained it from nearby residents it must have come from one of the more leafier parts of Brixton as the label says it is ‘Aquascutum of London at Alfred Sayers of Ealing and Wembley.’

I wore it quite a bit in London but now living in Strasbourg the winter’s are too cold and the summers too hot to wear it much of the time. I’ve been here five and a half years so I must have had the jacket more than six years. In that time it had it most of the buttons had decided to part company with the blazer. The buttons were quite dull, unobtrusive metallic ones.(Pictured right.)

At the weekend JTO and I went to the restaurant Marco Polo to celebrate her birthday – the Jambonneau braisé au miel et picon bière, pommes sautées, salade was fantastic!

Afterwards we adjourned to one of Strasbourg’s record shops to se if there was anything worth buying for Record Store Day (Here known as Disquaire Day!) – I hadn’t seen anything listed that I wanted so I hadn’t made any special effort to get anything. There was nothing.

We returned home via Petite France (EN) to go to La Mercerie Du Bain Aux Plantes to see if they had any buttons I could put on the blazer. After some effort we found some gold circular ones that fitted the existing holes and really  jazzed up the blazer.

We returned home and it had been quite an awful day , weather wise, so we were not going to go out. Why not sew on the buttons? I first did the three on the front used to do the jacket up and they were a bit tight but worked.

I then had to cut off the two remaining old, dull buttons on one sleeve and sewed three new buttons on each of the sleeves. As you can see from the picture on the right, they look really quite impressive. I must say I was quite pleased with myself.

I was taught to sew by my mother just as she taught me to cook etc as she believed boys should be able to do these things. I also learned to sew at school as, by the time I was studying everyone did these and everyone did metalwork. I have previously written about my sewing exploits.

I desperately wanted to avoid ‘Suits You’ as the headline so the one above is a play on:

Bucketlist

I had not really heard the term bucket list much until recently. I must have missed the film with Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson. A bucket list is a list of things to do before you die, you kick the bucket. I have for a long time had a list of places I wanted to visit. I kept them in my Moleskine notebook.Like the one on the left) Also in it were details of books I wanted to read and records to buy.

I then found out about the website where you can post details of your bucket list, of course there had to be such a thing in good old cyberspace. So I got an account and put a few things on it.

Today I was uploading my list from my notebook to the site. (Sounds very technical, I was just typing the item into the list and giving some background on why I wanted to do the thing as a start for writing the mater up once I had achieved it.) I was pleased because I found that I had achieved one item from the list already. It was written in April 2008. (I know that as there are items written before and after it which place it at that time.) That item which had been achieved was to visit Hamburg which I did in the last weekend of June 2011.

It was a fantastic visit and I am surprised I did not write about it here. As well as the Reeperbahn and the Beatles museum we visited the home of the Hamburg football team in the city, St Pauli, walked around the city, had a tour of the harbour, went to the wonderful Sunday morning fish market which sold most other things than fish and ate well and drank some good beer.

Home is in the Rhine valley between the two mountainous ranges of the Vosges and the Schwarzwald meaning the air is pretty still. It was great being somewhere where there was a proper breeze coming inland from the sea.

Since visiting Riga repeatedly when JTO was working there, having completed our goal of visiting every European city, and my having enjoyed living in Liverpool when there as a student, we had decided to try and visit Hanseatic port cities, of which this was the first. Last year we visited Gdansk which I wrote about on this blog here, here and here.

So, it is nice that one item on my bucket list has had some of it achieved.

