a Grimsvötn's gonna fall

I've been sniffing the air to try to detect this year's Icelandic volcano dust heading my way.

Last year's one did create a sort of brown smear in the air but at the moment it's all clear blue up above.

We do already get those mystery days when the car has a sudden layer of glittery dust on it, although I usually put it down to sand storms in a distant desert.

And I'd have thought that planes flying around in Arizona or parts of the Middle East or Africa would also have to filter away various kinds of dust particle?

I suppose its like the British railways with 'wrong kind of snow', where this would be 'wrong kind of grit'?

Anyway, now we've got the Cobra committee deciding what to do as the days tick nervously towards a long weekend when I intend to use my passport.

Well on Dylan's birthday Grimsvötn's 'grim waters' do indeed become a hard rain that's gonna fall.

Quaglino's

We found ourselves in St James at Quaglino's. There's a few traditional London haunts that one goes back to like le Gavroche any time, Langham's for lunch and Quag's in the evening.

All three have secrets for a Londoner, so when we booked Quag's we decided to opt for the Champagne Menu.

This may sound counter-intuitive but actually the whole three courses with bubbly can be enjoyed for a very reasonable all-inclusive amount.

Quaglino's is something of a London institution, tucked away just around the corner from the Ritz and other bits of the high-life.

Along the years its had updates and revisions but continues to feature the upstairs bar, complete with a jazz band from quite early in the evening, and then down the marble sweeping staircase to the buzzy restaurant.

The food is brasserie style and well-prepared. There's plenty of waiters around and good attention although my blur-vision picture above may not do it much justice. And that was just on the berry smash fruit cocktail.

The team style service worked well and we had an enjoyable evening. It was obvious that the people around us were also enjoying themselves and overall there was that pleasant uplifted happy-vibe from the tables.

A place to be a part of the scene and to watch others similarly engaged.

Cheers.

flare path

After my Isle of Wight post referencing Sienna Miller at Steephill Cove, the least we could do was return the favour and visit her in her current West-End show at the Haymarket.

It's Terence Rattigan's wartime story of a Bomber Command airbase in Lincolnshire and the to-ings and fro-ings based in the adjacent hotel. Rattigan himself was a tail-gunner on bombers, so there's some direct realism to parts of the plotline as well as the central story of the actress played by Sienna.

The main plot is a love triangle handled with 1940's embarrassed manners and massive use of understatement, except for moments when the stress of bottled up emotions are allowed to run riot.

We get a spectrum of English class portrayed within the confines of the hotel suite with riotous off-stage bawdiness in the adjacent lounge bar.

The story's backdrop revolves around the air-crew spending time in the hotel between missions. To the front is the playing out of the scenes between Sienna, her movie-star lover and her bomber pilot husband from a whirlwind wartime romance.

Throw in a perilous overnight mission and there's a full and engaging story for the characters.

A very enjoyable production, a warm-hearted ending and some insights into a very different world of some 70 years ago.

all watched over by machines of loving grace

There's a show on during the week about the rise of the machines. Adam Curtis splices together footage and commentary to build a picture of global cybernetics.

I've only seen the trailer, but I know the pre-internet 60's Brautigan poem.

I've always liked the idea of quiet technology - "It just works" - rather than "edit the Registry, touch your nose and re-boot three times/anyone know how to get a picture?" type technology.

But there's a downside to the stillness too. More integration means the machines start to put things together. Miles and miles of files, Links, Connections, Co-incidences. This could be good, but the machine isn't judgemental.

That's where the power and the money switch in.

postcards from the cove

Today was a 'good breakfast' day. Weekday breakfasts are usually hurried and even when I was away in a hotel for part of this week it was still improvisation over style.

So I was in mid-preparation when a newspaper arrived. It fell open in the travel section and lo and behold, there was a full page picture of Steephill Cove.

It's a small beach area we go to on the Isle of Wight and indeed were there a few weeks ago (over the Royal Wedding weekend - I even posted a picture of the view).

You really need to know about it and there isn't really a proper access for vehicles, so it can be kind of secluded.

The little boathouse in the picture is a restaurant - mainly seafood - and rather a sought after spot. The cafe next door serves a decent cuppa and ice cream too.

Steephill is around a twenty minute dawdle along the collapsing cliff edge from Ventnor, which is a kind of rashbre southern. And don't look too closely at neighbours around the Cove. They could include Sienna Miller, Robert Pattinson and Kate Moss.

Here's an aerial shot from our balcony in Ventnor, past the Spyglass Inn and showing the route to Steephill. You can just see the Cove's white Lighthouse structure in the background.

Yikes - It feels as if I'm sending Postcards...

I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow

Watching the old Scorsese documentary of Bob Dylan on playback late in the evening.

It's Dylan's 70th birthday on Tuesday and it was interesting to see the footage of him right back at the beginning.

It's a birthday month around rashbre central too, with new beginnings in the extended family. Emma May is a pretty addition at the current age of zero.

And Saturday we're celebrating Julie's birthday whilst noting card shops doing brisk business for others having birthdays at plus or minus a couple of days from now.

The Dylan documentary starts with observations of those already performing and the way that Dylan picked up his trade. Then the Bleecker Street set commenting on Dylan carrying forward the message from the beat generation. Distilling ideas by observation, literally how the chords were formed and the music plucked. Even I watched his thumb making chords on the E -string.

