Monday March 14, 2005

The Beautiful South

This band have done some excellent music over the years only tarnished by their use of expletive words in their songs. I think the track "Don't marry her" off the album "Blue is the colour" was the worst example of it.

Anyway back to the music . The best tracks for me is when the singing is by both the girl and bloke. The harmony of both together is brilliant. They also sing opposing roles in the duet songs which are skillfully worded. The best album has to be "0898". I don't think there is a bad track on the whole album. "You play glockenspiel.." is the best. I have recently bought two other albums of theirs "Miaow" which I am liking a lot and to a lesser extent " Welcome to the Beautiful South", which has the "Song for whoever" that everyone knows. The album "Blue is the Colour" has the excellent "Rotterdam" but otherwise not so good, and "Quench" has the clever "Perfect 10", " I may be ugly" and "The lure of the sea".

Good band shame about the expletives.

Three Greens walk

Did a nice four and a half mile walk on Sunday. The three greens are Wooley Green ( the start point ), Littlewick Green ( the midpoint ) and Burchetts Green ( the nearly home point ). We have avoided doing this walk before as the road numbers and layout have changed since the walk was written. But a bit of careful map reading meant I was confident we would not get lost. The walk started by the busy A404(M) that joins the M4 to the M40. Not far along the grass ride shown above and the traffic noise abated. Soon a different noise alerted us to activity in the woods. It was a clay pigeon shoot . Above the shoot in the sky were light aircraft doing circuits from White Waltham airfield and above them jets doing their final approach to Heathrow. Soon we we were at Littlewick Green where we had a coffee, a coke and a bag of Walkers cheese and onion crisps ( what else ? ). We then walked across the busy A4 and headed to Burchetts Green . Just by there was this impressive manor ( below )

We then continued into Maidenhead Thicket . At this point we briefly saw Stubbings house where Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands lived during the second world war. This areas was a highwaymen's heaven as the trees are close up to the road and also very thick providing excellent cover. We then recrossed the A4 and walked back to the start.

Back home I had a nice leek and chicken pie from the Sweeney Todd pie shop and pub which we purchased on Saturday. I then gave the grass its first cut of the year. As long as the ground is not too wet it is ok to start cutting grass now. I also gave the borders a quick tidy up, removing weeds that have grown over the winter. We already have some frog spawn in the stream. My final outdoor activity was to walk to the allotment and dig up some leeks for this week. I carefully lifted a shallot and it is showing some root growth from its base.