Oh. (Russ L going to and fro in the Earth)

I thought I’d better write something to that effect. It’s true though, I do. The ‘two or three Christmasseseseseses in my entire life during which I was not ill’ did not expand this year, but I love Christmas nonetheless. Such a sickly child. They shoot horses, don’t they?

There’s still a bunch o’ stuff from before Christmas that I went to but haven’t yet expressed wisdom/gobfoolery, only I can’t seem to get going. I don’t really do New Year so at least that won’t extend the To Do list. Or that particular one. I have a few. There are (*quick count*) seventeen volumes on the To Read pile (not counting the two currently underway), that’s what worries me. I have Waterstones gift cards to use up, too. Will the word offer me no peace?

So, other than that: Santa did come. I was glad about that because I have been especially good. Doctor Who was fun but I think they’re really overdoing the ‘Doctor as Jesus’ bit. I realise that’s a bit rich coming from someone wth a messiah complex as intense as mine. Rilstone will have kittens. I’m picking St. Pierre, Liddell, Lyoto, Fedor, Akiyama, Melendez, Kawajiri, Minowa, Sakuraba, KID, Tamura, and probably some other schmoes. It would be quite funny if Fedor lost, though. I’m glad P’Ashton is on holiday, ‘cos I’ve seen at least two different people on The Stirrer’s forum refer to ‘posting on a messageboard’ as ‘blogging’ and he’d probably have kittens too. Language not in keeping with the season could well have ended up being employed.

Have a nice New Year, if you go in for such. Happy Windsday, Owl. Happy Windsday, Pooh.

There was much angst, and both hands went through a process of ringing. Would I, or would I not, go to either or both of Carina Round’s gigs in the West Midlands on the 10th or 11th of December? Once upon a time the answer would have been an unreserved yes for both, but things change. Would I be happier with my memories? Would I be better off going to see M.I.A. and Gogol Bordello on those nights?

Compromise was reached when I found out that the Gogol Bordello gig had sold out: I’d go to see M.I.A. at The Custard Factory’s Rojac Building on the Monday, and then attend Carina’s gig at The Little Civic on the Tuesday. Perfick.

I arrived at The Custard Factory at just after half eight on the Monday night, though, only to find no sign of life at The Rojac. As such, I left. I wasn’t going to hang around in the cold to find out what was gwaaning. I’m assuming that the gig must have had late runnings/club night times, in which case it’s no loss as I’d have had to have left far before the end anyway. The thought now occurs that maybe Rojac has a different entrance to that used at Supersonic (maybe round the back), but that doesn’t seem likely. I couldn’t hear any music coming from the inside, anyway.

All this is easy enough to imagine in the cold late of day, but there and then the most likely explanation seemed to be that I’d been my usual scatty self and got the two days mixed up. I hurried off to the Bar Academy to see if anything could be salvaged. Blessedly, I hadn’t got myself all confuzzleded and it was indeed ‘Birmingham’ night. I decided that I would step into the Carina gig, after all.

I began to doubt my wisdom of this almost immediately after getting into the upstairs gigroom at The Bar Academy. Fresh from the freezing cold outside, one walked into a cloud of unpleasantly moist heat. Ye Gods, it felt like the inside of a mammal (that’s not a metaphor that could be applied consistently. Academy venues are clearly more insectoid than mammalian. I’m specifically thinking of dung beetles. Still, I’m not one to pass up an opportunity to quote Groucho Marx - “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read”). My ongoing Academy drinks boycott (I’m not paying that much for that quality in places I don’t even like to begin with, I’m just not) prevented me from having a refreshing beverage, too. Bah, Academy.

Now, you see, I’m not a band-merchandise t-shirt sort of person. I’m not really a t-shirt sort of person at all, but I’m particularly not a band t-shirt sort of person (”And why do they all wear clothes with writing on?”). I have a few from many years ago that I sometimes wear under real clothes for extra warmth, but because of this I don’t (beyond overall colour) tend to pay much attention to the design when selecting one. In the heat, I realised I could unbutton my shirt since I had a t-shirt on underneath. I did so, only to see it was a “The First Blood Mystery” era Carina Round t-shirt. Oh dear me. A Carina T-shirt at a Carina gig. How much of a crawler must I have looked?

The Little Civic gig the following day was a bit less complicated. I just went to Wolverhampton, and then went to the venue.

Right, music. I missed Tom Bellamy’s opening set in Brum, but I wasn’t particularly enamoured with him the first time I saw him so it’s no great loss. Dan Whitehouse opened in Wolves. I was present when he supported Carina at The Flapper in January 2006 and really enjoyed him. This was little different. He’s just, I suppose, your basic acoustic singer-songwriter, but has some interesting songs and a voice with power enough to stop a charging rhino. I wasn’t at all keen on his shirt, though. That’s something that really needs sorting out.

