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I have no idea whether to be shocked and angry or crush-heartingly saddened. http://i.imgur.com/JcS2H.png 


Also see: http://theinformedvegan.com/post/6824879891/bear-cub-euthanized-for-being-too-friendly-wildlife


I don't think I'm really in the mood to blog anymore right now.  Post-exam blogging catch up will have to wait, I'm afraid.  Sorry - but at least this is up before midnight, eh?

So how about a little peek into my lyric book

A couple of pages from my lyric book

Today doesn't seem like a good time to go through all the Tuesday to-dos that I've missed out on over exams - and I'll be merging that and Friday into a new Sunday feature soon (I think) - so I thought now might be nice to do a small blog about something I'm writing, or, more specifically, how I write.

However, first things first, I think we should all sing a quick happy birthday to Vivatramp which celebrates its first birthday today. Ready?

A happy blah blah

blah you

blah blah

blah you

blah blah blah blah blah,

blah 

Anyway, nice one Bee; I think the speed at which Viva's grown goes some way to showing you really quite how good it is.  It's definitely right up there amongst my favourite blogs and it's pretty easily my favourite personal one.   Anyway, onwaaaaaaaard:

You all know I'm in a band, right?  Well, yeah, I am, and being a little English nut who's keen on poetry and things, I always try and write lyrics when I can (If you have our EP, I did 'E9', 'Enlightenment; Maybe' and 'Black|White' (must improve my titles for songs)).  Jonny sent me a new song out of the blue the other day, so I'm jumping on the opportunity before Ed gets his filthy-but-better mitts on it.

Pretentious, badly written and unhelpful-because-its-a-personal-thing guides are ten-a-penny these days, but this is how I write - not a guide, but an insight into my creative process.
This is what happens when you have a song to write, not when you're inspired; whilst you'd assume I'd hate writing as a task, I often find it works - if I 'have' to write something, it stops me cringing and makes me get on with it.

Going hand in hand with this vague sense of duty, I find I need a song ready for me to write anything well.  You can write as much as you want without music, but that method leaves you rather susceptible to getting just too poetic, or alternatively leaving you with something that bit too hard to fit into a melody.  People aren't listening exclusively for your wordcraft, which might well be great and give depth or feel to a song but won't catch someone's immediate attention - how many songs sound brilliant to belt out but mean nothing at all? Often a few LALAs will suffice.

Second, get yourself some refreshments.  These are totally, absolutely necessary: writing is an excellent excuse to have some chai.

Chai tea and Marmite on toast are musts

 Then get a pen and some paper. Don't use a computer; that sucks the life out of any emotion you are trying to get across, which is kind of the point, right? Get physical, and knuckle down - listen to the song a couple of times on repeat and jot down any thoughts you have / do a mindmap of ideas. Draw a picture, write down some quotes, do a bit of word association or freeform writing. Get stuff down. Next, make a collection of all the words or phrases you might have jotted down in notebooks or on scraps of paper in the past few months (I use my phone's memos) and copy them all down in a page together.  Soon you'll find some recurring themes: that's your head, that is. Don't be afraid of talking about your preoccupations - lyrics or poetry can be a great release.  Although you can run the risk of re-lodging stuff in your mind, I wouldn't worry about anything coming back in my head too much - much due to the fact that I don't sing, but hand lyrics over to Ed.  The fact someone else can be singing something personal, or abstract and open to interpretation, feels like the best release.  If nothing else, hearing anything over and over, whilst writing, rehearsing and recording will make the subject lovely and dull - mundanity, much the subject of the song I'm doing now, can be a great comfort, as well as working wonders for ruining your memory.  All hail the death of good thought!

Some of my books full of notes

Giving vague order to any recurrences you have in your notes is a pretty good next step, after which you should try to fit them vaguely in with any of the stuff you wrote whilst listening to the song earlier.  For melody (I'm really bad at this), you can try and transcribe whatever you have already kicking around in your head, direct from the words you've written, or sit and listen to the song on repeat for ages in an attempt to work one out.  A personal favourite.

