Paul Heaton and Jacqui Abbott at Shepherd's Bush Empire

Paul Heaton had struggled to go solo after the end of The Beautiful South. But here he was, successfully reunited with Jacqui Abbott and with an acclaimed new album. The tour had sold out long ago and I only just managed to get a ticket for the highest of three upper levels at The O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire. Funny to think I was on that same stage some 55 years ago being quizzed by Eamon Andrews.

It hadn't stopped raining for last two days so I needed my brolly for the walk from the car park at Westfield shopping centre. Visitors to the Empire get a concession so parking was only £3! The band started with a song from the new album but when Paul went straight into "Old Red Eyes Is Back" we knew we would be getting a lot of old classics. Three from Carry On Up The Charts including "I'll Sail This Ship Alone" and the devastating (to me) "Prettiest Eyes". From blue is the colour Jacqui came into her own with "Rotterdam" and Don't Marry Her". Painting It Red was represented by "Baby Please Go". There were songs from The Housemartins days, some other Beautiful South songs I have forgotten and new songs too. A terrific set.

The highlight for me was the singing of Jacqui Abbott. Early on she sang the heavenly "Dream A Little Dream" but the penultimate song of the night was her version of  "Loving Arms". There have been so many covers of this wonderful Tom Jans classic but Jacqui topped the lot with her beautiful rendition accompanied by a quiet guitar. So we were then left with the closing "Caravan of Love" sung a Capella by the whole band. A superb show.

A Career in Construction - Part 13

The second half of 1978 was a highly dynamic time for Henry Boot in the south of England. We had been hearing rumours that the company wanted to expand and I guess the first realisation of this policy was when a new Contracts Manager arrived to look after Cheshunt and Harlow. Tony Whale was ex Bovis who were specialists in Management Contracting. Could this be what we might be doing in the future? Tony arrived on 4th August. How he fitted in with Peter Horth and Ken Ottley who knows.

The company owned a large mansion on The Boltons in Chelsea. I guess this was used for functions and offices for the Boot family. However in September I was going there for Management Meetings. By this time I think the company had set up a Special Projects team to look for new work, and this was now their base in the absence of any other accommodation. The company was now actively searching for a office, but in the meantime we had to use The Boltons. On 27th October, for what were now fortnightly Management Meetings, we were introduced to the new Managing Director for the whole company. David Woolf had come from .... you've guessed it ...... Bovis. He must have explained to us the opportunities that were open to the company in what would be a brand new Region.

The first of these materialised very quickly. Only a week later I was called to a meeting at The Boltons for a new contract, Kings House in Brentford. Although busy on Cheshunt and Harlow, I was grabbed by a new Contracts Manager called Mike Stafford to sort out the commercial stuff including placing the first sub-contract orders. Guess where Mike had come from? ....... Correct! Mike didn't have his own office so all the initial meetings were at The Boltons. It almost became a second home. Brentford was off to a lightning start in November. It was on a type of fee contract but we were trying to run it as our first management contract. The client was expecting we had all our own labour but the work was all sublet.

November also saw the company signing a lease on new offices on Castle Street in High Wycombe. There was a lot of fitting out required but I think we were using temporary areas during December. The office was finally ready for occupation immediately after Christmas but before then we were told of the structure for the new Southern Division. Instead of Peter Horth heading the Division as expected, we had a new leader in Colin Brooks. He was head of that Special Projects team at The Boltons but now took on Operations too. So the south had it's third man in charge. Peter Horth and Ken Ottley moved to High Wycombe as did Mike Stafford and Tony Whale. I had small office well down pecking order. But it was fantastic to have our own headquarters and the offices were excellent. But come the first week in January, I was in for a big shock.

The Garden in May

The mild and wet winter has certainly had an impact on the garden. All the shrubs have never been better and the borders seemed to have matured all of a sudden. The Alliums above are always nice to see. My prize Weigela below always flowers well and the roses in the foreground have lots of buds ready to flower.

The climbing Hydrangea is starting to flower and the Euphorbia in the background is still quite healthy.

This is the bed that used to be just a Virburnum gone mad. When I opened it up, I sowed some wild flower seed and they come up every year.

I can hardly get past the Campanula next to the conservatory.

My Lilac is an unusual variety with delicate pink flowers.

I just love Astrantia. The first is a lovely salmon pink and the second a dark purple with a white Tiarella behind.

I wish the lawn could stay as it is. The spring feed after the wet winter has done its job for now.

Clearing the beds of the bulb foliage and preparing the ground for the summer bedding seemed a much more difficult and laborious job this year, or is it just my age? Planting eight dozen bedding plants, twenty flower pots (mainly fuscia) and the three hanging baskets seemed easy in comparison.

Of course the cats are going out a lot more with the better weather.

A Career in Construction - Part 12

After the previous hiccup, I started again with Henry Boot on 2nd May 1977. If I remember rightly, when I had my interview at The Royal Chase Hotel in Barnet at the end of March, I was only being considered for a Senior Surveyor's position for the Harlow contract. I think that the original offer was then updated when Henry Boot gained the Cheshunt contract in April and I was made Area Surveyor once again.

