The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 14 The Circle Game

 

This feels impossible lapsarian. It takes you back to your mother's arms.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 151 Smog - A River Ain't Too Much To Love

 

Life remains a mystery. But it pays to explore its terrains. Its valleys and ravines. 'Slide, slide, slide. Down River....' What better companion than a Bill Callahan record. This gathers giddy momentum and post modernist resonance and you lose yourself.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,414 Provinz

 

I'm done for the day. I've just finishe teaching a charming young German woman called Sarah. She talked about visiting an LGBT Trade Fair in Berlin. How it was important to work for a company that reflected her own principles and ideals. We talked about the work she did and the English she needs. Had a great time together and I hope a useful time for her.

At the end of the hour I happened to ask her what kind of music she liked . She mentioned Provinz and I'm listening to them now. They're from Ravensberg in Baden Wurtemburg. I'm listening to Pazifik their album from last year now. It's much to my liking.

It exists in the same genral ballpark as Coldplay. But I don't mind Coldplay. Pazifik is a record that billows and gathers with tangible gusto. Its epiphanies are not inconsiderable  .  

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,389 Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Live Rust

 

An incredible way to make your break from the pack once and for all. Also a wonderful Sunday night record.

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 152 Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig Lazarus Dig !!!

 

Let's face it. The precedent for Nick Cave & The bad Seeds are - The Doors. Dark, sexy, literary. sly. I've just finished listening to Morrison Hotel. Now I'm listening to Dig Lazarus Dig !!! I find it much harder work. But that always happens !

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 15 In France They Kiss On Main Street

 

Teenage Romance alchemised into thirty-something artistic genius.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 10 Sarah Vaughan - Cool Baby

 

Music is something you can lose yourself in. Like writing. Life is essentially about escape. That's why we were given imaginations. Escape. Into a memory. Into a vanished imagined world. Into yourself. A time you may not have actually experienced yourself. A relationship you may not actually have had yourself. But one which chimes with the ones you have. Or are having. Escape. Into nuance.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,413 Modest Mouse

 

 I am listening to Modest Mouse's new album An Eraser & A Maze. It's not a particularly enjoyable experience but I shall persist. Modest Mouse are apparrently Pacific Nothwest legends. That's news to me . My idea of a Pacific Nothwest legend is The Sonics. Or Jimi Hendrix. 

An Eraser & A Maze is the band's eighth album. A key member has just died which of course is regrettable and apparently the lyrical themes circle and come back to grief. The band are currently intoning 'Life's a dream...' from my TV set. All I can say is if it is, if that's true, I hope the dream's a bit better than this album.

I keep listening because I think I must be missing something but nothing seems to stick. It seems very clever. But not remotely tuneful. Everything is clever these days. It all sounds  like the audio equivalent of  a shelf of tasteful paperbacks in a house in the suburbs. Vigiania Woolf, Pynchon and Carver, toni Morrison, Cheever and David Foster Wallace. But actually it all feels more like a cry of desperation .From a whisper to a squeak !

Damon Albarn

 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 51 Captain Beefheart - Trout Mask Replica

 

We pause for breath here. The author is taking a hiatus. But first Trout Mask Replica. A record I've never listened to before. It's relentless eternal motion. For many a sacred text. I surprised myelf and was smitten.

I've always been reistant to this album for some reason even though I love the Good Captain. But today I just sat at my desk , Put on my headphone. Listened to the album in its entirety . It's like leaping into a highly polluted river and flowing downstream with the debris. And I found the experience highly thrilling.  

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 11 Ultravox - Rage In Eden

 

I need a record store converstion every few days. To feed in to what I write here and generally to feed my soul or what I like to think passes for one. So today, I chatted to Nick. He went to see Midge Ure last night and apparently Midge was fab. So now I'm listening to Rage In Eden and the vox lads are going through their Mittel Europa motions. I fancy a beer. In a pint glass. The way the Czechs pour them.

I confess I find the angular cheeks and vivid sidies rather preposterous, but I'm pleased Nick had a great time. I know Midge  has been there and done it all. But Rage in Eden still sounds all pose and little meat on the bone to my ears. An approximation of Robert Musil in cartoon form

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 17 I Don't Know Where I Stand

 

Being in between. Hearing crickets call. The insecurity of not knowing what the response might be. But also the artistic permanence of the statement. And the peace.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,412 Heron

 

I'm sitting in my living room listening to Heron's second album Twice as Nice & Half the Price. It's a double. It came out in 1972 on Decca Reccords.. It's the definition of Pastoral charm and carried me back to my own childhood in the Seventies.Visits to Grandparents in Dorset and Sussex.

