Here goes:

Many, it seems, years ago I used to work from time to time as a  Barn Dance caller. Not being a musician myself I took great pleasure in persuading real musicians to get together to form bands and I would employ them to play for Dances that I was to call.

One such unit was The Highams Park Village Band (HPVB). Flute, accordion, fiddle (or two), guitar, cello, occasional double bass and jingle ring.  We used my PA system (PA = Public Address) consisting of mixer desk, amplifier and loudspeakers (odd name that: loudspeaker). The sound of everything was fed through the mixer  and carefully  balanced to reinforce the sound. As the “soundman” I was never satisfied.  Compromise is always forced upon one by availability of funds and I had very few funds.

One evening we were at a gig when I was approached by a young man who told me that he had first seen us at his daughters’ school and had been really impressed with the sound of the band. I said I’d pass on his comment. No, he didn’t mean the actual band, though they were good, he meant the sound from the PA system.
“How do you do it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied, “I’m never happy with the sound.”
“Well, it’s one of the best I’ve heard.”

“Thank you.  I just keep everything simple. No fancy stuff.”
” Ah! The Kiss Principle. Works every time.”
I smiled,trying to look as if I understood this comment.
“What’s your interest?” I inquired.
“Oh, I work for the BBC as a  sound engineer.”
I cannot tell you how proud I felt. These are the best sound engineers in the world and here was one of their number dishing out praise to me!

Later, I had many opportunities to work with this man for he is a really very good Bass Guitarist and every time we worked together he would say to some other member of the band, “I love this little rig. It is brilliantly simple and sounds so good.”

The Kiss Principle? Keep It Simple, Stupid! or as the children I taught would have it Keep It Sensible Simple… after all they were right to object to being called Stupid.

I wish I could apply the KISS to everything in life.

This passage comes from the website of an organisation called HOPE not hate and was published today;

“Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and we’ve given over this blog to Karen Pollock MBE, Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Even walking around the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it’s hard to begin imagining the evil which was committed there or to visualise the sheer scale of what took place. At Birkenau rows of crude huts into which hundreds of human beings were forced, stretch further than the eye can see. The numbers involved are so well-documented that they can almost seem to lose meaning: over six million people killed during the Holocaust, more than one million at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone. The systematic murder of Jews, Roma and Sinti and the appalling persecution of gay people, the disabled, trade unionists and other minority groups. The only way we can begin to comprehend the vastness and depravity of this chapter in our shared history is by focussing instead on the individuals and families whose futures were stolen in the name of a racist ideology.

Looking at the Holocaust through the lives of individuals naturally prompts enormous sadness, yet it also holds a small glimmer of hope, when we learn about those rare men and women who took great risks to speak up and speak out against injustice. Take Sophie Scholl, the Munich University student who as part of the anti-Nazi White Rose movement wrote pamphlets urging others to resist fascism – and who was executed for treason aged just 21. Or Hans Litten, the lawyer whose cross-investigation of Hitler exposed the violence of Nazism to the world in the early 1930s. Or even Marlene Dietrich, the great German actress who paid for Jewish friends to flee occupied Europe and made numerous anti-Nazi broadcasts.

These were people who refused to be subsumed by the tide of hatred engulfing their society – and who spoke up instead for peace and tolerance. These men and women provide both a template of courage and an extraordinary legacy, which Hope not Hate carries today through the activists who take to the streets to oppose racism and prejudice. Those who campaign tirelessly to ensure that fascism is never allowed to gain a foothold in our society should be applauded, because their vigilance safeguards values that all of us should cherish.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, the day on which Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, perhaps we should turn our thoughts from bleak images of concentration camps and visceral horror of gas chambers. Maybe instead we should remember the once colour-filled lives of those who were murdered and mourn the fact that they were taken from us. We should take a moment to celebrate the Holocaust survivors who moved here after the war and enriched modern Britain. And we should recommit ourselves to following the legacy of men and women like Sophie, Hans and Marlene – by never giving in to bigotry and by always speaking out against hatred.

Karen Pollock MBE is Chief Executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust”

Phil mentioned that he drinks his scotch (whisky) with ice. I’m afraid  I reacted negatively as for me the chill of ice deadens the flavours of most drinks. Not being a cocktail fiend I cannot comment on that field of imbibication.

There are other drinks that one should never serve too cold. Great white wines for instance. One should never serve a wonderful flinty dry Chablis or a great Riesling TBA at such flavour destroyingly low temperatures . (TBA= Trockenbeerenauslese…. arguably as great a style of sweet wine as Sauterenes ( Chateau d’Yquem being the ultimate expression of that style).

