I’m back a lot sooner than usual! Clearly something momentous has occurred.

Lucinda K Cunningham had a cancellation! This meant she was able to format my book earlier than forecast. The formatted document dropped into my inbox almost a week early and I sat down on Saturday afternoon (May 11th) with sweaty palms ready to tackle the Smashwords ‘meat grinder’.

An hour or so later I was home and hosed! Happy days! The document sailed through first time, all 95000 words of it. The only hiccup was the cover photo. In my excitement I uploaded a thumbnail version of the cover photo. Doh! Old age doesn’t come alone. I quickly corrected that issue and I received a ‘successful upload’ message and sat back while the book was ‘pending review’.

Normally, this takes about a week, but on Thursday evening I checked my Smashwords dashboard and the book was on the Premium list. No time for celebration though as all sorts of things needed to be done. I have upgraded my email signature to include hyperlinks to everything under the sun which might be relevant (plus some that probably won’t!); I’ve started to work on my press release which I’ll upload as soon as a couple more retailers add the book to their listings, which could be the end of the week (around May 25th). Some are already available for you to click on & either browse, review or buy.

The links are below:-

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/315179

http://www.kobobooks.com/ebook/The-Final-Straw/book-mYopJjSEAkyj4JbsCrc8/page1.html?s=P8WyUZf4AE-p

I’ve contacted www.godjira.co.uk to get my website refurbished to reflect the change from promoting the book that started my writing off in the first place, to featuring the new novel. As soon as this is up & ready I’ll let you know, so you can take a tour & let me know what you think.

I’ve already started to pester my Twitter followers and particularly my Facebook friends and colleagues to review and buy the book. After all, those people who bought the paperback copies are the ones who encouraged me to write something else after their kind comments. It’s only natural they would want to be among the first to buy this one……. Isn’t it?

A couple more links you might like to follow up on:-

http://twitter.com/ted_tayler

https://smashwords.com/profile/view/FatherTed

I’m back to school next week for more exams. I’ve got that snooker AGM on Monday evening which promises to be a lively affair. I think most of my time will be spent chasing reviews and checking the ebook retailers to confirm my listing. What a busy chap I am? All this & the weather is on the up too! We spent a couple of hours in the garden playing cricket, tennis, skittles & general mayhem with our grandsons Jack & Riley today. Time to put my feet up I reckon.

I hope you enjoy your read of the book! You know it makes sense. 2012 was 50 Shades; summer 2013 ought to be the summer of ‘The Final Straw’.

Back soon!

A little later than planned, but here we are again!

It’s been a hectic few weeks and last Saturday we arrived home from our ‘chill out’ week in Ibiza. More about that later. The weather at home has been amazing for 72 hours; but after lounging in the garden reading a book in hot sunshine yesterday, I awoke to grey skies this morning, with wind and rain forecast through until the weekend. ‘Plus ca change, plus la meme chose.’

As any further reading sessions appear to have been curtailed this week, I grabbed the opportunity to bring you up to date with everything that’s happened. I told you last month that ‘The Final Straw’ was complete and apart from a few peripheral tasks it should be available by June.

I checked out several cover designers, both locally and around the UK, because that thumbnail image online is your essential ‘hook’ to attract potential buyers; a totally different prospect to my first book which of course was essentially in paperback, with a kindle version tagged on as an afterthought. That option for people to access literature was in its infancy back then. Boy has it taken off in the last couple of years!

Almost to the nearest GBP the quotes were around £400 and so I searched a little more diligently! I soon discovered www.bookcovers.us and Melissa Alvarez from Florida. There were several options on offer and a sliding scale of prices, depending on how many original cover choices you asked her to provide and how many revisions you needed to get your cover just right. (Note to rival designers – I got a far better deal!)

Melissa couldn’t have been more helpful. I had four totally different designs within a couple of days; I saw the structure of the one I liked immediately, then a couple of revisions later the task was complete!

You can view the cover in her gallery by following the link above or by visiting my Facebook page.

The other task I needed to tackle was to write the ‘blurb’ for the book. I needed this to give the designers something to bite on, without giving too much of the storyline away. What I had come up with was this:-

‘An only child, unloved and unwanted by his parents, Colin Bailey is a bitter, emotionally damaged young man, hell bent on exacting revenge on anyone who has stopped him becoming the person he believes he was destined to be.

What sets Colin apart is his intellect and meticulous planning. Detective Phil Hounsell pursues his man relentlessly, while trying to avoid the small town in which he works sliding further and further into the grip of two rival gangs.

A devastating event in Colin’s life provides the final straw that herald’s a bloodbath.

Can Phil prevent it happening or will he too be a victim?’

Just before we flew off on holiday I sent the file to be formatted ready to upload to Smashwords.com. You can do it yourself, but if you get it wrong you’ll be tearing your hair out in frustration trying to get the thing out to your waiting public and a cost of £20 for around 100,000 words takes a lot of the potential pain away.

The formatted file is due back next Monday (13th May) and as soon as I’m able to devote a few hours to it, I’ll get it up & running!

Why the possible delay? The exam season is upon us and I start invigilating first thing Monday morning, then it’s back and forth to school virtually every day until the end of June. Happy days!

I can’t complain about being busy! The snooker season is over, apart from a summer competition, the AGM and Presentation ceremony, the fixtures for the new season, the handbook to prepare and joining a new Club so I can carry on playing, now Melksham House is to be no more. (Did I say ‘over’? As Secretary I’m busier in the close season than ever! Oh well come May 2015 and at 70 years young I’ll be walking away from it, no matter what)

Our social calendar is usually fairly quiet, but we have several invitations on the mantelpiece to see us through the summer. A wedding in early June, a retirement party the following Friday, then a hog roast
and party the next day! Long lie in on Sunday I reckon! There’s still time for a few other nights out before Lynne’s birthday in mid July, then in August there’s another wedding and then a BBQ to look forward to.

Looking out of the window, let’s pray for more weather like the past three days, not what we have now! We had enough of that last year thanks very much!

Lynne and I made our fifteenth trip to Ibiza last week; the rain and cold wind we experienced on Saturday and Sunday was the worst start to our holiday we have had on any of our trips, so we mustn’t complain.

By Tuesday morning though it was set fair and the rest of our holiday was excellent. We visited some old haunts like The Gallery and Pallardi’s where the food, wine and hospitality were superb as always. We even dropped into the Queen Vic for the first time in a decade; there are new people there now and the food was brilliant. I’m sure we’ll be back next year.

We spent many happy hours with Hayden & Yvette at the Ring O’Bells, during the days and nights, so nothing much changes! On Tuesday evening with the bar full of people watching the Germans thrash the Spanish (if you missed it, they did it again on Wednesday!) a young mum came to the bar and started chatting to Lynne. It turned out that Shelley wasn’t a holidaymaker but a local; her and husband Dave had moved out with their two kids last September.

Dave was chatting to a German lady, whose partner is one of the richest guys on the island, but he eventually tore himself away and the four of us Brits had an animated conversation for all of ten minutes, after which we were invited to a BBQ at their place on Thursday evening. I know, it must be something in the drinks, it’s not the way we reserved Brits behave is it? How many times have you been in a pub, talked to a perfect stranger for ten minutes, and then invited them back……. Okay yeah, but apart from those sorts of occasions?

