A spot of colouring

The weekend was not particularly conducive to going out with strong winds on Friday so with even bigger and strong people than myself struggling I needed to stay indoors which as you probably aware isn't something I like at all, being an outdoor girl.
One thing you can do when it is like this is colour and so I had my colouring book out on Friday.

 Normally when I colour I use Staedtler colour pencils available in the Noris Club 36 colour pack as they respond well to different pressures for shading and don't easily break in the way some cheaper ones found in convenience stores do
They also sharpen well.
That illustration is from the Jacqueline Wilson Colouring Book published by Penguin UK and illustrated by Nick Sharratt who does the drawings in her stories.

Fall sightings 2018

This week in the crazy world of me we actually go outside at the start of the Fall where within a built up area you actually get to see things you'd normally have to go a bit beyond down the country lanes for.

 I wouldn't go mentioning requiring a new jumper in the presence of these two as they may well Baa you out within seconds. They're within a hundred yards of a community centre but it doesn't feel like it.

 If anyone ever accused these two of horsing about they'd have quite answer to that as I careful supported the camera with the lens set at 105mm in uneven light and later on adjusted the exposure a little.
It was around here I once almost lost a camera bag to curious horses!

 There's nothing like crisp leaves and sunlight although I used to cheat in the old days armed with the Olympus OM4 and use the TTL flash with a warm up filter sometimes to get the kind of golden colour cast I like.

Teenbeat XVIIII - Driving to Billy Paul

More from the the time it was less clunk click fasten your seat belt so much as as it was a rat-a-tat CLUNK  coming from Pops Q8 player as we sped the highway between hospital appointments which both avoided being out of FM range on the radio and gave us four speakers.

 Life was simple then! Speakers in all four doors, push tape in to play, pull out to stop or spin the radio dial for a station and that was it.

Anyway that trip on takes us to these three albums and yes I can count -just!-  cos we had them .
Billy Paul was one the big names of the then big Philadelphia International  records label that specialized in jazz influenced soul, going beyond Motown and PhillyGroove and I loved that music and it has to be said, still do.
Philadelphia International was formed by producers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff after their earlier Neptune and Gamble labels with the backing of Columbia Records who wanted to tap into soul and "Black Music" sales.

In 1972 Philadelphia International issued 360 Degrees of Billy Paul which wasn't his first album but it was the home of the smash hit Me and Mrs Jones, the more decisive Am I Black Enough  U.S. follow up and Brown Baby which I think was issued in the U.K.
The record was issued in SQ quad (four channel surround sound) that played on regular stereo players and tape but released on Q8 quadraphonic tape in early 1973.
War of the Gods was issued in 1973 and is a more psychedelic soul album that personally I find more musically interesting if less overly commercial. 
From it Thanks For Saving My Life was lifted reaching #37 on the U.S. singles chart and #33 in the U.K. It two was issued on SQ record and Q8 Quadraphonic tape.

In December of 1973 Philadelphia International brought over a number of artists to the UK and Europe and two albums, one by the O'Jay's and this short set by Billy Paul were issued the next year.
Billy's is a short set recorded in London and Chatham, Kent where he expands upon the studio versions and acts today as a reminder of his ability to hold an audiences attention.
The Quad mix unlike many of live albums doesn't just place the audience in the rear but does put a few effects in the rear channels.
The SQ records were phased out  by the end of the 70's and the Q8 tapes were discontinued  by around 1977 although we hung onto our player for several years. 
In that time until last week, these albums in those mixes remained locked in the tape vaults when Vocalian-Dutton in Great Britain re-issued them as extra content on the Super Audio cd versions they issued complete with original stereo mixes on sacd and regular cd layers.
They sound superb on my player and accompanying hifi equipment.

Classical sacd round up part ten - two from the Atlantic

As I am road testing the second update to Pale Moon to see if they've been able to make it stable enough to use I am listening to some discs that I intend to talk about today,

 Leonard Bernstein was many things, composer, music teacher, advocate of the Arts and a great American of the last century.
I have a good number of his compositions originally recorded for Columbia (UK/Canada: CBS) records conducted by himself in a 7 cd Sony Music cd box set and a few choice extras such as the 1993 recording of On The Town.
Recently over here, the London symphony Orchestra's own cd label issued a recording in Super Audio cd (also playable in regular cd) taken from a live performance at the Barbican Arts Centre, London of his Wonderful Town musical.
Set in the 1940's but written in 1953, it tells the story of Ruth and Eilleen quest to make it big pursuing careers in writing and acting moving from Ohio in the Midwest to New York's Greenwich City  from the cramped basement apartment they moved to.
Along the way they meet colourful characters they'd never lived cheek by jowl by before in this city that never sleeps and the score reflects this being a a bright and cheery love letter to it.
The infectious jazz influenced score includes such classics as 'Ohio', 'One Hundred Easy Ways' and  A 'Little Bit in Love'
This performance is exhilarating, never letting up and technically superb.

Seeing this years Proms season ended September 10th thoughts went back to composers of the WW1 era.

