Locked down with my Ukulele 18

These are strange times but life goes on. I’ve noticed something hasn’t happened that normally would and I wouldn’t notice.

The weeds are growing in the cracks in the pavement and joins in the kerb. I noticed these pretty little pansies. I thought they were seeded from someone’s garden but watching Countryfile one of the presenters showed these tiny blooms and said they were a wild variety. I don’t know if these are but they are certainly very pretty.

As a norm’ the council would send a worker with a back pack of weed killer and a spray nozzle and he/she would spray the joins. This has not happened. It surprises me that I haven’t noticed it being done before. It occurs to me that there are a lot of things that we don’t notice until they don’t happen. Bin collection, running water, electricity, working internet, satellite. All of which if we were without, lockdown would have been a much different experience.

However, looking back some things we can look at with a degree of nostalgia. I can’t seem to get the spell check working properly. So I’ve not used the dictionary as much as I have in the last few weeks than I have for years. I think some of my English teachers would say that’s a good thing.

I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With Flowers In My Hair

It was written by Sandi Thom and released in 2005 and made number one in Britain in 2006. A Scottish singer songwriter that had success in her early career by performing in her basement and streaming the performances on the internet. Given the subject matter of the song this seems to be a little ironic.

The song, apparently, caused a bit of a stir in Punk circles as no self respecting Punk Rocker would have flowers in they’re hair. If they did then they stand a fairly good chance of getting beaten to a pulp. She has said the song was not supposed to be taken literally.

Being of the age I am I can remember when it wasn’t the norm to have a car. Telephones had to be connected by a wire and my dad went nuts if I was on the phone.

“Who made the call?”

This was because whoever made the call (or more likely the parent of whoever I was talking to) was getting the bill for the call. Calls where charged by the minute. I can talk, Olympic standard. You could remember friends numbers by heart. There was no automatic dial. People you didn’t call regularly were stored in a specially designed book with letters down the side, the paper was cut so you could short cut to the surname more efficiently. If you were particularly well off you had a contraption that you could slide a lever to the letter press a button and the top would flip up to the selected page.

No body had a printer, computers were in their infancy, so we wrote letters. Stuck a stamp on the envelope and put it in the post box. This could be kept and reread. Even if you keep e-mails or texts how often do you go back and reread them?

Kids were in “hand me downs”. Clothes were passed around until they had to be consigned to the rag bag because they were too thread bare.

Radio was definitely king. It was what informed my music and I’m sure helped form my musical taste. My sister has informed me that she does love Ace of Spades. I blame radio.

Stay safe