I’ve mentioned on the blog before my love of music (listening rather than playing an instrument) and realised one of the things that I have sorely missed over the last year is being able to go to a live gig. It also led me to realise that the frequency of buying and listening to new music had declined and I wanted to reverse this trend.

Not having bought more than half-a-dozen CDs in the years before lock down (although I must still own close to 1000, boxed and stored during the move) I turned to Spotify at the start of the year to provide me with some new and varied listening. What I have found instead though, was that I have gravitated to old favourites and re-discovered artists that I owned already. Presumably this is partly due to the algorithm Spotify uses to suggest artists to you in the daily mix, it being based upon artists you already like and re-enforcing your taste by giving you more of the same. I am trying to break out of this by using the artist ‘radio’ looking for new bands / singers / artists or whatever title they go by these days. And to a lesser degree picking on Spotify assembled playlists from varied claims such as decade or mood. Still not getting me to as much new music as I would like.

Possibly, like is the problem. In my teens and twenties I was exposed to much more music due to, I think, the way I listened. Like many of my generation, I too understand the frustration of trying to time the moment to press the pause button on the cassette recorder sat next to the radio on a Sunday afternoon listening to the chart rundown. Youth in the 1970’s didn’t afford to buying LPs or cassettes but pirating favourites from the top 40. It meant you had to listen to a varied offering of music, some heard of, some not, some to become favourite, others to be never heard of again. Tastes were effectively challenged, all be it within the commercial boundaries of the mainstream charts.

I hit my teens in the 80s and continue to think of this as my golden era of music, I started spending pocket money on vinyl or records as they were back then. Saturday mornings were spent at an independent record shop in Derby perusing the second hand bins for gems that quite often turned out to be scratched on first play. For me Dire Straits track Telegraph Road doesn’t quite sound right without extra beat created by a jumping needle at the start of the track.

It was also in the 80s that I got to see my first gigs, again with Dire Straits among the first bands I got to see live. To this day I don’t think I’ve seen a better live performance than Queen at Wembley in ’86. Recently watching Bohemian Rhapsody reminded me of what a great band they were and how disappointed I was not to have a ticket for Live Aid.

But I am not alone in craving the sounds of my teenage years it would seem…

https://theconversation.com/why-were-obsessed-with-music-from-our-youth-154864?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

To test the theory I went to look up the song that was number 1 on my 14th Birthday and found it to be ‘Jack & Diane’ by John Cougar Mellencamp – certainly in my liked songs on Spotify so that tallies. And whilst I find a fall into whats normal it doesn’t suppress my craving for something new.

So I need to find a new way to challenge that I listen to. I’m not one to criticize all new music as rubbish – I can find gems in pretty much all music genres. I need to find some sort of music roulette on Spotify that addresses this – any ideas?

Walking has been a saviour to my health and mental state alike during the enforced lock downs of the last year. Lock down aside Karen and I had already been trying to do more exercise via walking for some time now and over the last year I’m delighted to announce we’ve largely been successful in that goal. To quote the Proclaimers, “I will walk 500 miles and I will walk 500 more”. Well not quite, at least according to the iPhone, but nearly…….

The distance is the important bit for the physical health but the fresh air and scenery have been equally important for my mental state. We are truly blessed in Scotland to enjoy beautiful walking on our doorstep and the pictures below only capture in part the stunning views of the local area:

Being somewhat restricted to the local area I’ve also noticed the beauty of the changing seasons. From last March I watched a crop of wheat grow from seedling to harvest on our daily route that only time lapse photography (of which I’m not capable) could reproduce here. A more startling contrast in the two photos below.

Little more to report this month so one last view from the regular route, keep safe.

Resolve is defined as a firm determination to do something when used as a noun, and to find a solution when used as a verb. This year, which I hope will be better than the yo-yo lock-down of 2020 but as yet shows no sign of abating, we remain determined to find a solution to moving forward with a house purchase.

The COVID pandemic has disrupted plans for almost a year now, but even without that the path to buying has been tortuous. Seeing a rise in cases due to a new variant has further dismayed hope that the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is in sight and I assume this will further complicate the process moving forward and, more-so, the plans to renovate. However, I remain optimistic that the deal will be done and hungry for the challenge that awaits.

With stated optimism I therefore think it’s time to commit to writing the blog again on a more regular basis. My resolution will be to write once a month as a minimum. If nothing else, to use the blog as a diary of the month gone, which will hopefully be more interesting than the list of 30 meals I have eaten during the last period of lock-down. When I started I had it in mind that I downloaded my iPhone photos once a month to facebook as a reminder to what had happened – I’m going to try that tactic again with a few added here to the blog.

So as a practice some minders of 2020….

I decided that when COVID hit that I was not going to write a series of ill tempered monologues on the political state of the country and how lockdown was being handled. Nor would I fall into the trap of writing pointless blogs about what breakfast I had that day or the jigsaw I had recently completed. Rather, I would simply press pause on my blogging.

However, as another birthday is about to roll past I wanted to write a note, as much for myself as anyone else (I’ve learnt that no-one reads what I pen), to remind myself to pick up again once I have something to say once more.

Home, or the next one, is still not confirmed. Negotiations stalled with COVID and each time I think we take a step towards completion we have taken a step back. Cardross, where we currently rent, has been a great base for walking and access to local trails is plenty. It remains home for now.

I remain thankful that my family and I are safe, and I cannot complain that I have become bored during the periods when we have been asked to isolate as a household. There remains plenty to do and I haven’t yet exhausted NETFLIX.

