Carry on Weblogin

A riot of pink cherry blossom frames the view from my rear windows and some pleasant sunshine and warmth at long last has finally banished that irksome misery of the English winter, hurrah! A much needed respite from the soul crushing symptoms of SAD is at last upon us. Now I only have to contend with the wistful mellow evening sadness of thwarted romance. The perennial shock of any self made loner hitting 40 and realising the folly of his ways. But I digress, the main reason for this entry is essentially to indulge in a modest but non the less healthy dose of self doubt, at least as far as all of this website shilarney is concerned. Thanks to a recent self-indulgent exploration of my incoming links (via google) I managed to re-discover Laurence Armstrong-Hughes site. A very decent fast acting raw HTML job (I think) with a nice diary or "Musings" page. From this, I also encountered Dickon Edwards site, again boasting a very accomplished "weblog". Dickon's site also links to other sites by fellow members of the band Fosca and all of them containing well written, and imaginatively presented diaries, ultimately serving to illustrate just how crap my efforts are in comparative terms (see my Links page). Everything I do seems to have a kind of concise linearity to it. A quality of quintessentially masculine angularity (There, I'm doing it again! Didacticism and quasi technical vernacular evincing some kind of emotionless brutalism and arrogance. This is not me surly?) the linguistic equivalent of the uncompromisingly controlled look of my photos perhaps. I don't know what to do about it in truth, but think some form of reinvention is required because I would like to indulge a more "feeling" kind of discourse but without overtly copying any one else's format. Current mood: Self-hatred :-)

I went for one of my mini cycle marathons today, down to Jodrell Bank (that famous Cheshire landmark) stopping on route to visit Capesthorne Hall in Siddington. This is a strangely attractive place and yet very uncharacteristic of the local architecture, a blend of Gothic folly and the Queen Ann style (possibly?) {it's Jacobean...you ejit! And I love that period too!} and on a very large scale. As you go down the very long driveway, the place looms up like the badies lair in one of the more opulent Bond films. One half expects Christopher Walken to jauntily skip out of the front door in jodhpurs. As you pass the old gatehouse on the A34, you could be forgiven for momentarily thinking you were in Berkshire. The landscape is liberally scattered with those beautifully elegant and broody Scots Pines. Capesthorne has a special significance for me not only because it was one of the locations for some childhood modelling escapades in the 60s (trikes and stuff for the Embassy catalogue) but also because it is the venue for the closest thing Cheshire has to an open-air rock concert. This year boasting 80s stalwarts Human League, Go West, and Jools Holland and that's your lot. There will also be a dramatic concert by the Royal Philharmonic set against a backdrop of fireworks.