I use my glock to write melody (which I'm shit at) 

Fit it all together, go through it a few times, then go and do something else for a few hours. Never get rid of your rough work, whether it's throwing away notes or whatever.  Read/listen again for a quick once-over, before giving what you have the 24 hour rule, and if it's not cringeworthy after that you'll be fineeeee

PING

Got bored of writing towards the end so rushed through, really.  That's all, I'm going to get the song slowed down a bit so it fits a bit more nicely with my lyrics and so it sounds a bit more Wild Beasts-y.  I'll be doing a walking blog catch-up tomorrow, I think.  T'ra!

~

when I've finished these I'll put them here. Shouldn't be too long, though the result'll probably go down like a curry fart in a space suit

My hands are completely covering my eyes

Apologies

...for the lack of walking and friday blogs this week. Again, it's mainly exams, but before I get back into a regular thing I'm going to make this whole thing look lovely and jig around features.  Then I've got holidays until October so I'll spend a while getting my follower count up! I'll do competitions and stuff, I've already thought of an ace one ready for the massive 200 milestone, but that might be a few years yet...

Just here for a few things:

- To say the ace Zoe is nearly at 75 followers and will be doing a comp. soon - follow her so I you get a chance of winning, it's going to be a fab prize

- My brother tried to restart a blog but forgot his password so has a new site HERE where he'll probably do a few half baked rants and tell false anecdotes about me, like he does on Twitter. Follow him anyway, might be a laugh right?

- Fucking hell, Bee has over 700 followers, what a turd, I've only got 12

- I CUT MY BLOODY FRINGE OFF I HAVE LIKE NO HAIR

Before

After


...haha, the before picture looks like Stephen Fry


Also last night I saw The October Game again, and each time I do they get that little bit more amazing (and check out their new project here, which is properly mentally ace).  If I won the lottery tomorrow (which'd be miraculous, I don't enter) I'd put on the following gig:

Biffy Clyro
Manchester Orchestra
The October Game
There Were Bears
Spiked

- which would be fucking amazing.  Righto, I'm going to go and listen to Beach Boys records and make terminology revision cards for English now - go away.

Tuesday to-do #4

 -   warning, a very self-y post   -

Evening all, a return to regular blogging today for me!  Sorry this wasn't posted earlier, I've been very busy doing nothing at all, it's such great fun.  I haven't even finished my exams yet but RS is over so I've been having a great time just vegging out a bit, playing football with my brother, watching Sherlock, eating shortbread and rediscovering how superb this is. It's a short one-man play which I saw partly performed at Latitude last year.  It's poetic drama, and it's really really good.  It's by Inua Ellams, who I really cannot recommend enough.

Anyway, that aside, how have I done with the last targets I bothered setting myself, a couple of weeks back?  Well:

REVISE - yup, a fair amount
Do some walking in time for tomorrow's blog - yup, that was alright in the end
Read all you lovely beings' blogs - YES, I've been a good boy and starting reading my entire reading list and I'm very glad

Do some serious book reading - meh, started this (the Ishiguro) again and intend to get around to finishing it this time. Also read a couple more chapters of David Nobbs' excellent autobiography and looked at a few poems.  I really like Jean Ingelow; plus the Milton book's quite cool because it's got a few retro ads on/in it. 

                     
Book a haircut - not booked properly, but my friend Alice's mum, who's doing a college course in it at the moment, is going to lop off all of my luscious but lengthy locks for me at some point in the week, because I'm bored of my fringe.  DISASTER for my rep.  Before and, hopefully, after'll be something like this.  Approve?
Write my blogs before midnight - done!

Lovely.

Short one today before I'm back into the full swing of things, might do some one-off posts with thoughts from when I've been away (rather than lumber them here in one massive, unreadable chunk) over the next couple of weeks, if I can be bothered.  Probably not.  I'm off to begin to learn this then get bored of and watch some more Sherlock.  I'll be back soon and raving about Bee if she puts up her essay about the correlation between Harry Potter and Nazi Germany up on her superb little interweb space.  My kinda thing.

