Hadestown - Anaïs Mitchell

Just over a week ago, Steve Hodgson (@BestofTimes on Twitter) recommended Hadestown to me. I'd seen a good review of it in The Guardian and been intrigued, but a personal recommendation from someone that you know has overlapping musical tastes is worth ten good reviews, so I eventually took the plunge.

I was gripped from the first time I heard it, but I've enjoyed it even more with repeated listenings. It manages to pack in many different kinds of things that I love: roots/folk music, New Orleans jazz, a 1930s theme, great lyrics, Greek mythology, and a guy with the deepest voice I've ever heard — what more could I ask?

The album (a 'folk opera') was written by Anaïs Mitchell (who sings Eurydice), but also features many other talented musicians like Ani DiFranco (Persephone) and Justin Vernon (Orpheus). It retells the story of Eurydice lured down to the Underworld by Hades, and her lover Orpheus who follows her to try to bring her back, but sets it in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Orpheus and Eurydice are in love, but penniless, and Hades seduces Eurydice with a vision of prosperity and security in the Underworld. Once down there, though, she finds it a dark and joyless prison, and misses flowers and sunlight and — inevitably — Orpheus.

I don't think that there's a single dud track on the album, and they are all as catchy and singable as any good folk tune should be, but there are one or two tracks that I particularly like. 'Why We Build the Wall' is done in a country style with slide guitar, but has a call and response format that reminds me of a sea shanty or the kind of work song that slaves might have sung on a plantation. It is also somewhat timely. Do these lyrics remind you of anything?

Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

Another great track is 'Hey, Little Songbird'. Steve mentioned in his tweet that the album featured a guy with a voice that originated "somewhere about his ankles". That man is Greg Brown and Anaïs describes his voice as "subterranean": that's highly appropriate for someone playing Hades, the King of the Underworld. It's a glorious voice — deepest, darkest, 85% cocoa solids bitter chocolate, dangerous and seductive. Despite the warning, I wasn't expecting his voice, and the first notes of 'Hey, Little Songbird' pinned me to my chair, his basso profundo giving my woofers a good workout¹ and making the dust dance on the floor.

Then there's the great New Orleans jazz blast of 'Way Down Hadestown', and the slinky, prohibition number 'Our Lady of the Underground' featuring Persephone as the owner of a speakeasy. I could go on, but you should just go and listen to it yourself. I also found myself thinking again about one of my favourite Jeff Noon books, Pollen. Though it is set in a weird, psychedelic future Manchester, it also features Persephone and Hades (disguised as John Barleycorn) in a skewed and mixed up version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and it somehow fits well with the feel of the album.

¹ Not a euphemism. ↑

The TARDIS bag

I've admitted before that I'm obsessed about bags, and that I'm a total perfectionist about trying to find the One Bag. That Maxpedition bag was good, but it inevitably ended up not being perfect. One of the reasons was that I started walking to work fairly frequently, and so I needed more space to put my packed lunch and a change of t-shirt (without having to carry another bag). I tried using my old Crumpler messenger bag, but that made my back and shoulder hurt when walking with it for long distances, and it was only just big enough for the extra stuff, despite looking like a huge bag. So I swapped to using an old, cheap day rucksack, which was certainly large enough, but the pockets were badly organised so that I was constantly fishing for what I needed, and wasn't waterproof, so I had to mess about with plastic bags. What's more, it felt like an enormous, ungainly bag when I was only carrying a few things, so I was constantly packing and unpacking stuff into smaller bags as necessary.

Since I was about to have a significant birthday, and I have been trying to invest in fewer, better made, longer lasting things, I decided that I would finally spring for a Tom Bihn bag as a kind of 40th birthday present to myself¹.

I had been eyeing the Synapse rucksack for a while, and it seemed like the perfect size and configuration for my needs, as well as being small enough to fit a shorty like me. I couldn't resist the Indigo/Solar colour combination (vivid blue outside and bright yellow inside), as it is almost exactly the same colour combination as the wonderful hyacinth macaws I've seen in Brazil. The shipping cost has also been reduced a bit recently, so it made it more affordable, and I took the plunge, ordering a Side Effect and a few organiser pouches and a sleeve for my netbook at the same time.

