38 thoughts on “ALL OUR YESTERDAYS”

      2. Ha! Thanks for thinking of me, though I’m not sure I should be flattered that boobs made you think of me…

        And the cold wasn’t too bad, just a couple of days at -30 C (before the windchill), so we donned sweatshirts and all was good. Three days later it was 10 and raining; yesterday it was -8 and tomorrow (Sunday), it’s supposed to be -1 and snow again … for the next three days. But pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training on Tuesday, so it’s all good.

        I hope Spring is just around the corner for you guys, too.

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        1. Beautiful day here on the East Coast.

          Hoping the worst is over, but you can never be sure in Scotland, as you know.

          I remember a February a few years ago when I was in St Andrews in shorts and sandals, eating ice cream on the beach, and exactly one week later, I was clearing snow from the path.

          Keep warm…

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  2. Pic3 – Jimi Hendrix – not nearly the best 20thC guitar man. Pic5 – Gateshead looking to the Tyne Bridge and Newcastle (the Toon) beyond, probably 1970s. Pic6 – maybe Drumchapel 1950s, Catle Hill in background? Pic8 – Petula Clark. Pic13 – Count Basie? Last pic – Lulu.

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          1. Now that can be a matter of taste. But for influence, the Blues guitarist would be Robert Johnson, closely followed by Jimmy Page. Chuck Berry has to be up there too, and oor ain Bert Jansch. Personally I go for Ritchie Blackmore coz I was Rainbow fan in the seventies and I like his later stuff with Blackmore’s Knight.

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            2. I listened to the Jansch stuff and it is technically very good. I totally agree re Johnson, Page and Berry. I was a Deep Purple fan, not so much Rainbow but I think Ritchie comes a bit further down the list for me.

              For sheer influence and raw ability Hendrix has to be up there for me and a wee bit further down than your first three would see us in Jeff Beck, Stevie Ray Vaughn territory.

              So much to choose from and I haven’t mentioned Dave Gilmour. So yes it is down to personal taste but it can make for a lively debate when the right mix of stimulants are involved.

              The one certainty is that they can all play better than I can.

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              1. As for stimulants, my son has been dispatched for a wee message, It’s to the corner shop so it’ll be the beer advertised on the rail bridge above 🙂
                Stargazer, the best line up of Rainbow I think Dio, Cozy, and Ritchie, before they went poppy with Graham fucking Bonnet.

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                2. Aye but endless songs about wizards in towers got a bit tedious. There aren’t enough drugs in the world to make me listen to some of those albums again 😉

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              2. I have to say the best *live* guitarist I ever saw was Ry Cooder – I still don’t understand how you can play rhythm & lead on one guitar at the same time.

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            3. Aye, as was I but Blackmore wasn’t exactly a pleasant person – to say the very least. In fact I’m pretty sure everyone who ever worked with him wanted him dead, and most of those still alive probably still do 😀

              Mark Knopfler (Dire Straits & technically if not emotionally Scots) is overlooked a lot in terms of musical skill. The soundtrack to Cal is a good example. He wasn’t just the moneymaking machine everyone remembers from Dire Straits days…

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              1. I forgot about Mark Knopfler. Here’s a YouTube clip that I thinks worth watching.

                I watched a Rainbow concert on tv many years ago and there was a fireworks finale. It looked like Ritchie Blackmore was the only one allowed to set them off and you could see the annoyance of the other band members as he pranced around the stage hogging the limelight.

                It wasn’t a good look as I recall.

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        1. LOL.

          Incidentally Jimmy Page was Petula’s guitarist at one point in the 60s and played on Downtown and I know a Place and many more of her London recordings.

          She talks fondly of his talent and met up with him recently.

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  3. Andi….Correct about Pic 13! Count Basie was always a big name in Kansas City.

    Ellington was already a Duke when Bill Basie became a Count at the Reno Club in Kansas City in 1936. He had played with the Bennie Moten band, and after Moten’s untimely death in 1935, Basie formed his own band, the Barons of Rhythm, from some of the Moten alumni. Basie and the Barons of Rhythm gained fame as the house band at the Reno Club from where remote radio broadcasts reached at least as far as Chicago. It was early morning at the Reno Club with radio time to fill that he and the the band improvised what became his signature “One O’Clock Jump.”

