onionbagblog

To the Tattoo Studio! …early on Thursday morning. I was booked in for another session with my most amazing geometric dot tattoo specialist.

But first how about a trip to Lidl?

You need sustenance in order to get you through an all day tattoo session. I had given the Coop a try late in the day on Wednesday, hoping to pick up something cheap and cheerful in the Gypo Aisle.

No joy, and so Lidl it was.

Hey! How about a swan sandwich?

Blimey.

Waiting outside the doors of the Sunny Colch branch of Lidl shortly after 8 am was a massive fuck off white swan - and that wasn’t the craziest thing that I was to see all day.

I said my polite good mornings to Mr. Swan, picked up a cheapo cheapo cheese and onion sarnie, and then carried on cycling all the way to the other side of the half town, half city towards the tattoo studio.

What greeted me was the usual chaos and BANTZ at 9 am. This is how a tattoo studio should be. The chaos is, of course, managed and never gets out of hand, but it’s definitely a fun environment in which to be.

Thursday was the first of a run of five more sessions I’ve got booked in between now and Christmas.

Ouch, ouch, and bloody OUCH, etc.

The first hour or so was spent on a little planning. My tattoo man always likes to work with a blank slate, and so do I. I had a few rough ideas and then he got to work with his creative skills.

The soundtrack for most of the morning was country pop music. I wasn’t expecting that. It makes a welcome change from the usual 9 to 5 hip hop that has characterised previous sessions.

The playlist then altered in style and genre ever so slightly throughout the day. My ears pricked up when we came around to mid-70s Elvis. This seemed to suit the mood.

My tattoo man made some amazing progress throughout the entire day. He only stopped for the briefest of brief lunch breaks as he was keen to complete what he had started first thing. I wasn’t expecting that.

He went on well past the time that was expected. His attention to detail was incredible. Around 4 pm I was pretty much reaching my threshold for the day.

I cycled off sky high, as I always am after an all day ink session. My route took me back past Lidl.

The Swan had disappeared but I wasted no time in loading up my panniers with cheapo Lidl yoghourt and BOOZE.

A decent day.

I’ve come to the Bee Gees very late in life. What a mistake this was. I used to hate anything disco related. I think it was a fashion thing but this soundtrack is far, far more than disco. Even the disco bits are pretty special. You can’t listen to them without imagining yourself strutting down the street and looking the dog’s bollocks.

At the heart of it all is the songwriting. No matter what style they flirt with, the Bee Gees are exceptional in this regard. This is an amazing soundtrack and one I could listen to with repeat plays all weekend long.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

“I take blogging seriously, you should too. It’s very powerful, as long as we’re really working on the web. There’s a difference between having a product you can access through a browser and being on the web.”

via Dave Winer

To the Sailing Club! ..on Wednesday morning.

The aim of the WivGigs midweek social was to beat the rain. The forecast looked bloody beastly from around 11 am onwards. Thankfully the Weather Gods coincided rather kindly with the tide and time.

It was a little misty preparing both boats for launch. We had Audacity and Varuna heading out on a Wednesday morning.

That’s not bad going for a rowing club that only a few years ago struggled to get weekend crew. We’ve been fortunate in recent months in that a number of our members are a little more leisurely these days.

Some might call it the midweek retirement row. I prefer to call it for what it is: the Bum Dosser Crew.

It was wonderful to see the come and try-er from the weekend also joining us once again. She is no longer a C&T-er but a fully paid up member of WivGigs. My prediction is that she will be racing by the end of the Harkers Yard series this winter.

I’m not sure how this happened but the split of crew for the boats basically worked out as a boys' boat and a girls' boat. I was placed in the girls' boat as the odd one out, natch.

No worries. I actually wrote on a work feedback form ahead of a team re-organisation that I prefer working with girls. My rather belligerent line manager at the time then placed me in a team full of blokes.

Cheers, rather belligerent line manager.

I was designated stroke for the session. I decided to take it fairly gently, given we had a new crew member and this was, after all, a leisurely row.

