St Albans' Primary School where Dick and I once went

Mike's Pith & Wind - Love is all you need..
I’ve got The Beatles on in the background – the inadequate, but still interesting stereo version of George and Giles Martin’s Love album, conceived for the Cirque du Soleil. Coincidentally, my Kiwi mate Tony Brittenden rang last night and said he’d heard the album in context at the Las Vegas Cirque show a few months back and was utterly riveted. I can imagine the music combined with the circus’ off-the-wall presentation would be difficult to absorb in one sitting, and Tony confirmed this point, but the in-the-round 5.1 version would make much more sense than the comparatively one dimensional montage I’m listening to now.
Mind you, I’m not in the least tempted to invest in a surround-sound system, despite my inadvertently purchasing another 5.1 album recently in a sorry replay of the underpants fiasco a few months back. When I was round at Jeremy Alsop’s place recently he played me a couple of tracks from the most recent Donald Fagen CD, Morph The Cat, and I determined to buy it, as well as a replacement for another Fagen CD, (The Nightfly), which I had been playing at gigs between brackets and which had been unfairly frisbeed to death. I was annoyed to find The Nightfly was full price and so decided to forego buying it, but then dicovered the new one was twice the price again because it had an additional DVD. ‘OK’, I thought, ‘a DVD will be interesting, (remembering the very interesting making of the Steely Dan album show), I’ll get it’.
It was only when I got to Richard’s place, after having boasted about this fab Donald Fagen DVD I’d bought, that I discovered that the so-called DVD was this surround-sound business. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - Tom Brown’s Schooldays
When people say that their schooldays were the best days of their lives, you know that life has betrayed them. I look back dimly on at least four primary, one intermediate and one secondary school, each one in Toy Town, Flatland, End of the World – which most people know as Christchurch, New Zealand.
Primary Schools were an ever-changing stream of shallow impressions as my brother and I followed our mother’s teaching rounds, starting at St Albans and eventually arriving at Cashmere Hills, which was almost directly behind our house. When one is small, each school seems to stretch out far into a hostile Gobi desert with playgrounds of asphalt or desiccated buffalo grass with extremes of hot and cold. Each new institution was governed by the unseen Kafkaesque powers of self-determined under-sized elites, read more