Unfortunately, the colour combination was on back order, so I had to wait (impatiently) until they came back into stock again. At last, it shipped, and by a very happy coincidence, the delivery date turned out to be my birthday. When I finally got my hands on the package (several days after my birthday — see below for that sad tale), I was really impressed with the quality of all the products, and the colour of the bag was every bit as beautiful as I had hoped. The yellow lining is actually very practical, as you can see what's in the pockets much easier.

¹ Well, as mid-life crises go, it's certainly cheaper and more practical than a Ferrari. ↑

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New shower

I've written about the odd shower arrangements in our house before, but the previously unthinkable has now happened: we have a new, conventionally operated, functional shower! It has only taken four years, and the rest of our bathroom still leaves a lot to be desired, but we finally overcame the inertia to do something about it.

Recently, it had become even more unreliable, with a dribbly, pathetic flow which was — at best — tepid. We managed to find a good local plumber who was prepared to just fix a mixer shower rather than refit the entire bathroom, which we can't afford at the moment. And then the great day came when it was finished. Mere words cannot express how much I love this new shower: it's controllable from the shower itself, you can turn it on and off and — imagine the luxury! — you can have any temperature you wish. It's not a power shower, but it has a very decent flow, and gives you a gentle pummelling at the same time, which I like a lot.

However, muscle memory is such that both Mr. B and I have found ourselves wandering out of the bathroom (pre- or post-shower) and opening the airing cupboard door to turn the shower on or off, before remembering that we don't need to do that any more.

I have no idea why we left it so long. It didn't cost that much in the end, and it was less than a day of disruption. Considering how much the shower gets used, it's probably the best value for money of anything that we've done to the house. The only trouble now is that the shiny new shower makes the rest of the bathroom look terribly shabby.

Welcome to Lagos

I nearly didn't watch the first episode of the BBC Two documentary, Welcome to Lagos. I saw a bit of the trailer and thought it might be a bit depressing, and while I often watch depressing things if I think I might learn something, I have to be in the right kind of mood to deal with it. But I did watch it and I am incredibly glad about that: Welcome to Lagos was fascinating, intimate, sobering in places, certainly, but uplifting and life-affirming in others.

The first episode focussed on the people living and working on one of the city's rubbish dumps, picking over each new delivery of trash for anything they could reclaim and sell. They collect plastic, fabric, metals, batteries, wires (for the copper) and numerous other items you wouldn't think are worth salvaging, swarming gracefully over the slithering piles and pouncing on treasures with their metal hooks. Many of the workers there also live in shacks on the dump itself (for at least some of the time), and a impromptu town has sprung up to service the workers, with cafés, shops, mosques and barbers interspersed with the housing shacks.

It's a very dangerous environment and — it goes without saying — a dirty one. You can just imagine what the dump smells like in the heat, or when it floods in the rainy season. For that reason, I was fascinated by their clothes. While they were working, their clothes were obviously dusty and dirty, but when they finished they showered (still amid the rubbish) and put on spotless, beautifully pressed clothes. As someone who makes clean clothes look dirty and rumpled about three seconds after putting them on (in a clean environment), I was full of awed respect for how they managed to keep even one set of clothes clean on the dump.

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Google Chrome and gleeBox

I change browsers much more often than I buy new clothes. Whenever a new browser emerges or an older one adds new features, I tend to try it out for a while, but often end up gravitating back to Apple's Safari again. While Safari is far from perfect, the integration with the rest of the system and its stability and speed tends to pull me back to it again. However, I tried out Google's Chrome a month or so ago, and I haven't yet moved back.

Chrome is very fast and so far fairly stable, and it seems to strike a nice balance between being extensible but visually fairly uncluttered. So far the extensions I have installed have proved such a benefit that they have outweighed the disadvantages of less integration with the system.

