Chris
Matt
Lizzy
Reasons to be cheerful…
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The Wellington Family
The Wellingtons and others
A picture of some of those who attended Terry Wellington’s Funeral, taken at the Old Richians’ Rugby Club in Gloucester on Monday 14th May 2012.
It was a good occasion. Terry was not a religious man and so the funeral ceremony was conducted by a Civil Funeral Celebrant. It was ‘non-religious’, rather than ‘anti-religious’ and we sang a hymn (All Things Bright And Beautiful) and one of the readings was Henry Scott-Holland’s ‘Death is Nothing at all’.
Afterwards, we went back to the Old Richians’ Rugby Club for refreshments – and that’s where this picture was taken.
My Mum and Dad are in the front row, third and fourth from the left; and Rose and I are in the back-but-one row. You can also see Pauline, Bish and Mark; and Nic, Laura and Ruby.
Thanks to cousin Sharon for uploading the picture to Facebook!
A&R Anniversary Number Ones…
This July sees our 30th (Pearl) Wedding Anniversary. No, we can’t believe it either…
For our 25th (Silver), brother-in-law Iain put together a mix-tape of the number one records for each year since 1982. Now, all we have to do is add the remaining 5 years, and we’re good to go!
Anniversary Setlist
Halewood Bells and Tower Calendar
Welcome to St Knickerless!'St Knickerless'. I'm afraid I hadn't seen that coming....
Giants in Liverpool
The diver walks past 'the bombed out church'.
Liverpool does do these big, public, open-air things really very well! There were thousands of people in the centre of Liverpool to see the giants walk through the streets, to be re-united at the Kings Dock.
The diver - and the people who make him work. Picture by Rose.
The little giant girl and her uncle, reunited
Visit to Gloucester and that London
Rose and I enjoyed a few days in Gloucester after Easter, then drove to London to see Matt. 
A good time was had – we booked two nights in a posh hotel just next to the Tower of London. On Friday evening we went out for a walk and then dinner at Zizzi’s, Bankside, with Matt and Maya. 
On Saturday afternoon we went to Shoreditch where Matt works. We watched the Liverpool-Everton FA Cup Semi in a sports bar just over the road from the church were they film Rev. Nice!
Covent Garden in the evening and a meal the Gourmet Burger Kitchen.
On Sunday morning, Rose and I went to the Tower and were very impressed with how well thought out this major tourist attraction is. We were queuing for tickets before it opened and were in looking at the Crown Jewels before 10:30AM. We were trained at Disney.
Lunch at the Kitchen at the Tower, which we enjoyed, and then the drive home, which we didn’t. We stopped for a break after two and a half hours, having driven just 40 miles from the hotel….
Top News!
Top News (of a Jewell) is that Matt has a job! He has been working on a sort-of intern basis for a month for a mobile web design firm in Shoreditch. At the end of his time with them, they have taken him on.
Obviously, we’re thrilled about this!
Sunny Speke – update
It’s not sunny: hailstones are bouncing off the window ledges!
Sunny Speke!
The church bells and tower appeal has meant a whole extra layer of fundraising activities, one of which was a Promise Auction. The idea is that people offer goods or services (‘promises’) which are then auctioned, the money raised going to the appeal. We offered afternoon tea at the Rectory, which was eagerly snapped up. (We’ve agreed a date in March, so will let you know how we get on.)
Among the lots we bought was two nights bed and breakfast at the Crowne Plaza hotel at John Lennon Airport, donated by the hotel. And that’s where I’m writing this from. We have a nice room and last night enjoyed dinner in the hotel restaurant – very good it was too. (I had the mussels starter and pork tenderloin wrapped in pancetta for my main course.)
What is amusing to our Halewood friends is the fact that the hotel is in Speke, just five minutes away from where we live. And Speke is probably not the place that most of them think of as their ideal holiday destination.
But here we are. Our room is on the corner of the building so we have a good view over Speke retail park – the neon signs of Currys, Macdonalds and Argos are particularly prominent.
But as well as the opportunity of enjoying wine with our dinner (neither of us has to drive), our couple of nights away from home gives us the chance to get out of the usual routine, and means that we might just do a few things that we’ve been meaning to do for a while – Dobbie’s Garden Centre is just down the road, for example. (Apparently the cafe’s very good!) Speke Hall is not that far away And we might just go into town and visit the new museum. These are things we could easily have done from home. But we didn’t.
So, here we are, spending a couple of nights in Speke. And enjoying ourselves!
More Ukulele Madness
Yes, I’m sorry about this. It is an obsession. Mild, I think, but an obsession nonetheless. I have tickets to see the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain at the Philharmonic on 31st May. And I can’t tell you how excited I am. Those who share a home with me will know that not a day goes by without me picking up my uke and strumming a song or several. Everything from the inevitable George Formby to Sinatra and Bowie, something that I learned from ‘the Ukes’, as we call them, who say that the measure of a good song is, “Does it work on a ukulele?”. And I think they are right. Their renditions of Wuthering Heights, Anarchy in the UK, or the Theme from Shaft, are cases in point. (Actually, we did quite a nice version of ‘Anarchy’ right here in the rectory not so long ago: uke, guitar and vocal harmony. Sounded fab.)
The uke is an instrument with great limitations: only four strings, and the bottom string doesn’t even provide any bass notes as it’s tuned an octave higher than you’d expect, meaning that the uke’s range is far more limited than the guitar, its six-stringed big brother. And yet many ukulele songs have a more complex harmonic structure than much of what we are used to in popular music since rock and roll decided that those (E, A and B7) were the three chords you needed. (The Beatles added two more chords – relative minors – and middle-eights to rock and roll, thus inventing pop/rock song-writing.)
Ukulele-ists revel in getting sophisticated chord progressions and proper song-writing out of their four stringed baby instruments. The littleness of the uke and its inherently friendly sound makes it ideal for comic songs; but it’s also possible to get the thing to sound exhilarating or even proper poignant, as in Joe Brown’s I’ll See you In My Dreams, performed memorably at the Concert for George Harrison. McCartney also played uke at the concert, with a version of George’s Something, a song he still features in his globe-trotting live set. (We saw him perform it, uke in hand, at his Anfield concert in Liverpool’s year as European City of Culture. Mind you, on that occasion he didn’t have Eric Clapton standing behind him; or Albert Lee, the man Eric Clapton thinks is the world’s greatest guitarist.)
So there we have it, the humble uke, probably the answer to many of life’s problems. I’m thinking of re-training as a ukulele therapist, as I’m convinced that the world would be a much nicer place if more people played the uke. For me, it has re-connected me with what I love: proper songs played by proper musicians on musical instruments, even cute ones.