It was the Midland Region in Birmingham that was responsible for these new contracts in the south. (Remember where I noted in Part 10 about the region taking on a number of large housing contracts on the back of the success in Peterborough? Well Harlow and Cheshunt were two such contracts, destined to be disasters along with Tamworth, Coventry etc). When I joined, the housing contract in Harlow was already half way through and becoming difficult financially. We just had to get finished and get out. This included getting rid of the bricklaying sub-contractor who was going far too slowly. When management wanted to hold onto a cheque, the bricklayer's boss (as wide as he was tall, and an ex-boxer) sought me out on site and pulled me back to the office with various threats if he did not get his cheque. Fortunately my boss came over, gave the agreement to make the payment but that violence to staff could not be tolerated and the brickwork company had to go. So success of a kind in that we could employ new bricklayers and get the job on the move.

Cheshunt was different. This was 352 dwellings for the notorious GLC. Being there at the start was a big benefit. But we still struggled with the rates that Birmingham had given us. They had no appreciation of how much more labour cost in the south. We also struggled with our first bricklaying sub-contractor. He couldn't make the job pay, had too few men and came back for an increase on his rates. A huge decision was made that we would terminate his contract and take on the bricklayers as directly employed men. I worked out a payment regime that included bonus payments for various targets. These became a very popular incentive scheme and we had all the bricklayers we needed. They even worked some weekends just to get the bonus. There was an even more interesting story later when we did the same with the painting sub-contractor and we became, for a time, one of the biggest employers of individual painters in the south-east. We had to buy all the paint and the site manager used to dish out brushes personally.

It was in the June of 1977 that I started keeping action lists with various notes about my work. For a few years these were on sheets of bill paper that I kept in cardboard files until I progressed to A4 size notebooks. I have then all to this day along with an assortment of diaries. Looking at the first of these files I thought they would be a wealth of information. However they are filled with the day to day actions of a Quantity Surveyor and there is absolutely nothing of any real interest. The very first page is the list of things to do from a site meeting on Harlow. The first note is about some drainage drawings, and so it goes on.

What I did find in my notes was that we had a change of management in October 1977. Our two contracts in the south were taken off the badly performing Midland Region and given to the Yorkshire Region. I know! Remember Part 1 of this series and my seven managers in seven years? This was the first of those changes. Peter Horth was the Regional Manager and Ken Ottley the Regional Surveyor. They were first class. They were hugely supportive given both contracts turned out to have large losses.

Wrecking Ball and West revisted

Thanks to the series "True Detective", I have rediscovered Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams, not that they were ever lost. But I had not listened to them for such a long time and I was amazed that giving their albums a break, how great they sounded listening to them again.

The Emmylou song on "True Detective" was The Good Book, a cover version of a Rainer Ptacek song. But having had Michael tell me about her recent concert playing the whole of her album "Wrecking Ball" with producer Daniel Lanois, this was my first port of call. I had not remembered how many great cover versions there were on the album, my favourites being Steve Earle's Goodbye, Daniel's Blackhawk and Lucinda Williams' Sweet Old World.

Which takes me nicely onto Lucinda. Her featured song on "True Detective" was Are You Alright. So I went straight to her album "West" where it is the opening track, and not the more obvious "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road". Listening again to "West", I wondered what took me so long to play it again. My new favourite track is Learning How to Live. Rob Burger's piano is such a delight, especially in the midway instrumental break. (I now have to see Nebraska to hear him playing some of his compositions). I also wanted to hear Lucinda's original version of Sweet Old World and there it was, the title track of her album of the same name. I found it for £3.12 and it's on it's way. Even better, I found her double CD "Live @ The Fillmore" on eBay. Fortunately I was the only bidder and won it at £4.10, a huge saving on the Amazon price of £17.26.

Big Brother, Perfect and The Fault In Our Stars

I found the first half of "Big Brother" by Lionel Shriver fairly heavy going. There seemed to be far too much information about the background of some of the family members whose story this isn't. And when we want to know what drove Pandora's brother to become obese, we have to wait and wait. But halfway through the writing strangely takes on a wholly different tone, one that is positive, uplifting and terrifically enjoyable. All through, the dialogue remains consistently good, and the characters are very well drawn. The ending is a bit of a shock, but thinking back to that turn half way through, I should known something was up.

"Perfect" and imperfect. I loved Rachel Joyce's "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" so I was looking forward to this, her latest novel. The book alternates between two seemingly different stories, one in 1972 and one in the present day. The first, where eleven year old Byron and his friend James plan to save his mother from what they imagine is a crisis, is pretty uninteresting. There are the odd moments where the drama and the writing shines through, but I didn't find it believable. The second story about Jim, who is in his fifties, is marvelous. He suffers from OCD and although you can feel his pain as he struggles with his affliction, the overall effect is one of well being. Each chapter is about fifteen pages long, and as I was reading a section about Byron, I desperately wanted to get back to Jim. The revelatory connection towards the enjoyable ending is well structured. It was just a shame that wasn't the case all the way through. So the average of two stars (Byron) and four stars (Jim) is how I arrived at my rating.

