Our first school trip to London

Seeing school is out I thought I'd write an account of a junior school trip

One thing I do remember is the J2 school trip to London.

We started off with our teachers and the excellent headmaster, Mr. Smith and some parent helpers on the chartered coach where we all were put into pairs and the first tellings off would start for such breach of school rules as having ring pull cans of pop.

It wasn't always our fault: Your folks would put in your bag for you oblivious of School Rules.

We'd arrive getting off to the sound of "Sir, Keith's bag is dripping, sir" as he'd put fizzy pop in a container the pressure of which had blown the plastic lid off, putting our hands over mouths as mercilessly we laughed at his predicament. Thankfully his sandwiches were triple wrapped so he still had something to eat.

Eventually  we'd be frog marched to the underground (aka The Tube) subway to make our to the Tower of London going on a guided tour having been head counted to ensure nobody got lost.

The Underground is super busy even outside the rush hour.

We saw the Beefeaters, making up spontaneous corny jokes about them and the 'bloody tower' with Traitors Gate enjoying hearing about how they killed. We weren't screamish.

We went into the Science Museum first having been given an hour and three quarters to look around while the staff and helpers went in the café there. 

Perhaps we'd driven them crazy?

I went to look at the exhibits about radio and photography while one group went to look at the exhibits about time and ironically we lost one boy, the one in that group WITH a watch as he was so absorbed with time he'd both not realized it was time to go AND he's not noticed his group had left him!

He got a flea in his ear for that! I'm afraid we didn't have much sympathy for him as we could of lost time to go other places.

We found a spot to have our sandwiches in the sun.

We went to visit the Natural History museum  meeting Dippy our favourite Dinosaur as we were fascinated by them although I did look at the Big Cats and Birds before going to Rene's Cafe where we'd a pre-booked fish and chip tea to eat as our Headmaster looked on shaking his head to the helpers at the number of us who didn't know how to eat with a knife and fork.

After then we walked passing Soho that was seen by us as 'dodgy' and today I'd call seedy at the time back to the coach for trip home here in the Midlands.

Computing adventures

 This week there's been a few computing related things on my mind.

Sanriotown.com is a place I visited rather a lot from around 2007 because it had a variety of things under one roof such as a Multiplayer game set in the Sanrio world you could play, a fairly active forum where people of all ages talked about all the different characters tv shows and merchandise, not just Hello Kitty but Twin Little Stars, Chococat and others too.

You could send e-cards - and I certainly did - based on the characters, download screensavers which I also did, have a blog there and have email accounts with your name@any of the sanriocharacters.com such as hello kitty.

All in all it was great place, ideal for a little too if you used a bit of commonsense when it comes to sharing spaces.

Over the years bits have fell off such as the game but this last few weeks not only has the email been down with "Down for service" but the whole site has too like this morning I couldn't connect even to the homepage.

I just get this feeling it's terminal.

One advantage in having your browsers information used with your Google Account is it always stays in step across different machines so if you've been as online as long as I have you can whip out the old laptop and edit the bookmarks as sites either lose all interest to you, Tumblrs get removed or sites have shut down for good  in the knowledge every machine you use will now be updated.

This probably is something I should of done a while back to be honest but the idea of doing to separate machines one by one put me off.

That said the new Chromebook is working out fine for things like chatting with my BFF when the laptop isn't just overkill but takes a while to boot up and then runs warm which on a day like Saturday when it was almost 30 degrees C is the last thing you need as your sipping water by the beakerful, trying to stay cool.

The Rollers Singles Collection

I've been using that new Chromebook this week across the week working on my Tumblr of which is just over six years old which was marked.

Something else that is an anniversary is it's nearly a year to the day Alan Longmuir of the Bay City Rollers died and as you know it was one of few occasions I made a post about music here because, frankly it mattered as part of my boyhood past.

This is something I had for Christmas in 1975 as did many boys and girls particularly in with a copy of that years Blue Peter book and the fact I still have my copy with my childhood penned contributions says a lot about what being a BCR fan meant to me and how connected to that past I am.

Last Friday, Cherry Red Records almost by co-incidence issued a three cd set by the Bay City Rollers that sets itself outside of a good number of compilations and the cd issues of the first four British albums in 2004.

Entitled The Singles Collection, it collects in chronological order every British bay city rollers single (aka '45) issued from 1971's Keep On Dancing right though 1981's Life On The Radio and Set The Fashion from the Ricochet album recorded as 'The Rollers'  and featured in the Burning Rubber movie of the same year.

One of the things I like about it is it has the b sides of all the singles following the a (or main) side so for instance after listening to "Bye Bye Baby" you hear  "It's For You" which was the UK b side before moving to "Give a Little Love" so it's like playing all the original vinyl 45's the we did as kids.

Some of the earliest singles like Manana were hard to find even in the mid 1970's as they had been deleted but they are all here.

That's one from my original childhood 45 collection which I still have and I will say as a Rollermanic the American edition has added strings on it as did many of the tracks on the US "Bay City Rollers" album.

