If you’ve ever visited the About Me section of apoplectic.me, you may recognize this picture:
Flower Manchild
(Actually, it could do with a bit of an update. I’ll do that when I’m done here.)
That’s four years ago, and I don’t really remember anything about the circumstances. Well, y’know, I had recently suffered a catastrophic haemorrhagic stroke. I’m pretty sure about that. But, other than that….
Like Nick Drake, I’ve got to assume that most people who’ve suffered the effects of a stroke – and their loved ones – are familiar with the blues. And some of them may even look out the Blues as a form of therapy. I can’t locate the exact quote, but someone once said
It’s a sad music that makes you feel happy.
So it was that Mrs Stroke Bloke and I went along with a couple of friends to a show put on by the Edinburgh Blues Club on Friday.
Tonight, the Edinburgh Festival and the Fringe will be over for another year. Once again, the shows I went to see for The Edinburgh Reporter were never less than interesting, and the second half of the month was no less thought-provoking.
In addition to the stuff I mentioned last week, Daniel Kitson at the Traverse was great, and AL Kennedy at the Book Festival was a masterclass on how to take an audience with you when reading off the page.
This year’s recommendation for the NYC apoplectic massive
Blog hero Paul Morley on Bowie didn’t translate well to the inherently conservative milieu of Charlotte Square, but perhaps the most gripping night of August was… Continue reading A Northern Soul→
2016: Mrs Stroke Bloke loves owls. In a very particular way.
The beginning of the Fringe is always a bit of a whirl. I’m doing reviews and interviews during preview week and the first week proper. For the second half of the month, it’s more a case of hanging on and getting through to the end.
Before being distracted by something shiny last week, I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with this Donald Trump thing. Why, over the past week, have presidential general election polls continued to see Trump bouncing along at 40%, when he’s indicated that a Trump presidency would look like this?
To be fair, The Daily Mail would take a more celebratory approach
That’s an actual [inside] page from this TheGlobe back in April, described as the front page we hope we never have to print. The accompanying editorial called Trump’s White House run “flippant and reckless” and “profoundly un-American”. But while this would all seem obvious from within The Globe‘s newsroom, or my Twitter feed, Trump easily won the Massachusetts Republican primary, collecting 22 delegates and nearly 50% of the vote. Meanwhile, over 50% of the voters in the recent EU referendum in these islands voted for an Out campaign fronted by Trump-like trolls.
Last week’s post was described by The Prof as a perfect distillation of an apoplectic.me post – presumably in the hope that I would JUST STOP ALREADY!!! Well, I won’t. Because I distilled it even further, and it was presented on Broadcasting Giant Eddie Mair‘s Radio 4 PM show on 5th August.
Over the last two weeks, Stroke Bloke has reported from Berlin and London on modern iterations of democracy. Today, a report from closer to home…
Last week’s post, Monarchy had a hint of the oracle about it. I asked
Can Angela [Eagle] fit 172 Labour Party MPs in her tiny battle bus before its square wheels fall off?
And that very night, the Labour Party’s National executive committee voted to allow Jeremy Corbyn, as the incumbent leader of the party, to enter the party’s leadership election without having to collect the nominations of 50 of his MPs and MEPs.
Some years ago, Mrs Stroke Bloke and I noticed that – not much like J. Alfred Prufrock – our relationship could be measured out in international soccer tournaments.
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons, maaaan.”
Back in the summer of 2010, I was introducing my new American girlfriend to a Scottish pal in a Brooklyn bar as we watched (was it?) the USA v England in South Africa.
And as well as being beautiful and funny, she already understands the offside rule!
But as Scotland fail, yet again, to qualify for a major tournament at France 2016, how do I find a team to give me a rooting interest? Read on…
In explaining the origins of May Day, Ian comes up with all sort of specifics, but kind of slides over the idea that – as Longsufferingreaderoftheblogpaul wrote in a comment to a particularly off-the-wall post – time is social. Harvests. Day and night. Diurnal clocks. Biorhythms and cycles. All that mushy wetware bio stuff I never learned but is real.
Cornwall in England definitely gets into that side of things:
[On May Day,] Padstow holds its annual Hobby Horse day of festivities, believed to be one of the oldest fertility rites in the UK.