Lynne didn’t think they’d meant it, or had forgotten about it by the time they’d walked home, but on Wednesday afternoon as we were walking back from our annual hike along the side of the river, we saw them sat outside a bar/restaurant and Shelley asked if we were ‘still okay for tomorrow night?’ So we spent Thursday evening on one of their patios, chatting over a couple of bottles of wine and enjoying our first BBQ of the summer. Thanks for a really enjoyable evening guys. We’ll see you next year and we’ll all six go out for a meal somewhere, our treat. You know where to find us to fix a date!

Well, that pretty much brings us up to date. The next few weeks will be testing times, for the kids at school that I’ll be looking after and for yours truly as I try to get ‘The Final Straw’ into the hearts and minds of the readers of the world. I’ll be back in a few weeks with news on how I get on. Bye for now!

I thought I would wait until we got April 1st out of the way, in case you thought my blog contained some foolishness! I can assure you it doesn’t.

What an up and down month this has been! The weather has been cold, colder and coldest and there’s still no sign of a return to normal springtime temperatures anytime soon. The wife has suffered with a heavy cold and coughs for most of March, but somehow has failed to pass anything on to me so far; although it’s generally about now that I pick up a cold as we’re off to Ibiza on holiday in a few weeks time.

I finished the final pages of ‘The Final Straw’ and passed the completed novel onto my brother to get his opinion. My next task is to get a professional ‘blurb’ written and a suitable cover for the e-book publication.

Any offers of assistance with these two items will be suitably rewarded.

Bob’s initial review was ‘It was the kind of book that once you started reading it; you couldn’t put it down until you were too tired to read any more.’ Before you ask, no, there was no payment involved!

He went on to say that he’d been reading some James Patterson lately and although his books have short chapters which make them easy to pick up and put down (ideal for a trip to the toilet perhaps?) they lacked the logical precise story sequencing that typifies my work. He found himself re-reading the previous Patterson chapter to check that he hadn’t picked up a different book to the one he thought he was reading!

Of course, this suggests my novel is superior, but please bear in mind JP has over 100 titles to his name and 260 million sales; this is my first novel but it has to be worth a quick read to confirm or deny my brother’s opinion, doesn’t it?

I’ll keep you informed via social media of my progress and with a following wind the book should be on general release worldwide by June 2013.

While we’re on the subject of social media, there have been a couple of setbacks this month. Facebook switched the layout on my Timeline and added in stuff from my Profile that is superfluous and a pain in the ass, but I can’t seem to work out how to get rid of it! Why they keep tinkering with the blessed thing I haven’t a clue; I just wish they’d leave it alone!

My Hotmail account has disappeared too! I’ve been transferred over to Outlook with a Mickey Mouse layout and features I have absolutely no need of now or in the future! It seems to be a darn sight slower to get stuff done than before too, which makes it even less popular in the Tayler household!

I’m not finished with the ‘Grumpy Old Man’ section yet, sorry!

The Tweepi situation is much as before; the plus side of paying for the privilege was that initially I could prune out those people who had dipped into Twitter and decided after a month or two, they couldn’t work out what is was all about. My quest for 100,000 followers by the book launch date would then be set back a touch, but at least the resultant count would include a higher percentage of ‘live’ followers.

What is most annoying is the far too frequent delaying tactic of preventing me from following someone until several minutes have elapsed, during which time I’m invited to avail myself of some of the other features I’m paying for. Excuse me! I did all the pruning and checking up I needed to do in the first 48 hours of upgrading. It’s called ‘being organised’.

I mentioned the Twitter Valentine’s Day massacre, where they ditched a large number of my followers didn’t I? Well, I signed out at 8pm last evening (1st) with over 95000 followers and at 11am today (2nd) I had just over 89000! That’s an awful lot of ‘spammers’ that have been cleared out of the system and it wasn’t an April Fools joke either.

One door closes and another one slams in your face!

I’ve had setbacks before and I’ve no doubt there will be others to come, but I’ll just keep ploughing forward. My target is still to hit 100,000 by the end of May.

I mentioned the proposed family gathering for Mothering Sunday? In the end it was the Saturday evening and we took Lynne off to the Bell on the Common at Broughton Gifford. Steve’s wife Jan sadly had to stay home with Jack, one of our grandsons, as he was ill. The food was excellent and it would have been a pretty good evening all round, but Jack’s younger brother Riley had obviously picked up the same bug and he threw up on the pub carpet and he and his Dad had to make a sharp exit. Happy days!

Lynne and I saw all the grandkids last Wednesday and thankfully everyone was fully fit again! Lots of Easter eggs and hugs, then we were off to Wales to spend a couple of days with daughter Kim. I thought it was cold here in West Wiltshire! Walking by the Senate building in Cardiff Bay was a challenge I could have done without! Blimey, it was freezing! A really lazy wind that went through you rather than going around if you know what I mean.

Still the warm hospitality and good food with Kim and Mal made up for it and Lynne enjoyed the break away from home and work.

Another door which appears to have closed is on any future reunion with the group. I tried to stimulate some interest, but there has been no response. I’ve left it up to the others now; if they find time to think about making something happen all well and good, but it seems they are all too busy with other things this year.

There was a lot of positive response from readers of the local free paper to my letter regarding the closure of Melksham House and the ejection of the skittles and snooker teams. A further article appeared in the latest issue where half a dozen other organisations had been forced to move elsewhere, some having been in situ for over sixty years and none of them had been contacted by the Council!

With local elections due in early May I did wonder whether I should stand against one of the ‘hatchet men’ responsible for the debacle. Time and time again ‘a spokesman’ for the Council is quoted as saying that end users are being consulted every step of the way. This is a bare faced lie and although I’m not a political animal and I never expected to say this but ‘the people have a right to know!’

When the soulless campus site is delivered and the vibrant community that was Melksham House is no more it will be too late to complain! The council don’t want a bar and the social atmosphere that goes with it. They argue that they can’t be seen to promote the drinking of alcohol.

For those of you voting next month – The Bustard Club – opposite County Hall in Bythesea Road, Trowbridge has a large function room and lounge bar. Who is it for? It’s a social club for Council employees of course and has been there since 1978!

The word ‘hypocrites’ seems to be appropriate doesn’t it? How can they justify having their own social club, then deny the taxpayers the same opportunity?

I look forward to bringing you some more positive news in about a month. Keep smiling; this weather will improve eventually. Bye for now!

Sorry it’s been a while since I had time to write something to interest or amuse you. These words must do one or the other though, or you wouldn’t have come back for a look would you?

Over the past month, I have tried to force myself to write at least a thousand words a day so that I get this blessed novel finished! As I sit here today I’ve got 300 pages and 90000 words completed. I’ve just killed off my last character (for this book) and with a following wind I’ll have written the last word by the weekend.

The story is in three parts covering certain stages in the lives of the main characters. I need to revisit the first two parts and see if there’s some padding in them that could be removed, as I feel it’s a little too long. Someone told me 280 pages and around 90000 words was an optimum length for a novel.

Obviously no-one told Leo Tolstoy, but then he was a much better writer than I am!

I’m still beavering away on Twitter trying to increase those followers so that when the book is published on-line I have 100000 potential customers I can badger morning, noon and night to download ‘The Final Straw.’ A tale of murder, sex, music and comedy & even some comedy sex!

Yes, as you can see I’ve tried to cover all the bases. Apart from aliens or the supernatural, then pretty much everything else is in there!

