Cash For Gold!

I’ve just worked out what all this cash for gold business is all about. In case you don’t watch the telly or are reading this in fifty years time, the price of gold is apparently at an all time high. This is because of the world-wide recession and there being nothing else to put your money into.

If you only watch wildlife programmes you may have missed this phenomenon, but if you watch trash and daytime TV, which I do occasionally, you will have noticed relentless advertising to turn your old gold into cash squashed in between the online bingo ads that urge you to spend all the cash you’ve just made selling your gold.

A few years ago gold was cheaper and a big fashion statement. Rappers could be seen weighed down in “Bling”. Ah, how things move on. Bling was the thing – an ostentatious show of apparent wealth – all bought on credit cards or from the dodgy bloke down the pub.

Now all that bling is being turned back into cash. I’m sure most punters only see the cash and happily take the money, unaware of the real value in their gold, either that or they are disappointed when they find that the solid gold chains they bought in the pub aren’t quite what the dodgy guy said they were.

The people buying the gold obviously have cash to spare and could make a tidy sum. trash gold is a quick cash-crop harvest – get in quick and sell before the price of gold drops again – and it will. Assets need to be worked or churned to make a profit. Hoarding can only lead to a loss in the end. The price may shoot up through scarcity value, but then it becomes a game of chicken. First one to sell makes all the profit and then the price drops. Everyone else will pile in and sell for whatever they can, forcing the price down again. The same old story.

Still, I’m glad the whole Bling Thing is over. It did make gold look so cheap.

Roxy Music

Thanks to Spotify, I’m revisiting all sorts of music, that lies of scratched, unplayable LPs in the attic.

I’m so impressed by early Roxy Music. My friend, Simon Austin, waited for Hockliffes, in Bedford to open, the day the first album came out. He must have been one of the first to buy it. I remember him coming to the park, where we were hanging around on the swings and showed us the cover. That was mind-blowing enough. Ferry, Eno, Manzenara, Andy Mackay and Paul Thompson looked like exotic birds from a secret paradise. I wanted to be Eno before I’d even heard the album.

When I did, I remember it being a physical hit, like my first cigarette. It left me feeling dizzy, exhilarated and confused. nothing could ever be quite the same after that.

Listening to those first two albums, I’m amazed at how savvy Ferry and Eno were. The lyrics were so sophisticated and knowing. Ferry knew all about celebrity culture and how to manipulate it, way back then, when most people were really quite innocent and thought celebrities were actually special people. I don’t know if Ferry had travelled outside the movies, but he certainly comes across as a citizen of the world – an international playboy.

And Brian Eno – what can I say? He was my hero – all that knob-twiddling and mascara. Yes, I cut my hair like that and even tried to solder-up my own synthesiser.

I started listening to Emerson Lake and Palmer yesterday and soon got bored. They used the synthesiser like an organ extension – all twiddly-widdly-wah-wah.

Eno shaped the soundscape. If you listen for his work, it’s as fresh today as it was mind-blowing then. Did they consciously know what they were doing? Or was it a coming together of the right talents at the right time, plugged into the zeitgeist?

City Lullaby

It must be about ten years ago that I began writing lullabies with the idea of doing a picturebook. I had such negative reaction to the dummy I showed I kind of gave up. No one liked my hero and thought no one would by a lullaby books with unknown lullabies in it.

I’ve now realised that Youtube could maybe let me approach the project from a different angle, so, here for your amusement and delectation is a demo of one of the songs called City Lullaby, inspired by a hot steamy visit to New York. I was amazed at the noise and bustle that never seemed to stop. I wondered how any child ever got to sleep there.

If you like it, please tell your friends and rate the video by clicking on the stars in the top left hand corner. Enjoy – zzzzzzz

Lambent Sculpture – Snow Ice and Fire

In my norwegian influenced childhood, we always made snow lanterns. Here’s one I made today and a ring of ice and fire. Looks lovely at the bottom of the garden.

Bling My Coach

Please vote for the Pink Car Rally coach to win the bling my coach competition by voting for them here
The Pink Car Rally is in aid of a fledgling children’s charity, called the Little Princess Trust, which provides children who have lost their hair (primarily through cancer treatments) with ‘real hair’ wigs. If we win this competition, we can take 49 pink passengers on the coach and if each one raised an average of £50 Sponsorship, we could raise in the region of £2500 for the charity!! How fantastic would that be? It means that the charity could provide wigs for 8 more children!! We NEED to win!! Please help us…..

Please look at the short film, which is introduced by Gail Porter, on the Little Princess Trust’s website (www.littleprincesses.org.uk) It tells the story of how the charity helped Melissa….

Weston Super Mare – Quest Seekers

Weston-Super-Mare Pier Under Construction

On Wednesday I went to Weston Super Mare to present certificates to children who had been doing the Quest Seekers Summer Reading Challenge and give a bit of a story too. North Somerset had been very keen on Dragons during the quest, and the Winter Gardens venue was decked out with Dragons. This made me change my prepared story to Monster Boy – Dragon Danger, which, I think, went down well.

