In the first David Eagle’s Pick and
Mix
(which you can listen and download here)
I mentioned that I would write a blog post about some of my favourite DJ’s in an attempt to hopefully introduce you to some quality audio experiences and also so that you will no who to blame for my DJing attempts. So here goes.

December 2001: A trail came on bbc radio 1 that consisted of lots of different tracks all woven into one another and over the top of each other in a 30 second mix, advertising a program to be broadcast on Christmas night by 2 Many DJ’s called Hang the DJ. At the time, I’d never heard of
2 Many DJ’s, also known as Soulwax, but I was compelled to listen because of the trail.

That Christmas had the potential to be really depressing for me; in 2001 I would have been 16, and my dad decided that this meant I was now old enough to learn that he and my mother had been lying to me all these Christmas’s and that this Santa bloke who I’d been trying my hardest to be good for all these years didn’t actually exist?! Fortunately my disillusionment with life was tempered by the 2 Many DJ’s show.

It certainly didn’t disappoint. I sat by the radio and listened to the whole thing enraptured. It was the first time I’d come across the concept of the “bootleg) as it was labelled: Mixing the vocal of one song with the instrumental of another. Nowadays it’s common practise and has spawned many a pop hit but it seemed really innovative to me back then.

I remember my girlfriend at the time ringing me up to wish me a merry Christmas. She’d bought me loads of presents–a lot more than I’d bought her–and I am ashamed to say that rather than saying “thank you, merry Christmas” and engaging in conversation, I told her I was too busy to talk because I was doing something really important. I think she felt a bit put out at the time but I’m sure that if she’s reading this blog post now, she’ll willingly forgive me the transgression considering that “really important” thing led to the concept for David Eagle’s Pick and Mix which has obviously helped make the world a better place.

I recorded the mix on a couple of c90 cassettes. I’ve uploaded that original recording for you here. The whole mix is there, apart from the few missing seconds from turning over to the next side and changing the tape. I hope those missing seconds haven’t lost us some precious moment of genius, but I don’t remember thinking so at the time.

Click here to Listen.
Click here to download.
Or you can access the flash option if you’d rather stream it from this blog so you can enjoy listening while looking at the photo of my face.

I’ll release the next David Eagle’s Pick and Mix sometime this year but the main priority will be the Young’uns Podcasts, the first of which will be here by the end of this week / beginning of next week.

I hope you enjoy the mix. Listening to it again ten years later still brings me back to that Christmas, sitting by the radio in ore, telling my girlfriend to piss off … O the memories!

I’m writing this blog post while pretending to be writing something else. I’m at a training course and I think the woman at the front doing the talking is very flattered and impressed that I am furiously typing notes about what she’s saying. She may also be quite taken aback by my furious note taking because she may be aware of the fact that what she’s saying is a load of bollix. In some respects though, I am making notes about what she’s saying because I’ve just made the observation that what she’s saying is “a load of bollix”. I’ve also made a reference to what seems to be the whole premise of her talk for the last ten minutes which is about the importance of being “110 % pacific”.

I’m confused. She wants me to represent more of the pacific than the pacific itself? But not just me, she wants everyone in the room to be 10 % more pacific than the pacific itself. Has she any idea what she’s asking us
To do? Firstly, she’s completely disregarded the makeup of our human bodies. To turn flesh, blood and bone into ocean is no small feat. Secondly, if we somehow did manage to make ourselves more pacific than the pacific itself then what about the wider provocations? Such a mutation would undoubtedly cause terrible damage to our planet: earthquakes and tsunamies galore”. I doubt many of us would survive such an ordeal; not that any of the pacific people would enjoy this form of survival anyway, knowing that we’d destroyed our friends and family and billions of other people just because of one errant, maverick woman’s baffling instructions at a team leaders’ training course.

When this training course first started it seemed fairly prosaic. Firstly, we played a game where we had to associate each day of the week with a certain temperature and colour. You could try playing this game at home if you like, although you may not get the full impact of the game because we were privileged to have a properly qualified teacher – sorry, learning facilitator (they’re not teachers apparently; they don’t teach us, they just facilitate our learning. At least they’re honest about the fact that they don’t actually teach us anything.) I’m not sure exactly what the purpose of the game was meant to be, unless it literally was simply to make me aware that my colleague Phill associates Monday with a dark grey -10 degrees Celsius, as opposed to Fridays’ golden 25 degrees Celsius.

We’re making people redundant left right and centre: policemen, army staff, council workers; massive household businesses are going bust, yet in spite of all this we can still find enough money to employ none-teachers to facilitate the learning of the tenets of team leading by playing a game where we associate days of the week with temperatures and colours?!

