picture from BBC

I woke up on my Birthday Boxing Day having had a wonderful nights sleep at the Cathedral Quarter Hotel in Derby. In the lead up to my birthday we had considered going to London to see a show but nothing took our fancy in the theatre and there was nothing decent on at any comedy club because even though August is nearly over the best comedians are either still in Edinburgh or at home recovering. Mandi doesn't share my love of discovering new bands and artists at a gig in a dive so we ruled out London. Another factor was the train times being so ridiculous that we wouldn't arrive until the middle of the afternoon by which time we wouldn't be able to see any museums or anything of interest. Derby might not be the most obvious choice for a birthday night out but a show caught our eye that we were both interested in (although in retrospect I should have played my 'it's my birthday so we'll do what I want to do' card) and decided to book that. Toyah Willcox was playing a small acoustic show in Derby Cathedral. This is the kind of gig that I would usually overlook but I'm glad we went. Of course the cathedral was a lovely setting, although the pews were a bit uncomfortable after a while, and they had a bar selling wine and beer so it was like being at a normal gig but far cleaner and more respectable the surroundings. It was just her on stage with two guitarists, and she was operating a laptop projector showing photographs and film clips (I didn't realise how prolific an actress she was) while telling stories and anecdotes from her career, which incidentally is the same age as I am. Aside from her songs she also threw in a few covers such as 'Suffragette City' and 'Sweet Child Of Mine', and never faltered. Some singers go on for too long and nobody seems to tell them to pack it in and stop ruining the legacy but Toyah sounded as good as she always did.

It is very rare that I have breakfast in a hotel because of their insistence on serving it so early in the morning, which has never made sense as the days of hotels serving three meals a day have gone the way of the communal television room and the bar that stays open all night to residents, but makes even less sense in a hotel because if you're in a hotel you aren't going to be going to work. Sunday breakfast should be a drawn out affair with a paper to read so once we had got it together to leave the hotel we found a delightful little cafe that was neither greasy spoon (although I would have loved that, Mandi can't eat a lot of fried food so needs choice) or a rolled up trousers and lentil latte joint.

It doesn't look like much but it was filling in a good way and I was able to walk around without feeling bloated and wanting the toilet all the time, particularly good news as we had eaten at a Mexican restaurant last night. This was my second full English of the weekend as I had one before we travelled to Derby, of course I am in middle age now so this should stop now, it won't of course because if we weren't meant to eat bacon it wouldn't taste so nice.

We've been to Derby on several occasions but we haven't taken the time to 'see' it before now. There's a lovely river and lots of green to walk along and as someone who likes to look up I was very taken with the architecture in the city centre. Derby certainly seems to have a lot more respect for the beauty of an old building than Nottingham (a city exempt from the 'listed building' rule - okay not exempt but a lot of old buildings seem to have lorries crash into them or suffer a mysterious fire if it means more student flats). My only slight disappointment was that I couldn't find a bandstand, following what I did in Brighton last year I have decided to play a tune on the kazoo wherever I see a bandstand, and hopefully make the song match the location although this will be a challenge having already blown 'Oh I Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside' at the first opportunity. 

===

This week's edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.

The latest episode of The Random Saturday Sessions is here.

Thank you in advance for donating using the PayPal button at the top of this page. It all goes towards creating podcasts, sketches, documentaries, films and more, all of which I will make available for free in return for your generosity.

Once again I had no time during the week to record the podcast and yesterday was not only Valentine’s Day but Mandi’s birthday (yes, I have to buy two cards) so I couldn’t do it then. My only option was do it today before I sent it out which is something I was not looking forward to after last week’s debacle. My computer with the recording studio programme on is still running slowly but once everything has warmed up it seems to manage all right so all I could do was to hope for the best.

We had a late night last night and after Mandi went to bed I did some work in my office to try and get caught up. We’re both off work this week so it will give me a good opportunity to tick a few things off the list but I don’t want to be at my computer the whole time. This morning I didn’t have time to record the podcast so planned to do it when I returned from my dad’s house for lunch. Before we left the house I put all the tracks in the playlist maker thing (sorry, am I getting too technical?) and checked recording levels and all of the silly things like the microphone still worked, and left my office set up. To be honest, the thought of having to record it was something I was dreading all day and played on my mind. Last week was very stressful and the podcast suffered through poor recording quality and took two hours to record, which did nothing for my stress levels.