One extension that I absolutely love and miss a lot when I occasionally open Safari is gleeBox. The best way to describe it is that it's like LaunchBar or Quicksilver for the browser. If you haven't used either of those utilities, it's a command box that you summon by using a one key shortcut ('g' by default). You can then start typing to select any link on the page and launch that link by pressing enter, or you can do a search (using Google or Bing), or you can launch a named bookmark or bookmarklet. That's all tremendously useful, and means that you can navigate sites and open bookmarks without using the mouse, but you can also add various jQuery selectors so that you can select only headings with a particular class, or links with a certain ID. There are lots of examples on gleeBox's TipJar, but one of my favourites is this one to select links to go to the next page, just by entering ?n in the command box.

gleeBox is also available as a Firefox addon, so it's definitely worth having a look at if you use either Chrome or Firefox and prefer using the keyboard.

Easter roundup

I've had a pretty busy few weeks: just before Easter I was Chairing and helping to organise a two day symposium. In a classic bit of unfortunate timing, my 40th birthday was the day before it started, so I was much too preoccupied and stressed to do any celebrating (or drowning of sorrows). As a result, I was determined to take the full week after Easter off, to relax properly and actually celebrate my birthday in my own quiet way.

I've had a lovely week, with a great mixture of lazing around and various walks and visits to National Trust places. We also visited Ikea, and managed a record-setting hat trick of full circuits of their retail structure (Showroom, Marketplace, checkout) before we actually managed to find and/or remember every item we came to get. We managed to leave without filing for divorce, but it was a slightly close run thing. Anyway, that provided the raw material for our new bedside shelves, which I put up myself and am quite proud of. Since then I've also run the cables for the lamps through conduit attached to the wall, so it looks a bit more professional.

When friends and family enquired about ideas for birthday gifts, I asked for money, because I wanted to put it towards a Logitech Squeezebox system for our bedroom. Now that we have all our music centralised on the Mac mini in the living room, it makes sense to be able to listen to it anywhere in the house. I'm not very keen on the new models which have colour touch screens, as I really like the old vacuum fluorescent displays, and think they look much more elegant. If I want to see album art, I can always use iPeng on the iPhone to do that. I'm very fond of the discontinued Squeezebox Classic, having used its predecessor, SliMP3 for many years. We still use that attached to the stereo in the living room, but because it does not have a wireless receiver, we can't use it elsewhere in the house. I had originally planned to pick up a Squeezebox Classic and add a pair of powered speakers. But in the end, I went for a Squeezebox Boom for the bedroom, and I'm very happy with my choice.

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A new Doctor

I watched the first episode of Doctor Who with Matt Smith as the Doctor with a pretty open mind. I loved Christopher Eccleston so much in the role that I was dreading the transition to David Tennant. Tennant very gradually grew on me, but it took a long time, and there were still moments when his over-the-topness got on my nerves a bit. In many ways, I think that having a Doctor (and for that matter, a companion) who is relatively unknown is a good thing, because they bring less baggage from previous roles.

I really enjoyed Matt Smith's version of the Doctor. There was a bit of the inevitable wackiness that is written in to explain the Doctor getting used to his new body and new personality, but he does have the indefinable oddness that, in my opinion, made him a natural fit from the start. It helps that he has a striking and rather odd-looking face. I don't mean that as an insult: on the contrary, I find people of both sexes with conventionally beautiful faces really dull, and I love people with unusual faces. He also seems to have understood the mercurial nature of the Doctor, switching in a (double) heartbeat between deadly seriousness and child-like enthusiasm. I hope that in time they bring out more of the darker side of the Doctor, along with the playfulness, because that was something I thought Eccleston did very well. The Doctor should make you a bit uncomfortable at times, and I think that you should never forget for long that he is not human, whatever his appearance.

Karen Gillan, as companion Amy Pond, was also very good, and the lack of screaming is encouraging¹. The young Amy was absolutely adorable and totally believable. I think that Amy's independence, scepticism and refusal to be too impressed by the Doctor should be a good foil for him. However, Stephen Moffat should be ashamed of his transparent ploy to get the Dads watching: a kissogram Policewoman's outfit for Amy, complete with micro-miniskirt and seamed stockings? Really? I'm relieved to see that she doesn't wear that for the entire series.

The new TARDIS interior is also brilliant, and rather steampunky, I thought, with old typewriters instead of computer keyboards, brass taps, levers and a gorgeous blown-glass thingy² in the middle of the console which goes up and down when the TARDIS operates.

