Yesterday a few of us went canoeing and kayaking [whatever the difference] on the Great Stour. We went from the Grove Ferry Picnic Site to somewhere near Lampen Stream. It was a lovely couple of hours on the river.
M’era Luna 2022
THREE YEARS. That’s how long it had been since I’d been anywhere other than the south east of the UK, Lincolnshire or Cornwall [which was twice this month]. Three years since Smith and I had travelled to Germany to see a collection of bands, dress in weird shit and have a great time. The wait was worth it. 2022 was a great year for M’era Luna and I had an amazing time. There was news to make this year’s event even more interesting: a band had to pull out and they were replaced by Combichrist!
The journey out to Germany went well. The Eurotunnel was on time and Smith and I made it to our standard hotel in Bochum with time to explore the centre of the city and get some food. Most of the centre looked like Harlow – a new town in the UK. But we did find a street with some life and many restaurants. It was a hot evening with temperatures hitting 30C. After food and a couple of drinks we headed back to cheap hotel and planned Friday.
We arrived at Hildesheim early and queued for entry into the camp site. Once in we chose a spot far enough away from the noise and close enough to the car. Then we went for a walk to see how the grounds had changed in the three years since we had been there. Friday night is normally disco night but we didn’t go to that. Instead we found a bunch of Germans who we knew and spent some time with them, drinking their beer. It was good fun. The real music started at 1100 on Saturday though.
As with previous years this is where I just copy my notes from my phone. I can’t remember every band or song. I can’t remember what I thought about them. So I make notes as I go and then regurgitate them here. What follows is pretty much, word for word, my notes. Occasionally I will add detail for particular bands as I have remembered more from those appearances.
SATURDAY
Enemy Inside – main stage -I enjoyed this. They had a female lead singer and it was rock/metal.
Rave The Requiem – main stage – I also enjoyed this, christian sounding metal. There were references to religious passages and I couldn’t tell if they were critical or supportive after that.
Ambassador 21 – club stage – industrial punk and was great. I really loved this show.
Schattenmann – main stage – actually really enjoyable. Heavy songs. Singer had a chainsaw. Flames from front of stage.
OST+Front – main stage – Enjoyable, very similar to when we last saw them. German new metal. Female dressed in various outfits.
Lacrimas Profundere – main stage – Waiting for Faderhead tbh. Opening bars were really good. But everything else was not. Went to sit in the shade at Club stage.
Solitary Experiments – club stage – perfectly fine but his voice isn’t strong enough. A bit boring really.
Faderhead – club stage – AMAZING. Totally loved this. This was the best attraction on Saturday.
Blut Engel – main stage – halfway through when we arrive. Everything Is Black playing. Next song had 4 girls on stage. 4 songs then left to:
In Strict Confidence – club stage – 3 good songs.
Nitzer Ebb – main stage – probably great if you are off your head. Nice beat stuff. But boring live.
SUNDAY
Hell Boulevard – main stage – they sang hit me baby one more time.
Aeverium – main stage – elements of thrash, not really. But I enjoyed it.
Unzucht – main stage – Fuchs yeah. I do love a bit of Unzucht and they were really enjoyable. Great fun.
Feuerschwanz – main stage – medieval rock shit
Combichrist – main stage – Andy and I started the pit and it was good. Thank god. This made the weekend worth it. Totally loved the show.
Rotersand – club stage – amazing. Really enjoyable. People came and thanked us for starting the pit during the Combichrist show.
Nachtmahr – club stage – good show. Two dancers.
Eisbrecher – main stage – amazing show, really good fun.
And there we have it. A great weekend. Such a shame there were massive delays getting back into the UK but that’s the sort of shit we have to put up with now I guess a bunch of arseholes lied to us. One of the best bits of the weekend for me was Smith’s realisation that paying to have a shit in the posh loos was worth it and made things soooo much better.
