The books thread made me realise, shamefacedly, that I think I’ve only read two books published in 2017 this year.

I recently all but gave up Twitter because it was making me angry and sad, but most importantly because I feel like it’s made me stupid. My attention span is insanely shit these days, and I mostly blame Twitter: hit after hit after hit after short frothy hit. And my book consumption, which used to be pretty voracious, has become really bad. I don’t want to be that bloke who reads 4 books a year or whatever.

Now, I love my phone, and I’m not getting rid, but since I deleted the Twitter app, I’m looking at it way less. Which feels like it’s making me some headspace for books again. Now I just need to find time and energy.

When do you do your reading? I’m too tired and stupid of an evening.

Yeah, yeah, mein Deutsch ist ein bißchen eingerostet, sue me – I’m practising. 😉

But anyway I’m off to Munich next week. What should I see and do? Christmas market around the Marienplatz will be the main focus, but is there anything else I can do and see in the centre of the city in a couple of days and nights? Recommendations please!

I. Bloody. Love. Christmas.

I generally resist getting my Yule on until December, but it’s 3 weeks til the holidays and since I’d already made mincemeat and shortcrust (and a pudding, and a dangerously boozy cake), my girls prevailed upon me to make mince pies a little bit early yesterday so we went the whole hog and I had mulled wine too. (The pies were incredible, thanks for asking. The trick? A lard/butter combo in the pastry makes it shorter than Thom Yorke.)

This year has a bittersweet quality to it, in that I won’t be with my daughters on Christmas Day, but on the other hand I also won’t have to go to my former in-laws’ either. And it means that I get to be with my sister and her little ones on the day itself too, which hasn’t ever happened before (we’ve always alternated for reasons of available space in my parents’ house).

But I love Christmas, and everything that goes with it. The invention of the internet may be destroying the fabric of society as we know it, but on the plus side, it means you don’t have to fight your way down slippery pavements with a » Continue Reading.

I’ve been teaching Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs Dalloway” at A level recently. Prepping it was the first time I’d read it since 2nd year Modernism.

The bits with Septimus – the traumatised, broken veteran who’s one of the two main voices of the novel – cut like a knife, in a way I hadn’t remembered them doing. You really feel Woolf’s own voice in his psychosis, the grandiose delusions, the suicidal ideation, the lost little-boyness peeking out between the hallucinations and the madness.

I read them Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband. It made me cry. It’s so heartbreaking, not least in its wrongness: she’s a burden, she says. It will never be good again, she says. Thank you for making me so happy, but I have to go, she says. None of that was true, and yet her illness made her believe that it was.

We’re such beautiful sad creatures. This jet engine of a brain bolted to our Ford Fiesta of a brain stem. The things we do to ourselves. How our brains torture us.

I hope you’re all doing ok out there in Afterword-land, is the long and the short of it. As much » Continue Reading.

For as long as I’ve been reading the music press (c. 1988-2012, RIP) bands and solo artists have always been at pains to emphasise their working class credentials and try really hard not to seem in any way privileged.

But how many truly working class bands of note have there been?

The Manics were. Oasis too. John Lydon, sure. But I suspect they’re pretty notable by their rarity, aren’t they? I’ve always been quite struck by pop’s (well, rock’s) tendency to protest a bit too much on the class front. What’s that about?

Isn’t pop essentially a bit of a middle class affair? How many truly working class musical heroes have there really been? And if the answer is “not many”, why is being openly middle class so uncool in pop?

I want the sorts of faces that induce actual screaming. Nausea. Involuntary bowel evacuation.

I absolutely love it on Question Time or similar when a point is made and one bloke in the audience – always a bloke – claps with enormous enthusiasm, all by himself. He’s usually a potential member of The Wall Of Ham (pictured). I love it. Makes me very happy.

Any other minority-interest joys you’d like to share?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DK3_qzrWkAEV5-n.jpg

So, rather than being The Nicest Man In Ever, Dave Grohl turns out to be The Actual Worst. The Rock Dad. Can there be anything worse? His 8-year-old kid wants an Imagine Dragons record (not, as the headline claims, Lana del Rey). He comes out with AC/DC because PROPER MUSIC.

Other scenes from Chez Grohl: “Happy birthday, sweetheart. I know you wanted pizza for tea, but here’s some liver and onions. It’s better.”

“Here’s twenty quid, love. Get yourself a toy.” “Oooh, how about that?” “No, not that, get the Meccano. I loved Meccano when I was your age, plus it’s educational.”

Let’s have some more from the School of Be-My-Avatar Parenting!

https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/09/dave-grohl-buys-his-8-year-old-daughter-acdc-album-instead-of-lana-del-rey/

Bought myself a black filter at the leisure centre while taking the boblets to their swimming lesson.

Boblet 2 returns from her lesson.

Her: “I can smell your coffee.”

Me: “I see. I myself cannot. You use Evyan skin cream, and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps. But not today.”

Nearly did a victory lap of the place.

Any good moments from the lives of Afterworders lately?

To go along with https://theafterword.co.uk/things-we-could-live-without, what about the things you just cain’t quit, no matter how much you wish you could?

In my case it’s Amazon. I don’t disapprove of Amazon or anything – as I’ve said before, the fault is with the law, not with them. It’s just it’s so bloody easy to spend money on the thing.

(And yes, I have just checked my bank balance. And yes, I have just shit meself.)

I post from my phone a lot, and when I’m using mobile data rather than wifi, I get the Imunify360 Captcha security thing a LOT. Like, maybe 1 in 3 times I click a link on the site?

Anyone else?

I get that, post hack, the site needs protecting but for me it’s rather too much on the intrusive side right now.

