Outdoor Ice Skating

Yesterday we took Charlie ice skating to the outdoor temporary rink, situated outside Swinton Town Hall. Skating In Salford is apparently twice the size of last year's white elephant, which means last years was pretty tiny. we paid £6 for adults and £4 for the child booked online through Quay Tickets (no booking fee either which was a bonus), which includes skate hire - despite what is advertised on the council website, the sessions were an hour each, not 45 mins, although if you spend as long as we did putting the skates on you could easily lose 15 minutes. There is a small snack bar type places serving hot drinks etc..

It's been a good 14 years before I was last on ice skates, so it took a bit of getting used to, especially with the fabulously uncomfortable plastic hire skates which left my foot arches in agony. But a fun time was had by all, Charlie managed to not fall over at all (compared to the 8 times on a previous trip with school a few days earlier). There were staff on hand at all times to keep the kids/teenagers in check, which they handled very well in between picking people up off the ice.

We chose to go at 5pm just as it was getting dark and the area looked very festive with all the lights from the town hall, there are also several firs surrounding the rink with lights.
I have to say it feels very weird to be skating outdoors in the town centre with the buses pulling up every five minutes at the side, but it was a very enjoyable evening out.

Gig Time

The past few weeks have seen us take in not one but three gigs! Which certainly ended the dry spell for us. The first was local band The Whip, guitar based electro style music at the Academy 2. I can't remember the last time I went to a gig there that was so packed, with such a friendly vibe. The crowd seemed to be mainly students (maybe the £7 ticket price had something to do with it), and it was impossible to stand for more than a minute without someone pushing past to/from bar/toilets/wherever! Having seen The Whip only once before at D:percussion 18 months previously, I knew they sounded good live, but I was still pleasantly surprised. The album just doesn't do them justice IMO, the music sounded much more upbeat and danceable than it does via CD (or maybe you just need to play it really loud?) and they had cool lighting and the obligatory smoke machine to add to a club type atmosphere. I can't remember the entire set lit ut particular highlights were Sister Siam, Save My Soul, Dubsex and of course Trash.
The only complaint of the night (which was shared by several other fans) was the 'limited edition USB wrist bands' - gone are the days of having a live CD to buy 20 minutes after the gig, it's all gone digital now - like a lot of people at the gig, I bought mine before the gig - standard tickets were £7, ticket and wristband £20 - making the wristband £13 - the price of a CD in a high street music store. These were marketed as something you had to buy in advance, but on taking a trip to the merch stall it turns out you could pay for them on the night - for £9! I heard a lot of fans complaining to the poor merch guy that night, but that aside, a very fun night out.

A Place to Bury Strangers at the Roadhouse - have to admit, I'd never heard of them until about 4 weeks before hand, we went for Steven's birthday and it was a nice surprise to find that for an £8 ticket, there were actually several bands on all night. I wont even pretend to remember their names or recall any song titles, all I can recall was an eclectic crowd and a variety of guitar based bands that generally got the crowd going, although APTBS were the highlight and obviously the band most people came to see - worth checking out a few tracks via their myspace page (above).

Indie Darlings Glasvegas were our final gig of the year - I had mixed feelings about whether they could live up to the hype and my own expectations for a live gig. Whenever I think of Glasvegas it's their very raw and unpolished Home Tapes that springs to mind, so whilst I was anticipating a similar rawness, I was secretly hoping something a little more 'we're past recording in our bedroom' sound.
And I was not disappointed, at all.
Every tune was an anthem to sing along to, and sing along we all did, it was one of the most uplifting gigs ever. Like when you see 20,000 people singing along with Oasis for Wonderwall on TV - it was like that for every song, but with only a few hundred other people, very intimate and James' voice was outstanding. Favourite songs for me were Daddy's Gone and the grand finale of Geraldine.
My gig of the year.