I’m just not buying it

Two articles on the future of retail. One talking from an personal experience and the other mostly pontificating based upon stories that had been in other media. A vivid contrast in thoughtfulness, judgement and identifying what can be concluded from experience. To start with the second:

“Redefining the role of retail in regeneration policy is now a key challenge for planners in the UK. Much of the urban re-generation through the 1990s and the first decade of the new century focused on the importance of the city centre(1). UK projects drew from European success stories: Barcelona, Berlin, Bilbao and applied it to our new public spaces. Planning criteria drawn up under John Prescott during the first term of Labour Government acted as a constraint on the out-of-town mall and sprawling retail parks as the first priority for retail chains. The rules didn’t halt out of town development but it did push the balance back toward the urban centre. Had this been a matter of solely planning intent it would have been doomed from the outset. The market was on the side of the planner. Affluence, increasing disposable income and cultural changes created in the UK a much expanded ‘after hours’ economy which was to do with far more than mere alcohol consumption. Eating out in the UK had been something only the better off could do until the 1980s since when it has grown dramatically. The growth of dining out as much as anything else made city centre became a destination for the evening and created employment for an increasing pool of young part-time labour. Music, club culture and the resurgence of cinema all played their part in transforming the ‘closed after work’ UK city centre to an all day, all night economy.”

I’ll start with a declaration of interest in that I was involved in the successful work to revamp the city centre of a major southern town in the 1990′s – that’s my qualification for commenting on the shortcomings of this piece. I’ll come back to the first sentence later. The following paragraph I essentially agree with though it wasn’t just the examples from abroad which were followed, there were examples, both the good and the bad, from closer to home that were able to be learnt from. During this time I was also an employee trustee on my pension scheme and after the early 90′s recession the investment which gave the best returns was retail so people were seeking to invest in it too. This undermines the following paragraph as the motor came from investors looking to build new or expanded retail. The paragraph also puts too much emphasis on night-time activity. People want to eat-out, go to the cinema etc as well as shop, and not just at night but throughout the weekend.

“But whatever else was going on in city centre regeneration retail was always the magnet. In the UK we like our retail. Enough urban planners and politicians grasped the notion that ‘going to the shops’ was and is a major part of the lives of many ordinary people, especially women. It was a constant, a given, aspirational consumerism that crossed class and culture. Through the past two decades we created a quality experience around it and our cities thrived. Whatever else might change people would always ‘go to the shops’, wouldn’t they? Well, no and it is having a significant effect in our cities. UK commentators have focused on the recession and falling consumer spending but more significant for the retail sector is the effect of web-based retail. Recent closures at Comet, Jessops and HMV have added to a range of familiar names that have been left behind by the shift to online spending. Retail staff report that ‘going to the shops’ has become a scouting mission – find the facts, touch the product, compare, contrast, get a little demonstration, then go home to order it online for a few quid less. Staff in fashion retail outlets report spending as much time dealing with internet returns as making sales. You don’t need to be chief economist at the IMF to work out the consequences. The trend won’t end with this recession either (whenever that may be). Recession confirms and accelerates market trends, rarely does it create them.”

The paragraphs here shows the danger of this kind of black/white pontification. By overemphasizing the constancy of shopping in the first paragraph it sets up that now there have been changes it is catastrophic. I remember the recession of the 1980′s and that at the start of the 1990′s. Some chains of shops went out of business. Largely those who were the least secure economically or just those that were badly run. The last sentence is one of the few things correct about the piece. Recession means that economically under-performing businesses are more likely not to see the other side of the recession. The statement that web-based retail  is a more significant effect is supported with no evidence. Is it really the case that people are buying washing machines on the internet and not at Comet? Really? We then get another unsupported statement that all people do is go to the shops to check things out then go home and buy it on the net.

The crass mention of women though highlights the major error of this piece. Most people do not go shopping to buy something as cheaply as possible. Last weekend was my birthday and after eating lunch we went to a nearby record shop on a whim. between two of us we ended up with three records and had a great time looking at different records, showing them to each other and talking about them. When I lived in the southern town I often worked on Saturday and we’d go out or lunch which was often followed by some shopping. Done for the fun of it. I could probably have got the records cheaper on eBay, I would always have been able to get what I bought after my lunch cheaper elsewhere but it was the social aspect of shopping. I have just lost a large amount of weight which my existing shirts do not reflect. When paid last month and this month I’ve bought a couple of new shirts. In one case because I lusted after it in the window of the shop as I passed. You cannot do that on the internet. Another tow shirts I bought because I saw the shops were having a sale, I went in and found shirts I wanted at a reasonable price. One of the shops sends me details by email, I could have bought from them online but I preferred to go in the shop, look at what was available, try the shirts on and buy them.

