Day 337 – Ritchie Sacramento

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The Best Song Of The Year (So Far)™ for me, and a new album to go with it.

Step forward Scottish rockers Mogwai and their new one, Ritchie Sacramento.

Best played LOUD (as with all their stuff) and often, I love the grinding bass and soaring, dreamlike guitars. So, so good.

The new album As The Love Continues begins with a track called To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Planet Earth, the latter part of which sounds like a great idea and the whole of which is just a great title to open any long player.

We’re long overdue some time off – it’s been a rewarding, but punishing few weeks – so downtime in Agulhas is happening from this evening. I would suspect that Mogwai will play a large part in the soundtrack for the weekend.

Day 336 – In which I go out

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I would go out tonight, but I haven’t got a stitch to wear.

Wait – here’s a T-shirt. Right. We’re on.

We’ll be taking all of the sensible precautions this evening. Masks, social distancing, hand washing, and curry. To my knowledge, no-one has done any research into whether or not curry can stall or stop coronavirus infection, so we can’t be sure that it will work in that way, but equally, we can’t be sure that it won’t.

I’m going to give it a go. For science.

And it will be great to eat a meal somewhere other than my house.
Even it it is a lovely house.

Day 335 – House view

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I haven’t said anything detailed about the new house, because it’s not something that you want or need to know details about, and because I haven’t really had time to share anything, because I’ve been so busy sorting out those very details.

But stuff worth celebrating has occurred today: the study is no longer peach.


This is a project that took far longer than it should, simply because I had to re-prioritise for reasons. Once the priorities were taken care of, I finally managed to finish off the study today and it’s now a really pleasant place to be (if you can ignore the smell of fresh paint).

But it’s no longer peach. And that’s great.

Elsewhere (upstairs, basically), I took a quick and dirty shot from our bedroom window out to the SouthEast:

That’s looking across Grassy Park and Lavender Hill out across False Bay to Rooi Els, some 48km away.

Hello Rooi Els.

I suspect that I will be taking many more (and many better) images of this view. But right now, I need to be somewhere that doesn’t smell of grey paint.

Even though I love my grey paint.

Day 334 – Crooked

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Not a post about our erstwhile government.

But yes, Chesterfield does have a church with a crooked spire.

It’s quite a thing.

You drive right past it on the A61 when you’re heading to Sheffield because you’ve taken junction 29 off the M1 North in an effort to avoid the Catcliffe Link and the city centre traffic (and that’s really the only reason that you’d be in Chesterfield).

The spire was added in the 14th-century tower in about 1362, and is 228 feet (69 m) high from the ground. It is both twisted and leaning, twisting 45 degrees and leaning 9 ft 6 in (2.9 m) from its true centre. The leaning characteristic was initially suspected to be the result of the absence of skilled craftsmen (the Black Death had been gone only twelve years before the spire’s completion), insufficient cross bracing, and the use of unseasoned timber.

It is now believed that the twisting of the spire was caused by the lead that covers the spire. The lead causes this twisting phenomenon, because when the sun shines during the day the south side of the tower heats up, causing the lead there to expand at a greater rate than that of the north side of the tower, resulting in unequal expansion and contraction. This was compounded by the weight of the lead (approximately 33 tonnes) which the spire’s bracing was not originally designed to bear.

There are around a hundred twisted spires on churches across Europe, but this is the only one that you’d be likely to be passing if you were on your way to Sheffield

Day 333 – 1984

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If you choose to believe some people, we are currently living in 1984 – not the year (some of us have been through that already) – the George Orwell novel in which the population is controlled by Big Brother and the totalitarian state.

Get a grip. It’s just a bit of cloth on your face.

But what really happened in 1984 – not the George Orwell novel in which the population is controlled by Big Brother and the totalitarian state – the year?

Well, talking of totalitarian states (eh?) there was a by-election in Chesterfield and there were 17 candidates. By law, if you mention one of them (and clearly, Moira Stewart had done so), you also have to mention all of the others so as not to show any sort of bias.

So Moira: take us through the other names, if you would, please?

Ah, democracy.

Of course, none of these individuals came close to challenging the big three, and Labour’s Anthony Neil Wedgwood… er… “Tony” Benn romped home with 24,633 votes, much to the chagrin of John Connell of the Peace Party who came in 17th, just 24,626 behind.

So close.