If you read last month’s blog ‘It’s Not Rocket Science’ then you know that the Tweepi statistical site has been my main avenue for finding new followers. Twitter has done two things in February to knock me out of my stride.

Firstly they altered the ‘page loads’ criteria and anyone like me using the statistical data hit their ‘follower limits’ far earlier than previously. I was ‘persona non grata’ for 24 hours, but now that I understand where they are coming from it’s not an issue. (They don’t publish these ‘rules’ but merely tell you that there are rules!)

Secondly they did their annual purge of suspended and hacked accounts. I may have mentioned the effect it had last year, but of course with a lot more followers these days it hit me harder this year. I went to bed on the 13th Feb just shy of 85000 and in the morning it was St Valentine’s Day Massacre! Around 1600 -1800 followers had disappeared! (No biggie – they weren’t real so the chances of them buying a book were slim! I’m just wondering how many Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber lose in an annual cull like that?)

Tweepi woke up to the fact that I had over 75000 followers and after almost 15 months of trouble free activity with them without paying a penny, they decided I wasn’t entitled to the ‘free’ stats any longer! I signed up for a twelve month’s stint to see how things go. So far there have been no problems; progress has been slow but steady.

What else has happened? The group’s resurrection seems to have fallen after the first fence. The reunion gig went great; the meeting for a Christmas meal showed promise that we would play again, but two months of 2013 have passed and neither of the other members have any free time to get together for rehearsals. The odds against us performing this year are going out all the time. Unless, of course, pressure was brought to bear, on a certain lead guitarist, drummer and bassist?

Another subject close to my heart, covered in my blog in the past, is the future of Melksham House. The council have finally announced the closure of the ‘indoor facilities’ at the end of August and so the snooker teams have all had to be found new venues from which to play next season. Two political clubs in town immediately offered teams the chance to move in, which was brilliant news. Two teams have decided to pack it in, which is a shame; while the rest of the teams have had to move to clubs out of town.

So over eighty years of people playing billiards and snooker (including my father in the 1930’s) at Melksham House will come to an end. I’ve played there for fifty years and in the last twenty five in particular we have had a collective spirit between the teams that will never be recaptured.

The council have still not made it clear whether they intend to reinstate the snooker facilities in the future, whether in an existing property or in a new build. They have showed total disregard for the views and feelings of those that play the sport. They clearly don’t appreciate that leagues need to move as seamlessly as possible from one season to the next; you can’t just pack up for a year then pick up from where you left off!

As I am coming to the end of my playing days I would have liked to be able to see a facility where the next Ronnie O’Sullivan or Judd Trump (or their female counterpart) could learn to play the game & watch them flourish. Sadly even if you just want a ‘social’ game to while away a spare hour or so, it’s highly likely future & existing players will have to travel a minimum of six miles to find a place where you can do so.

We have moved almost 60 league players to new clubs; I wonder how many of them will bother coming back to a replacement venue IF and when it’s provided? I wouldn’t blame them if they stayed where they were, would you?

There have been some brighter moments in the last few weeks! My grandchildren have now all had their birthdays! Josh (9) and Sophie (7) at the back end of January and Jack (4) and Riley (2) in the past fortnight! Lots of cake and smiling faces! Happy days!

It’s Mothering Sunday on the 10th March so we have Kim and Mal coming over to stay on Saturday night. Can’t say any more about the arrangements because Mother doesn’t know where or when we’re going out, or who’ll be there!

Thank you for sparing the time to read my ramblings. I look forward to bringing some more news in about a month.

Sorry it’s been a bit longer between offerings than usual. I’ve been busy at school invigilating examinations. Some for Year 11 getting some out of the way before the summer; some A level retakes and a couple of Science papers for Year 7 and Year 8. Quite a mixed bag!

Of course we had the snowfall to deal with earlier in January too, which came immediately on the tail of the floods. For the first time in a long time I can see the sun out of the window. Sadly, the wind is blowing at about 70mph so it’s not pleasant.

I’ve still been writing the next book. I’ve got 140 pages and 41000 words behind me now. Still some way to go. Phew! Perhaps I should publish this in three parts? I don’t know how other writers go about it but I made a plan out of who was going to do what to who and when. Then I started fleshing out the individual storylines. I reckon I’ve completed six and I’ve got seven maybe eight to go. Still, it keeps me off the street!

All the characters have got first names and surnames of people I know, but not joined up if you see what I mean. It should be fun for people to spot who they are, but I suppose someone will moan because they’re killed off (oops!) or only have a very brief appearance (as a guy walking his dog who discovers a body on the way to the paper shop for example).

No news on the group front as yet I’m afraid. I tried to get a practice session organised a couple of weeks back but January was a non-starter. I told you these guys were busy! Paul has been doing lighting for shows/pantomimes. Roger had some people in the recording studio and Dave had the flu virus that was doing the rounds and although it hadn’t stopped him gigging in his duo, he couldn’t spare any time just yet. Fingers crossed I’ll have some better news next time.

If you’re not interested in the next bit, switch channels. I keep getting messages and tweets from people who want to know how I got 80000 plus followers in just over a year. It isn’t easy to squeeze that into 160 characters so I directed them to this website and I’ve written out chapter and verse for them. All you need is time and patience. (Yeah I know. One out of two isn’t bad though!)

FREE FOLLOWERS

If you read some of my early blog offerings you’ll know I tried a dozen different sites, plus various tools and techniques to get followers in the first three months or so. I even made the mistake of buying some. Cheap enough for a thousand at about £6-7, but ultimately useless. They had either been inactive for 6 months to a year; they were hacked accounts or were made up names, not even real people. SO DON’T BOTHER!

Tweepi found me, rather than the other way round. A young lady called Catherine suggested I take advantage of the listings they provide of followers of a particular person, which can be shown with a series of statistics about that follower from a list. You decide which statistics you require then once you have your data, you can follow as many as you like (within twitter limits) that fit your parameters.

If you like Metallica for example, then you might show their followers with categories such as Where they live; How many followers they have; When did they last tweet;; their Follow ratio (basically a measure of how likely they are to follow back calculated by dividing Followers by how many they follow).

So that’s how I started. I used groups who played the sort of music I liked and followed a selection of their followers; then I followed followers of people who followed the followers of the groups I liked. I don’t need to go on do I? Gradually the net grew wider and I branched out to DJs and record producers. In fact, anyone connected to the music industry.

So each morning I check the email notifications from twitter to see how many new followers I’ve picked up over night. This varies between 60 and 180. I go into twitter and delete the vast majority of DMs because they’re generally from hacked accounts. Those that aren’t are usually asking me to listen to a track on Soundcloud or YouTube and comment on it. Some days I do, some days I don’t depending on the time available.

Then I go to Who.UnfollowedMe and I check out how many followers gave up the ghost and if I am following them I delete them too. No point hanging on if they’ve gone!

Then it’s on to Tweepi to use the statistics tables again. First of all I follow back people who have followed me (that’s the Reciprocal tool); then I delete all those who are not following me back that have been hanging there for say 48hrs -72hrs. This might be a couple of hundred.

I make a note of any people with large numbers of followers that are relevant (viz. linked to the subject matter I’m interested in) and attack their listings when I get around to them.

Then I do a brief tidy up of the people who I have a mutual contact with (I follow them & they follow me) and unfollow those that have not tweeted for a month or more. Some people are very active on twitter for a while, and then they just drop off the face of the earth.