There was a lot of similar hand wringing when Woolworths departed the High Street, well in the UK. In September I was staying with family in Derbyshire and went into a shop I’d not experienced before, Wilkinson. They were great for the kind of toiletries which are hideously expensive here in France. I visited them again when in the UK staying with different family in Walthamstow where a visit to Wilko’s is an almost weekly event. Just as one of life’s certainties is death, another is that as one dies another is born.

“In Reading, one of the UK’s leading retail centres at a highly successful 90s city centre regeneration that has punched above its weight in the good times has seen a marked increase in vacant and available (on the market) retail space since 2009 (2).

YEAR	VACANT	AVAILABLE
Q4 2009	6.72%	4.69%
Q4 2010	9.03%	7.01%
Q4 2011	10.97%	8.93%
Q4 2012	11.13%	10.03%

While still below the UK average this trend should worry local policy makers, landlords and city centre business operators. The challenges they face are clear:

• If the magnet for the city centre economies is losing its pull, how do we maintain the health of our cities?
• How do major retailers respond to the challenge of web commerce?
• How do national governments and the EU deal with tax sheltering multi-nationals who undercut local trade and put nothing back into communities?
• What does it mean for property owners, investors and landlords when there is increasing vacancy in relatively new properties?

And aside from the more obvious economic consequences, what does this say for the quality of leisure experience when diversity is sucked out of city centre commerce? What does it do to our social lives? Two experiences brought this home to me: going to a major department store to purchase a lamp advertised in their mailshot only to find stock levels were so poor we were told to order online; and seeking in vain a pair of boot laces (off and on trying around fifteen stores) only to resort to Amazon.

If our city centres are not to enter a new period of crisis and decline creative thinking will be needed on many levels to adjust to these powerful market trends.”

A look at the number of empty properties in the last recession would give similar figures. More important than raw numbers though is the question of where the empty properties are. Are they in the prime retail spaces or in secondary? A much more important piece of information is footfall. The number of people visiting a place. What’s happened to that in the major and secondary shopping ares? As for the questions, well the first is an ‘if’ question so we have not received any evidence in the piece that the magnet for the city centres is losing its pull. In response to the second by selling what people want in a place they want to go to to buy it. The third question is not just restricted to retail, it applies throughout the economy and the fourth is not as obvious as it seems as the way the system works having property empty is not always a problem for a landlord or owner, when it’s retail, as it is when it’s other property. The two finishing anecdotes just reinforce that those retailers that survive will be those which sell things people want and have it available. The message of the much more thoughtful first piece:

What happens after the great retail clear-out?

“Not long ago Oxford Street had ten book shops. Now it has none – unless you count WH Smith. Not long ago it also had half a dozen places you could buy records. It now has just one – and a sorry, understocked specimen it is at the moment. Records and books are fast disappearing from our retail environment. You no longer encounter them on the way to get a sandwich. They enter most people’s lives as noughts and ones or via the sturdy cardboard Amazon package. I wonder whether they’ll come back. Obviously not on the same level but maybe at a level enough to sustain some manufacture, distribution and retail, many notches below the mad over-supply of ten years ago. We always cherish things just as they’re about to slip away altogether. People had been gaily chucking away vinyl for years before they realised that this redundant, fragile format was about to be reborn as a soulful antique. When I did a programme for Radio Four about bootlegs a few years back there was reputedly only one record deck in the whole of the BBC. Now they’re ordering them up like there’s no tomorrow. Even CDs are now starting to feel just a little bit precious, which never happened before. This is bound to be more the case as new CDs and books become less visible and more expensive, as they’re surely bound to do as the number of retail outlets shrinks and Amazon, having taken control of the market, decides to push the price. I was in Waterstone’s in Piccadilly on Saturday, which is a pretty civilised place to buy books. I saw a book I was interested in. It was £9.99. I looked it up on the Amazon app on my phone. They had it for £6.89.On two occasions recently I’ve walked out of independent book shops which didn’t have what I asked for and hadn’t heard of it either, stood on the pavement outside and ordered from Amazon from my phone. Both times I was thinking “I hope they’re watching.”In Waterstone’s I bought the copy in the shop. It’s a nice environment, easy to navigate and the staff were pleasant. But more important than they, they had it. That’s the clincher.I don’t expect to be able to find comprehensive book stores on every corner. A handful in the centre of London would probably do me fine. I would be perfectly happy with that.”

