5. Become a professional footballer and earn £30,000 a week. Really, how hard can it be?

 

4. Let Gordon Brown be your inspiration. Make a YouTube video laying out your plans in a bold decisive Presidential manner. Then completely capitulate four days later and don’t do anything that you said. You’ll look stupid, but then if it’s good enough for the Prime Minister...

  

3. Watch all seven series of the West Wing in a month. That’s what we’re doing. Great writing, flawless acting. You can tell the episodes that George Bush watched, the ones that made him try things. Like announcing in the State of the Union that America would soon put men on Mars. Whatever happened to that? 

 

2. If you'd like to undertake a mid-life crisis event but don't really have the time, why not try walking across the Silk Road, rather than along it.

  

1.  Read Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. Try and get to the other side.

  

(The continuing intergalactic saga of two children, One of Two and Two of Two, and two parents on the edge.)

 

On Saturday we introduced cricket to our ethnically European friends.

 

Reasonable people when playing cricket in the back garden with their children will use a tennis ball, or some other softer ball. However, I’m this crazed driven parent intent on making his children toughen up right from the off. We always use the real thing, although we don’t have pads, boxes, thigh pads or helmets. We do have a bat. It’s a tough game playing cricket with the Lindsays in the back garden.

  

My Ethnic Polish Friend lined up for her first ever bowl. Her son stood about ten yards away with a bat, not realising that he ought to be cowering in fear. Two of Two was standing just behind the stumps. My Ethnic Polish friend then delivered her first ball in international cricket; a full toss at a pace not that far removed from Michael Holding at his peak. Her boy dived for cover. Two of Two also dived out of the way, but the ball was directed straight at him. Tracking him like a guided missile, it thudded forcefully into his leg. He howled out in pain, and the crowd gathered round and the medics were called for.

  

Seriously this ball - a real, cork-filled cricket ball made by small children in a factory in India - hit him flush on the leg at about eighty miles an hour. And this is the thing. The following morning there was no bruise.

 

He’s an alien. Must get it from his mother.

A slow week on the great drive to get the Barney Thomson series up and running for re-launch in September 2009. Tasks and their current status:

  

Proof read Book number 2: not done

Re-write Book number 3: not done. (Not even started)

Proof read numbers 4,5 & 6: not even started

Start final draft of number 7: not even started.

Speak to bank about massive corporate financing package to relaunch the series: not done

 

A slow week, yes, but I should be able to get most of that stuff knocked off in the next five days.

 

Plans are afoot for the on-line release of the debut album by acoustic rock behemoths Strange Case, some time in June. Album artwork is in hand, and the mastering of the album is currently taking place at the studio of ace Polish sound engineer Sebastian Witkowski. In the meantime, go here to listen to some early pre-mix cuts from the album.

 

In a piece about Jakob Dylan last year in the Scotsman, the interviewer wrote: Jakob's reluctance to describe them (his songs) as political is understandable when you remember how his father soundtracked Vietnam... Some fellow thought that and wrote it; his editor and copy editor both presumably read it and didn’t think anything of it; no one added a comment to the piece to question the line. 

 

Dylan wrote anti-war songs before America became mired in Vietnam, and he chronicled the civil rights movement for a couple of years. But Vietnam? What did Bob write about Vietnam? At the height of US involvement in South East Asia he was writing Dig that Country Pie and Alberta let your hair hang low... 

 

How do you measure the new work of someone who can be credited with ten years worth of protest songs that he never wrote, and no one notices? That’s how it is with Bob. People assume things. Every move, every song, every line is poured over. When he sings on his new album that he’s reading James Joyce, thousands of people start to wonder what it is of Joyce’s that he’s reading, or what aspects of Joyce can then be read into the song, and how this affects the meaning of the lyric. In fact, in the song Bob is reading James Joyce because he’s got the blood of the land in his voice. More than likely, if he'd had the blood of the land on his shoe, he would have been reading Winnie the Pooh. 

 

So how do you measure any new product by Bob? Divest yourself of the past and listen to it as it is. The fact that Bob’s album stands at No.1 this morning, a feat he has not achieved in quite some time, suggests that a lot of people are buying this Bob without reference to the past. So what are they finding? 

 

His voice is shot, it’s a long time since he’s been at the forefront of anything, there’s nothing new here, and a lot that’s borrowed. And it’s a wonderful record. Maybe not every track, but a strong seven out of ten, which is a good effort from a sixty-seven year-old geezer who knocked off an album in a few weeks because he had the notion.

  

It opens with the derivative accordion-led blues tango Beyond Here Lies Nothin’, and if the words accordion-led blues tango don’t get you going, then you’re in the wrong place. It’s a strong opening, which is then immediately killed off by Life Is Hard, which is one of those shuffling mincing songs that Bob’s taken to in the last ten years that sound like they were written for Perry Como or Bing Crosby. Fortunately, this one does not plumb the depths of previous Bing-type songs, and neither is it repeated on this album.

  

Next up is a slow blues, Hell’s My Wife’s Home Town, and while it’s not the strongest track here, slow blues is better than slow Perry Como. This is followed by the infectious accordion-led If You Ever Go To Houston. It’s a few minutes too long, and the accordion does get a bit repetitive - if the album had been produced by someone other than Bob himself, it might not have happened - but after one listen I caught Two of Two singing it in the bathroom, which has got to be the definition of infectious. 

 

Forgetful Heart is a wonderful slow, bluesy track, with great understated distorted guitar, and closes out with the albums’ standout line: the door has closed for evermore, if indeed there ever was a door. Followed by an up-tempo blues, Jolene. No relation. Along with Shake Shake Mama, Jolene is the kind of blues that Bob has done a lot of recently, but here they seem melodically more interesting.

  

This Dream of You is another beautiful accordion driven piece, very reminiscent of Girl From The Red River Shore, although not quite on that song’s epic scale. I Feel a Change Coming On is possibly the album’s standout song, although there are many. On first listen I thought he mentioned a Finnish priest, and I was thinking, holy crap, a Finnish priest, I wonder how you distinguish one of them? It turned out on second listening to be the village priest, which is much more mundane. Village priests are ten a penny. 

 

The album closes with It’s All Good which is lyrically stronger than it is melodically, and that's that. New Bob in seven hundred and seventy words. It’s a great album, with the accordion - which isn’t on as many tracks as other reviewers are making out - giving it a feel unlike any of Bob’s previous thirty-two studio albums.

 

The man still isn’t saying anything about Vietnam though.

 

(A weekly look at the golfing trials of the Greatest Golfer Never To Win Three Majors)

 

There was no Old Man tournament this weekend in the US, nor on the European Tour, and Sandy wasn’t in a tournament on either of the regular tours. The US Old Man Tour doesn’t play every week. Not being a US Old Man Tour insider, I don’t know if this is because they don’t have the sponsorship to host a tournament every week, or if they feel they need to give the Old Men a rest every now and again. 

 

Sandy’s world ranking this morning is 752.