You will now be directed back to the page in the 3 second…

The music is always kind of secondary for me at festivals since we take the kids and it’s actually just a very fun holiday. Which is just as well cos I’m not fussed by this year’s lineup.

Any fellow AWers doing the Suffolkation this weekend?

@gatz just mentioned the band !!!, pronounced “chk chk chk” over on the “It’s all the same” thread.

I’ve never listened to them because their name was so annoying. It’s like Does It Offend You, Yeah? – something incredibly pleased with itself, arch, punchable. Now, sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie but I’ll never know cos I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. In the same way, !!! might be incredible, but I’ll never know cos I wouldn’t listen to them on purpose ever, just on the basis of that name.

What other band names are simply unacceptable? No ifs, no buts: too infuriating to even give the music the most cursory of chances. Not “a bit lame”. I’m taking instant non-negotiable shouts of “fuck off!”

OK, this is probably going to be extremely niche, but thought it might be of interest for a few of us – notably @twang and @fentonsteve!

As my band prepares to record final overdubs for our second album, we’ve basically spent all the money. We wanted to do this record right, so we’ve used professional studios and a pro mix engineer – all of which is great but not sustainable for a band made up of two working parents who have neither the time, inclination or record contract to give it all up and hit the road!

So once the album is done, we’re going back to DIY. (Our first album was entirely DIY – recorded in whatever space we could scrounge, with budget mics and a laptop. I mixed and mastered it myself long before I’d actually learned anything about how those things are done, and while the record definitely sounds good for a DIY beginner, I’ve learned tons since.)

So, if you record at all, what kit and techniques do you like?

Job 1 is obviously getting decent mics. Now, as much as I’d like a vintage Neumann, you’re talking » Continue Reading.

I’ve been through many iterations of what musical gear-heads call “GAS” over the years. Once coined to stand for “guitar acquisition syndrome”, now more often meaning “gear”, it describes the compulsive desire to buy the next piece of musical kit.

In my case, I’ve been a sufferer since my teens, when I’d feverishly leaf through the school music supplier’s catalogue looking at all the guitars I’d never be able to afford. It branched out: amps, basses and – most fatally – pedals. I got lost down the pedal wormhole for literally years, obsessing over getting JUST the right fuzz or delay. Daftness.

I was GAS free for many many years, until I tripped, fell and acquired my first hardware synthesizer. I ADORE synths. And the worst part is, you can get enormous modular racks of them which are never, ever finished. And they do so much!

To date, I’m the slightly shamefaced owner of a big Nord workstation, a MeeBlip Triode, a Korg Monologue, a Novation MiniNova, a Roland TR-8 drum machine (808 JOY) and a Roland JU-06 reissue of the incredible Juno 106. About to arrive is a hardware sequencer, my first: a Squarp Pyramid. I’ve had » Continue Reading.

Home at the folks’ for a couple of nights and my old man has dug out a load of old vinlies for me, bless him. Sure, there are a couple of original Beatles albums which my mum bought in the 60s (Abbey Rd and White Album, the latter pretty pristine with all the trimmings: photos of the boys etc) but what I’m really excited about is my old stuff, notably:

Bad by Michael Jackson Crazy For You by Madonna (the first single I ever bought)

Sadly no sign of Hunting High And Low by a-Ha, my first ever album purchase, but it’s so great to have Bad again. The moment I touched it, I could almost have been transported back to the beginning of 1988 and my 10th birthday, which I got this LP for. The next birthday I have, it’ll be exactly 30 years since that present. I’m gonna play it.

I realise this is a bit tiny-violin territory, but why has it become acceptable in the last 30 years or so to dismiss someone’s opinions, abilities, right to a complex interior life, emotions – you name it – purely on the basis that they’re a bit posh?

For me, pretty much the LEAST objectionable thing about Boris, Osborne and Cameron is their education and background. Conversely, Gove often gets credit (or anyway a grudging “at least he wasn’t born posh”) for being an adopted scholarship boy. Music journalists and musicians have been making a massive deal of the assumed virtues of being working class ever since (yawn) punk. Nicky Wire still won’t shut up about it. It’s presumed relevant that Corbyn isn’t state educated. It all seems a bit odd.

What’s it all about, then? Is it just resentment at the hold the posh still have on public life? What’s the statistic? – something like 7% of the population went to private school and yet they make up 32% of MPs.

That’s often quoted in horrified tones, but – devil’s advocate in excelsis here – isn’t it the case that private schools until quite recently did offer a vastly » Continue Reading.

I was reminded by the old Facebook memories thingy this morning of a great motto by Michael Lewis (I’ve forgotten who he is but should credit him anyway) which I adopted as the motto of House Bob. It runs thus:

“Do as little as possible, and that unwillingly, for it is better to receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.”

I adopt as my sigil the sloth.

You?

I’m acting as @drakeygirl’s self-appointed amanuensis this week. She hasn’t asked me to or anything but I’m an impatient bugger so ner.

So how’s everyone’s week been? I return semi-refreshed from the Easter break (apart from only getting 2 hrs sleep last night thanks to stressing THE FUCK OUT about work. But that’s another story. It’s possible I’m semi delirious. Sorry.)

I’ve discovered this amazing thing, right. It’s called WALKING. I basically really dislike cardio exercise but it turns out that a daily and brisk 3-mile walk is quite the tonic in a number of ways. I listen to far more music – and isn’t Gods of the Earth by The Sword just a great record? – and that combined with calorie counting and 3 lots of strength training a week is A Thing That I Can Do And Enjoy.

So I went to Greece. Ate a small percentage of it. Came back having put 4 lbs on. Did a week of the aforementioned regime and BANG. Net loss of a pound since last Chubby Check which means…fanfare: a stone. Done and dusted.

Now just 2 or 3 to go.