…and sometimes a lot more

I found this photie in a drawer. What you see here is the Yamaha FG-180 I bought in 1969. It's not clear whether it captures me in the grip of deep emotion, or the moment when I dropped my plectrum down the hole. Again.

These pieces of Japanes plywood had started to appear in folk clubs around a year before and they were uniformly dreadful.

An interesting quirk of evolution, alongside the unexplainable fact that, as men grow older, they need more hair up their nose, is that the ability wanes to impersonate accents. At various (drunken) times in my past I’ve successfully masqueraded as Welsh, Scottish, American and both northern and southern Irish. These days I struggle with my native Brummie.

Health and bloody safety. It's everywhere isn't it?

No, it isn't. There's one area where it's not only ignored, it's actively flouted. Now I know that, as someone who believes that life's dangers are there to weed out the stupid, I should be applauding this final bastion of peril as the needle in the lip balm of life that reminds us that we are, indeed, alive. But come on, at least be consistent.

Approaching yet another birthday, I determined that I needed a resonator guitar in my life. For those that don't know, these strange creatures first appeared in the 1920s as a way of making guitars louder. As pickups were yet to be invented, a chap named John Dopyera responded to the need by attaching resonator cones to the bridge.

It's easy to become obsessed by detail. At least, it is for me. I've long intended to produce an illustration of each of the main aircraft in The Larks, but each one takes so many hours that it's taken years to get to this one. They're produced digitally, using PhotoShop, and drawn using a Bamboo graphics tablet.

Paying Tribute to my Heroes

 I'm on a roll here!

Inspired by actually getting something finished and published, I've now completed the long-promised collection of disconnected stories. Originally it was to be called Discollection, a title that was dismissed as meaningless by the redoubtable Peter Coleborn, Chief Editor of Penkhull Press.

I'm somewhat ashamed to see that nine years have passed since The Larks was published. It's sold in decent numbers and received favourable reviews, but one criticism kept recurring. People thought it ended too abruptly.

A repeat visit to the Bovington Tank Museum (it's worth it) had me gazing for many minutes at a sprawling diorama of the tank assault on Cambrai. Always more suggestible than a hypnotised spaniel, I came away full of plans for a diorama of my own.

Having worked hard (well, hard by my standards anyway) on the dramatised account of Fray Bentos that I mentioned in a previous post, I found myself increasingly frustrated by the constraints of historical accuracy.

The Dawn of Tanks

 I'm just back from a great day out with a couple of mates. While I knew of the Tank Museum at Bovington, I'd never been there.

Bloody hell, it's good…