Five Miles Out

Silent the terror that reigned

It is funny how music connects different people. If you asked 100 people in the street if they are Altered Images fans, I doubt that any would say yes and yet I know two – Mike and John. Iron Maiden were a band that linked my friends in Royston (John Bonney and others) with Brightlingsea (Neil and Andy primarily, but plenty of others I knew a bit less well).

It was at John Bonney’s that I first heard the album The Number of the Beast. I had heard the singles – Run To the Hills (with the comic video) and the controversial single The Number of the Beast (the number 666 was famous for its use in The Omen films), but it was there I heard the whole album and realised that this was a group that I really liked. Of course they were condemned as Satanists in the USA, but so what. It is almost a badge of honour for heavy metal fans.

It was their third album and the first with Bruce Dickinson as lead singer, replacing Paul Di’Anno. It also marked a move away from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal style (like Saxon https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/11/26/i-saw-the-writing-on-the-wall/ or Judas Priest https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/09/22/theres-anger-in-my-heart/ towards their own niche.

The only real blot on the group lyrically are the three songs about the prostitute Charlotte (Charlotte the Harlot, 22 Acacia Avenue and From Here to Eternity), more like something a group like Whitesnake (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/09/26/im-so-tired-of-trying/ ) would do. Though Steve Harris always said the early songs were based on a real East End prostitute they always seemed at odds with their other material. I liked the fact that it had a song based on The Prisoner TV series (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/12/14/while-you-sleep-theres-a-whole-world-coming-alive/ ).

(Classic line up – Murray, Harris, Dickinson, Harris – Nicko out of sight at the back)

The classic line up of Bruce Dickinson (pilot and Olympic fencer), Steve Harris (it is Steve’s band), Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Nicko McBrain (drums and the last member of the classic line up to join) were not in place until the fourth album Piece of Mind. This is one of my favourite albums by the band – songs about mythology, films, novels (Dune) and war.

The classic line up made three more long players – Powerslave, Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. The most important song for the band (in retrospect) was Adrian Harris’s Wasted Years. This was a commentary on his time with Maiden and he left after Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. For me he was a great loss as I loved his melodic guitar playing and his replacement, Jannick Gers, had a very different style – choppier and less smooth.

This line up made two albums – No Prayer for the Dying and Fear of the Dark. The former included the song Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter, it was not number one on the last chart before Christmas, but was the highest seller in the week that included Christmas. Bruce exhorted us to buy this at the first Maiden gig I went to. Andy, Neil Wigley, Dick Wigley and I went up to Wembley Arena in Andy’s van. We arrived very early and ate at a greasy café – then as the last number was ending we ran out to escape the car park before the rush. Good thing Andy had known that as some people took two hours to get out of the car park. It was a really good gig and even had Anthrax as a support band.

Then Bruce Dickinson left the band for a solo career and his other interests. Blaze Bayley replaced him, but the two albums with him are the worst of their history. There is nothing wrong with Bayley per se, but Iron Maiden were not one of the groups who wrote the songs together. Losing Dickinson and Smith meant that the song writing mix changed substantially (Murray wrote less than the others, apart from McBrain who hardly wrote any). The group continued touring to big audiences and it looked like they would quietly become the kind of band that tours old material – like The Rolling Stones.

Then the amazing happened in 2000. Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith returned to the band and Blaze Bayley was ejected. Gers stayed, but he had been in the group for ten years. The album Brave New World had a couple of good tracks, but it felt like a lacklustre attempt to get the band back on the map.

The band surprised me again and 2003’s Dance of Death is my other favourite album by the band. Packed with great tracks Andy, Neil, Jason and I saw them at Earls Court. It left me deaf for a day but it was a hell of a night.

(The comeback line up – Adrian Smith, Jannick Gers, Steve Harris, Bruce Dickinson, Nicko McBrain, Dave Murray)

The next album, A Matter of Life and Death, would have been perfect on vinyl – side one is brilliant, side two is less memorable. It does include a couple of my favourite Maiden songs – These Colours Don’t Run and Brighter than A Thousand Suns As the whole album had a war them – obvious from the cover.