I stockpiled some crisps and sweets in my office (I crave sugar and salt when I get stressed) and set everything up before going downstairs to make two cups of tea. As I don’t smoke in the house and my office is on the top floor I had a cigarette while the kettle was boiling and prepared for the worst.

Given how I was let off the hook on Friday 13^th and I wasn’t brutally murdered yesterday, (or maybe I was and I am not aware of it like Patrick Swayze in Ghost when he runs after his attackers and then returns to Demi Moore to see himself lying dead on the pavement), I was cautious that my curse guardian would be lurking and primed to ensure disaster struck at every turn. Part of me was hoping that I would fall in the River Lean on the way home and drown, sure everyone around me would be sad at first but once they realised that I had been released from both my curse and my podcast (maybe they’re the same thing) they would get over it. The River Lean is only about one foot deep but if I tried hard enough it would do the job, you can drown in a cup of tea after all and I drink a shit load during the day so I have been playing fast and loose with my own personal safety for too long.

My fears were totally unfounded though, the recording of the podcast was the smoothest one I have ever done; recorded entirely in one take with the music starting when it should and all going to plan. Maybe the curse was lifted on Friday 13^th as a nice surprise, and the curse guardian chose that day so that I wouldn’t be expecting it? It is possible that because I confronted the unlucky day and went about my business it caused a reaction against my curse and the two cancelled each other out? I have no idea how this shit works, I am just throwing ideas out there. Could this be the beginning of a new chapter of my professional life where things go according to plan and I am allowed to climb another rung or two up the ladder instead of sliding down so many snakes? It’s about fucking time. It could just be that my curse guardian is away for the weekend and she’ll (it is a she, that’s not sexist) be back to make up for lost time tomorrow when I step out of the house and am hit by a bus. This will be typical really, as buses don’t even go past my house.

Listen to this week's edition of The Sunday Alternative here.

===

February housekeeping

I rely on donations via the PayPal button to enable me to provide free online content. This year there are plans afoot for more podcasts plus documentaries, comedy sketches, short films and other content that will be available free of charge.

My audio books can be downloaded from my Bandcamp page.

My books (including my latest, Bowie Day), are available to download to your Kindle.

This daily blog can be delivered to your Kindle for just 99p a month

If you want an audio book or e-book and would prefer me to get more money, cutting out the corporate middlemen (or women) then make a donation of one pound or more, and then email me with ‘I paid a pound or more’ in the subject line. In the email simply tell me what you want and I’ll email it to you.

steveEoliver@gmail.com
@SteveOliver76

There was much hullaballoo on Twitter this afternoon that I arrived late at and didn’t understand fully, all I saw were tweets from bands and indie labels informing everyone that they were ditching their Bandcamp accounts or at least removing all of their payable downloads as from January 1^st. I was busy sifting through piles of records upstairs in a charity shop so I hadn’t cottoned on to this story at all and tweeted a plea for a link to help me out. Thanks to a handful of responses I eventually found out that from tomorrow digital downloads will be liable for VAT. While this is a bit of a pisser for me and hundreds like me who work on the DIY basis, I don’t think it is the Armageddon that people are making it out to be. Perhaps I should read more into it, but to be honest I don’t know for sure if it will make a major difference to the money I make from audio book downloads. I will monitor the situation in the next few days and see if it would be worth abandoning the Bandcamp profile in favour of the system I used this Christmas for my audio book of A Christmas Tree, which was too big a file for Bandcamp to cope with so I emailed it to anyone who donated using the PayPal button above the blog. This would be an easier system in a way because the money would go straight to my fund to make free online content without anyone taking a slice. To be honest I am long overdue updating the shop page on this site so it would be a good excuse to change how I sell things.

