[	Tags	|	james dean bradfield, kylie, tony richardson	]
[	Current Mood	|	exhausted	]
[	Current Music	|	Kylie - ' Some Kind Of Bliss'	]

Those who know us will be aware of the long hard slog we have had making PB's orbit up here on the edge of nowhere into a successful venture. It's coming up to eight years now in business proper grown up stylee and finally it looks to be paying off. Despite having many extra headaches due to our location (next day delivery being impossible, no proper internet connection, 'nipping out' for supplies taking four hours round trip), we reckon it's the calmness and stillness up here that has kept us on the straight and narrow. 
At present if you are waiting on an order please be patient, any significant periods of sleep (ie over 2 hours) have been foregone until we clear this massive workload and we are looking into the possibilities regarding some kind of slave labour/Highland sweatshop if it continues on this level. Also, big apologies to Lindsay and Hannah, our new Glasgow reps who are twiddling their thumbs awaiting goodies. Promise you girls, they're on their way.
New stuff to go on the shoppe which we will get around to, including some cool car decals - like a tattoo for your vehicle! Will post some pics soonsome. Looks like we have found a new model too, so garments aplenty to sell for the Summer.
Through the caffeine haze yesterday our day was made by catching the great  'lost' Kylie single, 'Some Kind Of Bliss', penned by James Dean Bradfield and swept under the carpet of the Stalinist Kylie machine (see its omission from her 'Greatest Hits' collection) for being her wierd indie failure. This tune invokes happy memories and will not be airbrushed from our history.  Also, 'The Loved One'   was on in the wee small hours, another 'lost' classic from Tony Richardson which is only let down by being about an hour too long, but was a delight to see again. 
Anyroadup, orders to do - these slaves won't whip themselves, y'know...

[	Current Mood	|	cold	]
[	Current Music	|	The Long Blondes - 'Round The Hairpin'	]

Newcastle wears its history on its sleeve. It's probably the geography of it, with the city tumbling down at speed towards the quayside, that highlights this. You can see where the old Newcastle snaked its lumpy bumpy way to the water, and then when the industrial revolution strode into town waving its cock about it didn't have time to figure out how it was going to get around it all, so it went over the top. There are parts of town that feel like a redbrick and iron cuckoo has long since nudged the little bird from the nest, leaving its rickety offspring to fight for the scraps. Big iron legs of railway bridges stand askance cowering buildings that were literally built over. Little archways are towered over by vast Victorian expanses that puff out their chests for queen and country. It's all quite intriguing and we wish we could have explored that little bit more. When we say that we of course mean got lost less....
 
Went to the Baltic and enjoyed particularly the exhibitions by Barry Mcgee (Graffiti, geometry, 1950s comics - what's not to love?) and Mark Titchner ('1984' esque advertising propaganda with hypnotic psychedelic eye). One of his pieces can be seen enormostylee on the side of the gallery.   


We also love the stairs at The Baltic - we come over all Jimmy Stewart... no sniggering at the back.
 


     

Back up North in a day and a half and, although certain elements have grated as they always do we haven't quite got pig sick of suburban England-shire just yet. Give it another day and a half though...
Newcastle was great - will go into that in more depth when we can upload pictures. Visited the quayside, the Baltic, the Sage and all that - will post the pics soon. One highlight was Sagawa, a charming Japanese restaurant which confirmed to us that all pubs should ditch pork scratchings and peanuts obscuring Page 3 stunnas and serve edamame - steamed soya beans in their pods with a sprinklng of salt - instead. The perfect accompaniment for a pint.
Lincoln has changed - although so have we. We have been avoiding some old haunts on purpose to avoid stirring up old memories, so perhaps we've been seeking out new ones. Pimento Tea Rooms on Steep Hill was a welcome newbie today, a lovely veggie eaterie that serve great cakes and nice tea too. 
Nicola was a sight for sore eyes - she's officially our oldest friend after we bonded *cough cough* years ago in a newsagent over Morrissey. It was great to get together with her, her blokie Nick and lovely daughter Holly. We don't have many friends but we do miss those that we do have.
We don't have much to say tonight - just a collection of words in a sensible order - but there are things to commit to screen which will have to wait until we are suitably engaged to do so... until then, underwhelmed readers....      

