Some tangled string...

Just look at that tangle. How did it get like that? And so much of it – yards and yards. It must have started out all straight and neat, purposeful. Over time, getting muddled and messed and ending up in a knotted, tangled, mystery to be disentangled with patience.

Not even knowing how it ended up as it did.

How to unravel it? Tease out the knots and tangles and make it useable again. Useable will do, not as good as new, nothing could ever do that, it’s been too long on the waves - but of use, able to fulfil a purpose.

Maybe if I could find an end I could make a start.

Or a beginning.

Meet the band…

Believe it or not these four are worth around a hundred pounds each, considerably more as a set - not bad considering I bought them for under a fiver. It isn’t their value that interests me though; it’s the story behind them.

This isn’t just any old jazz band, these are the Jazz Hounds, the one and only original Jazz Hounds – Johnny (Dinks) Dunn on cornet, Sam (Almond) Thomas on percussion, Cole (Sax Boy) Hawkins on saxophone, and Mr. Willy (The Lion) Smith on piano, that’s him standing at the mike, they couldn’t fit a piano into the globe I guess.

They were the original band for the blues and jazz singer Mamie Smith. Later she had a much bigger band, but this is her original quartet. Back in 1920 Mamie was the first black blues singer to be recorded, and her version of ‘Crazy Blues’ sold over two million records for ‘Okeh Records’.

Mamie was a vaudeville singer, dancer, pianist, actress, and some say started out as a‘gentleman’s companion’ back in Cincinnati, Ohio where she was born. Whether or not this is true, she certainly had a taste for the wild life and was no stranger to drink, drugs, and the weakness that would eventually lay her low, men.

When a young saxophonist, sixteen year old Cole Hawkins joined the band, Mamie couldn’t help herself. Despite at thirty-eight, being twice his age she started an affair with him almost immediately - dropping her pianist and lover of the moment, Willy Smith, like a hot sweet potato.

This didn’t please the Lion at all. Up until then Mamie had been his girl and he’d hoped that they were going to marry. What he didn’t know was that Mamie had been sleeping with Dinks and Almond on and off for years as well, and Sax Boy was just the latest of her conquests.

One night whilst the band was performing at Baron Wilkin's Little Savoy Club, Willy (The Lion) Smith stopped playing his piano and, knocking over his piano stool in his haste and frenzy, pulled a pistol from his black tuxedo jacket and shot young Cole dead through the eye. He was tried for murder in the first degree and went to the electric chair at the Almira correctional facility a year later.

Things were never the same after that. Mamie continued to sing with a new and bigger band, but as the years passed her fame and popularity faded and eventually her public forgot her. She died in New York in 1946 and is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery, just up from Harlem.

Sometimes when I walk past my snow globes I could swear I hear the sound of a jazz band playing and from somewhere in the distance, the dusky, answering, voice of a woman - ‘Now the doctor's gonna do all that he can. But what you're gonna need is an undertaker man. I ain't had nothin' but bad news. Now I got the crazy blues.’

Play on you old Jazz Hounds you, play on.

My name is Andrew...

My name is Andrew and I am a serial doodler.

I’ve always doodled. I’m a fully paid up member of doodlers anonymous. I’ve doodled my way through geography, French, life class, typo design, time management, honeymoons, my daughter’s birth, project board, a keynote speech or two - I’ll probably still be doodling as I doodle my last doo.

Sometimes I doodle on paper (I dread to think the masterpieces I’ve left behind in meeting rooms over the years – not), other times in one of my doodle books. Most of my doodles have unconscious starts, a squiggle, a series of lines, and then I begin to see something and it becomes something more as I embellish. Other times, it remains unconscious to the finish, a moving of the pen on the page thing.

When I’m doodling I usually produce lots of smaller images on the page, sometimes there’s a connection between some of them, most times not. I have no idea what I’m going to doodle when I start, often I still don’t know when I’ve finished, some doodles I don’t even remember doodling.

This is a page out of one of my books.

a. A line of Breugel type creatures.

b. A biblical tree (I must have been to church).

c. My idea of the goddess Kali Crumpet.

d. Some animals in an Aborigine stylee.

e. Mr. Smudge as a young man working for the East India Company surrounded by some fruit, a bird, and a funny long-nosed animal (Smudge's first appearance in my life).

I don’t remember drawing the fruit or the bird, or where I was; probably on some teleconference to somewhere or other, listening to people talk about things even stranger and more inconsequential than these doodles.

Hope you like them. If you do I have others, so let me know.

The moon and lies...

There’s a fascination about the moon, at least I find it fascinating, but you should never look at her for too long, she can hurt with her cold beauty.

I don’t know why the moon should be a woman, it just seems to have always been that way; but she drags me in, captures, drives me mad; could turn me quite lunatic if I wasn’t careful. She’s had so many names; Aega, Allison, Arianrhod, Bendis, Candi, Chanh-O, Diana, Ems, Hekate, Isis, Juna, Luna, Sadarnuna – the Sumerian goddess of the new moon.

I could stare at her all night. Yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m already a little lunatic in its gentlest form - foolish; eccentric; perhaps a little crazy. I see every shade of grey in the moonlight, the truth and many lies. I search for truth in the chaos of the night, looking between the lies to glimpse moonbeams of truth.

There, I told you I was a lunatic. I shouldn’t stare so much.