The learning facilitator has just announced that she’s handing out feedback forms so that we can give our opinion about the training day. Maybe I should write this blog post on the form. Of course, I won’t; I’m far too nice – or coward is – to do that. Besides, she’s quite attractive in an odd sort of way and I don’t want to scupper my chances of getting with her. I’ve been making little jockey comments all through the training course in a bid to impress her, but I don’t think she’s noticed. She doesn’t seem to register them as jocular comments, treating them as if I’m saying something serious, taking the comment literally and then making a basic remark in her cooing, patronising, bored voice.

There’s something about that voice though that intrigues me. She can’t sound that bored all the time? She’s fairly young, in her early thirties. She must get excited sometimes. Maybe I can excite her. She sounds so bored that during one of my many drifting off moments I started wondering about how excited she might sound during sex. Is that odd? Of course it is, I didn’t need to ask. I wonder if she’d still sound bored or if she might perk up a bit. I could do some role-play with her. We could sit in a room (that we pretend is a classroom) as she goes through her tedious, nonsensical training garbage in her bored voice. As time goes on I seduce her with saucy quips that relate to what she’s saying in the training. At first, she treats me with indifference and keeps going with her talk, but in time her voice begins to get a bit more excited as she becomes increasingly aroused. I continue to taunt her with more saucy witticisms as she attempts to focus on the material of the training course and revert back to the bored voice. But it’s no use. She can’t help herself. She eventually gives in to temptation and … Shit! I’m writing this on her feedback form!

What the heck? I’ve just come back to the reality of the situation to hear the bored-voiced woman telling us that we must be “110 % reliable. Hang on, does that make sense? We have to be 110 % pacific and 110 % reliable? I’m now 220 % confused; we can’t be both; that’s mathematically impossible. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m on a course that’s just a bit too advanced for people like me with my primitive mathematical assertions and my inability to listen to the learning facilitator without fantasising about having sex with her.

Could this possibly be my most worrying (and perhaps most telling) blog post of them all?

If you’re still not bored of reading rants about training courses then
check out a previous post on the issue.
There isn’t any sexual content in that one so you can relax.

I was in the news agents the other day with a friend. (Not the most exciting opening sentence to a blog post but don’t be fooled, this story will be epic.) My friend needed to buy a pint of milk because he’d ran out of it and he wanted to make tea and eat serial and do other things that generally involve the need for milk (I told you it got more exciting.)
I waited for my friend in the queue at the counter as he went to get the milk. There were a few people in front of me and as we were in a bit of a rush – eager to get back to make tea and serial and do other things that generally involve the need for milk – we decided that I should wait in the queue while he quickly got the milk and then joined me in the queue with the milk. (A truly genius time saving master plan I’m sure you’ll agree. This blog is the place to come for time saving tips, although my best time saving tip for you would be that if you’re really serious about saving time then you should probably stop reading this time wasting blog.)

I heard my friend announce that he’d got the milk. This was perfect timing as we were next in the queue. This is when my blindness came into effect and thus an ordinary milk purchase got a bit unusual – teats up you might say, if you are the type of person who is sad enough to make milk based puns. I heard the shopkeeper say to the man in front of me, “So that’s one pint of milk”. “This must be Ben” I thought. I assumed he must have got the milk and joined me at the front of the queue. As I owed Ben a little bit of money, I decided that I was going to pay for the milk, so I said “I’ll pay for this” and handed the shopkeeper the money.

I then discovered that the man in front of me wasn’t Ben but a complete stranger. He made some kind of protestation in a very shocked voice. The shopkeeper, assuming that I was a friend of the man, accepted my money and handed the pint of milk to the man. The man went to protest again but his phone rang. He answers his phone and as he walked out the shop I heard him say, still sounding completely shocked, “I don’t believe it; the strangest thing has just happened to me!” His voice faded into the distance as he proceeded to tell his friend about the complete stranger who insisted on buying him his pint of milk.

There’s a very tiny chance that he’s reading this blog, but just in case he is I thought I’d provide him with an explanation of what happened. I thought you were my friend. Perhaps you should be my friend; you owe me a pint of milk mate!

What an exciting bank holiday weekend: One royal wedding and a dead Taliban leader. And a new YouTube clip of the Young’uns performing live!