P.S. I hate putting pics in, they never work for me, wish they just did drop and drag.  Grrrrrrrrrr

So how about that Nicola Roberts, then?

Old man verdict - I can scarcely hear above that electronic racket
Young indie teen - not bad, not bad
Current indie'n'Gaga Jamie - really really good, almost at 'amazing' level. Mildly rubbish video, tho'

These are my views on Nicola Roberts' new single, Beat of My Drum.  They're hardly secret, and I waxed lyrical about it on twitter when I first heard it, but I just wanted an excuse to put up this video of my brother Andrew and myself doing a bit of an owl-ey cover, inspired by And's friend Taylor giving him her drawing of an owl in a suit.  It's lovely and a little bit jubbly.  Excuse my incest joke at the end.

For something completely different, the majority of you will probably like this a lot more.  The band's called Daughter, and the EP sounds quality.

Also Bee did her vlog, which is amazing.  And I got her to talk about Nazis.  My favourite bit is when my stupid question confuses her and she says she would listen to music if it came in the form of 'a cake made of shit'.

That is all; I am meant to be revising now... I'll come back on, probably, Tuesday, but Friday the 24th's my last exam, so I might do a blog party - Zoe's idea, with a post every hour, and guest bloggers - or a vlog the following Saturday.  Something special to get all my thoughts over the past few weeks in without making a really stupidly long attention-losing post, and then I'll readjust the features schedule to get more blogging in in the absence of school commitments so to try and get my follower count up a bit and have a bit more fun with it here.  Might sort out my background and stuff too - let me know your thoughts, I'll be back soon to chat away, this paragraph's grown a bit long so I'm going to cut myself off here


P.S. so Gabriel Duquette who is ace mentioned me on his walking blog, big win

So, how about... Milky

Evening all, further to my current internet silence I'm going to have to go back on myself and say I'm not going to tweet OR blog till after exams, given how hard I'm finding it to concentrate on it.  History on Friday should be alright, if I can stay focussed for two hours, aiming for an A* in that; RS on Monday is a terrifying prospect which not only requires me to learn the entire large syllabus rather than falling asleep or playing FIFA like the past two days but to keep focus for three whole hours.  Those of you that know me will get how hard it can be to get me shut up, let alone properly concentrate.  If I'm successful I'll have dragged my essays from a year's worth of Es to a C.

In hindsight it was pretty bad timing starting a blog just now, and I feel a bit silly in that I've just started to get some followers and comments before I take a couple of week's enforced break.  I just do quite long, time-consuming writing, to my own detriment, and I really really really want to get into uni.  I might not take up my insurance offer if I only get into that, either, which is how much I've been looking forward to it.

I've also lost about five followers on twitter, and to my horror when I looked at who follows me the top of the list are bots, so I must have lost like ten real people to be replaced with rubbish like @strangeinews and @iheartcharlotte (Gainsbourg).  You guys are all so ruthless with your follows! I approve but feel strangely bad about it.  My twitter and blog is all I've got to make me feel I have a voice which is at least vaguely listened to.

So yeah, I figure this is another thing I can cut out of a busy-ish routine and another vice which'll stop making FIFA look so acceptable in my mind's eye.  As you can see what was originally intended to be a quick paragraph has morphed into a full post (must ruthlessly self-edit), so it might well be a sensible decision to stop this.  Not that waffling bodes well in exams for someone with my terribly slow handwriting.

Loads of good, interesting, thoughts occurred to me this week.  But you won't hear them here, so may I present...

So, err, Milky.  WHAT A LAD

That is all, I'll see you all soon; I might do a touch of light blogging next week, post-Monday, but 24th is my last exam so after that this blog is going to be, as my philosophy teacher described ancient Greece, party central (without the free-for-all anal sex to which she was referring (don't blame her, blame OCR)).  I'll be back with a relative-to-this-blog bang, so maybe just a picture of a zebra or something.  That might be cool.  Or a video blog.  Bee, you good for that?

Sorry, in-jokes on public blog.  Bad.  Thanks for a couple of blog plugs to the lovely Zoe - who's particularly ace - and see you on the other side!