 I have a good number of cds by by the mystic Gustav Holst and spotted this 2008 recording by the late Richard Hickox in a series of his Orchestral works he started and whose baton has been picked up by Sir Andrew Davis
This Chandos Super Audio cd has the popular Ballet from "The Perfect Fool" conceived as a an opera but written to ballet form in 1922 plus the much less popular but worthy The Lure ballet and Golden Goose choral ballet together with The Morning of the Year ballet the last two being composed in 1926.
I found this recording most enjoyable.

Read and in uniform

The weather is a bit better than it had been from the start of this week so I start with saying the last few entries that have been a little different from the the norm on this blog have been fairly well received.
I have been continuing with refreshing some items of my uniform although in certain  others areas I'm well stocked adding a  few replacement blouses and a green jumper to it.

 As most people know I usually look very much like her never happier to be wearing our school dresses although I dare say if I were to accidentally cause the netball to land though Miss Green's window I may well know it for a while!
Seeing it is early September I have been working my though some past stuff connected with roles and courses I've had that were very much paperwork heavy  tidying things up as there comes a point where most of that is no longer needed it just takes up unnecessary space with notes, bulky folders and so on.

As well, I also got around to reading Little Women although I'd had it for a while which is a timeless coming of age story of the four March sisters set in the post Civil War period in the States as though through childhood to adulthood, helped by their mother learning to navigate what it means to be a young woman from sibling rivalry to love, loss and marriage.

A walk around

It's been a damp weekend here  meaning going out was more a matter of picking a spot when it was either dry for a short while or just drizzling a little and given how I've been over the last month or so such venturing out has taken me beyond my usual haunts.
I normally go into town which as more seasoned readers will have worked out is a rather old market town with black and white buildings just out of the sprawl of the North Staffordshire conurbation but closer to edges of it are still just about detached villages admittedly with much mid twentieth century ribbon development prevailing along the main road.

 There are for me two ways of starting this trek, one is on foot, the other is to take a bus so normally I walk from my place passing the woods around the local rather imposing Hall and vast Estate at Rode with farms passing the main Anglican church to arrive at Scholar Green.
As I was walking I noticed signs of the onset of the Fall such as the changes in colour of the leaves and that thanks to the recent rain, fields and gardens have started to repair themselves from the summers high temperatures.
Although in recent years the number of Public Houses has fallen, there remains rather more than what the local static population would warrant and one famed both for its food and ale plus its architecture which has a Grade Two Listing being built in 1936 replacing a older ne on the same site but having a thatched roof.
This does a great passing trade.
Passing it I walked toward Lawton Woods where you can toward the sprawl that starts from Red Bull and Butt Lane and doesn't stop until Blythe Bridge and Trentham in the south or the woods that form a part of the barrier between it and the cluster of detached villages that increasingly function as detached suburbs of the sprawl.
One thing I like about this area and it is also true for much of the South Staffs conurbation too is the relative ease in which for all the built up environment it is easy to get to the more quieter countryside that you can walk and enjoy the flowers, trees and farm life at a more slower pace.
It's a close to the best of both worlds you can get.

Gender Spaces

Another week and one update to Pale Moon and that still hasn't cured the browser of freezing over so we're still in Firefox which as much as I don't like the interface does work very well.

Spaces are a contentious issue as anyone on Tumblr knows only too well and some of that also applies into off line life too as well as what people do when we allow them into our own.
One area I think worth talking about is gender spaces where yes most of us say people should be free to mix with whoever they want, take part in activities together and not be barred from an activity just because of their gender. 
This you might think is the end product of decades of arguments won when it comes to equal opportunities and as such the very last word but today it's not.
Unlike perhaps a few of you I've been in the work place and it isn't uncommon for female employees to actually have their own social groups that they keep to just women going out together or spending time at each others places.
Even in 2018 here in Great Britain there are Universities that only accept women being founded expressly for female higher education and women have voted to keep them that way because they prefer a all female ethos and under English Law at at least a private members club can be all female only too.
Part of the argument is it is nice to have a place just to talk and share things with without men around who as nice as they are would  change the feel by just being there and maybe inhibit conversations people needed.
There is a chunk of me that goes with that, indeed in my area Secondary Education is organized on gender lines unless you go out of town because that's what people here prefer feeling it's less distracting to study and children do better academically with girls feeling more able to show an interest in things like the sciences not trying to be a 'bimbo' or letting the boys take a dominate role and boys more able to express feeling in say both English's without feeling either a 'nerd'  or a 'sissy''.
If you accept the idea that some spaces should be able to be gendered if females wish, then we have to bear in mind we cannot then object if boys and men may also prefer a few   themselves to kept that way such as men's clubs where they may socialize and talk about things that wouldn't happen if a women was there.
That's different than arguing that say a woman shouldn't be allowed to a sports club that runs competitions such as golf clubs where teams are mixed.
Perhaps more give and take on gender spaces rather than battle cries might better suit our needs?

A Mars Bar is can be claimed for anyone spotting the typo in the illustration. 😁