The follow follower’s routine is last but not least and it’s up to you. If you have a person you wish to follow slavishly then you just call up their statistics and keep clicking on followers who fit your parameters. Always remembering twitter has a limit on the number you can do per day. Or you can ‘cherry pick’ and click on 25 from 10 different profiles.

That’s it, all done in about an hour. Then you get on with your life until the next day when you go in to your emails and check out your success rate. If you get 40% hits then that’s pretty good. Some people I’ve followed have been really good ‘earners’ others have been poor.

Always remember, there has to be a reason for getting a higher number of followers. My reason initially was to get people to buy ‘We’d Like To Do A Number Now’; then it was to visit the website to read the blog updates AND buy the book. Today it’s about creating as big an audience as possible well in advance of my novel being published online. My brain tells me if I have 100,000 followers that I keep badgering to buy my book I have more chance of success than if I have no twitter followers which is where I was at in August 2011 when the first book came out. Ultimately of course it will come down to how good the book is.

So to sum up, it’s not rocket science. I just follow people I think might like the stuff I write, I unfollow those that are perfectly happy to be on twitter without joining me, and those who have given it up as a bad job. I follow back a decent percentage of those who suddenly come out of the ether and follow me without any prompting.

If this appeals to you, try it. It only costs time, not money. If it seems like a lot of work and you can’t spare the time, then there are hundreds of sites out there that will help you get more followers. I wish you well.

For all my friends I thank you for sparing the time to read my updates and I look forward to bringing some more news in about a month. Happy days!

Well that’s Christmas over for another year! We’ve just seen our daughter Kim, plus her husband Mal and dog Bailey, off home after their all too brief visit from South Wales.

They arrived on Sunday afternoon in order to come to Melksham House with myself and Lynne that evening, when I did my last ever quiz night. I racked up over five hundred since I started in April 2001.

It all started to take shape in the summer of 2000 after I had been made redundant. Lynne and I would make a point of going to Melksham House, the Sports & Social Club that in those days belonged to the company for which I had worked for 34 years.

The children were all still living at home so with the girls we walked up the club on several Sunday summer evenings to sit on the patio and congregate with son Steve and the other cricketers who were always to be found there after a match, home or away.

Perhaps half a dozen lads started disappearing around 8.30pm each week with wives or girlfriends (who had also known where to find them!) so I asked Steve where they went. He said ‘They’re off to The Forester’s for the quiz. Some of them will be back later.’ I wondered why the club manager didn’t keep customers in his bar drinking rather than letting them dash off to spend money in someone else’s pub!

He said he was too busy to run a quiz and the barman felt no-one would be interested so it looked like a non- starter. The summer drew to a close and the cricket season too, so Sunday evenings on the patio had to be replaced by a few frames of snooker – indoors in the warm!

In late October Lynne & I went to Ibiza on holiday and while we were there we took part in a quiz (yeah okay we won!) and afterwards, the girl in charge did a version of ‘Play Your Cards Right’ where raffle tickets were sold and 3 people tried to get across the board, turning the 9 cards over higher or lower. If they succeeded they picked up the money collected. This jackpot rolled on night by night until it was won. We arrived on the Saturday and on the Thursday the jackpot was won by a lucky guy who picked up the equivalent of £400 in pesetas. This was just what we needed!

When we got home I suggested to Terry that we trial a quiz with a similar rolling jackpot on Sunday nights. Although he was still a bit dubious, because I was doing all the work, preparing the questions, score sheets for the teams; collecting the money (both for the quiz and the jackpot game) he relented and said okay. A month or so later he called me into the office & lo and behold he had a ‘Play Our Cards Right‘ board and a pack of over sized playing cards! A brewery rep had been in & Terry had asked where we might get hold of something to use to run our end game. The rep just happened to have a set lying around in a warehouse somewhere & it was delivered free of charge. Terry was chuffed to bits and so was I.

The trial run went well and we had half a dozen teams each week. Over the next decade or so we’ve had teams come and go, sometimes we’ve had eight or nine teams on a regular basis, other times it’s dropped back to only four or five. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed setting the questions following the same format week in week out. Quite a few of our quizzers have stayed with us throughout and have become firm friends so we will miss them now it’s come to an end. I guess you’re wondering why it has finished if it was so much fun?

Well it wasn’t the people. I must stress that. About eighteen months ago the company sold Melksham House and the sports grounds to Wiltshire County Council who plan to build a community campus. This will incorporate several sporting activities that are in older Council properties around town and also facilities for services such as Neighbourhood Policing, Youth Services and the like. This means some of the field sports being relocated and the House partly being demolished. The bits that remain will be spruced up with new custom built ‘pods’ built to house various other Council services.

What will disappear, will be the bar (the hub for all the sports and social activities that have been run there since the 1920s); indoor sports such as skittles, snooker and darts may or may not be found new homes. Outdoor sports such as Cricket, Tennis and Bowls will remain but they will have no venue to socialise with their opponents, unless they provide their own facility and cater for it themselves.

My family are no different to hundreds of others from around the town. Over the decades that the company supported Melksham House there were many other employees or associate members who could tell you a similar story.

My father started working at the factory in 1928. He played cricket, football, tennis and billiards in the years before the war. When I was about 12 he started taking me to watch the cricket and I sat on the grass putting the tin numbers on the score board on the instruction of the official scorer. If after tea one of the younger players was dashing off to take his young lady to a dance or whatever, I was invited to field in his place. After matches I played a frame or two of snooker with an older lad who I knew from the choir at the nearby St Michael’s church.

I joined the company in 1966 and played cricket and snooker there for many years. I entered quizzes on behalf of the company and recorded programmes in the main hall with people of the calibre of Peter Jones, Brian Johnston and Ted Moult. I sang in the hall with the groups I was in from the mid 60s until the early 70s. I joined a committee that organised cabaret evenings, the first time in the club’s history that they opened on Sunday nights. From the mid 70s to the early 80s we had Jim Bowen, Faith Brown, The New Vaudeville Band and dozens of other acts.

My wife and I were married at St Michaels in 1971 and had our reception in the main hall. We took our son Steve to Melksham House for the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 when he was about 8 weeks old. When my father retired in 1979 he started to use the club again and met up with people he had played billiards with almost fifty years before and relived those memories. In 1992 my parents celebrated their Golden Wedding there. My 3 children had all or part of their wedding receptions in 2003, 2005 & 2008 respectively in the main hall. I had my 65th birthday bash there in 2010.

I played bowls for the club from 2001 to 2009 and I was Captain in 2008. Together with countless Christmas Eve’s, Boxing Day lunchtimes and New Year’s Eve’s; parties for 18th birthdays to retirements, funeral wakes and nights just having a pint with friends, the bar and its surroundings were what made it a special place.

You want me to carry on running my quiz right through to the bitter end, when the bulldozers are outside the windows? Do you think I can go on brushing and ironing those snooker tables that I’ve looked after for a decade, not knowing if they will be played on again after the end of this season? I think not.

Not having a bar is crazy! The Council feel they ought not to be seen promoting drinking as a pastime and if the facilities were there solely for the purpose of people having more drink than is healthy I could understand that.

I can see the campus in danger of becoming a white elephant. The outline plans suggested that parking is going to be a problem. To believe that people will walk or use public transport shows a complete lack of the attitude of people today. The majority will drive or be driven and dropped off, it will be like the school run all over again, when swimming or indoor bowls sessions start and finish. The word ‘gridlock’ will be on everyone’s lips. As for the indoor bowlers, although I played outdoors only, I know perfectly well the age profile of the people who will use it. They had a vociferous lobby presence to ensure they had a new home but give it ten years and the majority of those people will no longer be with us; do you really see the next generation taking up bowls?