Friday - recommendations #3

I am writing this week's recommendations on the back of a really good mood.  I've done a bit of revision today, played a good bit of footie with Andrew in the garden and right now we're listening to Blur and Janelle Monáe.  A good brother day, particularly when I've just seen how cool his twitter background is. 


Brilliant blogging:
Bee's day sounds AMAZING.  I'd love that.  Though I must admit that, on first read, "I usually stir just before 10am when I'm having a naughty fuck-the-alarm-i-want-sleep day at Luke's" sounded a bit T.M.I....
Zoe is an excellent excellent person who I've met through blogging.  SHE IS REALLY COOL, as this post about a car boot shows.
This picture is pretty nice. Pop pop portraits are always lovely, though.
A good feminist critique of The King Blues.
Celeste's lovely pictures.  I want to work in that bookshop!
Andrea's version of this post.  It's probably much better.
Arseblog's fantastic Wednesday
A must read for any Arsenal fan,  the ever-excellent Swiss Ramble on the finances of The Arsenal
I totally get what this is saying. Goood blog. 

Franzen on technology
Wealth and income distribution in America (much more interesting than I'm making this sound)  



Other superb stuff:
Gemma brought this to my attention. It's ace, man 
Beat of My Drum, Nicola Roberts' new single. It's amazing (but only after the third listen, really).
Footie.  I'm loving the weather enabling some good uninterrupted passing drills between myself and my brother haha, just wish renovations to the park near us would get finished so we've got somewhere to play properly.
This interview with Andrey, who's lovely he is. Innie? Innie tho'? Cutie baby Andrey.  Coochie-coo (that was probably unwarranted in respect to that particular interview...)

Another Gemma's verdict of the new Coldplay single.

The video to Elephants, by Warpaint.  All the female members look amazing.

Check out this mental. Upload to my next walking blog? I tweeted fairly extensively on it last night, if you want more info.

Katy Perry breast love 
Finding this a day after my brother was performing the same dance to the family.  Something to tell us, And? 
AMAZING VIDEO OF RAY WINSTONE AND LIGHTNING AND ROSES.  So weird but excellent
St Vincent covering Kerosene. I know I've said it before, but I don't care, it's fantastic. AND SHE'S GOT A NEW ALBUM COMING OUT (':

Finding my craptastic old band on the web. 

Good song.  Excellent coloured vinyl. 

New Statesman taking the Daily Mail biscuit with site search Top Trumps  

Marie saying I look like @JosephMillson. C O M P L I M E N T

This

Japan's elderly are volunteering to work at Fukushima, saying they won't have to worry about long term cancer effects 

Hilarious 

The 21st Century Arsenal chants hashtag 

Arsenal players trying to speak Chinese. Obviously Le Prof could manage it. 

Johann Hari's article here being followed, a few days after, by this news. If there was any doubt before (there wasn't); Cameron, you are an arse. 

Also Hari, this interview of him.  Almost everything - and I only use 'almost' because I cannot remember the entire thing - is exactly what you should know.
I am shocked at how much I crave the vinyl bundle for Copy Haho's album - how good is that? 

Young Arsenal goalkeeper Emi Martínez on being selected for Argentina: "I thought f**k. This is big news. I will not waste this chance."

*sigh* - Epic Meal Time. Amazing.

Failure of sleep due to 1 2 3 

HEY GUYS! HEY! HEY! - I am also into all of this stuff  

The song Bear Hug on this is immense

BRILLIANT - FOTC chords and lyrics are on their website.  Perfect.

Too jealous. I aim for this in life.

Everyone going batshit crazy over Paul Scholes - "Paul Scholes has tallied 33 Premier League assists during his brilliant career" - mate, Fabregas has 80. And he's only 24. 

__

Sorry, not a massively interesting post, got revision and things, but hopefully some of these links will keep you occupied for a bit if you fancy a spot of light cunctation anytime.