For me, a great Young’uns gig isn’t really about how well we perform musically because I’m always confident that we’ll do that reasonably well; it’s more about the bits in between the songs that dictate whether I feel a gig was great or not. In fact, one of my favourite gigs we ever did was one where I had a really sore throat and was for all intents and purposes unable to sing. So we just talked. It had the potential to be a really stressful and bad performance; I’d been gigging for the last four days and was feeling really ill. We had to stop some songs halfway through because I just kept coughing really loudly while the other two fruitlessly attempted to compensate and cover my coughs. But the bits in between the songs – which was about 90 % of the gig – were amazing. We ended up telling anecdotes about things that happened to us on tour and the audience seemed to love it, laughing hysterically. Nowadays this is how are performances tend to be, only with a bit more singing than in that gig, but that potentially hideous gig was a major influence on how we now perform.

Here’s a bit in between the songs that someone kindly put on YouTube. I was hoping to be telling this story all the way through the summer run of festivals, but I think the YouTube clip’s kind of buggered that up now.
So I thought I might as well help perpetuate its buggering up powers by putting it up on my blog. So here it is; some accordion related toilet humour.

Right then, I’m off to try and write this joke that’s been brewing in my head for the last few days. It’s something to do with Bin Laden and refuse collecting but I can’t tell you at the moment until I’ve ironed out a few of the finer nuances of my amazing joke. I think you’ll be very impressed by it though.

It’s another bloody bus story! Actually the bus part of the story features fairly minimally because the bus I was on – heading back home after a long day’s work – broke down and we all had to get off it while an engineer came from somewhere miles away to try and fix the problem.
It was a half an hour wait for the next bus and the engineer would be at least half an hour before he turned up. I decided that because I was only a 15 minute walk away from my house that it would be a good idea to walk the rest of the journey. So I headed off the bus with everyone else and started walking.

I was quite glad to be getting away from my bus companions because there was a number of small, noisy children with parents who were either very apathetic or very deaf; so I wasn’t bothered about having to walk, in fact I was looking forward to it because it was a good excuse to use my Satnav
(see this post if you were unfortunate and missed my lovely satnav post).

I’d only taken a few steps when the bus driver shouted at me to stop. I turned back round. “You can’t walk” he shouted, “you’ll have to wait till the next bus”. I was a bit confused by this statement, given that, in my opinion, I’d been doing a pretty good approximation of walking before he’d stopped me; it’d been taking me from A-to-B so I assume I’D been doing it right. I explained to him – over the increasingly louder screaming children – that I only lived about fifteen minutes walk away and that I knew the way back home. The bus driver protested, saying it was too dangerous for me to walk. I reciprocated by pointing out that I’d walked the route before, I knew the way and I wanted to get home in fifteen minutes rather than 45 minutes, especially since I was getting pretty desperate for the toilet. I then cheerily thanked him for his concern and assured him that I’d be fine and started to walk off again. The bus driver shouted at me to stop. I turned my head around and shouted back that I was fine and continued to walk. one of the waiting bus passengers ran up to me and took hold of me. I tried to once again assure the bus driver and now the passenger that I would be fine but the passenger cut across me: “If you walk then I’ll call the police!” The police? I started laughing at the absurdity of all this and once again attempted to explain that I was fine and that this was starting to get a bit over-the-top. The passenger’s response to this was to take hold of me with even greater force and say in a very sympathetic tone, “look, you’re blind son”. I didn’t point out the paradox of that statement; instead I told him that I was fully aware that I was blind. Sadly, he didn’t then immediately let go of me and say, “o right, sorry, well just as long as you know; I’ll let you go on your way now then”.

What could I do? By this point, other passengers were joining the scene and some screaming children came over to see what was going on. I should have stood my ground which I suppose is actually exactly what I did do in a very literal sense because I didn’t move. I ended up waiting for half an hour with the screaming children and a load of very condescending passengers, who tried to take my mind off my aggravation at the situation by distracting me with a litany of questions about my blindness: “how long have you been blind?” “how much can you see?” “how did you become blind?” “how many fingers am I holding up?” “where’s your carer?” … So I was essentially held hostage and then interrogated under the torture of bladder pain.

Then to add insult to injury, an old age pensioner (not one of the young ones under 60 – an old age pensioner) turned to the waiting crowd and announced, “actually, I only live ten minutes away so I might as well walk home rather than pointlessly waiting for twenty minutes”. The crowd parted and let him through as he nonchalantly walked past me and headed off whistling in the direction that I was going in which was apparently “too dangerous”. Then another man spoke up and said that he too would rather walk than wait and again the crowd parted and let him walk in the same direction. To add further insult to injury, this man was walking with a crutch.

Fortunately I did eventually get home, although I was a bit concerned that they might not have let me get off the bus by myself and insisted I ordered a taxi to take me the 215 yards from the bus stop to my house (I really am too obsessed with the Satnav).