I think I could like Lupen Crook And The Murderbirds, I’m just not sure I actually did. I missed the beginning of their set in Brum and they seemed to cut it short early themselves in Wolves (they didn’t appear at all pleased with the state of the monitors), and while I certainly enjoyed some of their folk-punk-indie-bitsofallsorts songs (standouts were the one that was something about a Magpie, and that one that to my strange ol’ ears sounded a bit like “My Old Man’s A Dustman”) and digged the fun added-percussion… there was something missing. I couldn’t put my finger on what but something led me to lean towards disinterest. Curse the intangibles.

Carina, then. I am so very happy to be able to say that my faith in her has been restored. You’ll forgive me, I hope, if the following gubbins is disjointed and confused – there are lots of things I want to say about this and am finding it difficult to link them all together coherently.

She’s back, it seems, in a number of different ways. First of all back home and seeming to love the fact (“It’s like falling back to earth off a twelve-storey building” she quipped with a smile). One could possibly use the fact that she started the Birmingham gig with a slight trace of American in her accent - only for it to melt away over the course of the night - as a metaphor for a few different things, but that’d be silly. Never stopped me before, of course. She was also clearly having fun and lots of it, working without a setlist and just playing what she felt like at the time. This stands in massive contrast to the (obvious in retrospect) slightly forced nature of the last couple of times I saw her

She was on her own apart from a few one-off collaborations, and I’d never seen her without a band before. The interesting thing about this was that the third album stuff quite often sounded a lot better done acoustically – I’m not overly enamoured by “Stolen Car” or “Come To You” on record, but here they really worked. “Down Slow” was bolstered in Wolverhampton by the chap who played drums on the record… doing beatbox. Contrary to what you might already be thinking, this worked really well.

For the first time in ages, we got significant amounts of first album stuff. In Wolverhampton SHE ACTUALLY PLAYED “RIBBONS”. Oh yes. It’s been many a-year since I last heard that live, and truly it was heartbreaking. “How I See It” in Birmingham was bolstered by backing vocals from one Chrissy Van Dyke as it was at an encore at The Flapper some years ago and sounded beautiful, and both nights saw a performance of “Let It Fall” that scorched the earth for miles around. From the second album, “Paris” was as lovely as it always is and a “Motel 74” really suited the more countrified feel is got from the acousticicicity. Two new songs were aired – “Backseat” in Birmingham only (with backing vocals from CVD and two others), which was absolutely divine and distantly akin to a Jeff Buckley indie-hymn type of thing, and “Thief In The Sky” at both. This worked best on the second night, with the (commonplace of late) ‘sample a bit of yourself and loop it’ trick used to build up a very interesting texture.

Her new mantra of “If it’s shit, it’s your fault” also deserves mention. That’s the spirit.

I enjoyed these no end: two Live Set Of The Year Candidates on two consecutive days and – more importantly – my faith has been restored. I am indescribably happy that her (comparatively) fallow period seems to have been primarily down to Interscope (we’ll leave aside “What did she expect?’ thoughts here while we’re in the spirit of celebration), and that she’s back on track to having her music again be The Greatest Thing In The World Ever. I couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas present.

Baron was also at Birmingham, while there’s another account of the Wolves one here. For that matter, it’s always worth going to CarinaLive.com for photos and writings and suchforth about Carina gigs.

- Kids: they grow up quickly. A year ago my cousin Jasmine still looked like a little girl, now she looks like a teenager.

- I hate Broad Street. I hate it even more after trying and subsequently giving up trying to find somewhere to watch Hatton vs Mayweather on Saturday (Sports Cafe was tickets only, Rococco wouldn’t let us in ‘cos they already had too many men in relation to woman inside…). On the plus side, we did see what looked like a substantially large portion of the West Midlands Constabulary storm into The Sports Cafe and arrest a bloke dressed as Superman. I’m not making this up.

- I did download it the following day, though. I’d like to see Mayweather vs Cotto next. Mayweather will still win, obviously, but I do actually think Cotto would have a slightly better chance than Hatton had.

- We went to see the Canal Boat Light Parade in Brum, which - even when I put aside the two recurring problems of that particular weekend (having to stand with my arms squished up due to there being amongst too great a density of people, and having surprises spoiled for me) - didn’t seem as good as last year. I liked the one with the great big flappy bird going up and down, though. Noddy was there and I didn’t realise it was him. Heh.

- In more union news, I’ve showed one of our reps how to use WordPress. I may or may not have created a monster.

