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I was thinking the other day about artists – particularly in music – who were better off together than they were apart. For example, Lennon and McCartney. Both fine songwriters separately, but when put together they really came up with something amazing. In fact, the Beatles as a band seemed to pull together to form something more than the sum of its parts.

I once heard a story that summed it up. Paul McCartney is a relentless optimist, and I think John Lennon was very cynical. In the song “Getting Better” (from Sergeant Pepper), Paul McCartney was singing it through and got to the line “It’s getting better all the time”. John Lennon walked in, having never heard the song before, and sung “Can’t get no worse” in perfect time to it.

It got me wondering whether truly great art comes from a tension – such as the tension between Lennon and McCartney, between optimism and pessimism. As with many things in life, the truth often lies somewhere in between two extremes.

The other example I thought of was The Smiths: the songs were written by Morrissey and Jonny Marr. Neither of them, to my mind, have done anything quite as good since. Certainly I haven’t really liked Morrissey’s albums so much. Why is that? I think part of the reason is, Morrissey on his own would be too depressing – it was the genius of Jonny Marr’s guitar parts that made it listenable and generally great music.

I wondered if anyone had any other thoughts on great partnerships like that?

So, Phil and I have started watching “Glee”, which is a new American comedy. Apparently Alex and Sarah both really like it, and Alex gave us some episodes to watch through (it’s being shown on Channel 4 at the moment I think).

Anyway, as it started out I didn’t think I was going to like it, but it won me over by the end of the first episode (we’ve only watched the first two episodes, including the pilot). At the moment it seems feel-good comedy, but it seems well written and the musical numbers are very well done. I also like the fact that it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, so when the supposedly amateur high schoolers (who’ve never got anything musically right before) perform a pretty much spot-on version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing”, it tips a nod to the audience as if to say, “Yeah, we know, it’s just part of the show… enjoy it”.

That said, it does epitomise some of the things I don’t like about American comedy. Namely, characterisation. I don’t know, it just seems that British comedies tend to make it more subtle – you get a more realistic blend of character traits. For example, in Green Wing, even the unsympathetic characters (such as Joanna Clore, Guy Secretan, Alan Statham) you really feel for sometimes. They still have moments of genuine warmth for them.

American characters tend to be much more… well, I would say more pantomime characters. They just aren’t as complex as real life. I don’t know whether this is a difference in my perception or whether there is something objective going on. But I still have to say I prefer British comedies. Perhaps America is just a different place to Britian, and Glee really is reflecting what’s going on in America.

All I can say is, if Glee is an accurate (or at least, based on facts) depiction of what happens in American schools, I’m glad I didn’t go to school there!

This weekend was the 3rd Annual Colchester Winter Beer Festival, held at Colchester Arts Centre. We went along on Saturday afternoon, and met up wtih Alex, Matt, Tom and Alison. In general it was a very good afternoon, as always! Afterwards we headed to the Ashiana for a curry, which I managed most of even after having a few slices of the Pie of Awesomeness from Proctor’s. (The Pie of Awesomeness is a very nice pork pie which we first tried at the Fat Cat. I don’t usually like pork pies but those are … well, awesome).

Anyway. So Saturday was very enjoyable 🙂 On Sunday we went to church in the morning (getting a lift with someone, as I shall explain in a moment), and then in the afternoon we went for a nice walk around Highwoods (through the mud!), then went round to see Jo and Evie for a bit, then watched Lark Rise to Candleford and Rhod Gilbert’s Award-Winning Mince Pie. On our new HDTV. I shall review the HDTV at a later date, suffice it to say at the moment that I am impressed with it! We haven’t yet watched any proper HD content on it (some Blu-Ray discs are coming via LoveFilm so hopefully soon…) and I will give it some more time then.

Aaaaanyway. Back to Rhod Gilbert: he has got to be one of the funniest guys I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely hilarious. The show itself was very clever, the way he drew out one story into all the different strands, and they came together quite cleverly at the end. I would recommend anyone who’s a fan of comedy to see it – you can get a good idea of what it will be like by looking up his Live at the Apollo gig from a year or two ago.

