The utter lack of questions my readers have been posing about this blog has continued well into 2017. "A good teacher answers all questions before they have a chance to be asked", said someone feigning philosopher-speak. A welcome side effect of this disinterest is that I can put together my own batch of questions that I want to answer, rather than having to deal with queries that either don't interest me or are too damn difficult to answer. I like to think that such a task helps to sharpen my mind for future posts as we approach LIL's autumn (which happens to be in the spring and summer). With a little further ado, here's the EMSAQ - Even More Seldomly Asked Questions. As with last time, please do post any questions you may have in the comments below. Either that or don't bother and I'll just continue to come up with my own.
Any chance you might keep this blog going in some form after this August?
Any chance you might keep this blog going in some form after this August?
As meaningful as those twenty page views and three likes on Facebook a week are, I don't have any plans to see this bad boy through my first year back in Canada (and, presumably, on from there). Aside from the fact that I was no longer taking trips with my family on a weekly basis, I no longer felt captivated by the music and I was soon to fall into my melancholic teenage years, a time I have no interest in revisiting. I'll probably finish up with an afterword post going into some detail about my post-England life but that's about it.
I like the fact that there's an end point to it.
That's not a question. But, yes, there's nothing worse in the world of blogging than witnessing your favourite blog peter out before your eyes. I've had blogs before and I got into them and posted regularly but eventually lost interest - and I'm far from alone in that regard. I was initially worried that something similar would occur here but I soon realised that having an eventual finish line would help motivate me to see it through.
What gave you the idea for Lost in Laindon?
Mostly from Popular. Music writer Tom Ewing has spent the better part of the last fifteen years rating and reviewing every UK number one single and his batch covering the chart toppers from '88 and '89 were, naturally, of particular interest to me. We don't necessarily have the same tastes - is ABBA's The Winner Takes It All really that great? - but I very much liked the format and his writing and I soon began to want to get back into blogging. (Unfortunately, he seems to be falling prey to what I said above about losing interest in a blog with no end in sight. Still, he has an extensive archive which I would highly recommend you explore if you have the requisite free time, as I clearly do)
In addition, I read a lot of music books and many of my recent favourites - Stuart Maconie's Cider with Roadies and David Hepworth's Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded, just to name the two I can think of - manage to fuse critcism with memoir, something I would quite like to try myself. This is my first shot in fact.
I like the fact that there's an end point to it.
That's not a question. But, yes, there's nothing worse in the world of blogging than witnessing your favourite blog peter out before your eyes. I've had blogs before and I got into them and posted regularly but eventually lost interest - and I'm far from alone in that regard. I was initially worried that something similar would occur here but I soon realised that having an eventual finish line would help motivate me to see it through.
What gave you the idea for Lost in Laindon?
Mostly from Popular. Music writer Tom Ewing has spent the better part of the last fifteen years rating and reviewing every UK number one single and his batch covering the chart toppers from '88 and '89 were, naturally, of particular interest to me. We don't necessarily have the same tastes - is ABBA's The Winner Takes It All really that great? - but I very much liked the format and his writing and I soon began to want to get back into blogging. (Unfortunately, he seems to be falling prey to what I said above about losing interest in a blog with no end in sight. Still, he has an extensive archive which I would highly recommend you explore if you have the requisite free time, as I clearly do)
In addition, I read a lot of music books and many of my recent favourites - Stuart Maconie's Cider with Roadies and David Hepworth's Never a Dull Moment: 1971 The Year That Rock Exploded, just to name the two I can think of - manage to fuse critcism with memoir, something I would quite like to try myself. This is my first shot in fact.
Do you have any future blogs in mind once this one's done?
Wow, it's like I read my mind! I am committed to starting up at least one new blog this summer once this one's in the can and I'm toying with a second. I don't want to give too much away - that and I haven't really prepared much at this point - but the one I'm sure of will be about being a lazy, dilettante English teacher abroad and the other might be about music though I'm struggling to come up with a theme. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Are you going to try to turn this into a book?
Probably not. I did think about it early on but I don't think my memory has held up well enough for this to be fleshed out fully into book form. The very fact that I've struggled to go into detail about the house I lived in and the school I attended speaks volumes as to my shortcomings - and, indeed, I wasn't particularly happy with my most recent entry about Mayflower's eccentric staff.
Also, it kind of feels like this blog will be enough: I've covered some memories and I've elaborated on some inconsequential theories about pop music, what else is there to be said? I do want to write a book - and then several more - but not on this topic.
I would like to point out, however, that this blog has been a useful way of testing if I have the mental fitness for writing a book. The jury's still out on that one.
Why didn't you wait a couple years so this could be a thirtieth anniversary blog?
