Record Reconstructor

This Week: Foreign language recommendations, Lorde, Beth Gibons, a weird A Perfect Circle album and The Sounds. I'm not a natural linguist;  you could argue I'm not a natural anything apart from blonde (and even these days it's more like someone dipped me in a muddy puddle streaked with grey than the golden blonde I was when I was younger) - rarely has there been a skill, trait or party trick I haven't had to practice endlessly in order to get to a baseline level of competency*, and languages are the things I struggle with the most.  When my parents went to live in Spain, I became so embarrassed not being able to speak to the people they shared a village with that I signed up for an 8 month course in Spanish at Chesterfield College (Spanish for Business Travellers).  A year later, armed with my new knowledge I flew back to Spain only to discover that all of my practice was useless in the face of the Extrameños accent -where they speak incredibly quickly, drop the ends o...

  This Week: New HAIM album; songs for drinking, geopolitical disasters This is a day late but I had a pretty busy weekend;  we were entertaining my mother-in-law from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, had the social event of the summer in the Locksley Beer Festival on Saturday, and then a day watching tennis at the Nottingham Open Final yesterday, leaving me little time to write my blog.  It's also been incredibly hot all weekend and it's caused me to sleep very badly, in addition to generally sleeping badly because my global terrible news quota has meant my worry bucket is very full.  I've become concerned that I am somehow speaking terrible, anxiety-inducing apocalyptic events into existence through this blog like some internet-enabled Death Note notebook, so I'd just like to say that I think this week, hugely positive things will happen in global geopolitics, capitalist systems will be exposed and everyone will get a free week off.  At this point, that had...