I question whether we will need a library in ten years time; with the pace of change in the printed word and the way succeeding generations embrace new technology and discard the old, will we really need libraries even in the in the existing format which houses the new alongside the traditional hardback in rows on shelves? Can the model proposed for the 2014 opening be adapted easily and with little expense? If it can, will it still have any users? In a decade, any family will be able to access any book online in the comfort of their own home. A mobile library could satisfy the requirements of a handful of elderly pensioners who remain computer illiterate. (Harsh but fair? Surely the Council have experts who can anticipate this too?)

But the biggest problem of all is the lack of a central point where all the various sporting and non- sporting people can come together to socialise, whether they drink an alcoholic drink or a soft drink.
The banter between the different sports people will be lost forever because their new homes are designed to be insular. The friendships that begin and are nurtured in social club bars and often exist for a lifetime will never happen. A simple fact that couples may attend the campus for different activities and unlikely to finish at exactly the same time seems to have been totally ignored! Where do they meet up? The car park perhaps? Terrific! ‘I’ll sit in the car dear until you’re ready to leave; then we’ll queue up to get out and drive home. You can have a drink when we get indoors!’

Community, what community?

I can’t let 2012 end on such a depressing note. You know we were planning a meal out for all the lads involved in the reunion gig on November 17th? Well we went for lunch together on Sunday 16th December and there were no objections to us looking forward to 2013 with some optimism! We all want to play together again. How often and where and when is yet to be decided but something in Party in the Park music week is a distinct possibility. As soon as I know any more details I’ll let you know.

I’m six chapters into a murder mystery which I intend to finish by the spring. My New Year’s resolution is to get a thousand words written every day, so one day in January I’m going to be extra busy as I’ll be writing some words to share with you.

Enjoy the rest of the Christmas holidays and a Happy and peaceful 2013 to you and you families and friends.

I have to admit that this week is a bit of an anti-climax. After all the preparations for the reunion gig I was telling you about, it’s come and gone and we’re no further forward in deciding where we go from here.

I left you towards the end of October, just as Lynne and I were about to celebrate forty one years of marriage, by telling you the band members were heading off for a practice session that week, with a mind to finalising our sixteen strong playlist and sorting out a running order.

Well, the Wednesday evening session was cancelled! Roger, the bass player had a surprise family visitor for a couple of days and the others were unavailable either earlier or later in the week so we couldn’t re-schedule. Eventually we got together on the 14th of November, just seventy two hours before the big night and agreed what to play and in what order.

The final rehearsal was reassuring, not too many potential ‘crash and burn’ situations on the horizon, but Steve, the keyboard player inexplicably failed to turn up! (In the morning we found out that his battery had died on the first roundabout from home and he had had to get his car towed back!)

With a running order to hand, I sat down and wrote a script to help me remember to thank all the appropriate people and to link the songs with a touch of humour, some background information and fascinating facts on the songs themselves as well as a couple of stories concerning Ralph, our roadie whose sixty-fifth birthday celebration it was all in aid of. Alright, I admit it! There was an element of using the script to pad out the set so that we guaranteed it lasting for over an hour!

Ralph had about eighty friends & family arriving for his early ‘private’ party. He had also put up posters at the venue to get a few extra ‘bums on seats’ from Club members who were encouraged to walk up the stairs to the hall. I had already made sure my family were all going to be there on the night; the remaining band members were bringing wives and a few friends so we were fairly certain the place would be reasonably full. To be on the safe side I raised an ‘Event’ on facebook and invited around forty people, most of whom had bought my book and who were all pretty keen to discover whether we were anywhere near as good as I had always told them we were!

Something that you may have picked up on over the past year or so in these blog chapters is that I give a review most Saturday mornings of the bands I watch on a Friday night in the Parson’s Nose pub in town. If they’re good – I say so; if not, I don’t mince my words! This has been well received in most quarters but several people think I’m taking a liberty by knocking a band they think are the best thing since sliced bread!

One group in particular springs to mind. They have been undoubtedly the best pub band that you could see for nothing in the region for years. No argument. I would even pay money to go and watch them! After seeing them perform three or four times per year for the past five or six years, I had the audacity to suggest the playlist was getting a ‘bit tired’ and wished they’d learn a few new tracks and ditch some of the not so ‘golden oldies’. Boy, did I get some comments after that one! Heaven knows why? Surely I’m entitled to my opinion and to offer positive criticism? A quick ‘refresh’ of their set and they’d be ‘top dogs’ for a few more years; it’s never a good sign when people can tell you which song is next up, before the opening chords have been played!

After a few years of my reviews of course, the reunion gig was going to offer the opportunity for some (if not all!) of these groups and their supporters to get their own back. Bring it on I said. I realise only too well that if you dish it out, you have to be able to take it!

Saturday the 17th of November duly arrived and I arose, somewhat reluctantly after a night out at the pub, for a trip to town far earlier than I felt was decent! We had agreed to meet at 11.00am to unload the kit from Roger’s van and Dave, Paul and Steve’s cars and lug it up the stairs into the Cons Club. Forty years ago we had roadies (Chris and Ralph) who did most of the heavy lifting, so it came hard I can tell you. Particularly since the amount of kit each person had seemed to be FAR greater than we had all those years ago.

While I was helping Paul bring up his drum kit I asked what all this scaffolding and extra boxes was in aid of? ‘It’s the lights’ he replied. ‘I brought half a dozen for tonight. I’ve got another three dozen at home for when I do the lighting for other shows! The whole rig takes several days to assemble!’ No wonder he has so little time to fit in a practice session with us when his day job is so time consuming!

I recognised the basic shapes of guitar amps, keyboards and drums as they were positioned on the small stage, but the PA system and monitors at the side and front of the stage plus mikes for all the equipment, let alone for yours truly, meant there were towers of kit, plus bundles of wires and masking tape everywhere!

Three hours later we had managed to run through a couple of songs, fix the settings on the mixing desk and win the battle with the feedback, so that I could get off home and have a belated lunch. After the late finish the night before, I was starting to flag! I know, but you try doing it at sixty seven mate!

My daughter Kim and her husband Mal were staying over the weekend, to see us perform. Kim’s twin sister Louise and husband Rich were going to be there as were number one son Steve and his wife Jan. We all met up in the Cons Club, where Ralph’s party was already in full swing at about half past eight. Steve kept people entertained with some party favourites on his keyboard for the next hour or so, then having given me sufficient time to lubricate my throat (!) and meet up with a lot of old friends who were part of Ralph’s invited guests or people I’d asked to join us to get the numbers up, it was time for the band to take the stage.

If you’re wondering which numbers made the final cut, then I’m sorry but you should have come! Either that or you should sign the petition to get us to appear again sometime soon, so you can rectify your mistake. Suffice to say that Cream, Hendrix, Gallagher, Fleetwood Mac, Sabbath & Groundhogs featured heavily.

How was the set received? A quick visit to my facebook page will tell you all you need to know. Perhaps the comment from Susan Fido, whose late husband Nick was our saxophone player for several years, gives a pretty good flavour and is all the more poignant as the four of us in the last group I played with, met up for the first time in forty years on the very day Nick passed away:-

‘Thank you for a great night. You were brilliant. Nick used to boast how good you all were and not having actually heard you, I used to think – yeah right! But you ARE really good – carry on!’

