On Seeing Arvo Pärt at Riga Airport

I normally try to be cool towards famous people. Maybe it's having lived for several years in London, where pointing and screaming at famous people or asking for an autograph was so provincial and sad....
Here in the baltic states it's even more so; you just don't even look at famous people (or ordinary people). Maintain the poker face no matter what.
So it was with some trepidation that little 'ole me approached Arvo Pärt, one of the greatest living composers, notebook and pen thankfully with me. Would he rebuff me. Worse still would he get angry, a bit like this old Father Ted clip (not that I shouted out his catchphrase, he doesn't have one anyway - still, could have whistled spiegel im spiegel..)
I took the plunge, nothing ventured and any other cliches that spring to mind as cliches do, and approached him, starting off in Estonian and switiching to English in the hope that he might forgive my impudence on the grounds of being a, well, impudent foreigner. He was somewhat bemused at first and looked at me blankly.
I suddenly thought, what if it's not him??! I may as well have gone and put my head into the turbine of the jet taxiing across the apron at the time if that had happened, it would have been easier for all concerned. 'You are Arvo Pärt?' I said
'Yes'...so I reiterated the autograph question. Maybe he doesn't get asked very often. He's not exactly a pin up, and as noted the baltic ... in such things probalby sees off most of the fans. But in the end it was quite a big signature that I had to take away with me and will now keep forever.
I then spent the rest of the time studiously avoiding him and therefore continually running into him as we waited for the plane, then again as he was only a coupld of rows in front of me, and once we'd landed at Tallinn as well. I was starting to look like a stalker, or at least it was a bit painful, like this, again from Father Ted (1.00 - 3.30).
Oh well...Arvo Pärt.

Richard v Bill (an old youtube clip)

..it's not a question of does God exist or no, but something far more important than that....

It's Britain v. the US in an argument;-) !!!!!

....down-home, corny, side of the mouth schmaltz v. urbane, laconic pithiness...

... brash, intimidatory loquacity versus cool understatement

...and shock horror, those dangerous, shifty Europeans and their non-God fearing ways..

..see for yourself..

Going Out On Friday Evening Since There's Nothing On Telly Any More..

A bit whistfully mournful for a Friday night but I don't like to follow the herd all the time....what happened to

Music Videos (or for that matter bands) like this...

...comedian chat show guests like this...

or, combining the two, comedy music shows like this....


All the good people are dead:-(

Great Wedding Party

I slipped off the waggon, without hurting myself I'm happy to say, last Saturday night, but in a good cause - at a friend's wedding party. The actual ceremony was in Melbourne, it's one of those Aussie-Pommie love stories, which was a bit of a distance, but the party was in a hotel which I would in the past have thought was out of my league, in Farnborough, near London. It's only really on the map for having a great big airshow there every other year or so.
It was lovely to be back however fleetingly, putting up my feet as the football scores were coming in on the 'vidiprinter' as I think they still call it, walking round without a coat in the middle of November and being smiled at by strangers...
Anyway, bit like walking through a hole in time as I found all the old crowd from Wycombe days to be mercifully unchanged, and caught up with people I hadn't seen since I'd been away. All way to short and sweet. Cheers Dom!

What Accent Does My Blog Have? (Seth)

This is a little item my big brother wrote which you can view here,..
..to paraphrases someone who I wouldn't normally even phrase, let alone with paras, GB Shaw, who said something to the effect that it's impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without another Englishman hating him...ah yes, we English really 'do' accents more than anyone in the anglosphere and probably beyond...I'm talking accents, not dialects, that are made much of in the region of Europe where I live, or these little minority languages ( which reminds me of a witty aphorism, which means you've probably heard it long before me, that a language is nothing but a dialect with an army). But accents, proper, absurd, comical-sounding accents of the type which suddenly disappear when you're beyond 20 miles in any direction and are replaced by something else.
It's puzzling to north americans how such a huge variation of accents can be found within such a, to them, piddling little area of land. I remember Aleksei Sayle on a show with, I think, Bill Bryson, pointing out that a scouse (Liverpool) accent suddenly fizzles out in some side street somewhere in St Helens only to be replaced by another, presumably Lancashire or Mancunian, accent. In my own experience, growing up where I did which was very middle England and therefore quite 'posh', if people had an accent at all it was a Coventrian one, a rather flat sounding but quite homely chatter that's quite distinct from the more well-known lilting brummie accent. In fact in the next village along to us, a commuter dormitory town in effect, you suddenly started hearing brummie accents, particularly amongst younger people whose social lives leaned more in that direction.
What's even greater about England is it's possible to have no accent, and still be English (I've never met an American without an American accent or a Scot below the age of 80 without a Scottish accent of some kind, and rightly so).
I fancy that I fall into this category. As noted, I was from near Coventry but definitely don't have that accent any more (and am often berated down south for not having a 'brummie' accent) but I don't think I'm especially posh either. Of course it's in the ears of the beholder, but if Shaw's right, someone, somewhere has to despise me on the grounds of the way I speak.
But in any event, accent-neutral it is, which leads me to ponder Seth's thoughts on the fact that blogs have 'accents' too - the tone, vocab, syntax and even punctuation can create a written accent that can put people off or attract them simulataneously. I'm acutely aware of the plethora of sarky attempts at pithiness that bloggers, journos and the like come up with, so I must apologise for adding to this already-crowded field. I suppose that makes the blog's accent something like, though it hurts me to say it, 'mockney'. Hmm, I think I need to go to elocution lessons...

Intellectual Thirst - Seth's Blog

Something interesting from my big brother Seth Godiney, a very short post indeed (see, even he does it, so it's ok!) in which he ponders which comes first, success or intellectual curiosity (as expressed in reading books and, nowadays, blogs). I tend to think intellectual curiosity comes first and in fact needn't necessarily be followed by 'success', whatever that means.
But I take the point, all 'successful' people (by which I mean people who are truly human, not that necessarily make a lot of money or have a big, important job, though it's ok to do these things if you want) are intellectually curious, of that there's no doubt in my mind.

Puumaja Mees Is Unwell

I am ill today, will be back online tomorrow I hope.

Don't Believe The Hype - Seth's Blog

This is a (sorta) regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.My big brother's just posted a great piece about how irrational people are when they make purchases. Everyone 'knows' it's ok to, say, eat salmon at a wedding regardless of what the effects of salmon farming might be on the environment. People make purchases based on the flimsiest of try outs (kicking a car's tyres is one example he gives) and the experts know this. I'm guilty of this - once I just instructed an IFA (Independent Financial Advisor) to get me a deal whereby I could keep my old flat and rent it out and buy a new one (in which I rented the 2nd bedroom out) so he set me up with what was the UK equivalent of the Sub-Prime mortgage, the collapse of which in part started the current recession. I agreed on the basis of him running some meaningless numbers past me. I found out later he'd told the mortgage lenders that my income was about double what it actually was. Nothing particularly bad happened in the end (though the rental lost money and I'm having to sell that flat now) and a lesson learned, but better to learn from someone else's.
Essentially, he says, people are irrational, and there's a great example of this around the swine flu 'epidemic' and his cynical but sensible thoughts on marketing a swine flu vaccine..