My Grandmother on my mother's side retired to a Cul De Sac bungalow in Eastbourne in the early Seventies. . My grandfather had died just before she moved there and she went on with life as well as she could for twenty years before she herself passed in the early nineties. .Though she must have been terribly lonely sometimes. My mother called her every day. I keep the tradition alive and call mum daily to see how she is keeping. Half five on the dot.

I have special memories of visiting my grandmother. Her succession of labrador companions. We used to walk them in the neighbouring avenues. Drive them up to the Sussex downs early in the morning with rabbits scuttling across the road into the ditches at our approach with the labrador bounding up and straining and frothing against the window.

 Penguin Chocolate Biscuits. The different colours . My Uncle's model cars and aeroplanes, kept in the back bedroom in the cupboards. A memorial sabre sword displayed above the mantelpiece. The Moscow Olympics which we watched together. Steve Ovett. Sebastian Coe. Athletes from the Eastern Bloc trailing in their wake. The arrival of my Uncle Malcolm and Aunt Linda and their bounding red setters and their newborn arrival Alexander.

My mother held Alexander in her arms and I asked her 'Would you swap places.'She said 'Yes I would.' But almost fify years on I wouldn't. I wouldn't swop places with anybody. I think it's important to be happy with where you are and who you are. What you are.

Records like Twice as Nice & Half the Price help me feel this way. It's an ordinary record. Ram light. But it's its ordinariness is extraordinary. Comforting

It's the lead review in the current issue of Idler magazine. There's a picture of John Lennon and Paul McCartney from their Beatles peak on the cover. Idler is a magazine for people like me. Of a certain age and disposition..

That's exactly what Twice as Nice & Half the Price is. Music for people like me. People who want to live in the moment and enjoy their day. This was recorded at a farm in Devon.. Listening to this you feel like you are there. Transported to exist in the moment.

 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 52 Culpepper's Orchard - Culpepper's Orchard

 

Danish 1971 album. It's pretty full on. Dervish like and constant momentum and motion.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 12 Yo La Tengo - There's a Riot Going On

 

What a day ! I'll spare you the gory details. As my friend David puts it. 'Some days are out to get you.' And then you come to rest. It's not quite as bad as it seems. And then you put Yo La Tengo on knowing it's a double album and you have nothing to do but listen to all four sides and it all seems that much better as the evening stretches ahead of you. Yo La Tengo are a hipsters treat !

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 17 Raised On Robbery

 

Joni looking back to go forward. This is joyous, sensual flair and no mistake.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,411 Widowspeak

 

I've been fond of Widowspeak, an Indie band from Brooklyn, New York and previously Tacoma, Washington, for a while now. They have a new album Roses just out where they pick further at a familiar seam on Rock & Roll's Goldmine. The shaft that connects Mazzy Star to The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan's 'Wild Mercury Sound' 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 53 Mighty Baby - Mighty Baby

 

An English  'Head' band. From 1969. Much beloved of Julian Cope and the like. Right up my street. Freewheeling. 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 54 Hawkwind - Space Ritual

 

A lot of these sings sound like your're getting the Motherlode. As if the Middlearth Wars are being enacted in your living room The Riders of Rohan are charging.

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 18 Edith & The Kingpin

 

This is why I bought Hissing Of  Summer Lawns I realised . Because The NME told me tii, Because I knew what I wanted to be. I want to be sophisticated and live life to the full. I'd read Fitzgerald and struggled through Hamlet. This is what Joni had for me. She was impossibly cultivated. Erudite, Bellow, Vidal, Didion. In a long iced fluted glass. 

.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 153 Kylie Minogue - Fever

 

There's a first time for everything. I'm listening to a Kylie album. I won't listen to another one. It's non-descript. It's the one with Can't Get You Out of My Head , which isn't, on it.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,410 Leaf Hound

 

I think I'm going back. Got to keep going back. For surely that is how to best go forwaed. Try to pit one foot in fromt of the other. Walk the straight path. This morning Leaf Hound. Listed on Wikipedia as Heavy Metal, Hard Rock, Stoner Rock, Psychedelic Rock. Call it what you will. I know what Billy Joel would say....

