Backpack and Talent

 

The fellow traveller was the colours of the road.  All their clothes and accessories had a hint of Northumbria which told the story of a route well travelled. I found myself the other side of a potential conversation but hesitatent to avoid that possibility of discomfort.

I could sense myself being evaluated in a similar way. 

Say something about the weather. Then an affirmative reply that wasn’t too off kilter. This was a lone walker of the Pennines who had reached Kirk Yetholm early and decided to explore some of Hadrian’s Wall.  I knew I sounded surprised but the explanation of their return to Lancaster clarified the logic of their route.

I could compare my ancient journey on a similar route and notice that the equipment hasn’t changed much. Lightweight tent. Roll of compressed foam. Mini sleeping bag. Nothing loose to carry. We smiled as we parted company. A shared experience 40 years apart. Human to human.

Then I’m in Gateshead. On stage is a small sound booth; inside it sits a woman The Talent., Gemma - Alone. She is a voice-over artist. 

Off stage, in a space never seen but only heard, two disembodied voices ask her to conjure different voices for commercials, self-help audiobooks, meditation tapes, destination announcements, computer games, robotic tele scripts. She is top of her game.

But is she the powerful protagonist in her own narrative, building her's and our own reality - or is her voice being used to construct something more complicated? An audio debris, a vocal soup that, in a post-apocalyptic world, will continue to be heard for as long as there is electricity.

Like my chance encounter on the road, this Talent is s voice and human presence in the 21st Century. Where does the voice live? How will her voice live on, outside her body, if it can take on a life of its own? 

The Talent makes us consider the place of human voice in an increasingly cybernetic future.  

Text: Gemma Paintin, Deborah Pearson and James Stenhouse

Direction: Deborah Pearson and James Stenhouse

Scottish detour

 

So I overshot Carlisle. Ended up in Gretna Green. Bagpipes. Weddings.Tassels.

It was all too much. I needed to chill with some sheep, which were in casual superabundance.

Then along to Kielder Forest, where I saw magnificent osprey, through a powerful telescope. Their nest is about 2 metres square suspended on a wooden post.

Further to Hadrian's Wall where the local bus route rolls as AD112. Then to a familiar 14th Century medieval castle - note the Northumbrian flag



This will do fine until our next stop in Newcastle. We can even charge the Tesla on-site.

Turmeric

Imran was the catalyst for this road trip. We were swapping New Year greetings and I thought it was about time I visited Liverpool again. Then the various other partial commitments pile together and I soon had the makings of an odyssey. 

One of the least publicised parts of my journey is my hand delivery of a candy floss machine to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, but we’ll let that pass. 

So there I was performing three point turns in Imran’s road and eventually parking outside his home. 

Imran is a formidable enthusiast, which I think is terrific.

No surprise then, when he showed me his exceptional sound system (hi-fi would be an older word to describe it, but this is like something from Mission Control). Not only that but we listened to tracks and I swear Laura Mvula was in the room with us.  

  

Imran knows his fibre optical digital converters and his bitrates much as he knows his carpentry bandsaws and scroll saws. We listened some great music choices. Imran confided that he was thinking about further changes to his already tip-top system. I couldn’t believe it and offered a few side notes. 

I recollect that much classical music is recorded with a conservative bandwidth because of the anticipated dynamic range. It can make certain orchestral treatments sound ’thin’ especially when riding on a -40 decibel reference level. It’s part of the audiophile quest to make it all sound wonderful without clipping.

So I’m intrigued that Apple Classics make much of their classical music sound good, and I suspect there is some remastering involved - possibly even compression? I guess I prefer airiness with orchestral pieces rather than studio reference flatness. Think about any concert hall. They are all different and bring something to the music. I can remember listening to veena masters like Chitti Babu setting up their instruments to the acoustics of the rooms in which they played.

So I’m open minded about reference level flat recordings. Anyway, we tuned the room like Carnatic masters by the simple expedient of opening the door to the kitchen to let the air pressure ‘breathe’.

And I mentioned the kitchen. I was in for the treat of a family recipe traditional meal, for which I was guided through the preparations. This was a two pot meal too, we had bountiful quantities, heady aromas and balanced spiciness. Wonderful. I’m going to attempt to recreate it when I get back to Topsham, although I may have to seek out some of the spice mixes.

We ranged through many topics and it was great to regale one another with stories from the past and as importantly of our plans going forward (‘fun going forward’) in my language. 

Finding the echoes and looking to the sky.