  

[	Current Location	|	Lincoln	]
[	Current Mood	|	relaxed	]
[	Current Music	|	The Yardbirds - 'Over Under Sideways Down'	]

So here we are on a Southerly sojourn. We find ourselves orbiting Lincoln, place of our nascence, and experiencing the mixed emotions that come with it. On the one hand we love pavements and streetlights and shops and architecture and actual broadband that works and stuff, but then we look out at the cloyingly ordered lines and curves of suburbia and remember that we had to make our own romance from it. The rain comes down and makes puddles and runs away down the drain in the grey street. It only becomes a network of interlacing loves and sorrows all washed by bitter raindrops dappling glowing orange pools because we're walking along it dressed to the nines with a Scott Walker song in our head. Contrast that with the first part of our journey from Tongue to Lairg yesterday with the sky blue, sharp and crystalline, the Winter sun making the snow glitter like a carpet of a billion billion diamelles. There were icicle sculptures, gatherings of curious deer and air so clean and clear that it crackled in our throat. The magic doesn't need spinning - it's everywhere. We know that sounds like hippy bullshit, but it's the dichotomy of emotion we are living. Amongst that glorious Winter loveliness the only thing that would make it any more perfect would be a magic Northern Line station that existed just for us, one stop up from Tufnell Park. 
You see we love cities, but we're also anti-corporate and irritably misanthropist to boot, so it's a delicate love/hate relationship. We're here to get a fix, but we'll be back up North by next weekend because we know we will have had a gutful by then.

In the meantime we will be spending what we are hoping to be an enjoyable couple of days of art, good food, culture, vintage clothes shopping and cocktail debauchery in Newcastle. If anyone can give us any tips of places to go and people to see on our weekend it would be much appreciated.
 

[	Current Mood	|	cold	]
[	Current Music	|	David Bowie - 'Sound & Vision'	]

There is a new short story posted on the Planet Boo Myspace blog thingie... if you are at all interested it is here >>> 

 http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&Mytoken=78D1F2B6-A7C1-4307-B32413EF87C855FE61537608

That is all....

[	Current Mood	|	contemplative	]
[	Current Music	|	Sons & Daughters - 'Darling'	]

Quite regularly we do little jobs for people for birthday celebrations or hen/stag dos involving producing badges with photos of a subject as a child, or with an alarming 80s haircut - you get the idea. We are in the midst of one such job now, scanning a thick pile of photos in varying degrees of fadedness which chronicle one woman's journey from childhood to impending hen night. We always get mixed feelings doing these jobs - quite honoured, for instance, that these memories are entrusted to us and in return we get to contribute to a happy occasion. At the same time the air is imbued with a wistful melancholy as we reach back into the aether of a stranger's past, track the line of a parallel life... it sometimes makes one feel overwhelmed at the size of it all - billions of people, all with a different story, all with their own little chunk in time, a life intersecting with other lives and other timelines but in its own way private and unique. Of course we have to let that feeling pass and return to our usual whelmed state again in order to finish the job... pictures to print, badges to press, post to catch, hen parties to help, other lives to contribute to in some tiny, barely noticeable way. 

Snow came on Sunday night. Remnants lie around, crunchy with frost this morning. Yesterday at this time the view from Boo was this -

Soon afterwards big sticky flakes had covered over the window completely and the whirled was white and cold. Spring is reticent up here, it knows not to get ahead of itself - any daffs daft enough to show their face yet will be obliterated by gales and 'lambing snow'. That's fine though, at least we're still having something like seasons, unlike the rest of the UK which seems to just get bits of weather at random, like the days of the year were thrown up in the air by David Bowie and reassembled in the order they landed. 
           

[	Current Mood	|	cold	]
[	Current Music	|	Momus - 'The Complete History Of Sexual Jealousy (Parts 17-24)'	]

It's always twenty past twelve. 

The sky is a curious off-grey through the Boo skylight. It must be pregnant with snow. We wrote about the taste of snow today, how it's  all at once like lemon sorbet and a cut lip and cracked pepper, but at the same time none of those things.