The band's name comes from a Ray Bradbury short story anbout a dog that came back from the dead covered in leaves. I'm listening to Growers of Mushroom which was iriginally entitled Leaf Hound. It was relased in 1970 then rereleased in 1971 as Growers of Mushroom with additional tracks. It's so of its time that you're transported back there immediately on listening to it.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 13 The Roches - The Roches

 

The Seventies is a foreign country. They do things differently there, If you don't believe me take a listen to The Roches  self titled album. Released in 1979. An album like this could not and would not be made now. Or ever again frankly. It exists in a different light and space..

Songs About People # 1,426 Johnny Rep

 

Johnny Rep was the man. 

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 13 XTC - Drums & Wires

 

I get the sense that XTC took a while to become the band they wanted and needed to be. Drums & Wires their third record was frantic and nervy. Very New Wave. But not altogether coherent.The best thing about it is probably its sleeve,

The songs here for the most part seem not entirely sure where they are going. Production is sharp but most of this is destined for evening radio shows. Except for Nigel the band haven't fully worked out how to write sings. They improved vastly when they did. 

 

1967 Top 40 8th June # 20 Tom Jones

 

Tom Jones must have had a song in the Top Twenty every couple of months for the second half of the Sixties. This wasn't the worst thing in the world surely.

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 55 Baumstam -On Tour 1975

 

This is a controversial one. Oh don't pretend you've heard of it. Sounds like Goldin Earring's Kissing cousins.

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 154 Cornershop - Handcream For a Generation

 

My heart leaps like a salmon through a circus hoop help a metre above the lake. Cornershop. I adore Cornershop. People go on about Oasis. They do go on and on. Bit let's face it we're not talking Cornershop. Inimitable !

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 19 Little Green

 

There's an intricacy and intimacy about the songs from Blue. He went to California and wrote a letter . Which he posted in a box. Imagine. How romantic. This has all the characteristics of the most deeply worked on and posted love letters.

 .

 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,409 Tyler Ballgame

 

Tyler Ballgame's is a Berklee College Music dropout. He dusted himself down and For The First Time his debut album is just out, It's an easy going amiable genre hopping.record that could probably have slotted in comfortably on Seventies AOR radio,

It's clear the man has done his ground work,. There's plenty of swoon and shiver here. A touch if the old west Perhaps sometimes a bit close to pastiche for comfort. but it has some lovely oranges on the cover and gets a thumbs up from here.  

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 20 Cat On A Hill

 

I have a seat at a desk where I write these blog entries and stare down at the pavement opposite me. Watch the people come and go. The record player is spinning and I'm listening to Court & Spark as I make my way through my day. The Roland Garros French Open is on and  Court & Spark  spins like an absorbing rally between Vilas and Borg back in the day. 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,408 Sister Irene O'Connor

 

God descends on It Starts With a Birthstone. Well Pentecost is fast approaching. And as all Germans know. Pentecost. means. A day off work! . So here comes Sister Irene O'Connor with her acoustic guitar,

Fire of God is a weird collection of Folk Spirituals from 1973 with echoes of Vashti Bunyan and Space Lady. It's playing on my television set as I make my way through my morning. It's all really rather lovely

June

 

1967 Top 40 8th June # 21 Topol

 

One o the great 'what ifs...'

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 155 Ryan Adams - Hearbreaker.

 

Oh Ryan Adams.  'Why do you have to be a heartbreaker/' Echoes of Gram and Emmylou. But too long !!!

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 56 Resan - Resan

 

The Swedish Hippy Dream. Hitch a ride. Join the Magic Bus.

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 21 The Jungle Line

 

A song inspired by Rousseau. This is a song where Joni shows what Rock & Roll is capable of. It's so ambitious its scope is inconceivable.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,408 Kurt Vile

 

The song remains the same. Kurt Vile remains on  his porch in Philadelphia churning out product. If ut was that easy folks, you'd be doing it His latest album is Philapelphia's been good to me. It sounds to me as if the man pays his dues.   

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 156 Sparklehorse - It's A Wonderful Life

 

Another poet who got too sad and listened to too much Neil Young and left us all too soon. I missed out on Sparklehorse and I like it well enough but also find it incredibly self pitying which isn't something I buy into. I'm sorry to be brutal. Life is tough. Have a biscuit,

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 21 Carey

 

I realised during the writing if this that Joni had quite a lot of love affairs and used them fairly openly as the material for songs. Carey was about the bearded red headed Carey Radutz who she took up with for a couple of months on a hippy village in Greece.. She wrote it in a cave on a dulcimer and it makes the episode appear carefree and of the moment.

