A Miserable Bloody Day

Added on 20 November 2008

A grim, bleak, dreich day in Warsaw. Cloudy and wet, a cold wind bustling through the city. A day for settling down with a doughnut and a cup of tea, and listening to Bob Dylan. That's what I'm doing. Except I'd finished the doughnut by the time I'd written the second sentence. Obviously I'm just going to have to get hold of another one.

Here's a link to a small news story which a friend in New Zealand sent last night. It involves a large shark swimming in a small estuary, where our friend lives and where we visited earlier in the year. The kids enjoyed jumping from the wharf into the water. Well, one of our kids did, the other was too scared. I held her hand and tried to do a Butch and Sundance with her, but when it came to it and we stood on the precipice, she let me jump in myself. Maybe she knew there was a possibility of a ruddy great shark pitching up.

We showed Two of Two the clip this morning. That could have been you, said TPCKAM, assuming he might be impressed with the whole thing. You could have been jumping in there when that shark was swimming up the estuary. He shrugged. No, he said. That was seven months ago, not now. And it's not like it's going to come to our door...

Some people think it's mean to send an eight year-old wee boy to boarding school, but I reckon that's just people who don't have one.

To capture the true essence of this blog, try listening to Tell Tale Signs, the new Dylan album, as you read. (Should you not be in possession of Tell Tale Signs most, if not all of it, is now on YouTube. Here's one.)

Tell Tale Signs reminds me of Fire Walk With Me, the Twin Peaks movie. Reviews of that movie seemed to be split into two camps. If you hadn't watched the tv series, then it seemed like a decent enough film. However, had you watched all twenty-nine episodes of the tv show, the movie was exceptionally disappointing. You didn't want to know what came before the tv series, you needed to know what came after.

If you're a Dylan obsessive, already in possession of four thousand tracks, then there's probably not a huge amount on Tell Tale Signs that's of interest. Maybe only five or six tracks out of twenty-seven, if that. And if you hate Dylan, well, it's twenty-seven Bob Dylan songs, so you're going to hate it anyway. If you're somewhere in the middle - you like Dylan, you have lots of Dylan, but haven't gone out your way to collect every live bootleg going and every single song from a movie soundtrack - then this album is a wonderful collection.

I'm in the latter camp. The rest of my family are in the we hate Bob Dylan and never want to hear him again camp. Fortunately I have plenty of time to sit and eat doughnuts and listen to Dylan and not have to listen to my kids complaining about the music. I mean, do I complain when they listen to the soundtrack to High School Musical 3? Well, yes, I do. But that's only fair.

The winds are picking up, the rain is beating against the window. Time to put a call through to Doughnut Home Delivery.