The set does put in American singles that were not issued in the UK  such as the re-recorded Saturday Night, a US #1 from 1976 and Yesterday's Heroes featuring the screams of Toronto's youthful BCR fans gathered at a CHUM 1050 promoted concert placed in order of release too.
The set includes a booklet with a write up about each single related to events in the life of the band and photos of the records and many world-wide picture sleeves.

The sound quality is very good not sounding compressed or muddy.

Thus it is a complete set that appeals to all of us fans whither like me you still have your childhood singles and albums or just looking for a set of the records you loved to remember Alan and the band by. It's available either direct from Cherry Red's website or Amazon.

This is for all of us who remember the era.

A well read little sissy gurl

In a world where to be honest I have not been feeling too good apart from listening to a bit of music softly while taking tablets my thoughts were on other things.

I have a bit of an fascination for oldish compilations of short stories usually written by the top authors of the day not least for the quality of the stories with believable characters and rich language that is so much the polar opposite of today's obsession with 'accessible language' that rather than stretching your knowledge of words and means actually holds it back.

They also tend to have a clear idea as to who their audience is, tailoring the topics very much to them so a compilation like this is clearly aimed for and around the interests of girls of that era with lots of adventure.

Girls stories aren't all romances and odes to Pony Club.

Books like these are just what sissy gurls like me need badly to connect our sense of adventure and zest for life with our feminine inner selves.

I love being a frilly sissy gurl as that was what I was always meant to be

Summer fun

We're officially into Summer  as much as it doesn't seem so long ago that we'd entered a new year.

That means going away for a break where I can explore things, make things in craft sessions and play in the sun.

Here I am being that little sissy gurl dressed  in a juniors black  boxy pinafore dress, black gym knickers and grey long socks with pretty bows on them playing croquet

One thing I have been doing is reading old annuals  not least comic ones and there's a kind of storyline in them you don't see in today's versions.

No that's from November 22nd 1952 which I might is before I was born but it's a comic strip where wrong doing gets swift punishment - whacked with Biffo's skipping rope but this kind of ending was common place when I was (allegedly) growing up and actually in the 1975 Beano annual I did have this year there were a few like Rodger the Dodger getting a spanking.

That may seem incomprehensible to a modern child which may be a reason why it doesn't feature - it could alarm some - in the way that for us it was everyday life wherever adults ruled so it was seen as normal if unpleasant. 

lt is an indicator of how over time society changes.

A new computer for Tammy

Computing with me has come on from the old days of big tower units with separate monitors and keyboards that were hard wired into your internet to the longing for more mobile working fitting in with my life rather than being it.

Recently I bought a new, simpler kind of a laptop computer that fits more into this life I live.

This is a Asus C202 in white l that has a 11.6 inch screen with a unspectacular but adequate 1366 x 768 resolution which is fine for general usage or watching anything from the BBC iPlayer on.

It has 32gb of memory but that's expandable to whatever you want using a SD card and 2gb of RAM which unless you've got absolutely heaps of tabs open is fine with the Chrome Os which is a kind of Linux in a browser system that doesn't suck processing power unlike Windows.

It comes in nice white trim and like practically all of the species has a built in video cam should it be needed.

Unless you're doing anything that requires a program running in the machine it's fine and today many things can be run as Apps from the Chrome browser, even basic photo editing.

Hopefully it won't be long before it arrives and be quickly set up.

Mozart Sonata's - new set

This week we're back to music and looking at Sonata's.

What is a Sonata I hear you ask?

A Sonata a composition for an instrumental soloist, often with a piano accompaniment, typically in several movements with one or more in sonata form.

One composer who wrote an awful lot of them was Mozart, who if you're familiar with this blog (and it's bigger companion) you will know is a composer I've always had affinity with to the point of buying over twenty recordings in 1991, the two-hundredth anniversary of his death which included a few sonatas.

Music of this era is very much in the firing line of the battle between traditionalist and those who believe in 'historically informed performances' with replicas of older instruments and looking for clues to how originally they were performed.

The young lady on the left may be familiar to some blog readers as she's the acclaimed baroque violinist Rachel Podger who started a long running survey of Mozart's sonatas in 2004 with the pianist Gary Cooper.

This disc covers four, KV 6, KV 379, KV 547 and KV 378.

This was followed up with KV 303, KV 7, KV 301, KV 30 and KV 481 in 2005

In 2006 they recorded volume three that covered  KV 454, KV 28, KV 402, KV 404, KV 8 and KV 380.

 Volume four came out in 2007 which took in K 302, K 9,K 304, K 29 and K 526

At which point you are probably saying and what's with this "KV" number?
KV happens to be  an abbreviation in German for Köchel Verzeichnis. 

 It is indeed a register for all the compositions of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), not only the symphonies. K stands for Köchel, the last name of Austrian publisher and collector Ludwig Alois Ferdinand Ritter von Knöchel (1800-1877).

All Mozart's  music is catalogued in order using this notation which makes things simpler.

These performances and others in the series I'm slowly picking up, are widely regarded as the finest modern ones and the smooth effortless reproduction  the super audio format allows for sounds most natural, as if you were in a room listening to a recital.

Personally I just love the playing.