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 14 Throwing Muses - Throwing Muses

 

I bought this when it came out in 1986 and listened to it a lot. I was going through an incredible phase in my life. I was 21 and  terribly sick and so was my older  sister. I went into recovery. I couldn't open jars or peel potatoes or open windows  I looked weird. I lost confidence, I almost had hallucinations when I drank too much and it reacted ro the strong medication I was taking. It took me years to fully 'get back', 

I was constantly drenched in sweat. I wrote poems about living in an elephant's skin We were in a house with my parents and my sister. My sister meanwhile died. She went to the hospice.  We brought her home my mother tended her and she died. My mother went up one evening. We were watching television in the living room. 

My mother came downstairs said Sarah was dead and the four of us went upstairs held hands at the foot of the bed and said goodbye to our darling Sarah.  The experience changed me and has been something I and all of us have been coming to terms with ever since. But forty years later I'm alive and happy. I don't believe in living in the past and the one thing I absolutely know is that Sarah would not have wanted us to be unhappy. So I'm determined to honour her wishes  

And all the time through those years I was listening to this jagged, uncompromising record and not knowing really what I felt about it except that I liked ir. I'm listening to it now, I still like it. It was given incredible reviews. The band were compared to Joy Division and The Birthday Party. Kirsten Hersh the Throwing Muses leader had been knocked off her bike and her skull had been fractured in three places when the band were coming together at High School which skewed their happy go lucky trajectory and made them Sylvia Plath's for the mid Eighties alternative set. 

It's still an incredibly powerful album. There's self harm and threat in most songs. It's still not an album a mother would want to come into a room and hear her little darling listening to. There aren't conventional verse chorus structures. Or lyrics. Each song seems to have gear changes every fifteen seconds or so.. It's not the stuff of mass acceptance. A record destined for the margins though of course it gets Mojo retrospectives. A display in the Unorthodox Hall of Fame

It's melodic, colorful but self consciously unsettling. Disturbing and deceptive. Demanding further listening. I've been listening for forty years and I'm not quite sure what I think yet. The mark of a great record. 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 57 Elvis Presley - Elvis Presley

 

He's still the King you know. Hard one to discount  Elvis and their are worse ways to spend a Sinday afternoon than listening to his debut album from 1956 on Sun Records. It has a beautiful purity and clarity.

The instruments are differntiated so clinically in the mix. There's a purity in the mix and it still makes you move. Takes you back and carries you forward.

Song(s) of the Day # 4,407 Boards of Canada

 

I went into the record shop across the road from me yesterday morning and saw the latest Board of Canada album in the front of the rack of new releases going for a cool 40 quid. Lumme. I remember buying freshly released records for a fiver or so. Back in the day. I suspect I'll never own it, But I'm listening to it now as the sun sets and imagine I'll probably listen to it on a regular basis. All year and beyond. Because frankly it's a completely staggering achievement. .

Now the sun is up, it's Sunday morning and I'm listening to it again. It has heft and gravitas. It feels like a document for our time. It's the Scittish duo s first album for 13 years and I imagine I'll be playing it on loop..Record reviews hint at the great themes; the occult, doomsday, climate collapse, melancholy, depression, mourning, grief, economic, political, cultural upheaval. Same as it ever was. 

The Manson family read all kinds of similar things into Beatles songs and it led them to do monstrous things. Perhaps they should have just stayed at home and listened to and appreciated the music. . Inferno should be played as a suite. Then on a loop. That's what I'll be doing. 

Top 100 Records - SublimMedia # 58 Trad Gas & Stenar - Trad Gas & Stenar

 

A Swedish Prog Psych album from 1970 'Unpolished in the best way possible...' according to the author of this., It sets off with ragged but quite intriguing covers of All Along The Watchtower and Satisfaction an dbuilds from there. Another record that has a quite remarkable cumulative effect

1967 Top 40 8th June # 22 Lulu

 

Empowering.

Best Ever Albums - 2,000 - 1,001 - 1,390 Ramones - Leave Home

 

'I met her at the Burger King. We feel in love by the soda machine...'.

 Leave Home is the Ramones album to die for. The cover. The tunes. It took me a while to realise the full genius of The Ramones. That this was essentially an art statement every much as Television or Patti Smith were. 