My only complaint about the new series is what they've done with the theme tune. The previous 'remix' was just about OK, but this one is a truly pale and lifeless imitation of Delia Derbyshire's original theme. I recently heard a wonderful documentary on Radio 4 about Delia's work, and it struck me again how futuristic that version sounds even now. The slight roughness and variability that comes from the way she had to slice up tape with a razor blade and stick it back together to create the loops makes it live and breathe in a way that both I Brian Eno love. I don't know why they can't just reinstate her theme — I think it would actually go rather well with Matt Smith's new Doctor.

¹ I'm sure that all of us old enough to remember were scarred for life by Bonnie Langford's Mel. Sorry, I didn't mean to rake over old pain. Just go to your happy place, and hopefully the memory will fade again in time. ↑

² If I was a paid up member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, I'm sure that I would know the proper term for the thingy. Please let me know if you know what it's called. ↑

In which I go a bit barmy over a washing machine

I hate consumer appliances which are made from poor-quality, non-serviceable parts, and which last only a year or two before ending up at the Council tip because they cannot be repaired economically. So I faced the task of buying a new washing machine with a heavy heart. The old one was left in our house by the previous owners, and had never washed, rinsed¹ or spun well since we first encountered it. Then, a couple of weeks ago, the motor went and the drum would no longer turn. It would have cost more to repair than replace, even supposing we could have got the parts: we had to get a new machine.

I had heard that the quality of consumer washing machines had declined sharply in recent years, driven by the big warehouse sellers (Dixons, Comet et al.) pushing cheaper and cheaper machines. That impression was confirmed by a bit of research on the internet. It seems that the majority of machines have parts that are only rated for the equivalent of 18 months to 2 or 3 years of normal use, and when they inevitably pack up, you're faced with a repair bill that can be more than half the cost of entirely replacing the machine.

After a lot of searching, it seemed that if I wanted a machine that would last a decent length of time and would be repairable, I had only a couple of choices: I could buy a Miele, or a brand I hadn't heard of before, ISE. Both were much more expensive than the 'bargain' washers, but they were guaranteed for a good length of time, had quality components, and were energy efficient. However, the problem with Miele (as with many other brands) is that they operate a rather closed system of repairs. Washing machine engineers have to buy a special laptop interface from Miele just to diagnose faults (which is expensive), and spares are also pretty costly.

ISE is a company with a completely different ethos. They make machines with components tested (and guaranteed) for very long life (about 22 years of use, with one wash per day), they distribute only through local, independent repairers (who also undertake any repairs under guarantee), and the spares are easy to get hold of and sold to repairers with no mark-up. That was all very appealing to me, and while the purchase price was going to be rather painful, the fact that I knew we would have no repair bills to pay for 10 years, come what may, meant that it would probably work out cheaper than having to buy or repair a succession of cheaper machines.

We've had our ISE10 for a bit over a week now (so it is a baby in terms of its projected life), but I'm really happy with my decision. I've never got particularly excited over washing machines before, but this is a serious bit of engineering, and I love it to bits. It's incredibly solid and heavy, with a clever design. The drum is housed inside an independently-suspended housing sitting on four shock absorbers inside the outer steel casing. This means that when it is agitating the wash or spinning, the outer case barely moves or vibrates. Our old machine used to leap and buck around as if it was possessed while spinning, and a couple of times we'd feared for our worktop. This one sits there like a rock. The machine is also a very quiet as it has a brushless motor. The loudest part is actually when the water is gushing into the drum. At other times it purrs away so quietly that if you're in another room, you wonder if you've actually remembered to switch it on. It also washes superbly, and our clothes are cleaner than they've been for ages.

It's the kind of machine that inspires confidence that it will just quietly get on with its job, and I have found myself giving it an affectionate little pat when I pass by it. In the end, you get what you pay for, and I'd prefer to spend a bit more money and get something that will do its job for a long time, and be easy to repair when bits wear out. Our Dualit toaster will be 10 years old this September, and is still toasting bread every day like a champ. With any luck, I will still be giving the ISE10 a little pat when Mr. Bsag and I are celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary.

