Looking for the Perfect Stick

Posted on July 15, 2026 by Alan

This week I’ve been doing a lot of wandering and pondering. I think it’s time well spent when I have a few days off work. Today I found myself drawn to another place from my childhood.

I’d planned a longish walk – around five miles – that would take me from Carlton Hill, down towards Sneinton and up into Bakersfield and eventually into Colwick Woods before looping back again. Looking at the map beforehand, I realised something I’d never really considered before.

Growing up in Mapperley, then buying my first houses in Netherfield and Gedling I’d spent years quietly orbiting Carlton. Dad’s side of the family seemed to inhabit every corner of the suburb, so we were frequent visitors whether it was to see Mama on a Saturday or one of my uncles and aunties, they were all there – those still with us still are!

And right on its doorstep is Colwick Woods.

I honestly can’t recall when Dad first starting taking me and Rich there.

It feels as though they were simply always part of childhood.

The funny thing about childhood memories is that they don’t usually arrive in chronological order. They arrive in flashes. One moment I’m searching the woodland floor for the perfect stick. Not just any stick, but the sort that absolutely had to become a magnificent longbow.

As far as I can remember, none of them ever did.

Finding them always seemed to be far more important than making them. Then another memory surfaces.

Dad telling us about one of his childhood friends running full speed down a hill and straight into a tree. I’ve often wondered whether that actually happened or whether it was simply an inspired piece of parenting designed to discourage two energetic boys from doing exactly the same thing. Either way, it mostly worked.

Some memories arrive attached to people – one afternoon I think nearly back at the car I managed to disturb what was probably a wasps’ nest. I remember John, a dear family friend sadly no longer with us instantly leaping into action. At the time I simply remember him furiously swatting wasps that had dared sting me. I don’t think I ever saw John express anger before or after that event.

I don’t think he was really angry with the wasps, perhaps he was simply furious that something had hurt one of his people.

Other memories arrive attached to the sky – I clearly remember standing in the open grassland watching the Red Arrows thunder overhead. I recall it was planned. I’ve no idea where they were going, or what event they were performing at, or even how my parents knew they’d be passing overhead. None of that mattered. We simply stood there looking up.

The same hills became sledging runs when winter decided to oblige. Looking back now, they don’t seem anywhere near as steep as they once did. Perhaps hills shrink as we grow, or perhaps imagination simply makes everything bigger.

Another memory has stayed with me for decades despite never actually happening. Throughout a chunk of my childhood I had the same recurring dream.

Somehow, a travelling fair had arrived on the open grassland beside the woods. I remember winning a toy fire engine before wandering into the woodland with my friends Carl and Phil. The woods were familiar and weird all at once. The ground undulated almost like freshly ploughed earth and, somehow, the branches and shadows in the trees formed enormous smiling and frowning faces, like the comedy and tragedy masks you see outside old theatres.

The dream was viewed from the side as we wobbled over the uneven ground, apparently unconcerned with our eerie surroundings. I haven’t dreamt it for years. Yet I can still picture it more vividly than places I’ve actually visited. Memory is a strange thing. Sometimes imagination leaves deeper footprints than reality.

Returning to today, I found myself noticing how much had changed. The broad grassy areas I remembered being closely mown and green have become flowering meadows as part of the woodland’s management as a local nature reserve. In the July sunshine they’d taken on that familiar straw-coloured appearance that only comes after a spell of proper summer weather.

Yet the woodland itself felt reassuring familiar. The valleys still scoop away towards the railway and Colwick Loop Road, there are still glimpses through and over the fence across the Trent Valley, Colwick Hall and Nottingham Racecourse. The paths still invite you to wonder what’s around the next bend, or which fork to choose.

Although these days I’m no longer looking for the perfect stick, the woods still have a habit of leading me down rabbit holes. Only now they’re nostalgia and local history warrens rather than imaginary archery.

Even the name Colwick tells a story. I’d always idly wondered whether it might somehow have been an accidental mutation of “cowlick” over the centuries, but probably not. It almost certainly derives from the Old English Cola’s wīc – a farm or dairy settlement belonging to someone called Cola. Over the centuries, Cola’s Wic quietly became Colwick.

Maybe that dairy fixation leads to the twice-extinct Colwick Cheese. Rich wrote about this before so I won’t repeat the point here.

By the time William the Conqueror’s surveyors compiled the Domesday Book in 1086, Colwick was already a substantial place (listed as Colewic). It had a church, a mill, woodland, meadow, fisheries on the Trent and around thirty-four households spread across three separate manors. While my childhood imagination was busy turning sticks into longbows, it never occurred to me that people had been making their homes around these woods for at least nine centuries before I arrived.

The woods themselves are older still – parts of them are designated ancient woodland, surviving as one of those increasingly rare fragments of woodland that has remained wooded for centuries. They once formed part of the deer park belonging to Colwick Hall and, like so many old landscapes, every generation seems to have found a different purpose for them. Even during the Second World War, the wider area found itself playing a role as a prisoner of war camp for German and Italian prisoners.

I didn’t think of any of this as a child – I simply thought they were woods. Only years later do you begin to realise how many stories they’ve quietly witnessed – ranging from moments of grand historical significance to individual formative moments.

As I dragged my weary legs up the hills of Bakersfield back towards the car, I realised Colwick Woods has two different histories – the version you’ll find in books and from Google searches: ancient woodland, deer parks, OId English place names, estate history, wars, nature conservation.

But then there’s the other history.

Dad carrying sticks while two boys searched for ‘better’ ones, John defending a clumsy boy from angry wasps. The Red Arrows overhead. Snow on the hills. Dreams that somehow still linger decades later.

Neither history is more important than the other. One belongs to the landscape, the other belongs to my family. They’re now impossible for me to separate.

Maybe that’s why certain places stay with us – not because they’re especially beautiful, not because they’re historically important (although Colwick Woods ticks both those boxes), but because – without ever realising it at the time – they quietly become woven into the fabric of our lives.

When I was a boy, Colwick Woods was simply somewhere Dad took us at the weekend or during the school holidays. Now, walking the same paths, I realise he was giving us something rather more valuable, a place we’d carry with us for the rest of our lives.

I very much doubt Dad ever imagined that one day I’d come back here wondering who Cola was, looking up entries in the Domesday Book or writing about ancient woodland. He probably just thought he was taking his boys for a walk.

Addendum: the airshow in question was the annual Nottingham Air Show hosted at Tollerton Airport. We’d take a picnic and enjoy a grandstand view from the grassy hill overlooking Trent Valley.

Categories: Blog, Exploring | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Time Travelling through Lambley Dumbles..

Posted on July 14, 2026 by Alan

I’m not sure how long I’ll try to milk this particular cow, but as I’ve a few days off work this week and the weather is lovely I decided to reacquaint myself with an old childhood haunt, and with time travelling in mind, it naturally flowed!

Unlike Woodville Tollgate, this one doesn’t involve sitting in traffic. Instead, it begins with a walk through Lambley Dumbles, following the winding paths beside Cocker Beck.