Aside from the fact that I feel a bit sorry for years that don't happen to be divisible by fives and tens, at one point last year I discovered that the 1988-89 and 2016-17 calendars match up perfectly (well, apart from Easter falling three weeks later for whatever reason) and figured I might as well start it off twenty-eight years to the day after we left Canada. I came up with the idea for blogging my year in England about a year ago and I was initially going to start it right away, thus having posts from August being written in April and so forth, but the idea of having to write about Mistletoe and Wine in the midst of the summer seemed dispiriting - it's hard enough to have to listen to it around Christmastime - so I decided to wait a few months.
But mostly it involved not wanting to wait on an idea that I really liked.
How much of this comes from your own memories?
Lots. I still remember my class schedule from Mayflower and can tell you the names of the vast majority of my teachers. Most of the anecdotes are also my own although I have used a couple from my mum's letters home to my grandma as sources. Obviously the chart info isn't my own but that's about it.
Don't you wish you could be writing about a different era of pop music?
No, not particularly. I realise the late eighties aren't quite everyone's cup of tea but I have a soft spot for it. It was when I got into music so it has that going for it for a start. It was also a time when music mattered to people. Oh, I know there's a thriving indie hip hop scene in France and there are plenty of up and coming quirky singer-songwriters for me to explore on youtube but it has become divorced from a shared experience. Kids don't talk about pop videos on the school bus, no one invests their money in it
The eighties weren't perfect but they offered up a lot of diversity which people could easily get exposed to. Kids could get into songs dealing with issues that also sounded good (I always think of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears as examples), few cared about nonsense like "authenticity" and throwbacks such as The Beatles and punk may have been respected but they weren't revered.
Finally, who else bothers to write about this period? You might say I've cornered the market. You know, assuming there is a market for late eighties music blogs.
What can we expect from the next few months from Lost in Laindon?
Well, there are several more trips in store - including pair of visits to continental Europe - as well as coping with a brutal heat wave, my birthday and coming to terms with having to return to Calgary. I'm still yet to go into detail about our tiny, uninspiring home but I will get round to that soon enough. And then, of course, there's the music which is beginning to get a bit too 1989 for my taste.
Don't you know what a comma is for?
Does it look like I know what a comma is for?
Also, it kind of feels like this blog will be enough: I've covered some memories and I've elaborated on some inconsequential theories about pop music, what else is there to be said? I do want to write a book - and then several more - but not on this topic.
I would like to point out, however, that this blog has been a useful way of testing if I have the mental fitness for writing a book. The jury's still out on that one.
Why didn't you wait a couple years so this could be a thirtieth anniversary blog?
Aside from the fact that I feel a bit sorry for years that don't happen to be divisible by fives and tens, at one point last year I discovered that the 1988-89 and 2016-17 calendars match up perfectly (well, apart from Easter falling three weeks later for whatever reason) and figured I might as well start it off twenty-eight years to the day after we left Canada. I came up with the idea for blogging my year in England about a year ago and I was initially going to start it right away, thus having posts from August being written in April and so forth, but the idea of having to write about Mistletoe and Wine in the midst of the summer seemed dispiriting - it's hard enough to have to listen to it around Christmastime - so I decided to wait a few months.
But mostly it involved not wanting to wait on an idea that I really liked.
How much of this comes from your own memories?
Lots. I still remember my class schedule from Mayflower and can tell you the names of the vast majority of my teachers. Most of the anecdotes are also my own although I have used a couple from my mum's letters home to my grandma as sources. Obviously the chart info isn't my own but that's about it.
Don't you wish you could be writing about a different era of pop music?
No, not particularly. I realise the late eighties aren't quite everyone's cup of tea but I have a soft spot for it. It was when I got into music so it has that going for it for a start. It was also a time when music mattered to people. Oh, I know there's a thriving indie hip hop scene in France and there are plenty of up and coming quirky singer-songwriters for me to explore on youtube but it has become divorced from a shared experience. Kids don't talk about pop videos on the school bus, no one invests their money in it
The eighties weren't perfect but they offered up a lot of diversity which people could easily get exposed to. Kids could get into songs dealing with issues that also sounded good (I always think of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman and Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears as examples), few cared about nonsense like "authenticity" and throwbacks such as The Beatles and punk may have been respected but they weren't revered.
Finally, who else bothers to write about this period? You might say I've cornered the market. You know, assuming there is a market for late eighties music blogs.
What can we expect from the next few months from Lost in Laindon?
Well, there are several more trips in store - including pair of visits to continental Europe - as well as coping with a brutal heat wave, my birthday and coming to terms with having to return to Calgary. I'm still yet to go into detail about our tiny, uninspiring home but I will get round to that soon enough. And then, of course, there's the music which is beginning to get a bit too 1989 for my taste.
Don't you know what a comma is for?
Does it look like I know what a comma is for?
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