London part 2

On our second day in London, we got up slightly hung over and headed into central London, first stop Oxford Street. With the credit crunch and recession looming it was sale central. We stopped off at Debenhams to browse their sale with up to 25% off, we got loads of bargains and did a fair bit of Christmas shopping. After that it was off to Russell Square to check out the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum in the pouring rain, unfortunately it was sold out for the day, so we dried off by browsing the permanent collections and realised that interspersed with the very old was the very new in the form of Statuephila - Contemporary British Sculpture including Damien Hirst's painted skulls, Antony Gormley's Case for an Angel 1 and my favourite Ron Mueck's mask II - which along with the easter island statue fell foul to the "crushing your head" thing



After grabbing a bite to eat in the nearby Museum Street, we headed off towards the Barbican as we had tickets for the snappy titled This Is War! Robert Capa at Work, Gerda Taro On the Subject of War. it was a very interesting photographic exhibition, concentrating a lot on Capa & Toro's coverage of the Spanish Civil War, but also down stairs included photos and video pieces based on more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I thought maybe the upstairs section (Capa & Toro) could've been better laid out, it wasn't clear where the exhibition started and finished, and there were several shots that were displayed twice for reasons unknown. But if you're in London, definitely worth a visit. We also managed to visit the Curve Gallery on the ground floor of the Barbican which was hosting Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Frequency & Volume which is a large scale installation piece contains radios (that seem to double as projectors)that you walk past, depending on the size and strength of your shadow on the wall, the projectors tune to various radio frequencies, displayed on the walls. It's quite surreal listening to a mish mash of local, pirate and national radio stations mixed in with emergency services radio frequencies etc... a lot of fun to be had though - great for kids.

It was getting on for after 6pm at this point, so we took the tube a couple of stops to Brick Lane, in my old neighbourhood of Whitechapel to meet with Julia and Carly who I hadn't seen for well over 2 years! We had a couple of drinks in the Archers pub and then went for a curry. Sorry can't remember the name of the curry house, but as usual the standard was high whilst being less that £10 a head including drinks.

Monday was our day home but we still had the morning to kill, so we checked out the Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, just off Trafalgar Square. I was really looking forward to this and it didn't disappoint as one of my favourite Leibovitch photos of the White Stripes was on display

it also contained a variety of "famous" images and faces along side personal photos of the late Susan Sontag. Again, this is definitely worth checking out if you have £12 to spare.

After this there was not much time to do anything except grab a quick bite to eat anc head back to St Pancras for what turned out to be a rather uneventful train journey home.

London part 1

Made a visit down south a couple of weeks ago to visit my best friend Jen, and of course to do some shopping and sights. I'm honestly not going to mention the farce that is East Midlands Rail Replacement service - just that it should be avoided like the plague.
First stop was Tate Modern, we got off the tube at St Paul's to walk over the bridge and I was amazed at how gleaming white the building is now after all the cleaning work that has gone on (there are some parts still left to do)

Once we got to the Tate, I called up my friend Julia who works there and we got to see a couple of exhibitions gratis. First up was Cildo Meireles who created some quite bizarre and intriguing installations that you walk through - including a floor made of cracked panels of glass that crunched under foot with various other materials on top including barbed wire, metal chains, and scrunched up plastic.
Another installation consisted of a white room with the walls covered in clocks

with thousands of rulers hanging down in circles clacking as you couldn't avoid touching them as you walked through.
Also included was a what looked like a tree on a field of coins with bones for leaves but turned out to be something completely different "Mission/Missions(How to Build Cathedrals)"

"the work comments on the human cost of missionary work and its connection with the exploitation of wealth in the colonies: the ceiling is composed of
2,000 bones, while the floor comprises 600,000 coins. Symbolically joining these two elements is a column of 800 communion wafers."
After this we also briefly checked out the Rothko exhibition but weren't that impressed in all honesty.
Then feeling rather tired we headed back to Kilburn stopping off at Papa John's for pizza, which was nice.