There are certain things in life that are absolutes.

For a start - the fastest way to find a stray piece of lego is to walk across the floor in stockinged feet, and you will find it in an instant (and with more than a modicum of extreme pain). Toast always falls butter side down, and if it is a pair of sunglasses or a laptop charger I am going to misplace it.

The TCD absolute (...sorry Lucy), is that however innocuous the topic might seem at first glance, Ant and I seem effortlessly to get a podcast episode out of it.

Take this week, to be honest I had slight misgivings that going through a list of countries where the beat-combo had only ever performed twice would not really be worthy of discussion. But I was mistaken, because as soon as the red light came on then we were off and running, my often unreliable neurons began firing and I was throwing out random memories like a man possessed.

Love'n'sharp giraffes

h

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I happened to listen to the opening credits today, and this week's chapter is certainly a bit random, and a bit irreverent.

What it really needs to accompany it is one of those maps that you get on travel programs, that indicate the route taken as the story unfolds. You know the kind of thing I mean, I have the one from Antiques Road Trip in mind but numerous other examples are available.

You start with a static visual of the area in question (in our case North Yorkshire and the East Coast) and then you get a little car-style icon that plots a course from the beginning of the story (in this case Scarborough) around the interim stops (Filingdales, Egton Bridge, Egton, Glaisdale, Staithes) and ending up at the journeys end, which for me was Steve R's childhood home of Whitby.

Of course I don't have the go-to-skills to conjure one of those maps up, but how nice would it have been. Anyhow you get the idea.

Love'n'streetfighting

h

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Let’s start with the plaudits. High fives, if not big tens are due to John Sturm and Seamus Colgan for being the purple folk who said that we needed more chat about the Europeans.

Tim Glasswell deserves the freedom of Luton for all the work he has put into the Rainbow Room website, which is dedicated to all things How We Live and Europeans.

And next we move to whatever the opposite of plaudits is…(??!!). And that goes to Ant for not sending me something over to read for the middle of the chapter, choosing instead to clear off to Catalonia for his holibobs.

You do get an approximation of my favourite live review of the Euros, maybe Tim G will offer up something inspired that I can read for a future episode.

Love’n’vans full of hats

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It’s a case of life imitating art this week.

It’s a minor bloody miracle you are actually listening to this at all because Ant had one of those head in hand moments whilst trying to download the episode from the Zoom recorder, and managed instead to format the SD card and delete everything we had .

Fortunately he managed to rescue one half of the recording using some whizzy software that was able to partially rebuild what had been on the card (you can indeed do anything with computers these days) which at least gave us what had been captured on my microphone.

The life imitating art bit is that, after having started the chat with an explanation of how an audio compressor works and when to use it, we then had to employ it quite extensively so you could hear us both at roughly the same level. It did indeed make the loud thing (me) quieter and the quiet thing (Ant) louder. Of course (as I will explain) it meant that the village gossip, and the wind, also came to the fore, as we were recording this episode LIVE in my garden.

So apologies for the slightly variable levels and overall quality, but we wanted to be able to share the chat because we enjoyed recording it and it just wouldn’t have been the same if we had revisited it.

Oh and it cuts off a little abruptly at the end, seems the goodbyes were lost in the recovery process.

Love’n’presidential spread

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It’s a gentle and meandering affair for this chapter of TCD (…sorry Lucy) which is podcast code for not really planned, and certainly not thought through.

Saying that, the vibe is about right for a chat that takes place at the seaside and touches on fence repair, cricket and Susie Dent.

The thing I can’t forget is to mention the chaps in the boat, who are called Adam, David, Jack and Sam and you can find out more about them by clicking here. The link that Vibes sent me is from Insta and covers them going over the Titanic.

All of this will become clear as you listen to the pod. Oh.. and as you watch the clip, any resemblance to Ant and I rowing around Peasholm Park is purely serendipitous.

Love'n sweating in a hedge…

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For this week's episode of TCD (...sorry Lucy) we have been remembering Luis.

So much of what Luis did had a touch of the mystical about it, he sprinkled musical magic wherever he went, and helped music transcend with just the shake of his tambourine.

Of course that goes a long way to explaining his career, and the legacy he leaves behind, but it doesn't explain the multiple ways he has touched the lives of me and the rest of the marillion family. That was down to something else, the magic of the human being that was Luis Jardim.

It was a joy to have him contribute in the studio and a joy to have him on the road with us. It was also a joy to have him join us for TCD back in October 2022 and if you want to listen back to that episode then click the link below.

Chapter 129. Tightening it up when it's a little loose, and softening it when it's a little stiff

Obrigado meu amigo

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Of the things that fly-in-and out of this week’s TCD (….sorry Lucy) Gene Wilder was already lodged well and truly at the front of the ol’ synapses. Having finished my evening in Berlin with him (and Anthony having a similar soft-spot), perhaps it wasn’t too much of a surprise that he found his way into the chat.

Combining the letters D, M and T with the number 8 however, wouldn’t have even been a fleeting blip on the radar feed of my brainiacles* before we started. So how that made an appearance was down to kismet, the power of TCD, and a downward slide into nerdishness (which we will henceforth try to keep to a minimum).

The rest of the conversation was bubbling under the surface somewhere, jostling with the other accumulated randomness, and waiting to happen.

Love, and do tell The Edge to turn that soldering iron off. Oh, his poor mother’s carpet..

h

*A word I am proud to introduce to the world, and encourage you to employ whenever you feel it might elevate the conversation.

Fostex DMT8

Hohner Pianet

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Well it feels like quite a while since we were here last… how have you been?

What with the Leicester Weekend, and then dashing off on holiday I can't really remember where we had got up to, not that it really matters because this week was always going to be a bit of a catch-up and reset as far as TCD goes (...sorry Lucy).

What I can tell you is that Lionel Plain, who is one of the Purple folk, came up with an inspired idea for the middle of the pod this week - which was welcome because it meant we only had to flounder around at the beginning and the end!

Anyway, wonderful boating weather!

See you in Oslo x

h

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