Dead On A Sunday Night
I have recently spent some time in the glorious county of Cornwall. It was my first time there in over two years, much like it’s a new thing for anyone to go anywhere at the moment. It was lovely.
We stayed at a campsite near St Stephen and close to St Austell. We did some things. It was great. Plenty to do and plenty of relaxing to do also. The first night we had fish and chips from a shop in St Austell, a place which seemed dead on a Sunday night.
Monday was all about getting some clothes bought from a shop in Truro, then we headed to the Maritime Museum in Falmouth. This had some lovely exhibits from the history of sailing and water transport. I also saw a real angler fish and I was unhappy at how small it was. About 12cm long. That is about as long as they grow. I was disappointed. Tuesday we went to an aviation museum because it can’t all be boring stuff. Then we visited Carne beach which was lovely. Dinner took place in Mevagissey.
Wednesday’s main event was admiring the Eden Project and learning about the world’s plants and ecosystems. Thursday we visited HMNB Devenport and met with my Marine Commando nephew for a guided tour of HMS Albion, a look at some of the marine landing craft and also a sneaky look at some of their weapon systems.
Friday we visited a police officer friend of mine on the Rame peninsula and played frisbee golf at Mount Edgecombe country house. It was a great day. The following Saturday we travelled home to chill out a bit as Sunday we visited more friends and toured their orchard.
Service Interrupted Slightly
It’s been two weeks since I last published a communication and I’m aware some people out there read this website so this is here to hold the fort. I’ve spent quite a while wondering about the correlation between my mental and emotional health and communications on this site. I use to wonder whether, when feeling rough, I didn’t have the energy and ability to communicate on this site. But in the past when I have looked at the months when I know I was mentally fucked and the communications on here I write more in those times then when I’m fine. It would appear this site is a distraction from the emotional reality of the world. I use writing here as a distraction or somewhere to let my mind go rather than what’s happening to me.
So, the lack of recent communications, which is far below stable-me output, is to do with the fact that I have very good things on my mind. Life has taken a turn and it’s for the good. I hope to resume a more normal service in the future as this place is a source of pride for me. I like writing here and attempting to communicate to the world. I like being a presence for anyone to see. When I get to the point of writing more I am sure that I will still be gloriously happy. Which I am currently.
CCF Camp HLW
I’ve just returned from the first summer camp we’ve had for three years. In pre-pandemic times we would head off for a week each summer and spend that time at a RAF Station and have great fun doing activities. This year we booked accommodation at RAF Henlow and organised our own camp. Normally HQ would allocate us to a camp somewhere in the country but all the systems aren’t working very well yet, they’ll get there. So we drove ourselves to RAF Henlow and settled into the cadet block there, Barrack Block 56.
Our first day at camp was getting unpacked, checking the block and sending the cadets on a FAMEX. We also booked into the cinema in Royston to see Top Gun Maverick. It was much better on second watching and I didn’t expect that to happen! Sunday was a trip to Wyboston Lakes and an assault course in the morning followed by time on the inflatables in the lake. It was great, even with the A&E visit that was required.
LJ and I had a bit of a prank war going on and the picture above was the point at which we decided just to make it a verbal roasting war rather than anything physical. We could both see it was going to get out of hand! Monday was a multi-activity day with some cadets going flying with 5AEF at RAF Wittering, some cadets went to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and others went for a trip around a nuclear bunker and some high ropes. Great fun was had by all. In the evening a pilot mate of mine came and gave the cadets a talk about the flying industry.
Tuesday we visited RAF Honington to see what the RAF Regiment and Force Protection get up to. We might have had some instruction on small burst weapons during the day and then had a visit to the heritage centre detailing all the exploits of the Regiment.
Wednesday was a visit to the RAF Centre of Aviation Medicine at RAF Henlow followed by weapon training. In the evening I ran a DCCT range over the other side of the airfield at the Force Protection flight.
