My first online activity of the day use to be emails; around ten years ago this became a news catch up via Twitter. Now it’s buying CD’s.

I really enjoyed the Total Roots reggae compilation on VP Records that I played last night. So much so that I looked a little further into the series.

Oh look: There’s a Total Greensleeves edition to add to the series. £3.50 later and job’s a good ‘un. Every morning should start with some CD buying.

This led to a listen of the Scott Prophet stream from Lion Vibes over the summer. Yer man Scott was on the decks at Lion Vibes last week. He put in a blinder of a set. The Mixcloud session was a decent way to ease into the morning.

Album of the Day: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – It’s Blitz

This sounded incredibly tinny. Maybe it was the streaming via my AirPods that forgot abut the bass? I’m such a music snob. My War Against Pop means I have no room for this. There’s absolutely no soul. It’s such a cold album. Not a bad record, but not my style. I bailed after seven tracks.

⭐ ⭐

It was then time for some more serious business. Hey! Why not fill in a Lambeth enforcement form alerting Planning of a breach of regulations? Lidl really chose the wrong person to mess with by sneakily removing the bicycle racks and replacing them with shitty car parking spaces.

BT was playing silly buggers once again. The modern interweb is definitely not right. I had to do another hard reboot of the hub. I felt justified in booking an engineer for later in the week.

The music then switched to some early 90’s anarcho sounds. R very kindly gave me a copy of his old band’s CD which he has recently got pressed up. I loved the Melody Maker review of:

“Cheap, nasty and viciously refreshing.”

R played down his own bass technique when we met at the weekend. Despite the DIY ethos, there’s a variance in pace and style across the tracks. I’ll still give the bass a go. But it’s no piece of piss.

Attention turned towards art for my mid-morning work break. I asked Open Art to magic up a painting themed around Nottingham Forest in the style of Van Gough. If nothing else then I think these parameters highlight the depths of my cultural reference points.

The art work itself is on par with my own CSE Grade 3 achievement.

Something WEIRD happened with a U2 Blood Red Sky (yeah, yeah, I know) cassette I’m selling. In the space of half an hour I had two offers and a request to ship to France. It’s been listed on eBay for a couple of months. I suspect the listing was picked up on some fan forum.

It’s nothing special. I priced it at market value. I turned down the first piss take offer, but then came to a compromise with the buyer.

I tried to book tickets for a tour of the old Reading Room in the British Museum. These were available for the first time today. By mid-afternoon all dates in February and March had gone.

Some more experimentation, some more asking the modern interweb to do the heavy lifting. I played around with WriteSonic – a Chat GPT alternative. I tried to get it to write school content for me. It wasn’t that convincing.

Hang on – how about *shhhhh* Buzz content? It did a half decent job of providing an overview of estate regeneration at Cressingham in 500 words. I then fed in a pdf for a Cabinet doc and asked for a summary. Each time I tried with a different file it summarised a completely different Lambeth doc.

Buzz content is pretty unique anyway. The very idea is that we don’t bash out boring copy that *ahem* others are so good at. Have an opinion – ANY OPINION – just have an opinion.

Instead I turned to WriteSonic and got it write this obb entry instead.

Job’s a good ‘un.

To Alresford! …early evening for a return to walking football. We’ve split off from WTFC. The opportunities to use Broad Lane for training were becoming limited. Alresford nearby were very accommodating.

It was bloody cold cycling the short distance. I was tempted to go on the Raleigh electric, but I didn’t fancy the weight of the bicycle on the icy roads.

I was fully lit up with the flashing Christmas tree cycling vest. It’s surprising how much space on the road car users give you when you make a point of looking like a lighthouse.

It was a decent, but cagey game of football. Half the pitch was frozen solid. We all agreed to take it easy and not to attempt anything silly. I scored two goals and was hat-trick hunting. One of the guys had a slight injury and so time was called before I got the chance to showboat.

Oh yeah – the new track from Sleaford fucking Mods is half decent.

Links for Wednesday 8th February, 2023

There’s an important reason to visit the Post Building’s roof terrace

“Its demise will leave a hole in the capital’s cycling scene that will be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to fill.”

So sad to hear this. Lmnh! was always so much more than a bicycle cafe