When I did get home I was so relieved to be finally able to go to the toilet and far too hungry to brood too much about the whole situation. I do however feel annoyed and upset that out of a bus load of passengers, not one of them seemed to think that it was completely inappropriate and ignorant to refuse me the right to walk a fifteen minute route just because it happened to involve a main road, despite my confidence and anything I said.

I’ve told this story to a few people and all of my friends think it’s a bit out-of-order, although one old woman I met on the bus afterwards who was present at the scene said “that was really nice of them to be so concerned; real community spirit”. I wanted to punch her.

I hope that you can see why I’m so appalled by what happened and you’re not thinking like that old woman and those passengers. This to me indicates the very apparent existence of the negative stereotypes about blind people that indicate why there are so many unemployed blind people.

A few days ago I was crossing a road and an old woman pulled me back. “no! you’re going the wrong way!” she shrieked in my ear. I informed her that I was not going the wrong way, but she continued to pull at me and shrieked again with more defiance “no, you don’t go that way!” I asked her what on earth she was going on about. “I’ve seen you do this journey before and you always turn right; you don’t cross this road. Come on, I’ll take you the right way!” I hope you appreciate that I do try and be as polite as I can in these situations when what I really want to do is punch these people. I explained to her that I usually go the other way because I usually go somewhere different to the place that I’m going to today, so therefore today I need to go a different way to get to the different place. There was a pause, then she said, “o, Ok”. I thought that she would now let go of me and I could be on my way but she kept hold of me and insisted that she took me across the road, then persisted to insist that she walked the whole journey with me, holding on to me and walking very slowly. Before she eventually left me she said to me in a sympathetic tone, “I understand what it’s like; my dad was just like you”. She then gave me a sweet and walked off leaving me to feel confused and a bit shit. She might have meant that I was like her dad because we are both extremely good looking, intelligent or amazingly funny, but I think it’s more likely that she meant that we were both blind, and this obviously makes us identical.

I hope you can see why this riles me so much. If this happened once in a while then it might be Ok but there’s always something every day that suggests that people think I’m incapable of functioning on anything remotely resembling a “normal” level. If you’ve read my other posts about various problems with getting work because of people’s attitudes to blindness then hopefully you can see why my aggravation compounds. However, if I don’t want people to view me purely as “blind” then I suppose I should probably stop writing about it; so here ends my rant.

In other news: The new series of the young’uns podcast is coming very soon; This means regular Young’uns podcast episodes. I’m planning on recording podcasts at all the festivals we do so that should be a really good summer run. I’ve also put down the satnav and made a start on the next Pick and Mix

Thanks for reading; I know it’s only because I’m blind! Byeeeeee!

I’m writing this blog post from a really hot bus – that’s “hot” as in the temperature not “hot” as in sexually alluring, I’m not particularly attracted to busses; well, apart from the 93 from Middlesbrough to Scarborough, but then who wouldn’t be? As regular readers will know-ever the optimist-I tend to write my blog entries from busses on the way to and from work, which gives me plenty of writing time since I spend 4 hours a day on them. Although I haven’t blogged for a while, I have still been doing a lot of bus travel. The reason for my lack of bus based blogging is to do with a newly acquired gadget that I’ve been using addictively. It’s a satnav. It may seem a little strange that I should be using a Satnav at all given that I am blind and can’t drive, never mind the fact that I use it on a bus, but this particular satnav is especially designed for blind people. Rather than the satnav voice just telling you to turn left or right like the boring satnavs you bland sighted people use, blind satnavs are much more exciting; not only do they give directions but they announce all the street names and the types of buildings you pass. On a practical level, the satnav has in all honesty revolutionised my life. I can now travel to new places all by myself without needing to know the route or continuously ask people for directions. It also means that I don’t have to ask people to tell me when we get to the bus stop I want to get off at, and any technological device that reduces the need to talk to pesky people is obviously very worthwhile. To try and put the amazingness of the satnav into perspective: I visited my friend Ben recently in York. By the help of the satnav I located Newcastle train station, then got off the train in York and walked a 20 minute walk in a completely unfamiliar area to be successfully guided to Ben’s house. I can even record my own landmarks such as bus stops so that I know exactly how to get to places that aren’t on the standard map installed on the satnav.

So it does have immense practical value. However, I must confess that I have been using it needlessly to the point of it being an addiction. When I’m being driven to places by a friend or in a taxi, I will turn on the satnav and listen intently to the names of the streets. During this quality time with the satnav I tend not to join in with conversation around me and ignore what people are saying to me. I seem to find street names more interesting than the nonsense my friends go on about. I suppose it’s the thrill of the whole thing-the adventure: Will we turn left on Bernard street or right on to Albert Street? I can feel my heart rate increase as we get closer to the turn, as the anticipation builds. I’m sure you all know the feeling. Just writing about it makes me feel excited! It’s not just the street names that I get though (although this would be enough excitement for anyone) I also get the speed, distance travelled, distance from my various landmarks (such as my pre-programmed bus stops) and of course the all important altitude.