Marine Parade Weston-super-mare

I used to go to weston as a child and chipped my front tooth on the bumper cars on the pier. The Marine Parade is looking very sorry for itself at the moment. The Fire on the pier really was the last straw for a town that has been going downhill for a while. But- It really feels like something is happening now. The Front is being rebuilt, as is the pier, which is due to be a thing of wonder once it is finished. The largest indoor entertainment venue in Europe and the top pier in the world.

Whoops! I forgot the front legs. I knew something was missing.

Good luck Weston and thanks for a great evening, effortlessly organised by North Somerset Libraries.

Where’s Wally Now?

Thanks to Damian Harvey for giving me an idea for today’s Blog. It’s quite hard keeping up this blog-a-day thing. Damian noted on Facebook that he’d spent the day driving his kids to and fro to some music event in Leeds. He wondered if parents drove their kids to Woodstock in the 60s.

Well, of course they didn’t. Nowadays the parents are more likely to join the kids at the gig! Going to festivals was a generational rebellion thing.

Somehow, when I was 15, I managed to get my parents to let me go off to the last Great Free Festival in WIndsor Great Park with my mate Godfrey, to meet up with our gang, who were also travelling in pairs. It took us all day to hitch from Bedford to Slough where we caught the local train to Windsor.

The town was heaving with the unwashed. Queues of hippies lined the streets to get into the toilets under the town hall where Prince Charles and Camilla were later married. I didn’t have a tent, just a sleeping bag wrapped up in a tarpaulin.

It was crazy. There was no real organisation, just a flatbed lorry as a stage. Most people were stoned. All the time you could hear the cry, “Where’s Wally?” wafting over the crowds. Wally was a mythical drug dealer. I think if you called out for him, someone would approach you and sell you some dope. I was more of a hippy than my friends, indeed several people used to call me “hippy” in those days. But I didn’t do drugs. I puffed a few joints that were passed around but I didn’t like it and was terrified of anything stronger. At that age I had a friend who was a heroine addict who eventually died of an overdose. I couldn’t see any glamour in it. Also there were serious sanctions for being caught in possession of even the smallest amount of any kind of drug and in those days the “fuzz” were quite happy to plant it on you if they suspected you but couldn’t find any on you.

At the festival, I bumped into Glyn, my old best friend from my previous school. He and his brother had gone full time into hippydom and were quite stoned. I joined their camp as they were really quite together. They were raiding for firewood and had a nice little campfire going and were actually cooking stuff on it. I had a few tins of beans and a can opener. That’s all I had to live off for the weekend! Glyn had turned into a fabulously romantic character, bare-chested with a yellow velvet cloak and long, flaming red hair. He looked every bit like a Viking God and had picked up the attitude to go with it.

There were no toilets and luckily no rain or otherwise the place would have turned into a cholera breeding ground. Stoned hippies were urinating and defacating where ever they liked. There were no nice Highland Spring plastic water bottles to be bought from Tesco in those days, no catering vans or mobile toilets. No event industry. It was a bit like a modern Flashmob. The word went out and everyone turned up. The town pretty much ran out of food. I think emergency standpipes were set up so we could get a drink and splash our faces.

As I remember, Mud and the Pink Fairies were the major Bands. There was no running order. No one knew who was playing. Bands just turned up and played. The first you knew was playing when someone introduced the next band. The generators would often pack up half way through a set. Ah, such innocent days. Not like today, mollycoddled in Stadia, with barcode tickets and overpriced merchandise bought through your bluetooth phone.

We were awoken at daybreak on the last day, it must have been the Monday or Tuesday after the August Bank Holiday. The “fuzz” moved in to “bust” us! “Move on or be arrested,” they said, kicking the sleepy heads awake and itching to arrest and have a go at anyone who stood up to them.

Us weekend hippies packed our bags and slinked away back to normality, giving the town of Windsor back to it’s inhabitants.

I guess most of those old hippies are establishment old farts like me now. You can’t tell me that 90% of the great and the good of today never inhaled.

Actually it really was an exciting time. No one knew what the rules were. Not like now when anything that might be fun must have a health and safety audit and a clear profit stream. No wonder you see videos on YouTube of kids racing on top of cars and doing stupid stuff like that. Kids do stupid things and learn by their mistakes. My generation did the most stupid things and realised how dangerous they were and decided to protect our kids from themselves.

Where’s Wally now? I imagine he’s got a clip board and is organising safe family events somewhere.

Either that or he’s wearing a bobble hat and a stripy jumper and is happily walking around in the world of children’s books trying to hide in the crowd. Only the walking stick gives a clue to his former, shady life. He never quite walked properly again after the “fuzz” beat three shades of shit out of him in a cell in Windsor police station back in seventies. He’d been dealing in illegal substances all weekend and done pretty good business and had to pay his dues.