djdarren

This makes me think about my ex-wife, who made very little attempt at giving a shit about what our son was into, because that was just stupid boy stuff, then couldn’t understand why they weren’t all that close.

I didn’t really care all that much about half the stuff he was into, but I at least made an effort to meet him on his level, and wouldn’t you know, our relationship is great.

AND YET, Pictures of Matchstick Men is a psych masterpiece.

Coldplay springs to mind. The Coldplay who released Moon Music last year is an entirely different band to the one who released Parachutes in 2000. I know of few other bands who’ve gone through such an enormous transformation. And while the newer stuff may not resonate with me the way the early stuff did, it’s fair to say that it’s worked for them.

As a teenage metalhead of the 90s, little has distressed me more than literally everything Metallica have released since St Anger.

I really, really dug Load and ReLoad. They were different to what had come before, but they still had a hard rock edge to them that I loved. Then Jason quit, and The Corporation Of James And Lars hired the formely mighty Rob Trujillo and set about their plan to record the same indistinguishable wall of noise over and over again until people stopped bothering to even pirate their music.

When they took our wooden boat out of the water it turned out that she’d hogged by around 500mm. Which is quite a lot for a boat. In fairness, she was 150 years old by that point.

Now there’s a vast system of hydraulic rams supporting her in the dry dock, to the point that they reckon she’s better supported now than when she was afloat.

Ah, I’m mostly joking. Victory is a really cool museum, almost as cool as the wreck of the Mary Rose that’s displayed in a building next to her.

She’s too beautiful. So beautiful in fact, that I am now banned from Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.

I would say that the US is a very weird place, but then I remembered that this

is the flagship of the British Navy First British Sea Lord. She hasn’t floated for literally 100 years.

So mostly I guess it’s just that militaries are weird.

It was watching The Bear that made me finally appreciate that fine dining isn’t about filling yer belleh, and more about the art of food; how the senses meld together.

I’m too poor to eat at places that offer that kind of experience, but at least I now understand the point of it and appreciate why it can be so expensive.

When cucumbers are so cheap, and re-usable.

We had an apprentice at work a few years ago who had never seen those movies. The first was released the year he was born.

I shrivelled into a corpse as he told me that.