It's funny and sharp and lean and mean. But also tender. It aches. It has a great sense of Pop History and where its going. You never really  Leave Home.

 

The Soul Searcher - The 50 Greatest Joni Mitchell Songs # 22 Blue

 

Blue is a versatile word. Dependent on its comtexy. This is an extraordinary song. About Joni's upheaval from the end of her relationship with James Taylor. Sometimes you need to resist the temptation to listen to the whole album and just listen to the same song again and feel its weight and wonder..

250 Albums- An Arbitrary Rumble Through My Record Collection # 15 The Clash - Combat Rock

 

This was the first Clash album I bought. I got it soon after it came out. I liked it. I liked The Clash and I still do. I never bought into the rhetoric or inderstood why they didn't want to go on Top Of The Pops.  but liked the tunes. I still like the tunes and the lyrics. It felt like something was coming to an end.

I have a friend who they took on the road when he was 15. It formed him I imagine. I have anither friend who swears by them but wrote this to me recently. 'It doesn't matter what people in their 50s and 60s think fifty years after the fact. They were important in their time but now it's just background music'  I've turned the record over and I'm listening to Know Your Rights. It still seems to speak to me. .

 

500 Greatest Albums of the 2000's # 157 Spirtiualised - Let It All Come Down

 

Everybody has their sound. Spiritualised sound is nominally that of The Velvet Underground, the Stooges and The MC5. Stir in some Sun Ra and Soul. Bring to the boil. Then remove from the pan. Simmer. Pour into bowls 

Song(s) of the Day # 4,406 Alela Diane

                                                    

                                                'They line their pockets with our souls.......' 

It's difficult not to blink sometimes . Sometimes I'd say it's best to try not to. It's Friday morning. At the end of May. It's my sister's birthday. I imagine she'll be rising and will take her Bulgarian rescue dog for a walk at some point today. Across woods and sunlit meadows of bluebells, primroses. and the like  My brother is rising in Galicia with his wife.  Making their way up steep slopes. It's hot as blazes he tells us. We're all walking up steep slopes aren't we? It's the only way we know

My mother will stir and go down to prepare my father some breakfast. .Fix a tray with corn flakes, raspberries, yoghurt, toast and a cup of tea. Just how dad likes it..Run her bath, dress  and descend to the living room to do her sudoku and crosswords. Classic FM.  Everywhere people are rising. Heading into their day, The world turns. The weekend is coming

I run my bath and dress, I look in the t shirt drawer and find a Jane Birkin t shirt Alison gave me for a birthday many years ago. Jane Birkin isn't with us an more but the t shirt still is and I put it on. It will do me for today, It's appropriate. 

I've got Alena Diane's new album Who's Keeping Time playing on my television. On my television You see what I mean about not blinking, It's called Who's Keeping Time? Who Knows Where the Time Goes ! Ir's a lovely record. With a sleeve adorned with images of Alela surrounded by a gathering of geese clustered around a dining table on a prairie. Little Table on the Prairie,.

I teach my first class. Dennis, Julianne, Beheshata. Clinical Professionals heading into  their own days but making a window for English. We talk about implants and why the body rejects them. Stones in our internal organs and what we can do about them. Broken bones and our experience of them comes up. One to Ones with our line managers and how best to approach them. How to best demand appreciation  and ensure commensurate recompensation for our labour. Not being taken for granted. What we have looking forward to at the weekend.  

In Beheshta's case this means a drive to Rotterdam to a wedding tomorrow. A stay in a hotel and then a quick look around Antwerp. A drive back to the Ruhr Gebeit and a baby shower with friends on Sunday. Fitting in a bit of life before work starts again on Monday morning. All the while the stones keep stirring in our inner organs. The blood keeps flowing between our arteries.

I have some downtime between classes so I send off powerpoints for my classes and fix myself more tea. Boil an egg, I fancy a change from Alela so I put Soft Machine's Third on my turntable and the stylus clicks into its groove and my flat fills with light and cool burbling, meandering Hippy Jazz sound. 

I've been entranced with this magical record for a few weeks. I saw a vinyl copy at one of the record stores around the corner from me where the price of the vinyl copy of this in their racks had dropped from £39 to £29 so I saw my chance, made my move and bought a copy. It already sounds like a good investment for my sixties.. A long term downpayment that should pay back in terms of stillness and space.

