As I look back on various days I realise that most are made up of different elements, some good and some bad, and at the end of the day I tend to review what has happened by writing my diary and realise that in most there are some highlights and some lowlights but always things happening.
On Tuesday we went to the funeral of our friend Andy Newstead. Funerals have changed. They used to be sombre affairs with everyone wearing black. Now they are a celebration of life. Most people at Andy's funeral were quite formal and I did wear a suit and shirt and tie, but I have been to others where the rule has been casual and colourful gear.
I think this is good. A funeral should reflect the character of the person being remembered. If that person has been informal all their life, the service should be informal.
I still find it hugely poignant to look back on somebody's life, picking out various events and usually honing in on amusing incidents, laughter amongst the tears.
Later in the day we travelled into Norwich to go to Cinema City. Virtually every week they have a free film showing for members, which is excellent and greatly appreciated. It means obviously that you can't chose the film but this week's certainly resonated with me. It was entitled "Squaring the Circle" and was about the history of Hipgnosis.
Hipgnosis was a design company responsible for some of the greatest rock LP sleeve art of all time. The documentary film had plenty of archive footage along with interviews with the likes of David Gilmore, Roger Waters and Nick Mason from Pink Floyd, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant from Led Zeppelin, Liam Gallagher from Oasis and many more.
Hiipgnosis took its title from the word Hip which anyone who lived through the 60s and 70s will recognise, along with the Greek word Gnosis meaning knowledge. It doesn't have anything to do with people being put under a trance, although there was plenty of that in the 1970s.
The founders of Hipgnosis were Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson. Thorgerson died in 2014 but Powell or Po as he was known as is still alive and took the main part in the documentary which was fascinating and of the time.
I couldn't help thinking at the end that if you love rock music from the 1970s and lived through it this was a brilliant documentary. If you don't like music of that era it would probably be boring and dull, although the other threequarters, who isn't interested in music, said she enjoyed it for the chaotic flashback images and the story in general.
It was a story of excess, of lots of drug taking and general chaos and we particularly liked the story of the film shoot for Pink Floyd's album "Animals" where they suspended a giant pink pig over Battersea Power Station and the pig broke from its tethering and floated off into the atmosphere. The previous day there had been a police marksman ready for such an incident but on this day there was none. The pig stopped air flights and eventually came down in a farmer's field, frightening a herd of cows. It was the kind of story you couldn't make up.
The cost for making some of the iconic album sleeves was huge. Air flights to exotic parts, shots taken in exotic locations like the top of a mountain and the cover for Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here featured a stunt actor who was actually set on fire and got severely singed. Wouldn't happen today of course - health and safety - and it would all be shot in a studio or done with graphics.
I particularly liked the story of one of the 10CC covers for the album "Look Hear" which had a lone sheep sitting on a chez long on a tropical beach and facing the sea. This was shot somewhere exotic and the sheep came from a local farm/zoo and wouldn't behave itself. It had to have a shot of valium to keep it quiet. Nobody seems to know why the shot couldn't have been done in the UK where there are plenty of sheep and quite a bit of sea as well. But as I have said the album sleeves were of their time when budgets meant very little, especially as the resultant LPs were selling in their thousands and even millions. So what we had here was an album cover with the words "Are You Normal?" in massive letters and a tiny shot of the sheep by the sea - thus proving that these people definitely weren't normal.
I think Liam Gallagher summed the whole thing up brilliantly when he explained that he didn't bother about album covers and would agree to anything for Oasis and then realised that the cover for their biggest album "What's The Story Morning Glory" was in his words "crap." This made him look at album covers and view them as an artform.
I'm not a great fan of Mr Gallagher or Oasis but he did sum things up nicely when he said that in the 1970s rich people owned expensive art that they hung on their walls, poor students owned brilliant LP art which they left lying around in piles on their floors.
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Yesterday I wrote about two guilty pleasure pieces of music - Azzurro by Ken Dodd and a song by Vince Hill. Don Williamson sent me the You Tube link to the Ken Dodd song and I've also got the link to the Vince Hill. So here goes if anyone wants to listen to them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_xQR1A4Ikc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xx9VaZvcxI
Somehow I managed to play them both at the same time which was an interesting musical experience but probably one not to be repeated. Now please excuse me whilst I get back to some Pink Floyd and Led Zep.
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I see Yorkshire Water are in hot water (forgive the pun) for shooting a promotional video not in Yorkshire but in the Malvern Hills which are over the other side of the country. It's not as if Yorkshire doesn't have a few hills of its own. They then make matters worse by showing a car that is a left hand drive and it turns out that this footage comes from Ukraine. Whoever passes these promotional videos and what would make them use footage from anywhere other than Yorkshire? I will ask the other threequarters when I see her because as I write this she is on her way to the Sandringham Flower Show by coach. Obviously coming from Yorkshire she will be able to tell me why Yorkshire Water is run by idiots.
I was pleased on the local news to see that the iconic Winter Gardens in Great Yarmouth are being restored to their former glory. I have written about these in the past and it will be lovely to have them back as an attraction on the sea front rather than as an eyesore.
That was the only local news story from Norfolk on the "local" news. The main story was about wild water swimming being at risk in Bedfordshire. Once again I underline that wild water swimming or anything else happening or not happening in Bedfordshire is of no interest whatsoever to us here in Norfolk.
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A few blogs ago I spoke about picking up dog poo. Most owners do it as a matter of course but some are still happy to leave it. We were eating at our favourite small restaurant in Norwich - Saporita - and had a seat by the window. Outside there were six very large pieces of dog poo and it made me feel sick just to look at them and it was obviously only a matter of time before somebody stepped in one of them.
Most people today are too tuned in to headphones or speaking on their mobiles to look where they are going and sure enough a couple stepped in it without realising. They will have had a very unpleasant surprise when they got home. Meanwhile knowing that the poo was there almost put me off my food. Of course I use the word almost as I still managed to shovel it down.
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The 15th annual Norwich Pride festival is being held this weekend. Due to other commitments I doubt that we will be able to get there this year. I do like to support it when I can as it's usually very colourful. I have to say, however, that I was offended by a shop display in Upper Goat Lane in Norwich on Tuesday evening.
It was what might be called "aggressive" and which a few years ago might have been termed highly offensive and even obscene. I'm anything but a prude, but I don't like having slogans thrust down my throat in a public place. It also does the Pride community no favours. The slogans were offensive and highly aggressive. One that I can recall had the words.
"I'm Queer so fuck off."
I usually use asterisks in my blogs to cut out offensive material but I felt this needed to be used without the stars as an example of what is wrong in our society and what is currently on open display and something that can be seen and read by young children.. This kind of thing (and there was a window full of it) does nothing to help social harmony in our city.
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It's all going to go wrong. Or in other words how many haircuts do Norwich people need? On Tuesday evening walking round Norwich Lanes we passed four hairdressers' in what couldn't have been more than 50 yards. How on earth will they all survive? I Googled "how many hairdressers are there in Norwich" and it came up with a figure of 53. I guess that doesn't count the ones in the suburbs either.