This isn’t somewhere I’ve recently discovered. Quite the opposite.

I grew up in Mapperley and Gedling, and long before I developed an interest in history, archaeology or place names, I spent countless hours exploring these woods and fields. Back then it was simply somewhere to escape. Somewhere to paddle in the beck, scramble over fallen trees, get thoroughly muddy and latterly as a younger adult possibly reward myself with a pint at The Lambley.

As children, we don’t really think about history. We just accept places as they’ve always been.

Only much later did it occur to me that I’d spent my childhood wandering through a landscape that was already ancient before the first human being ever set foot there.

So, let’s wind the clock backwards.

The oldest thing on the walk

The first surprise is that the Dumbles themselves are almost certainly the oldest thing you’ll encounter.

Not the church, not the village, not even Cocker Beck, the valley itself.

Go back around ten thousand years to the end of the last Ice Age and Britain is emerging from a world of glaciers, meltwater and dramatic environmental change. Vast quantities of water carved deep channels through the soft Mercia Mudstone beneath what is now Nottinghamshire, creating the steep-sided wooded valleys we know today as dumbles.

Which is pretty crazy to think about really.

As children we ran through them without a second thought. We probably saw them as nothing more than somewhere steep enough to slide down and difficult enough to climb back out of again.

In reality, they are among the oldest features in the entire landscape.

A word that belongs here

One thing I’ve always loved about local history is discovering words that only seem to exist because local people needed them.

“Dumble” is one of those words.

Elsewhere people might call them ravines, gullies or wooded valleys, but none of those quite capture what a dumble is. Here in the East Midlands, everyone simply seems to understand the word instinctively.

I rather like that.

Sometimes language survives not because scholars preserve it, but because ordinary people never found a better word.

The beck that shaped everything

As I walked beside Cocker Beck this week, something struck me. It’s tempting to think the stream runs through Lambley. In reality, Lambley exists because of the stream.

Long before anyone built houses, churches or footpaths, the beck had already found the easiest route through the landscape. Those same routes later became tracks, and eventually roads. Even today, the oldest parts of the village still follow the water.

The village didn’t tell Cocker Beck where to flow. Cocker Beck quietly told the village where to be. Once that thought occurred to me, it became impossible to unsee.

Before there was England

Keep travelling backwards.

Long before there was Nottinghamshire, before there was Mercia, before there was England, this landscape was peopled by Brythonic-speaking Britons, members of clans we’ve subsequently named but have no idea what they called themselves or how they even thought about themselves.

There were no counties. No churches. No villages.

Just woodland, streams and probably scattered hunter-gatherers, and later the first farming communities.

Rome arrives… and almost passes by

When the Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 they transformed much of the country.

Curiously, Lambley Dumbles seems to have escaped much of that transformation.

Roman roads passed nearby, connecting settlements at modern-day Derby, Leicester and Lincoln, but the valley itself probably changed remarkably little. If you stood beside Cocker Beck around AD 200, you might occasionally encounter travellers heading towards those roads, but otherwise the view would probably have felt surprisingly familiar.

The Romans stayed for nearly four centuries. The Dumbles simply carried on being Dumbles.

The village arrives

Eventually, people began settling permanently around the streams.

By the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, Lambley was already an established village. Its name probably derives from an Old English phrase meaning something like “the clearing where lambs grazed.”

Like Wooden Box in my last article, it’s another reminder that our ancestors generally named places for what they were rather than what they wished they were.

Kingdoms come and go

Beyond the valley, history refused to stand still. Mercian kings ruled from nearby Repton. Viking armies marched across Nottinghamshire. The Danelaw began and receded, the Normans arrived and reshaped England.

And yet I can’t help wondering how much of that would have been obvious if you’d simply stood beside Cocker Beck.

The water would still have flowed over the same stones, the trees would still have filled the valley with birdsong, the seasons would still have turned exactly as they always had.

Some places seem to absorb history, others simply watch it unfold, immovable.

Looking through time

Walking through Lambley Dumbles this week, I realised I probably enjoyed it just now as a child.

The difference is that I was looking at something completely different, back then I saw mud, trees and a stream, now I see the end of the Ice Age. I see prehistoric hunters following the water. I see Brythonic farmers, Roman travellers, Saxon settlers and medieval villagers all walking the same valley. The people changed, the languages changed, the kingdoms changed.

But the Dumbles remained exactly where the melting ice left them ten thousand years ago.

Perhaps that’s why this place has always felt different to me.

Not because it’s untouched by history, but because it’s older than almost all of it.

The next time I find myself following Cocker Beck beneath the trees, I doubt I’ll be thinking about my step count, I’ll probably be wondering whether ten-year-old me ever imagined that one day I’d realise the oldest thing in Lambley wasn’t the village, or the church, or even the beck.

It was the valley itself.

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Time Travelling from Woodville Tollgate

Posted on July 12, 2026 by Alan

I have a slightly odd mental exercise habit.

Whenever I’m sitting in traffic at Woodville Tollgate, I like to time travel.

Not literally, of course, but I do find myself looking beyond the supermarkets, traffic lights and housing estates and wondering what this exact spot looked like a hundred years ago… a thousand years ago… two thousand years ago.

The answer is actually quite interesting.

Today, Woodville feels like another modern Derbyshire village, but that’s deceptive. In reality it’s one of the youngest settlements in the area, sitting in the middle of a landscape that tells almost the entire story of England.

So let’s wind the clock backwards.

The youngest place in an ancient landscape

The first surprise is that, for most of history, Woodville simply didn’t exist.

Go back 300 years and you’d find woodland, farmland and a handful of scattered cottages. The place wasn’t called Woodville because there was no Woodville to name.

Its origin is a simple toll house on the turnpike road between Burton upon Trent and Ashby. Around 1753, when Parliament authorised the new turnpike, a humble wooden toll booth appeared at the crossroads. It became known simply as Wooden Box.

That’s such a wonderfully practical English name. No romance. No ancient king. Just… the wooden toll booth.

Gradually, houses clustered around the crossroads. Then workshops. Then inns. A tiny roadside hamlet slowly emerged.

By the mid-19th century, “Wooden Box” was quietly giving way to the rather more respectable Victorian name of Woodville. Whether the old name was considered too rustic or whether the growing settlement simply wanted something more dignified, we’ll probably never know. Around the time St Stephen’s Church was built, the new name had taken hold. Which, personally, makes me a little sad. I think Wooden Box has far more character, and perhaps my natural distaste for the Woodville family role in the latter stages of the War of the Roses, but that’s another tale for another day…

Standing at the Tollgate today, you’re still standing where Wooden Box once stood.

Before there was England

Now let’s keep travelling backwards.

Long before there was Derbyshire, before there was Mercia, before there was England, this landscape belonged to Brythonic-speaking Britons, maybe they didn’t see it like that, maybe they belonged to the land.

