A bit of a historical picture / crossover with Saturday ’80s Photo for today’s phone box! While I’m still hunting for the next phone box example in Doctor Who, I remembered I was going to share this one from the family archives. It’s a phone box that features in the background of a snap from our trip to Cornwall in September 1987.
Red phone box, Riverside, Padstow, 10th September 1987.
It was September 1987, and on this particular day of our Cornish holiday we were visiting the town of Padstow. I don’t have the exact date as photos in our family archive are only labelled by month, but I could probably track it down in the future as Mum has always tended to log things like that in her diaries. EDIT: Mum tells me it was the 10th. Thanks Mum!
The phone box even still has a phone in it as of the most recent Street View image taken in 2018. It looks very well-kept and is maybe maintained by the pub owners as well as the council.
Still hoping to get back to the Who phone boxes next week!
A slight bit of blog business today. Now that I’m caught up with all my pre-pandemic gig reviews, I’m planning to make Wednesday ‘music day’ on the blog. I’ve not focused on music posts for a while, as I’ve not been focusing on music so much in my everyday life, for a couple of reasons. First of all, gigs are obviously on the back burner for now. Secondly, I’ve not been listening to music in a focused way during the last year – I’ve been finding I concentrate on work better when it’s quiet, and when I’m out for a walk with headphones I prefer to listen to podcasts. When I do put music on (largely at the request of Geth when he wants some background music), it’s always an old standby like ’80s pop or synthwave or videogame soundtracks – it’s been a long time since I’ve deliberately listened to an album or sought out new music.
It’s been about eighteen months since I wrote my last New Hits Friday post, because I’ve not been keeping up with the chart for the last year (most chart music is not to my taste so I was starting to find it a bit of a chore, though I will go back and catch up because I still find the chart really interesting academically). I’m a few Now! albums behind, and other than the usual Christmas shows, I can’t remember the last time I turned on the music channels. It’s just not been a focus for the last year and a bit; there have been other things going on.
However, I would like to get back into the habit of focused music listening, which is why I’m going to be setting aside Wednesday blog posts for related content. This could take many forms – reviews, features, general ramblings – as I want to keep the scope quite broad. I expect that at first, I’ll mostly be focusing on music topics I already know about, but there’s always the potential to learn something new. Sometimes on ukulele!
Ocarina out of time. Mum and Dad passed this on to me a couple of Christmases ago but I haven’t had much chance to pick it up yet. One day 🙂
You might notice we’ve skipped #27. It’s another pizza that’s missing a picture! Thankfully it’s one that I will almost certainly have again, so I’ll catch up with the log at some point.
We’re into the last few days of 2019 now, and today’s entry is a pizza that I had during a boardgaming break when spending time with friends in Edinburgh. On this occasion we ordered from Nkd Pizza in Morningside, which has since unfortunately closed down.
Nkd Pizza Garden Party… or the empty box after the eating, at any rate.
I’m glad I did get to sample this pizza while the Edinburgh branches were still open. (Most remaining branches appear to be in the ‘southern north’* of England – there’s apparently a branch in Burnley of all places, so I may be able to sample this pizza again next time I’m visiting the in-laws in Colne!)
The pizza was just the right size, which is more difficult to get right than it sounds. Too-big pizzas usually result in overeating on my part because I don’t see the point in saving the rest for next-day reheating when there’s only a slice or two left. Too-small pizzas, on the other hand, are unsatisfying. This one was perfect… for my particular appetite on that day, at any rate! It was really tasty too.
*A term that perhaps only makes sense if you live in north-east England or Cumbria. The endlessly interesting thing I have learnt from my nearly ten years of living in England (at the two extremes of the country) is that English people generally consider ‘the north’ to be everything north of where they are and ‘the south’ to be everything south of where they are. Growing up, I was often told by my Lancastrian relatives that southerners erroneously considered ‘the north’ to be anything north of Watford; when I lived in Southampton, I was fascinated to find that the opposite was also true, i.e. that northerners erroneously considered ‘the south’ to be anything south of Sheffield. As a result, the entire swathe of England between Watford and Sheffield falls into what I call ‘Schrodinger’s England’: simultaneously north and south at the same time.
This December challenge was the second (and last as of now) of the Great Run Solo accumulators that I’ve entered, following October’s Hallowe’en event.
It followed a fairly similar formula to the Hallowe’en version, this time requiring participants to complete twelve runs between the 1st and 25th of December. Usually you don’t get the medal until the following month, but on this occasion they sent them out early (before most people had even completed the challenge) so that we could all use the alternative ‘tree decoration’ ribbon to hang them on our Christmas trees!
There were three medals designed for this challenge, and it was a surprise as to which one you would be sent. Mine was a Santa medal, but I’d have been equally happy with a snowman or reindeer!
A little bit of extra sparkle for my 2020 tree!
The basic challenge wasn’t really a challenge for me as I run every day anyway, so my main interest was in seeing how much mileage I could rack up. It wasn’t as much as I would have liked as I was still on a bit of a post-London slump, and so I only managed the lowest of the three certificate levels, but anything was a win in the first part of December.
Post-Christmas I was a bit more refreshed and was able to move onto slightly bigger challenges, which I’ll discuss in the next few weeks!
The UK winter preferring to save most of its snow for February and March when people are already sick of winter is not a new phenomenon, judging by our family photo archives. My February 1989 wardrobe heavily featured this, um, dashing snow suit, something I have most definitely not seen on any of the small children dragging sledges around the snow-laden streets of Newcastle this winter. ’80s fashion: nothing if not careful.
