NINE YEARS ON…..

Thursday 4 – Sunday 7 May 2017

The First Big Bloggers Weekend in Glasgow.  Attended at various times by quite a few locals, along with Walter, Dirk, Brian and Adam, who came over from Germany, Germany, USA and England respectively.  So many wonderful memories.

Today will see me catch up again with Dirk for the first time since then.  Plans to do so a couple of years back were thwarted when a trip to Germany by myself and Rachel, where we could see both Dirk and Walter, had to be postponed when the flights were cancelled at 48 hours notice. There’s been a couple of other attempts that have, for one reason or another, fallen by the wayside, but finally it all comes together today.

Dirk, along with his wife and a couple of their friends are visiting Edinburgh this weekend.  They will have arrived yesterday and, with the help of Aldo, have been given a few suggestions as to where to go in and around the vicinity of their temporary abode on their first evening.  Today, I’ll be heading through to meet up with them and give them a slightly wider tour of the city, taking in Leith, Stockbridge and the New Town….they have also been given some suggestions as to how best occupy themselves on Saturday and Sunday.

The catch-up will certainly take my mind off the outcome of the election results (the count in Scotland gets underway later today), and I’m incredibly excited to be meeting up with my great friend after such a long time.

mp3: Grandaddy – Everything Beautiful Is Faraway

Today’s song is from Grandaddy‘s debut album, Under The Western Freeway.   It was one of 21 songs picked out by Dirk for inclusion on his Contrast Podcast Compilation CD back in 2009.  The Contrast Podcast was a brilliant exercise in worldwide friendship, organised by Tim Young (living in Switzerland) and often assisted by Fil Hemming (living in Canada) which began in 2006 (waaaaay before these things became popular and trendy) involving numerous contributors, giving a spoken introduction to a song of their choice on a particular theme.

There were a couple of occasions when we all had to burn a CD of songs and post it overseas to one of the other contributors. On one such occasion, I was lucky enough to be the recipient of Dirk’s CD which, as instructed by Tim, had to consist entirely of singers/bands with a particular letter of the alphabet, in this instance ‘G’.

I do miss those days and often wonder what the various contributors are up to, albeit I know some do occasionally pop into TVV.

We’ll certainly be offering a toast to absent friends at some point today.

JC