I mentioned the car. We’ve been having a few problems: on Tuesday morning I was driving into work, and noticed the car losing power. It turns out that the car hadn’t just lost power, it was basically dead (the engine pretty much cut out). Fortunately, thank God, I wasn’t going very fast at the time and was just able to coast off the A12 and pull up at the side of the road. (The fortunately is because I’d been spending the previous 20 minutes doing about 2mph, average, crawling along the A12 – I wouldn’t have had enough speed to get off the road! And if I’d been going much faster, it would have been very difficult to stop: the Saab is a heavy car and the brakes didn’t do much without being servo-assisted)

So, I pulled over and called up the AA, who arrived fairly promptly. After doing some tests the AA man decided he couldn’t fix it on the road, and so towed me to Wivenhoe. Being towed was an interesting experience – it was a fixed bar, the van in front of me did all the accelerating / braking. I just had to steer and indicate. It was strange not actually having to use any of the pedals! Anyway, we eventually got the car to the mechanic, and I worked from home that day.

The rest of the week I have been getting the bus into work (not nice – there are limited buses to Chelmsford from Colchester and it takes over an hour… although I guess I should be lucky I can get the bus at all).

It took a couple of days to diagnose exactly what was wrong with the car, but it’s apparently the ignition coil pack. That is … well, suffice it to say it’s a fairly expensive part to replace (in the order of about £400). But again, I should be grateful it wasn’t the ECU – modern ECUs are quite expensive (£1800 or so), so it could have been much worse. The part should have been delivered on Friday or Saturday, so I’m hoping that the car will be fixed today! I think the part is fairly easy to replace from what the mechanic has told me, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be back with me later today (or tomorrow).

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t mention going to 21 on Friday night: I wasn’t able to (the bus doesn’t get back to Colchester until too late), and why we didn’t go to Sunday@6 yesterday. Still, these things do happen! One of the perils of running a car – even newer cars aren’t immune from these kind of issues.

Hah. In “my room” (a/k/a the study) in our house I have a piano, two guitars, and an effects pedal. The piano has the ability to record things, and it also has the ability to pretend to be a bass. The effects pedal has a little drum machine on it. Can you see where this is going? Yep, I’ve just played four instruments simultaneously… sort of. And I did cheat on one – I wasn’t actually playing the drums. But still, it’s fantastic fun. I’ve just spent half an hour rocking out like Led Zeppelin. (Note to self: using the “Jimmy Page” setting on my effects pedal does *not* make me sound like Jimmy Page…)

It does make me think that I would quite like to be in a band though. Sunday@6 is good but it’s only really worship music at the moment. Anyone a bit crap at playing an instrument, like me, who wants to play a few random songs occasionally? 😉

Aaaanyway. Weekend antics. What did we get up to, etc. The usual. 21, shopping, church, relaxing. We watched “Burn After Reading” on Saturday night which is a typical Coen brothers film – a bit weird but quite clever and funny in places. Quite off-beat humour, if you like darker comedies you’d probably like this one.

The other news is, after rambling on about media centres and the like in my last post – and those of you who follow my Twitter feed will know this – we’ve decided to buy a new HDTV. It’s an LG 32″ Full HD model. Apparently, after we bought it the assistant told us it was what he and another one of the assistants had – and they were both really happy with it. Why he didn’t say that before I don’t know, but still, it looks pretty good. It should hopefully be delivered on Friday.

After all that talk about media centres and the like, I finally decided to go with a solid state Blu-Ray player. They had a very good deal on them, and I felt like the rest of our needs (iPlayer etc) for now can be handled by my laptop. So, not a very exciting outcome really, but there’s still scope for change!

Anyway, I think that’s all for now. Last night Matthew came and stayed with us, just for one night, because he had a meeting in Maldon this morning. It was nice to see him, albeit briefly, and he was even able to come and play drums at the Sunday@6 music rehearsal last night. Good fun.

Well, that’s about it for now, I’d better stop rambling again!

Well, I think the time has finally come to replace our aging TV. I’m not entirely sure how old it is, it was my Nan’s old TV before she died, but I’m guessing it’s around 10-15 years old.

Anyway, now seems like the right time to be buying a TV: High-Definition (HD) is becoming common, the analogue signal is going to be turned off in a few years – but, more importantly, apart from that I don’t think there are going to be any massive changes over the next few years.