At least the boots looked vaguely cool?
I am a lot more cavalier about snow in 2021 and have been going out in Doc Martens, leggings and a light trenchcoat this week. I love a bit of ’80s retro, but I’m not quite ready to do one-piece snow wear again.
It’s been a week of snow and power cuts and hence a week that has not really gone to plan. Other than the long-awaited outdoor 10k I managed last Saturday, the snow has derailed pretty much all my running this week. However, to be honest I’m kind of used to that after this long, bleak winter, and Geth and I have been looking into ways to make treadmill running less boring. I’ve ordered a Zwift Runn sensor, which you attach to the side of your treadmill in order to connect it to Zwift. I’ve been interested in trying Zwift for a while and a prolonged period of snow seems like as good an opportunity as ever… Of course, I thoroughly expect that as soon as it arrives, the snow and ice will clear up and I won’t need to use the treadmill again until next winter. Still, it’s a win either way!
In the meantime, Geth has discovered the RunDisney YouTube channel, which provides lots of nice video tours around Disneyland that enable you to watch the screen while on the treadmill and pretend you’re running round a theme park on a hot day in Florida (something that feels like a total fantasy at the moment). I watched one of the videos during my treadmill run this morning and it felt a lot less tedious than usual! Geth originally wanted to do a real-life RunDisney event for his 40th birthday last year, but obviously that has had to be put on hold for now. We’re determined that it will happen eventually, though.
The power cuts we had earlier this week, meanwhile, meant that work was disrupted quite a bit and I’ve not really been able to catch up. As such, I’m going to have to do a bit of work at the weekend, which is something I’ve been trying to avoid 🙁 Hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly next week.
The world is endlessly white at the moment.
This week’s earworm playlists:
Saturday
Cast of The Sound Of Music – ‘So Long, Farewell’* Kate Bush – ‘Wuthering Heights’ Barenaked Ladies – ‘One Week’
*RIP Christopher Plummer.
Sunday
The Bangles – ‘Hazy Shade Of Winter’ Lindisfarne – ‘Meet Me On The Corner’
Monday
Lindisfarne – ‘Meet Me On The Corner’ Duran Duran – ‘Friends Of Mine’
Tuesday
Cast of The Sound Of Music – ‘Edelweiss’ Cast of Mary Poppins – ‘Let’s Go Fly A Kite’ Queen – ‘Flash’ Ladytron – ‘Destroy Everything You Touch’ Duran Duran – ‘Ball Of Confusion’ The Weeknd and Daft Punk – ‘Starboy’ Duran Duran – ‘Five Years’
Wednesday
The Weeknd – ‘Blinding Lights’ Lil’ Dicky, Chris Brown, Ed Sheeran, DJ Khaled and Kendall Jenner – ‘Freaky Friday’ Queen – ‘One Vision’ Duran Duran – ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’ Robson & Jerome – ‘Unchained Melody’
Thursday
Adam & The Ants – ‘Prince Charming’ Randy Newman – ‘You’ve Got A Friend In Me’
Friday
The Bangles – ‘Hazy Shade Of Winter’ Revo – ‘Sylvan Tranquility’ Duran Duran – ‘Winter Marches On’ Traditional – ‘Bonnie Ship The Diamond’
I’m still sifting through old Doctor Who episodes to find the next ‘wrong phone box’, so we’ll take a break for this week!
I found this phone box tin (containing toffees) in the Boundary Mill shopping centre in Colne a few Christmases ago. I got one for me and one for Dad, so there’s an identical tin sitting in my old room at Mum and Dad’s house.
Red phone box tin. One of my favourite ornaments.
Hopefully I’ll have tracked down the next Who phone box next week! I’m steadily making my way through the Patrick Troughton stories…
I find it a bit depressing that this last Saturday marked the one-year anniversary of the last time I went to a gig. I had so many booked for the rest of 2020, and now so many postponed ones booked for 2021… but as I’ve mentioned before, I expect it’ll be closer to 2022 before we can watch live music in a venue again.
As such, this very belated review marks the end of event reviewing on this blog for now. The next one – whenever it is – will be very special!
I’ve been really enjoying synthwave for a few years now, but this was only the second time I’d made it to a synthwave gig (the first being The Midnight a few months previously). Really hope we get a few more synthwave bands playing in Newcastle once the pandemic is over.
The support band were Tired of Fighting. Our friend George is in this band and is a huge synthwave fan, which is why they asked for the support slot as I understand it. Their sound isn’t very synthy but it was quite high-energy, creating a good atmosphere for what was to follow.
Blurry photography as usual (there were a lot of dancing people in the way!) so I’ve had to cobble the band together in this image.
LeBrock, when they came on, kept up this energy throughout their set – which was surprisingly short, finishing quite some time before the venue closed, but featured all the songs they were best known for. I loved the set but I wish it had been longer – or that the venue had organised an extra band on the bill to fill the gap, as it sort of felt like the night had been cut short!
There was more energy onstage than it looks like in this image.
So with that early finish from LeBrock, that was the end of my pre-pandemic gig-attending. Not a bad way to end, but I’m really looking forward to the return of music events!
This sparkling alcohol-free drink was one of a selection I picked up at M&S last summer.
Fizzero Zero Alcohol Sparkling White.
It doesn’t have quite as much of a ‘fake booze’ taste as other zero alcohol sparkling wines I’ve tried, and so it feels lighter. It has an interesting grape-y medium taste, which is very pleasant.
I’ve not been in the local M&S Food for a while, but this one is well worth picking up again.