Obviously, trade union activity is not fashionable these days. The main idea in this Thatcher-blighted world seems to be “my job is crap, so I don’t see why anyone else should have the nerve to try and make theirs less so.” We see this primarily in the general attitude to tales of various professions going on strike. Solidarity doesn’t seem popular.

I, myself, don’t believe that sort of thinking is very helpful. Only by standing together is anything ever going to be achieved for anybody. I am a member of PCS, just as I’d be a member of the union in any job I was doing. There’s a widespread feeling that PCS has failed us in its negotiations over various things in the past few years, and a few people at our place are using that as a reason not to support industrial action. I can see the argument there, but I don’t like or agree with it at all. As the union supports me, I will attempt to support it; it’ll take something bloody big to change that.

So, on Thursday the 6th and Friday the 7th we were on strike. The primary reason for this was the pay rise we’ve been offered, or nigh-on lack thereof: a three year deal offering 2%, 0% and 1%, below inflation and therefore a pay cut in real terms. We’ve been out on strike before, but in the four and a bit years I’ve worked at our place we’d never had a picket before. One was organised for the Thursday morning. “Ah,” I thought. “Chance for a new experience.”

Picketing, of course, is not what it was in the olden days. You’re not allowed to use the ‘s’ word, throw stones, set fire to anyone etc. Shame. No, in all seriousness I’m glad – I wouldn’t want to take part in a ‘nasty’ picket in the first place.

Out it was into the freezing cold, then, placard aloft. I was… let’s say disappointed by some of the faces I saw going in, but only two people behaved in any way you could call ‘rude’ to us (I do think it’s a slightly sad fact that picketers are very tightly bound by the rules of what is and isn’t considered intimidating, but picket-crossers can be as insulting as they like), with most either being friendly or desperately trying to get past as quickly as possible without looking any of us in the eye. What was depressing to see was that quite a few of the younger ones (younger than me) didn’t actually seem to know what a picket line was. That’s a scary thought. Our shop-floor reps also mentioned that a fair few people who get a lot of help from the union (for one reason or another) decided to go in. Such, I suppose, is life.

None of those whose conscience had told them to scwork actually turned back, but four people said they wouldn’t come in on the Friday (funnily enough, we forgot to mention that there wasn’t going to be a picket then. Oops, silly us and so on. Ahem.), so that was good. We got lots of beeps and waves from passing traffic as well, which was nice. I think that’s the main point of it these days, really – consciousness raising.

The funniest result came when the big guvnor at our place took her attention off her driving for a moment to respond (somewhat sarcastically, I felt) to our sweetest smiles and waves. An almighty crunching sound rang through the air, and when she was through the entrance onto the carpark we could see the huge gouge above her back-right wheel arch that had resulted from her car scraping off the gate. How we laughed. Oh, how we laughed.

She should join PCS. She could get money off some Halfords vouchers and get herself a pot of car paint.

This isn’t the potentially juicy post I spoke of (it won’t be that juicy really, or in fact juicy at all. I should stop mentioning it and building it up), but I wanted to get these down (before what may well be the biggest weekend of fighting ever, in my eyes) so that afterwards I can either crow or be crowed at.

Boxing:

- Floyd Mayweather Jr beats Ricky Hatton by decision (sucks, but there we are).
- Amir Khan beats Graham Earl by decision.
- Arthur Abraham stops Wayne Elcock somewhere between rounds 7-9 (again, a shame).
- John Duddy beats Howard Eastman by decision, prior to Eastman retiring.

MMA:

- Clay Guida beats Roger Huerta by a razor-close decision.
- A frustration-fueled Dan Hardy smashes seven bells out of Manuel Garcia and stops him in the first round.

K1:

- Semmy Schilt and Badr Hari make it to the finals, and Schilt wins by decision.

I wish extra-special good luck to all of our local fighters involved in big or international fights - Wayne Elcock, Marcus Portman, Dean Harrison, Martin Gethin, and Rob Norton.

Quick ‘un to get this out of the way, since the next post could potentially be quite juicy. We’ll see, though. Don’t count on that. I went to see Beverley Knight at The Civic in Wolves on Thursday the 29th of November, and she was as great as ever. It was the same set as last time (well, it’s the same tour), and while not quite approaching the same ‘best time I’ve ever seen her’ level it was still great fun. The highlights were similar - “Black Butta”, “Affirmation”, the acoustic soul-y version of “Made It Back”, a really over-the-top (in a good way) version of “Sister Sister” etc. It’s always nice to see Bev looking genuinely chuffed to be home, too.

There you go. Concise. You wouldn’t have thought I was capable of it.