It would be churlish of me not to give "The Fault In Our Stars" five stars. It isn't perfect, but the writing is so smart and touching that it made a huge impression on me. When I ordered this book, I was not aware that John Green is a writer of young adult fiction as that might have led me to avoid it altogether. I'm glad I didn't know as this may have meant I would not have had the pleasure of reading this wonderful novel. I did wonder why a story narrated by a sixteen year old girl with cancer had become so popular. The answer is the writing. Full of dark humour and some real laugh out loud moments. Whereas the last book I read (Perfect by Rachel Joyce) had too much description, this book had just enough. There is a huge amount of dialogue, all of it sharp, witty and intelligent. The author will be on my to read list from now on.

The Marlow 5 Mile

After running the Marlow 5 Mile two years ago, only three months or so after I started running, I was looking forward to this years race around the closed roads of this lovely riverside town. I had agreed with Alison not to go too fast as I had been feeling very tired the day before, and had thought I might even have to pull out.

It was a chilly morning, not only heavy clouds but very windy. It must have put a lot of people off as the number of runners was down on two years ago. I was outside my target of 45 minutes for nearly all the way round, which was OK, but a quickening pace for the last half mile brought me in at 44 minutes 33 seconds. Considering I didn't push myself, I was very pleased with the time.

Alison has not been able to do her normal training due to work and weekends away to see her father, so was also very pleased with her 48 minutes 21 seconds. She said she even sprinted the last few hundred meters, something I have never heard her say before. Then it was off to John Lewis for tea and cake before heading home for that certain big game on the TV.

Balloons, Marlow, John Lewis and a City Title - History Repeats Itself

The exact same Sunday two years ago. Balloons went up in anticipation of Manchester City winning the Premiership for the first time in 44 years, off in the morning to run the Marlow 5 Mile race with over 1000 other runners, a welcome break for tea and cake at John Lewis in High Wycombe on the way home, then steel ourselves for the last game of the season.

The only difference this year was that the weather was cloudy, chilly and windy for the race compared with the calm sunshine of 2012, and that City only needed the draw instead of the win to secure the title. No last minute heroics this time. The manager was calm and so were we. Alison was glued to the TV instead of disappearing upstairs, and watched the whole of the celebrations after the game finished.

Despite the weather, we preferred this year to the nerve shattering come back in added time of two years ago. Roll on 2016.

Bluebells and Beechwoods

This is my favourite walk this time of year as the beech trees have just come into leaf and the bluebells are out. Michael and Sara will remember this walk, except with the latter we did it in the opposite direction a couple of years ago.

The car parks at the centre were getting busy mid morning. Few people walk out of Wendover Woods in the direction I take as it is close to the entry road. But the bluebells are a pretty sight. There is a very nice short track off the road. The beech trees have a luminous look this time of year.

Then across a field covered in buttercups.

To arrive at the top of Aston Hill where the following plaque explains it's significance.

The path down Aston Hill passes the mountain bike area before lovely views across Aylesbury Vale. In the distance is Ivinghoe Beacon and the end of the Chiltern Ridge.

At the bottom of the hill I cross two fields with the next part of the Chiltern Ridge in the distance and my next destination which is Pavis Wood.

Reaching the bottom of the woods there is a gully that winds up the hill. This used to be the path but is now used mainly by horse riders. The new path runs parallel to and above the gully.

At the top I join The Ridgeway, the path that extends all the way along the Chiltern Ridge. This takes me all the way through Pavis Wood. The bluebells here are the best I have found anywhere. They cover the ground all the way along the mile route through the wood.

The best part is the tiny paths that have been created through the bluebells off the main track.

Leaving Pavis Wood, the Ridgeway crosses two more fields. The calves there were pretty friendly. Although they did try to block my way to the style.

Crossing a minor road, the path makes it way back into Wendover Woods and the end of my circular walk.

This time I follow the road that takes visitors out of the woods. In previous years there have hardly been any bluebells here, but now they are spreading all the way off the road. The weather was great. Mainly sunny but with a fresh chilly breeze. Perfect.

National Theatre Live - King Lear

My first experience of a live theatre production at the cinema took me to the Aylesbury Odeon for The National Theatre's acclaimed performance of King Lear. It has always been my favourite Shakespeare play ever since it was my "A" Level book. In my last year at school we went to see RSC's production at the Aldwych Theatre starring Paul Schofield so that is probably why.

I enjoyed the fact that we could hear almost every word, the sound quality was excellent. The use of multiple cameras also worked well, with close ups you never see at a live performance. However I did feel a certain detachment and not the involvement I get from being there. It was like watching a recording so although it was being performed live, it didn't feel like it.

That said, the acting was superb. Simon Russell Beale made a great Lear and the the actresses playing his daughters were also terrific. Who would have known Anna Maxwell Martin could be so nasty. The two actors who stood out were Adrian Scarborough as The Fool (photo below) and the wonderful Stanley Townsend as the Duke of Kent. He kept the whole thing together.

The big surprise was the fact we had a one sheet programme waiting on our seat. A nice touch.