... there will be no opera, no Viennese waltzes, no country music, no hip-hop and nothing ponderously slow. - Crotchety Man Home Page Two of the blogs I follow have recently suggested that hip hop is a genre that can not be dismissed by any music fan who claims to have an open mind. One of those blogs…Read more Afronaut
2010s
Sometimes You Just Drive
Time is relative. We don't need Einstein to tell us that. Sometimes time drags; sometimes it flies by. For Michael Chapman, although his face and guitar picking fingers have aged, his music remains as fresh today as it did 50 and more years ago. The English folk singer-songwriter released another album a few days ago…Read more Sometimes You Just Drive
Dawn Lit Metropolis
Jazz is in the air in this part of Crotchety Land, it seems. Several online music contacts have wandered off along that mysterious twisting path recently. Who knows what they will find? Crotchety Man set off in a different direction; he doesn't like crowds. But the road kept turning back on itself, back towards the dangerous…Read more Dawn Lit Metropolis
Narrow Margins
In 1637 Pierre de Fermat, a French lawyer and mathematician, scribbled a short note in the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, a 3rd century AD treatise by the Greek mathematician, Diophantus. He wrote that he had found a marvellous proof of the following statement: an + bn = cn has no solution for any…Read more Narrow Margins
Listening Wind
The wind can be noisy at times. A strong wind will whip the sea into a seething, hissing foam; it will lash the sails of the yachts in the harbour and slap the rigging lines against the mast. Gales will send trashcans clattering down the street and make the trees moan and creak. Hurricanes will…Read more Listening Wind
Highlights of 2018
In a few days time this blog will be four years old and, I humbly suggest, it's looking pretty good for its age. Did you know the average lifespan of a blog site is only 2 years and 7 months? That makes Crotchety Man positively geriatric! But before we celebrate our fourth birthday, let's look…Read more Highlights of 2018
We Built This City …
For me, nothing sums up the Spirit of Christmas better than this cute and slightly silly video. It's for fun, it's for the family and it's for a worthy charity. And I'm delighted to say that 75,000 people agree with me because it has taken the number 1 slot on the official UK charts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iEB8bfP7wE…Read more We Built This City …
Waiting
According to Wikipedia, "Advent is a season observed in many Christian churches as a time of expectant waiting". It's the same in non-religious communities, too, because it's also when little children start waiting for a jovial old man with a long white beard, dressed in a bright red suit, to come down the chimney to deliver…Read more Waiting
Whiskey In The Jar
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I'm late!", moaned the fluffy white bunny shaking his long furry ears in shame and humiliation. And he was. Very late. Crotchety Man had outsourced his next Track of the Week to White Rabbit Publications because he was going to be otherwise engaged at the weekend. There was a final band…Read more Whiskey In The Jar
Spiral Cities
Facebook sucks. Early in the morning of Thursday, 8th November I checked my news feed. Among a few useful, but unexciting, notifications there was one by Fyfe Dangerfield announcing that he would be interviewed live on the RadMac show on BBC 6 Music 'tomorrow' afternoon. That was worth a diary entry and the Crotchety Ears…Read more Spiral Cities
Crotchety Man 