Two pieces on retail, the last quoted thoughtful and reflective upon experience, both good and bad. The other trying to bend the facts to fit the black and white pontificating, which they don’t, and then ignoring a whole part of the subject. The piece on Reading shows the ignorance and poor judgement which explains why the writer ran away from involvement in politics in the town, just before being run out of the place, after the debacle and lack of judgement that was the one-way IDR. I know who I will turn to for insight and intelligent commentary.

50,000 miles beneath my brain

When a teenager at school someone in the same year as me said he had just got a load of cassettes from a relative and would I like to buy them. They weren’t prerecorded but previously blank tapes that people had recorded albums onto. They were in a cardboard box and I didn’t get to choose which I wanted it was all or nothing. There were some I wanted and some I knew nothing about. One of the ones I knew I wanted was the whole Woodstock album. David Hepworth talks about the film of the same album here.

One of the tapes that fell into the second group, that I knew nothing about, was Ten Years After’s ’Cricklewood Green.’ It’s not often that something blows me away but this did. In particular tracks like, ‘Love like a man’, ’50,000 miles beneath my brain’ and ‘Working on the road’ are just fantastic with a mix of blues and great organ playing topped off by the fantastic guitar playing of Alvin Lee. His big break came via the performance the band put in at Woodstock.

The cassettes have done what my mother calls “gone the way of all flesh.” A couple of years ago something reminded me of the tracks and I downloaded them, I think they might even have been the first tracks I downloaded, and I enjoyed playing them again. On Tuesday night whilst out seeing Jake Bugg at the venue round the corner I’d been reminded that Ten Years After were playing there in October and I’d remembered that I wanted to go.Then yesterday it was announced that Alvin Lee had died. I was sorry that I would now not get to see Ten Years After but in the process of writing this I discovered that he had not been playing with the band for some time and that the gig seems still to be on. Here they are with working on the road. Enjoy:

I don’t normally do re-posts but….

….when someone has written something so well and you know you will not better it why not re-post it? This comes from the blog of David Hepworth, someone I first knew of as a presenter of the’The Old Grey Whistle Test‘ and then as editor of my all time favourite magazine, that is sadly no longer with us. I have listened to the podcast about the school in Chicago referred to in this post and it is very good. I too would recommend ‘This American Life‘:

Harper High School is a two-part programme from NPR in the States. I heard it via the This American Life podcast. It’s the kind of radio you don’t get in this country, not even from Radio 4. It sets out to discover what it’s like in a school on the south side of Chicago where they’ve “lost” (how the language of warfare clings) over twenty students in the last year.

The teachers and social workers of Harper High patrol the halls relentlessly exuding positivity. One of them, Crystal, says “let me appreciate you in advance” as soon as any student doesn’t directly refuse to comply with an instruction. This is the kind of school where they have to offer students a cookie for turning up at a class on time.

Even the police around Harper High reckon it’s impossible to escape being allied to one gang or another. It’s not to do with drugs. It’s to do with where you live. The kids are frightened, which is why they sound depressed. One boy, who has gone back into his shell after accidentally shooting and killing his brother, says “I don’t like to remember”. His words are those of a toddler. His voice is that of a man. 

