Oh, I’ve not done one of these for a while. It just so happened to coincide with my latest “digital music” purchase in a way that simply hasn’t happened before. Did any of you watch that “Unforgettable Jeremy Beadle” thing that was on ITV tonight? No? Anyone find it odd that the obituary programme was shown at roughly the same time slot as many of his programmes? No again? Well, I’m going to continue anyway.

Chris was round tonight, so a night of vegetation in front of the telly was in order. The afore mentioned programme sparked enough interest in the room to warrant its watching. On the other hand (ho ho), there wasn’t much else on.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable look back at the man’s life, with clips from shows I didn’t even think existed anymore. The end theme, however, made me shout of with amazement.

Let me take you back to 1992, 1993ish. My record collection was still at a minimal level. Few singles, fewer albums. This was boosted by an old relative clearing out her cupboards, and a stack of mainly uninteresting LPs were given to me. Out of all of the albums played, two tracks stood out. One of them featured on a scratchy old Telstar compilation album named “More Green Velvet”, and was entitled “The Lonesome Boatman” by The Fureys + Davey Arthur. It was a short, flutey, instrumental with a great guitar track and very 80s sounding seagull samples.

Now, thanks to the tinternet, I was able to find many different recordings of this, but not the one featured on the More Green Velvet album. The online stores only stocked the same CDs which had a different version. Even Spotify didn’t have it. Thankfully, I managed to find a version of it on youtube. It was longer than my vinyl version, though it would appear that the disc it came from was long out of print, and therefore went for an absolute fortune on ebay. Sigh. This was the only time I’d heard it coming from a source other than my own record collection.

Years pass, and on Friday, I’m awoken with the tune in my head, and the realisation I’d not tried any of the digital download sites. Within minutes, I was 69p lighter, and downloading “The Lonesome Boatman” My long search was over! In fact, I tweeted about it…

Finally got a digital version of “The Lonesome Boatman” by The Fureys for 69p… had it on vinyl, given to me by a long dead relative. 11:45 AM Aug 13th via web

All was not right, however, when I played it through headphones for the first time…

Ugh. Disregard my earlier “Lonesome Boatman” tweet. Awful analogue tape damage on this version all the way through. 69p wasted. Grrrrr. 1:48 AM Aug 14th via web

If you’re listening through speakers, it’s not too bad, but on headphones, the right channel is terrible! This version is taken from a “greatest hits”, so I’m hoping for a better version out there somewhere.

Er, anyway, back to the telly theme link…. two days after purchasing it, the very same version was used as the closing credits for the Jeremy Beadle thing. I find it really a bit spooky and coincidental that I would buy this tune almost immediately after waking up thinking about it, and two days later, for the first time in ~18 years, actually hear it broadcast on TV. It’s just weird, and a little too concidental.

Oh, and, to end this posting with yet another “death” announcement, according to the UKGameshows mailing list, Jack Parnell, one of the two composers of the original “Family Fortunes” theme (Bob Monkhouse / Max Bygraves era), has died. The other composer, Dave Lindup, died in 1992. Lindup’s son, Mark, is the keyboard player from Level 42.

I know I’m late, I apologise. I’ve been at work, and have managed to find a few minutes free to talk about Joffa Smifff, one of my favourite ZX Spectrum programmers who sadly died over the weekend. One of his first projects, if not his very first, was “Pud Pud in Weird World” (normally shortened to “Pud Pud”). This was one of my favourite Spectrum games, mainly thanks to its theme of “In The Mood” reproduced on the Spectrum’s beeper, and the fact that the game would change the octave of every loop of the music, and also flash the border random colours. It didn’t seem much, but as a child, I loved it. And, I’m sure, if I had a Spectrum emulator installed on here, I’d be playing it right now.

Joffa also had a flickr account which I didn’t know until right now.

Sad news. Ray Alan (appearently not Ray Allen, which is how I always thought it was spelt), mildly amusing 80s ventriloquist act has died.

Lord Charles is speechless…

Sad news.

I’m going to play “Double Dutch” loudly. Because that’s the only song of his I can remember, and even then it was because of the Dope Smugglas remix in 1998ish.

A catchy, and to-the-point title. As we watch the final hours of 2009 dwindle away, it is time for me to look back over the past 12 months, and recap on what has, quite literally been the worst year of my life. I have achieved nothing, in fact, I am in exactly the same position I was a year ago, but feeling even more depressed for it. I am now 30 years old, there has been no holiday, very little communication with fellow human beings, and I’ve finally experienced what a panic attack is.

The sooner 2009 ends, the sooner I can get on with life, and start afresh…

JANUARY 2009

The first proper post saw me killing off the video blogs. They were unpopular and embarrassing. I took the first of a handful of walks throughout the year, and documented it with photos. Work continued to get me down, for reasons I can’t think of, and I survived the great Google outage. The first death of 2009 came in the form of my 4Gb memory stick, which succombed to a shorted out USB port…

FEBRUARY 2009

It snowed a little, more than once. JT moved onto the other rotation, and I started blethering on about creating backups using Clonezilla. Unfortunately, this was not going to be the last long-winded post about my computer experimentations. In fact, this seemed to be the whole theme of the year. Work started on building houses on the vacant land on Warren Road, despite it being heavily landscaped only a few years before, no doubt at great cost to the Hartlepudlian taxpayer.

Dick Brown, webmaster of www.dick-brown.com (the w’s stand for wankstain) received an insanely full bottle of orange squash.

MARCH 2009

An entirely forgettable month, if I’m honest. I worked overtime for only the second time in my life, and I went to Durham with Chris at some point, to give my camera its first test. I ended up misjudging a step and twatting my knee off the floor. The cooler on the sarnie machine also malfunctioned, casuing it to display “HEALTH CONTROL” on its VFD display.

APRIL 2009

April 1st consisted of vast amounts of kitchen cleaning. April 4th consisted of my Grand National faux pas, and mercuryvapour.co.uk once again moved servers.

A bird took residence in Mercuryvapour Towers, and it became apparent that nobody reads this blog anymore.

MAY 2009

Unperturbed about the bad news regarding the blog “statistics”, I still continued to write. On May 7th, Andy The Iridium Fan donated the second mercury lantern into my streetlighting collection, in the form of an unused Revo Prefect.

The biggest overhaul came towards the end of this particular month wne I took delivery of a new dartboard.

A lot of spare time was taken with this particular hobby from this moment on.

Dick Brown received some money from MS, on May 13th. I have no idea what for, but I was on-hand with cameraphone, to record the historic event…

JUNE 2009

So, everyone will be asking, where were you when he died? Yes, surely, the biggest, most famously untimely death of 2009, according to the mercuryvapour.co.uk super-statistic website generator, is…

Yes, sod Michael Jackson. This was the most untimely death for me anyway

Apart from death, June consisted of record breaking sunburn, after climbing Christchurch, and spending about an hour up there.

It really was crustier than it looked.

Unfortunately, it turned out that a sunburned scalp was to be the least of my worries, as July rearerd its ugly head… stay tuned for Part 2