The hills around modern Hartshorne and Ticknall were covered in woodland, and the River Trent already flowed to the north, probably carrying much the same name it does today. Like many rivers, it seems to have stubbornly resisted every invasion Britain has experienced. Empires came and went, languages changed, but the river simply kept its name.

The people here probably belonged to, or lived close to the frontier between, two Iron Age tribes: the Corieltauvi to the east and the Cornovii to the west. No one knows exactly where that boundary lay, but this area may well have been part of that borderland. It’s quite a fun thought experiment to imagine I might live in what was once a sort of contested no-man’s-land, although in reality we’ll probably never know.

There were no counties. No roads. Just forests, rivers and small farming communities speaking a Brythonic language whose descendants would eventually become Welsh and Cornish, while migrants crossing the Channel carried closely related speech into Brittany, where Breton would later develop.

Rome arrives

In AD 43 everything changed.

The Romans invaded Britain.

Curiously, they never built a town where Woodville stands today. Instead they established settlements around it. To the north-east, where modern Derby city centre now stands, was the Roman fort of Little Chester. Near modern Wall, just south of Lichfield, stood Letocetum on Watling Street. Near Atherstone was Manduessedum.

Roman roads stitched these places together while the countryside around modern Woodville quietly carried on producing timber, livestock and grain for the Empire. If you stood where Woodville is today around AD 200, you might occasionally hear wagons travelling towards one of those Roman roads, but otherwise life would probably have looked resolutely agricultural.

For nearly four centuries this part of Britain belonged to Rome.

Then Rome disappeared.

Mercia

As Roman authority faded, new people crossed the North Sea.

Angles and Saxons settled the Midlands, bringing a new language that would eventually become English.

This was the birth of Mercia.

Only ten miles north of Woodville lies Repton. Today it’s a peaceful village, but around AD 700 it was one of the most important places in England. Mercian kings were buried there, princes were educated there and a monastery stood at its heart.

If you had lived where Woodville now stands thirteen centuries ago, Repton would probably have been the centre of your world.

Then came the Vikings

History has a habit of refusing to stand still.

In AD 873 the Great Heathen Army arrived. Not just to raid. To stay.

For an entire winter, thousands of Viking warriors occupied Repton. Modern archaeology has uncovered defensive earthworks, Scandinavian weapons and a remarkable mass burial associated with that occupation.

Imagine standing on the high ground near Hartshorne that winter. To the north you’d see smoke rising from one of the greatest Viking camps ever established in England. The world changing again.

Where cultures met

One reason I enjoy living here is that this really was a meeting place.

Drive east into Nottinghamshire and Scandinavian place names begin appearing everywhere. Villages ending in -by, -thorpe and -toft tell the story of Danish settlement. Around Woodville, the names remain mostly Anglo-Saxon, although we do have nearby examples such as Bretby and Boothorpe reminding us that Viking influence certainly reached this far.

You’re standing remarkably close to where English Mercia and the Danelaw rubbed shoulders. A century or so later came the Normans, adding yet another layer to the landscape.

One of my favourite examples is just down the road.

Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Its name tells two stories at once.

“Ashby” is Old Norse, meaning something like “Ash tree farm.”

“de la Zouch” is Norman French, added after the Zouche family acquired the manor in the twelfth century.

One place name. Four words. Two invasions.

It’s almost like reading English history in miniature.

Nearby, Tutbury Castle reminds you who won the second conquest. The Normans didn’t so much replace the villages as place themselves above them, building castles, granting estates and reshaping English society for centuries.

Quiet fields with fire beneath them

After that, time slows again.

For hundreds of years the villages around Woodville changed very little.

Hartshorne. Ticknall. Bretby. Melbourne.

Fields, churches and manor houses.

Then, suddenly, everything accelerates.

Coal. Fireclay. Brick clay.

The Industrial Revolution transformed this quiet corner of Derbyshire almost overnight. Railways spread across the fields, brickworks and potteries appeared, mines opened and workers arrived.

Wooden Box became Woodville.

In little more than a century, a place that hadn’t existed for most of English history became a thriving industrial community.

Looking through time

Today the pits have gone and the railways have disappeared. Many of the potteries survive only in photographs, while the National Forest is slowly returning trees to land that industry once stripped bare.

And yet, every time I drive through Woodville Tollgate, I still find myself travelling backwards.

Past Victorian brickworks.

Past medieval farms.

Past Norman lords.

Past Viking camps.

Past Mercian kings.

Past Roman soldiers.

Past Celtic farmers walking through ancient woodland.

It’s all still here.

Not because the buildings remain, but because the landscape remembers.

The next time I’m waiting at the Tollgate, I doubt I’ll be thinking about the queue of traffic in front of me. I’ll probably be wondering where the toll keeper stood, where the first cottages clustered around Wooden Box, whether Roman traders passed nearby, or whether Viking scouts once looked south from Repton towards these same hills.

That’s the joy of history. The places don’t change nearly as much as we imagine; they simply accumulate stories. Sometimes all it takes is a little imagination—and perhaps a traffic light stuck on red—to realise you’re sitting in one of the most remarkable little corners of England.

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

Week One with My AI-Powered Bird Feeder

Posted on July 10, 2026 by Alan

Like I’m sure a few people do, I watched enviously as the bird feeders at the very bottom of our neighbour’s garden became a regular meeting place for robins, blue tits, sparrows and finches – and the occasional wood pigeon with all the grace of a bowling ball.

Over time, though, those feeders gradually emptied, the visits became less frequent and eventually they disappeared altogether.

It got me thinking.

We don’t actually use our garden all that much. It’s a fairly quiet little space, especially during the day, and with the recent warm weather it seemed like the perfect opportunity to make it a little more welcoming for whatever wildlife happened to be passing through.

So, armed with optimism and perhaps a little too much technology, I installed a Birdfy smart feeder and matching bird bath.

The concept is wonderful.

A bird lands.

The camera spots it.

Artificial intelligence identifies it.

My phone excitedly tells me that a goldfinch has popped in for lunch.

I become David Attenborough with push notifications.

Reality has been… somewhat quieter.

The feeder has now been in place for about a week.

Number of birds observed using it: 0.

Number of birds observed using the bath: 0.

Number of times I’ve opened the app expecting exciting wildlife footage: considerably more than I’d care to admit.

The feeder is full of fresh seed.

The bath contains clean water that seems especially appropriate given the current spell of hot weather.

Everything has decent Wi-Fi coverage.

The birds, however, appear to have declined the invitation.

I can only assume there’s a committee meeting taking place somewhere nearby.

“Right then, everyone. New feeding station on the agenda.”

“Looks very nice.”

“Plenty of seed.”

“Fresh water.”

“…Camera?”

“Camera.”

“Absolutely not.”

To be fair, everything I’ve read says this is perfectly normal. Birds are naturally cautious of anything new appearing in their environment. If a fully stocked restaurant with multiple cameras suddenly appeared at the end of my street, I’d probably watch from a safe distance for a week too.

So, for now, we wait.