I leave 2014 behind a lot happier than how I parted company with 2013, although there are good and bad points to both. 2013 was a far more productive year professionally, (I had three weekly radio shows to add to my work average of course) but I did take a few financial kicks in the bollocks which puts a cloud over it. This year has been an improvement on that score but for some reason my professional productivity was far lower than last year and I don’t really understand why. It is my intention to hit the ground running next year (tomorrow) and focus my attention on working my way through the to-do list I have written for this year. As I have said already, I have set myself the challenge of doing something creative and work related every single day of the year, (the blog only counts on ‘holiday’ type days such as my birthday and Christmas Day) and marking the day in my diary with a tick and a brief description of what I did.

Having said that, tomorrow I will begin 2015 by cheating slightly by releasing a podcast that I have had gathering dust since the summer when I recorded it and forgot all about it. The release will count because I made the rules.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

My Sherwood Radio archive is here, why not listen and donate?

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.

Although I can’t remember when I first saw them, I have long been a fan of Band of Jackals, a Nottingham band who has been together three or four years. We were lucky enough to have them in the studio last year for a live session on NottinghamLIVE and I have regarded them as a band that would surely be lucky enough to break free of Nottingham’s restrictive music scene and go on to bigger and better things. Sadly this won’t happen now (at least in the current line up if the reports are accurate) as tonight was their final gig, surely a late contender for gig of the year, at one of our best venues – Jam Café.

Even more unfortunately, today was my Nana Freda’s 90^th birthday and a party had been organised by various members of the family in the communal area on the complex where she lives. If only I had a time machine so that I could go back and visit my great-grandparents and ask them to either hold on for one more day or try and manage the day before. I’m sure they would have understood the request of a stranger who informed them that one of his favourite bands would be playing their final gig in ninety years time and I wouldn’t want to miss it. It might of course have been easier to ask the band to put things off a day but if I’ve got a time machine I am getting my moneys worth. Having said that, if I had a time machine it would have been possible to attend both of these events and (had I felt like it) also gone to the Crown Court Christmas meal.

I wasn’t in the mood for any of these three possibilities to be honest, as I am in a mild depressive state (brought on incidentally by the Christmas party season) and couldn’t be arsed being sociable with anyone, not even my family. I’d already decided against the Christmas meal but had planned to go along for a drink after work just to show willing. Another option was to go back into town after my nana’s party and see the gig, but I was still suited for the courtroom and by the time I got home I remembered that I don’t have the capacity for alcohol that I once had and watched the BBC3 repeat of Eastenders instead.

Even when my mood is good I still suffer from crippling shyness and need to psyche myself up to leave the house to go anywhere, yet once I am there I thoroughly enjoy myself. Tonight was an example, I wouldn’t have missed my nana’s birthday party for the world and it was lovely to see members of my family again as we don’t get together on this scale often enough. For a 90 year old woman, my nana does incredibly well compared to some of the people in her flats who seem to have given up on life and seem content to sit at home waiting to die. She loves her family and we love her and she really enjoyed the party which is all that matters. My cousin had booked a singer to entertain us for an hour but she was one of those people who walk around the room holding the microphone in front of people for them to complete the line. The young son of one of my cousins was found hiding behind a door in the kitchen because “that lady keeps singing at me”, my thoughts exactly and had there been room I might have joined him. Once she had finished (with a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’) I felt able to relax safe in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to be called upon to tunelessly turn out a quick “let it snow let it snow let it snow”.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

My Sherwood Radio archive is here, why not listen and donate?

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.

We finally got round to going out for a family dinner to celebrate my birthday tonight, if we’d left it any longer it would have been a joint celebration with my dad’s or maybe we could have really dragged it out and combined everything together for our Christmas meal. The venue was The Willow Tree, we’ve had quite a good run here as usually something happens to put us off causing us to have to find somewhere else, this being I think the fourth place we have called headquarters. Standards have never dropped here with the steak done to perfection (although it isn’t difficult to do a rare steak) and the service spot on.

On our walk home from the pub I always turn to Mandi and for a joke I ask if she fancies popping in the chip shop for a bag of chips, I am hilarious and repeating jokes just makes them funnier, try it.

