Later this week, Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (who, before he got married, was commonly known as prince pils), will turn 40. For this occasion, the prince answered 40 questions* (Dutch only, sorry) from Dutch people on the royal family’s official website. Now I don’t really care about the Dutch royal family, or any other royal family for that matter, but I noticed a striking difference between the royal families of England and the Netherlands.

The latter always try to appear as ‘common’ as possible. When the prince was, for instance, asked what stories he reads to his daughters (he has three of them), he said they love Nijntje (Miffy) and the stories of Annie M. G. Schmidt. Those were exactly the ones that my parents used to read me and neither have anything even distinctly upper class about them.

In England, in the meantime, the royal family is in a bit of a crisis: prince William –the one to become king when both his dad and his grandma die (or go crazy)– has just broken up with his girlfriend of five years. Which is quite normal, after all it had only been his first proper relationship. Things happen. But for the English press –especially the tabloids, of course– things don’t ‘just’ happen. And thus it has been suggested all over that the real reason for the break-up is the class difference between William and, especially, Kate’s mum.

I’m not saying classes (or more generally: cultural backgrounds) don’t make a difference, because I think they do. But it’s interesting to see two essential differeces between two countries reflect in the way they view their royal family. (Actually, would there have been an American royal family, all problems would have been attributed to different ethnic backgrounds.)

* That’s not true. One of the questions was: ‘at what time does your mum send you to bed?’ which he didn’t answer.

Walking through the hills of Exeter’s university campus on a sunny Sunday afternoon, while listening to (and singing along with) the Crystals is a great thing to do in general. But the fact that I could hear properly again made the experience twice as enjoyable. My right ear had been clogged for a week and in my attempts to unblock it, I had managed to clog the other one too… But thanks to something called Audiclean (hey, it worked!) I saved myself from some more days of grumpiness and, in the end, a visit to a GP.

So there I was, feeling grounded and more alive than I had been in a while. Which probably also had to do with a visit to a London based therapist on Friday, who’s going to help me make more sense of life, get more grounded and interact more properly with fellow human beings. To make the autistic me take a bigger part in life, so to say. I had meant to do that for ages, but if I had an inner motivation to do this, I suppose would have one reason less to go…

It was good, because it was, and, because it’s going to work, will be even better.

I don’t really mind delayed trains. Unless I have an appointment, or something I’m really looking forward to, I happily spend some extra time at a station or in a train. It’s not that I have enough time to read books anyway. And spending some time in the new waiting room at Exeter St Davids Station, which was warm, quiet and, especially, clean, wasn’t so bad either. (I do wonder though whether Steve Jobs pays money to First Great Western to makeWindows restart itself on the information screens every minute for at least an hour…)

What I do mind though is suddenly being forced to guess what would be the fastest way to get at the destination. There are about five different ways to get from home to work and if the default one fails, it all depends on the unpredictable delays of the other trains and buses which one will turn out to be fastest. So I spend the journey stressing about arrival times (and bemoaning the fact that I didn’t know all time tables by heart). Closing my eyes for a while was never an option. But I seemed to have made the right decisionsthis time, as I had reduced a two-hour delay to one hour at some point (though it got extended by fifteen minutes again).

Well, at least I had time read Nelson Mandela’s brilliant speech An ideal for which I am prepared to die which came free with the Guardian today (part of a series of fourteen ‘great speeches’). It’s brilliantly subtle in the way he defended that fact that the ANC had to start using violence against the South African government. It must have impressed the government, who despised the man at the time, too, as they did not sentence him to death. The rest of the story, which should motivate anyone looking for a better world, is very well known of course. I don’t have many heroes, especially not among the Big Names, but Mandela definitely is one.

I find it hard to add something to what Alistair wrote, but the third Exeter Goes Pop! was the best so far. Definitely. I had thought it would be ‘just’ Joe from the Pines and the Foxgloves playing his songs, with another bloke singing some of them, five locals coming to the Phoenix to listen and us playing some tunes afterwards. Well, stripped down to bare facts, it was like this.

Except that it wasn’t.

The other bloke, for instance, was Tim Hopkins, once of local band the Visitors, the only West Country band ever to release something on Matinée and the most visible trace of the fact the indiepop did not get completely ignored by Devon. The Phoenix, when it was still known as the Arts Centre, used to be the Visitors’ home venue and they hadn’t played there for more than twenty years. Although back in 1987, I didn’t know there were things as ‘indiepop’ or ‘Devon‘, it wasn’t hard to feel something special when Goldmining was given a home performance for the first time in two decades.