I went to see them at Earls Court again. Three members of Dumper (https://fivemilesout.home.blog/2020/06/10/ma-youre-just-jealous-were-the-dumper-boys/ ) – Andy , Jason Cook and Jason Sainty – as well as Neil and a couple of other guys met up outside for food. I had a nightmare journey there, with a 45-minute walk needed to get to Plaistow tube station. I had not been involved in buying the tickets and I found out we were standing on the arena floor. Not only had I walked miles, I had done a 90-minute workout at lunchtime and was exhausted. Not only that it was so loud on the floor – if you held up pieces of paper the sound waves from the speakers blew them away.

It would probably have still been alright if a power cable had not burned through after the 1^st 5 songs from the latest LP. After a 35 min break it started again but the gig had gone flat for me. The place was full of illegal smokers, arseholes punching the air, people with bad BO. I drifted to the back and then lost the others on leaving. It was incredibly late (for me) and this was the last gig I attended.

There have been two more albums in the last 14 years. Not their best, but still high quality – which is impressive as they approach 60 years old.

If you don’t like Iron Maiden or Heavy Metal listen to the b side of Wasted Years, Reach Out. I assume no boy band manager ever heard it as it could be very easily retooled into an MOR piece of pop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e275RzmQekA

Powerslave is another album of two halves. Side 1 is okay, but side 2 has Back in the Village (The Prisoner again), Rime of the Ancient Mariner and this track. The story of Osiris, Isis and Horus (the cover of the album illustrates the influence). It was a close call between this track (from Powerslave), To Tame a Land and Brighter than a Thousand Suns.

Powerslave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4U07_4rvbM

Playlist:

Running Free
Charlotte the Harlot
Iron Maiden
Killers
Phantom of the Opera
Run To The Hills
The Number of the Beast
The Prisoner
22 Acacia Avenue
Flight of Icarus
Die With Your Boots On
Where Eagles Dare
The Trooper
Quest For Fire
The Flight of Icarus
Sun and Steel
To Tame a Land
2 Minutes to Midnight
Back in the Village
Powerslave
Caught Somewhere in Time
Wasted Years
Juanita
Reach Out
Moonchild
Infinite Dreams
Can I Play With Madness
The Evil That Men Do
The Clairvoyant
Only the Good Die Young
Holy Smoke
Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter
Be Quick or Be Dead
From Here to Eternity
Afraid to Shoot Strangers
Fear of the Dark
Futureal
The Wicker Man
Brave New World
Wildest Dreams
Dance of the Dead
Paschendale
These Colours Don’t Run
Brighter Than a Thousand Suns

And let me dream

You do appreciate how important a good night’s sleep is until you aren’t getting them anymore. Most children are exhausted and sleep well; when you get into your teens and twenties you can party all night and keep going (of course biologically this is so that parents can cope with the disturbed night that babies and small children give them, but humanity is changing in the UK with childbirth delayed).

The closest I ever came to not sleeping were the 24-hour D&D game (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1194 ) and the first night of the 2004 Olympics. I got up at 5am to go to work, getting in to the office 6am. Having worked all day I drove to Neil’s in Colchester arriving there at 8pm. We went out and drank, grabbing fast food and ending up in a club. We walked all the way back across Colchester to Neil’s house, getting there at 4.30am. I felt ill for days after that.

A woman who I used to work with did something similar. She went out with some women from work as she had not been out for over two years. She had been up at 7.30am and got back to her parents at 6am the following day – 30 minutes before her son woke up and with a raging hangover.

I have not slept through more than half a dozen nights in the last 20 years. Even when I am prescribed drugs that make me sleepy (like amitriptyline). Even when these were short walking periods it was incredibly disruptive. If my mind started working – worrying about problems or what I was going to do at work that day these waking spells would get longer.

I do fall asleep quickly, which I know is a problem for many people. This is not luck – it is my medical condition. I pass out at the same time every night and it is not satisfying. I can only offer the standard advice to people – stop watching TV or using a screen at least 30 minutes before you sleep. Get in bed, relax and read (Kindles are ok as the liquid paper display is not the same as LCD screens.

You get to the point where you wonder if you should go back to sleep again – knowing that if you do you will be woken by the alarm clock and feel terrible for that.