The habit of serving beers of any kind at mouth numbingly low temperatures is interesting. These beverages can be remarkably refreshing, but then, so can iced water. It has even become fashionable to serve  Guinness chilled. This latter may be something to do with the reported habit of serving this, at one time, wonderful beverage full of bubbles of Nitrogen as opposed to the traditional Carbon Dioxide. The latter has specific effects upon the taste due to its habit of dissolving in Hydrogen Oxide (water to the non scientists) to form Carbonic Acid. Mind you, I am given to understand that even Guinness Original is no longer bottle conditioned. (If anyone from the Guinness organisation (or CAMRA?) would like to confirm or deny these claims then please do as I have to admit that I am quoting hearsay)

Why do these beers need to be chilled? It is reported that on arrival in Britain during WWII American GIs were shaken by our “Warm” Beer. Of course traditional British beers are served at temperatures above the freezing temperature of water. The reason is simple. Theya re  so full of wonderful flavours that it would be wrong to destroy them by cooling them too much.

Now the realisation:

The reason that so many foreign beers need to be served so cold is that they just have no flavour to enjoy or perhaps the flavours are so disgusting that they just have to be closed in.

Psst! My tongue is firmly in my cheek.  There are some wonderful, flavoursome European beers around.

Whatever, please  serve only cheap whiskeys, brandies and the like with ice but always serve your vodka straight from the freezer.

The culprit? A bottle of wine: McLaren Vale Shiraz from 2006 by Chateau Reynella.
Now I hold no brief for Makro as a company but if this an indication of the quality of wines that can be bought there then more power to their elbows.

Wine chosen by youngest  Magpie out of professional interest and purchased for us by Diane from down the road.

And it will only get better as it gets a bit more air!

Thank you both.

I loathe with a deadly loathing the run up to Christmas. I would willingly leave all that to the Christians themselves.

I despise the, “It’s all about the children.” attitude. It’s not about the children. That is just an excuse.

I  dislike the seasonal attitude to charity summed up in the old name for one charity; Crisis at Christmas. It’s not just a crisis at Christmas it’s a bloody crisis all the year round and existed before Christmas was ever thought of. And it’s world wide. I have to admit that the charity is now named simply Crisis and they operate all year round.

That’s another thing to loathe: the parochialism of Christmas. Okay, “Charity begins at home.” But surely, IF (and it’s a big if) Jesus was preaching a multinational message, Christmas charity should be  multinational.

I feel guilty about Christmas Lunch. But I do enjoy it! And Christmas cake… a rich dark fruit cake covered in a layed of almost 100% sugar icing. I enjoy that too. But maybe I should feel guilty about its carbon footprint?

Compulsion….or at least a feeling of compulsion engendered by that list of people who sent cards last year. Not all of them have email addresses and many of those who have have not made us privy to them. Actually emails are not as enjoyable as cards.

Round Robins! Why oh why is it always (95% of the time) my Christian acquaintances who send out Round Robins? Boasting of how “The Lord” has sent this and that to try us or has blessed us with this and that and aren’t our kids wonderful because they’ve done this or that? Actually the latter is a  way of boasting as to how damn superior their kids are to everyone else’s when in reality they are just ordinary kids. If you really want to share your kids with us, and I don’t mind that, do it for the whole year.  Oh, and the cat had two litters of kittens and we are still trying to house four of the darling little creatures.  That might tempt me if they didn’t live so far away.

I rarely get Round Robins from non-Christian friends and it’s interesting how un-self satisfied those are that I do get. No smugness there on the whole.

I expect that you are wondering if there is anything I like about Christmas?

Well, there are a few things. I love the tree and decorating it. Mind you I think we need to move on from “designer” decorating with just silver and white with a bit of red…. we first did that decades ago before everyone else seemed to pick up on the idea…but that’s like the decking in the garden, we irst had it long before TV gardening became fashionable and ours was Hexagonal. We were ahead of the game. Mind you the tree SHOULD NEVER go up before Christmas Eve…. Certainly not in OCTOBER!!!!!

I love the feeling of comfortable isolation and the quiet in the streets.

Most of all I love the giving. From the careful selection of which card to send to which person to the competition to get our card to Vicky in Canada before she has had a chance to send ours. Vicky’s card always arrives in the first week of December and we usually forget to send ours to her until it’s almost too late. This year of course we remembered and enclosed a long lost photograph of her grandson as a toddler…he is now 21. Wouldn’t you know it? This year her card to us did not arrive until the proper time and it had been posted in England. Was  she over here or was her sister over there? Mystery!

The pleasure, the joy, of giving something material that embodies a bit of thought is the real pleasure of Christmas. Only improved by the last minute rush on Christmas Eve to get something for the family members. Shopping! Spending, even if you can’t really afford it. Or maybe especially if…  Go on I can hear it…Typical man leaves everything to the last minute! Of course I do…I will NOT be organised by others if I can help it.

The joy of giving was emphasised this year when we nipped down the road to some neighbours and delivered pressies! Welcomed in we sat down and were offered a drink….duly declined..and then we gave out the present for them to put under their (prematurely erected and decorated) tree. Jane (I’ll call her that) looked up and said, “You spoil us.” and Lady M piped up with, “He enjoys it!”

Yes I do. I get a huge buzz out of seeing someone’s face when they think, “A present? For me? Weee!”

Yup! That’s my present to me!

