Dave’s Blog

You’ll be pleased to know I’m feeling a lot better since my last post. Today, I’d like to talk about cover versions. Two things got me on to this train of thought. The first was listening to Thea Gilmore’s excellent Loft Music earlier and marveling at the way she’s taken songs like Ever Fallen in Love with Someone, Bad Moon Rising and Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime, changed them completely and produced something if not better, then certainly as brilliant, and in some cases bringing out new things from the songs you never would have noticed in the originals.

The second thing is that I’ve finally got my hands on a copy of Fire and Skill, the Jam tribute album I remember getting at The Courier. I would have gladly paid the money for the Beastie Boys amazing version of Start!, but there’s a few other gems on there as well. Garabge’s version of The Butterfly Collector is just creepy. No other word for it. Noel Gallagher’s version of To Be Someone manages to be both light and poiniant at the same time while Reef’s version of That’s Entertainment is (unintentionally) hilarious for the lines ‘.. and a kick in the balls, I said that’s Enterainment’, in the thickest West Country accent.

Sure there’s some dross on Fire and Skill, but by the standards of most cover albums they’re both fantastic. Shame more cover albums can be that good.

It never rains, it pours.

The car, having failed it’s MOT, has thrown us into a transport induced mini-crisis. OK, crisis may be over stating it, but I’m in that kind of frame of mind. We clearly need a new car, however we cannot purchase one until:

1. Our driving licenses are returned from the DVLA with the correct addresses on
2.  Hwyel comes back from Cuba so we can get shot of the old car which is still in his name
3. We sort out where the money’s going to come from, which involves me having a good hard look at the state of my finances which always puts me in a ‘bear with a sore head’ kind of mood.

So we’ve borrowed Janet’s Fiat somethingorother (I suspect it translates as ‘only for small people’ or something similar) on which I’m not insured. Still, it gets us around.

Oh, and I have no idea how we’re going to shift the car we can’t drive from outside the house either.

Add to that the fact that it has become clear that my devil-may-care attitude towards the laminate flooring has come back to bite me firmly on the arse. The edging doesn’t cover a couple of the slightly more liberal interpretations of a ’10mm gap’, so a fair swathe of the floor is due to be hauled up in the morning, so I can replace the suspect plank, and then lay it all down again. That will be preceded by a walk to Spar to purchase the milk, bread and cereal we failed to buy from the supermarket this evening, so Sions can have her breakfast.

On top of these twin battles being faught, my psyche seems have weighed into the battle. On the other side. Yes, I’ve started getting the fear about September. Nothing that I know won’t be fixed by sitting down for a day and getting to grips with the boxes of stuff in the study, but I also know that I won’t get that day till the end of the week at the least.

Oh, and I’ve just found out the sofa that was being delivered by my brother in law on Wednesday evening is now being delivered tomorrow.

Did I mention that it had started raining?

Things are actually going pretty well in the DIY stakes. The walls of the snook are now a nice yellow colour, the minging carpet is no more and I’m about to embrak on my maiden attempt at laying a floor. In addition the garden is pretty much taimed, and today I even did some digging. Horrah. I’m sure there’s man points for digging.

We’ve also launched the baby guessing game over on facebook, inviting people to have a go at guessing the gender, weight and date and time of birth of young Ytbn (for some reason I only ever call it* that here…) So far 35 people have joined the group and we’ve got 15 guesses. I’ll probably come up with some kind of summary board on the Babi tab at davestacey.co.uk. Which reminds me, I need to figure out how to get an RSS feed for just one category for this blog…

* oops, just had to delete a gender specific pronoun!