Then there are the nightmares that come in these light sleeping spells. Vivid, graphic – often in the same fictional city built of deep rust brown sandstone in the middle of a desert, yet serviced a river. The streets are narrow and tight, unless driving is part of it. The city is like none I have ever seen. It is also the home of lots of weird creatures that lurk in the darkness. Not a good way to wake up.

For the last three years I have been using a band that monitors sleep. The band gets it wrong as it is based on heart rates so being still and calm will fool it. The positive is that it often shows that a night when I think I have slept very badly was really a night of badly fragmented sleep.

I have tried listening to calming music and other remedies. On the worst nights I have to get up for an hour and mimic going to bed again. Listening to a podcast by someone with a boring voice sometimes work too. The History of the Crusades works well for me – interesting subject, but dull voice.

The worst thing is all the symptoms that it leaves you with. The constant exhaustion and inability to focus properly.

Not a great fan of Faithless but the full-length version of this is a tour de force

Insomnia

Across your face my friend

It was only recently that I talked about British exceptionalism as it related to intervening abroad (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/2123 ). The UK has elected to leave the European Union (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/2007 ) and will need to exercise power on the world stage without a 28-country bloc to help. The reaction of the government was to pour money into the armed forces, probably to make headlines because if you want your country to have influence abroad in the 21^st century that is not the way to go about it.

It was an easy sop to people who do not think too much to cut the international aid budget from the promised 1% of GDP. This ignores the fact that it was set up as a percentage of GDP so it automatically reduces when GDP shrinks. This commitment has long been a bugbear of the Tory party and it has spouted lots of propaganda about how it has been used badly to turn the public against it – like countries who receive aid having funds for other things, an African “Spice Girls” being funded (they were used to get messages to rural communities not pop stardom) or just the nationalist message that we should look after our “own” at home first (notwithstanding the fact that Tory policies have created the poverty at home in the first place). I find the last so objectionable – people are people – we have a common humanity.

Soft power is how you win friends and influence in the 21^st century, not with troops and bombs. The cut in the Aid budget is far smaller than the extra defence money.

China is the coming power of the age and will probably be the world’s greatest superpower within the next 50 years. They are spraying soft power around all over the place. When the Greek financial crisis hit they were the first country to provide financial aid. No strings attached. That put them in a good position to bid for assets the country had to privatise.

China has been investing all over Africa and in other poorer nations. This has enabled them to pick up a lot of support at the United Nations and thus they can continue with policies that may otherwise have been blocked. They have also guaranteed free COVID-19 vaccine to many of the world’s poorest countries (though there are questions around how effective their vaccine is).

There is also the belt and road initiative to provide links across Asia to Europe. That is investing in a huge swathe of countries and assisting their economies. This is how you gain power today.

One of the UK’s greatest sources of soft power is the BBC World Service. The BBC is still a trusted brand across the world as it is independent of the government. The reach of the service has been progressively reduced and curtailed by budget cuts (part of the World Service is directly Government funded for soft power purposes) just as China, Russia and others are investing in media services building their soft power.

Not only are UK Governments short sighted, in particular Johnson’s chumocracy of idiots, but they literally do not understand how the world works today. They still believe it is the nineteenth century. Which is where we will end up if we do not get rid of them.

For a long time it was widely believed that it was going to be Africa’s time in the 21^st Century. Debt and apartheid really put a stop to that as South Africa should have been one of the powerhouses of the continent. In the depths of 1980s apartheid there was one group that mixed black and white – Juluka. They mixed western rock with the beats of South African music. They were championed on evening radio in the UK and one member of our sixth form was a big fan. They were successful in Europe but never made it in the UK. Johnny Clegg (the lead singer) was a prominent anti-apartheid campaigner and received several honorary doctorates from universities in the post-apartheid era. He was just 66 when he died in 2019 – Rest In Power Johnny, you were a bloody hero. This is my favourite track by them.

December African Rain

Before the storm

Is it strange to be friends with people you were at school with over 30 years since you left school? A lot of people think so. To stay close to those people for that long despite moving apart and having families. How we related changed bit by bit. During university holidays and after Neil and I graduated there were Friday and Saturday nights out drinking, Rotaract midweek and other weekend events like sport playing.

As work and settling down increased first of all it was Saturday nights only, then just some Saturdays, then once a month. Three of us living or working in London made it easier for a while My ongoing ME made it even harder (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1526 ) and Neil retired.