The garden remains peaceful.

The seed remains untouched.

The water remains crystal clear.

The AI, capable of identifying thousands of bird species, continues its demanding workload of identifying absolutely nothing.

And oddly, I’m quite happy about that.

The whole point wasn’t to create instant entertainment. It was to provide a quiet corner where birds could stop for a drink, grab a bite to eat and carry on with their day without being disturbed. If it takes a little while for word to spread, that’s fine by me.

I’ll keep the feeder topped up, keep the bath clean, and let nature work to its own schedule.

Although if the local robin committee could perhaps expedite the approval process, I’d be most grateful.

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I wanted to make my Plex library more efficient and accidentally built a media processing platform

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Alan

One of the more dangerous phrases in technology is:

“It’ll be a fairly simple project.”

The latest example began with a perfectly reasonable observation. I have a lot of media. This isn’t exactly breaking news to anyone who knows me, but it became particularly obvious once I found myself storing films measured in tens of gigabytes each whilst simultaneously insisting that storage space wasn’t really a concern.

To be fair, storage isn’t a concern. The NAS has plenty of room left and I have absolutely no hesitation filling it with unnecessarily large files if they happen to be shiny enough. Even so, I started wondering how much of what I’d accumulated over the years was actually efficient.

Some files were old encodes. Some contained audio tracks that would never be used. Some carried around subtitle streams, metadata and assorted baggage that served little practical purpose for me. Others were encoded using formats that made perfect sense when they were created but are no longer particularly efficient.

The original plan was straightforward enough: analyse the library, identify opportunities for improvement and make the collection a bit leaner without upsetting Plex, or perhaps even making Plex happier with less transcoding work to do.

That’s it.

A modest objective.

An afternoon’s work, perhaps.

Naturally it evolved into something considerably larger.

Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really looking for a transcoding tool. Those already exist, and some of them are excellent. Tdarr, FileFlows and Unmanic all tackle various aspects of media optimisation extremely well. If your goal is to point a tool at a library and have it start transcoding files, there are plenty of mature solutions available.

What I found myself wanting was something slightly different.

I didn’t want a system that immediately started changing media. I wanted a system that could analyse a library, explain what it thought should happen, categorise recommendations by risk and allow me to decide how aggressively I wanted to proceed.

After all, if I trusted things too much I could end up with non-English language films like Pan’s Labyrinth or Apocalypto calibrated beautifully with no audio track at all if I blindly pointed a tool at my library.

More importantly, I wanted to understand the potential benefit before committing to days or weeks of processing time.

That distinction turned out to be important.

The other thing I quickly discovered was that once you’re dealing with thousands of files, memory isn’t enough. I wasn’t interested in a tool that spat out recommendations and expected me to remember them. I wanted something that could track decisions, record outcomes, understand what had already been reviewed and provide a clear path from “this file could be improved” to “this file has been improved”.

Which is roughly the point at which a media optimiser starts suspiciously resembling a workflow platform.

The first surprise was discovering that media optimisation isn’t really one problem. It’s several completely different problems wearing a trench coat and pretending to be one problem.

Some recommendations are almost entirely safe. If a file contains redundant subtitle tracks, duplicate audio streams or other bits of media archaeology that nobody is ever likely to use, cleaning them up is relatively straightforward. Other recommendations require human judgement. Perhaps a file contains multiple audio tracks and the “correct” answer depends entirely on how you consume your media. Then there are conversions, where the potential savings are significantly larger but so are the risks.

Before long I realised I wasn’t building a tool that made recommendations.

I was building a workflow.

What eventually emerged was a three-stage process.

The first stage deals with safe recommendations. Things that can be cleaned up with minimal risk and relatively little processing overhead. The second stage covers recommendations that require a human being to look at them and decide whether they’re sensible. The third stage is conversion, where files are re-encoded into more efficient formats and where the genuinely substantial savings begin to appear.

This may sound suspiciously like enterprise workflow software.

I would like to stress that the original objective was merely to tidy up a Plex library.

The conversion side of things is where the project really started to become interesting. Modern video codecs are astonishingly effective when given the opportunity. One of the first large validation runs took a 17.5GB UHD source file and reduced it to around 8.5GB whilst preserving the streams and characteristics I actually cared about. Nearly 9GB saved from a single file is the sort of result that immediately gets your attention when you’re looking at a library measured in terabytes rather than gigabytes.

That file hasn’t even been through the Safe and Review paths yet, so there are likely to be further savings to be squeezed out of it.

The dangerous thing about seeing a saving like that is that your brain immediately starts extrapolating.

Save 9GB here.

Save 12GB there.

Repeat often enough and suddenly you’re talking about hundreds of gigabytes, perhaps even terabytes, of reclaimed storage. That in turn makes life easier for Plex by reducing transcoding overhead and network traffic.

That’s roughly the point where a fun experiment starts looking suspiciously like a project.

The obvious response to discovering that you can almost halve the size of some files is to enthusiastically start converting everything.

The less obvious response, which is usually the correct one, is to spend several days proving that doing so won’t create an absolute disaster.

This has been one of the more challenging aspects of the project because I am not, by nature, a particularly patient person. Most software development rewards impatience. You write some code, refresh a browser and immediately discover whether you’ve made things better or significantly worse.

Media conversion does not work like that.

Some of the larger UHD files take twenty hours or more to process. One of the validation runs spent the better part of a day chewing through a single film before finally revealing whether my assumptions had been correct. When you’re accustomed to software projects where the feedback loop is measured in seconds, that’s a surprisingly uncomfortable amount of waiting.

If the answer turns out to be “no”, congratulations: you’ve just spent the best part of a day discovering a new and exciting way to waste the best part of a day.

Mercifully, the pre-work I put in meant all of the major conversion tests yielded a resounding yes.

The idea itself has existed for a few weeks. The last few days, however, have largely involved staring at progress bars and developing a newfound appreciation for delayed gratification.

The irony is that the conversion queue isn’t even the beginning of the actual optimisation work.

The eventual rollout plan deliberately starts elsewhere. Safe recommendations are processed first because they’re quick, low risk and immediately reduce clutter. After that come the review items, where human decisions determine what should happen next. Only then does the conversion queue get unleashed on the library.

In other words, the slowest and most resource-intensive part of the entire project happens last.

This feels entirely consistent with how the rest of the project has gone.

As a result, Media Auditor has become increasingly conservative. Source media remains read-only. Generated files are written elsewhere. Conversions are verified. Outputs are audited. Human approval remains mandatory. A surprising amount of engineering effort is spent proving that a change is safe before the system is allowed to do anything particularly exciting.

This is partly because media libraries are valuable, but mostly because I have no desire to discover what happens when an overenthusiastic optimisation engine decides to improve several terabytes of content in an unexpected manner.

One of the more amusing discoveries has been that the most dangerous part of the entire workflow isn’t actually the conversion process itself.

It’s putting the converted file back.