The riverside banks were surprisingly busy. There were a number of walkers and runners getting their km’s in ahead of the rain that was forecast.

There also seemed to be an abundance of local school kids out and about. It must have been a local INSET day. I did enjoy seeing some of the youth spending their early morning casting their rods out and fishing, rather than staying in bed, which would have been my choice back in the day.

We headed downstream and then downstream and then downstream some more. It was that kind of row. It was most peaceful.

I offered to cox for the return leg. This gave everyone a chance to have a decent row.

To my surprise the designated cox actually asked if I would take Audacity all the way back up to the Sailing Club hard for the recovery. This is not as simple as it seems. It’s like landing an aircraft, albeit without responsibility for the livelihood of 300 or so passengers.

We managed a successful recovery. We didn’t sink. We didn’t crash into any of the other moored boats.

We were also back on dry land just ahead of the rainfall that fell for the rest of the day.

Perfect.

I turned on the radio just in time to hear Kemi Badenoch deliver her keynote speech at the Tory Party conference:

“Those who can work, SHOULD work.”

Not today, Kemi. Thank you very much.

A Mediterranean Imagined Village companion piece - which in itself is no bad thing. Genres and styles don’t seem to matter. It’s all one big melting pot, innit? I love the mix of raucous celebratory songs, then tempered with some lighter moments. This feels like the soundtrack to some village dance in rural Catalan, with plenty of dancing as well as some more romantic moments.

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

To Moving Image! …on Tuesday evening.

One day you’re sitting in a multiplex massive FUCK OFF screen in Sunny Colch, and then the very next you’re back in a village hall, sitting on a school chair and watching an art house film.

The Moving Image cinematic experience is slightly different to the Sunny Colch Odeon cheapo cheapo grubby fiver Monday afternoon deal.

No one was smoking weed, and a running commentary wasn’t provided by a couple of dickheads who really don’t give a shit about anybody else watching the film.

It’s a shame then that the film wasn’t all that.

Oh dear.

For our enjoyment - or not - on Tuesday evening was the Italian film Primavera. At first I thought this was a film about a Spanish music festival, but nope it was all about Vivaldi and classical music.

This was a real slow burner. It was so slow it didn’t really change gear and never got going. Thankfully it was short in length.

The plot centres around Vivaldi, or rather not Vivaldi, but a young musical prodigy.

It’s quite something when an esteemed name in classical music doesn’t even land the lead role in a film.

It’s a pretty brutal film as well. The story is set in some kind of orphanage where rather wicked proprietors are happy to take the cash off benefactors in order to pretty much keep young girls as musical slaves.

Step forward Mr Vivaldi to lead the whole experience.

One particular young violin player is singled out as the lead character. What’s portrayed is a rather nasty existence.

Scenes involve kittens being drowned and the lead character having her wrist deliberately broken to stop her playing by a particularly nasty male character.

One thing that comes out strongly throughout the film is that men with power can be absolute shits.

There was great chemistry between Vivaldi and the lead character. There was never any suggestion of this being more than a musical relationship, and nothing romantic or even sexual.

The ending was a bit odd. It was a kind of happy ending but not on a musical note. I felt pretty exhausted coming out of the Loveless Hall even though the film was around one and a half hours in length.

There was a faint whiff of ever so- lightly strong weed from the local yoof as I walked home.

Time was a little tight for the bicycle ride on Tuesday. On Tuesdays we ride; on Tuesdays we ride with the North Essex branch of the Forty group.

But not this Tuesday. I had some rare work first thing in the morning.

Pay to play, etc.

With rain forecast all day for Wednesday, my options were limited. I had a couple of hours of daylight left in the day to head out and do my thing.

Chapeau!

Unfortunately that meant that my ride coincided with the school run, which then bled into rush hour. This wasn’t the wisest time to be rolling out.

Adding to this forecast of doom and gloom was that I really didn’t have the energy. I felt pretty much zapped, but a ride is a ride, yeah? Just get out and bloody do it.

