Had an interesting few days back home. Due to the adverse weather, every plane and train I boarded was delayed, but not enough to spoil the trip and anyway, I think it´s all rather festive. Only problem was that I was just about the only one to actually make it to Blackpool for our mini reunion, so I was glad that Pauline and Sid from Leeds made it and acted as my surrogate parents for the weekend. Visited a few good friendly clubs, - hat´s off to “The Comrades Club”, “The Duple”, “North Shore Sports and Social Club” and of course “The Royal British Legion”.
Just bought a brand new i-Pod due to the fact that the last one I purchased from up the Benidorm Old Town was possibly one of the worst pieces of electrical equipment I ever came across. The only way you could change the track was to push the volume button (the volume couldn´t be altered once you´d turned it on), the music was really loud but the vocal sounded like the lead singer was wailing from a bathroom three doors away through a tin can, and once you´d charged the battery it had the life expectancy of the equivalent of a midge with emphysema. And then it packed up altogether after 3 weeks.
This was a cheap model though, so I upgraded to the standard “Apple Shuffle”. The only thing with the Apple is that you have to upload the songs through “i Tunes” which I haven´t used for years. Think it´s fair to say that I haven´t quite got the hang of it. The thing is that when I downloaded “i-Tunes” it automatically looked for music already on my computer and it managed to dig up from the very basement vault of my PC some sound effects, some of which I have used at work from time to time. Somehow it mixed these along with the songs that I wanted to place on the i-Pod, - I was totally unaware of this until I got to the gym this morning. The resulting mish-mash was that of high comedy and I struggled like hell not to laugh out loud. I don´t know if it was because it was so unexpected, or the sheer inappropriateness of the sounds compared to my archaic song choice, although this wasn´t always the case, - indeed I didn´t at first cotton on to what was happening and some bird “dawn chorus” sounds and applause effects didn´t sound at all out of place, and the gunfight after The Who´s “My Generation” was an inspired choice. The “Clown Car” effect (which is a series of squeaks, wobbly wheel noises and high pitched horn sounds) just before The Clash´s "London Calling" was a corker, as was the rasping fart after “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by The Police. Another thing was, I didn´t happen after every song, maybe every third or fourth one which kept me on my toes, and after a while even the most non comical sounds had me spluttering behind the back of my hand. The tapping of a hammer before “You´re an Embarrassment” by Madness, and the industrial vacuum cleaner pre empting “Going Underground” by The Jam for example.
As I neared the end of my workout I plonked myself on a seated cycling machine just as a loud foghorn acted as the intro to Bonnie Tyler´s Lost in France. As I put in a final spurt as the finish line homed into view, the sound of a thundering steam train matched exactly the rhythm the piston action of my lower limbs and as I disengaged myself from the machine and stretched out to my full height a coiled spring sounded right on cue and made me guffaw as I swigged back several mouthfuls of water from my bottle. I´ve never had so much fun in a gym before. Indeed, when I think about the timings of these comic and totally accidental interjections – and let´s face it, re reading it, it sounds like some binned script from some dodgy sitcom from the 70´s, I wouldn´t be surprised if one of my dear departed mates from way back when, hadn´t been sat upstairs with the main man looking down on me today – and taking the piss!
