Pig Sty Avenue

I'm on to the third of the above, with the last one being in the post and expected over my third glass of wine later this evening. And I've remembered now why I've avoided the supporting of England for the last two or three World Cups.  It was done in psychic defence. One knows about these things, being a Newcastle supporter.  Speaking of which, thank God we had no players in that squad of numpties.  And our team can look significant members of the top Premier League teams in the eye and think, "You were shit."  Ha' way the lads.

The Archivebookstore. 

...Or something.   The Germans, ditto.   But as for Rooney, the cheeky little twat , only several goals from him on Wednesday will stop me shouting and swearing at the telly.

When you saw the fixture for 14th August , did you think, "Oh shit," or "Fucken aye, go to it lads!"?

Seeing as it's Bloomsday, and seeing as I forgot this morning to go to the butcher's for a kidney.  Frankly, I've gotten a bit stultified with Beethoven's 5th, (I love classical music, Beethoven in particular, but I just don't want to play it).  So I'm going to give Humphrey's tune a go - my inability to read the above bit of music when I first read the book, thirty years ago, could be argued to be one of the reason why I'm at last learning to read music.  Also, given the nature of the Finnegans Wake, it will be an ideal bit of music to play around with the different instruments in Live, and maybe improvise some left hand parts in due course. You can get The Dubliners shortened version on youtube .  I love the version I found on Amazon by Kristin Bachtle-Golly , which is well worth 79p.   The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty  How he fell with a roll and a rumble  And curled up like Lord Olofa Crumple  By the b...

On the BBC you can get the live video with Radio 5 commentary.

Even imperfectly, this is going to take me a week or two to get the hang of.

I had a plan, that I would keep on practising those eight bars from Hava Nagila, over and over, until I had them just so, and could play them quickly, slowly, heavily, lightly, wtf.  In the event, I never got that far, though I did spend several hours (altogether) with it.  During that time, the improvement in the way my hands were working seemed tangible: I really was playing two handed, rather smoothly.  But now I've moved on, even though I hadn't reached any sort of perfection with those eight bars. I know that in language learning we'd never seek "perfection", there's no such thing.  And maybe music should be treated in the same way?  The only purpose that these eight bars serve is to help me learn - it's only a baby version of a tune which, later, I will perhaps come back to and learn properly - maybe a year or two from now.  So, essentially, perfection is not a goal yet.  My methodology (for now) will be to work through the lessons in the softw...