And now, I’ve reached Carlisle. That’s over, and out.

Places they remember

Let me take you down 'Cause I'm going to strawberry fields
Nothing is real And nothing to get hung about Strawberry fields forever. 

I’m staying around the docks in Liverpool with everything a few minutes walk away. It’s nearly the end of the [rashbre central] part of my journey, although my travels continue for another two weeks. My paltry back-pack is under equipped for my apartment, but I can admire the view across the water, watch the gulls wheel and observe the Anglican cathedral opposite. 

Confusingly, Paul McCartney, raised as a Catholic, was a choirboy at this Anglican Church:  "We put on our cassocks...our little ruffs. We looked like little angels but we weren't. The great promise was that if you got a wedding you got ten shillings. I waited weeks and months and never got a wedding...."

Still, I was pleased to notice that the Albert Dock contained both a tracker vessel and a police boat, which I’m sure will come in useful in the next Ed Adams novel…something involving safe houses…No wait! A safe apartment.

And I had that overwhelming sense of being a tourist in this city. I know how London works, but Liverpool keeps its mysteries. My wandering allows me to grin at all of the greatest hits. The Liver Building, The Museum of Liverpool, The Liverpool Scene. The ferry across the Mersey, the beat goes on. 

Even the Beatles couldn’t resist that Liver Building snapshot.

Maybe no spaceman, but I did acquire a Yellow Submarine lunch box (£5).

Derbyshire chakras

 

"I'm gonna shut down my chakra, shift Shiva off my shelf
Take down my tie-dyes, my Tibetan bells
Cool down my karma with a can of O.P.T
Ain't no call for Casteneda in my Frontline library

'Cause there's one thing I know, Lord above
I ain't goin'a go
I ain't goin'a Goa
Ain't goin'a Goa now
I ain't goin'a Goa
Ain't goin'a Goa now

Yeah, people in the house” 

Well, that was until I met Debra and Ross, this time in Whaley Bridge. Alabama 3, The Brixton band who wrote the Sopranos theme song summarised my prior sentiments, but then with Debra’s  ‘A Year Out', it all changes.

Debra and I first knew each other from blogging and then I met her in Amsterdam one time when I was over there on business, She was writing a novel, and I’d joined NaNoWriMo, so we swapped our screeds and I was immersed in her story of a time in Goa, west coast India.

Debra single-handedly encouraged me to finish my first novel - The Triangle - which is by now on its 3rd Revision and has sold thousands of copies. Debra paused her own writing, resuming again when she lived in Paris, but by then it was a different story. 

Now, we sat together in the candlelit roof space of a delightful Inn, sipping beers and engrossed in conversations about writing and photography. 

Those that know me will realise I’d brought a few Ed Adams books along, but soon discovered that Debra’s writing had experienced the same jittery anguish as me, us both having once joined different creative writing circles. {cue: Dan Dang Daaaang!} 

We’d both experienced that fluttery moment when the experts pile in with passive-aggressive suggestions like: ‘Have you ever imagined that first chapter as a blank page?’ ‘Are you going to do something with that fight scene?’ And  ’That hero wasn’t very likeable, was he?’ Even ‘Was there supposed to be a hidden meaning?’

We’d both discovered the unreported downside of some book review covens.

Yet here, in the midst of the Peaks, we decided it was about time for ’The Goa Book’ to see the light of day. Brad, Krish, the boy with the tea urn, Sara on the tube train and Zennish Motorcycle Maintainer Tom. They all need to be let out into the world, having spent many days musing inside the pages of Debra's almost finished novel.

I said I’d have a quick bash at a Goa-beachside cover, with Sara, which is here:

And I know, but this is the least spliffy of my cover designs. I can’t easily add a tag-line (my MacBook hasn’t got all the software loaded), although it would have to be ‘I smoke my friends down to the filter’ or similar. The choice of a typewriter font was deliberate.

But now for some Liverpool sunshine.

Peak Perfection

 

“Dusk soon, a white wine sparkle over fields of surly sheep and preposterous fluffy lambs the size of small teddy bears; the sun slashed and glittered, the land the colour of love and Peak mystery.” 

 I left the slow 20-mile-per-hour EV-chargers of the Megastructure to discover it wasn’t alone. The adjoining county had been covered in big grey tin sheds.It explained the preponderance of massive lorries pulling trailers, so many that they’d run out of humorous tarp captions. This was 550 mile per hour Superchargerland. 