    Record producer John Hammond heard Basie on the radio, traveled to Kansas City, and signed him to a recording contract. Basie moved on to Chicago and the rest is history. Where the Reno Club stood is now part of the parking lot of the Kansas City, Missouri police headquarters.

    http://paris-of-the-plains.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-reno-club.html

    “One O’Clock Jump”:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_jazz

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  5. The Austin on the roof was some sort of “Student Prank” so beloved of our aristos when they are at Oxbridge, a step up from the Bullingdon bellends I suppose.

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  6. I don’t know where Pic11 was taken other than it’s in NE England as it’s a Tynemouth double-decker headed for Whitley Bay. What struck me about the photo of the bus ploughing through flooding was that I know many places where that happened regularly in just the same situation, a road going under a railway bridge. If I hadn’t noticed the bus livery, I’d have placed it in Hawthorn Street, Glasgow. It also used to happen in Dumbarton East under the railway bridge and many other locations. I think it was because the road went into a dip under the bridges to allow height clearance and the said dips were prone to flooding. The level of the roadway had probably been lowered underneath the bridges after their initial construction to cope with the increased height of vehicles like buses and lorries.

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  7. I am missing the chocolates and biscuits this week. This week’s jaunty commercial is “Esso means happy motoring”, from 1956. You would have seen it in the cinema rather than the TV.

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  8. The Freeman Hardy Willis advert must be 1950s at the latest as 105 Rutland Street hasn’t existed since the 1960s when the optimistically named “International Hotel” was built. That hotel has been closed for 20 years now and is falling down. In fact the entire area is a third-world shithole now, much like most of Leicester 😦

    The IRA set off a bomb there (about 100m from where FHW presumably were) in 1990 – https://leics.police.uk/about-us/our-history/180-years (I’m the civilian mentioned as being treated, was sod all wrong with me, nor did I go to hospital).

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    1. I don’t know much about the style of women’s shoes, but I’ve certainly never seen anything like them, and at 12/9 a pair… yeah, I’d say 40s or 50s.

      Everywhere is starting to fall down. 10 years of under investment in infrastructure in the name of austerity which has seen the debt rise from £800 billion to over £2 trillion has left places looking shabby and people feeling despondent.

      Well done the Tories, I say.

      Goodness Vestas. What fame! Were you far away from the blast?

      I guess the police were encouraged to big these things up to engender even more hatred for the IRA. Not that they weren’t mostrous enough anyway. Just no more monstrous than the other side… ie the British government.

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      1. I was literally around the corner – probably 50m away. The area at the time had a lot of alleyways and if you knew your way you could cut ten minutes off a walk across town. This is obviously before the point at which that became stupidly dangerous – maybe 2005 or so?

        Anyway PIRA intended to blow up an army recruitment office without killing anyone but things went tits-up in terms of placement/warnings. Cops couldn’t fully clear the area & the squaddies were, well fat RSMs only fit for recruitment offices/drives.

        Now the cops find someone with a “suspect” accent around the corner inside the exclusion zone (which they’d never completed due to abovementioned fuckups) so what do you think happened? It wasn’t a visit to hospital 😉 Fortunately the job I had at the time required security vetting so it was a short visit 😉

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          1. Last time I was in Glasgow I got called “Paddy” by a Scots black cab driver. Then a barman elsewhere 🙂

            The mix of Lewis(Gaelic)/Glasgow accent confuses lots of people even in Scotland.

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            1. Ah yeah fair enough. It’s a lovely accent, but then so are many of the Irish accents.

              When I was in Dublin a few years ago I loved to just stand and listen to people talking.

              I was with a Hungarian friend and he found the accent difficult (but beautiful). But that meant he was depending on me to be able to understand stuff like directions and bus numbers etc… And I wasn’t listening to WHAT they were saying as much as to the sound of the voices. This got me into trouble on a couple of occasions.

              Dani – so what did he/she say?

              Tris – Ooops, not a clue…

              Dani – But that’s why we asked him/her for directions… so we could hear his answer and erm, know where to go.

              Tris – Oh yeah, dude, sorry.

              Dani- Jeeeez.

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