Creating a replacement file is relatively straightforward. Replacing an existing file without upsetting Plex, preserving rollback options and ensuring that everything can be verified afterwards turns out to be considerably more complicated. As a result, a disproportionate amount of current effort is focused on replacement workflows, validation and approval processes rather than the conversion technology itself.

This probably says something profound about software engineering.

Or possibly just about me.

The project has also changed direction over time. Initially the objective was simply to optimise an existing library. Increasingly, though, that feels like the first phase rather than the end goal.

Once the existing library has been processed, the more interesting opportunity is preventing inefficient media from entering it in the first place.

The long-term vision is to move the same workflow further upstream. New downloads can be analysed before they ever reach the library. Safe improvements can be applied automatically. More complex recommendations can be surfaced for approval. By the time something appears in Plex, it has already passed through a process designed to ensure it’s as efficient and well-structured as possible.

In other words, stop cleaning up after myself and start avoiding the mess entirely.

Which feels suspiciously like a life lesson.

What I find most amusing is how quickly all of this happened. A few weeks ago I was looking for ways to make a media library slightly more efficient. Today I’m validating conversion batches that run for the better part of a day, designing approval workflows, thinking about resource management profiles and planning an optimisation campaign that may ultimately take weeks to complete.

The really annoying thing is that it’s worked.

The first validated conversions have demonstrated exactly the sort of savings I’d hoped for, the workflow is gradually proving itself and there’s a very real possibility that this ends up reclaiming a substantial amount of storage whilst simultaneously making the library easier for Plex to manage.

Which means I can no longer dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous over-engineered distraction.

Somewhere along the way, “let’s make Plex a bit more efficient” quietly evolved into a media processing platform.

I should probably stop being surprised when this happens.

At this point it’s becoming a pattern.

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I bought a NAS and accidentally built a tiny data centre

Posted on May 23, 2026 by Alan

A couple weeks ago I bought a NAS because I wanted somewhere sensible to store my Plex library (which was sat on a flaky USB hard drive connected to my always-on Mac mini) and provide Time Machine backup for my two Macs.

That was the plan. Simple.

A nice, boring, responsible grown-up storage solution.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’ve accidentally-on-purpose built what can only be described as a budget enterprise media bunker with VPN mesh networking, internal DNS routing, automated torrent workflows, dashboard telemetry, HomeKit camera integrations and enough storage to archive a modest Principality.

As these things tend to go.

The heart of it all is a QNAP TS-464 stuffed with four 22TB Toshiba Enterprise drives in Raid 5. Which means:

  • It stores an absurd amount of data, and
  • One drive can die without me immediately entering a state of spiritual collapse.

Originally, the goal was just:

  • Move Plex media off the randomly disconnecting USB drive
  • Centralise Time Machine backups
  • Stop relying on ‘vibes’ as a data resilience strategy

But once the NAS existed, it immediately became obvious it could far more than hold files, as my first job tinkering with the servers at an internet hosting company came screaming from the void of forgotten things in my brain to the forefront. Who knew you could have muscle memory for vi?

Plex moved off the Mac and became a proper always-on media server without having a computer running all the time. Then I added an HDHomeRun Flex Quatro, which basically turned the whole setup into a DIY Sky+/TiVo replacement. Live TV streams around the house now, Plex records broadcasts directly onto the NAS, and somewhere along the line I found myself learning far more about multicast networking than any sane person should. Particularly since I never really watch live TV, haha!

Of course, the second you start self-hosting things, IP addresses begin breeding in dark corners. Suddenly you’re trying to remember whether qBitttorrent lives on :8080 or :8090 and whether Homarr was .71 or .73 and honestly, life is too short for that nonsense.

So naturally I ended up deploying AdGuard Home and Nginx Proxy Manager to create proper internal DNS routing.

Now everything has delightfully nerdy addresses like:

  • adguard.home.arpa
  • nas.home.arpa
  • router.home.arpa
  • etc..

Which makes the whole thing feel dramatically more professional than it probably is (and certainly more so than it needs to be!).

Then came the dashboard phase.

Homarr dashboard on mobile

I discovered Homarr and immediately lost a few hours redesigning widgets that nobody except me will probably ever properly appreciate.

But now I’ve got a mobile-friendly dashboard that surfaces quick links to the assorted things installed on there, NAS stats, services health and other telemetry so I can feel like I’m managing a tiny data centre from the sofa (which I suppose I am!).

It works beautifully as a web app on my iPhone.

And because I’m apparently incapable of leaving things alone, I also wanted all of this available remotely.

Securely, naturally.

Without opening horrifying holes in the router.

Enter Tailscale – which honestly feels like cheating. Suddenly my phone and laptop behave as though they’re still inside the home network even when I’m elsewhere. My entire Homarr dashboard, internal services and admin tools now work remotely as though the house itself has been quietly stuffed in my pocket.

The ‘tiny but brilliant’ things are probably my favourite parts though.

For example: I now have a non-HomeKit compatible doorbell camera appearing inside Apple Home because Scrypted is essentially digital witchcraft.

My torrent setup can accept magnet links emailed to a dummy address, automatically feed them into qBittorrent, then email me when the download is complete like some sort of shady digital butler.

The Nvidia Shield TV Pro has also evolved into an absurdly polished media appliance. Projectivy Launcher cleaned the interface of all the Google cruft, Surfshark selectively routes only certain apps through VPN, and assorted apps cover the combination of things I stream externally and internally on Plex. The whole thing feels smoother and cleaner than most commercial streaming boxes I’ve encountered.

Somewhere along the way I also accidentally reawakened the person who gets excited by:

  • Reverse proxies
  • SSL certificates
  • DNS propagation
  • Multicast traffic
  • Graceful UPS shutdown behaviour
    Whether dashboards have the correct border radius

I regret nothing.

What I love most is that it not longer feels like a pile of separate gadgets.

Everything talks to everything else.

The NAS handles storage and services. Plex handles media. HDHomeRun handles TV. AdGuard handles DNS. Tailscale stitches the entire thing remotely. Homarr surfaces everything cleanly. The Shield makes it pleasant to actually use day to day.

And underneath all the nerdy nonsense, the original goal still quietly works perfectly: the Macs backup automatically, the Plex library is centralised, and everything feels vastly more robust than it did before.

It’s just that the “simple NAS storage project” accidentally evolved into a full-blown self-hosted ecosystem somewhere along the way – thanks to a geeky tendency, awareness of the kind of things that could be achieved – that can, thanks to the power of AI assistants, be converted into clear step by step instructions to achieve what you need!

I’m sure there’ll be more tinkering to come…

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

🎼 The Lost Blackbird Song: A Follow-Up on a Musical That Barely Exists

Posted on December 6, 2025 by Alan

Back in 2011, I wrote a little blog post about a song I remembered from primary school. Nothing grand, nothing with a Wikipedia page, nothing anybody outside a generation of classrooms would ever have heard of. Just a strange little musical number from the mid-to-late 80s, sung by a bunch of children who almost certainly had no idea what they were performing.