Couple that with the fact that me and Phil do, in fact, watch a fair few DVDs (we’re not avid film buffs but we usually have a DVD out from LoveFilm), plus the fact that most of the TV we watch is widescreen (we usually watch on Freeview. Doctor Who etc. are now widescreen), I think we have a reasonable case for a new TV.

At this point, you might be thinking “Do you really need to justify it?” Well, yes, yes I do. That is the way I am: I may want a new TV, but I won’t actually be able to buy one until I can reasonably justify it to myself. Especially when we have a working TV, albeit a rather old one.

So… this weekend, I think we might be popping up to the shops to have a look at TVs. (And maybe even come away with one!)

But this leads me onto another issue – HD: we don’t have HD freeview at the moment (and most Freeview isn’t HD anyway, to be fair). Virgin do a V+HD box, but I’m not sure about getting cable. We also don’t have a Blu-Ray player, although our DVD player does do upscaling (it’s one of the HD-DVD ones, before HD-DVD was discontinued).

So I’ve been debating what to do: to buy a new Blu-Ray player, plus maybe a cable and V+HD subscription… OR buy a media centre PC which has a Blu-Ray drive and a TV tuner.

The advantages of a media centre PC are obvious to me: you can upgrade it, the software is easily upgradable, you can stream files from anywhere on your network, etc.

But, given my legendary indecision, I’m not so sure now: given these energy-conscious days, I don’t really want to keep the PC on all the time. I’d want to be able to only turn it on when I wanted it, and have it ready in a short space of time. Also, I want something very small and quiet.

I’ve found a good candidate for that – the ASRock ION. But, you hit the slight snag that they’re not really upgradeable: that kind of takes away one advantage. As for streaming stuff over the network… I have a laptop at the moment which has HDMI output. Streaming stuff isn’t really an issue, I can just carry my laptop down to the TV and plug it in. No probs.

So, in general I’m kind of leaning towards getting a Blu-Ray player and perhaps a V+HD box at some point in the future. But hey, this is my, all opinions subject to change… probably in the next 20 minutes.

Quick weekend update: it was pretty standard, except for Friday night. 21 was cancelled because of the snow (apparently all the schools were closed around so it made sense). Luckily for us that meant we were able to go to the Ashiana – for the second time in a week! – with Dan, Tom and Alison as Dan is moving to Cardiff. After the (very nice) meal we went back to Tom’s flat and watched some Father Ted 🙂

Saturday evening we watched ‘Miss Congeniality’, which is quite a fun, entertaining film even if it’s not Oscar material. On Sunday we managed to get to both church services – we were a bit worried because of the snow, but it turned out that the snow was melting pretty much the whole day.

Anyway. I wanted to mention Dollhouse. It’s an American sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon. Alex has lent us the first series on DVD and we’ve gradually been watching through it. We watched the fourth episode last night, and we’re hooked! It’s quite compelling watching – it does take a while to really get going but it seems that it’s worth the wait.

Not new mattress troubles (although, for what it’s worth, the new mattress is very comfortable now).

The problem is with the old mattress. We don’t have a big enough car to take it to the rubbish tip – we’ve just had it in the spare room for the past few months. Anyway, we eventually got round to contacting the council, who provide a service where you pay for large items to be taken away. The agreement is that you pay the money, leave it out on the designated day, and then they will collect it. All fair enough and simple.

So, we left it out on Tuesday – by 7AM – and expected them to come and collect it. Except… they didn’t. We called up on Wednesday, and apparently it was “an oversight”. In other words, they forgot. In a normal week that would be inconvenient – they have promised to pick it up next Tuesday: we could have just brought it back in again and left it out next Tuesday. Unfortunately, the snow came down on Wednesday. If the mattress had been collected on Tuesday – when there was no snow – it would have been fine. But by Wednesday afternoon, it was covered in snow. Not much we can do about it.

