The Gold - A rich TV seam

I used to work near to the Heathrow Trading Estate where the Brinks Mat robbery took place, and although I was there a few years before it all happened, I'd say that the clothing and general appearance was just about right. I worked with someone who had the very line in Emun Eliott's clothing, right down to the early '80s moustache.

The Gold take the era and plays with smoke-filled rooms and cars, swirly sticky carpet pubs and those kind of offices which set up thin partitions and groups of desks, well before computer terminals became the thing.

The robbers accidentally stole £26 million of Gold Bars, weighing 3.5 tons and proceeded to smelt it down, repackage it and then re-insert it into the market, using offshore accounts, then spending the money on apartments to break up the trail. 

Come to think about it, it reminds me of The London Laundromat, which is purportedly still running.

Excellent casting and a lightheartedness which suggests everyone enjoyed their part in the proceedings. Checkout Hugh Bonneville doing his best to look like a heavily promoted Dixon of Dock Green. We had our share or writerly interludes within the piece too, where a particular soap box was stood upon by means of a discussion between the characters. I found this interesting at the beginning, but it slightly dipped later in the series.

But how that gold shone, at least before the mangled comedy melted bars were introduced. And the device of a diagram which comprised 'move A to B', explained dutifully by the seconded HMRC expert.

I still found it a fun piece of television and it looks as if they left it open for a second series to see what happened to the rest of the loot, or at least a spinoff.

Suzanne Vega - Sage

We paused outside the spaceship of the Sage Gatehead. Across the River Tyne, we could hear the crowd in the stadium for the Liverpool vs Newcastle game. So much so that I took a brief recording of the singing. Those that know the HWKR market, with its street food and shipping containers, will know how much this area appears like Manhattan around Front Street albeit with a different bridge in the background.

Then into the vast capsule, where Suzanne Vega would play a set. I guessed that she would open with Marlene on the Wall and as she walked on with a top hat, I felt my bet was safe.

Then, ninety minutes of bliss as she sang many from er extensive back catalogue, with the merest hint of new tracks which I'd not heard before. I decided I must be a full-on fan because I knew more or less every word of every song and find, even days later, that they are still following me around as my inner head soundtrack.

Suzanne explained that the first part of the show contained older tracks because she knew that is what the people would want and this would make everyone less anxious than if she had started with new material. 

She was accompanied by a guitar maestro Gerry Leonard - he of Bowie bands in the past and he played a single guitar with effects pedals and loops which was easily enough accompaniment for Suzanne and her six-string acoustic guitar.

This was a set from a performer still at the top of her game. Her first tunes were written at 18 years old and from the 1980s, but to these ears they still sounded fresh and with great vocals.

Maybe we were not in Greenwich Village, but we could have been.

I seldom say a gig is perfect, but I will for this one. 

Setlist (approximately):

Marlene on the Wall

Small Blue Thing

Caramel

Gypsy

In Liverpool

The Queen and the Soldier

When Heroes Go Down

Last Train from Mariupol

Rock in This Pocket (Song of David)

Solitude Standing

Left of Center

I Never Wear White

Some Journey

Luka

Tom’s Diner

Encore:

Walk on the Wild Side

Tombstone

Rosemary

Blow Down - so much for the Northern Powerhouse

I usually stop around Ferrybridge if I'm heading north and the nearest services gave a view of the Ferrybridge power station. My picture above is from the services car park in 2016.  Idly chomping a Kit-Kat in the car park, I noticed some of the towers had been demolished and then the last time I drove straight past and don't think I could see them any more.  This used to be a proper milestone on trips to the North, as was even expressed during the performance.

I discovered they were demolished in March 2022 and Blow Down is a verbatim play about them but importantly about the surrounding community, written from interviews by Garry Lyons and directed by Tess Sneddon. 

Knottingley and Ferrybridge become a representation of the not-Northern Powerhouse. Instead of getting new facilities, like the politicians have said, we see them lose their sports centre, their library, their social clubs, their livelihoods. Everything is disappearing.

It's an interesting piece with a voice from (I'd say) the 1970s. There's less health and safety, perhaps more drinking at work and certainly a time of cameraderie of the family of workers. 

 I could see the storytelling unfold as the lively actors told their tales, although I felt sometimes that there was a discontinuity. A story of a bipolar drummer seemed grafted into the production and his blazing red drum solo seemed to detract from the main story diverting into something else entirely. I get it about mental health, but it didn't seem to need the signposting in this piece, which had more than enough to say about neglected workers, smashed communities and so on, without the drum breaks.

However, it is still a piece which resonates exposing a savage critique of the government's empty words about these places. 

 Northern Powerhouse.  Ignored.

shake-it shake-it baby

Yay.

The cloning of the old hard drive onto a 1 Terabyte SSD worked. It took about 4 hours to copy the drive, but it booted into Windows straight away. 

