Happy New Friday

Well, good golly gosh and crikey.

One minute I'm in the middle of telling you about my fun and not at all boozy weekend at the Summer's End Festival, and the next, Christmas and New Year have been and gone and we're all flopping about in the post-festive period, shoveling in the last of the leftover food we don't actually want, and idly playing with our new toys like those guys from Wall-E.

I'm a bit crap, really, aren't I? It's even taken me 5 days just to write this much, which explains why the previous paragraph doesn't make much sense - I have to keep changing the days in it. Fear not, though... plans are afoot to bring you as much wordy goodness as your eyeballs can consume. (Probably more, if we're honest.)

Firstly, I've just bought a dedicated blogging laptop so that I don't feel I'm depriving Karin of her Spider Solitaire every time I want to write something - although I'm not using it yet because it has Windows 8 on it and I'm extremely scared.

And secondly, I've quit my job so that I can spend more time writing. No, don't worry, I'm not that deluded - I have actually accepted another, hopefully less demanding one, no need to send the intervention people round.

"Darling, we are only telling you this because we will always love and support you,
but that top really doesn't go with the jeans... "

There are various gigs booked in already for 2014, and a couple of trips, so I shouldn't be short of things to write too much about. But before all of that...

I've Got a Little List

Me and 2013 have some distinctly unfinished business to take care of - yes, it'll soon be time for the annual Gigging Forever page of album covers and associated waffle with accompanying meaningless ranking. This year I've been putting a lot more thought into it (i.e. some) and making sure I play every new album I bought this year once through, making some notes.

Unfortunately, I bought 65 new albums this year so it's taking a while. I'm just about at 'T' though, so hopefully the first part will be ready soon. As with last year, the "Prog" list pretty much writes itself, but aside from that, there are 50-odd albums of assorted other interesting music to go through, making a list that makes me sound just the right combination of young and cool, whilst not being blatant lies. Not as easy as you'd think.

Obviously this won't be on it. Or will it?
Is it post-retro-ironic to like this now? Help...

I've also got notes to write up from some of the best gigs I've ever been to, so there'll be a bit of a gig-round-up of the year type thing. Featuring this...

And this...

And, er, probably not this.

Radio GaGa

Just before Christmas, I popped over to deepest darkest Stratford (as much as one can pop anywhere for TWELVE SODDING HOURS), to visit my good friend David and provide witty repartee as special guest for his end of year review podcasts. In-between all the music, we talked about why Robert Ramsay should join Daft Punk, why David should probably have invited Karin instead of me, and what is my "pooing album of the year." You'd be criminally insane to miss it.

Now, I don't like to break the magic of radio, but although we pretend they're recorded on various days over the festive period, we actually sat there all day recording all 3 epic shows back to back, which you can probably tell by the fact that my input is pretty much reduced to snarky comments by the end of the last one. My point is, anyway, that if I can sit there on David's landing doing that all day, the least you can do is go and take a listen - and there is clearly no finer collection of progressive music anywhere on the web (that's progressive and not just Prog, since I insisted on putting some of my electro-bollocks on the playlist, too.)

The European Perspective End of Year Review - click here or look for it on iTunes...


Been Around the World and I, I, I...

For some inexplicable reason (or possibly because I paid my sister to bump my Facebook post), my travel blog got quite a lot of attention over the holiday period, and became something of a viral hit. As in a hit with people who were stuck in with the flu and had nothing better to do.

Anyway, literally 6 people liked my comment that I should carry on with it, and as everyone knows, that's basically a binding contract, so I'll be putting some time into that at some point as well. There'll be stuff like this:

And this....

And, er, this...

In the meantime, if you've not seen it yet, why not go and have a quick look. And then continue having a look for as long as it takes to read it all.


Run, Forrest, Run

Last but not least, I know how much everyone enjoyed it when I used to write about training for a 10k race - so much so that I've signed up for the London Marathon. So I'll be sure to:

a) bore you with that, and
b) beg for more money for the Cure Parkinson's Trust


Happy new Year!