Harper High School flips the picture presented by British teacher recruitment advertising. You know that one – “work with the most exciting people in the country”. At Harper teachers are the ones who sound like the brightest, most questioning people in the world. The children are the ones who sound closed off, beaten down by life. They walk down the middle of the street, not merely to annoy the traffic, but because experience has taught them it’s the best place to be if the shooting starts. A star football player says he has learned that when you hear a shot you should go down as if you’ve been hit. It’s safer than running. If you run you will definitely be shot.

One of the reasons Harper High succeeds is because at no stage does a government spokesman or a representative of the teachers union or an academic pop up to try and explain it all. The relative looseness of the format allows them to break off and explain complex sequences of cause and effect without needing a single interviewee to stand them up, as would probably happen here. 

Because the programme is not committing itself to coming up with a solution, because it doesn’t fit into any pre-existing current affairs strand, because it’s only setting out to answer the “what’s it like?” question, it can do at least a tiny bit of justice to the exhausting complexity of the problem.

I don’t know much about classical music…..

I have been listening a lot to Sibelius this week. JTO says she thinks it sounds cold, drawing pictures of the Finnish countryside in the current season. I, on the other hand, hear warmth in the music. People in the warmth of their homes. The ending of the long cold winter and the arrival of the spring and the warmth. The CD contains symphonies 5-7, The Oceanides, Finlandia and Tapiola played by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund. As you will see from the cover of the CD they did not go with the cold and snowy Finland but with the land of lakes.

The title of this piece is half of a saying usually made about art and attributed to people who are philistines. It continues “…but I know what I like.” I never learnt about classical music, I don’t really know much about it and that which I like I came to via a different range of influences. Take Sibelius. That’s him on the right of this post.According to the notes on the CD, “the ‘age of Romanticism’ was bound up with an outbreak of nationalist fever in those countries outside the well established French/Austro-German/Italian musical traditions.” It goes on to mention “Glinka in Russia, Liszt in Hungary, and Smetana in Bohemia followed by Grieg in Norway, Nielsen in Denmark, Albéniz in Spain, Alfvén in Sweden and Elgar in England.”  It places Sibelius in this tradition. The Fifth Symphony is the one I started listening to this CD for. The notes go on to say, “Compared to the agonisingly bleak and introspective Fourth Symphony, Sibelius’ Fifth is a far more outward-going and positive affair, the composer’s final musical statement in the heroically conquering mould familiar from his first two symphonies. Originally cast in four movements and completed just in time for his 50th birthday celebrations, Sibelius later telescoped the first two movements into one to produce one of the most exhilarating utterances in the history of symphonic form. The gently contemplative central movement provides a sobering contrast before the indelible horns calls of the finale push the music ever onwards towards its exultant conclusion.” Ah the horns.

In November 1984 I first heard ‘Since Yesterday’ by Strawberry Switchblade. I loved the ‘indelible horns’ at the start of the song and that recur during it. A friend who worked in a record store knew of my love for this song and, when clearing things out from his record collection, gave me the whole album it came from. It was some time later that I learnt that the musical theme in the song had been taken from the Third Movement of the Fifth Symphony by Sibelius, which was why I bought it and now listen to it.

That has pretty much been a theme of my life. If I find something I like I go back to the things that inspired the author or musician. It was from my love of Echo and the Bunnymen that I went back to the inspiration of the lead singer and found Leonard Cohen. It sometimes went astray. When, as a young man in my late teens/early twenties, I loved the writing of Jack Kerouac I sought out his inspiration Thomas Wolfe, the American writer from the early part of the twentieth century. I instead found Tom Wolfe the then writer of new-Journalism and now noted author.

So, I discovered the late String Quartets of Beethoven from the book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being‘ by Milan Kundera, one of my all-time favourite books. The main character is agonising over whether to return to Soviet Prague from Paris to follow his partner. She loves Beethoven and introduced his music to him. The last movement of Quartet 135, the last, is called ‘the difficult decision.’ It has a theme running through it “Muss es sein? Es muss sein.” (Must it be? It must be.) The main character reflects on this whilst agonising over the decision and, when he has made a decision he justifies the decision my “Es muss sein!” Beethoven fits into other themes in the book about heaviness and lightness but it was listening to the music after reading that section of the book and hearing the theme as described that led me to fall in love with the piece of music.