Thursday was a trip to the Shuttleworth Collection for a private tour and trip on a bus that was over a hundred years old. There were a few planes flying and that was nice to see. RAF Henlow not being a flying base.
Thursday evening was another session in the DCCT range and virtually all cadets gained their L98A2 trained shot badge with the excellent guidance of the staff. It’s a pretty good achievement. Friday was the reverse of Monday with 12 more cadets getting airborne at RAF Wittering and the others heading to the bunker and high ropes.
Friday evening was paper plate awards and chill time. TR and I went to visit the Officers’ Mess and checked out the bar. Saturday we tidied up, somehow loaded our transport of all the kit and headed home after lunch. It was a great week and another memorable camp. Such excellent fun and hopefully an amazing experience for our cadets. RTU was around 1500 hours and then the buses were tidied and parked up. We arrived back at the same time as the Army section which caused some issues in the car park but it all worked out in the end. I’m looking forward to next year.
Nine Inch Nails – The Eden Project
This weekend has been pretty awesome. Smith and I drove down to Cornwall yesterday to see the band Nine Inch Nails. There aren’t many bands that would have the draw to get us to travel the width of the country but NIN are one of them. Firstly we stayed at a hotel in Okehampton which was on the route and far enough away from Eden to make the journey home this morning less by an hour. While waiting in Okehampton I persuade Smith that we should try and see a viaduct!
We parked near the reservoir and walked down by the river to the viaduct. Climbed up and walked the length of the bridge/viaduct. On the return journey we saw Dartmoor ponies and they were rather cute. We also got up close and personal with the dam holding back the reservoir waters.
After the walk and some food we drove to Eden. Parking was at the top of the project but there were shuttle buses up and down before and after the concert. It was lovely wandering through the biomes with 6000 other metal fans. It was absolutely pissing it down outside at this point with a lightning storm. The noise of this inside the biomes was like a small jet taking off, quite spectacular.
First band on were Yves Tumor. Not really my thing. Listened to a couple of songs but left it at that. Wandered around for a while.
Nine Inch Nails were quite spectacular. There wasn’t much interaction with the crowd from Trent Reznor. But is was still an amazing show. I hadn’t noticed until right towards the end of the concert that the biomes had lights and lit up as part of the show. The sound quality was really good and the fact there were only 6500 people attending made it quite an intimate venue. It’s the largest concert I’ve been to for years (mostly because of covid).
Andy disappeared into the pit on the second song which was “Wish” from The Downward Spiral. I maintained my composure until they started playing March Of The Pigs and I joined in with the pit. I didn’t stay there, I just hovered on the edge and enjoyed the show.
At one point Trent spoke and said there were two things that happened this evening that had never happened at any other gig. First, he made a mistake playing one of his songs and secondly, there was a rainbow. The rainbow was enjoyed by the crowd, it was quite life-positive-affirming.
It was a great concert. As we left and walked up the winding path to the main entrance my niece called both of us and drunkenly chatted which was pretty funny. Also, the biomes were lit up thus:
It Looked Amazing
It’s been a windy few days here in the south east of this funny island. It hasn’t rained much, or at least not when I’ve been awake, but the wind has been a consistent feature of the “jubilee” days. Yes, it’s been the queen’s jubilee and I’ve been mostly not-interested. I’m not a monarchist by a long way, in fact I think that the royals embody all that is wrong with this entitled country. Anyway, the wheat in the fields out the back of my house are young and have bendy stalks still. The wind gusts were creating lovely wave patterns in the fields and so I tried to capture what that looks like. To be honest I don’t think I succeeded.
In respect of all other things I’ve [once again] deleted Twitter and Reddit from my phone. I don’t think they are good for mental health. I do like knowing the things that I see mentioned on there but there’s only so much shit in this world that I can cope with and along with the knowledge that the entire environment is going to collapse soon I’ve decided to try and focus on what I can do from afar and stop worrying about the end of the world. There isn’t really anything I can do to try and change what’s going to happen. My area of focus needs to be more on the things I can affect. I will occasionally check Twitter but Reddit is likely not to be looked at much.
