Word to Your Mother

Just a quick image dump this week. I shouldn't be pleased with myself for managing to produce a page two consecutive weeks in a row, but I am. Don't judge me. You don't know my life.

I did have an accompanying rant about how I'm 86% confident I could take Jeremy Clarkson in a fight. Unfortunately I only got as far as drafting it out in the purple lined notebook with the happy elephant on the cover that exists exclusively in my head before I was kidnapped by a gang of desperate characters and forced to participate in a dangerous mission of international importance, by which I mean I went out for a Nandos with the family. I will bore you with my very important views on trivial matters next time,

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton.

Sunshine on Leith

Was away last week on romance related duties, hence the lack of an update. It was me and the missus's two year anniversary so she took the high road and I took the low road and we were both in Scotland before ye. We didn't get to the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond, but we did make it to Edinburgh, which is - as I'm sure you're aware - plenty bonnie itself.  I've been to Auld Reekie before, but more in a go there, get shit done, leave again capacity so it was nice to see the place in a more leisurely context. If you've never been, go there now, it's beautiful. Also hilly, but that's not really relevant. Thanks to the wonders of deal-of-the day-voucher websites we stayed in what was quite easily the swankiest hotel I've ever been in. The restaurant served food on unconventionally shaped plates, so you knew it was legit posh.

We also went to the zoo, because nothing lets a girl know that you love her and cherish the years you've shared together better than taking her look at some incarcerated animals. We saw pandas and penguins and bears (oh my) and I have now decided that squirrel monkeys are the best monkeys. A good time was had by all, save perhaps one melancholy chimp whose mate nicked one of his carrots. I would recommend it to anybody reading this and thinking of going, although would advise you to allow for more time than the few hours we set aside as it's deceptively large and, as with everything else in Edinburgh, hilly.

Closer to home the above image is a bit of a homage to Get Carter. I've recently finished Ted Lewis's Jack's Return Home, the source novel for the film, which in turn inspired me to watch Michael Caine's Geordie western, which in turn inspired the above doodlage. While I've written previously that Billy Wilder's The Appartment is my number one film of all time, Get Carter has a quite comfortable berth in my personal top ten, mainly because it is one of the most insanely quotable films of all time, think Philip Marlowe by way of Mike Leigh. The film is also notable/notorious for being the number one factor in prolonging the life of Gateshead's Trinity Car Park one of the locations in the film and a building notable for being a) completely and utterly fuck ugly, and b) a car park which, thanks to the somewhat acute angle of its entrance ramp, was inaccessible to cars. There's a Tesco's there now, which is also fuck ugly, but at least you can actually access it to buy some dairylea and toilet duck.

Also, to make amends for the lack of words, there's another page of Rag and Bone below, inform the people.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Mackem Beasts and Where to Find Them

I finished the latest page of Rag and Bone,  because I said I would and I'm good like that. As I was congratulating myself on a job well done (or probably more accurately a job that's... well... done) and prepared to settle in for the night with a lovely hot cup of Worcester sauce it suddenly popped up in my news feed that Hyde and Beast were doing a free gig at Pop Recs round the corner from me. Despite already having changed into my lazy pants I made an executive decision to go check it out, because, dammit, if I don't go to these things, who will?

Actually it turns out that lots of people will as the place was packed with the great and the good of Wearside. As is traditional at these sort of things the very tallest present had arranged themselves into a blockade directly in front of me, compounding the fact that the lead singer of the group is a rather diminutive,beardy chap who may or may not have taken part in the quest to reclaim Erebor.

I didn't really know much about Hyde and Beast going in beyond there's two guys, one who's called Mr Hyde and another who, disappointingly, is not called Mr Beast. It transpires that they play jaunty McCartneyesque pop/rock that I wouldn't really have imagined coming from former members of The Futureheads and The Golden Virgins. While a record shop's not really an optimal setting to see any band, the band came across as tight, likeable, with plenty of tunage in their arsenal, certainly on a par or better than a lot of the guitar based acts out there.

Of course, the fact that it was free was a definite plus. Again, full props should be given to the various Heartstrings that run the Pops Recs record shop for providing a space for shit like this to take place.  Earlier this week Sunderland announced it'd be bidding to be the UK capital culture 2021. While the initial reaction from myself and others was the raised eyebrows and suppressed snorts of the terminally cynical if there were a few more places like that around town it wouldn't seem quite so daft.

Below's the video for a single from last year's Keep Moving album, which I thought had a nice Crosby, Stills and Nash 'Our House' vibe

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton

Auf Weidershen, Pets

I've spent most of this weekend working on a daft distance learning thing. It's basically an employers market at the moment and as such most companies feel little compulsion to train or develop staff. I therefore figured it'd be a positive step to take the initiative and do a few things that I could add to my CV. Unfortunately, as the whole thing was done in a sort of 'tomorrow is too late' spirit I ended up signing on for the first course I came across, which was a course in Equality and Diversity. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm generally all for equality, diversity, tolerance and rainbows, but when 90% of your course material can be summarised as 'don't be a bigoted dick-meister', then you'll forgive me if after a while I began to find the whole thing a bit tedious.  

One lot of people who would probably agree that the whole thing was a waste of time - although probably for very different reasons - would be PEGIDA (Which stands for Patriotische Europäer Gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes. Duh.), who were just up the road in Newcastle the other day. If, like me, you are baffled as to why a German right wing nationalist movement were demonstrating in the north of England it seems that the group operates a sort of franchise system within different countries (a structure it shares, perhaps ironically, with Al Qaeda), so it was basically the English Defence League/Britain First/The National Front waving different flags and trying to piggyback on the success of a more successful group of toss merchants. Even so Newcastle seemed a rather arbitrary choice of venue. I spent several years years living on Tyneside and it never really came across as a powder keg of racial tension. A cynic might posit that it was selected as the North East has quite high levels of social deprivation and historically such places tend to be fertile breeding ground for the angry slap heads.

The organisers predicted that there'd be thousands demonstrating and, in all fairness, they were correct, with attendance around 2,000. However it should be noted that those thousands were on the other side of the police barricade, at the counter demonstration organised under the banner Newcastle Unites. PEGIDA meanwhile managed less than a fifth of that, and most of those seemed to be coming from outside the region. For the most part though, it seems the Geordies simply couldn't be arsed.  The inorganic, bussed in nature of the whole thing was probably best illustrated by the fact that the organisers had utterly failed to take into account that Newcastle United were playing at home. Given a choice between standing in the freezing cold, shouting into the drizzle about things you hate or doing something halfway enjoyable with their Saturday most people seemed to have plumped for the latter. In a nice little demonstration of the occasional synchronicity of the universe, the Geordies won their match with a goal by Pappis Cisse, a practicing Muslim. Back in the Bigg Market meanwhile, a lot of council taxpayer's time and resources was spent humouring the clash of civilisation fantasies of a handful of professional miserabilists. So that's something.

Most of the way through a page for Rag and Bone, added a work in progress below. should have it finished by next week. Huzzah