The only lyrics I could recall were:

“The blackbird sings a tuneful song,
With turns and trills so fine,
Such skill has he, such majesty,
But it’s not as good as mine.”

And for years, that fragment has lived rent-free in my head — a dirge-like, slightly smug verse from a “fake song” written by a character inside a school musical. As best as I can remember, the plot involved a composer who knew he was being spied on, and so he deliberately wrote a terrible dirge to trick whoever was trying to copy him.

It was clever. It was funny. It was, in its own tiny way, art.

And yet… it seems to have vanished from the universe.

🕳 A Song That Fell Through the Cracks

When I say vanished, I mean properly vanished.

You can usually find anything online these days — half-remembered TV jingles, obscure adventure game walk-throughs, the full lyrics to commercial jingles that aired once in 1984. But this? This little school musical? Nothing.

  • No recordings.
  • No sheet music.
  • No mention in BBC Schools Radio archives.
  • No teachers’ resource PDFs.
  • No nostalgia forum threads.
  • Not even a throwaway reference in a Reddit comment.

Just my 2011 blog post… and my own memory, which has been clinging to that blackbird verse like a last surviving witness.

It’s completely mad when you think about it. Someone, somewhere, sat down in the 1980s and wrote this musical. They composed melodies, crafted characters, wove a plot about artistic pride and deception. They sent the work out into classrooms, where children in school halls around the UK sang their hearts out to it.

And now, nearly forty years later, the only evidence it ever existed is a few lines stuck in my head and an old blog entry on a site best known these days for dormancy and a very occasional burst of random recollections.

🎨 The Quiet Tragedy (and Beauty) of Lost Creativity

There’s something strangely beautiful about that.

We tend to think art only “matters” if it becomes part of the cultural machine — if it’s recorded, archived, written about, remastered, reposted, commented on, placed onto a shelf somewhere.

But so much creative work — especially in schools — is ephemeral by design:

  • Perform it once in assembly.
  • Stick the poster on the corridor wall.
  • Fold up the lyric sheets.
  • Box up the cassette.
  • Move on to the next term’s topic.

No cameras in every parent’s hand.
No YouTube to immortalise it.
No cloud storage full of forgotten MP3s.

Just a moment that existed briefly, fully, joyfully… and then dissolved.

And yet here I am, decades on, still humming “but it’s not as good as mine,” still wondering who wrote it, and still moved by the idea that I might be the last person on Earth who remembers it.

There’s something quietly touching in that — a reminder that even small, fleeting acts of creativity can lodge themselves somewhere deep.

🔍 So Here’s My Hope…

I’m posting this in the faint hope that someone, somewhere, might Google a lyric snippet, or remember doing that musical in the 80s:

  • The one with the composer.
  • The spy.
  • The fake dirge.
  • The hilariously pompous blackbird song.

If any of this rings a bell — even a faint one — please get in touch. I would love to give this little fragment its proper title, its composer, its context, and maybe even its full lyrics.

Because right now, this tiny piece of someone’s genuine creative work is balanced on one wobbly stool: my memory.

And I think it deserves at least a small place on the internet — somewhere safer than the inside of my brain.

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

Severance..

Posted on November 16, 2024 by Alan

I never really gave it much thought, in truth, but always had a kind of warm fuzzy glow that I still hosted a few domain names through the employer of my first ‘proper job’.

Notwithstanding I’m sure that a series of mergers and takeovers and things make that company completely unrecognisable from the initially small local internet hosting business I joined back at the start of the millennium (!).

I remember when Nominet launched the me.uk extension the technical guys developing a system to apply for them on launch, I logged into my account and successfully snagged both my forename and surname – not sure why on the former, but the latter has enabled me to have a very neat email address over the years, as I’ve transferred it from a hosted account, to connecting it to my Googlemail account before finally completing the ubiquitous Apple ecosystem my life is connected to.

So I had one domain name, this one, pointed to the WordPress nameserver to handle hosting, with the MX records pointing back to my old employer to handle email forwarding, the other two names the DNS was handled by the old employer – with the MX records for my surname pointing at Apple, and web forwarded here, and for my forename it was all just web and email forwarding.

I hadn’t realised they disabled email forwarding some time ago – I’m not even sure how I noticed, but it prompted one of those far too late at night rabbit holes. Things I’ve not thought about for years if not decades – A records, CNAME records, MX records, name servers – all came flooding back as I belligerently decided to transfer these last little remnants and sever all ties, to a host with less restrictive offerings.

If nothing else it’s made me update all the registrant details for the domains, spread between at least three former addresses – haha! And so far I seem to have managed to get everything pointing in the right direction, without utterly destroying my live email account too. Which is a bonus!

But yeah, it felt kinda weird to have formally severed any relationship with that first foray into gainful employment – even if nobody at the company from the office workers to the owners are probably in any way related to the folk I worked with an for!

Categories: Blog | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Tell it to the birds..

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Alan

I’ve been periodically glancing blogward and feeling an urge to update it, without much inspiration for meaningful content (ha, how would that change my infrequent musings – I hear you say!). So tonight I logged on and with the help of a quick search I realised I never mentioned the wonder of Quaker parrots on here. Which is dreadfully remiss. Having returned to this paragraph having been writing for a while, this has turned into a bloody dissertation – I do apologise!

Paz, already an old lady by now, on a play date with Lloyd and Frankie

Like most things in life for someone who rarely has a plan or goal, my introduction to them was completely accidental! I’m sure I’ve mentioned my cockatiels on here, sadly they’ve long since passed away. As a child I first encountered a cockatiel at a house my Dad was doing some work at over the weekends, he was called Matey and we were smitten with him. We’d had pet budgies at home so were already definitely pet bird aficionados.

A birthday or two later my brother Rich received a cockatiel he called Paz, my childhood forays into cockatiel ownership was a bit more fraught – we rescued an untamed one I called Archie. Despite trying to utilise the hand-reared Paz and lots of patience and treats, Archie was not keen on the idea of being tamed – and when something spooked him to the point that she nearly savaged Paz to death in a fight we opted to re-home him to an aviary to let her be wild, where she thrived.

Undeterred I was treated to a hand-reared freshly weaned cockatiel, a beautiful pearl little bird I called Klaw (this so far is a lesson in the miss-more-than-hit process of letting children name their pets I guess!). He was awesome, I remember banning my Dad from spending too much with him to avoid him bonding with him which Paz had done, haha. Sadly, he succumbed quite soon to some kind of congenital illness, worst of all after he’d passed away Paz started showing symptoms too but thankfully recovered.

Lloydie!

Fast forward to adulthood, freshly graduated and working and buying my first house (that said, before that whilst still renting Rich moved in with Paz for a while, still going strong!), one of the first things I did was buy myself a cockatiel. Lloyd was another pearl mutation, who turned out to be a she – and Frankie arrived soon after, another girl – a present from my then partner. A couple of years later we added a third, Phoebe.

