bunn

I am not sporty, and there are exactly two detailed depictions of sport in media of any kind that I can easily think of that I like.
One is the brilliantly-described cricket match in Dorothy Sayers' Murder Must Advertise.

This song is the other one. ( Read more... )

Driving back from walking the dogs, I had the Ipod on random shuffle. First it gave me 99 Red Balloons, which for those with imperfect memories of 1980s pop, is a dystopian tale of how a day beginning with a minor act of environmental vandalism ends in global nuclear catastrophe. It ends with the singer standing in the dust that was a city.

And then my Ipod, which, it appears, is an unsung musical genius, swung straight into Bill Bailey's Cockney Medley : I swear the join was completely invisible, I didn't even realise the first song had ended until suddenly the lyrics. (And wtf, youtube, with the visuals on that Bill Bailey video? But it does start at just the right point).

And Helga Saab, whose internal IT originates from 2002, and so has a somewhat shaky relationship with the Ipod, who she considers newfangled and confusing, announced the second song on her display by saying BILLB LOONS

... perhaps you had to be there. But I almost drove into a hedge I was laughing so much.

I walked up through the quarry on the hill this morning.  I like to go that way on Sundays, as it's quiet then with no Monster Trucks moving and no huge bangs.  The huge bangs do shake the whole hillside when they happen, including our house, but I imagine they must be much scarier up close, with the warning sirens wailing.

It was a wild windy morning, the bare trees on the hill all bending with a tremendous rushing sound in the wind coming over from Dartmoor.  The road runs below the hilltop, so it is sheltered, but the trees up on the top were roaring.

I went up on the road that runs through the quarry, and could hear a strange distant music.  The whole place was shut up, with nobody about at all. Eventually I realised that the music must be the wind blowing through the metal steps and rails and bars that are arranged around the vast funnels and tubes and pipes that the quarry uses to process its sands and gravels.

The sound was like something between tubular bells, distant church bells on a windy day, and someone blowing a tune on a series of partially-filled bottles.  It was surprisingly beautiful.

I've heard mines singing before, when the wind races across the top of a chimney on a hillside, it can have a sort of deep voice.  But never a whole organs-worth of accidental instruments all singing together.