Song, by Toad

It’s just vaguely possible that there are some amazing gigs taking place somewhere I know not where in Edinburgh this week, but in all honestly I do not give a tinker’s cuss.  It’s Christmas, you should all either be wrapping presents, buying the bastards, or just cooking something nice and stopping in with friends and family with some nice music.  Far be it from me to lecture people on how to enjoy themselves but… well, you know me well enough by now, I’m going to do it anyway aren’t I.

So honestly, balls to gigs this week, there’s really no point in worrying about them is there, it’s just not what this time of year is for.  I’ve seen a few emails recently saying things like Happy Holidays and people making reference to non-denominational Winter whateverthefucktheywereonabout and all that, and I know they mean well, but fucking hell, I am about as uncompromising an atheist as you’ll meet (ie I find it very hard not to see religious belief as a form of learning disability) but Christmas?  It’s not even a fucking Christian holiday.

I’ve never been offended by being wished happy anything, and I went to a school where that might have been Ramadan, Chinese New Year, Chanukah, Christmas, some solstice or other, or whatever the fuck else.  Who fucking cares?  It’s just a greeting and someone wishing you well, get the hell over it you fucking coward.  As long as no-one asks you to personally give a shit, then someone else having different beliefs to yours and celebrating their own festivals does not fucking oppress you.  So yeah, happy Christmas, whatever.

Personally, apart from the Pagan celebration of light in the darkness of Winter, which has a rather magical quality of its own, just symbolically, I couldn’t care less about the religious implications of Christmas.  It’s not a Christian festival, it was simply adopted by the Christians because they realised that they had far more chance of foisting their religious babble on populations they wished to convert if they respected and adapted to existing rituals, it has nothing to do with anything in the fucking Bible and anyone who tells you that ‘Jesus is the reason for the season’ is basically a fucking idiot.

Apart from those of us in the Northern Hemisphere needing the celebration of light and warmth to combat the cold and the snow and increasing absence of sunlight (welcome to the shortest day of the year, incidentally) there is another big benefit to the Christmas and New Year period which I really appreciate.  It’s the punctuation of the year.  One thing about living in a society which is still fairly homgenous is that the Christmas and New Year breaks are pretty much celebrated by everyone, or at least acknowledged by everyone, and consequently pretty much all of society just stops and pauses for breath.

Life gets pretty fucking hectic, and things develop a sort of helter skelter momentum of their own and you can go on holiday, but the fact that you and everyone around you kind of has to take a break and put their feet up for a week seems to punctuate the natural forwards motion of life for just long enough.  So as long as you can ignore the rapacious commercialism and observe the break on your own terms, something I have very little difficulty in doing, then that week just stopping and doing nothing, looking back on where you were this time last year and musing on where you might be this time next year is just a relaxing, peaceful and nurturing way to recharge the batteries and draw breath before it all goes mental in the New Year again.  Which it always does.

So I’ll appreciate the next couple of weeks and all the silly rituals people, including myself, choose to observe.  It’ll be nice just to do nothing for a while and feel no guilt about it whatsoever.

Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Neko Case – Wayfaring Stranger

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Mrs. Toad and I went out for dinner last night and I mentioned the fact that I have now been in Edinburgh for over four years – the longest I’ve lived anywhere since I left Vienna in 1987 after six years.  That’s weird, really, because I kind of moved here by accident.  Certainly I didn’t have it even in the back of my mind to move here back in 2003 when we first started seeing each other (we met in 1991, but that’s a different story).

At that point I had just divested myself of a particularly tenacious ex-girlfriend and was working at a pretty shite company in London and really had no ties at all.  Basically, if I hadn’t accidentally got hammered and ended up in bed pawing enthusiastically at a tolerantly indifferent yet-to-become-Mrs. Toad, the chances are very good that I would have ended up somewhere foreign, quite probably in East Asia somewhere.

I am an industrial designer by trade, and judging by some of the unutterable guff coming out of China I could actually have had an extremely healthy and well-paid career out there by this point.  Actually, fuck it, my career over here is actually pretty respectable anyway, it’s only because I am so focussed on music at the moment and because Mrs. Toad makes so much more than I do that I sometimes forget that fact.

I went to gigs down South, and I’d started writing about music online, but not to anything like this extent.  I was a designer who fannied about with web stuff occasionally, not a musical muppet whose day job required monumental amounts of patience to tolerate his extra-curricular distractions.

So yes, it turns out that never mind her tolerance for all the work I put into this nonsense and her funding for my errant ideas, just meeting Mrs. Toad had a massive influence on the very existence of this website.  Primarily I suppose because the dull, domesticated, middle class existence into which I was lured required me to find something to go a bit mental about because the other option was a mortal dose of cabin fever.  Pick your madness.

1. Go back five or ten years, make some particular decision differently, and what would you be?
2. Which apparently trivial change has made the most difference to the rest of your life?
3. Where was the shortest time you actually lived anywhere properly?
4. Say you’re the Time Bandits*.  Where would you choose to interfere?
5. You have regression therapy… who were you in your previous life?

Tom Waits – Anywhere I Lay My Head

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Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger

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Willard Grant Conspiracy – The Trials of Harrison Hayes

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The Flatlanders – Going Away

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Supergrass – Moving

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*

During the year I’ve been so desperately thrashing about, trying not to get behind with this blog, that I’ve never really had a worry about what to write about next, apart from choosing between the dozen or so things fluttering about in my head at the time.

I’ve never seriously suffered from writer’s block, and I’m not suffering from it now exactly, but I don’t actually have anything to write about today. Habits form quickly, and I have not blogged for almost two weeks over the Christmas period and am squarely out of the habit of writing. I suppose that during the year I was always thinking about posts, even if not writing them, and for the last few days I’ve not been thinking about posts at all. So here I sit at the computer to write one and there just isn’t one there.

Which, in a way, is refreshing. That’s what a holiday is for, and I have a bulging inbox of new things, some of which are presumably going to be at least half decent – including an email from someone in Pakistan which I am looking forward to – so there’ll be no shortage of new stuff coming up I shouldn’t think.

Also, there are new releases by The Magnetic Fields, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, The Mountain Goats, Cat Power and Honeytrap to look forward to over the first few months of 2008, so things are looking good. Honeytrap in particular is one I’m looking forward to. There’s also a new Destroyer record and an apparently folkier album by Goldfrapp on the horizon as well, which should be interesting. I love Alison Goldfrapp’s voice, but there’s only so much disco I am really up for, so this new project sounds interesting.

So we set sail for 2008 on the Good Ship Toad and all, it would appear, looks rather rosy. Here are some old American folk songs, which is an area I think I might just explore a little more in the year ahead, along with some contemporary versions of the same songs.

Carlton Rees – 99½ Won’t Do
The Detroit Cobras – 99½ Won’t Do
Doc Watson – John Henry
Bruce Springsteen – John Henry
Burl Ives – Wayfaring Stranger
Blanche – Wayfaring Stranger