After last week's mad dash, this week turned out to be rather sedate by comparison. I worked over the weekend and managed to do quite a large chunk of the work I had lined up; it meant that I finished the first run through of all the artwork on Tuesday and began the second run through, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything, on Wednesday. A bit of resizing and checking through PDF copies of the stories today (Thursday) and I will be finished, ready to send the stories over to the publisher using a file transfer website.
I even had a chance to spend some time — well, about an hour — attacking some of the overgrown bits of the garden in time for the green waste collection on Wednesday morning. I'm not overly keen on gardening, but it was a joy just to get away from the computer and into the sunshine; I think the joy came from the fact that it wasn't planned (like our usual walks), it wasn't along the roads, and there was no pressure to have it finished and I could stop at any time.
It also worked out the kink in my shoulder blade that comes of scanning lots of pages. These are pocket libraries I'm working on so you press down hard enough to make sure the artwork is flat on the glass of the scanner, but not so much that you crease the cover or have the page split away from the staple that holds the book together. Achieving that sweet spot of pressure and holding it for each scan can cause the muscles around my shoulder and neck to twinge. At least the gardening gave me something else to think about — lower back ache. (Although nowhere near what I used to suffer, thanks to the regular walks and losing some weight. I can highly recommend it!)
I mentioned last week that I had managed to pick up a few books recently. I haven't been travelling into Colchester, so my regular trawls through charity shops that I had done every Saturday for over twenty-five years have come to a shuddering halt. I'm relying on people around town leaving books out in boxes to keep my collecting bug sated.
Putting work and books to one side, the other bit of good news this week is that I've heard of three new album releases that I'll be picking up in due course. Big Big Train are releasing a new album in October, Summer Shall Not Fade, which is their live set from Loreley at 2018's Night of the Prog Festival. Because BBT were a studio band for many years, this was apparently only the band's eighth live gig together. I have their other live/DVD releases (From Stone to Steel, A Stone's Throw from the Line, Merchants of Light and Empire) and thought that we would never see any more of the band with David Longdon (he died last November). To have this live performance released will be a fitting tribute to the line-up as it was.
The posthumous release of Longdon's Door One has also been announced. It was 90% completed before his tragic death, and it, too, will arrive in October. I have his collaboration with Julie Dyble, which is at the folkier end of the spectrum, but has some fine tracks, and I'm guessing his solo work is likely to sit somewhere in between that and the songs he wrote for BBT. I'll definitely be getting it.
Ditto the new Lonely Robot album. I'm a huge fan of John Mitchell, and it sounds like A Model Life (due August) will be his version of Adele's 25, drawing from what he has called "a particularly challenging couple of years." The one single released to date ("Recalibrating") is about a broken relationship and other songs reflect on the impermanence of life... so nice and cheery then. I'm only just getting over Marillion's reflections on the pandemic (An Hour Before It's Dark) and now this...
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