¹ I have — on occasion — found myself literally foaming at the knee while cycling in the rain, because the machine did not rinse out the washing powder properly. ↑

Pop-up shops

If there's a possible bright side to the recession, it's the phenomenon of the pop-up shop: local people take over a vacant shop in an otherwise bland and homogenous shopping centre, and suddenly there's a place where you can buy lovely, quirky, one-off, hand-crafted things made by local people.

If you're in Birmingham over the next few weeks, there are two pop-up shops to visit. First there's the Pavilions Pop-up Arts Shop in the Pavilions Shopping Centre, which will only be open 5 days from 2nd-7th April, and features Mr. Bsag's prints, if you'll forgive the obligatory spousal plug. Then there's the Created in Birmingham shop, which is in the Bullring Shopping Centre. Both are fine places to have a look at interesting things made by talented people.

Who put that there?

I love our cat Bianca dearly, but there are times when she amazes me. She's beautiful, affectionate and incredibly sweet, but sometimes I feel that she's a refined, crustless cucumber sandwich or two short of a picnic.

Take yesterday, as an example. I was watching her grooming, and she was doing that graceful, flexible cat thing, where they hoist a rear leg skywards while they groom what I will tactfully refer to as their 'hard to reach regions'. She heard a noise downstairs and abruptly stopped and turned her head mid-groom, her leg still in the air. After satisfying herself that the noise did not mean either food or a possible play-fight with Bella, she turned her head back, knocking it on her raised leg. She actually jumped slightly, startled by her own leg. After a second or two looking at it in a baffled and mildly alarmed way, she appeared to remember that a) it was her own leg, and b) she was in the middle of grooming, and carried on with the task.

Well-connected applications

In a brief exchange with Steve Hodgson (@BestofTimes) on Twitter, I recommended TextSoap — a brilliant utility for munging and cleaning up text in a multitude of different ways. It's not a very glamorous application, and it seems pricey until you actually use it intensively. I've had it a while now, and on most days I use it once or twice, but it really pays its keep when I have big tasks that require a lot of text manipulation.

Yesterday I had to copy a lot of information from PDF files and emails and enter it into forms on a website, many (many) times over. Copying from PDFs resulted in odd problems with the text like line breaks instead of spaces between words, orphaned hyphenation and so forth. Since the forms required strictly ASCII text, I also had to convert curly quotes to straight quotes and accented characters to LaTeX format accents.

That would all have been a huge chore, but for TextSoap. It has a variety of built-in 'cleaners' (for example, straighten or smarten quotes), but you can also build your own cleaning components using regular expressions, and you can chain together the existing cleaners to form custom workflows. So cleaning the text was only a case of a making a few clicks.

However, TextSoap doesn't really do anything you couldn't do with a text editor and good knowledge of regular expressions and scripting languages (it has a 'convert to Markdown' cleaner, for example), albeit that it packages those functions up in a user-friendly way. The real beauty and utility lies in how easy TextSoap makes it to access those functions. You can use the Services menu (which has incidentally become a lot more powerful with Snow Leopard), which also means that you can assign global keyboard shortcuts to your most-used cleaners. You can use the contextual menu or even Automator workflows, and there are specific plugins for text editors like BBEdit. So whichever application you are in (provided it supports Services and/or Applescript), you have easy access to the cleaners.

That — it seems to me — is one of the most powerful things about Mac OS X as a platform, and the thing I miss most when I use other platforms. There is standardisation of a lot of important features¹, and a lot of different technologies that allow you to connect your applications together in useful ways that save time and effort.

¹ For example, I love Linux dearly, but it drives me absolutely crazy that there's no standard keyboard shortcut to quit an application. ↑

Exploding Head Syndrome

Every now and again, while wandering around on the internet, you come across the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask. This happened to me the other day, when I stumbled on this passage:

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

My first thought was, "Oh, so that's a real thing, not just some weird and random peculiarity of my own." My second was, "And it has a really cool name: Exploding Head Syndrome. I have Exploding Head Syndrome."

