Wordle 1,044 3/6*

🟨⬛⬛⬛⬛
⬛⬛🟨🟨🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

About seven minutes .. spent a long time on the third word.

Finally got round to watching Living on Amazon Prime. Set in 1953, it's a touching tale of an elderly bureaucrat at County Hall who learns that he doesn't have long to live and sets out to make the most of his remaining time.

It's a heartwarming, touching story but the 1950s mood, enhanced by a beautiful orchestral soundtrack and some stunning photography, is immaculate. It's like time travel. The sets, the decor, the hairstyles and clothes, and importantly the language and manner of the characters. Nighy's performance is note-perfect; gently understated and fragile.

I especially loved the County Hall scenes - the portrayal of the stultefying bureaucracy of the time (surely exaggerated) gently leans into the surreal; it reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Brazil.

Must admit I'm a sucker for period pieces set in the recent past. I can't abide Wuthering Heights, Far from the Madding Crowd, Pride and Prejudice and all that nonsense but give me something set in the '40s or '50s and I'm in.

I heard a BBC commentator say that the Chelsea women's team were "down to ten men" against Barcelona earlier. There'll be a stern internal email about that on Monday, I imagine.

3. The Who Sell Out [December 1967]

This is a wonderful record. Actually I have a certain sentimental attachment to this album, because its cover art was one of the more memorable images printed in the NME Encyclopaedia of Rock, a book I spent many happy hours immersed in as a teenager. But I'd never actually listened to it before today. What a shame I waited 45 years.



This is an early concept album. Some of the songs are spoof commercials. Some start or end with a mock radio jingle. The whole thing has a wonderful sense of motion. To me this is everything that A Quick One wasn't - very cohesive and focused, a proper whole album statement. It's a big step forward in songwriting, performance and production. It leans in to accessible, melodic rock music and away from their R&B beginnings.

I have to suppose that Sergeant Pepper was an influence on this record. It's certainly not out-and-out Beatles-style cinematic psychedelia though there are hints of that but the way it flows, the recurring themes and the sense of a journey are similar.

Entwistle writes and sings three songs here, all really good. Silas Stingy especially is remarkably harmonically sophisticated. Townshend writes most of the album of course and I suppose I'd have to say that I Can See for Miles, the only tune on the record I was familiar with, is the highlight. Pete plays some beautiful acoustic guitar on Sunrise, he sings very nicely on it too.

Curiously, the album opens (after a brief radio jingle) with a song written by Speedy Keen called Armenia, City in the Sky. Speedy also wrote Thunderclap Newman's Something in the Air (actually Thunderclap Newman was a band put together by Townshend, who plays bass on that song). I first became aware of Speedy Keen as producer of the first Motorhead album, personally. He did a terrible job. But I digress.

Anyway - everyone should have a copy of this.

And the rain just keeps on keepin' on, right into May.

Wordle 1,043 4/6*

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
⬛🟨⬛🟨⬛
⬛🟨⬛🟩🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Three minute one.

The forecast was for showers but I really want to get to 400 miles this month if I can, so I decided to put up with it and do 30-odd miles after work. The wind was coming from the east so I headed over that way. Thought I'd probably do Rempstone or Wymeswold and back. After Zouch though I had the idea of taking a left off the main route, to try to loop back round to Sutton Bonington.

I did this a few weeks ago but this time I took the left a bit later (through East Leake rather than West Leake). Followed a sign to Gotham, after a while I didn't have a good feel for where I was so I cheated and had a look at Google Maps. This suggested a nice easy way to Sutton Bonington through New Kingston and Kingston on Soar. So I did that.

Good to explore new roads. Quite liked the stretch between Gotham and Kingston. I'll make a note to go that way again.

Came back the longer way through Peggs Green and Coleorton. Listened to another couple of hours of the Reacher novel. Best one for quite a while. Familiar plot ideas, but nicely put together. I didn't get rained on at all.

Back on 34.85 miles and that's 379 this month, coincidentally the precise target for April. But I'd still like to end up with more than 400. At the moment Monday looks like a nice day and I've booked the day off work.

https://www.strava.com/activities/11269907774

Wordle 1,042 3/6*

⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛
🟨🟩🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Took me about 20 minutes!

I handed my notice in. I'm not convinced I'm retiring. It's not necessarily permanent. Maybe it is. But it is indefinite.

Ideally I would have liked to work for another six months or so but the job is getting more annoying by the day and as Miles Davis once said - when you're at a party, you've gotta know when to leave.

I'm contracted to provide 8 weeks' notice, but I've given them 9. Partly to make the transition easier for them, partly to squeeze another week of cash while I'm in the less stressful situation of knowing I'm leaving.

Wordle 1,041 3/6*

🟨🟨⬛⬛🟨
🟨🟨🟨⬛⬛
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

About five minutes after midnight, then five this morning.

Another Map Men video is out!

Published seven hours ago, and it's had 326,000 views.

2. A Quick One [December 1966]

A bit of a mixed bag, this one. A slightly indigestible mix of '60s pop / R&B and English whimsy, with a prototype rock opera in several parts tacked on the end.

Relations in the band were fractious in 1966 apparently, and perhaps to address this, or perhaps merely to cope with it, the band's manager Kit Lambert pushed for each member to contribute as equally as possible to the album - meaning that less of the album is written by Townshend than would otherwise have been the case. I think it does suffer as a result.

In the end Daltrey only wrote one song for the album called See My Way and actually it's not bad at all.

Entwistle sings really nicely on his two pieces. If he was adept at singing and playing bass at the same time, they could have been a three piece band. But Whiskey Man is unexceptional and Boris the Spider is of course really a novelty piece. It's certainly enjoyable though, with the big man's bass being used as a clanging, growling lead instrument. Sounds like a Rickenbacker to my untutored ear but as far as I can make out from reading around it was a rare slab-body Precision. I wonder if Chris Squire was influenced by this tune. I remember hearing it for the first time myself while visiting a school pal in the early '70s. Like myself, he had an older brother with an ear for rock music. Handy.

Moon's Cobwebs and Strange is an oompah-brass band number. His I Need You is terrible: messy in the composition, the execution and the recording. There's a spoken section that's supposedly a Lennon pastiche.

Townshend's Run Run Run and So Sad About Us are really very good, albeit both redolent of that British '60s 'beat' sound that aged very quickly - echoes of The Searchers, The Dave Clark Five - you know the sort of thing. This album came out a few months after Revolver so it's evident that Pete's band was well behind the curve in some respects.

And yet - famously this record contains what is considered in some quarters to be the first rock opera - the forebear of Tommy, a nine minute oddity in six movements entitled A Quick One, While He's Away. A heartwarming tale of adultery and forgiveness. I liked it. Daltrey, Entwistle and Townshend all sing lead. But it's more old-time Music Hall than prog rock, somehow. Very theatrical.

As a Who fan giving this a spin for the first time in the winter of 1966, I think I'd be disappointed. Very interesting, for sure. But mostly not playing to their strengths.

Car passed its MOT again, that's two years in a row.

Nurse Campbell has been touting a link between the third "booster" COVID vaccine and a rise in the incidence of cancer. Unsuprisingly, it's bollocks.

I was getting quite annoyed listening to 5 Live's Drive programme while out on a bike yesterday. The two presenters were chattering between themselves and asking if was near the edge of the galaxy? or perhaps the universe? And throughout the programme when the subject came up the rhetoric was that it was "out there in the universe" and so on.

But as Picnic points out, it's still very close to Earth in cosmological terms. If you imagine our planet to be the monument at Charing Cross Station and the edge of the galaxy to be the nearest part of the M25, it's travelled about 2mm.