In 2016 we were 50 and we decided to go on holiday for a week together. Dave had suggested this a number of times, but this time we were serious. We went to Lindos to make sure that the pace of life was not too much for us 50-year-olds (actually it turned out we could go more lively than that).

We were lucky to go. Dave’s son was ill and in hospital, Neil and I both had medical flare ups – John was very nearly at the departure gate on his own with a four-person apartment for himself.

It was a nice apartment, part of a small complex above Lindos with its own pool, there was even some limited wi-fi in the pool area. Neil celebrated our arrival with a large Greek Salad (though in my experience that is the only size that they come in)

Eight days isn’t a lot as the first and last are pretty much travelling. We needed recovery time from work (John had not slept for 36 hours by the time we arrived and had some severe headaches for a while)

(Me, John, Dave and Neil in the Ice Bar)

We went to the Ice Bar – totally incongruous in a place like Lindos. It would have been nicer to pop in for five minutes a couple of times a day.

Lindos is pretty but not very exciting. On the second day we asked the rep in there were any night clubs. She asked us how late we were out, and we said until around 11pm. Her answer was that the clubs did not open until 1 or 2am. Our response? We like to be in bed earlier than that. She looked at us and said that if that was the case maybe they weren’t for us. Cruel.

We hired a car for three days and went Go Karting. John won but I amazed the others by being second (though Dave being bigger than me and the size of the engines gave me an advantage). It was enlivened by Dave getting a wasp up his shorts near the end of the race but managing to keep going.

I did not do so well at mini golf – I am not at the podium as I was a distant fourth.

(Neil, Dave and John)

Neil elected not to go on our second day out. First to Seven Springs where Dave and John noted how much lower the water was than when they had visited in 1989.

(Hiking around Seven Springs)

Then into Rhodes and looking around the Old Town, somewhere we would spend far more time in 2018.

(Dave and John in the Old Town).

We use the car to spend two nights in Faliraki – watching football and enjoying the louder bars and the more vibrant atmosphere. Faliraki was far more gentile than it had been in 1995, something that would only increase by 2018. Shame as it was a great party town. Rhodes is the no the family vacation centre for Romania, Bulgaria and the Ukraine, but at least they don’t have British people passed out in the streets. The hotel owners and bar owners were ambivalent about the change – they liked the calm, but there was far less revenue.

If you can put up with three other men in a cramped apartment for a week it shows you must be mates for life.

The ultimate trance song, but it was already over a decade old by the time we went on holiday – and we thought that was recent. Love the twist ending to the video too.

Sandstorm

Concealing to Appeal

Genesis were one of those bands I was aware of but did not really know well in 1980 as no one I knew had any of their albums for me to tape. Or no one I knew well enough. They had a hit in 1981 with Abacab, which was on rock side of pop, but did not seem anything special.

When we moved to Brightlingsea one shop in the town (which did not have a music shop) had some Genesis cassettes in the window and the pictures were intriguing – strange pastoral scenes, that when you looked closer were disturbing.

Like I said in my introductory post, all the way back on 6^th April 2020 (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/29 ) some groups change so much that they are more than one group. Genesis are one of the leading examples of that. The band have been a five piece (with two different drummers, Phil Collins was not the original); a four piece when Peter Gabriel left; a three piece after Steve Hackett departed and there was a final album as a two piece after Phil Collins quit.

Steve Doubtfire (a man of great musical taste) had some early Genesis albums. He lent me a couple to tape. They had the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve and Peter Gabriel plays multiple characters in the songs that can be seen easily from this – harder when you just have a pirate tape,

The highlight of Nusery Cryme is The Musical Box, a ten minute song about a boy who ages rapidly with all his desires for a girl concentrated into minutes. This was short compared to Supper’s Ready from Foxtrot that runs over 20 minutes (Darrin Keeble was offended by the line “Winston Churchill dressed in drag” which I thought was odd).

(The first two albums are interesting, but really only for aficionados – highlighting how in the good old days groups would be a given a chance to grow without huge success).

I went back for more and their fifth album, Selling England By the Pound, remains one of my favourite albums ever. It is overshadowed in history by the double album that followed (Gabriel’s last) following a young man around a fantasy New York.

