Category Archives: what will be will be

International vibes yet again

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This Sunday 19th May 2024 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2000 UTC on 6160 kHz and 3975 kHz Imaginary Stations bring you Skybird Radio International which will be beamed to Europe via Shortwave Gold.

SRI is a worldwide affair as you can imagine with tunes from around this globe of ours from DJ Frederick and Justin Patrick Moore. There’s also a mix from One Deck Pete which will include tracks by Marlena Shaw, Manjeet Kondal, Tubotito & Rags, Adrian Sherwood and Esher Suarez.

Gerry Hectic (also a contributor to our Countryfile style calendar 2025) has produced an answer version to the One Deck Pete mix and here it is in its glory and what a mix it is. Thank you Gerry, it’s appreciated.

Gerry Hectic presents “A May themed answer” mix
One Deck Pete & Popular – Enrico (Hay-eer-yah’s Continual Harmonica Cut) BCR
Loretta Heywood – Satta Massagana (The 6/* Blues Mix) – Tangential Music
Marlena Shaw – Love Has Gone Away (Disco Version) – Blue Note 12”
Sababa 5 – Bezani – Batov Records
Natasha Kitty Katt ft. His Bitter Truth – Galactic Love – F*CLR Music

(North) London Calling

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A big thanks to Debby H for sending us some pictures of what’s going on in the flower pots and flower beds in north London at the moment. “The picture (above) is of our begonias which are now flowering. They nearly died the winter before last as we put them on the bathroom windowsill. They didn’t like it at all. Probably not enough light. They spent all last summer sulking and doing very little. However, it seems that they have now forgiven us, and are rewarding us with flowers.” Brilliant, good luck with them!

“Here’s a picture of our first bud on an iris plant that’s growing in a shady part of our back garden.”
“Also here’s photos of two front gardens near us. One garden has a lovely lot of irises. The other has an impressive array of Arum-Lilies.”
Excellent stuff Debby! It looks like we’re well on the way now weatherwise!

More lovable spikey tops

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If you remember recently, we had a post about cacti after our friend in Ukraine, Wlad (US7IGN) sent us some pictures of his cacti here. A big thanks to Debby H for passing on some great pictures from her friends in Arizona of some super examples of cacti out there.

The pictures she passed on include a couple from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near to Tucson which looks such a great place. See more about their cacti garden and the many interesting plants they have here and here.

Thanks again to Debby H for passing on the pictures and we’ll post up another couple later this week. All we can say cacti are great!

Spring must be here now!

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Thanks to Mike G and his partner Julia for sending us a couple more pictures of their garden near Coventry again this week. What we thought was a great looking brick wall is actually decking (above) and we love the raised bedding and can spy a great looking poppy getting ready to flower if we’re not wrong.

And look at their well colourful trees and bushes (below). They’re looking good Mike and Julia! Keep sending us those pics of your great garden. It really is good to see how other people garden. If you want to send us some pictures of your garden, balcony or windowsill gardening exploits drop us an email to one deck pete at gee mail dot com.

In the beginning (there was Jack)

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This morning whilst on an early morning mission to Deptford we caught this poster in a pub window. It’s for Wednesday’s May Day celebrations featuring an appearance of Fowlers Troop and the Deptford Jack in the Green (more on them here which even includes a Hawkwind and Pink Fairies connection!)

The great John Rogers has got a interesting little film that explains the celebrations a little more. Looks like a fun day!

All this talk of May Day revelry reminded us of one spring evening years ago when we were going to London Bridge station and followed a man dressed as a tree walking with a lady who was sporadically ringing an old school bell. We made a bit of a detour so we could capture more of the madness and just before we turned off for the station we had to see what it was all about. “Excuse me mate, could you explain more about your get up” we said to the tree man/man tree to which he curtly replied, “Mayday?” We were told that day and by a bloke with a painted green face.

 

And talking of John Rogers, here is again the two part excellent walk of the “Magic” River Quaggy, which is a “much watch”.

Music to drive any frosts away

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Here’s two great tunes for a Tuesday evening to drive any chance of the frost away.

The first is a lovely middle eastern-inspired mix of an Adrian Sherwood live track. It’s a wonderful piece of instrumental reggae called Sinnervisions from the great Spy From Cairo who makes some brilliant music that we have featured before and this one is really up there! More about his stuff here.

 

And from 2015 from Blackboard Revision we have Blackboard Horns from Lee Scratch Perry, Danny Boyle and Danny Red. Wonderful horns with some fantastic bass!

 

And here’s another track or two from each of the artists for good measure!

 

Cacti calling…

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Another big thanks to our friend in Kyiv, Wlad (US7IGN) for sending us some pictures of his cacti. As Wlad told us “They have been making me happy for the last 10 years and there’s never any problems with them.” Great stuff Wlad and great pictures, they are appreciated as always!

Over the years we’ve posted up a few pictures of cacti, in this case more of a succulent in our back garden (below) that flowered for one day only back in 2018 here.

And in 2014, Nic G The Fellow Traveller from California sent us a pic of a cactus in his landlord’s (Mr Gonzales) garden here. Crazy stuff!

Also from 2014 Haji Mike from the beautiful island of Cyprus wrote a piece called Reggae and the Cactus here. Here’s the mentioned well-traveled cactus (below).

And the final one from 2014 (seemed to be a good year for cacti stories) is from Nic Egan artist (Including the cover art of The Clash’s “White Man In Hammersmith Palais” and “Tommy Gun”) and film director from his garden in Hollywood here. How we actually once met Nic Egan in 1978 is a mad story, it’s one where he saved our bacon so to speak, the full story being here.

And here’s another cacti, one more recently here from Debby H in north London of a flowering cactus she owns which looks great.

Cacti are great and thanks to Wlad and everybody again for sending in their pics over the years! Do remember that it is going to be a bit nippy this evening around these parts and possibly where you are so don’t forget the frost protection.

Tune of the afternoon

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We’re ashamed to say we’ve never heard this tune before. It’s from the great King Sunny Ade and it’s a dubby version of Ja Funmi and it is wonderful 7 minute piece of music.

We found out about this tune from listening to a great mixcloud show called Jah Wobble’s 10 Commandments of dub. It’s just a collection of the tunes, no interview with Wobble or anything but the tunes are all good ones! For the full track listings see here. Well worth listening to if you like a bit of dub.

Sophisticated frost protection for beginners

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Here’s an example of one of our cheapskate frost protection schemes in situ in the bed at the bottom of the garden. We’ve got a couple of split bin bags down to keep the weeds out and the soil warm, an old vase, some glacé cherry containers and an old plastic cloche we found in the street years ago. They may be not look pretty but they will hopefully work to keep that damn frost out!

Thank goodness, there wasn’t a frost last night. Now the SE23 weather forecast has changed a bit, tonight is still supposedly going to be 5°C, tomorrow 9°C and from Friday night to Sunday night there’s lows of 3°C during the wee hours. So the protection will be back on for the next few nights and of course be taken off during the day if it heats up a little like when the sun came out today for a couple of hours.

We’ve seen online all sorts of frost protection from old clothes, net curtains to random bits of fabric draped over bamboo canes in a teepee. It’s not about what it looks like more about if it’ll work or not and what you have at hand, punk rock style.

And here’s a nice chilled tune made by a punk rocker so it says on Bandcamp, it’s from “Dan Rincon, longtime drummer of the prolific psych-punk band OSEES’” and the tune is called MotorRhythm, Wooden and it’s a good one if like us, you like a bit of out there downbeat.