Fifteen years...

 

Well now: it's fourteen years to the day since this little development, which tells me too that it is roughly fifteen years since McClintic Sphere started this here blog, which I joined shortly thereafter. Yes, the actual first post was laid down on October 9th, not the 7th, but... let's not be too fussy about these things. (As it happens, now is when I have time to write about it.)

Fifteen years... an awful lot has happened since then. Purely in terms of this endeavour, though: quite a lot has happened with that, too. It's just that none of it was very recent ;-)

But regardless of what happened in the past - including but not limited to the things which could have happened and didn't, or which could have been avoided and weren't - this feels above all like a time to look to the future rather than to dwell on the past. It's an odd situation for me, to be sure: outside this house, the world appears to be going completely crazy (in ways few people could have envisaged, back in 2007); yet within this household, there is a positive feeling and indeed there are little signs of growth and progress everywhere I look. One of these, clearly, is the fact that after years of half-arsed promises to resume writing this blog one day, I finally did it; as I have said before, it's pretty unimportant whether anyone besides me even sees the results in the first instance, since it is so obviously beneficial to me to write again. Of course, if anyone else does read it... great! In the meantime: onwards...

I am installed in the new house now (after an extremely protracted and messy move), and I did eventually locate my CD player the other day - although I have still not managed to find enough time to myself to use it yet - so at some point I will undertake:

- one final (for now) recapitulation of the Rainbow Gallery '79 bootleg

- a more detailed listen to the "Tristano/Marsh" quintet love-in from 1989

- a long-threatened write-up of "the" Thumbscrew album (yes! really!!)

... and I have ordered, but am still rather eagerly awaiting, the Kobe Van Cauwenberghe Ghost Trance Septet album, which looks utterly mouth/ear?-watering. 

I also have several live videos cued up which I'm waiting to watch, as time permits. Some of these, at least, will no doubt prove interesting enough to inspire a few written observations. The idea, really, is that with practice I can go more deeply into the material and spend less time scratching around the surface layers (as I have been doing recently).

Happy birthday, blog. (McC, if you're reading: here's to you - cheers!)