Week 19 - Listen to all 12 (actually 13!) major studio albums released by The Beatles

As a massive fan of The Beatles, this challenge was something I was looking forward to more than some of the others! All I needed was an excuse to listen to them all one after another and my 32 County Road Trip conveniently needed a first rate soundtrack! I came across some things on the way around too that made me think The Beatles were meant to come along for the spin!

I only had a rough plan drawn up for the trip so I thought it would be remiss of me to start with anything other than Magical Mystery Tour!

I've gone through various periods of listening to the 4 Liverpool lads including a complete overdose in Leaving Cert year (I'm looking at you Johnny Morris) when we probably should have been spending more quality time with textbooks!

I think my dad was the reason I first got into The Beatles. He had a load of Beatles records in his collection and I really got hooked when the complete Beatles back catalogue arrived in the house in the form of a pretty great birthday present! They might have been his albums but I was the one who was intent on wearing them out!

Instead of reviewing all the albums I'm just gonna put together a top 5 of both albums and songs. Everyone has their own personal favourites and reasoning behind them so these are mine!...

Songs

1. A Day The Life (Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club)
There's something about this song that gets me every time. It's a song of epic proportions with drama at every turn. Not only No.1 on my Beatles list but No.1 on my all time list. It's a bit of a patchwork quilt of styles but stitched together perfectly! The way the 2 chords of piano comes in at the very end and puts a full stop on the entire Sgt. Peppers album is absolutely sublime.

2. While My Guitar Gently Weeps (The White Album)
What an intro. Four minutes and forty six seconds of brilliance. Written by George Harrison too with a solo from Eric Clapton thrown in for good measure!

3. Helter Skelter (The White Album)
I may have to come clean and say that Bono and U2 are partly reponsible for this one. I heard U2's version of this somehow before I heard The Beatles original. U2's version is great but McCartney's attempt to create the rawest, edgiest and dirtiest Beatles sound to that point really works.

4. Come Together (Abbey Road)
This was actually the last song all four of the Beatles recorded together in the same room and each of them provide pieces of individual brilliance that make it the perfect opening track for Abbey Road, one of my very favourite Beatles albums.

5. Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver)
This song was so far ahead of its time. LSD played a major part in creating something that, for me, is today as fresh and imaginative as it was when it arrived on Revolver nearly 50 years ago in 1966.


The above is my own take on what is an almost impossible exercise! I know I mentioned that I'd put together a list of albums too but I think I've done pretty well to narrow down the songs to just 5 so leave that one with me!

K.

Week 18 - Visit all 32 Counties in a week

First of all, I’d like to say that I’ve fallen in love with Ireland all over again this past week. I’m one of those people often guilty of overlooking our very own patch of paradise when looking for places to spend a few days. Like so many things, we think the grass is always greener… I can, however, confirm we have some of the greenest grass anywhere on this earth!

It was only a convenient break between projects that made me decide just 2 weeks ago to embark on a spin around the country and the ticking of a box I was worried wouldn’t get ticked! The challenge of visiting every county on the island in a week was the brainchild of my lovely sister Aisling (thanks sis) and at the time I thought it was a brilliant idea! As the year crept and the evenings shortened I wasn’t so sure and was worried that I wouldn’t get to doing it at all. I was already (and still am!) waaay behind in my quest to do 52 things in 52 weeks.

6 days, 32 counties and 2345km have taught me a lot about our lovely land as well as a lot of about myself… not to mention a detailed knowledge of diesel prices in every corner of the country!

Some people were surprised that I was doing the trip solo. I’m not weird or anything (those that disagree form an orderly queue here) but I’m someone who’s very happy in my own company when I need to be. I know people who can’t be alone in a room with themselves for more than 30 seconds before they go mad. The jeep was my own personal think thank at a time when I needed to do some thinking  about my next steps and work some stuff out. Doing the trip solo meant I could go where I wanted, when I wanted, catch up with who I wanted and stop to take photos of whatever I wanted, however ridiculous! There was also the small matter of getting through 13 Beatles albums along the way. For what it matters, I reckon they were a waaaay better band after they discovered LSD!