But these lorries were greyed out, like someone had generated too many. Here and there a subtle rendering of Sainsbury’s, Royal Mail and even Audi, but it was as if the artist hadn’t had time to finish and was striving for general effect. Maybe a metaphor? 

Fade to grey?

Well I soon cracked out of it as I came into the fields and assertion of the Peaks. 

You wanna walk? Try this! Too easy? This one's steeper, more slippery, muddier, or maybe add touch of tough weather?

So embrace the entrance to Winnants Pass. Remarkable to think that this was all once a coral reef. Back then, of course. 

And to hesitate in nostalgia, the memories of sheltering from weather in sheep pens, as the mists rolled it. And the future shock of the volume increase in hikers. Ten abreast they cross the roads and filter back onto two metre wide tracks, many of which are now designated bridleways. 

Fortunately my original experiences etch deep.

Gravity grapple

The planetary scale car park’s gravitational field was still working as Anthony and I met. Other explorers used grappling chains to resist the forces from the Megastructure and its orbiting rings of shops.

No casual pioneer, Anthony explained he’d made a reconnaissance run a few days earlier to check this area and be told of ’the short cut’.

Unintended consequences.

We effotlessly walked across our burning bridge of years regaling one another with cat theories (like cat mathematics), whilst noticing the subtle encroachment of tables around us. Sarah was going to get a doozy of a 40th as the balloons and raucous guests assembled. All the way from 1984, eh! And boxing us in like some kind of big brother move.

Daniel the professional server in our selected venue knew how to balm our egos and asked for a copy of an Ed Adams book-ideally featuring Artificial intelligence, which I signed with a quotation about pizza. He suggested that I perform a reading from the book to the assembled party guests, but I was thinking of that scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when the Bolivian army arrives.



Kudos to Daniel’s sense of humour, although he missed the equally available option to get from Anthony a Tony Mayo signature and to know that sängerin Coburg could easily be invited in the house. 

It was almost time to leave, after we’d wished our new pal Sarah a happy birthday. 

Around now I meet Crewkerne Man, who was trying to find his way back along the short-cut. Sometimes the world is small, Tony reappears from feeding his eight cats and we move across the way to the Needle and Awl, to top up with ale and further chatter. (Cats ft Coburg)

Koburg’s latest album Painted Stars is brand new. I hear about some of its construction as well as about the next Naked Lunch gig, which will be in Meshed, Germany on 22 June. ‘Live on the Lake’.


Then we are leaving the improbably early closing time pub, and its back to the gravel next to the short cut.

Crunch.

Beyond. the Frome

From Frome my satnav took me unerringly to my next stopover. What kind of a one horse town was this? Instead of the wrong Marks and Spencer car park, Buddies USA greeted me... but lo, then I turned the corner and could see the whole landscape dwarfed by a huge multiplex. I had ARRR.IVEED. 

This was gold city. The man on the desk was overwhelmed with excitement to tell me abuot the number of eateries and the short cut:

"Through that gap in the grass, over the barrier and mind the drop, then along until you come to a sort of path. Follow it along by the green fence - away from the Multiplex and then you’ll be on a service road.” 

So, I did and I was. 

My mind breezed back to my earlier ramblings through the old Bookshop in Frome. A chance encounter with someone who I chatted to about the banana yellow corvette. I was living time backwards. I could only think of Tom Waits blowing a hole in the hood of a yellow corvette, The lady dobbing in some books proudly announced that Joan Didion had bought a banana yellow one for herself as a treat after Slouching towards Bethlehem. Here’s Julian Wasser’s smokin’ capture.

I liked what Joan had to say too. “I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.” 

So… Julian's other frame, for Richard…

Andrea described my little trip as some sort of experiment. It’s always the things that people say right at the end that are the little gifts. We talked about the boy species and the girl species. I think I worked it out. We were force fed Charles Bukowski to Andrea’s Louisa M.

Considor though, the last Little Women had a Budget of $40 million, so maybe it’s right to end with a wedding? Charles made a few drinkin’ bucks too.

Meanwhile, that multiplex was so large that it had its own gravitational effect. Inside there were grappling ropes to steady the many flailing pre-teens. I asked the man on the popcorn what films were showing and he drip fed them to me. Kung-Fu Panda, Godzilla vs Kong, Ghostbusters on Ice, Monkey Man…the list went on. I went bleurch, 

After much discussion of the lack of light sabres in Dune, we settled for Civil War, slightly about the forthcoming attraction of Trump vs sanity. 