So we’ve had to leave it out all week. I feel rather bad about leaving it out for the whole week – I think it’s been getting a few funny looks from our neighbours. But not much we can do about it 🙁

Hopefully they will be able to come and collect it on Tuesday. OK, so that blog post had very little point, other than to make me feel better. But it worked in that respect, so it’s not all bad news 😉

The problem with ‘snow’ is that it’s too easy to pun with! So, once again, apologies for the terrible pun.

The snow has rather caused problems here, as you might imagine. I’ve been working from home today: I did try to get to Chelmsford, but the conditions were too poor. I think the roads had been gritted, but because it was so cold (-4° when I left!) it just settled on the road anyway. By the time I got towards the edge of Colchester my mind was made up – it was too dangerous to drive! I think a few other people from this kind of distance also were unable to get in, so it wasn’t just me.

I’ve also had to postpone my meeting with the warden of ordinands tomorrow – it seemed sensible to do the least amount of travelling I could get away with! I might or might not be able to get into work tomorrow, we’ll see how it goes.

Ah well, at least it’s pretty!

Well, it’s now official 2010 (and has been for a few days now), so I’d like to take this opportunity to wish all my loyal blog readers a happy new year! (All my unloyal blog readers can take a running jump :p)

It’s been a good new year for us. We came back home on the Tuesday after Christmas, after which I proceeded to get a nasty cold 🙁 Well, it left me in bed for a day or so. But apart from that, New Year’s Eve went well – we had over a whole bunch of people for a mini party. Kirsty, Sarah, Anne-Marie, Alex and Heather all came round and we played some silly games, at lots of food, and generally chatted.

We didn’t get to bed until late that night (or early that morning, I should say) so we didn’t do much on New Year’s Day in the morning! In the evening we headed round to Anne-Marie’s for dinner and Doctor Who. We did enjoy the last episode of DW, although – to be honest – I’m not sad to see the back of Russell T. Davies. The episode was good although I did feel it went on a bit too long at the end, how much can you drag that kind of thing out? Still, seemed a fitting end for what is really the end of an era. All hail Stephen Moffat, though, I see the weeping angels are back for the next series so that’s something to look forward to!

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping for various random things, and then in the evening went to the pub with Alex, Tom and Heather. Then we went on for a curry at the Ashiana, before heading back to ours to watch some random DVDs.

I think that’s pretty much all that happened in terms of new year festivities… in general, it’s nice to get back to work for a bit of a rest 😉 But here’s to 2010, hopefully it will bring many good things!

Speaking of which – I’ve just sent off an email to the Diocesan Warden of Ordinands. Basically that’s the first step on the rung of becoming an ordained Church of England minister. Scary stuff! But exciting, too – hopefully I will hear something back about that soon. I will keep you posted.

The Christmas break has been pretty good so far! I am currently writing this from Phil’s parents’ house. We came down here after the carol service at Fordham on Christmas Eve. We had a pretty safe journey – it was well above freezing (well, above freezing anyway) so there was no ice to worry about. (The ice and snow has all gone now, don’t know what it’s like in Colchester but here it’s all clear).

Anyway. Quick overview of the time so far: Christmas Eve – we both took the day off, so we went over to Ipswich to exchange presents with my parents. In the evening we went to the “Carols by candlelight” service at Fordham, which was absolutely packed as per usual!

Christmas Day – spent the time with Phil’s parents and sister, went to church in the morning, and just relaxed for the rest of the day.

On Boxing day morning we went for a walk nearby with some more of Phil’s family. In the afternoon some family friends came round and we played silly games / had a sing song round the piano etc. The usual kind of stuff!

Yesterday we didn’t do very much, but in the evening we went round to Julie and Dave’s and had a nice evening there. Which included watching Top Gear – I really enjoyed the special! I think the Top Gear specials are my favourites. Can’t believe the most unreliable car in the world… turned out to be the most reliable. (Who saw that one coming?!)

Anyway, this afternoon we are going to see “War Horse” in London, I don’t know much about it but hopefully it will be good. The write-up looks good anyway.

Well, that’s all for now! We’re back in Colchester tomorrow, and then we’re off to see my family on Wednesday. That’s all from me for now. Hope all my loyal blog readers are having a good week!

And I wish you a very happy New Year.

(Don’t forget, if you’re around in Colchester and don’t have any plans – our place for a new year party type thing. Let me know if you can make it :))