Onto Class Two. Olli and Stefan. Insurance professionals. Tuning in from Dussledorf and Nuremberg. We always laugh. There's time for football, family and fun. .Chat about cheese..I have a quiz on cheese prepared. This doesn't happen entirely by accident. We debate who would win the World Cup of Cheese Why does Emmental have holes. Olli and Stefan read an article to find out. Spoiler. It's the flecks in the hay folks.

The conversation meanders back to 1970. A podcast I'm engrossed in about a World Cup related Conspiracy from when I was five and in Zimbabwe and my sister was just a baby Gordon Banks drank a beer in a bar in Mexico a few days before a World Cup Quarter Final against West Germany. And was struck down with tummy trouble and missed the match which England lost,. The podcast posits that it was all a CIA related plot. There's no end to the mystery and wonder in life. Why bother doomscrolling about the here and now. Being right wing . Being scared or angry. Blaming someone else..

Onward from Srefan and Olli to Pierre. A Broker Manager from the same organisation with a great Wes Anderson look.. Charming and kind. Just turned 50. He tells me about his weekend in Holland with his mum, brother and their kids. We talk about erm football again. Where will Cologne's finest prospect  Mala go in the summer. Brentford possibly.

 Should my team Newcastle make their move. They've just lost Anthony Gordon to Barcelona not Bayern. Much to Olli and now Pierre's amusement. Then we talk about how he can find the word he needs when he needs it in business contexts when talking to Poles or Indians about contract and brokerage stuff. We develop a strategy which I follow up after the lesson. This doesn't feel like work. 

Soft Machine have taken the place of Alela as my ongoing soundtrack as my Friday turns its attention to the afternoon. I'm in a trance for Part Four of my Friday online odyssey. The ideal state for Marina. My Friday afternoon Extemadura Angel. In Amsterdam working for a bank but always Extemadura essentially. There's never, ever a dull moment with Marina.

She's charm and intelligence personified. We're training her up to be CEO within the year. She confides at a certain point this afternoon that she doesn't actually want to be CEO but she certainly gets my vote if she ever needs it. We have the dreaded Internet is down panic midway through. That hasn't happened to me for a while. We reconnect. There are fifteen minutes left before the weekend lands. 

So we get to the heart of the matter. That's what Graham Green would do. You can get to this point after four pints on a Friday night with a mate if you choose but in my experience it's far better at four on a Friday afternoon with a canny operator like Marina who knows what she's talking about. .Does Love exist? Does the Soul?

From Marina's perspective the idea of a Soul is ludicrous. It's something we want to believe in but it's actually a huge red herring. Wishful thinking. .Like Lloyd Cole though, Marina believes in love. There's been persuasive scientific research she says. She's persuaded. It's nice to hear. A good time to wish each other a happy weekend. Next week we'll discuss Atomic Habits further and delve into the Third Conditional. Anyway I need to go to Rosie's and find out who I've got in The World Cup Sweepstakes. These things are important.. Fellowship. Banter. A fiver.

I make my way up the slope from my flat. Turn into Stowell Street. Newcastle's Chinatown. Millie is perched in his place at the end of the bar. Where he belongs.. I've got Belgium. He's got Mexico. No chance for either of us. Neither Belgium nor Mexico have ever reached the World Cup Final never mind won the bloody thing and paraded round the pitch kissing the golden trophy and blowing kisses to the crowd. That's for France, Brazil, Germany, Spain and Argentina. 

Millie and I. Like Belgium and Mexico are content to be supporting players. In the chorus. Halfway down the final credits. I ask Millie if he's got a tab and his eyebrows head for the ceiling. 'You'll be the death of me.' 'Not too soon I hope Millie.' I thank him and head for the exit, Get back to the flat. Put Soft Machine on again while I smoke my tab. Call Mum at half five as I always do.

She tells me of her cleaning lady Linda's latest travelling drama. Coming home from Majorca the flight was delayed. A passenger was taken off the flight.. Charged with murder in Majorca. Where is Morse when you need him? Perhaps Nigel Farage who Linda feels is the bees knees is the answer. I doubt it personally. That guys a spiv. Private Walker.

I say goodbye to mum. She's going to a birthday party tomorrow. Makes a change from funerals. I go upstairs collapse on the bed. Wake up at nine and make a cup of tea. Alison has had a good day. She's having a barbecue. There are parakeets flying over her lawn. She likes  the Bowie book I've sent her. I go to bed.

Now it's Saturday morning. I'm listening to Who's Keeping Time again. I commend it to you. Time to head into the new day. Somewhere the geese are flying .