Record Reconstructor

    Dashboard! This Week:  Lightning Round, Holiday Plans It's been a busy few weeks, in part because of the impending arrival of our annual holiday, this year a two week trip to Australia.  I'm bad at getting excited for holidays because I generally spend so much time mentally processing the things that need to be done before we go away that I can't really relax until I am through airport security and it starts to feel real.  What this has meant though is I have been listening to albums at a far faster pace than I've been able to find time to sit down and write about them, so I'm working at a significant deficit at the moment.  In an effort to go on holiday with as close to my desk clear as possible, my plan is to get all the outstanding albums documented in this wrap up.  In order to make it so it doesn't take forty hours to write, I am limiting myself to 50 words per album, in the hopes that cuts the core of what I want to say about each of them. Fi...

   Dashboard! If my superpower is meeting interesting people and gently inserting myself into their life, it's without doubt that my friend Rachel's superpower is knowing, I think, everyone in the city of Sheffield and its local environs.  I've walked into bars with Rachel, gone to lunch with Rachel, visited the Snooker with Rachel; no matter the occasion, no matter the venue, you can be sure we would walk in and within five minutes she'd be greeting someone you'd never seen before in your life like an old friend.  If you needed to get in touch with someone in Sheffield and you had no idea how to find them, I'd recommend just handing Rachel a letter and assume that if she doesn't know them herself, someone she knows will.  She's direct, and honest, and fun, and incredibly easy to talk to about just about anything, which is probably what makes her a great doctor as well as a great friend. We met in a fairly normal chain of events, I dated Catherine, who l...

   Dashboard! One of the strange side effects of being the child of a military family, the son of a father who worked for the Royal Air Force for 25 years, and with whom his family travelled the country and the world in line with whatever military base he was posted to, was the strange reality of not being from  anywhere.  " Where did you grow up?"   people have asked, and I always hedge with an answer which is some flavour of "We moved around a lot".  The real answer is I was born on the Italian island of Sardinia and grew up in The Costwolds, Stafford, York, High Wycombe, Warsaw in Poland, a fleeting residency in the US, and whistle-stop visits to half a dozen other countries besides, all before I had turned 14 years old.  We're you to ask my sister, she would tell you this experience was plague on her adolescence, made it impossible for her to make friends and left her isolated and alone when we finally did stop moving from place to place;...

  This Week: Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud, No, It's The Children Who Are Wrong, Tramlines Festival Roundup and a few odds and ends Behind us, a young woman is complaining in quite heated terms about her boss, who is apparently upset at the amount of time she spends going to the toilet while she should be working.  "They said I was in there for twenty minutes every hour, and it's not more than 10 or 15.  My boss said I should make better use of my breaks and not go to the loo 5 minutes after I come back from lunch, but sometimes you just need it, you know?". I know. I have some sympathy, but if you need to visit the toilet for 20% of every hour you either need to visit a doctor, or you are skiving. "My boss even told me I need to go to the doctor if it's affecting me like this, what's it got to do with her?" I'm not her boss, for the record,  I don't know who she is and couldn't pick her out of a lineup, but everyone within 50 meters in ev...