If you read the news or listen to the radio [I don’t watch television news] then you will notice the, almost daily, warnings from scientists about the collapse of the climate and environment. Those warning signs have been there for most of my life time but no one has really done anything to try to change what’s going to happen. The current economic and political systems do not allow a decent long-term plan that will help the future generations. I am convinced it is all going to be utter shit.
Through my life I had thought that the country and world was heading towards a more liberal approach to people and life. I had thought that society progresses to be more accepting of social norms as they change. But it turns out that I was wrong. The current UK government are fucking horrible people who are liars and self-serving assholes. They have been brought up to believe they are entitled to the power. The problem is they are morally bankrupt racist liars. I honestly can’t believe some of the headlines I see where people are “I’m almost at the point where I won’t vote conservative“. What the fuck have you been watching for the last decade? I honestly despair at the level of cognitive dissonance these people have.
I’m not claiming to be perfect or to have the answers. I honestly have no idea how to change the current to fix the future. But I do know it’s not what we are doing now. The way we treat some aspects of society is horrific. My central tenant is “be nice”. It’s the easiest thing to do. I think I’d also have to say that we should use evidence to improve and help people along with doing out best to look after the planet for the future. We are nowhere near doing that yet. It’s a real shame. So, now I’m going to head off and be selfish for a while along with donating money to organisations that are working to change our current world in the best of ways so we can be the best for the future.
Tweeting About Sunk Cost
There’s been quite a lot of people leaving Twitter because Elon Musk has decided to try and buy the platform. I’ve been thinking what to do about this and whether I care or not. I’m no fan of Elon Musk. I’m pretty sure he’s a disingenuous fool who says lots of things but it’s all self-serving promotion. I don’t even think he’s a business genius. So, when all the news broke about him buying Twitter I did have a few thoughts about whether I should stay on the platform. But then, what’s the difference between him owning it and a bunch of faceless investors owning it? I don’t think it will make a difference to me and my uses of twitter.
Then there’s the concept that he’ll allow “free speech” on the platform. Well, that’s interesting because in my experience that just means racists will be racist. As a private company Twitter can set whatever rules it wants given the current status of “things being said on the internet are not the responsibility of the platforms on which they are said”. Can you imagine having to moderate all the gigabytes of data that gets sent to these platforms for dodgy content? Who would be doing the monitoring and what would the rules be? At the moment Twitter is like advertising in the UK. It’s fine until someone complains about it. There are rules but you only have to follow them if someone raises an issue.
I’ve got quite a lot invested in Twitter in terms of this website. If I delete all my data then every tweet that I’ve embedded over the years on my communications will be removed and to be honest it will change the look and feel of this site. If there’s an option to download all my tweets and images and try to then re-link every tweet on this site then that’s something I could look into but the time and challenge to do that might make it not worth it. I am invested – time wise – into twitter and so removing that would bother me. I am aware that this is the “sunk cost” fallacy. It wouldn’t matter to anyone but me if I left twitter. That place has been a rabid discourse of racists and arseholes for over eight years now [everything went shit in the middle of 2016] so leaving now wouldn’t change much.
Only Two Hours Sleep You Say?
It has been an interesting few weeks. I recently met up with my good friend Jamie from Cornwall and had a nice meal with him and Smith. When I returned to my car and started it all hell broke loose and it sounded as though the exhaust had fallen off! I turned it on again just to see what would happen and – BLAM – still the same [sexy for a race car] noise. There is no way a Toyota Prius should sound like that. So I had to call the AA for Bora Horza Gobuchul. Now, being a male and having broken the car in the leafy Surrey suburbs I was not top of the list to be helped, but that is perfectly fine. It makes sense that women and vulnerable people should be helped first. We shouldn’t live in a world where that discrimination is necessary but as there is a very clear problem with male-on-female violence I’m happy to wait.