The best wishes from my kids and their other halves meant an awful lot to me and after initially being very negative and thinking I was making a terrible mistake & should forget the idea and ‘grow old gracefully’, Lynne came up at the end and said she enjoyed it and we were much better than she had expected. Praise indeed!

So the question remains – where do we go from here? Let’s weigh up the pros and cons:- We have proved we can still do it; there’s an audience out there that likes the music we would play.

On the other hand, Dave and Steve are already in a duo with a smattering of gigs booked until New Year’s Eve 2013. Paul has his lighting business & still sits in on drums occasionally with other outfits he’s played with over the years. Roger has his recording studio & video suite which take up quite a bit of his time and he too plays bass now & then in other bands.

In order to put on a proper performance, say two one hour sets, we would need another 14 – 16 songs. That means a minimum of six practice sessions and based on our previous frequency we’d need three months possibly four months to get ready. We’re then talking about spring 2013 as a start point. Because of all the other commitments, we’re probably going to be available for 4 to 6 gigs before the year end. Would it be worth all the hassle?

The next step is to arrange a lunchtime out somewhere for all the interested parties to discuss it amicably over a few drinks and a good meal. If you come back again in December perhaps I’ll have some news? Bye for now!

Well hello again! Another month beckons and then we’re hurtling towards Christmas! I’m sure the days are getting shorter as it does NOT feel like a year since our fortieth wedding anniversary! Yet here I am on the 23rd October with another year under my belt, starting to gather together my thoughts on the events of the past few weeks since we last had time for a chat.

Forty one years ago today my best man, my brother Bob, offered me the bus fare to Trowbridge, to make a break for freedom! We had just stepped out from the bar of the King’s Arms in the Market Place as the 234 bus from Chippenham pulled up at the bus stop, but I declined the offer and crossed the road and walked up Place Road to St Michael’s Church to await my fate and so far I have no regrets! (Anyway, I would have looked out of place in Trowbridge in a new suit and a buttonhole, they’d only just got used to wearing shoes back then!)

For a change, Lynne my wife, finished work on time today and we’ve just had a fantastic meal for six pounds a head! Two sirloin steaks, some mushrooms and tomatoes plus home made chips. Two mini Black Forest gateaux in ramekins and happy days! We already had the Chardonnay and English mustard so I didn’t include that in the bill!

I mentioned last month that it was my birthday in early October and Lynne took me out for Sunday lunch at the Golden Fleece in Atworth, just three miles out of town. The pub has happy memories for me as it was our ‘watering hole’ when the group practised in the sports pavilion on the playing fields half a mile back towards town. Chris our roadie and I would pop down in the van to pick up a few bottles and packets of crisps while the rest of the lads ran through the songs we were learning on the night. Of course, it would have been rude to dash in and out of such a nice little country pub, so we always stayed for a couple of beers and a chat with the landlord and his wife before making our way back.

On my birthday, I sat with Lynne chatting over a drink while we waited to be called through to our table; the door opened and in came our son Steve with his wife Jan plus Jack and Riley their mischievous little boys. One surprise after another! Just behind were daughter Louise, hubby Rich with Josh and Sophie. Two more grandkids but a little more grown up these days. Suffice to say the food was excellent and the unexpected company made the occasion all the more special.

Louise’s twin sister Kim hadn’t come over from South Wales as her husband Mal was either on a course (work related) or on a course (golf tournament) I can’t recall which. To round off the birthday celebrations (which did NOT go on quite as long as Lynne’s sixtieth I might add!) we travelled down to Merthyr Tydfil on the following Friday and stayed with them in their brand new house. Very posh! Great for them but bad news for me as it put loads of ideas into someone’s head!

What a fabulous weekend it was too; the weather was terrific for a change and on Saturday afternoon we took a leisurely drive across the hills to Crickhowell, the town they first moved to when they came back to the UK from Germany. Initially we took the A465 towards Abergavenny, and then cut across country. The narrow winding B road took us higher and higher then suddenly we topped the brow of the hill and the panoramic view below took my breath away. Clear blue skies and a handful of white fluffy clouds on top, everything below, whether trees, fields or buildings, lit with a pleasant autumn sun and the colours were almost too many to mention. Every shade of green, brown and yellow with flecks of white, grey and black as the narrow road dropped away below us into the valley. Sheep were the main inhabitants this high up and they had right of way, as we threaded our way through them towards our destination. The villages of Llangydir and Llangattock came into closer view and away in the distance lay the small town of Crickhowell.

Two hours from our own doorstep in West Wiltshire for a free view to die for; why on earth do people pay a small fortune to fly off to some distant shore when we have such special treats as this to hand?

We strolled around a few shops in town, mainly browsing, then made our way back to Merthyr via one of the many out of town retail parks scattered around the Welsh valleys. I think I preferred the old days when shops were in the town; smaller and more individual in character, rather than these soulless sheds with blank staff and a sameness that means that apart from the local accents, they could be anywhere in the UK!

Later that evening we drove over to Hirwaun, about five miles away, to the Glancynon Inn, somewhere Kim and Mal had never visited before, but wanted to try. There were two things which left a lasting impression on me that night; they were the food and the local youngsters.

We parked in the already busy car park and entered the building. The décor was a little tired and the bar/restaurant downstairs reminded me more of the social clubs we played in forty years ago than an establishment with a reputation for fine cuisine. It was very busy and we only stayed briefly as we discovered the main restaurant was upstairs. As we walked up to the first floor, the décor remained stuck in the past and there were balloons and posters in the stairwell indicating a sixtieth birthday party! When Mal opened the door the sound hit us! There were around forty men women and children seated around tables, with the matriarch of the family sat at the head of an open ended rectangle. Two young girls, looking petrified rather than cool, calm and collected were hovering behind the small bar. After a shaky start where they seemed unaware anyone other than this family party would be eating, we were seated at a table and the drinks we ordered arrived shortly after the menus.

I won’t tell you everything that was on the menu, as we’ll be here all night, but it covered all the bases. If you wanted cheap and cheerful (which seemed to apply to our noisy neighbours) it was there in several forms; if you wanted something more refined, that was there in a wide selection of courses too. The garlic mushrooms starter I had, followed by a main course of braised Welsh beef with a red wine sauce plus seasonal vegetables, were both as good as anything I’ve eaten in a very long time. Indeed, all four of us commented on the quality of the food and the excellent service.

Three or four other tables were now occupied on our side of the room and meals were arriving for the revellers as well as for our newer arrivals. With the busy bar downstairs serving snacks into the bargain, I think it was a tour de force to provide so many meals in the time frame; to produce meals of such quality as well was nothing short of remarkable. A big tick in the box for the Glancynon Inn! Well worth a visit if you’re in that neck of the woods!

Why did I mention the youngsters? As we drove along the main street on our way into Hirwaun I saw a group of ten or a dozen teenagers, just hanging around on the side of the road. As we drove away after our meal I counted four similar sized groups at various points along the main road. As a visitor I have no idea whether there’s a youth club in Hirwaun these days, perhaps it fell victim to the cuts recently or maybe there’s been little for them to do for several years. I cast my mind back to those days in the 60s when we had a choice of youth clubs in town and very few kids between 14 and 19 were hanging around on street corners.