But my addiction doesn’t stop there. I see no reason why I should stop addictively using my satnav just because of a small factor like the fact that I’m not actually travelling. The makers of the satnav have created their product with the crazed addict in mind. I can sit in the comfort of my own home while stationary, without the need for GPS coverage and replay the routes that I have previously travelled using the virtual mode. So I can be sitting in my home in Hartlepool and relive the rollercoaster of a journey that was the trip from my house to the venue that I did a gig at in Peterborough a fortnight ago: Every twist and every turn, every rise and drop in altitude, the increases and decreases in speed is mine to relive now and forever, over and over again. When I have children, instead of bedtime stories, we can go on virtual adventures together, reliving journey’s taken in year’s gone by: “This is your mother walking down the isle at 2.7 miles per hour at an altitude of 50 feet. She walks the 18 yard walk then makes an 172 degrees turn to face me”.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. I’m not merely limited to reliving the epic voyages taken in my past; I can also explore new routes that I’ve never taken before without having to actually bother leaving the house. I can programme in any destination and any starting point, which means I could travel from Buckingham Palace to the Blackpool tower without having to leave my house. Genius!

I must apologise for anyone who has travelled with me over the last couple of weeks for not listening to anything they’ve been saying and interrupting their attempts to converse with me with a cavalcade of stats about our speed, distance altitude, the names of the streets and the distance we are at any given time from any given bus stop in the area. It’s come as a bit of a shock to me, but not everyone seems to share my enthusiasm for these comprehensive commentaries-the continuously updating unexpurgated minutiae of the journey.

Perhaps I should mention the name of the Satnav and then this will constitute a professionally written review of the product. The company might even use this blog post as part of their literature. I see know reason why not.
It’s the Trekker Breeze from Humanware.

Unfortunately, the satnav addiction has not only affected my ability to blog but also my work on the next David Eagle’s Pick and Mix which I have yet to start.

This is David Eagle, travelling at a speed of 32 miles per hour at an altitude of 72 ft, signing off. O no! I can’t stop myself! Help!

In 2010, The Young’uns’ Sean Cooney committed a terrible act that we really can’t talk about. His sentence was to organise a folk event as part of Hartlepool’s tall ships festival alongside Hartlepool borough Council with oodles of red tape and risk assessment forms. Sean took this great responsibility like a man and did Hartlepool and the folk community proud, hosting an incredible event with an amazing list of performers. This Young’uns Podcast aims to capture the joys of the festival through recorded performances, interviews and various random happenings that took place over the festival.

There’s music from Polish Shanty group
Brasy,
world folk from
Sheelanagig,
Mrs Trevor’s Deep Freeze Secrets,
the Askew Sisters,
Paul martin and Ian Mckoen. Plus there’s world-class kazoo playing from a children’s marching band; find out what folk musicians get up to late at night; we expose the folk group that have launched an attack on the blind; Michael Hughes dices with the law; The Young’uns get involved in some interesting collaborations, and of course there’s the obligatory smattering of puns. I could go on, but what’s the point when you can find out for yourself.

Click here to listen.
Click Here to Download.

Remember, you can catch up with the previous 102 podcasts
here
how about listening to all 103 of them in one sitting, perhaps for charity?

Thanks to everyone who came to see
The Young’uns
in Peterborough; we had a very enjoyable night. Thanks also to Toby wood who wrote this review of the gig, which is a completely accurate and well-considered critique of the proceedings:

“I would love to be a fly on the windscreen of the car transporting to a gig the three chaps who comprise The Young ‘Uns. (I should emphasise that I would hope that my fly incarnation would ideally be on the inside, not the outside!). The reason for this somewhat odd entreaty is that I could spend a few hours listening to Sean Cooney, David Eagle and Michael Hughes practising as they speed along.
The Young ‘Uns are in essence an a cappella group, hence the ease of being able to practise in the car with a fly for company. Just as well the trio don’t play harp, double bass and grand piano!
Along with friends and a healthy audience I was fortunate enough to see Cooney, Eagle and Hughes at Baston Folk Club on a Friday night, as opposed to the club’s customary Thursday. Oh the thrill of a change of night – we do know how to enjoy ourselves! I write ‘fortunate’ because, according to details on their website, The Young ‘Uns only seem to perform live two or three times a month, possibly due to the fact that they all have ‘proper’ jobs as community artist, producer and teacher. Indeed should Mr Hughes (as I presume his teacher name to be) ever get fed up of the teaching life he could easily get a job as a doppelganger for Marcus Brigstocke, so physically reminiscent is he of the comedian. Sean’s own website is so full of educational and cultural activity that no wonder The Young ‘Uns don’t gig that much. Want a Tall Ships Folk Festival organising? Then Sean’s yer man! And as for David – well just type his name into YouTube and you’ll find a wealth of humorous clips and quips as well as lengthy ‘Pick and Mix’ sessions. In short individual talent abounds.
The group performed mostly traditional shanties and homages to Hartlepool but all in a way that had a modern touch. Indeed a James Taylor song made a brief appearance alongside my own personal favourite, Sean’s ‘Jenny Waits For Me’, a poignant tale of men at sea.
I took a while to try to work out why the trio actually worked and then it clicked. Individually they appear so diverse, singular and individual yet as a threesome they blend seamlessly together, each appreciating the other’s strengths without becoming competitive or domineering (a sort of folkie Crosby, Stills and Nash). This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that they can spend two or three minutes in a comedic, laugh out loud introduction and then suddenly swoop into a song that requires concentration and even a little gravitas. They simultaneously revere the material and recognise that pleasing an audience is paramount.
The Young ‘Uns are one of those acts that’s best seen live. Their quirky and enthusiastic mix of seriousness and laughter is infectious.
Just one gripe! I’m just not keen on the name ‘The Young ‘Uns’. What will happen when they hit fifty (assuming they are still playing together)? Will they become ‘The Middle-aged ‘Uns’ or ‘The Receding and Increasingly Podgy ‘Uns’. Perhaps they ought to cross that bridge when they get to it.”

Yes, very accurate and well-considered.

So what will the next project be? I’m planning on starting work on the next Pick and Mix in the next few days so perhaps it will be that, though I imagine there’ll be two or three long rambling blogs written from busses in the meantime.

So there I was, just ten minutes ago, standing by the sandwiches and wraps stand in the Marks and Spencers shop in the Trowell service station just outside Nottingham about to purchase a Hoisin Duck wrap when
I had the comedy equivalent of the Eureka moment. There’s just no telling when genius will strike – in the bath or in the Marks and Spensers sandwiches and Wraps isle. So here’s my joke:

I have a friend who is totally blind and totally deaf. He has very poor orientation with no sense of direction; he’s always crashing into stuff and falling over. However, he has this uncanny ability to locate checkout tills. As soon as we’re in a shop he moves at great speed and with complete ease in the direction of the checkout till. I asked him “how do you do it?” to which he replied, “Well, I suppose it’s because I’m counter intuitive”.

I’m currently in a car with my fellow
Young’uns,
heading back home after a gig in Surrey. Gardeners questions is on radio 4, and so we’re driving through the streets with the windows down, Gardeners Questions on full volume,
blasting out conversations about Couch grass, Pine weed and the best way to propagate Delphiniums. That’s the way we roll, o yeah!

The Hartlepool tall ships podcast is coming even sooner than it was when I mentioned that it was “coming soon” the last time. I’ll be back with it in the next few days.

I dedicate this blog post to Jamey the security guard at Gateshead bus Station who reads the blog. The strange thing about writing a blog is that I get really surprised and taken aback when someone says they read it, even though the whole point of writing it is for people to read, as well as to satisfy my ego obviously. Also, people at work have now discovered the blog and my Youtube videos; This has led to a few interesting encounters where people come up to me and make references to things in my videos and posts. So rather than just saying “hey I watched your
Bleating Love Parody on Youtube”,
they will come up to me and say something like “I can’t believe he shot the poor sheep”. As I’m in work mode, living under my work-based Alta ego Davis Eagles
(see this post if you’re confused)
I’m not really expecting this and I find the whole thing a bit baffling especially when I’m in a group of people who are completely oblivious as to why a colleague has come up to me and said “I can’t believe he shot the poor sheep”. Jamy the security guard at Gateshead bus station walked up to me a few days ago and greeted me by saying rather loudly in front of a group of very bemused passengers, “I love your Mongol Sex post mate”. People started quickly inching away from us, a bit fearful, unsure of what he could possibly mean by “my Mongol Sex Post”.
I then had to explain to the frightened crowd that he was referring to
a blog post I’d written which was perfectly innocent,
but I don’t think this really placated anyone. So hello to you Jamey and to anyone else associated with Gateshead bus station.

Thanks for reading, bye!