Fish and chips is a difficult thing to get right, you are of course better off buying them at the seaside for reasons of freshness, but you need some kind of insider knowledge because seaside towns have a lot of shops that intentionally sell any old shit because holidaymakers aren’t fussy. In Skegness for example you should only use Eptons or Salts, never any of the shops on the promenade. Whitby has Mr. Chips and one other I can’t remember the name of, (NOT the Magpie which is overrated) although ‘Whitby’ fish isn’t caught in Whitby at all. I recently learned that if a chip shop is open on a Monday you should not use it as the fish won’t be fresh because the fishermen don’t go out on Sunday. In an inland city, you have to be very careful; Nottingham for example only has two proper fish and chip shops, until now.

This photograph displays one of the most disappointing declarations since Samantha Fox came out as a lesbian.

M&S Fish Bar was the best inland fish and chip shop in Nottingham, a traditional fish and chip shop that sold items that should be seen in such a place. If we go for a chippy tea then I have haddock, chips, mushy peas, pickled egg, and scraps. This place until recently was one of the only traditional chip shops, you knew it was a traditional chip shop because it didn’t use the word ‘traditional’ in its name. Shops calling themselves a traditional fish and chip shop generally sell kebabs, pizza, fried chicken, and various other things that simply do not belong in a fish and chip shop. A lower quality chippy has opened over the road selling such none-chip shop items and it looks as though M&S have seen the new shop as some kind of competition which is terrible news. It would have been fine to have a ‘traditional’ (not traditional) chip shop selling kebabs and other such crap to idiots and M&S could have carried on catering for people who know what quality is. M&S have obviously seen this new shop as a threat (although in reality only a threat in the same way that Fortnum & Mason’s should feel threatened by a Greggs opening next door) and have dumbed down in order to attract the custom of the sort of people who you don’t want custom from. This is sadly a sign of the world we live in now, where the stupid people get everything their way.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.

Photo from the Oliver archive

I’m sure we all remember that feeling of waking up on that first morning of the long summer holiday from school, and how to our young brains it seemed as if we were free with endless days of leisure stretching out in front of us when the sun always shone and life was like an Enid Blyton story (without the racism) with bike rides and picnics and the chimes of the ice-cream van ringing in our ears. We were safe to roam because we didn’t know what a paedophile was in those days (we had to buy our own sweets) and we knew when it was time to go indoors as the chorus of motherly voices calling out that it was time to eat. Our signal to go home to bed was nightfall. A victorious jump of the BMX over a makeshift ramp would be met with vocal congratulations, no clicking on a ‘like’ button for us.

My sister’s birthday is seven days before mine, and it is at that point that time started to speed up again. Suddenly we were shopping for school uniforms and stationary and a sense of dread hung in the air like old cigarette smoke. My birthday would be the last hurrah of summer, and life would return to normal.

As an adult we look back at summer in much the same way that we look back at Christmas, through glasses so rose-tinted it is a wonder we see anything at all. Did the sun really shine every day? Of course it didn’t.

It is my birthday today and I decided on the minimum amount of fuss. At the age of thirty eight I simply couldn’t be arsed with it. The child in these photographs didn’t worry about how his career was panning out, he didn’t worry about bills, he didn’t have depressive bouts that involved thoughts of suicide, he didn’t have back trouble, and he genuinely enjoyed summer. If the child in the photos knew what was in store for him it would have really pissed on his picnic. I can’t remember worrying about anything more pressing than getting home from school in time for Grange Hill. Actually that is inaccurate because one thing I can remember being worried about was solar powered calculators. I had a solar powered calculator and once I had used it I would put something over it (a towel perhaps) because I was scared that if people left them on it would use up valuable sunlight and one day our lack of mathematical ability would cause the world to be plunged into darkness. Sometimes I envy my younger self because I can’t remember that happiness, when did it go wrong?

I opened my cards this morning and (because this is the modern world) checked my personal Facebook account to read the greetings that were written on my wall. After that I boarded the tram and spent the day in court working (I didn’t encourage fuss as I hate forced workplace jollity, only three people knew it was my birthday and I asked them to keep it quiet). There was a time when I wouldn’t work on my birthday but the day doesn’t excite me anymore. When I got home I had some nice presents to open; my dad bought me the album Going Back Home by Wilko Johnson and Roger Daltrey, and from Mandi I received Saving Mr. Banks on DVD, Me:Moir by Vic Reeves, and best of all the first series of Happy Days on DVD. We are saving the birthday niceties for the weekend as we both work during the week, and after that the summer will be over.