Those clubs provided a safe haven, kept us on the straight and narrow, taught us certain values. They allowed us access to games, music and all sorts of entertainment. We put on small plays and revues for instance, nothing earth shattering, but while I was sat looking around the restaurant walls I saw a picture of a young Richard Burton, perhaps in his mid twenties, who was born not many miles away. Whether he drank or ate in the Inn many years ago, who knows?

I reflected later on that evening as we relaxed at Kim and Mal’s home that among those forty or fifty youngsters might have been another Burton, a Dylan Thomas, Katherine Jenkins or Tom Jones? Something needs to be done to harness those drifting groups of untapped potential, not just in Hirwaun but across the country or we’ll be a poorer nation in years to come.

Wednesday evening is practice night! Sixteen songs to be polished then sorted into a play list. Some sort of dress code to be agreed upon for the 17th November reunion gig. Will we be advertising our impending reincarnation in the local press? There’s lots to do that’s for sure. All that and as the autumn leaves start to fall my garden is calling me! Tomorrow! If it’s not raining I promise!

I hope you can come back again in early November for another chat? Bye for now!

They reckon that time passes more quickly the older you get! Well, it’s early October and yours truly has a birthday coming up on Sunday. We had another band practice session last night and despite our combined ages totalling over two hundred and fifty my colleagues had been reminded of my upcoming birthday via Facebook and they wished me all the best for my sixty-seventh!

Dave, the guitarist reminded me that today (4th October) is his forty-third wedding anniversary so it gives you a hint of how old in the tooth we’re all getting! I remember the church service and reception in the Rose Marie café in town vividly. In just over two weeks it will be my own anniversary, just a mere forty-one years since we tied the knot. Happy days!

Getting back to the preparations for the reunion gig in mid November, the last two practices have been reasonably successful. Steve the keyboard player who is in a duo with Dave sat in with us a couple of weeks ago and we ripped through four new tracks in no time. Hey Joe, Crossroads. Paint It Black and Jumping Jack Flash were added to the play list and Steve’s harmonies plus his keyboard skills added a lot more to the overall sound.

Last night, sadly Steve couldn’t make it, so we only added two new items, Morning Dew and Hideaway and spent the rest of the time running through half a dozen of our earlier efforts. Time is running short now but that’s the whole set put together, so the remaining three or four sessions will be spent determining a running order, polishing up beginnings and endings and thinking up some appropriate links between the tunes. Anything to pad it out to the hour that we committed ourselves to playing.

We have to remember who we’re doing it for of course; Ralph our former roadie, who is sixty-five at the end of this month, so a few anecdotes won’t go amiss! Also humour might deflect the audience from noticing we’re a little rough round the edges!

My wife can’t really understand why I’m doing it. She thinks I should ‘grow old gracefully’! Well, I disagree with her for once! I feel I can still put in a performance, so I will. I’ve enjoyed the practice sessions and if we crash and burn, so what? If it goes okay, we may play a few more gigs next year; if not we could still get together every now and then to play a few tunes we like, just for our own amusement. As a hobby, it beats standing about in all winds and weathers playing bowls as I used to do when I first retired!

What else has happened since my last posting in early September? Pretty quiet. You know how it goes!

There was a trip to Bristol Hippodrome for a Sunday matinee performance of ‘The Lion King’ with Lynne and a dozen of her work colleagues. It chucked it down with rain all the way down the M4 and all the way back, so nothing changes! Having not been to a theatre for donkey’s years, I was in one again within a month of the London trip to see ‘Warhorse’! The theatre was full and the performance was excellent. If you like that sort of thing. The costumes were the stand out element for me, the songs although familiar after being around for several years, aren’t my cup of tea is has to be said.

We had a planned trip to Bristol for a family reunion meal cancelled at the last minute due to one of the party having a fall in the bath, which although thankfully not too serious, was enough to postpone that event for a week or two.

The five hundredth quiz night I’ve prepared and hosted is nearly upon us (14th October) and I’ve decided that enough is enough, so I’ve given notice that Sunday 23rd December will be my swan-song. I shall miss the camaraderie of the thirty odd people who have continued to support me over the almost twelve years I’ve been running the quiz nights. I won’t miss the three or four hours every week preparing the questions or the restrictions those forty eight weeks of having to be available puts on our social life.

In the same vein, my involvement in snooker is fast approaching its conclusion. After forty-five seasons of playing, my eyesight and my interest in the game are fading fast in equal measure! After over twenty seasons as secretary of the local League I have decided that it’s time to hand over the reins to a younger person. Our rules dictate that I cannot serve as an Officer of the League after I’ve stopped playing for three years so I’m not standing for re-election after May 2015. Hopefully, someone will come forward before then so I can show them the ropes & the handover will be seamless!

As usual, my Twitter activities have been varied and interesting. Numbers continue to rise faster than I imagined they would. I’ve received a few dozen requests to review material on various sites, some of which I’ve succumbed to! I never realised there could be so many female singer/songwriters out there either, but for the most part these are not destined for greatness on the evidence put before me. If only they could write their own material rather than upload a passable version of a song by Adele, Rhianna or the late Amy Winehouse.

This week a young lad called Sam Jennings asked for a ‘shout out’ to give him a bit of a boost to his followers. I obliged, as I usually do to be fair and almost sixty thousand souls were given a brief glimpse of him which he told me produced no ‘hits’ whatsoever. He came back and asked me how I’d got so many followers. I could have said it was my dazzling wit and good looks that persuaded people to click that button, but I don’t think it can be that! It is a simple philosophy however and it depends on why you use a social networking site like Facebook or Twitter or any of the other sites available these days.

I know it’s going over old ground for some of you but forgive me? When my book was published in August 2011 it had no real publicity and although it was available on Amazon with good reviews, it was difficult to sell too many copies. The paperback copies sold out inside three months and the kindle version was reduced in price to attract as many buyers as possible. By the October I had launched my website and joined Twitter with the sole intention of adding as many followers as possible and gently nudging them via my ‘tweets’ to buy the book. I used various methods in the early days (described in earlier postings) and settled on tweepi.com as my main vehicle at the turn of the year. I follow perhaps four hundred people per day, loosely ‘targeted’ based on the statistics provided. Their location is irrelevant, if they are avid readers, if they love music, if they write, if they are musicians, if they have a ‘hook’ that sets them apart from the crowd, then I follow them. About 30% follow back and a significant number arrive without any prompting. Why they click that button I have no idea. You win some, you lose some. Not everyone stays for long but an average week sees fifteen hundred new people added to the total.

So each day or two I dangle the carrot – Read the blog and follow the link….. Download 280 pages of music and laughter…. and so on. Progress is slow, but with every new follower comes new hope. Every surprise unsolicited addition offers the prospect of that film producer looking to make the next ‘The Commitments’ movie. So for this soon to be sixty-seven, singer in a rock band, retired, with time to fill, it works for me!

I don’t know what Sam’s ambitions are but if you search out @samjennings23 take a look, you might want to click that button and follow him too.

Everyone deserves a helping hand they say but they also say ‘God helps those who help themselves’ and although I’m not a particularly religious man, I take that to mean that if you want something bad enough you need to put some grafting in to get your reward. It might be a bit of a slog, yet it’s SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE.

I hope you can come back again in early November for another look? Keep well & keep smiling!

The fact that you’re back here reading this means it’s September already and I’ve got a handful of stories concerning the past four weeks.