(Selling England by the Pound)

Peter Gabriel departed (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1290 ) and Phil Collins added vocals to his drumming. There are two albums as a four piece – Wind and Wuthering and A Trick of the Tail. Both good, but they seem slightly awkward. The albums are long for the time and only feature eight tracks. They are rock but not heavy rock.

Hackett’s departure produces another classic album. The songs are still long and complex but there is a single on …. And Then There Were Three (Follow You, Follow Me). Genesis actually went on Tiswas to promote it (a children’s Saturday morning program of unbelievable anarchy where custard was thrown everywhere – Chris Tarrant and Lenny Henry were heavily involved). Scenes From a Night’s Dream (about Little Nemo in Slumberland) and The Ballad of Big (a cowboy story) are stand outs.

Hugh Padgam’s influence as producer is more and more evident over the next albums, each one less interesting than the last with a bigger emphasis on percussion and a pop sensibility. At the same time Phil Collins started his solo career after one of his divorces and his solo music is proper pop music.

Dire Straits are usually cited as the archetypal CD band that allowed the music industry to move away from vinyl in the mid-80s, but Genesis are part of it too. So much so that Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho cites them as his favourite band, not understanding their older material. As Bateman is meant to typify the vapid superficiality of the 1980s this is quite a damning commentary on Genesis.

They made one album after Collins left but it is not really Genesis anymore. They did produce a lot of great albums though – any serious music enthusiast should listen to Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Wind and Wuthering and …..And Then There Were Three.

There are a huge number of tracks from Genesis that could be on the list. Scenes From a Night’s Dream and The Battle of Epping Forest are amazing. Having two on one album shows how good that is –

The Cinema Show

Playlist:

When the Sour Turns to Sweet
White Mountain
The Musical Box
The Return of the Giant Hogweed
Harold the Barrel
Get ‘Em Out By Friday
Supper’s Ready
Firth of Forth
The Battle of Epping Forest
The Cinema Show
The Aisle of Plenty
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Lily White Lilith
Dance on a Volcano
Robbery, Assault and Battery
All in a Mouse’s Night
Eleventh Earl of Mar
Ballad of Big
Scenes From a Night’s Dream
Burning Rope
Many Too Many
Follow You, Follow Me
Heathaze
Turn It On Again
Abacab
Keep It Dark
Mama
Home By the Sea
Land of Confusion
Jesus He Knows Me

There’s a fire in your heart

I know the UK does not understand it (for a large part) and I am pretty sure the USA doesn’t for the most part. A lot of people abroad think we are at least self-serving arseholes, if not outright evil. Britain still perceives itself as a punching above its weight superpower, when it patently is not and is clinging to dreams of imperial power that were shredded long ago.

This exceptionalism makes us think that it is our right and, indeed (harrumphing from the entitled), responsibility to intervene abroad where there are gross violations of human rights and to make things good.

The map of Europe used to change regularly across the nineteenth century. The unification of Italy, the unification of Germany, wars and so on.

(Europe 1910)

The end of the First World War redrew it again.

(Europe 1920)

The rise of Nazism and the expansion of Germany changed it again.

(Europe 1938)

After World War 2 and the Yalta agreement Europe was split into the capitalist (mostly) West and the Communist East. That was frozen in place until after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. This gave Boomers and Gen Xers an incorrect assumption that Europe was fixed and stable.

(Europe 1950)

The fall of The Soviet Union led to it fracturing into 15 countries – Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Moldova Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Whilst a lot of this happened peacefully the ongoing military situations in Nagorno-Karabakh and the Crimea still show this fallout having a direct effect on people’s lives.

Czechia and Slovakia went their separate ways peacefully. The same could not be said about Yugoslavia. The iron hand of communism had held it together, without that the ethnic and religious tensions that had rendered the Balkans the flashpoint of Europe for so long before World War 2 came crashing to the surface. The Serbians and the Croatians have issues going back centuries. Stir in ethnic Albanians and Muslim Bosniaks (the area was part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries) and it did not take a lot to lead to disaster.

The area was devastated. Ethnic cleansing – including the rape of women so they would be ashamed and have babies out of wedlock – was normalised. Whole Bosniak villages were massacred, mass graves of men have been found. Awful reports of the torture and degradation that these people were subjected to have emerged. This area remains a hub of people trafficking for the sex trade – echoing long ago wars where women were seized as prizes by the winners.