I’ve not ridden my triple loops circuit for some time. This involves staying fairly local but, as the name suggests, looping the loop on three occasions.

Two outta Three ain’t bad for Tuesday. The third loop would have involved taking in a pretty hairy stretch of a main road at peak rush hour. No thank you. I decided to cut it short and not be bossed around by petrolhead dickheads.

There was a never ending stench of manure around the lanes throughout the entire ride. It’s good for your nostrils, right?

Some of the remote houses were full of Halloween tat - and when I say tat, I mean the tattiest of cheap tatty tat, plastic tat.

It was all going rather well until my peace was disturbed by a lone paraglider with his small jet engine. Still, it’s better than having some four by four arsehole trying to take you up from behind.

I reached the turnoff stage for the third loop. I admit to pondering, thinking, yeah I could do this. Let’s put in the km’s.

I took one look at the traffic and wisely opted out.

A ride of necessity rather than a ride of complete enjoyment.

I’m not sure what this album was doing on the list. I’d be hard pushed to call it a classic album. It’s not exactly up there with Dark Side of the Moon, Abbey Road, etc. That said, it is quite a nice distraction and proved particularly useful during a morning of work where I needed to focus. The focus was on the work and not on the music. This just drifted by.

⭐ ⭐

Burnham told his government must improve the lives of the working class or risk fuelling a ‘fascist fire’

via Morning Star

HDIF Weller Night

“Finch then developed a distinctive tower block design for the borough, used on a number of sites built in the late 1960s. Eight tall towers with projecting facades were built in the area either side of Kennington Park Road/Clapham Road between Kennington and Stockwell.”

The legacy of George Finch, via Modernist London

“But in recent seasons, the Premier League middle-class have been flexing their muscles: Aston Villa regularly qualifying for Europe and wining silverware, Crystal Palace lifting the FA Cup, Newcastle United the League Cup, Bournemouth and Brighton establishing themselves as top ten clubs with an eye on a trophy, and lest we forget our three semi-finals and seventh place finish. The point being that such clubs might even have achieved more were it not for City’s sham contracts.”

David Marples on Man City

Weller on Clobbered

To the Odeon! …on Monday afternoon as part of the latest instalment in the Grubby Fiver Odeon cinema ticket deal.

But wait! What’s this?

We upgraded our usual tight arse experience of dropping in at Lidl for a bakery bargain for a Too Good To Go surprise bag at a nearby coffee shop.

£3.99 later we walked out with a very weighty blue plastic bag containing all sorts of pastry surprises. It then soon dawned upon us that maybe having a bag full of surprises wasn’t best explored in the darkness of the cinema.

Can you taste what it is yet?

Trying to distract us from our culinary pastry fixation was the film The Digger. We saw a trailer and it looked half decent.

The film chap with Robert Elms on BBC London was a little cold about it and let it slip that there is a major plot twist midway through.

The basic premise of the film is a Texan oil billionaire who is pals with the U.S. president. Both are faced with an impending environmental disaster.

My main aim throughout was to tuck into the Too Good to Go cheapo cheapo bag and try not to fall asleep.

The dialogue was quite gripping. For such an environmental themed film there wasn’t a lot of action to witness apart from the conversation between the characters.

You had to stay awake to witness this. I didn’t stay awake. I think I fell asleep during the big reveal, as mentioned by the BBC London film chap.

He said it wasn’t all that and was surprised that the critics had been told to stay schtum on it. I won’t give away the spoiler here but basically what unfolded was a play within a play.

The environmental message is really powerful, even when delivered through such comic means. You realise that we’re just one madcap U.S. president away from being completely fucked.

Oh, wait.

You can’t really say much more about the film without giving away the entire premise and plot.

There was a rather lovely Easter egg at the end. As the credits started to roll it’s worth hanging around just to hear this and have the shit scared out of you.

Another Easter egg surfaced when I remarked to my film companion, as we walked out, that I thought Tom Hanks was the strongest actor in the film.

“Do you mean Tom Cruise?”

Oh I’m not really cut out for this film review shit.