Cheerio chaps, cheerio goodbye

@jamieeelaing

Walking #3

I've done very little walking this week, if we consider that LOADS of what I have done was drunk or in darkness so I couldn't take pictures or make sensible observations.  So I thought I'd take a detour on the way back from revision session today so I had something to write here...

LAST MAP

CURRENT MAP


I wasn't thinking much on my small walk today, just trying to remember where I had been this week when drunk, plus a small bit of mental history revision, and feeling really hot in my jumper on a sunny day. Pictures:

Check out this straw motorbike dude

 'check' out this car

 I want a row of trees in my front garden

 Some really nice roses

 One of the very busy (probably old people's) gardens in LGC

 Trevor's a plant?

 This hedge is massive but very well trimmed

I don't think Cartref is a very good name for a house

 Chimney arches are super cool

 Every house should have two massive trees in front of it

 Can you see the fountain? It looks rubbish on full zoom but the entire alleyway was shining

Keep away from religion, kids. It's bad and causes amazing amounts of problems.

 Took about 20 attempts to get a picture of this which you could read.  This is rubbish but will have to do. ANYWAY, it's a good name

 Stump. Ha

 I always walk past this sign and find it hilarious.  Isn't it jokes? I'll paraphrase: "Do YOU have no faith? But quite like the ritual? Come here - it's great, we start at 11, you don't have to get up early!"
What's the point?
I don't like organised religion.

 This is a really quaint house.

 I had to go home after walking past this because my hayfever went MENTAL. Bloody garden cities.

 I wish the builders would hurry up, I want my park back.  Nowhere to play football!

This. WHO would make an alright car look like this?

 I approve of allotments (apologies for rushed photo, there was someone working on her vegetables and I didn't want to look creepy taking pictures of her)

 Kids in Letchy think they're hard doing this, but they're really not.  There's another untouched one just the other side of the road, silly vandals

This is my absolute favourite house in Letchworth.  IT HAS EYEBROWS, MAN. FUCKING EYEBROWS


Thanks for reading!  I think this feature may need to be replaced next week, given I have exams on friday and the following monday, so I might take pictures if my room and show you around, or something. Any suggestions?

Tuesday to-do #3

REVISION
REVISION
REVISION
BLAH BLAH BLAH PROCRASTINATE CUNCTATE BLAH*

A bit more, in brief:
That's the majority of my week for you. Anyway, evenin' and welcome to another pretty-much-compulsory-to-be-late edition of my Tuesday series.  Despite the above summary, I did do quite a bit of actually fun stuff this week - starting with bowling, straight after last week's post. I got 148, which beat Simon. Happy about that. Also went to a party on fri and then had a load of lovely drunken chats, particularly, as ever, with Alice, then stayed at Richard's until 4am.  Then on Sunday we got Guitar Hero/ The Beatles Rockband (surprisingly not presents for ANDREW'S BIRTHDAY which was that day but a nice augmentation to it).  I was well pleased with my present-buying skills for once.  Then today I went into school for half term - late, of course - then had a pub lunch with Nanny and saw Grandad in hospital.

Phew, we whizzed through that, didn't we?

Right, onwards...

Something actually interesting // a bit of juicy gossip:
I am arrogant beyond words, pretentious, shit at apologising, a prick.  I did write a large, interesting section about this bit but after some excellent Marie advice you'll only get this much.  Sorry guys - but who knows, maybe the email subscribe sent out the original and you'll be lucky to see a bit of gossip.  Could make things awkward for those who know both sides of the thing, ignorance is always easier. Basically I find it a little funny but overall I couldn't care less, which surprises me... didn't know I was such a knob...

Plan for the week:
Tomorrow: revision at school
Saturday: maybe go down to Strawberry Fair
Otherwise: Loads of revision. Dull as fuck, my life. Bad time to start a blog, really...

Targets for the week:
REVISE
Do some walking in time for tomorrow's blog
Read all you lovely beings' blogs
Do some serious book reading
Book a haircut
Write my blogs before midnight


I'm very tired. It's now quite late and I need to be in school tomorrow morning.  Sleep well x

__


*applies to both revision and writing this post and anything else useful and constructive