It seems to have become as much a part of our vocabulary as starting every sentence with the word "So" and other meaningless phrases such as "if I'm being honest" as if being dishonest is an option.
Anyway today I would like to give a big shout out to Jane Bull and her husband whom I met at Cafe Kin. It was lovely that she recognised me as writer of these blogs. I love having a chat with people who enjoy my ramblings. As I always say please do say hello if you come across me. It really does make my day. I am very pleased that it has happened on a number of occasions over the past year or so.
After a coffee and a catch-up chat with our county and district councillor David Bills, I moved on to see Liz Hovey to talk about her mother Doris Langford who has died. Doris spent over 60 years raising funds for and supporting many charities and notably the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and Save the Children.
Doris used to organise fund-raisers for the causes close to her heart and in 2011 was made an MBE for her service to the RNLI. You notice I said made an MBE rather than "was presented with an MBE". People who become MBEs are made Members of the British Empire. They do, however, receive a medal. Anyway Doris received her medal from the Queen in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.
I came home and wrote a piece for the local Media. Over the years I have attended a number of quizzes organised by Doris who moved to Hethersett from Norwich in 2006 after the death of her husband.
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I promised Jane Bull that tomorrow's blog (i.e this one) would be one of my messy all over the place affairs and so here it is - one of those where my brain leads my hands all over the keyboards in an attempt to make some sense of what is scrambled in my imagination.
So where to go next? Well I'm reading a book about progressive rock entitled "A New Day Yesterday." I have found a relatively new website entitled Scribd and have a month's free trial. It allows you to download unlimited numbers of printed books, audiobooks, documents and podcasts for a monthly fee. It also has free sheet music which is an aspect that intrigues me. I haven't as yet found a way of playing the piano from sheet music on a mobile phone (it's all too small) but I'm working on it.
Anyway the term progressive rock is a strange one. We still have prog today but essentially it is a genre of music that abounded in the late 1960s and through the 1970s when it had its heyday. There was a chapter discussing just what the first truly prog album was and it came to the conclusion that it was/is In The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson and I wouldn't argue with that assessment as this is one of my favourite all time albums. I love what I refer to as swirling keyboards and full sounds. It takes me back to my days at the Norwich School (that's the one in Norwich Cathedral Close). I may have mentioned before that we had sixth form social evenings which were based around the sixth form club which was the underground part of the school chapel on the left as you approach the cathedral. I think it's now an art room.
Can you imagine the scene? Testosterone-fuelled young men on a Saturday night in Norwich Cathedral Close with the sound of Deep Purple, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath and many more very loud bands coming out into the Close through a powerful sound system. Aaah those were the days. Every time I look at the statues of Nelson and Wellington I have to smile when I remember some of the things that took place around these but which good taste precludes me from mentioning almost 50 years later.
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I said yesterday that I would talk about those powerful people the Mythical They.
You will all have met them or at least heard of them. Their name is usually brought up when somebody wants to have a good old whinge or moan about something. You know.
"Why have they put traffic lights there?"
"Why have they made the road like that?"
"Why haven't they done anything about x/y/z?"
My dear wife is very prone to doing this. So I have christened these people the Mythical They - Mystical people who should be doing something about something but quite obviously aren't. I will give more details of what these people are responsible for in coming blogs.
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Well that really should be enough waffle for today and I haven't even got round to an Alan Titchmarsh television programme which annoys me or a Sunday League Football Cup Final from 17 years ago which saw my eldest son carried off in a wheelbarrow, a resurgence in deckchairs at the seaside and the way Coronation Street seems to be writing scripts for five-year-olds. Oh and the fact that one of my favourite TV presenters is calling it a day.
Oh well in the words of 1950s British balladeer Mark Wynter "It's Almost Tomorrow".
Before I close I thought I'd just check how many words this latest load of waffle weighed in at - 947!!!!!