Shortly after that relationship broke down, Phoebe – in echoes of Klaw – picked up some kind of illness. Now armed with the internet and more readily available avian veterinarians I spent a fortune trying to get her well, but alas she wasn’t strong enough. Frankie had bonded with Phoebe and was terribly impacted, since Lloyd had clearly bonded with me from being my only bird she never really showed much interest in Frankie, bless her.

Phoebe – doing her best Bruce Forsyth impression!

The silver lining was Frankie became more tame with me, particularly if she went through a spate of egg laying! After buying the a new house after the break-up, it was me, Lloyd and Frankie living happily with the neighbours cats looking at them through the patio doors. Lloyd had a few medical issues along the way, including egg-binding which my network of avian vets were able to resolve. But one day unexpectedly on returning home I found her at the bottom of her cage. I was devastated.

Frankie

Which left me and Frankie. I think we got through the loss together, she became much more fully tame and wanted to spend all her time with me – which made it much easier! I decided that since I go to work, and do leave the house on occasion I should look at getting her a companion of her own kind again – however, I didn’t want to inflict a young rambunctious baby on her – partly because it would probably annoy her, and also in a more macabre sense I’d just repeat the problem as it’s likely the young ‘un would outlive her considerably.

So I turned to rescues – which, frankly, is what in good conscience any aspiring bird-keeper should do – I was pretty ignorant to that in my formative forays into parrot-keeping. I registered for a load of them, one in particular was really communicative and did a home-check. They briefly suggested I ‘safehouse’ an Amazon but I had been really clear I was looking for an older cockatiel where maybe the owner had passed away, or had fallen out of favour for some other reason.

Then the lady who’d home checked me got in touch – she’d hand-reared a Quaker parrot that had been rejected by its mother, it was incredibly tame and playful but unfortunately her son had an allergic reaction to its feathers. Perhaps foolishly I arranged to go and see it. Rook was an absolute delight, a powder blue tiny bundle of chaos, playfulness and affection – frankly, the temptation was too strong and he came home with me. He was respectful of Frankie mostly, but certainly the two of them showed no interest in one another once his quarantine period upstairs was over, except for stealing each others’ food!

Rook – little blue bundle of chaos

So that plan didn’t really work, did it? It was okay though – with scheduled out time and Rook’s contentment to play on his stand, Frankie still had plenty of me-time, Then the lesson in patience manifest – another rescue reached out, they’d got a gentle 20 year old cockatiel called Bill (Frankie was 18 or 19 by this point). His owner had passed away, their family had good intentions and took him on but neglected him over time, he ended up in a room on his own, more often than not covered up. Exactly what I was looking for when I first started the search.

I visited Bill and brought him home the same day – he was a nervous but lovely boy, he liked to fold the paper at the bottom of his cage, and he had a nice sing song. I sited his (awful) cage next to Frankie’s and let them case each other out. Frankie was fascinated, rather than sit with me she’d sit like a sentinel on Bill’s cage, eventually getting in there with him largely to steal his food. This process lasted a few weeks but eventually they both decided to ‘move in’ together in Frankie’s much nicer cage – perfect solution!

Gentle Bill – such a lovely little soul

Rook meanwhile was really only interested in human interaction – which is good as he had a much more powerful beak than the tiels! His story was to end in tragedy too though, sadly. After showing symptoms of ill-health I took him straight to the avian vet, tests revealed not very much, but armed with formula I tried to build his strength and get him well. I’d thought we’d had a good day, I was feeding him a pomegranate seed before bed time (his favourite snack), he said ‘Whatcha got?’ – he’d hardly been talking whilst ill – but alas, I found him on the bottom of the cage the next morning.

Bill, Rook and Frankie could co-exist in an uneasy truce!

That hit me hard. He should’ve had a lifespan sufficient so that we could’ve retired together as a pair of grumpy old men. He was so much fun, a lovely little soul who adored my girlfriend as much as me – he was a really big loss. Foolishly I went to work that day, It was my introduction to Quaker parrots – my first love will always be the peaceful souls that cockatiels are, but it’s hard not to be intoxicated by the agents of chaos that are Quaker parrots.

My logic-chip kicked in at this point – I had two older tiels, Frankie had had considerable veterinary issues – including a hysterectomy – I used to joke she was probably the most expensive cockatiel in the world with her ongoing veterinary care. Bill I knew less about his history but he’d not got the best diet and whilst I improved it it was with limited success – it was likely they’d both have a few years left max so I’d see that out and then perhaps take a break from the emotional rollercoaster of caring for these amazing creatures.

A year or so later Bill started to show swelling, I took him to the vet who had to sedate him to x-ray him – she found fluids in his abdomen which she was able to drain, but it also showed his internal organs weren’t in great shape. Bill came home much more comfortable, but needed a follow-up appointment for further tests, and unfortunately the gentle little man didn’t pull through the sedation this time, he passed away on the table.

I took him home so that Frankie could see what happened – conscious that she never got to see what happened to Phoebe, unlike with Lloyd and Rook. I like to think, perhaps foolishly, it helped her to realise what had happened. I resolved to myself that at this point it would be Frankie and me now, the dice-roll of introducing another bird too open to going wrong, and also Frankie had ongoing medical issues (she was basically on the pill to suppress egg production since she only had half a reproductive system!).

Sonic (Boom)

But of course, as mentioned above, I don’t thrive at planning or goal-setting! We are in the midst of lockdown thanks to Covid-19 – the Facebook page that I’d set up for Rook initially, which had been taken over by Frankie and Bill, received a message from a lady who had – guess what – a Quaker parrot, powder-blue no less, who needed a home. Sonic was bonded to her husband who was about to be away on tour with the armed forces and she felt it wasn’t fair, and having seen Rook’s shenanigans she thought she’d found the perfect home.

I was reticent, then I saw the pictures and videos. Sonic was about one and a half, the age Rook was when he passed away roughly – I arranged a not inconsiderable road trip to see him (okay, her – I’ve since had her sex-tested!) probably flouting the rules at the time for necessary travel. Sonic is also a delight, tame as you like – we got on brilliantly from the off. Obviously she came home with me, much to Frankie’s chagrin (you could almost see the look on her face: “Why have you brought another one of those back with you?”

Sonic looks just like Rook, she has a little more grey in her wings. She’s just as tame and can also talk, when she first arrive she used to enjoy throwing toys on the floor and laughing – she doesn’t laugh so much any more, and unlike Rook is a reluctant talker. She has a huge vocabulary, but you only hear her talking either when she’s in her cage chilling out, or if we take a shower together. She’s much more affectionate and loves to be petted – whereas Rook was a real monster for playing.

This was one of the prompts to get her DNA tested for sex – I wondered if these quite strikingly different personality traits meant she was female. I was right! It doesn’t make any difference to me, but it’s good to know to watch out for issues like egg-binding. Just like Rook, Sonic didn’t really bother with Frankie and vice versa – I always supervised them when out together and gave Frankie extra time out without the blue menace and things worked well.