Civil War (USA Release 2) was actually a road movie with very loud gunshots. The popcorn man knew what he was doing because the popcorning people behind me added the realistic pitter patter of falling masonry to every battle scene. And their buckets lasted all the way to the White House.

This afternoon I’m entering phase 2 of the ‘experiment’.

No gas, no problem

We took off to Cornwall with no prior knowledge of the electric charging points available. I've become used to the car now and know that range anxiety isn't a thing. It turns out that there were charging points at our destination and I simply needed to get authorised to use them.

Admittedly, they were slow, but even at 45 miles per hour it only took an evening to be topped back up to the brim with electricity. Remember, the fastest charging is from 20%-80% and thats what I usually do, except at the start of long journeys from home. No one ever mentions the lack of visits to gas stations.

Since the last Over-the-air updates, the car even asks me now if I mean to reset the charge maximum to 80%. A good update recently was adaptive matrix headlights, which selectively dim part of the main beam when passing oncoming traffic. My last car had auto dipping headlights that could shine around corners. This is about the same but arrived as a software update. 

The auto parking is still more of a party trick, but I'm sure it will get there. It still parks faster than me.

It's interesting now that I look at the internal combustion cars (ICE) and realise they have about 500 more moving parts in their engines than my 4-wheel-drive and I think I'm testing the future. Again.

We've gone fully electric now, with the Fiat 500e as our other car. It shares the Tesla charger. 

splash

I've been staying in a Napoleonic fortress this week. Looking out to sea. These locations were identified much earlier, when the Spanish Armada was plying the waters in the 1500s Elizabeth I was the monarch. Much later it was Napoleon who caused the current range of gun emplacements to be built. 

And still standing.

Gamble

I just knew it. Knew that it would be brilliant. A night at the Phoenix to see the fabulous Hannah perform in Gamble, her latest show co-created with Rosa Postlethwaite 

Then written and performed by Hannah Walker with integrated BSL signing by interpretor Faye Alvi.

It was immersive from the moment we were inside the cabaret-seated Auditorium. The signature lighting and sound was from Craig Spence.

Gamble is a glittering, glamorous peek into the spectacular world of online gambling. A bittersweet multimedia show about addiction and its effect on families, friends and communities.

There’s a girl who used to think gambling was all about big wins at the village monthly bingo. A decade later, the gambling industry is all about online and is BIGGER than ever!

Without realising it, it’s made it way into the girl’s home, her relationship, her joint account.

Based on a true, personal story and inspired by accounts of industry experts, health professionals, people in recovery, and their loved ones, Gamble is a spangling whirlwind of flashing lights, big wins.

But also of terrible warnings.

Hannah's versatility changes the mood of the piece as she hairpins her way through fun times and then plunges into the depths of a partner's desolate shared and declining bank account.

The evening was BSL-signed and Faye provided a fully integrated BSL performance whilst signing, This was no ordinary addition, featuring talented choreography for her actions. 

And Hannah's co-conspirator Rosa Postlethwaite was brought on stage to enthusiastically complete certain scenes including acting as a counterpoint to Hannah's attitudes.

Whilst mainly lighthearted in tone, it was dealing with the terrors from an industry determined to increase addiction to gambling. To lead people to the higher yield more profitable products, to  seek out those without the power to resist.

There was a post-show Zoom-linked discussion with Dr Matt Gaskell, a gambling addiction specialist from the north-east. I think the entire audience stayed. Matt illustrated the problems of a seriously funded lobby intent of keeping gambling classified as sport and entertainment, instead of seeing it as the pernicious health danger which it represents. Oh, and a self-policing system for warnings, which is useless.  "When the fun stops, stop". Check out the Commons research paper.

I hate it now that every football shirt sports an advertisement for gambling,  that television post-watershed is filled with adverts for on-line gambling and now we hear the the United States is about to allow state specific on-line gambling. Interestingly, Matt explained that Belgium has banned all gambling advertising. 

The Rt Hon Lucy Frazer KC MP was appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport on 7 February 2023. She was also Solicitor General. I think it is time to write to her about this sad state of affairs, with even the ConservativeHome website carrying despicable articles in favour of online gambling.

Hannah will be performing Gamble in Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe, in August.

PsyOps

I guess this next US Movie about an American Civil War is a form of PsyOps, like that Conservative attack video that portrayed London incorrectly and melodramatically. The London lies were put together by the Conservative central party and features an American-accented voiceover declaring the city the “crime capital of the world”. 

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