The AA man turned up and I described what the car sounded like. He grabbed a torch and looked underneath the vehicle. “Your catalytic converter’s been nicked”. In the couple of hours I was with my friends people had come and jacked up my car and sawn out the catalytic converter. This was a bit of a “bugger” moment as I was hoping he could just do some bolts up and I’d be on my way back home. Nope. The AA man called for a flat-bed truck to come and get me. Again, I’m down the list of priority so I had to wait until 0230 for the truck to arrive. I was slightly terrified of having to start the engine to get the car onto the truck as the Prius can only be put into neutral with the power system turned on, if the battery is low the engine will start. It turned out there was enough juice in the hybrid battery to run the car on EV power for a short while. It was loaded onto the truck and we headed off to Kent.
I had Bora Horza Gobuchul dropped off at an exhaust centre a couple of miles from my house and I got home a little before 0400. I went to bed and got up after not sleeping particularly well to organise work things and getting to the exhaust centre to explain the car dumped outside their workshop. I had already planned to cycle to work for a few days this particular week and so I had all my shower kit and spare clothes at school. So, I just had to cycle a few more days. Fortunately the weather was good and quite warm. Hopefully it’ll be similar the next time I cycle to work. The ride is about thirty minutes and as the majority of it follows the Medway towpath is actually really pleasant.
After speaking to insurance people and various garages it turned out that if I needed a courtesy car then I would have to get Bora Horza Gobuchul fixed at their choice of garage. In Ashford. The guys at ATS couldn’t fix the Prius because they can only replace the exhaust with OEM parts and they don’t have a deal with Toyota. So I had to get the car fixed in Ashford. After calling them I had to wait five days before they could get to me! Five days. I phoned them on the Friday, they couldn’t get the car picked up until I had uploaded a photograph of the car showing it can’t be driven. This was an amusing piece of administration as I couldn’t take a photo of the bits of the car showing I couldn’t drive it because from the outside it just looked like a normal car. While they understood this they also said that they can’t proceed until I upload a photo. I was at work. My car was thirty minutes bike ride away. So, I had an old photo of the car, cropped the background out, removed the meta-data and uploaded that. The garage said they would be able to get to me for Tuesday morning between 0800 and 1300.
I managed to borrow a friend’s car for the weekend and to run small jobs and the sorts of journeys you take for granted when you have a car. Even so I was mighty pissed off that I was expecting a speedy service and all that happened with me was delay and delay. So, I am currently in the position of waiting for Bora Horza Gobuchul to be fixed. I have a courtesy car which is ok. It’s a car. I don’t like it, but it’s a car. It’s nice to be mobile. All the money side of the admin has yet to be completed and I’m hoping to get the Prius early next week. I have no idea whether I’ll get a cat-lock fitted next time it’s in for a service. I suspect that if people want to steal my catalytic converter then they will.
Deepest Darkest Essex
While driving with my parents to a restaurant/café for lunch I noticed this strange thing by the road. It seemed pertinent to stop and tell my children of the punishment methods of the past. People I give you the Great Canfield Stocks and Whipping Post.
The sign explains that the stocks were replaced to commemorate the start of the third millennium. I’m quite curious to know what was in this position before these and the history of them. The sign explains the stocks were last used in 1860 for a case of drunkenness and also that this site was where Elizabeth Abbott was burnt as a witch in 1693. The sheer terror I feel with how we used to treat people is only masked by the general terror I feel for how we treat people these days. I’m not sure we’ve moved on that far.
This is comms#2023 and I’m still trying to work out what to replace my “events each year” thing. Give me some time and when I get a chance I will figure this out. Things have been a little busy recently with work and also my car being off the road because some cunts stole the catalytic converter. I’m currently waiting for it to be towed to be repaired along with getting a courtesy car.