In Google webmaster tools, you can see what searches people do in order to find and click on your website. The most common search terms are things like “David Eagle” and
“the Young’uns”
but down near the bottom of the list is the search term “Mongol sex”.
Presumably this is due to
this blog post,
where I wrote (on the subject of Shortwave radio):
“you’re on the shortwave band and that slight touch can tune you into a completely different station and into a completely different world. One moment you’re listening to an enraged American evangelist damning you to hell unless you send him money, then you touch the dial ever so slightly and you’re listening to a French radio drama with Lesbian sex scenes; then the sound of a Mongolian throat singer, belting out the popular Mongolian hits of the day. …”

I can just imagine some sweaty pervert (o god, I hope no one finds me by searching for “sweaty pervert”) breathing heavily over his laptop, anticipating some hot Mongolian porn, finding my website in Google search with the following words shown:
“… Lesbian sex scene .. Mongolian throat …”.
then clicking to see what this Lesbian sex scene Mongolian throat website is all about, only to see a picture of my face and a blog post about Vick Reeves and smelly pirates with hairy knees. O well, you never know, perhaps there are people out there with a sexual interest in Vick Reaves, smelly pirates and hairy knees. I look forward to more revelations from Google in the near future.

Hartlepool’s Tall Ships Young’uns Podcast coming soon!

“Pirates”, “pilgrims”, “pub” and “philosophy” are four words that begin with the same consonant and so I suppose is an example of alliteration; however the word philosophy does not begin with a hardened P sound and so is it really alliteration in the true sense? Thank god for the Internet; I could probably find this out relatively quickly. In the olden days we’d have to sit and watch hundreds of
QI
episodes in the vain hope of finding the answer. I may do an Internet search to get some information about this and include my findings at the end of this post. You’ll have to read on though to find out. Now I’ve got you interested.

I’m writing this post from a bus. I know this will be great news to you all; I tried writing my last blog post from a different location to the bus but I’m sure you’ll all agree that I write much better when I’m blogging from a bus. There’s a certain poetry about my bus posts; a certain je ne sais quoi maybe – I don’t know. Before I actually write about what I’d planned to write about, I should probably set the scene a little bit; it might explain why this post might turn out to be a bit rubbish.

As regular readers will know, I usually write from the x9 bus. Each morning I get the 36 bus from Hartlepool to Bilingham and then the x9 from Billingham to Gateshead. I usually set off from my house at 7:30 and arrive in Gateshead (where I work) at about 9:15.
I have managed to inadvertently train my brain to associate work with blessed relief. Invariably, by the time I get to work, I am utterly desperate for the toilet; I run into the building with a wide grin on my face, race across to my office, throw down my bags and coat and rush down the corridor in the direction of the toilet, panting and shouting “thank god, I’m here!” Most of the staff probably think I’m a crazed workaholic and this is probably why they avoid me, but in actuality I’m just a man with a very full bladder, exulted by the fact that I can finally relieve my liquid burden – which is a very poetic way of saying “have a piss”; I’m so poetic.

The first reason this blog post might be rubbish (although it’s going pretty well so far I’m sure you’ll agree) is because I am even more desperate for the toilet than usual. The reason for this is because I’m running late. I set off from my house at the same time that I usually do; in fact it was slightly earlier than normal. Either the 36 bus didn’t turn up or it had come early. I was not late. Nevertheless, the bus didn’t come and I had to get the next one, meaning I had missed my connecting bus. Because I’d been stood at a bus stop for 30 minutes as opposed to the usual two minutes, the cold had gone to my bladder and I started to need the toilet. Unfortunately, because I’d missed the x9 bus from Billing ham, I would now have to travel even further on the 36 to Norton to catch the x10. Unfortunately again, I have another 20 minute wait in Norton before the x10 comes, meaning another 20 minutes for the cold to effect my bladder, increasing my need for the toilet. What makes the situation even more frustrating is that Norton is in the opposite direction to Gateshead, so I’ve had to travel further away from the place I want to be and then come back again in the opposite direction. I set off from my house at 7:30; I was stood at a bus stop, desperate for the toilet, in the cold about 50 minutes later from leaving my house, further away from the place I wanted to get to than I was when I was lying in bed this morning. I’m eventually starting to head in the right direction again after one hour and 15 minutes of setting off from my house.