What happened? The West sent in peacekeepers who were not allowed to intervene and had to watch this going on. A weapons ban was issued – cementing in place the arms advantage the Serbs had.

Contrast this with the response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the 90s – immediate response and freedom for Kuwait (though the Marsh Arabs were left to be massacred in one of the most vile acts of Western betrayal since Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to send the Poles back to be killed at Yalta). Even worse under George W Bush after 9/11 Iraq was invaded and its infrastructure wiped out, despite it not being linked in any way to terror attacks or having Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Oil. And capitalism. The USA has made a fortune out of reconstruction or at least firms related to the upper echelons of the Republican party have.

To be fair part of this would be due to Bill Clinton being President during the Yugoslavia breakup and Republicans being in charge at other times.

Combine with this with the failure to make Israel leave occupied Palestinian territories for over 50 years and you might understand why some Muslim countries think there is a double standard operating in the West on armed intervention.

If we (and the USA) are going to be interventionist then it must be consistent.

This was the last great song of the 20^th Century. Paul Oakenfold was the best DJ and producer of the 90s and he made a lot of singles under various names, Planet Perfecto was one of them.

Bullet in the Gun

You had chemicals boy

I hated Night Clubs. Night Clubs started out as places to go where the posh elements of society could have a meal, a cabaret and a dance to live music. When they mutated into large pubs with DJs and the ability to stay open and serve alcohol after 11pm they somehow kept hold of some of those pretensions of grandeur.

No jeans, no trainers, shirts, ties, some even demanded suits. Much like other dress related requirements the code for women was less strict (and I am well aware, like in working environments, this can be as much of a problem as a benefit – men may have to dress in a suit, but it is easy to choose, whereas women have a far wider choice, but that in itself brings questions about what works and is suitable for the environment). These rules could be imposed because the clubs knew men wanted to go there to meet women – this could also mean that men paid for entry, but women were let in free or allowed to jump the queues (of course the bouncers were all men in the 80s too). I hated dressing like that – I did not realise at the time that I had hypersensitive skin that reacted to certain materials and styles. I also did not want to dress for going out the way that I dressed for work. (This did not just apply to clubs, some restaurants had rules too and it was only in the late 90s that I stopped asking if there was a dress code when eating out – if there were it was usually no soiled workmen’s clothes, no vests or the like).

Another thing that I hate about clubs is the line outside to get in. In most cases this is not for any other reason than the owners want it to look popular and attract attention. Shivering at 11pm on a cold night for 45 minutes only to enter an almost empty club is not my idea of fun. To get round this you could get in early, usually paying a lower entry fee, but have to pay higher rates for alcohol and hang around in a cavernous empty space for ages.

The nearest club to us was The Tartan House in Frating – so middle of nowhere that they laid on transport. Now it is a housing development. In Colchester there were several, but the problem was that buses stopped running at 10pm, minicabs would often take 2 to 3 hours to pick you up and taxis were prohibitively expensive. I know people who have walked the ten miles from Colchester to Brightlingsea in the wee small hours. The most infamous club in Colchester at the time had a mirrored floor – whether or not apocryphal everyone had heard of the poor woman who had not thought about this when going commando.

The main club on Colchester High Street has gone by many names and is at least a reasonable size – unlike L’Aristos or the Andromeda were. It was so loud though and if you did not like dancing there was nothing to do. Chicago’s were a type of hybrid pub/ club chain that was successful for a while in the nineties and noughties – aiming at a slightly older crowd and at least included an outside area in Colchester – for quiet and air.

(Chicagos now)

It was not just Colchester -Sheila’s in London was an expensive underground club that, on my one visit, was packed to the rafters and had sweat dripping down the walls yet seemed to think that it was an exclusive venue.

The only club that I actually liked was Kudos in Watford. It was a massive club. There were two separate dance areas playing different music. There were quiet spaces and there were even indoor food outlets to keep you going. They had proper DJs too – not just Carl from shipping doing a weekend gig in the hope of fame.

