Category Archives: jazz

>Unwanted bloody intrusions

>Whether it’s people making ‘courtesy calls’ to find out if their dimwitted customer support people answered my question satisfactorily, or my bank phoning me to let me know about a special offer that I might be interested in, or Amazon sending me ‘because you once looked at an album by an obscure 70s psych band we thought you might be interested in the 8 disk ‘immersion’ edition of Dark Side Of The Moon’ messages (and NO I WOULD BLOODY NOT – keep an eye out later on for Pink Floyd rantings and ravings), in general I wish such people would piss off and leave me alone.

Only today I got a real classic.

I sometimes say, with a reasonable amount of seriousness, that I hate jazz. I don’t hate *all* jazz, in fact some ‘jazz’ is great but *most* jazz is horrible. And any band that boasts they play ‘jazz standards’ (or, worse still, *sing* the buggers) can be guaranteed to be given a bloody wide berth my me. But my bottom line is that if I want jazz I will go to it – I certainly don’t want it approaching me.
So can you imagine (perhaps you can, perhaps you can’t, perhaps you think I’m overreacting) my rage when I get an email from someone I’ve never heard of (Keith Neill, FWIW) telling me that they have added me to their ‘jazz update’ Yahoo group and mailing list.
And just now I received the first of their newsletters. You can imagine I was thrilled to read about the dire, bottom-scraping crap that is happening in London over the next few weeks. So thrilled I emailed him right back. I doubt that he’ll be happy with my reply.

>Say hello to my high horse

>Those of you who have been following me on facebook or twitter (@W1tchseason) will have noticed a tendency to rant and rave, from time to time, about my pet hates and the things that make me cross. Once upon a time I could rather glibly say that the three worst things in the world, in no particular order (and that will give you a clue as to one of my hates), were wasps, beetroot and Annie Lennox – but I’m afraid it’s not that simple.
As I get older (and I’m now nearer 60 than 50) I’m finding that I have less and less tolerance for people who are ignorant, stupid, or both. And whereas in general I would agree that ignorance is no sin, in the age of the Internet where Google is everybody’s home page and Wikipedia top of their bookmarks list it’s getting harder to support that view. If you don’t know, FFS, look it up (or ‘use the Web, Luke’ as we used to say at Psion).
So, rather than fill my FaceBook timeline and twitter feed with the same old crap, I’ve started a pair of blogs – one for my rants and pet hates (http://highestofhorses.blogspot.com) and one for my loves (http://littlestofponies.blogspot.com). There’s nothing on either of them yet (apart from this intro text) but you can see from the tags on each what they’re going to be about 🙂