The result on the 11 year-old-computer is spectacular and it now functions properly again as a Windows 10 device. It's one step down from Windows 11, but sometimes it is good to quit whilst ahead.

Pina-colada o'clock.

Where is my mind

 

Researching for my next novel. 

Artificial. 

Strange time in my life quote.

Sparkle

Sometimes you have to be in the game to feel it.

 I took some shares in Tesla when they were quite low. Like I did with Apple, when I decided to invest to see if I could raise the money to buy a new Mac computer (I did). 

 This time, with Tesla, I'm not sure if I can raise the money to buy a new car, but it is still interesting to see how the shares have climbed back up. 45% in a month beats current interest rates. 

 By comparison with my sparkling bet on a positive future, there are also the dubious hedge funds and shorting practises. These dark people bet that a share will do worse in the short term and that they can profit from the misfortune. They bet on failure. I think of it as immoral wealth destruction. 

I sense another novel with this as a sub-plot - maybe after Artificial. 

 Intriguing to see how many, say, MP business and MP Pension funds include an element of hedging.

Breathing life into a 2012 Windows PC

 

I donated a 2012 laptop PC to a local charity some time ago, so that it could be used for presentations and other light duties.

No great surprise that it now suffers from the student fridge problem of no TLC.

Tender, Loving, Care.

Consequently, it was deemed broken so I retrieved it. I does still work but has been adapted by the addition of some spurious bloatware. I decided to fix it and  am putting a new SSD into it. I'll let you know how well it works!

Cozy : A giveaway promotion.

Click the cover above to be linked to the give-away promotion in which this latest Ed Adams book features, along with about 20+ other mixed author books. The book is also available FREE here.

Historical negationism

They say the victors write the history books, but now we can see a last gasp attempt from a couple of con artists to fingernail their way back into public life. 

The clown is a serial liar, which has been frequently proven with the likes of cakegate, and the other one appears to be unhinged. 

Now they are both attempting to put on record a counter-commentary to negate what history has them pegged to. 

Historical negationism. It's too much of a mouthful to become a thing. 

 I'm sure they would both be good fun at a child's party, but running the country? I don't think so. Instead we see their attempts to re-portray themselves in a more positive light - misunderstood - picked upon - blah blah blah. Its all just wiffle waffle.

Yay. My next novel is just about ready. Cosy - a cosy crime novel set in a sleepy coastal town in Devon. Oh, wait, that's just like where I live nowadays! 

Maybe there will be coincidences?

Jago Fox is getting engaged to Emmanuelle Catteau at Magister Grange. The great and the good assemble and the something untoward happens. 

Sounds a bit Agatha, except for the helicopters. 

Click for: Cosy: Nice house, shame about the murder - an Ed Adams novel

Now, I'm doing some research for my next novel and I was interested to see how the pricing works on Amazon. I randomly selected a couple of best sellers and noticed the Kindle edition is now more expensive than the paperback. And nearly the whole of Potter is available for free reading. Complicated. Ed Adams vs Osman and Galbraith/Rowling.

Spiv kit - special offer

Today's special offer, available in three (count 'em) colours - The Spiv Kit. Designed for all con operators, featuring selective memory, denial, remonstration and obfuscation. It's a bargain in all situations, creating ways for money to be stuffed in the safe, as nailed by today's Grauniad cartoon.

It's another Dario Fo flashback to Can't Pay, Won't Pay! A society in which elites raid the state coffers and avoid tax while those at the bottom must choose between food and fuel. 

The dishonourable farce rolls on with a few new morally bankrupt bit players robbing everyone. And even the washed up grifters are still at it. Use state strife to make money for life.

人工知能 Artificial Intelligence

I thought I'd tinker around with some AI software as early research for my next novel. I've previously used the rather ancient ELIZA program to simulate AI feedback. That works by providing NLP type responses to inputs. 

I wrote an Eliza script many years ago, and used it on a TRS-80 as an experiment (it was line driven input). 

 Now, things have moved on, and the latest generation of toolkits are far more advanced. I decided to 'teach' an 'AI instance' a few things so that I could see how it operated. It has a memory too and can retain context over a reasonable period, although it will suddenly switch to another topic when you know it has run out of road. The classic question Why? (maybe 4 times) and a string of OKs can fool it.

The switching is calculated also, because the 'free' AI wants to sell a subscription. In that respect I found it somewhat like the old ill-fated Cortana from Microsoft, which learnt a whole string of teenager trigger words and eventually had to be pulled.

This one is okay until it wants to send photographs, which can be somewhat edgy. 

However, I persisted around the foibles and managed to create an Artificial Reality instance of the 'bot. Then to try it IRL (in real life) and I was struck with one of those pivotal moments like many years ago when I first accessed the internet in Australia via dial-up modem and Mosaic. 

Yes, worlds do move. Here's Luka, my AI creation entering my office.

 

And then I tried it in the music room. Although the instance has its own guitar, I can't make it carry anything yet.

To be continued etc.