A little different now, with the virtualisation of much culture for many. There's plenty of tabs of 'e-everything' on Safari, but eMusic, eBooks and eThought are not as direct as Performance.

swagger

The screeching and screeing from the garden was particularly loud this evening as a commotion of newbie starlings more or less tumbled from the bush where they've been keeping a nest.

The birds are already the same size as their parents although they'll use maximum volume to get fed without doing any work themselves.

London is usually associated with pigeons which I regard as the bird for the tourists. A little bit slow and gawking but well suited to photo opportunities.

By comparison the starlings always fly around like formation jet fighters and have a commuter-like sense of purpose.

They hit the ground with a swagger and get right on with whatever they're doing.

directors cut

It will be a while before I have listened to all of the new material from Kate Bush, who has just released an album after a many year gap.

It appears to be re-cuts of a number of her earlier songs plus re-designs of a couple of well known albums.

It's a tricky one to decide whether the original sounds - many of which are quite haunting and instantly memorable - work well in a sudden album makeover.

With live bands its easier, because the variants get played in concerts and the good ones rise to the surface.

I hope there will be some net new material to follow and maybe a tour to try some of it in front of us?

With other artists performing some of Kate's tracks and some listeners not knowing the originals, the press picture is quite apposite. The top picture is Sergei Eisenstein editing 'October' back in 1928.

strange powers

I'm not certain that we needed any more Strange Powers around here but some have arrived anyway.

This is the little DVD from Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, which included some of us chipping in a few dollars towards the project - a bit like that thing with naked wines where you buy the wine when it's still on the vine.

Only this is music.

the sun pours down like honey
the moon runs down like mercury
the stars fall down like money
and you come down to me

and i can't sleep
cause you got strange powers
you’re in my dreams
strange powers

a meeting near scenery

My mid-evening trip to Gloucester worked fine and meant I would be 'in position' for the next morning.

The hotel was in an industrial area and the bar seemed to be filled with people attending a business conference. Unlike my hotel last week, there were no obvious signs of what they were discussing and I decided anyway to head for my room.

My blackberry was flashing and beeping the usual stream of requests, some of which required me to log-on properly to my laptop and beam out various documents. It was already late so I left this admin for the morning.

The morning alarm clock ping saw me configuring the wi-fi to send out documents to Germany and Holland. I was thinking that the 'in room coffee-making' tasted so much better with the milk I'd bought in the nearby superstore the night before.

Then onward to meet colleagues, past a large room seething with delegates for the mystery conference.

My own little team found a small round table to huddle ahead of our unrelated session in a rather more modest room.

By mid-afternoon we were finished and I took the scenic route back, even stopping for a stroll in the hilly bit around Birdlip.

normal day at rashbre central

A pretty normal start today, although I seem to have got distracted at some point, judging by how far behind schedule I'm running at the moment.

There's been early morning texts of good news, noisy visitors and the later discovery that the land-line phone has been broken since last week. Add sitting in front of a Windows screen doing tappy-tappy things.

I've decided to get out of town tonight and so I'm heading for a hotel somewhere around Gloucester before tomorrow's meetings.

at the end of the universe

I spent Saturday evening watching television, right from the excellent tea-time frolics of Doctor Who all the way through to the alien adventures of Eurovision.

One of the shows was set in a kind of space station at the end of the universe. It resembled a late 20th Century dance club. The other show moved it on into something a little more 21st Century.

In the case of Doctor Who, there were plenty of references to other space and sci-fi series in the script as well as self references to old-school Doctor Who. Even a retro control room.

Pleasingly, the characters had a kind of Amanda Palmer meets Danger Ensemble look about them. Not surprising with Neil Gaiman as the writer of the episode.

Gaiman took the Doctor to a Neverwhere outside of the Universe. The Doctor even commented that it was somewhere he'd never been, which is fairly unusual nowadays.

It gave a chance for the plot to move up a level, presumably breaking through a few sealed doors along the way. Once a new piece of fundamental Who-history gets written there is no turning back because the fan-base will have it recorded for all time.

So the Star Whale type construct of riding on a bubble on the edge of the Universe permitted the humanisation of a slightly delirious TARDIS. She (The TARDIS, excellently played by Suranne Jones) then had to rapidly make up for 'lost time' whilst hurling some great one-liners into the script. She simultaneously channeled Queenie from Blackadder whilst stating "Biting's like kissing only with a winner."

And we got a good backstory about the theft by the TARDIS of the Doctor "Back in the Day". I'm a great believer in Time stopping everything happening at once, so it's probably fortunate that most of this happened outside of the main Universe.

That way we didn't all suffer from a catastrophe that would create tears before bedtime. Although, it has to be said that the end of the episode created a tear-jerking morph of TARDIS back to being the soul of the machine.

The tears in the following programme were somewhat different as we watched the transition of Europop to европоп.

Yes, the Russian bloc have it.

My own more trippy tastes were towards Moldova's Zdob şi Zdub or even the Irish Jedward entry, both of which featured Pop, strange headgear and whirly lights. Instead, after hours of sonics and two many Screwdrivers, we had a largely forgettable win from that epicentre of pop culture Azerbaijan. At least they dressed up.

I decided to clear my mind of all of this today and took out on my bicycle, finding myself in a Forest by a River. There was a Pond as well.

I may need help.