Phew! Glad I got that off my chest. I hope you managed to follow all that. I imagine that in the future, perhaps when I’m dead, there will be throngs of David Eagle worshipers making pilgrimages, setting off early in the mornings to travel the famed route as detailed in this blog post. Congregations from all over the world will set off from my house – which has now been turned into a David Eagle themed place of worship – and stand at the relevant bus stops – which are still standing exactly as they did in my day because they have been deemed as buildings of historic interest and are protected under heritage law. The congregation will drink a special potion that makes the drinker desperate for the toilet – to be honest drinking lots of water would have had just the same effect but the potion makers got in on the act and started profiting on the back
Of my name; this makes me very angry, as I specifically wrote in an authoritative and widely quoted blog post about the evils of false profits (you see what I did there?) The pilgrims will eventually – after a large amount of tedious bus travel – arrive at my place of work which has also been turned into a place of worship. They will run into the building with broad grins on their faces, race through the corridors towards the toilets shrieking ecstatically “thank god, we’re here!” They then all pile into the toilet and what happens after that is probably best left to your imagination, but this is something else about the whole affair that upsets me, and I do not condone that sort of behaviour in my name.

Anyway, last Tuesday we, is in
The Young’uns
recorded our duet with
Vick Reeves
about smelly pirates with hairy knees. It went very well. I feel really sorry for the studio staff: the producers and technicians working on the project had to spend a whole day in a recording studio, recording different musicians and actors and the Young’uns doing take after take, singing the same one minute song: “I’m a smelly pirate, with hairy knees” etc etc, over and over again.

I suppose I better explain a bit more about this song and the film since all I’ve mentioned so far is that my folk group are singing a song with Vick Reeves about smelly pirates with hairy knees. The project is a film animation that has a budget of £3’0000000 – I’m sure that at least a third of that money was spent on the smelly pirate song. I think that the story and the songs are all written by children. The film is animated and produced by the film company who are responsible for Wallace and Grommet – not responsible for them in terms of their welfare, making sure they’ve got enough cheese; I suppose you knew what I meant. They also have celebrities doing various voices, such as
David Walliams,
Harry Hill,
Miranda Hart,
Catherine Tate
and of course Vick Reeves.
O, and, of course, The young’uns.
The project isn’t complete yet and so I’ve not heard the finished smelly Pirate song but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

An accurate barometer of the Young’uns’ success and popularity is the amount of paperwork we have to sign. When we first started out doing this folk music lark, we would just do gigs in pubs in front of who ever would listen. As time has gone on, we’ve had to sign contracts for performances, appearances and recordings; these contracts have grown exponentially both in frequency and content. We did a gig recently at the Sage theatre in Gateshead. We were one of a number of acts on the bill that night, which was a folk against fascism event. The folk against fascism concept derives from the comments made by
British National Party
leader
Nick Griffin
who suggested that bnp members should go to folk clubs because they might be a good place for recruiting members. This inference that folk clubs and folk music was in anyway associated with the beliefs of the bnp was met with outrage by the folk fraternity including many folk musicians and many high-profiled singers who made anti-fascists speeches and countered the idea that British folk music was fascist simply because it was British, celebrating tradition and history. Anyway, we were only on stage at the sage for about 15 minutes and it took us longer than that to read and sign the various contracts: the health and safety contract, image rights, copyright etc. The copyright document was interesting. You have to write the names of all the songs you’re going to perform that night – which is a bit of an issue since we normally don’t decide this until we’re on stage. You then have to write down the name of the song writer for each of the songs so that they can get the money from
PRS.
This is a bit of a fruitless exercise as the majority of the songs we sing are either written by people, who have been dead for centuries, are people who aren’t on prs, or the songs are traditional folk songs
and the writer is unknown. If this trend continues and we have to sign even longer and more ludicrously convoluted contracts before we can actually do a gig then we might have to start increasing our fee to compensate for the large amount of time taken up by the contracts.

After the recording, we went to the pub to celebrate the success of this soon to be historic song. Just before we left the pub, there was a group of people who started filing in. One of them approached us and asked: “here for the philosophy in pubs night lads?” He was disappointed when we informed him that we had no idea what a philosophy in pubs night was and that unfortunately we had to scoot off and would not be joining in; apparently they want new blood in the group. I asked what philosophy in pubs was all about and apparently it’s a group of people who meet each fortnight in the pub, take a vote about what subject to talk about, then philosophise. I decided to do an interview with the group which we’ll feature on a future
Young’uns podcast
episode along with the pirate song.

Anyway, this brings me to the final paragraph and now you know the reason for the four p words in the blog post title. According to my Internet searching, words still count as being alliterated even if the consonants don’t sound the same, so “Pirates with pneumonia in pubs philosophising” is alliteration even if they don’t all start with hardened P sounds. Anyway, the bus has finally arrived at Gateshead and so I can finally go to work and enjoy making a P sound of my very own – or should that be “pee” sound (o I’m so poetic!)