Reasons to be bashful

This recent gap in posts here has been the longest since I started this thing. Blogging just seemed to be pushed to the bottom of life’s priority list for a time.

I know I don’t need to justify this silence to you, but in a way I need to justify it to myself. This blog has been a part of my life for over eight years now, have I been just too busy doing other things or is this the end, or the beginning of the end, of this blog – this phase of my life?  

So, here are ten reasons I gave this blog a rest for a few weeks:

1. Our daughter has been in Canada for a year and came home (for a holiday!) for  three weeks before embarking on another year back in Canada. Plenty of family time.

2. Collecting Panini world cup stickers. Yes, like seemingly many hundreds of thousands of adults who should know better, for a brief time I worked myself into a frenzy of collecting and swapping via Ebay and Gumtree to complete my Panini sticker book. (For the record 162 – Mauricio Pinilla of Chile was the final sticker to be, er, stuck in; and this act was played out on Skype so that our daughter - by then back in Canada - could witness it. She is another sticker fan.)

3. Painting kitchen cabinets.

4. Getting the garden in shape – pruning, cutting, and chopping - repeat; and of course there were all those pots to plant up (seems like a long time ago now, but it is only four weeks or so). We then enjoyed sitting in the garden a bit too.    

 

5. Painting kitchen cabinets.

6. Watching the World Cup.

7. A weekend staying with friends in Exmouth.

8. Watching the World Cup.

9. Moving everything in our conservatory elsewhere in the house while I  redecorated it and the roof was replaced. A lot of the things ended up in the hi-fi room which meant the turntable was inaccessible for about 10 days L

10. Painting kitchen cabinets (Yippee! They’re finished at last!). 

   

Sorry if I bored you there. It is a fairly mundane list isn’t it? But this has served to convince me I have been busy lately (if you can call sitting on the sofa watching 22 blokes kick a football about a bit being busy).

Returning to number 7 on the list, while we were in Devon we visited Topsham, a lovely little village (which is actually classed as a suburb of Exeter I believe). Topsham is home to an antique market. A veritable Aladdin’s cave on three floors – which, much to Mrs Darce’s dismay, had some vinyl J

So, as far as I can remember, for the first time in my life I bought some vinyl in an antique market. This turned out to be more expensive that I had bargained for as Mrs Darce, tired of waiting for me to rifle through yet another stack of LPs, wandered off and bought (yet another) pair of earrings.    

I bought four albums in total, including this excellent Isley Brothers compilation Tamla Motown Presents… on the budget MFP label (this is actually a Dutch press, funny, I always thought of MFP as quintessentially English).

The compilation includes a few tracks that were essentially left in the can, never being released as 45s, nor on bona fide Isleys albums, and made their first appearance on this album in around 1972. One such track is this gorgeous version of My Love Is Your Love (Forever), written by Ivy Joe Hunter and Stevie Wonder and taken at a slower pace than the more well-known Smokey Robinson & The Miracles take on the song, and all the better for it in my opinion. 

Ronald Isley’s voice is a thing of beauty, that's for sure.

The Isley Brothers – My Love Is Your Love(Forever) 1967