Hell-icopters, Compasses and 007

I received a few neat comments on my first posting of Hell-icopters, so I’ve rewritten it to incorporate them. It starts the same way:

Here’s a first – someone (my neighbour and good friend) has asked me to write a blog on a specific topic. Yep, I’m now taking requests – how cool is that! Except the topic that has been requested is helicopter noise (probably prompted by my previous blog inspired by Bea’s wedding). Sorry. Bit technical. Bit dry. I’ll start typing and see if the muse strikes. If it doesn’t then that’s another post collecting dust in my drafts’ folder.

And I was indeed struggling. Totally uninspired, until one of the buggers buzzed me when I was out walking last week, on a sunny day, lost in my own thoughts, enjoying the birdsong, the bees, the rustling leaves, the snorting of cattle … and then pulse pulse pulse, chop chop chop, grate grate grate.

Hell-icopters and Compasses

Here’s a first – someone (my neighbour and good friend) has asked me to write a blog on a specific topic. Yep, I’m now taking requests – how cool is that! Except the topic that has been requested is helicopter noise (probably prompted by my previous post). Sorry. Bit technical. Bit dry. I’ll start typing and see if the muse strikes. If it doesn’t then that’s another post collecting dust in my drafts’ folder.

And I was indeed struggling. Totally uninspired, until one of the buggers buzzed me when I was out walking last week, on a sunny day, lost in my own thoughts, enjoying the birdsong, the bees, the rustling leaves, the snorting of cattle … and then pulse pulse pulse, chop chop chop, grate grate grate.

Helicopter noise is different from the likes of SleasyJet and SwizzAir, because choppers generally fly lower, much lower, can hang around (I believe the technical term is ‘hover’), and I’m always suspicious who’s been flown where. If it’s an air ambulance, coastguard, police or military (especially Chinooks; I lurve Chinooks; so distinctive, so solid, so sexy) then fine. But if it’s the brash and tasteless nouveau riche heading to Silverstone or Pinewood Studios, then the finger it is. Some people make socialism a very attractive proposition.

A dress, a poem and some helicopters

Princess Bea and her Beau Edo thought they’d pulled off the perfect-under-the-circumstances-wedding – small, discreet, a borrowed dress (but what a corker), under-styled but oh-so-effective hair, and that was just Edo. Even this poem by e. e. cummings (1894 – 1962), read by Fergie, couldn’t be beat:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

Is this the worst magazine ever?

I’m not a great magazine reader, apart from Standpoint Magazine and The Critic. It’s an absolute joy to read so many beautifully crafted articles, even if afterwards I can’t resist firing up the old laptop to ‘pen’ a letter to the editor from Mrs Angry of Buckinghamshire. 

Less erudite magazines I normally don’t have time for / I don’t indulge in / how on earth do I end this sentence without a preposition? The exception is when I’m having my hair coloured and have to wait 45 minutes while the chemicals do their damnedest. This necessary hiatus in my life is filled with flicks through the likes of Homes and Gardens, and I really appreciate page-after-page of stunning architecture, interior design, landscapes, gardens and plates of food. I might read part of the occasional article, and they do the job that was intended. They’re fine. I couldn’t do any better. I end the session at my hairdressers relaxed, in good humour, and with a long shopping list of ‘indispensables’ for the home and garden, thanks to … Homes and Gardens.

Kneel to God only

I took my 90-year-old Mum to church today, first time she’s been since before lockdown and she was so happy to be there. Unlike Mum, I’m not a regular Sunday church-goer. More like weddings, funerals, the odd Midnight Mass, and tourist jollies such as Eucharist at one of the Four-Weddings-And-A-Funeral venues, or at Wells Cathedral, where my great-grandfather learned to play the organ back in the 1880s.

However, I used to go to church every week when I was younger, so some prayers, psalms and hymns I know by heart, even now. But today, while reciting one of those familiar litanies, I had an epiphany. I was reciting the Penitential Rite that includes the following:

From Elland Road to Corporate Alley

Sob sob. Where’s me ‘anky? Former Leeds United great Jack Charlton has joined his recently departed teammates Norman “Bites yer Legs” Hunter and Trevor Cherry to play in that great football stadium in the sky.

Tributes are flooding in again, not just for Jack, but for the Leeds team of 50-or-so years ago and their manager Don Revie, who took a very ordinary club and turned it into the most revered (derived from Revied? Or reviled?) team in Europe. 

Sing a Song of Haydn's

That’s what we, the Stewkley Singers, were going to do this May. We had been rehearsing Haydn’s Nelson Mass since January, had covered just about all the movements, then wham-bam lockdown cam’, and rehearsals and the concert were cancelled.

At the time, I felt it was “a shame” but nothing worse. I was too busy enjoying the crystal clear, azure-blue, quiet skies because of the delicious lack of aircraft, and relishing the empty roads whenever I drove to Milton Keynes to visit my elderly mum. The town almost looked appealing.

Dr David Starkey

No need for a clever headline to attract attention for this post, methinks.

Unless you’ve been hibernating on Venus, you’ll have heard that Dr David Starkey CBE, Cambridge historian, writer and media presenter, said some apparently racist things and was promptly ostracised from society.

I have two questions:

How to lose friends and alienate people

Yes I know that’s the title of a Simon Pegg film – we watched it the other evening, which is what prompted the plagiarism. Not his best film, but it still contains some laugh-out-loud moments, like when Kirsten Dunst kicks Pegg on the shin. It doesn’t sound much but I thought it hilarious.

Talking about hilarious, I’ve had one of those anything-but weeks when I couldn’t stop annoying people. The first was during a hang-over morning, when I did not want to wake up to a half-a-mug-a-coffee-long email from a complete stranger having a go at a local project I’m leading on. We are trialling a voluntary reduction in the village speed limit from 30 to 20mph before deciding whether to go for a legally enforced limit throughout the village, for part of the village, or leave well alone. He said things like: why stop at 20 and why not 5; traffic-calming was more effective; ‘Community Speedwatch’ was even better. I fired off a polite (honest, it was) riposte that included variations on a seen-that-done-that-got-the-T-shirt theme.