PB has been a swirling morass lately, just as the sky is about to be. There's work on many levels - the treadmill stuff that keeps us in orbit, then the creamy stuff that is making things that little bit easier year on year and means we can think about things like getting some curtains up at the bedroom window... after ten years perhaps the time may have arrived. Finally, there's all the other stuff that needs to find a way out and bubbles under the surface more than ever at times prefixed with 'new'. This all being this, we are having to channel a few minutes of energy to force an entry out , in the interests of  a stilted continuity. Here it is.

New stuff will be on the Boo shoppe very soon - we were photographing bags and purses and some other gubbins earlier, and a new section, 'Boo vintage' will come when we get it done. 

If anyone in the area of our Highland orbit is reading this, by the way, we are looking for new models. Ben, Chloe and Sophie have relocated en masse to NathanBarleyland, so to them we say, "THE BEST OF LUCK!" ... can anyone tell us if the happy bloke that  used to shout that at everyone in Camden Sainsburys is still about, whilst we are on the subject of London and stuff?

 Hey ho, let's go. Will be back with something coherent soonsome, we promise, like.

[	Current Mood	|	cold	]
[	Current Music	|	Reparata & The Delrons - 'The Captain Of Your Ship'	]

Much as we'd like to think we will soon have an oak panelled library with the carefully collected boo book collection displayed from floor to ceiling, our current situation is our bookcases in this little crofters' cottage are creaking and literature is spilling out all over the place. So, brutality it has to be and the second annual book cull is upon us. Not quite a 'Fahrenheit 451'   situation, we are trying to rehome the little blighters through Amazon... so if you are at all interested, the unlucky bookies (plus the odd CD, record, vidio etc) are here -  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/shops/index.html?ie=UTF8&sellerID=A2A3QBEAL59JH9 - if you can give one a happy place amongst friends we would be grateful.

[	Current Mood	|	hopeful	]
[	Current Music	|	Stars - 'He Lied About Death'	]

It has been a large swathe of Earthtime since the last Boopost, and humble apologies for this, if anyone has missed us, which is doubtful, but hey, one never knows. As November rumbled truculently into December into the Christmas miasma of of Sardinapalian excess the work piled up and it all became a bit of a snowstorm of time - and indeed snow.

This is actually not much snow at all, but the picture is pleasing. Snow's come a couple of times but gone just as quickly. Last Thursday was shaping up nastily, but nothing came of it. No proper Winters for the last three or four years now. 

Some points which occurred in the interim are transferred from the Boo notebook below...

Solstice... Perhaps it's losing that childlike wonder at Christmas and all it's fake fripperies, or being so far North and so close to the elements, but the Winter Solstice is becoming more of an anticipated event than it's more popular near neighbour on the calendar. Not in a Pagan way, mind - we just look forward to experiencing the shortest day, it's uniqueness actually quite tangible, especially if the conditions are right. This Solstice enjoyed perfect clarity, a crisp, still day allowing us to trace the meagre arc of the sun as it stumbled out from behind Ben Loyal at around 10am. It looked like a smudge of chalk on the frosty sky and was barely able to navigate the mountain's peak before fizzling into a dark orange horizon barely into mid afternoon. Days are noticeably longer already.   
Christmas trees... they started the harvest in the last week of October up here - if you bought a real tree in the UK this year there is a good chance it may have come up here. If you end up with a carpet infested with dry needles come January 6th it is because you are harbouring a thing that was living nine weeks hence. If something is dead for nine weeks it kind of needs to be decomposing and becoming some other thing. It's the way of the universe, and no amount of reflective baubles will disguise the fact. 
Sales... just seem a bit obscene. It's the capitalist equivalent of a dog gorging itself on a big dinner, throwing up and then hungrily polishing off the pile of vomit. There will not be a Planet Boo sale - quite the opposite, in fact. The arteries of trade are furry and need a detox.
Time travel... Our (very basic, admittedly) understanding of Einstein's law of Special Relativity led us to thinking that if in the future a pair of identical twin sisters, born on the same day, are split by one exploring the stars and the other staying on Earth, when the explorer (having travelled at an average of half the speed of light) returns ten years later she will be five years younger than her sister. 
Canada... What is it like? Has anyone lived there? Good and bad points please.

