A friend of mine went to a posh party recently - dinner, dancing and hobnobbing with the great and the good. You could tell it was a really posh occasion because the guests were being formally announced. There was an aristocratic middle-aged couple and a young woman in the entrance when my friend arrived. "The Lord and…Read more Miss Fortune
Month: October 2016
The Other Side
Cast your mind back to December 1968. Apollo 8 was on the launchpad. No human being had ever been beyond Earth orbit. No astronaut had flown on the Saturn V launch vehicle before. There had been no less than three engine failures on the unmanned Apollo 6 mission earlier that year. Apollo 8 had been…Read more The Other Side
Let Them Eat Chaos
Years ago now Crotchety Man was watching a documentary about old sitcoms on the BBC. The discussion turned to The Good Life, a TV series about a cheap plastic toy designer, Tom Good, who gives up his well-paid but unfulfilling job to turn his suburban house into a small-holding and become entirely self-sufficient. Needless to say…Read more Let Them Eat Chaos
Peaches En Regalia
Peaches En Regalia is the perfect radio theme tune. It's instrumental music of indeterminable genre, of unspecified length and quite undemanding of the listener. It could be the background music for a speaker introducing a programme on the fine arts, history, politics or religion. For those potentially serious subjects it would set a light-hearted tone, inviting the listeners…Read more Peaches En Regalia
Blind Faith
Regular readers of the Crotchety Man blog may have picked up that I hold a non-religious view of the world. I'm a humanist - one who believes that there is probably no god and we must, therefore, base our moral code on being nice to one another. I came to this way of thinking because…Read more Blind Faith
Fend for Yourself
Back in June the Crotchety Man blog carried a review of Magnolia, which was then the most recent album by The Pineapple Thief. I gave it a rating of 3.5 out of 5 but reserved the right to adjust that as I got to know it better. Over the last few months, though, it has become…Read more Fend for Yourself
Down River
Here's a Track of the Week from the guilty pleasures vault. It's old, it's simple and it's of a genre you might call folk/pop. But don't turn the web page just yet. Like many folk songs it's a sad song; like most pop songs it's easy on the ear. But it binds the listener to the torturer's rack, ratcheting up the…Read more Down River
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