Nick Jordan

Earlier today I took delivery of the latest Eliza Carthy CD, Rough Music. I’ve just got it home and shoved it into my computer’s CD drive to play it and discovered something truly wonderful. As well as the usual standard CD stuff, every track has been provided in a number of formats - MP3, WAV, FLAC and, most brilliantly of all, Ogg Vorbis. If only more artists and their record companies were so sensible.

The music’s up to the usual extremely high standard as well, so I can put my hand on my heart and recommend that you rush out and buy it, not only to support an extremely talented musician but also to show the music industry that we want more of this sort of thing and we’re willing to part with good money for it.

Update: OK, so it appears I’ve been stupid. I’ve recently upgraded to a newer version of KDE and it was this that was providing the functionality I mentioned above. Rough Music is still a damn fine CD, though. Buy it.

For the two people who haven’t seen it yet, a healthy response (in my not terribly humble opinion) to werenotafraid.com comes in the form of iamfuckingterrified.com. This seems to be a very British thing and I, for one, applaud it.

‘Why I hate Harry Potter’. I have to confess that I agree with Robert Winder on this completely. While I’m all for anything that encourages people to read, I’d much rather read something good, myself. Yes, I’m a curmudgeonly old fart, I admit. I also hate trash TV and almost all advertising and become irritated quite quickly with hype of every kind. Maybe I should go and live in a cave.

Sorry for the lack of posting recently. I’ve been on holiday. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that I went to visit my mother in Somerset last weekend then spent the week slowly working my way back across the country via places such as Glastonbury, Salisbury and Winchester.

As a result, I was miles away from London when the bombs went off on Thursday. The first I knew about it all was when I received a text message on my mobile phone asking me if I was OK. I’m glad I wasn’t anywhere near the explosions, but my heart goes out to those who were, or whose loved ones have been killed or injured.

I most sincerely hope that there won’t be any kind of knee-jerk response to the bombings. I’d much rather that the authorities investigate thoroughly and provide a measured but firm response in due course.

I shall say no more on this subject because others have said it all much better than I ever could.