10 years ago (in 2014) I went to France twice, both times to the South. Once on my own in the spring to Nice and Eze, and then to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin (and Eze again) in August with my American family. In Roquebrune-Cap-Martin I shared a hotel room with a member of my family who snored like […]
Memories
1993 and 1988
No one reads much at this end of the blog these days (not even me). So I can quite safely warble on about being all old and nostalgic about years long gone. Listening to Jellyfish and thinking about the strange, strange year that was 1993 (for me). Pondering 1988, seemingly a “nothing year” for me […]
Vehicle Derek on French Podcast
From the department of “looking for something else”, really, exactly what it says on the tin (okay, exactly what it says in the title of this blog post). 2nd track in, and it’s “one of mine” too š They also play a track by a band with a similar name to one of our support […]
Recollecting A Broken Brandy Glass
A memory I buried for a long time. An emotional moment that I wanted to just forget about. It seems like I had more of those when I was younger than I do now as an adult. There were numerous times when something stirred my emotions to turmoil and I couldn’t handle that. Maybe I […]
Being Positive About Something That Was Negative
I have written in a lot of diaries over the years. Sometimes they hardly even define a point in my life as anything in particular. Sometimes I will look up a bit of my life I have strong memories of, and be disappointed that I didn’t write much down at the time that tallies with […]
OMG
There is an LP that I own, and its spatial sound, the sound of the mix of all the songs and its lush, reverberating production remind me of a time and a place that I experienced “between lives”. The place and the time are combined, though the place existed long before the time. The time […]
Bicycle Car Nostalgia
Whilst walking in a place I used to live yesterday I spotted a CitroĆ«n Xantia peeking out of a garage and was astonished to see it later on when I checked Google Maps Street View in both 2008 and 2012. That sparked a memory of Sunday bike rides around my neighbourhood as a little boy […]
Farewell Dad
13 years ago today I was in a kind of strange no-mans land. I absolutely knew my father was dying, imminently, but he wasn’t dead…yet. We had the call from the care home on the Monday night that he had been taken very ill with pneumonia and went up to the hospital, saw him conscious […]
The Results
Since there is a page about Vehicle Derek on this site I really ought to put more silly-named band-related pages up here. My problem is I tend to ramble on and on about everything and it’s hard to get to the point half the time. Something of the history of Spunkle is actually available onscreen […]
The Night We Met I Knew I Needed You So
The death of Ronnie Spector this week reminded me of one of my earliest memories of “musical significance”. I grew up in the town where my mum’s family were from, and my dad’s family lived much further away in the north. My brother and my mum and dad and me would go to see them […]
Self portrait, 1994
Found whilst looking for something else.
Rock Bottom
It’s a thing for sure that when I was once zooming up the M40 to Birmingham for a Vehicle Derek rehearsal and blasting Phenomenon by UFO on the tape deck, that it got to the point in “Rock Bottom”, around about 4.23 where the 19 year old Michael Schenker’s guitar solo reaches peak-pant-weeing-ecstasy and I […]
Totality
Back when I lived in East Oxford and could ride my bike to work I developed a special game to play on my commute. It was called Totality. It actually began in about 1986 back in Boston, Lincolnshire when one of my brothers came home once from his girlfriendās house and told me that he […]