scruffian

You are invited to view our house on Saturday 20th January 2018, between 1pm and 3pm. If you would like to view at another time please get in touch.

Details: Three bedrooms, semi-detached house on a quiet road in the lovely village Cheswick Green.

Features: Log burner, Oak flooring, Solar panels, Aqualisa shower, Insinkerator, Gas central heating, Double gazing, Range Master double oven. 

Address: 36 Saxon Wood Road, Cheswick Green, West Midlands, B90 4JN

Price: £300,000. Offers considered.

Photos:

Floor plan:

The best thing about this house is the neighbours, who are friendly, generous and lovely.

Over the last few months, I have been clearing and sorting lots of my old junk. This has uncovered a collection of demos I recorded between roughly 2006 and 2010. I put them onto last.fm at the time but they have since disappeared. One realisation I have come to while sorting out this stuff is that those projects you think you might get round to one day will probably never happen. So it is with these songs. Each one is filled with memories and thoughts that I felt at the time, but now I’ve moved on. I’m never going to want to devote time to recording better versions when there are more songs to find. But I don’t want to just let them die either…

I also discovered a song I wrote 11 years ago (there are hundreds of these), which I never recorded – Until Autumn Leaves. In the last few weeks I became slightly obsessed with this song, and have reworked it and am releasing it now in an album with the original collection of demos.

“Until Autumn Leaves” is a song about riding bikes. It’s dedicated to everyone I rode trails with; Tim, Seb, Nigel, Pete, Tom, Rob, Richie and Max Dagger, Paul Wilson, Chris A & D, Mark, Simon, Joe and Poll, Yak and Aiden, Louis and Will Spence, and Max, Dave King, and anyone else I rode trails with.

Hidden in the song are many bike related puns. See how many you can spot:

Lyrics:

Summer has gone again
The leaves are falling from the trees
Hedges burst with bright rose hips
I can taste them on my lips
Until Autumn leaves

These leaves were not growing for long
Budded blossomed bloomed and now they’re gone
And now they stay on the ground
Where the earthy worms will grind them down
Until autumn leaves

Winter’s cold grip clamps again
Mud slides under my feet
Frost bites hard and the snow falls down
As the autumn leaves

Spring has sprung again
The sap is pumping through the trees
Stems rise up and break new ground
Birds fly free, wheels spin round
We will ride until Autumn leaves

Autumn’s crown will fall again
The seasons cycle in their chain
Sunset notches up a gear
They tread the tracks of the former years
We will ride until autumn leaves

The album is now available on Bandcamp, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play and all major music outlets.

Here are some photos that didn’t make the cover:

For the last two and three-quarter years, I have written a daily haiku. These one thousand haiku act as a journal and a sketchbook of every day. Here is the thousandth one:

For one thousand days
Laughter, longing, light, loss, love
A life in haiku

I owe special thanks to Andrea Badgley for her help and encouragement, and insta-likes, every step of the way.

I plan to continue this project for another 1000 days. If you’d like to follow along then you can subscribe to haiku.blog, or follow along on Telegram: https://t.me/haikublog

When my daughter was born I made a little film of me playing a song for her while I held her. My second son was born on the 18th September 2017, so I did the same thing for him.

Baddersly Clinton

I write music all the time. I always have a song that I am working on, usually a few. They bounce around from piano to guitar for a week or so, sometimes getting caught by Logic Pro, before scuttling off to die with all the others. I always intend to go back to them and “finish” them, but I am a terrible finisher it seems. In the last 7 years I have “finished” 10 songs, despite having started ten times that.

There are a lot of things that hold me back from sharing songs more often than I do. I am scared of what people with think of the things I share. I’m scared that they aren’t worth sharing.

The curios thing is that despite feeling like this I still feel compelled to share something. I don’t understand what this is exactly. It seems somehow not enough to just write music for myself. Maybe I’m looking for validation. Maybe the fact that I find it scary is also what compels me. However, if a fear of failure prevents me from sharing then haven’t I already failed?

It also struck me recently that no one is listening. Who are these people who I am worried about judging me? They exist only in my head.

I think about my songs a lot more than anyone else. I think about every aspect of it and how it can be improved. And yet for all this I am not convinced the end result is any better than the song was when it was born.

In this spirit I am sharing this song, which is very unfinished. Here are the things I don’t like about it:

• The lyrics all start with the same phrase – it’s lazy and repetitive
• The lyrics are too cliché and uninteresting
• The lyrics don’t always fit the melody (the last line is particularly bad)
• The music is too repetitive – there is only one structure through the whole song
• The melody isn’t interesting enough to justify six verses
• The piano plays the same thing as the vocals. It’s redundant.
• It’s a rip off of Videotape and Like Spinning Plates
• The recording is too low quality
• There a several mistakes in the recording
• It’s too hard to hear the lyrics

However, I won’t have time or inclination to fix these things before I move on to another song, so here it is. No one is listening anyway.

(more…)

We are sadly parting ways from Scruff, our faithful campervan. We are expecting a new addition to the family,  and Scruff only seats and sleeps four,  so he needs a new family to serve:

We have really loved owning this van. It has given us lots of pleasure and many cheap holidays. I am sure its new owner will get just as much joy from it.

Make: Volkswagen
Model: Transporter (T4)
Conversion: Autosleeper Trident
Miles: 126k (ish)
Fuel: Petrol

The van has a working Fridge, Cooker, Sink, and running hot water.  There is also a leisure battery (18 months old) for running the lights and the pump for the tap. I am including the cable for the electric hookup so you can also run 240V power inside the van.

This model is pretty unchanged from the original conversion.

If you’re interested pleased get in touch.

Sister Corita Kent‘s 10 Rules for Students and Teachers, made famous by John Cage, states:

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

This was a revelation to me.

So often when we try to create we judge what we are making before its even had a chance to breathe and grow. I see this all the time with my children, who are too scared to try anything new for feat that they will do it wrong. We all seem to have this tendency to analyse and deconstruct any creative work we are doing at the same time that we are doing it.

To me this rule is a useful reminder to enjoy the creative process more. To be comfortable making mistakes (although according to rule 6 these don’t exist), to play with ideas and see where they take me. I hope that this attitude will allow me to be more confident in sharing what I made without fear of it being judged. I encourage you to do the same.

In April last year we began work on a new product to sell .blog domains. We just open sourced this project. Check out the announcement from my friend and team-mate, Stéphane Thomas.

This was a really fun project to work on. We worked very closely with a team of designers to trial some new product concepts (like passwordless signup), and were able to experiment with some interesting new technologies (like CSS modules). I am really proud of the things we achieved together. I believe that this is an great demonstration of how a team is greater than the sum of its parts.

If you want your own .blog domain, then take a look at get.blog.