And Joe, for instance, isn’t ‘just’ the bloke from the Pines and the Foxgloves. Because there isn’t a ‘just’ in his songs. Because his songs, whether sung by Pam Berry, Tim Hopkins or Mr. Brooker himself, are close to perfectness.

And it, for instance, wasn’t just us, biased die-hard fans who thought so. Several people who didn’t know they band before –two, at least, but they came from different directions– came up to us and told us how much hey had enjoyed the show.

And we, for instance, weren’t just playing some records afterwards. We were hanging out with the visitors (think of this written with a semi-capital V) on Friday before the gig and for most of Saturday too, discussing topics from James Joyce to Lloyd Cole and from the saddest line in a song to Dutch culture. And mother nature, who had saved the first warm day of the year for the event, showed how much she appreciated Devon. And indiepop. And she told us we should do a popfest here in summer.

We’ll never be cool, probably. But we can have great times. I suppose that’s what matters.

Tomorrow.

At the Phoenix in Exeter.

From 8pm. But if you come early, you can have a nice meal there too.

With a unique gig by The First Division. Whom you might not know.

But they have a member of the Pines. Whom you do know.

And one of The Visitors. Whom you might remember too.

And they will have you believe they are the long lost link between Lloyd Cole and C86.

And then you’ll hear some pop records too. Played by us.

Because we promised you spring was coming closer. And look at the weather now.

So we’ll see you tomorrow.

Song of the day: Mutt Ramon – Just My Honey

It’s always good to get emails from Simon who is in Mutt Ramon as not only does he live in the West Country too, but he too works far away from home during the week. So we moan to each other about missing our wives, missing the south coast and the unequal distribution of nice jobs among the various regions of England. So it’s quite unfair that I kept forgetting to download the new songs of his band Mutt Ramon (huge in Italy), while I actually like their songs a lot, just as I like the clever, funny lyrics too. To make up, I happily point you in the direction of their website where you can find this song, as well as a couple of older tunes.

I regularly dream of people of the past these days. People that I never was close friends with, but with whom I still spent several years of my life. Fellow university students, usually. They have disappeared out of my life, just like I have disappeared out of theirs and that’s all normal. Still, while the dreams are never really bad, they always make me wake up in a rather confused state, feeling haunted by a past that seems to have disappeared much faster than I can grasp.

So I did feel for Ryder, the narrator of The Unconsoled, who runs into several old friends that he, it seems, hasn’t seen in years, while visiting a city abroad, apparently only to give a piano concert. It is just one of the confusing things in the book. Ryder, for instance, also suffers from amnesia and since he is the sole narrator, the unfolding story Kafka-esque when it comes to time and, especially, location. Things just don’t make sense.

That is Kazuo Ishiguro for you.

It took me at least 200 pages (and three weeks) to get to a point where I really wanted to finish the book, and then only because I previous experience with Ishiguro’s books had taught me things would make sense in the end. But in this case they only did a little bit. Which somehow fit in with the story and the book still left me filled with amazement. Though I suppose that, after all, I liked When We Were Orphans and The Remains of the Day better still.

The book is from 1995, but with books that matters even less than with music. I found this interview with Ishiguro, in which he appears as a kind, dedicated and very serious person. Just what you’d expect from reading his books.

It’s getting a bit boring, the weekly routine of downloading a bunch of songs during the weekend –usually on Monday morning, when I’m already in a rush–l and then listening to them on the mp3-player the during the rest of the week. In fact, I’m usually too tired after work to put the earplugs in and it happens that I don’t hear any music for a couple of days in a row. I think I’m starting to care less about music. Which probably isn’t so bad, but just the way things go.

But then it’s Monday morning and I’m on a train, tired from a short night of sleep, sad because the weekend is over, but happy because spring seems to have finally come. And among the recently downloaded songs are a couple of real gems. And I get as excited as I’ve ever been.

Take Soko’s I’ll Kill Her, which you can download here or here or here (I found it on the latter). A French girl that combines a sweet pop song with rather direct lyrics and an really beautiful voice. And when she sings about how she will keel that blonde girl her ex-boyfriend ran away with you almost start wishing she actually will do that.

Or take Gaze’s version of Crayon’s Pedal, that Tullycraft blogged about. Crayon is the band that preceded Tullycraft and the original is one of my favourite Crayon songs, but this female-sung version of Gaze (a band that featured Rose Melberg on drums) is really good too. Now that’s probably way too much popgeeky information in two sentences. Let me just praise Tullycraft once more for their blog.