Sparks "tour" 2008

Most bands when they do a tour visit several venues and play much the same set every night but Sparks are going to play the same venue for 20 nights and will play a different one of their albums each night.

Then on the 21st night they are moving to a bigger venue and will launch their 21st album.

The concerts are in May/June next year and went on sale at 9am this morning. So far I have bought tickets for Propaganda, Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins, and Balls.

I am so looking forward to this :-)

A very small step forward for deprived children in Kingston

The working party of the Kingston Schools Forums that I have been on for about a year has finished it's work and our proposals will be going out to schools for consultation soon. The result of our deliberations will see a small shift of funding away from the majority of schools towards the handful that have relatively high levels of deprivation, as measured by the eligibility of pupils for Free School Meals (FSM). I have problems with both the amount of funding being redistributed (you can only give to some schools by taking from others) and the approach taken by Kingston Council to funding deprivation.

Schools that have high levels of deprivation need funding to cover four main areas of cost:

1. Addressing social problems within the families, such as attending meetings with Social Care and the Police. This can be almost a full time role for a senior member of staff.
2. Addressing learning difficulties arising directly from deprivation, typically speech and language skills. Usually this means employing additional staff so teach small groups of children.
3. Making up for things missing from home life, such as having books around and visiting places of interest. Basically this means schools paying for things that parents of wealthier parents normally pay for.
4. Making up for the reduced donations from parents. Some schools get tens of thousands of pounds from their parents whereas others get almost nothing.

The proposals in Kingston go nowhere near addressing these costs. The most that any school will gain is under £100k but the costs are easily twice that.

Kingston Council recognises two types of need at pupil level, deprivation and Special Education Needs (SEN). The funding for SEN is needs based and each SEN child gets an amount of funding based on their assessed need. However, deprivation funding is quite different being based on a pot of money which is allocated between the children eligible for FSM. If deprivation goes up, each deprived child gets less.

Because of the reasons given above I am very unhappy at the way that Kingston is planning to fund deprivation and the battle will continue in future years, it has only been ten years so far!

Sadly, in one way this is actually a relatively positive outcome. A very small step in the right direction contrasts with all the steps taken in the wrong direction in previous years. So the situation overall is bad but it is slightly better than it was.

A roar for powerful words!

My thanks to swenglishexpat for passing on this award. He said, “Those people I've given this award to are encouraged to post it on their own blogs; list three things they believe are necessary for good, powerful writing; and then pass the award on to the five blogs they want to honour, who in turn pass it on to five others, etc etc. Let's send a roar through the blogosphere! The image above can be copied and pasted onto other blogs. Also, a small size of the award for sidebars can be found over at the writing circle site.”

The approach I take to writing this blog is (sadly) is the same that I use at work as a management consultant adapted to try and recreate a pub conversation feel, so my three rules are:

1. Understand who your audience is and what they want to get from reading your words.
2. Make sure that your piece is well structured, e.g. it as a beginning, middle, and ending (though not necessarily in that order).
3. Entertain! Just because you are writing about a dry subject does not mean that you have to use a dry writing style. Humour and passion and good things!

In passing the baton on to five others I have picked those blogs that I most enjoy reading not just for their content but for their style. I read lots of blogs (using Bloglines) but many of these are fairly technical and while they are informative they are not usually fun to read.

So my chosen few are:

Czech Mate?
Tony started writing about his pending move from the UK to Prague and now writes on his life there. His pieces are quite long but are a complete joy to read. Sadly he is doing far too much teaching these days and his blogging is suffering a bit as a result. I hope this will be a spur to him to be more active!

Shelly's Comic Book Shelf
I read several blogs on comics but I picked this one because it’s like talking to another fan but one who has an interesting different perspective because they tend to read different comics (Shelly favours DC whereas I favour Marvel) and they are female.

E L S U A ~ A KM Blog by Luis Suarez
I was initially tempted not to nominate this as it is quite a famous blog in the KM but then I decided that it was unfair to exclude it on those grounds, so here it is! Luis writes about all aspects of KM technologies with an enthusiasm that is infectious.

Blimey! It's another blog about comics!
I like Lew’s blog because he is a comics professional, fan and historian and so he covers lots of interesting stories in interesting ways.

News Dissector Blog
This is my daily does of news and analysis of American politics and society. It’s often a depressing read (because of the news, not the way it is presented) but I probably learn more from Danny's blog than any other.

Arthur Brown and Nick Pynn on top form

Earlier this week I went to the 100 Club on Oxford Street to see Arthur Brown supporting The Pretty Things.

I like the venue because it is fairly small and it feels like the band are playing in your front room. The stage is low and there is no barrier so you can get right up close. This also makes it good for taking photos!

As with the other Arthur Brown gigs that I have been to recently, the only accompaniment came from the multi-instrumentalist Nick Pynn. But he does more than just play a range of string instruments, he also does some amazing things with his feet that, for example, enable him to record himself playing one instrument then to repeat that recording as a rhythm track while playing another instrument as the melody.

I was pleased to see that the set was opened by Nick playing one of his own compositions while he was on the stage alone.

Arthur Brown performed a relatively short set of established songs, I think that he performed all of them at the ICA earlier this year, but that did nothing to lessen the magic.

I use the word "perform" deliberately as Arthur does much more than just sing, if that was all there was to it then I would just sit at home and play the CDs.

Hopefully this picture shows the drama that Arthur puts into his performances. This was particularly evident during that old crowd-pleaser from 1968, Fire which he preceded with Fire Poem.

Other very old songs played were Spell on You and Devil's Grip (his first single from 1967 reprised on the new album). We also had the title track from his current album, The Voice of Love, and another old song reworked on the album, the classic single Kites that was a hit for Simon Dupree and The Big Sound also in 67.

Arthur Brown is a must-see performer which is why I am seeing him again next week :-)

A night out in Soho

These are the rather jolly Christmas decorations in Carnaby Street which I walked under when going from drinks at The Clachan to a meal at Aperitivo.

Aperitivo has become my default restaurant when eating out in London because the atmosphere is good, the food is excellent and the service is better. I had not been there for a couple of months but the manageress remembered me and, more importantly, remembered the wine that I ordered last time and wanted again. I'll be back before too long.