Frankie had started to have seizures which was alarming, back to the vet we went, he couldn’t really find a cause but as she visited fairly often for her contraceptive shots, the vet agreed to monitor her. The seizures gradually became more frequent and severe, including instances of coughing up blood – Frankie had showed me numerous times she had a fierce will to live and I’d made a tacit agreement with her that as long as that was the case I’d do everything I could to deal with her health issues.

Unfortunately – still in lockdown – it was becoming so bad, with lockdown easing slightly I was terrified she’d have a particularly bad episode whilst I was at work or out and basically drown to death. I took the desperately difficult call to have her put to sleep at the vet – 20 years of companionship, the soul that kept me sane in alone in lockdown before Sonic arrived. It was a hard decision. I still think it was the right decision. My only regret is that because of the pandemic legislation at the time I wasn’t permitted to be with her at the end, I had to hand her over to a vet in a car park.

Since Sonic showed no real interest in Frankie I didn’t ask to bring her home, instead asked them to arrange a cremation (yes, I do have a little birdy mausoleum of their ashes, I’m that person!). Sonic I suspect was probably happy to have me just to herself, and to be honest, whilst I was reticent to take on another bird when contemplating the demise of my cockatiels, given the timing during the pandemic, having Sonic around really saved me from myself – and she continues to thrive. She’s around five years old now and very well settled in.

She’s very much bonded to me – unsurprisingly, we were stuck together in a house alone during a pandemic! But she’s warmed to my girlfriend who now lives with us, Definitely the case of a happy accident – I might not have initially been looking for Quaker parrots in my life, but I’m sure glad that they arrived. They’re little bipolar bundles of affection, playfulness, song, fun.- and occasional violence! They’re not to be taken lightly, they demand a lot of attention and time – but if you provide that, they’re also so rewarding!

Categories: Blog | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Accidental performer..

Posted on June 13, 2024 by Alan
It’s important to remember to pack the correct bass before a gig…

For somebody with no inherent musical skill – probably as a result of singularly failing to engage with opportunities to learn music at school, something I’d love to have a word with past-Alan about – it’s a bit of a surprise how much musical performance I’ve ended up doing over the last few years.

My first foray was with the Star Copiers – a venture that started with two friends who were learning guitar, a challenge set by a friend organising a festival that saw a fledgling band start along with another friend on vocal duties.

After they’d performed a few times, at another festival a drunken conversation with Mark saw me say something foolish like “you know what you need, someone to sit on one of those box things to keep you in time“, “Good idea!” he said “You’ve got the job – go and buy one of those box things!“

And so it began, I managed to bash my way through the first cheap eBay cajon (and learned what a cajon was called), so bought a more expensive one, visiting a dealer in his warehouse and feeling like a massive fraud – and well, we actually managed to secure some pretty cool gigs for a bunch of mates pissing around covering songs in our own inimitable style. We even recorded a couple of songs and released them into the wild to raise money for St. Giles hospice, even securing a donation in exchange for some t-shirts from the frontman of Alice Donut, the band whose song we covered in tribute to our dear friend Richard.

Along the way I was invited to perform on my box with Ferocious Dog, Nick Parker, Dis-honest Foke, Morganella and a fair few other artists. It’s funny how things escalate from one throwaway comment at a festival, isn’t it?

As the Star Copiers fizzled out, the Car Boot Bandits came to the fore – pretty much the same deal from my point of view, cover versions (and one original song – which I wrote after learning to butcher a few chords on a ukulele), but then Covid-19 landed and it really took the wind out of the band sails, never managing to reconvene after the world closed down for a year and a bit. That said, I did record a song for Pete Drake (another artist I’ve box-banged with!) utilising ukuleles, cajon and some backing vocals from Ella for his Pete Drake Project album under the Car Boots Bandits name, despite the rest of the band not being involved due to lockdown restrictions.

Something submitted jokingly to Radio Nottingham of our only original song saw the local station make some kind of collaboration/mash-up with LadBaby too. I wasn’t sure whether to be honoured or horrified!

Running in parallel with these acts were Darwin’s Rejects – another group of festival friends, but with I think it’s fair to say a more ambitious end-game. Sometimes at festivals we mix-and-matched line-ups on festival open-mic stages, usually under the name of the Egyptian Whores. A couple of times when their percussionist Jim wasn’t available for a gig I was asked to deputise on my box – a real honour and always fun! At this time mostly a cover band too, but with a couple of their own songs in the mix. It made me realise how much I’d missed both the performing aspect of being in a band, but also the camaraderie of rehearsals.

It must have been obvious to everyone else, not least Ella as well as the rest of the Darwin’s (at that time) boys. A plan was hatched. Warren had determined the missing piece for the band’s sound was bass guitar, “you could learn that” he said to me I thought jokingly when we were rehearsing ahead of a gig I was covering for Jim. I didn’t take it too seriously, albeit idly fantasising that this could be a cool idea. Bass is like a fusion of percussion and guitar really after all!

In the background this conversation carried on between Warren and Ella – and on Christmas morning 2022 a lovely rubber stringed bass ukulele was under the tree for me. Okay, I might have got wind of this before Christmas even if I wasn’t permitted to open it before then! I dutifully signed up to some bass resources online and started to methodically try to learn to play, and progressed pretty well – but with gigs mounting up and me trying to learn ‘properly’ rehearsals left me feeling very out of my depth.

So I refocused, I developed a ‘cheat sheet’ template (initially on paper, now on an iPad) and realised that whilst I wouldn’t be a virtuoso I could get away with moving around mostly root notes to add some passable depth to our songs. Initially training myself to move round the fretboard I probably did one note per bar, but then built up to add some different patterns to lock into Jim’s drums. I progressed more quickly – I was on stage within a couple of months for my debut a couple of months from receiving my first bass guitar. Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure.

Since then we’ve been working on more of our own material – I love the collaborative approach, working out what patterns sound best for my parts, I’ve even offered up songs of my own which sates the creative writing dearth as we’re trying to work up enough songs to make up what will be our debut album later this year. The EP we released last year came a little too soon for me to actually play on so whilst I can merrily play those songs now, back then it made more sense for Warren to do it – so from a personal pride point of view I’m excited to actually have my own contributions laid down in recordings.

So yeah, the accidental performer thing seems to be such a recurring theme that it must just be something about me – I absolutely love being on a stage and hopefully contributing to something that people are enjoying. We’ve had some great feedback and I’m really excited about some of the things we’ve been working on that have yet to make it out into the wild – all of this stems back to innocently making a suggestion to Mark all those years ago about the need for a dude sitting on a box keeping time.

In the meantime I now have a choice of two basses – both ukulele sized albeit tuned like.a regular bass guitar, I like the quirkiness and convenience of size, a choice in pedal set ups, an amp – hmm, expensive hobby indeed. That’s what Russ always describes being in a grassroots band as being – and he’s not wrong, haha! But it’s a whole lot of fun!

Categories: Blog, Darwin's Rejects, Ferocious Dog, Music, Videos | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.