Photo from the Oliver archive

The old saying is wrong; schooldays are not the happiest days of your life, school holidays are.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.

The secret booking I made for today was of course the secret booking that I should have secured for yesterday, but Mandi was just going to have a late birthday treat (or Valentine’s Day treat, it is really up to her which one she thinks deserves the accolade). All week I had been trying to wind Mandi up about what we were going to be doing; wing-walking, bungee jumping (she has vertigo) naturist afternoon (only I am allowed access to her nakedness), and other outlandish excursions were mentioned, none of which she believed. The booking wasn’t until half past three so we didn’t have to be up and about too early thankfully (Saturday is my Sunday after all) so Mandi brought cups of tea to bed before she had a shower while I took the dog for a walk.

I had secretly booked afternoon tea at Browns Bar and Brasserie (they see fit to not use the apostrophe so I don’t feel it my place to add it despite having the green squiggle underneath it now as I type these words into Word), a place that neither of us had been before. Mandi wouldn’t let me tell her where we were going as she wanted to be surprised. That is my idea of a nightmare as I hate surprises. That’s not strictly true, I like a surprise but not the anticipation of a surprise as that kind of ruins the surprise so I’d rather not know that a surprise is imminent, just surprise me.

picture from 192.com

Browns is a lovely old place just skimming an area of the city called The Park, and I imagine was once a hotel. The building looks reasonably new to me although has been built in a style sympathetic to its surroundings, unlike a lot of houses in The Park – it’s a private estate and people don’t need planning permission to knock down a grand Victorian villa to build a modern monstrosity. I might be wrong of course but couldn’t pin it down.

The restaurant itself is light and clean, modern looking but maintaining an old fashioned look about it, making it the perfect venue for afternoon tea. When everything was delivered to our table, I wondered if there would be enough for two of us, but then again I have a huge appetite. I needn’t have worried as the platter of sandwiches (salmon, cucumber, egg and cucumber), scones, and cakes filled us up nicely but not uncomfortably so. That of course was the whole point of the concept of afternoon tea, to put you on rather than a proper meal in itself.

At home my tea of choice is PG Tips, who print a code in the lid of the boxes for something called Cuppa Club. This is a reward based system similar to the one once found in certain brands of cigarettes. I had used Cuppa Club points to get a discount on afternoon tea today, which made it even more value for money than it already was, but I was disappointed that they didn’t think to employ chimpanzee butlers for Cuppa Club members.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Any money donated to the PayPal account above will be put to good creative use, find out more here.

Friday The Effing Thirteenth!

The completely unlucky aspect of today’s date escaped me to some degree. Apart from when I was on the train at nine o’clock this morning and awoken by a reminder on my phone. Today is my nephew James’s birthday. Oh shit! Its James’s birthday! My sister never forgets Emily’s birthday and here I was forgetting James’s birthday! 

James is thirteen today. Thirteen! How did he get so old? I remember playing football with him and him insisting on using his Teletubbies football, I cannot see that happening again. Especially not when I forget his birthday! I needed a plan.

When I got to Leeds, I went in search of an outlet selling blank cassettes. How could a thirteen year old not love opening some blank cassettes to record his favourite pop tunes from the hit parade to play on his Walkman? I couldn’t find a branch of Our Price anywhere, but I did find a card shop. I bought a card for a three year old and wrote a number one in front, and changed the wording inside from three to thirteen. Surely, he would see my amazing talent for comedy there.

My mate Chris, who goes out with Emily’s half sister Kim, was meeting me from Redcar train station, so I got him to drop me off at my sister’s house so I could hand deliver the card. The only person at home was Dominic, my future brother in law.

“I thought I’d deliver his card personally as I was in the area today, I didn’t really want to post it the way things are going and I thought it would be a good excuse to see Mary and the baby. I bet James thought I’d forgotten him eh, eh?”

Fuck me I am good at this shit!