The criteria of the challenge was simple… visit all 32 counties in one week. I needed photographic proof so I decided the ‘Welcome to..’ roadsigns were as good as anything! Trouble is, some countries are more welcoming than others it seems (I’m looking at you Co. Clare) so I had to improvise a couple.

I'm not going to bore people with a detailed account of where I've been. There are way to many highlights and places worth mentioning for that. A few places in particular however, really blew me away. I was looking forward to exploring Donegal and it didn’t disappoint. It has everything, including the most northerly point in the country! The Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge in Antrim is a must, as is Harry’s shack on Portstewart beach (Breakfast bap alone is worth the drive!). Speaking of drives… the journey down through Co. Wicklow and Blessington Lake is brilliant and the road from Bantry in Cork to Killarney (taking in part of the Ring of Kerry) is one of the most spectacular I’ve ever driven.

It really has been a fantastic experience driving through this country that I’m now even prouder than ever to call home. It helped that, unusually for Ireland, it barely rained during the entire 6 days. This island has some of the most spectacular scenery and friendliest people in the world and for those lucky to live here, none of it is more than 3 or 4 hours away. If this all sounds like the spiel from a Failte Ireland brochure then I unashamedly put my hand up. I’ve been to so many new places the past week, met some incredible characters and learned a lot about both myself and the country I call home.

It’s a special place our lovely island… a paradise on our doorstep. All we have to do now is explore it!

Week 17 - Visit a museum

Spending a week or so in London gave me the perfect opportunity to tick off another card on my list of 52 for the year. Seeing as I haven't been doing all that well recently with the cards I said I'd go for broke with this one and not limit it to one museum. (I know, I'm crazy!!)

On Wednesday last I headed to the South Kensington to get me some culture. This area of London is home to a number of world class museums within a stone's throw of one another. The Victoria & Albert Museum is, in its own words, the world's largest museum of decorative arts and design. It's a spectacular building which houses a collection of some 4.5 million objects including incredible works of art, textiles, photography, sculpture, furniture and ceramics that span over 5,000 years of human history. I didn't have time unfortunately to see all of the exhibits that cover its 12 acre footprint but I'll definitely be back to explore it in more depth. Decided to bring Pac-Man for a bit of a stroll too!

 

 The next stop on my afternoon at the museums was The National History Museum, an equally impressive building. Like the big child that I am, I headed straight for the dinosaur exhibition which was extraordinary. I don't care what anyone says, you're never too old to think dinosaurs are cool! The exhibition went right through the various ages and varieties of dinosaur but as you'd expect the animatronic t-rex was the star of the show. After skipping quickly through a couple of million years of history, I made a beeline for the big cats but disappointingly they were just another display in a big corridor of far less impressive beasts. Somehow I managed to stumble across the biggest hall in the entire place, home to a full scale blue whale and a number of its brethren with a supporting cast of giraffes, elephants and dolphins but most impressively of all, a collection of wooly mammoth type giants.

 

 

Having raced my way through mosaics, mammoths, terracottas and a t-rex, I just about had enough time to take in some of the Science Museum and especially an exhibition about Winston Churchill and technology the Allies employed during World War One which I'd seen posters for dotted all around London. Churchill was fascinated by science and technology and put together what was effectively a brains trust of brilliant scientist and engineers who worked on areas like developing a reliable form of radar, the production of penicillin and antibiotics and Britain’s top secret research behind the first atomic bomb. Fascinating stuff for a complete nerd like myself!

So that concludes my mini museum marathon! Decided to add a fourth and go to the Tate Modern too but that may have been a museum too far. Incredibly cool building, even if it has some REALLY strange stuff in it that somehow counts as art! Who am I to criticise I guess... I'm a professional crayon engineer after all! :-)