Life's about experiences. These are mine.
Anyone that has been paying attention will have noticed that I am back into vinyl in a big way – mainly because I like having a physical product and also the print on a record sleeve is large enough for me to be able to read without glasses! However, I am trying to be a …
My annual round-up of the year just gone (you can read the previous year’s reports here). This year I was interested to see how the fact that now I am pretty much fully retired would have had an impact on some of these stats. For a start, I feel that I have listened to less …
Back in September 2022 I visited the Berkshire Record Office as part of the Heritage Open Days and was shown how important records are preserved and restored. At the end of the post, I wondered how future digital records might similarly be stored in future. I found myself pondering this once more when I was …
I was looking through the blog posts of a friend of mine when I saw one called “25 Things (Slight Return)“. This was based upon one of these annoying social media trends where you have to complete a list and then get x people to do the same. This one was to list out 25 …
There is a shop in Reading that I regularly frequent and takes plenty of money off me and that’s the Oxfam Music Shop on Duke Street. It is a tiny place, not much bigger than my front room but it packs a lot in such a small space. They always have a great selection of …
I think it’s fair to say that my tolerance for staying at home is probably higher than most others but even I have my limits. And I am beginning reach the end of mine now. Lockdown hasn’t been as much as a shock to me as it must have been for many others as I …
Well what a year that was! Not quite the one I was expecting to have that’s for sure. We didn’t get to go on the holidays we had planned but we got to see a lot more of our granddaughter which was more than adequate compensation. For me the adjustment due to the pandemic wasn’t …
When junior school children go back to the classroom in September (assuming that they do) I have no doubt that up and down the country teachers will be getting their pupils to write the “what I did during my lockdown” essay. This being a variant on the “what I did on my holidays” essay which …
This has taken me longer to sort out this year than it did for 2018 but here, finally, for you delectation is my 2019 in numbers. Once again these figures have been culled from a number of sources including Exist, last.fm, Audible, Swarm and a couple of spreadsheets that I keep. Healthily I managed 124,000 …
A coupe of years go we visited the small town of Hay-on-Wye, famous for its second-hand bookshops. We’re back this weekend to stock up on more books (and vinyl too if possible). Once again we stayed at The Bear bed and breakfast. I would recommend that you stay there too but the owners told us …