Ackit

Rain at night

Rain at night

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Concorde

Despite my best efforts, with music and camping, there’s still a geek inside me trying to get out. Generally he manifests himself in subtle ways - this blog for instance - but occasionally he bubbles to the surface in a torrent of NHS specs and cough pastilles.

Yesterday was one of those days. The first Concorde ever built (G-BOAC) is now in a hanger at Manchester Airport, which offers tours looking at the history of Concorde and a tour of the aircraft itself. How could I refuse?

The first thing that hits you on seeing Concorde is how thin it is. Comparing it to a 747 is like comparing a greyhound to St Bernard, all aerodynamic thinness and sleekness. The second thing you notice is how ordinary the inside is. Given it’s size, there’s only room for 100 passengers (in 25 rows of 2x2) and no room at all for anything like luxury: even installing televisions would have added to weight and left no headroom whatsoever.

But there was no need for televisions anyway, because the overwhelming feeling you get in and around Concorde is how wonderful it is. From the outside, it’s beautiful, a shining, gleaming, Swan-like feat of engineering. And the statistics are incredible: at a cruising speed of Mach II (twice the speed of sound, 1,330mph) it could reach New York from London in just over 3 hours (compare that to a 747 which takes around 8 hours to complete the same flight). At three hours, you’d reach New York before you set off.

Given all that, it seems a terrible waste for Concorde to be sitting as a museum piece in a hanger in Manchester. I can’t think of any other example of a company building something so incredible, so useful, and then abandoning it. Even if it did cost £10-15 million restore one of the younger models, there must surely be a market for supersonic transatlantic flight.

Apparently a French group is keeping F-BTSD in a “near air-worthy” condition, and hopes to fly it at the 2012 Olympics. I really do hope they succeed.

Gazing at Concorde. A bit sad I’ll never get to travel on one

Being a happy camper

I’m back from my weekend under canvas and, as predicted, the weather was glorious all weekend. Even better, I managed to avoid getting sunstroke (an occupational hazard in anything less than storms when you’re me) and, incredibly, Spider enjoyed it too.

There was, in fairness, very little to dislike about the campsite. The camping field had plenty of room, the toilet blocks had recently been refurbished, and there was a little pub on site, meaning I didn’t have to cook a full dinner on a one-pan burner.

Perhaps because everything was so easy to do, we did very little at all. Friday night saw us eat at the pub, walk one mile to the nearest village for another drink, walk slightly more slowly back to the campsite for a final drink, before settling down in front of the tent for a nice cup of tea before bed.

And that was it. I think an absence of natural light means you fall asleep and wake up with the sun, which is just as well because we were woken up at 5am by a herd of cows passing to be milked and again at 6am as they made their way back.

That intrusion of nature is something I’d forgotten about camping. There are a couple of other things I’d forgotten to, namely:

Rules

Campsites, it seems, love rules. It wasn’t possible to walk more than 100 yards before another sign implored us to use a pooper-scooper (even though we haven’t got a dog) and avoid playing gramophones or musical instruments between 11pm and 6am.

The main gate was open between 6am and midnight but at no other time.  Dogs - also on their holidays - were to be kept on a lead at all times. Gazebos are forbidden.

Someone has clearly tried to think of every possible way in which the enjoyment of others could be spoilt and then legislated accordingly. But it’s impossible to legislate for everything. I emptied an unfinished cup of tea into the flowerbed this morning just because I could.

I am a terrible camper.

View from the campsite

Camping it up

I mentioned last week, using only a picture of a camping stove, that my angelically patient girlfriend (who shall be known for the purposes of this blog as Spider) and I were going camping this weekend.

With hindsight, I appreciate that one picture might not have been able to convey all that information…

But today’s the day. It’s 8am and the sun’s out. In fact, it’s probably going to be the hottest day of the year and, if the BBC is to be believed, it’s going to continue throughout the weekend. Hurrah! I am aware that it might actually be too hot for camping: tents get stuffy and I’ll probably end up burned. After wishing for fine weather all week, maybe I’ve been wishing too hard?

It doesn’t matter. It’s going to be wonderful. I’ve decided. The camping stove and lamp are loaded with gas and ready to go, the tent has been checked and packed, and once I’ve bought bacon and eggs for breakfast tomorrow I reckon we’ll have everything we need.

In reality, I think I’ve probably over-hyped this in my mind. My idyllic image of camping is born of naivity rather than experience (I’ve been camping once before…) and I’m sure there’s hundreds of things I’ve forgotten to pack or don’t know how to work. But, what I lack in experience, I make up for in enthusiasm. And, in what must surely be a Tumblr first, I’m going to try and liveblog throughout the day. It’s modern camping.

Don’t look back

One of the delights of using Spotify is that I get to listen to albums I haven’t heard in years and never thought to buy. Part of the battle, of course, is remembering what they’re called: the last few days have seen me humming half-remembered fragments of songs from decades ago, trying to remember a title or, at the very least, a lyric.

One of those albums is the Supernaturals’ A Tune a Day. As a proper indie child of the 90’s, I’d listen to The Evening Session on Radio 1 each evening, my index finger hovering over the record button, hoping that I’d catch a whole song before Steve Lamacq or Jo Whiley ruined it all and interrupted.

One song that featured regularly around 1997 was The Supernaturals - Day Before Yesterday’s Man. Delivering papers in the morning, I’d cycle blissfully across busy junctions, listening to an illicit recording from the night before on a walkman with its volume set to ‘maximum’. Even now, listening to Day Before Yesterday’s Man takes me back to dark, dew-filled mornings, delivering papers to sleeping houses.

With that in mind, I’d dowloaded A Tune a Day, hoping for more of the same. And the thing is - it’s just not as good. The recklessness of Day Before… sounds forced on every other track, or it’s simply not there.

But it might not be the Supernaturals’ fault. It occurs to me that, actually, I and the world around me have changed. I’m not a teenager anymore: I’ve got a job and a career, rent to pay, deadlines, expenses, pressure. I just can’t hear those songs in the same way any more.

This isn’t the first album it’s happened with. Radiohead’s The Bends followed me everywhere for about 5 years. On that basis I must have listened to that album well over 1,000 times. And suddenly, I realised I just wasn’t listening to it anymore. I’ll put it on occasionally now, and enjoy it, but I don’t hear it in the same way I used to.

That said, Belle and Sebastian’s The Life Pursuit is still ace.

It’s late

And I’m on my way home from a friend’s leaving drinks. They’re always tinged with melancholy, aren’t they?

So I’m not going to dwell. I’m going to try and stay awake until the train gets to my stop.