The article explains the what, but not the why, probably because no-one knows what causes it or what the mechanisms involved are. There are many comments by readers on that page, most saying that they have experienced it, but never knew what it was, just like me. However, many were also frightened by it and thought it might be some dire harbinger of serious illness. For some reason (and for the life of me, I can't think why) it never crossed my mind that it might be a symptom of something serious. It didn't hurt, I didn't have any after-effects from it, and otherwise I felt fine: it was just my head going bang for some mysterious reason of its own.

In fact, it never really frightened me that much, though of course it does jolt you awake suddenly when it happens. Mine seem to happen when I'm just on the point of going to sleep, so perhaps it's clearer to me that it's not a real sound, but something inside my head. My sounds also vary a fair bit and are rather inventive, so it often makes me smile. For example, I get the standard bangs and crashes, but also a sound like a grand piano falling on the floor from a great height, and another that sounds very like the Mac alert sound 'Sosumi', but at a deeper pitch. I quite like the fact that I have my own alert sounds, even if they do wake me up.

Teaching the intangible

I've been really enjoying Monty Don's new series, Mastercrafts, about people learning rural crafts. Part of my enjoyment can be explained by my inordinate fondness for Monty Don, but mostly it's because I love watching people skilled in their craft do their work.

The programme uses the familiar 'they have only 6 weeks to compete to be the best at X' format, which seems to be obligatory for any kind of reality show these days, but it isn't too obnoxious. Winning isn't the only goal for those participating, and they can all progress further with the skills they have learned when the show is over.

What fascinates me is the difficulty of actually teaching many of the crucial skills for these traditional crafts. In the programme on thatching, for example, they were told that a vital part of building a durable, watertight roof is to make sure that the bundles of longstraw (called 'yealms') are properly blended in with one another and the rows offset, so that there are no gaps or channels for the rain to enlarge. That sounds straightforward enough, but to a novice — certainly to me, watching the programme — there appears to be no obvious visible difference between a good and bad piece of thatch. It seems to be something that you learn very gradually by developing a 'feel' for the subtleties of the materials and the ways in which they interact.

Another example in the same programme was the technique for bending hazel rods, sharpened at each end, into 'staples' with which to pin the yealms to the roof. The tutors demonstrated how to bend and twist the rods in the middle, with a flick of the wrist to cause the middle to bend rather than break. However, it was clear from how difficult the participants found this process that there was a definite 'knack' to it, that was very difficult to teach directly. The tutors could model the necessary process and give them guidance about what they should pay attention to, but in the end, they had to learn the precise action required themselves.

I think that many traditional crafts require these kinds of skills that are difficult to teach quickly, which is probably why apprenticeships were traditionally so long. However, as someone who also teaches as part of my living, I can recognise similarities with some of the skills required to be a good scientist. For example, grammatical rules are fairly straightforward to teach, but trying to guide students in how to properly structure their writing, write clear, logical, flowing sentences and so forth is quite difficult to do. You can give tips, point out good and bad examples, and suggest ways in which they can improve, but in the end, they need to develop their own 'feel' for what makes a good piece of scientific writing.

Listen yourself warm

I've had a request from James. He enjoyed my snowy photo from a couple of weeks ago, but it's making him feel cold. He's had enough of the winter and wondered if I could post some 'summery music' to warm things up a bit. Well James, your wish is my command. It's a great idea, and I've had a blast putting together a summery/warm playlist this morning.

Rather than risk the authorities taking me away for posting tracks without permission, I thought a Spotify playlist might be the safest bet, so I hope that the majority of you have access to Spotify. If not, you should be able to hunt down the tracks elsewhere. I present — with great pleasure — the Summer Heat playlist.

