Categories: uncategorized
Date: 01 February 2007 09:40:31
I think I might have done a bad thing. Spent far too much money on CDs and DVDs again.
On Sunday I preached to our larger congregation at the morning service for the first time. Don't worry, I'll not bother to post the burden of the sermon here - if only because I arrogantly think it was rather a good one (in concept if not delivery) so I'm probably not a good judge of whether its worth writing about,
BUT speaking in public, much as I love it (and I do, I do - all those courses they make us go on at work where they say that being on stage in front of a crowd is the next worst thing to death or divorce or moving house have got it wrong, its fun, fun, fun all the way) much as I love it its knackering. So, after fighting with an evil laptop with MicroShit PowerPoint in the evening service, hie me to the pub and find they are doing another music night. So banjos and Oirish session music for a few hours. Which is good fun but which, along with vague attempts to rewatch "Oh Brother where art thou?" on DVD late at night rather than falling asleep, and foolishly looking at Shirley Collins's website (this would be a longer post than anyone would read if I started going on about Shirley Collins) and vague reminiscences about the Downs and Sussex led to lots of music going through my head. (not to mention reading A Hat full of Sky by Terry Pratchett. Terry doesn't really get chalk, not, I suspect, having been brough up on it himself ;-)
What's a bloke come to when he comes back late from the pub and starts playing Copper Family CDs loud after midnight?
And all that made me vulnerable to being mugged by CDs of Alan Lomax's recordings when I accidentally wandered into the Virgin Megaspore after work, as one does. So now, along with Rachmaninoff's Vespers and a whole load of Thomas Tallis (including Spem in allium of course) I seem to have two CDs full of shape-note music and white gospel from Kentucky and Alabama in the 1950s and a collection of about fifty Scottish children's street songs. With odd added bits from Ewan McColl and Hamish Henderson and others.
And there are at least another 15 CDs in that series.
Along with entire first series ofHouse on DVD. And last year's Dr Who. And cheap (honest!) DVDs of The Five Doctors, V for Vendetta, Howls moving castle and something else I just forgot.
No wonder I'm broke all the time.
All this and a laptop with Windows Vista on it. Though I didn't have to pay for that. Which is another long story o won;t be told this time.
AND why have I been so stupid to only just realise that the US version of the UK TV program "Cracker", greatest of all crime shows is in fact nothing to do with police at all but in fact "House"? It so obviously is. Its all but identical except that Hugh Laurie is thin and English pretending to be from New Jersey instead of fat and Scottish pretending to be working-class. But really, it is the equivalent:
"No, there isn't a thin line between love and hate.There's a huge wall patrolled by armed German soldiers..."