I’m glad that Lady M understands that about me.

When I first suggested this topic I was thinking biblically. There are several references to the birds of the air in the Bible. Some of them apocalyptic. (Ezekiel?)  I was also thinking of our supposed dominion over them  as in Genesis 1;26 “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

However,  my mind turned to the freedom of the birds the other day.

We have had some fairly storm weather here in the U.K. over the past week and two days ago I was out and about enjoying the wind blowing through my hair when I became aware of an increasingly familiar sound.

I may have mentioned that over the past thirty-five or so years there have been changes in the local bird population. We have gained green woodpeckers, wood pigeons( a pity I am not allowed to shoot them in town as pigeon pie is delicious),  collared doves and several other species. We have lost particularly that bumptious little bird the House Sparrow.

A noticeable increase in corvids is apparent. Years ago we might have been lucky to see the occasional crow (Corvus corone) but now they are abundant along with the ever present  magpie(Pica pica), the Jay (Garrulus glandarius)which, with it’s blue shot wing feathers , is increasingly finding its way into the more urban parts of out locality.

Two or three years ago I head the distinctive call of a Jackdaw((Coloeus monedula)….(http://education.scholastic.co.uk/resources/12095) and this is what caught my attention last Wednesday. I stopped and looked up. There, gleefully riding the wind, was a flock of jackdaw calling, soaring  and tumbling in the air.  I stood and watched this play, it can only have been play,  for several minutes.

I like to think theirs was a similar pleasure to my own, felt as the wind buffeted me and blew my (increasingly sparse) hair and pinched my cheeks.

Riding the wind? What a wonderful experience that must be.

More about “The birds of the air” may be found at these various places on the “net”, amongst the various writings of the LBC:Conrad, Delirious, Maria/Gaelikaa, Maria SilverFox, OCD writer, Padmum, Paul, Ramana, Rohit, Will Knott, Grannymar

I am wondering what kind of idea this idea  really is? Why choose Ideas as an idea to write about? My mind is boggling>

So I decided to consult The Shorter Oxford Dictionary (6th Edition) to seek the real meaning and etymology of the word.

I found myself confronted by ten different meanings, most of which are completely new to me.

The earliest use of the word occurs, apparently, in Late Middle English (1350-1469): In Platonic philosophy: an eternally existing pattern of any class, of which the individual members are imperfect copies.

I have to ask, What does that mean?

As to the etymology: it comes from Greek, via Latin.The base of idien and apparently idea = look,semblance, form, kind, nature,  ideal form, model…Oh dear! Whose idea was it to send me off on this search?

Speaking of ideas. Here is one I had earlier: If a small rodent chews a hole in a football, is it a deflater mouse?

I leave you all to ponder this and wish you a Good new Year and a Happy 2012.

“Seventeen of you set out on a venture that was a) barely likely to succeed and b) was devised to serve the purposes of two greedy nations. Now that it is in a bit of a mess you expect the rest to rescue you.

Germany and particularly France seem to think that it is absolutely alright for them to break the rules or put pressure on others to change the rules to suit them but when another nation wants their very economic existence  to be considered they whinge.  Not only do they whinge but the little nations who seem to live in fear of the power of Germany join in.

France seems to believe that they have some god given right to rule Europe, in spite of their several failed attempts to do so and also seemed to believe that they could control Germany when it was at its weakest by following Churchill’s idea for unifying trade. They never realized that Germany would pull itself up by its bootstraps and become once more a force to be feared by smaller nations, this time in financial terms rather than military as so often happened after Bismark.

The introduction of the Euro was a blatant attempt to create a “U.S.E”. How often have I heard the cry, “It works in America.” and replied that America has one official language not twenty-seven.

Now you all know one reason France and others worked so hard to keep Britain out side The Common Market. Do you remember de Gaulle’s “Non”?

Britain was always bound, ultimately,to challenge the other two.”

I cannot afford the huge fees that it would take to restore every file and I have lost all my Bookmarks too.
Grannie and the rest of my ancestors have all disappeared (including pictures that I had sent to me by distant relations whom I only discovered a few years ago).

Not having a bookmark for the LBC subject list I cannot proceed…though I think there is something about Fishes of the sea for next week.

I am tempted to go down to the workshop, avail myself of a hand-axe and put paid to these damn Windows machines for good! The only thing that stops me is that it would be a waste of money and a bottle of Jack Daniels .

Someone should have taught Bill Gates about the Kiss principle.  Keep It Simple Stupid. And that goes for all the fools that fell for his sales pitch and forced this stuff upon the rest of us!
Come back Acorn and Risc Os all is forgiven>

Well, Jennie has started a “Shop” on line selling copies of vintage Knitting Patterns. Here is the link:

Jen's Vintage Knits

http://www.etsy.com/shop/JensVintageKnits?ref=seller_info

Please have a look and let your Knitting ( and non Knitting) friends know and if you have any Vintage Knitting patterns (or dressmaking patterns) that you can spare please let me know