Morrissey is to blame for another. The only time I saw the Smiths the first song they played was the eponymous first track from the album, The Queen is Dead, which starts with actress Cicely Courtneidge nostalgically singing the First World War song ‘Take me back to dear old Blighty‘ from the 60′s film ‘The L Shaped Room‘. Before that the Montagues and Capulets from Serge Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliette was played through the PA. I was aware of the piece of music but after being put to such a use I had to have it on record.

There are other similar stories to each of the pieces of classical music in my record collection apart from two which feature Mozart’s last three symphonies. Those were given to me by my mother when I left home and I have played them a lot of times and have come to love them a lot.

A Top of the Pops

I was asked in December to take part, with a group of other people, in getting together lists of the best of 2012. I took too long to reply and, in a way, I’m pleased because four albums which I’ve grown to like, that were produced last year, I hadn’t heard at that point. If I’d taken part I would not have included them. I know it’s a bit late into this year to be looking back at the last year, but ‘what the hell’ I’m going to do it anyway.

Records

Amazon did a top 100 of the year, NPR Music did a top 50, as did NME. I wrote in November about Piccadilly Records doing one at the end of November. I only got 14 new albums during the year, and 4 of those were over Christmas so dividing them into a top 10 and ranking them seems a bit superfluous. It was heartening as someone who turns 50 in less than a month to see Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan return with strong new albums and I have grown to love the John Cale very much. I would strongly recommend any of the ones from this list:

• Old Ideas – Leonard Cohen
• Tempest – Bob Dylan
• Blunderbuss – Jack White
• Sun – Cat Power
• Sonic Kicks – Paul Weller
• Island Fire – Gemma Ray
• Not Your Kind of People – Garbage
• Standing at the Sky’s Edge – Richard Hawley
• Come of Age – The Vaccines
• Co-Exist – The XX
• Born to Die – Lana Del Rey
• Carrington Street – Adele & Glenn
• Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood – John Cale
• One Day I’m Going to Soar – Dexys

Film

I saw more films than I bought and listened to music. Special mention goes the ‘The Guard’ ‘The Separation’, The Descendants’, ‘Millennium’, ‘Margin Call’. ‘Ruby Sparks’, ‘Ides of March’ and ‘Skyfall’. I was blown away by ‘Life of Pi’ and I can see why people said it could no be filmed, and without special effects it could not have been, and a an extra special mention for ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ which was charming. Special opprobrium for Sherlock Holmes which was rubbish and I only went to see it because the first minute or so was filmed here in Strasbourg.

• The Guard
• J Edgar Hoover
• The Separation
• The Descendants
• Mrs Henderson Presents
• Sherlock Homes & Games of Shadows
• Millennium
• Iron Lady
• Margin Call
• W.E.
• Ruby Sparks
• Paperboy
• Ides of March
• 3 Days of the Condor
• Skyfall
• Life of Pi
• Moonrise Kingdom

 Books

In terms of number I read slightly fewer books than films I watched but more than albums I bought and listened to. However, signing up to Goodreads in June means it was easy to track what I read in the last year and to rank them. As I gave five stars to the autobiography of Madeline Albright, the fourth instalment of Robert Caro’s biography of LBJ and to Stonemouth by Ian Banks they were obviously the top three with a one, two, three in the order I mentioned them.