More thoughts as and when they regurgitate.

   

[

Current Mood

|

working

]

From chapter 3 of 'Everything'.....

Fire is an honest leveller – it destroys the homes of rich and poor alike. Man’s mastery and enslavement of the flame has made us kings of this world. In the main fire is complicit with this power brokerage and has been the willing workhorse and sometime hitman with little question. Of course sometimes it needs to teach man a lesson as to who is really in charge.

^{On November 5th people in Britain get together to be dishonest around a fire, just to commemorate the time humanity’s honest relationship with this particular element began to diverge. Fire has nothing to hide, never has, never will, but the hairless ape?}

Now we have learned as a species to keep fire on a leash, caged - a dangerous working animal. We are taught to fear it and be wary of its power when untethered; but that temptation is always there, that primal urge that tells us to jump from the edge of railway platforms is the same one that makes us want to start fires. Once every so often, just so we don’t jump in front of trains, we sate that urge and find a flimsy excuse to light the biggest fire we possibly can.

In 1605 the new king of England, James I, was disliked and mistrusted by the populace - in modern Yankophile parlance we would say his approval rating was at an all time low. Then on 5th November of that year Robert Cecil, the king’s spin doctor proclaimed, "It has pleased God to uncover a plot to kill the King, Queen, Prince and the most important men of the land by secretly putting gunpowder into a cellar under Parliament and blowing them all up at once." Soon the tide began to turn – Catholic ‘terrorists’ like Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators became the common enemy for the country to unite against. There’s nothing like a bunch of bearded folk worshipping at a different altar to raise the collective ire. Fawkes was hanged before his guts were cut out and burnt, then beheaded and cut into four pieces. A surgical strike at the heart of the nation’s evil foe.

The thing was though, Fawkes was set up. He was never the leader of a plot, just a flunky who became an unfortunate scapegoat and unwittingly a poster child for sectarian propaganda. Fawkes was just a roadie, setting things up – the planned explosion wasn’t due for another twelve hours. The king was never in any danger, especially as his guards had been tipped off and were lying in wait. It all worked like a dream though – as the Malvinas did for Thatcher many years later, the gunpowder plot made sure James I’s approval rating went through the roof. It didn’t end there though. ‘Remember, remember, the fifth of November; gunpowder, treason and plot.’ What a catchy slogan. Spin is not a modern phenomenon. So it was that nearly four hundred years after one of the greatest propaganda coups in human history that we all gathered in a Lincolnshire field to celebrate the joyful burning of Catholics.

[	Current Mood	|	cold	]
[	Current Music	|	The Long Blondes - ' Swallow Tattoo'	]

Those of you who have been subscribing to the Boo blog for longer than a year will perhaps remember that the week just gone is the one we dread as it lollops over the Autumn horizon. Fucking Halloween. Fucking bonfire night. Yes, and verily it was shite, as usual, but this year there were extra layers of doo-doo. This Monday somehow a nasty virus got into the Boo compooter and finally we had to give up and do a complete system restore. Everything was backed up and all, except for the fact that we've lost all your contact details (oops), so if you want to stay in touch please let us know your hemale address etcetera...
Then the Winter came at us like a barrel-load of cranked up tomcats. Severe gales from the North, laced liberally with snow and ice and the like, the mountains are white - infact, looking out, so are exposed corneres of the garden. We're still hassling the loft insulation people to come and make us all nice and toasty (haha!) but like everything up here that operates on Highland time we may see it by next Summer. So it's back to spending £40 a week on coal just to heat two rooms and the water, and freezing everywhere else (including Boo nerve centre where this is being typed from). We don't mind the cold, but when fingertips, toes, nose and thighs start to go numb it means work must stop at least until circulation is restored in front of the stove.  But hey, what can you do? Swings and roundabouts, puppies and trampolenes.

If anybody is waiting for orders and they haven't arrived yet please get in touch 'cuz we may have lost your details, what with the crap going down this week.  Oh, and if you don't know why we hate Halloween and 5th November, we can't be arsed going into it again, our fingers are too cold. Maybe we'll find a bit of 'Everything' and paste it into another post to explain a bit more. We shall see.