(Inside Kudos)

Clubbing became huge because of the rise of dance culture and every town had at least one. Then 2008 hit and money was tighter. Young people realised it costed a fraction of the cost to get drunk at home. Then the rise of dating apps meant that you could meet people without having to spend hours being deafened and buying bad lager for £10 a pint. Clubs were already declining when the pandemic hit.

I am not sure they will be back.

This is the most clubby, dancey song ever.

Born Slippy

We take the pills to find each other

The Culture War started in the USA and has progressed to the extent that wearing or not wearing a mask in the face of the worst pandemic for a century is a political act. For years the British laughed at this while the Tory party joined as enthusiastically using nativism and the politics of hatred to attack the left.

In the midst of a pandemic the right-wing press and the Tory hardliners started a war about singing at The Last Night of The Proms. They were upset that it was cancelled. Yet it never was cancelled. The vile Daily Mail and the marginally less vile Daily Telegraph and Daily Express have been harping on about immigrants for years. Egged on by the race baiting demagogues like Nigel Farage and Katie Hopkins they have turned refugees from conflicts into the cause of all Britain’s problems, rather the people who are in charge.

On particular target of these demagogues is the Human Right’s Act, which is always linked to some perceived injustice of immigrants using it to stay in the country. Human Rights are rights for all of us and we should be fighting like hell to stop the government watering them down.

Articles 1 and 13 do not feature in the Act. This is because, by creating the Human Rights Act, the UK has fulfilled these rights.

For example, Article 1 says that states must secure the rights of the Convention in their own jurisdiction. The Human Rights Act is the main way of doing this for the UK.

Article 13 makes sure that if people’s rights are violated that they are able to access effective remedy. This means they can take their case to court to seek a judgment. The Human Rights Act is designed to make sure this happens.

Article 2: Right to life

Article 3: Freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment

Article 4: Freedom from slavery and forced labour

Article 5: Right to liberty and security

Article 6: Right to a fair trial

Article 7: No punishment without law

Article 8: Respect for your private and family life, home and correspondence

Article 9: Freedom of thought, belief and religion

Article 10: Freedom of expression

Article 11: Freedom of assembly and association

Article 12: Right to marry and start a family

Article 14: Protection from discrimination in respect of these rights and freedoms

Protocol 1, Article 1: Right to peaceful enjoyment of your property

Protocol 1, Article 2: Right to education

Protocol 1, Article 3: Right to participate in free elections

Protocol 13, Article 1: Abolition of the death penalty

Bow I am not sure what any right-minded human being would object to in these (some people may not agree that the death penalty should not be available, but I just point to all the executed found innocent in retrospect). The rights listed means that you live in a free country, not one where the government rides roughshod over its citizens. If a government wants to abolish them you should be asking why they want to and what they want to do when you are deprived of the rights.

Suede typified a genre of androgynous rock from the early 1990s. Brent Anderson and Bernard Butler were the creative force of the band, but split after just two albums. Suede continued but the real Suede was just these two long-players.

New Generation

Playlist:

So Young
Animal Nitrate
She’s Not Dead
Animal Lover
WE Are the Pigs
The Beautiful Ones
The Wild Ones
Daddy’s Speeding
New Generation
Killing of a Flash Boy

I’m not the pleasure I used to be

The only time that I had tried a moped was when Alison got one to go to and from Clacton. I tried it out but when Alison rode the moped she had a helmet and protective gear. Dave and Andy had tried out mopeds on our holiday in 1991 and it was decided that we should all have a day out on them. We got up early (9am is early if you are out drinking after 2am) and hired them from a shop called Tomas over the road. Neil and I had the smallest (as we had no experience on bikes), John had a vespa and Dave and Andy had bigger mopeds.

The Greek attitude to health and safety was laxer in those days (and may well still be). No helmets or protective gear – just what you see us in. We stopped to fill up with petrol as Dave had run out the first time that he had hired one and went off to the Institute of Hippocrates (the father of medicine). Just ruins.

(Me, John, Neil and Andy at the Institute of Hippocrates)

After that we tried to go across country to a village called Zia. These mopeds were not designed for off roading and there were huge amounts of dust. We even got turned away from an army base – the soldiers incredulous at what these English idiots were doing. John’s vespa started cutting out. Both he and Andy tried to deal with it, but to no avail.

