Rotherwick birthday reading while cycling

as promised last tuesday, although it took a week rather than a couple of days, 21 miles SSE of my home village of blewbury lies Rotherwick...

and our 8888th visitor hails from this place, close to Hook in Hampshire, the village of Rotherwick:


it turns out that this person comes to see my blog every now and again, they were here this afternoon, then 3 fridays before that... and they were the 8888th since that counter began...

"Situated between the Whitewater and the Lyde, both tributaries of the Loddon, Rotherwick stands 300ft. above sea level."

so says this website devoted to Rotherwick... ok enough rotherwickness... thankyou sitemeter for providing me with this counter which feeds my obsession with numbers...

i'm currently reading the master & margarita, possibly for the 3rd time, finished the book thief last week which was wonderful...

note to self - don't try reading while cycling, even if you survive your journey you will find that you won't have been able to read very much...

coming back from a jaunt into woodgreen i was so taken with the book that i tried reading it while cycling and honestly... it's just not a good idea...

one of these days i'm going to get better acquainted with the journey from woodgreen to here, it goes via noel park and i'm forever getting confused... my local biking knowledge is very good up to about half way up woodgreen high street but to where the tube is...

D, along with John Sinclair when he's in london, have moved up to woodgreen, somewhere up there,

John who currently has dinah's memory stick, in detroit...

a journey up there to see those cats is definitely in order...

ok the birthday, it proved to be most lovely, T & M, the singers of the 2 bands i'm in, landlord E, felinity & dad, dinah & floopy, spski, guitarist O (from M's band) and old friend J, who i thought might have been the 8888th but i think he's living actually in reading, not south of it...

we had a great deal of fun,floopy & J accompanying us back home for more frivolity once the bar had shut...

a really nice birthday, somehow i often feel the lack of friends on birthdays, dating back to years ago when me & E stopped seeing each other and most of our mutual friends gravitated to her birthday which is 2 days before mine...

but this year i think i'm finally passed that... of course it might yet raise it's ugly head next year but this time it wasn't to be seen...

oh and i'm playing a song or two next tuesday @ CM, a smallish gig for people involved in the place, i'm getting T to come down and do one or two with me as well, to publicise our gig @ the clapham grand on august 1st, if your in east london on tueday night you're more than welcome to come along, i doubt it'll cost anything...

x

all the 8's

maybe tomorrow, (i'll try to sttle down...)

no, no,

maybe tomorrow it'll happen, 8867 right now, 21 visits away,

could be tomorrow, or thursday,

anyway the same deal as when i've noticed before, some facts about you 8888th visitor, as much as i can glean from sitemeter...

x

8000th

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glenside, pennsylvania,

our 8000th visitor was looking for longcat encryption when they stumbled across this place...

well even though you're gone now mr/mrs/miss/ms 8000 i'm glad you passed by x

leeds new telly

so, what with the rec-calculation based on ignoring myself, our 7777th visitor turned out to be... from...

(wait for it)

LEEDS

which i know very little about, only that i once stopped off in leeds on a hitching journey going further north and i found myself doing magic mushrooms with some lovely people and listening to john martyn who i just spelt wrong and searched for in google maps by mistake & found Big John Drive in Martin:


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but enough random frivolity... TV baby TV... i took the plunge and bought a TV from argos which had a sticker on the box saying:

two person indeed but did i need another person?

did i heck, well, just within sight of home it started to slip a bit on the bicycle (strolling beside the bicycle not madly cycling along) and in fact when i got it to the front door i had to ask for dinah's help to get it off the bike and into the flat..

so now we can watch DVD's better quality than my computer gives and we can watch BBC2 pretty well and all the other channels except channel 5 fairly poorly until next friday when virgin media are installing our digital TV ness and then... well that'll be quite something, let me tell you x

7777 almost WOWIEZOWIE

yesterday i had a look and it said 7776... so i excitedly went to see who it could be and by the time i got to where it tells me it said 7777!

wowy zowy

(more on that phrase later)

but it seems that since i was clever and sorted out our little network in this flat the counter had been counting me...

so my 7777th visitor was in fact... MYSELF...

how dull, so i'm going back and counting how many me's it's seen and the 7777th person will look like the 7777+however many me's person...

but being as it was me i will give you a little info on our little residence right now:

i have unpacked the vinyl...

we have a sofa, in fact those 2 statements should be reversed because having a sofa is a huge thing for us, and unpacking the vinyl, whilst big, isn't that big,

also balthazara loves the sofa, she lies on the back bit, on the arms, curls on her favourite cushion on a seat of it...

it's near to our dining table (at the moment) and whilst we were eating last night she leapt up to sit upright on one of the arms and she was right there at our level, while we ate...

but the vinyl, 3 things:

it was in several boxes, and now my room has a little more space free... which is wierd and great... immensely boxy as it has been in here,

listening to old music is such a joy - i put on seal's 1st album yesterday while unpacking the vinyl and it brings all kinds of warm/dusty emotions to the fore...

wowie zowie... which is one particular album i found in amongst my vinyl that i've never listened to, it's full title is:

THE WORLD OF PROGRESSIVE MUSIC - 42 MINUTES 32 SECONDS OF WOWIE ZOWIE

i'm going to listen to it at some point in the next few days i'll tell you that for nothing x

lost improvisation russian visitor

T came round yesterday to do probably my last session for the recordings, some piano, some clav, some hammond and also my voice...

good session, closing with the 1st of my longcat collaborative improvisations, T on voice, me on voice & hammond...

and i half knew it would happen, but somehow i thought if i waited long enough it would right itself...

cubase freezing at the moment i pressed stop, we went out to the plough after to wait it out and when i came home much the worse for wear 4 or so hours later it was still frozen, so the improvisation is lost...

it's happened before and i really need to get into the habit of saving just before i press stop... or maybe set up auto saving... foolish, and it means this week's improvisation will be recorded later today on my own...

i did however meet a man in the pub who said steven seagal is a great blues musician... this is going to make me laugh for weeks...

and then also at roughly the same time i had my 6666th visitor, sadly @ 8:04pm on the 6th of the 7th 07 and not 4 hours later on 7/7/07 but it's still great...

and tonight i'm meeting with felinity to go the circus courtesy of spski which is lovely, i was meant to be going with my dinah but some work has come up and though i'm very sad not to have her on my arm it's great that felinity can come...

oh yes, and where did my 6666th visitor hail from?

well i'm glad you asked, they hail from the great city of st petersburg.

x

Billy Childish is Dead

people come to this blog for the strangest things...

our 5555th visitor was searching the web for the above, the medway based punk influenced billy childish, from somewhere in london, sitemeter tells me it was bromley but i've learnt not to trust it's locations within london...

to my 5555th visitor on the night of the equinox... something kind of cool there...

i'm stuck @ work trawling through the mountain of paperwork i've been putting off, sadly it doesn't look like i'll get through it all tonight as i'm scooting up to W(floopy)shaman & T's for an equinox fire this evening and then it's early to bed so i can rise bright and madly early for the dawn project tomorrow...

so i've got to push on...

a good lesson today but then they almost always are on a wednesday this semester...

and i was playing the piano in the break and i had to keep reminding myself that nothing is wrong... this project to shift my sleep really messes with my emotional state...

strange days...

x

all the fives

welcome, oh welcome you...

oh 5555th visitor (since i started counting)

oh what a great number....

x

welcome 5000th visitor

...(since july 23rd 2005)

which was roughly a year? i think since i started blogging...

was it really 2004 when i started this thing...? yes indeed, june 2004...

anyway, as i did almost a thousands visits ago i will bestow upon my 5000th visitor some kind of geographical reference...

there, now that's an incentive if ever i offered one...

long day of travelling by public transport today, gigging tomorrow and my keyboard has to be where we're rehearsing so that i can cycle from my work in the morning...

so it meant that i strapped it to my back and braved the tube down to kennington this morning, dropping it off and getting straight back on the tube to go to hammersmith, where i stayed an extra hour beyond my regular classes (but why?) which put me right in the rushhour as i caught the tube home again...

were those mad storms last thursday? yes i believe so... so that's two thursday's in a row that i've been tubing it to hammersmith... last week because of aforementioned storm and wind... i remember getting off the tube @ finsbury park to a veritable wall of commuters... fighting my way out of the tube doors, more fighting just to make my way off the platform...

dismembered limbs and blood all around me and i had to wash my sword on the...

hang on...

no, no, no...

so why did i stay an extra hour at hammersmith?

because my boss turned down my idea for splitting up my two classes over there into those who find it easier and those who find it harder, as recompense she offered me an extra hour or perhaps two if there was interest from the students, a space where select students could get more attention from me... and this week 5/6 students took up that offer... more hourage for me and also potentially a good learning situation, early days thereof today but hopeful...

you know, i think the mad storms were two weeks ago... can't be sure...

what all this tubing did for me today was give me an opportunity to read from 2012 the year of the mayan prophesy by daniel pinchbeck that Wfloopy(shaman) & T have leant me... it's turning out to be very good... (set me up for a satisfying fantasy the other day where i was somehow the chosen one writhing in spiritual agony while a blinding light created a crop circle around me)...

oh... and i've had a notion about my weekly improvisations... i don't know if there's interest enough for this, but i thought i could offer for sale a cd of whichever improvisations people wish... each one typically 15 minutes long, so you could fit 5 on a cd...

but how to make them nice not just the usual burnt cd's i can do myself... hmmm... cdbaby?

anyway, i'm rambling...

welcome oh 5000th visitor, your presence is a present...

x

welcome

4000th browser (since july 23rd 2005)

i love numbers... & i love that counter over there on the right... i started it over a year after i started the blog, over a year ago now...

and in the last week it's given me pleasure watching it count from 3980 to where it's @ right now 3999....

so i have nothing else to say but welcome... oh 4000th browsing person...

welcome...

x



and you were browsing from the city of Nagoya in Japan where it was 2.22 am 15 minutes ago (6.22 pm here) and it gave me the opportunity to check out what Nagoya looks like (bless google earth)

x