• Priors Garden – Jane Griffiths
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• The Unfinished Revolution – Phillip Gould
• I An Actor – Nicholas Craig
• A View from the Foothills – Chris Mullin
• Back to Blood – Tom Woolfe
• Sweet Tooth – Ian McEwan
• Master of the Senate – Robert Caro
• Stonemouth – Iain Banks
• NW – Zadie Smith
• Transition – Iain Banks
• Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half Forgotten Europe – Norman Davies
• Lionel Asbo: State of England
• Prague Winter: A personal Story of Remembrance and War – Madeleine Albright
• Love Me Do – Michael Braun
• The Human Factor – Graham Greene

Film 2013

I’ve never been one for doing reviews of films, never really thought people would be interested in what I had to say about them. However. Last month I just managed to catch up on two films that were being shown as part of a Télérama (Radio Times but more intellectual) catch up on the best films of last year, Holy Motors and The Deep Blue Sea.(Links to trailers for the films) The first showed someone working throughout Paris at night and the second showed a Judge’s wife falling for a former Battle of Britain airman. Both were really good and enjoyable. The former with the added bonus of an appearance of Kylie! I was really sorry to miss out on The Master but I did.

Then last week I went to Zero Dark Thirty. I had been concerned at the first half being about how intelligence about the search for the head of Al Qaeda and the operation to take him out. Enthralling cinema.

Then this weekend and a veritable cinema feast. First up was Silver Linings Playbook.(Happiness Therapy in France) I had received a lot of encouragement from the best blogger in Reading, and he won’t like this, but the positive encouragement was added to by Stephen Fry on the Danny Baker Show where he talked about the subtlety of this film. From the performances of the male and female lead through to the shades in the OCD of Robert De Niro. It is a fantastic life-affirming film, go and see it now!

Then I went to see Django Unchained. I had expected to see a Tarantino blood-fest, which I did not think it was so much. I also thought it had much more of a story than his recent films, a lot of wit and a good story. It also had, as legal blogger David Allen Green pointed out, thought-provoking moments with regard to the law.

The last film of the weekend was a visit to see Lincoln last night. This was the most disappointing film of the last four.  It was a fine performance from Daniel-Day Lewis and Shirley Field. I thought the film was dull, too much of a reflection of the Iraq-all-war-is-nonsense hokum and, as someone with experience of Parliamentary maneuvers and knowledge of the working of the US system through reading the fantastic Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, suffered from the double problem of being too long and not dramatic enough.

Well, three fantastic films and one  worthwhile story that could have been told better, that still leaves Sugar Man, Hitchcock and Shadow Dancer on show. I hope the remaining months are as good as February seems to be.

You know what this has to end with:

Alsace hardcore

I haven’t posted about the fact it’s snowing because, it’s Alsace it’s what happens in the winter. I guess the closest I came was through hinting at it in the post yesterday showing the planters on our balcony with a covering of snow. The first picture shows the courtyard of our flats, notice the covering of snow, it is not melting, it must be cold – probably below zero.

Picture 2 shows the flat across the courtyard from us. You will notice that they have both windows wide open. On a day when the apple weather app. on my mp3 device, there are other mp3 devices available, shows the temperature as -3 and The Weather Channel app. has the temperature at -1 but feeling like -6 then big style respect to the Alsace hardcore.

Everything’s coming up lovely

When we left for our Christmas break in the UK, which I wrote about here, we had some bulbs starting to show in the planters on our balcony, their green shoots poking out of the soil. This made me sad as I was afraid they might not survive the winter.

I’m not a big fan of the winter, more specifically things getting darker through the autumn and then staying dark in the winter. So occasions like Monday when the sun was shinning after 16:00 and it was still light after 17:00 are welcome signs of the improvement coming. Similarly the arrival and flowering of bulbs, when younger indoor ones that had been planted for me and given to me usually by my mother or other relative, whilst of late more that we have planted in the special planters on the balcony. The first photo is of myself in the 80′s trying to be arty and take a photo of myself taking a photo of myself and to my right are the daffodils I had received that year.

On my return I was pleased to see that the shoots had not died off in the cold weather whilst we were away but they had prospered and grown. The picture here is of them in the sun this morning. I’m so looking forward to them blooming whilst today I just enjoyed cycling in the sunshine on my way home from work, even if it was cold, and seeing the sunshine on the neighbouring buildings out of the window.