The first weekend after I posted my last blog would have been my late father in law’s ninetieth birthday, so my brother in law suggested we take a trip to Weymouth, Dorset to have lunch at a little country pub the family had been to previously, then visit the crematorium where Vernon’s ashes were scattered. His father’s idea behind the scattering of course, was to avoid the need for those left behind having to tend to gravestones etcetera, or make infrequent pilgrimages to ‘visit’. Still, it was a lovely day and the meal was excellent, so Vernon would probably have forgiven us just this once!

It was an uneventful trip for the most part, but as the Olympics were in full swing, Weymouth was particularly clogged with traffic for the sailing events and we were almost twenty minutes late arriving at the ‘Turk’s Head in Chickerell. The whole country was abuzz with the Team GB performance and a ‘feel good’ factor was apparent throughout August. Indeed, as the Paralympics are currently underway, that feeling seems to have continued and if anything grown in strength. Long may it continue?

You will recall seeing news bulletins and extended coverage of our Queen’s Jubilee, you can’t have missed it, it was in ALL the papers! Well, my wife Lynne has now completed her own sixtieth birthday celebrations. The trip of a lifetime to Australia early in the year; a new car in July; then her birthday meal with the family on the day itself and finally a trip to London to watch a show and to do some sightseeing.

This trip had been arranged by our daughter Kim (bless her) and she and husband Mal came up from their new home in Wales on the Friday evening. Early Saturday morning the four of us caught a train to London from Chippenham station. Now this is all pretty standard fare to some of you, but although Lynne made the same trip with some work colleague’s to visit a client earlier in the summer, I hadn’t been on a train for almost thirty years!

We booked into our hotel on the Bayswater Road (ring any bells? If not all will become clear later) and set off in the early afternoon sun to walk through Hyde Park. We passed the Serpentine and saw the temporary seating for the open water swimming and triathlon events at the Olympics still in situ and although we were basically just ‘following our nose’ we eventually found ourselves outside Harrods and decided to do some window shopping (from the inside). The weather forecast had been less than promising, so we were congratulating ourselves on our good fortune to have walked so far in the sunshine and the wisdom of taking our raincoats with us was brought into question. When we left Harrods, the storm clouds were gathering and the sun was long gone.

We thought a quick lunch was in order, so that we were indoors if a passing shower fell. Good move! As we were eating, it fell. ‘Fell’ is possibly not the right word. It chucked it down; it bounced up so high from the pavements it almost did as much damage when it fell for the second time. Sadly, there’s only so much time you can spend nursing a cup of coffee after a jacket potato with savoury filling has been demolished, so with a heavy heart we dragged our feet out into the rain sodden streets. The sky seemed a little lighter and indeed within five minutes we could stop sheltering in doorways, under trees and shop awnings and congratulate ourselves on carrying our raincoats ‘just in case’.

Mal led us through streets filled with shoppers and tourists and we spotted Marble Arch, the Royal Mews and in the distance Buckingham Palace itself. The long tree-lined approach afforded some shelter as the rain began to fall again in the form of a brief shower to begin with. We were about to cross the road to the Palace, when the heavens opened, this time accompanied by furious claps of thunder. Zip! Hood! Tree! Useless!

We relaxed as the rain eased and Mal recalled a decent little pub, five minutes down the road, opposite the Wellington Barracks. ‘If we cross over in front of the Palace and pop around the corner we can have a drink, dry out and plan the rest of the afternoon, plus decide where we want to eat this evening, before we head for the theatre’. We set off and as we were half way across, I saw the guards in their sentry boxes being issued with capes to protect their uniforms by some of their comrades. I looked back as I heard a group of tourists about twenty five yards in front of me screaming. I laughed as I saw that the rain had begun again in earnest. It was stair rods; in fact you could hardly see through the rain.

Unfortunately, that rain was moving inexorably towards us! You could actually track its progress as each successive yard was being treated to an absolute hosing. We awaited our fate. The rain passed over us, almost ‘through’ actually and where we had been wet before, we were now absolutely drenched! This time there was no letting up! It rained, it thundered and it rained some more.

After what felt like thirty rather than five minutes we squelched our way into the pub Mal remembered from the ‘old days’ and ordered up some well deserved drinks. The bar was only half full, but no one was leaving and very few customers managed to float in on the tide while we sat and relaxed, drying out very slowly. We could just hear some piped music over the drumming of the rain on the roof. As the first drops of rain fell near to where we were sat, we realised the ‘roof’ was mostly a skylight and with the volume of water showing no sign of decreasing, the frames gave up the ghost and burst into tears! Eventually, the barmaid produced a champagne bucket to catch most of the drips, then she mopped the floor and erected the ‘wet floor please don’t sue’ sign. We realised the rest of our afternoon was likely to be spent having a drink, dodging the puddles on the way to the nearest tube station and a quick dash from our closest stop to reach the sanctuary of our hotel. Oh well, it could have been worse!

I mentioned the Bayswater Road earlier and of course, if you’ve read the book, you’ll know that ‘The Swan’ was the pub where Lynne and I met Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford from Genesis for a drink on the Monday afternoon following our wedding in October 1971. So for the first time in over forty years I returned to ‘The Swan’. This time, not for a couple of beers in the autumn afternoon’s sun, but the four of us ventured upstairs to the restaurant for what turned out to be a very good meal indeed.

Suitably replenished we took the tube to the New London Theatre and discovered Kim had broken the bank to get us seats in the dress circle! Lynne was chuffed to bits and eagerly anticipating her performance of ‘Warhorse’. I had not been particularly keen on going it must be said, theatres haven’t really been my kind of thing; I’d rather have gone to listen to a band somewhere, but when the action began, I had to admit it was extremely good. There was more humour than I had imagined and although the sentimentality was pretty evident it was the puppeteers that left the lasting impression on me.

It was still raining on and off when we came out of the theatre; we made our way back to the hotel, had a couple of overpriced drinks and hit the hay. In the morning it was more sightseeing as we crossed the Millennium Bridge, walked past the queues for the London Eye, ambled along Horse Guards Parade, ignored Downing Street and eventually headed underground again near Trafalgar Square. The sunshine was back so it was a very pleasant relaxing morning. Following a convoluted trip back to Paddington because of restrictions caused by the Notting Hill Carnival we travelled home after a tiring but satisfying weekend.

On the Wednesday evening it was practice session number two, where three quarters of Bucephalus were reunited in pursuit of those fifteen songs to perform in mid November. Bucephalus was Alexander the Great’s warhorse of course, so it felt appropriate that after the weekend trip to the theatre I should be meeting up with my old friends and singing some familiar tunes.

We made a little more progress this time, not great strides, but progress nevertheless. We have a defined playlist now with fifteen songs plus three or four in reserve. Two new songs were tackled on Wednesday night from that list. Both were Groundhog’s tracks from their ‘Thank Christ for the Bomb’ album – ‘Ship on the Ocean’ and ‘Rich Man, Poor Man’. Our next get together is in a week and we have to get cracking on the remaining three or four songs from the list that we haven’t tackled so far, but we’re not panicking as they’re pretty well known and we’ve all played them before over the years.

Well that pretty much brings us up to date; I hit another ‘milestone’ last week when I passed 50000 followers on twitter, for which I’m extremely grateful. If only I could turn each one of those into a book sale, then I’d be over the moon! Ah well, I hope you have a good September. I look forward to having you visit again in a few weeks to catch up on the latest news. Happy days!