1. Ma'Africa - Mahotella Queens and Ulali (from 1 Giant Leap). This had to be the first choice, as it warmed me up very effectively on a snowy walk recently. It's a great, bouncy, sunny track, which will put a spring in your step.
2. Night Scented Stock - Kate Bush (from Never For Ever). It's a short, sweet gem of a song, and other than the title, it isn't obviously summery. But somehow I always think of a hot, midsummer night in a secret, moonlit garden when I listen to this. YMMV.
3. Psychedelic Shack - The Temptations (from Psychedlic Shack). Party music! You will be dancing by the end of it (or at least jigging in your seat) and that will warm you up.
4. Firefly - Michael Franti (from Songs from the Front Porch). I find Michael Franti's voice wonderfully warm, and the atmosphere of this song just says warm summer night to me.
5. Plastic Factory - Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (from Safe As Milk). What would a playlist be without Beefheart? This is another that might not scream summer to everyone, but for me it makes me think of driving off on holiday, windows down, yelling the line "Factory's no place for me, Boss Man leave me be!" at the top of my voice while drumming on the steering wheel. It also has a lovely, dirty, stomping quality to it that somehow says summer freedom to me.
6. Marieta - Ibrahim Ferrer (from Buena Vista Social Club presents Ibrahim Ferrer). A deliciously lively, infectiously upbeat track. In contrast to Plastic Factory, if listening to this doesn't immediately conjure up images of hot, Cuban nights, dancing your flip-flops off in a sweaty, smoky club, you have a faulty imagination. I particularly love the bit near the end where it all kicks off.
7. Mustt Mustt - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (from Mustt Mustt). I could have chosen any of the Sufi master's music, but even though this is one of the most well known of his works, I really love it. Nusrat's voice a source of warmth of its own, and that's reason enough to include it.
8. Nocturn - Kate Bush (from Aerial). The song is actually about skinny dipping in the sea on a midsummer night, so it's very appropriate. Plus, it's a great song, and her voice has the same warmth inducing properties as Nusrat's.
9. Summerfield Avenue - Chris Wood (from Trespasser). This makes me remember playing in the garden in the summer when I was a kid and splashing about it the paddling pool.
10. Sankofa - Hypnotic Brass Ensemble (from Hypnotic Brass Ensemble). Brass — I have decided — is inherently summery, and this is just the right music for sitting in the sun and drinking a beer or two.
11. Sweet Home Alabama - Lynyrd Skynyrd (from A Retrospective). More, 'going away on holiday in a carefree mood' music. Also, classic track.
12. One Day Like This - Elbow (from The Seldom Seen Kid). This is one of those songs which is in danger of over-exposure, because it seems to be used as background music to just about every TV programme. However, it's a lovely song — uplifting, life-affirming and sunny.
13. Bonus track! Sexual Healing - Kate Bush (B side of King of the Mountain). I had absolutely no idea that Kate had covered Sexual Healing until I found it by chance on Spotify. It's hard to compete with the Marvin Gaye original, but this is pretty special. I'm including it because a) it's Valentine's Day and b) if this doesn't warm you up, nothing will!

Enjoy.

On the ball

Last week, our beloved, elderly Dyson vacuum cleaner finally packed up. We've had it about 12 years, so it has done well, but has been getting gradually more decrepit. We had the power supply replaced a couple of years ago, but the problem this time was a burnt-out motor. It could be fixed, but with such an old unit, it wasn't really cost effective.

We're lucky to have an excellent, independently owned vacuum shop fairly near us (Midland Vac), which has a great range of Dyson units, so we visited at the weekend to try to decide on a model. After a lot of indecision, literal weighing up, and pushing units speculatively around the shop floor like a Freddie Mercury tribute act¹, we settled on the Dyson DC24. It's one of the models which uses a ball rather than wheels, and it's really tiny. Compared to our old clunker, it feels incredibly light, which makes you much more inclined to lug it upstairs to do the vacuuming.

We worried slightly that it might be too small, but as soon as we tried it out — and saw the proper colour and texture of our carpet for the first time in ages — we realised that it's a very capable machine. They have improved the cyclone mechanism a lot in the years since our old model was made, and even though the new one has a smaller motor, it develops much greater suction. It's also great fun. The ball makes it very manoeuvrable, and you can sweep and glide around the furniture, making "neeyoww" noises like a racing motorbike going into a corner. Well, you can if you like — the noises are optional.

I think people either love Dyson products, or they think they are overpriced and over-engineered. I'm in the former camp, and I also like the fact that they are readily repairable, and tend to last a long time. I also get unreasonably excited whenever I find an Airblade in a bathroom. No matter how many times I use one, I still think that it's tantamount to magic.

¹ No mini skirts or pink earrings, though. ↑

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