Lockdown has confirmed to me we are making the right decision to flee the city and seek our own remote home with the ambition to become more self sufficient and live a simpler life. So the vision remains and the desire to make it happen as strong as it always was. It is just taking more time to get to the starting gate than I ever thought.

I was hoping that soon I would be able to break exciting news to our next house purchase, instead I’m learning to treat the process more like a hurdle race. Problem being (still) is I don’t know if I’m three hurdles in to 110m, or three hurdles in to a 10,000m steeplechase.

We have moved forward. After a year of negotiation, failure at closing date, and a reopening of negotiation due a deal falling thru we have had an offer accepted. Now, due to the state of the property, comes our opportunity to ascertain if the renovation is affordable before committing to the final signature. This will be a significant hurdle – the water jump in the steeplechase to continue the analogy.

Wheels are in motion to do this but Karen and I are reserving our own excitement as we have had disappointments before. For now it remains a waiting game……

So I drafted the above text at the start of the month not knowing the world was shortly going to become a very different place. A hurdle presented to each and every one of us, Coronavirus, has further slowed progress on proceedings and certainly could not have been foreseen. For now we are thankful that we are safe at home and not knowingly infected. Unsurprisingly therefore, still nothing more to report.

Something neither Karen or I had the opportunity to deal with in the time it deserved before our house move was photographs. We, as many of us I assume, have a plethora of snaps documenting our lives before the digital age (which presents a different problem in itself). Not only our lives together but family photographs that span generations in my case having inherited when my parents passed.

We carried at least a dozen large cardboard boxes of said photographs from Nethermill. Some catalogued, some with scrawls on the back, some in albums that give a hint to the date that the photograph was taken. A constant theme to many of the photographs however, is that I do not recognise the subject whether person, place or a random tree that looked particularly photogenic on a given day.

There are a small selection of photos that I hold really dear but I estimate they number a percentage in single figures and I have now set about the process of converting them to digital image so I no longer have to keep the physical form. It’s been great to relive memories of childhood and laugh at images of myself that are comedy gold!

On to the digital images themselves, with that age came the opportunity to take hundreds, thousands of images in search of that great shot. Indeed, I was once told by a professional photographer friend, that the work was not in taking the multitude of photos but in down selecting the better images and deleting the remainder. The thousands of images I did take, what didn’t happen was the administration of those images that should have been deleted years ago and I’m now paying for.

Hopefully, at the end of this process I will have a full catalogue of digitised images that don’t gather dust and are viewed again and again. A collection small enough to be viewed more than once every 20 years but big enough to hold all of the precious times. The hope being that when they are inherited by the kids they will open the folder with the same delight as I have had over the last week without the frustration of playing guess that face / castle / tree that the album suggested I would have known in 1978.

c1973 Andy on donkey, possibly at Bridlington (or maybe Blackpool?)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the blog of the want to return to house hunting and that we had yet to find a proposition similar to that we had seen on Gigha. I don’t know if the Gods were listening, or perhaps I should say reading, when I penned that but I’ve a story to tell out of the blue. Karen and I received an email from our solicitor to the effect that the sale we had missed out on at closing date in July of last year had fallen through. To that end were we still interested in the property?

When I say out of the blue, perhaps it wasn’t totally as a chance meeting of a good friend with a resident of Gigha had suggested as much last year. Karen had also researched the website to find the sale was still ongoing and a phone call confirmed that it was yet to be concluded. What I think is amazing is that we haven’t seen anything else in the mean time that has interested us in the way this offering has.

However, a note of caution to myself as much as anyone who reads on. The process in speaking to the vendor was long and drawn out last time and there is no reason to believe it wont be the same this time. There is both an excitement and an anxiety to the recurrence of this property and to have a second chance at it is great but it could still end in disappointment either because we decide the deal is not right or the vendor decides our offer is not enough (again).

My wish that the blog begins to document our new life my yet be realised………….

I tend to look back at when I last wrote a blog post before starting to write again and think, if I made a promise to myself to do something, did I do it? Well it’s a very swift no to the answer this time having cancelled gym membership that I simply wasn’t finding the time or inclination to visit. Work still dominates the January schedule but hopefully we will soon be back to house hunting.

Time in between the last post and now has not been dull however. Delighted to say that the whole family were in the same hemisphere for Christmas and in the two week break for Karen and I, we were joined by our New Zealand residing daughter and her partner. Loved having them back and harmony with her younger brother lasted almost to the New Year. We managed to fit in trips to rugby (Glasgow versus Edinburgh), Edinburgh Theatre (The Lion King), Cinema (Star Wars) & Elfingrove (fake snow). All of this and traditional dinners at Christmas and New Year.

When the blog started I was hoping it would chart our adventure of selling the big house and swapping it for a lifestyle that included sea views and our own business. I have documented the house on the Isle of Gigha that didn’t happen and nothing has excited us in quite the same way since. There remains one property I would describe as ‘we are keeping an eye to’ but for the moment doesn’t fit the budget without that elusive lottery win. I still hope the blog moves to that eventually but for now I’m simply reporting that the right proposition is yet to present itself.

Work has stemmed the flow of monies out I’m glad to report such that we have largely preserved the equity from the house sale. It has also stemmed to do all the things I was previously reporting as enjoyable in my time down from the office. That will come to an end soon with a re-focus to the housing market that has slowed over the winter months. I’m hoping that balance will be restored once the new home is found.