(John, Neil and Andy off road)

(John and Tomas go back to Kos Town)

We got down to the main road and found a taverna. Dave and Andy went back to Kos Town to the shop and we got some food. They got back with Tomas before the food had arrived. Tomas got the vespa going and escorted John back to Kos Town to replace it. His lunch arrived while he was away and we ate half of it, rearranging the food to make it look like that was all that had been served. The wait for his return was enlivened by a topless female cyclist going past.

All set we got back and headed towards Zia in the mountains. Dave at the front, followed By Andy; then Neil, me and John looking after the novices at the back. We took at turn and there was a huge pothole just around a corner. Dave avoided it and everyone from Neil back stopped. Andy crashed.

(Neil photobombing, Andy trying to see the extent of his injuries and Dave)

He needed to clean his wounds and we found this trough, the water was a bit green, but he washed up. The combination of the injuries, sunburn and the infection from the stagnant water was not pleasant for poor Andy. He was a trooper and kept going – I am not sure that I would have managed that.

We got some instructions and drove down a 3km dust track to the Castle of Antimachia in the middle of the island. Free to get into but no signs or information.

(Me and Neil at the castle, behind us is Kardamena)

We played boy racer a bit – even then I almost managed to crash.

(I should not be allowed on a moped)

Sweat, dust and suntan lotion is a horrible combination so we went to the pool at the Cosmopolitan Hotel (where they assumed we were staying we were there so much so never charged us) for a refreshing swim.

We had a nice evening meal at the only Chinese restaurant in Kos Town. Dave was not feeling great so went to bed, but the rest of us said we would get one drink at Club 69. Turned into a hell of a party night with various people pinning pornographic cards to other people and sex being simulated on the cars in Garage Bar by the staff. John and I went on to Heaven night club, where I totally lost my voice (probably from all the dust). Great night though.

All told it was an incredible 20 hours or so.

Previously I said that there was a song in The Sun that I could not identify (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1956 ). I eventually found it – with John’s help. It did not actually have “She” in the title. It was this song by The House of Love.

Shine On

De lo imposible de la noche

De lo imposible de la noche

Day four of the trip to Egypt and I was ill. I am certain that it was not anything that I had eaten – it was either sunstrike or touching my lips after handling the money. I felt grim but we were going to the Valley of the Kings and I was not missing out on that. We had slept on the MS Tulip after seeing Luxor and Karnak the day before (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/2076 ).

There had been an optional balloon to see the sunrise that we decided was too much. One poor guy had an attack of diarrhoea on board and had to go over the edge of the basket on to the desert below. A few months later one of these balloon rides crashed in the desert and everyone died. Health and safety are not dirty words.

We met the balloon group at the Colossi of Memnon – statues of Amonhotep III.

(Statues of Memnon)

There are no cameras allowed to be used in the Valley of the Kings. Fortunately for me we were taken up part of the way on motorised trollies – despite it being November and 8am it was already an inferno inside the heat trap and I was dehydrated already.

We went to see four tombs: Tutankhamun, Rameses 3, 6 & 9. They were all spectacular, even though the contents have been moved to the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. A general admission ticket gets you three tombs, but Tutankhamun is separate and has to be bought on its own. Despite the restrictions the damage being done to the tombs means that they are creating virtual versions to explore.

I would love to go back and se the other Valleys – this is the most famous but there are others.

On the way down a hawker got very angry with Dad when he thought that he had conned him and he saw the scam, but Randa (our guide) gave that hawker hell.

We drove to the alabaster factory and saw how they made things. Dad got a big granite statue and people made jokes about the statues with big dicks. I stuck to my water.

Last stop for the morning it was the Temple of Hatshepsut – the only female Pharaoh (this was where tourists were gunned down years ago in a terrorist attack). Pictures of her were done with a beard, but after her death her successors tried to wipe out any reference to her. Plus ca change. I was on my last legs here but made it round.

In the afternoon, after a doze, I went up on deck for a long discussion about Egyptian politics as we cruised down the Nile. Sadly Randa’s predictions that day proved accurate and Egypt has returned to authoritarian rule. She was also right that Morsi would win the election and the army would get rid of him.

Day five was to be Edfu and Kom Ombo (https://wordpress.com/post/fivemilesout.home.blog/1969 ).

A trance classic.

El Nino