As a boy, I remember my grandmother coming into my room on nights when the moon was very bright, making sure that the curtains were drawn tight against the light.

She’d tell me that if the moon shone on my face as I lay in my bed that I’d die inside of a year. It was her gypsy blood I think, drawn up like the tides to the surface as the moon shone full.

I let it happen once, opening the curtains wide so that the bright full moon flooded onto my face as I lay in my green candlewick-spreaded bed. I left them open for over an hour, allowing my skin to bathe in the cold white light, absorbing the death rays that I imagined that light must contain.

My head was full of science fiction movies; ‘Forbidden Planet’, ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, ‘It Came From Outer Space’, ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’. It seemed perfectly reasonable to my nine year old mind that the light of the moon might kill you if you were exposed to it for too long. In my mind my gypsy blooded grandmother’s tale was metamorphosed into fact by way of a scientific explanation gleaned from American ‘B’ movies watched at the picture house on North Street every Saturday morning.

For a year I waited to die, and when I didn’t felt a tiny twinge of disappointment.

How silly we are as children, how gullible. How could I think that by allowing the light of the moon to shine on my face that I could die?

They say that if you stand in the moonlight of the full moon for long enough, wishing hard and concentrating on what you would become, that you can change yourself into anything you choose.

But then the same ‘they’ say that if you look between the lies you’ll find the truth.

Maybe I’ll become a cat.

Signs of change…

I can feel the changes coming, the seasons continuing to turn, as they ride on the roundabout that’s centred in this funfair that we call passing time.

There are clear signs that autumn is all around, I spotted some this last weekend. It looks like being a ‘mast-year’, no, not last, a mast-year. A year when nature does her best to protect herself from the times to come. There’s an abundance of berries on the bushes and trees - conkers, acorns, crabs, rowan, holly, and blackberries, they seem to be everywhere I look. If folktales are to be believed, they all in volume predict the bitter badness of the winter to come.

Walking on the headland last Saturday I came across a hawthorn, bowed to the wind and laden with berries, bright red against the crisp blue sky. I’ve passed it before in other years, other lighter autumns, but I’ve never before seen it as full with bright red haws. So full of swollen life - a warning for all to begin to make ready for the cold season.

Standing, looking out across the sea, I heard a sound in the air and looking up saw a flock of swans overhead, the thrup, thrup, thrup of their beating wings high in the sky above my craned, sky-gazed, neck. Thrup, thrup, thrup, running from the cold of Siberia. Thrup, thrup, thrup, fleeing her frosty breath.

And spiders everywhere. Seven in the cottage last weekend. The greater the number that crawl in from the cold and the larger the webs they spin, the colder the winter to come – and longer.

I’ll keep my eyes peeled back for ratty squirrels gathering, fortifying ready for a hard winter, preparation for the snow – the earlier the gather the harder the winter will be.

Longer and harder, colder and darker - winter's breath just out of sight around that autumn corner.

Some say a warm November and we’ll freeze in December. It’ll be a warm November for sure, weather or no weather. The berries, swans, squirrels, spiders, are all true signs of winter’s bite. She’s on her way in her long white coat, teeth sharpened ready - who can blame us for making ready?

The roundabout keeps turning. I’ll ride with it a while.

Spiders in the bath...

Seven. Yes, seven!

Far too many to pick up and hold in my hand, so instead I scooped them into a plastic glass turning it upside down onto a saucer.

Seven soft grey brown bodies, fourteen staring black stalk eyes, fifty–six legs, and two hundred and twenty-four joints in those legs; tumbling over one another in a pointless attempt to escape.

Spiders. The clean kind, the ones that come in from the outside and wait in the bath for us to arrive, creeping up the pipes and out of the plughole.

Why do they do it?

After photographing them I set them free outside. But they’ll be back.

I wonder how many we’ll find next week.

We all know that song…

Friday evening, old friends, beer, laughter, memories, Didsbury Rugby Club (so hard to find that our taxi driver couldn’t and dropped us in the wrongest part of town – thanks Sue for coming to the rescue), food, tears, goodbyes, and karaoke.

A great night with great people. I’m glad I got up and sang. I’m glad I chose this song. It isn’t about a broken love affair as so many people think, it’s about – well, have a read of the lyrics, you’ll work it out.

Thanks for the photo Glynne.

Love on the Rocks.

Love on the rocks
Aint no surprise
Just’ Pour me a drink
And I'll tell you some lies
Got nothing to lose
So you just sing the blues all the time

Gave you my heart
Gave you my soul
You left me alone here
With nothing to hold
Yesterday's gone
Now all I want is a smile

First, they say they want you
How they really need you
Suddenly you find you're out there
Walking in the storm
And when they know they have you
Then they really have you
Nothing you can do or say
You've got to leave, just get away
We all know the song

You need what you need
You can say what you want
Not much you can do
When the feeling is gone
Maybe blue skies above
But it's cool when your love's on the rocks

First, they say they want you
They really, really need you
Suddenly you find you're out there
Walking in the storm
And when they know they have you
Then they really have you
Nothing you can do or say
You’ve got to leave, just get away
We all know the song

Love on the rocks
Ain’t no big surprise
Just Pour me a drink
And I'll tell you more lies
Yesterday's gone
And now all I want is a smile

Keep in touch guys.