little bits of everything

It must have been in my early teenage years that I first read Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals . I loved it, and I'm pretty sure I read it more than once. I decided recently to re-read it. I don't have a good history with revisiting things from my childhood. I had a bad experience rewatching Blake's 7 . Even one of my favourite TV Series, Heroes , wasn't that interesting when I rewatched the first episode. To put the summary at the start - it was a good move. In case you're not familiar with it, My Family etc. tells the story of how Gerry, his widowed mother, and older sister and two brothers moved to Corfu when he was ten years old. Gerry was fascinated by the wildlife around him and the book, and the following two books in what is sometimes sold as the Corfu Trilogy, is a mixture of descriptions of his nature explorations and the things his family gets up to. To give you an idea of the latter, here's a sample: “Les, muttering wrathfully, ...

  This is part 2 of the series, " Me? I'm just listening to the music ". Before I start though, I need to tell you why the US version of this album is called "No Answer". An executive from the United Artists Records executive rang someone on the ELO side to find out the name of the album. When they didn't get through they wrote down, "no answer" and so that became the album title. I had ELO1  on tape in my teenage years, but never the whole album, so some tracks are very familiar and I heard some for the first time when I listened to it recently. 10538 overture is prehistoric ELO. I love that it's firmly rooted in the sixties in its sound. It's like an old uncle that you don't want to change. It introduces the heavy string sound that we're going to get familiar with on this album. Look at me  is sung by Roy Wood, not Jeff Lynne and it doesn't age well. Nellie takes her bow  is lovely and dramatic. It's a long song - nearly 6...

  On the occasion of my 60th birthday, I, like so many before me, created a 16 page zine printed newspaper style by newspaperclub.com . The subject is mostly me, so modesty forbids I publish the whole thing online. However there are some things which are about the year of my birth. So here are three pages from Threescore , lightly edited to avoid controversy (maybe you can guess the edit).