Life's about experiences. These are mine.
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 …
This is the fourth summary of my year that I have done (you can read 2018, 2019 and 2020‘s reports) and, for reasons I will outline below, this year is very much incomplete. Nevertheless it is still worth taking time to assess the year. Data for this report has as ever been taken from a …
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 …
On a normal year by this point I would have have been to see, on average, about five music concerts. This, of course, is not a normal year by any means and so the total stands exactly at a measly one. There were supposed to be more. I had booked to see Steve Hackett (twice), …
God, who we all know is Alanis Morissette, is clearly not very happy with the inhabitants of planet Earth. Those hints about climate change were clearly too subtle for many so she decided that another forty days and forty nights of rain leading to flooding might clue some people up. When that didn’t have the …
Continue reading “Relative Strangers (and God). The Mill at Sonning, 14th March 2020”
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 …
I think that we have established that I have been to a fair few concerts in my time but last nights Marillion gig at the RAH must have been the strangest of the lot. The Royal Albert Hall is a beautiful venue and the acoustics are just amazing. It really is one of the best …
Continue reading “Marillion, Royal Albert Hall, 18th November 2019. Bums and Pointing.”
A couple of years ago we went to Progress Theatre’s annual Writefest. This is an evening of seven short plays written and performed by local and up-and-coming actors. As you can imagine there is real mixed bag of plays on offer and the quality and therefore the enjoyability is also variable. This time out the …
UPDATE! Amélie has now transferred to the West End and you can see it too. More info here. When you discover that someone has turned one of your favourite films into a musical the initial reaction is “well, that can only end badly”. When you then discover that it is going to be staged in …
Continue reading “Amélie The Musical, The Watermill Theatre, 27th April 2019”
My eldest son is going to be making me a grandparent in the summer and we were talking about what the arrival of children does to your ability to get out and about. Turns out this is beautifully illustrated in the chart above. I have kept a log of all the gigs I have ever …