Slowly things are returning to a more mundane rhythm. Slowly. We’re not there yet. At least the weather changed this weekend. The heat made place for some long overdue rain, clearing the air, giving some space to breathe and making it easier to find some sleep. Even my cat Schnitzl spent some time sleeping indoors during the night again. But first, imagine the music setting in and, in a slow fade we move into a backflash and in an artistic blur we are taken back to the beginning of the week for the recap montage… and the voiceover takes a deep breath and starts:
The Week that was/The Weeks that were – Lisbon and the aftermath. 15.07. & 22.07.2018
“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender”… I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Churchill speak those words, but it must have been often. This week, more precisely Friday, I heard them again.
Whenever I hear them they are usually followed by the intro riff to Aces High, one of THE classic Iron Maiden tunes. The same Friday July 13th. With a difference. Usually, when I hear them, I’m listening to a recording, most of the time the classic 86 live album Live after Death. This time I heard it stood in the middle of a crowd of fellow Maiden fans and the band which I’ve absolutely adored in my very early teens, and which I still proudly count among one of my favourite bands, were live on stage at Lisbon’s Altice Arena. It was a great experience!
But before going into any more detail about the concert (and I’m not going to write a full review anyway), let’s look back a bit further, all the way to that first Sunday (July 8th), when the location for the Week that Was was being set! It’s worth mentioning at this point – I didn’t want to spoil the intro – that at the time this is being finished and published we’re speaking of the Week that Was previous to the week that just was. Sometimes that’s how it goes.
The Week that Was – 08.07.2018
Gone Fishing Lisbon.
The week that was was full of preparations for my trip to Lisbon which started today and will be going on until the 16th. I’m sitting here now in my AirBnB room in the north of Lisbon, listening to planes go by overhead and looking forward to an interesting week in this town which I’m visiting for the first time. Coming Friday I will see Iron Maiden live here. For the very first time. I promise I will scream for Bruce! In light of all this there wasn’t really much to write about last week. Hence all I’m doing right here right now is saying that there’s nothing I’ll be writing about in a longwinded way to make it, at least a little, look like I’m writing about something…. I hope your bygone week was awesome and exciting
The week that will have been might not make it into blog post form until after the 16th, but at least there should be a good deal of things to write about. And photos!
Talking of photos… here’s one of a cat in Lisbon.
The Week that Was – 07.01.2018
And thus, as the week ends, we enter the second half of 2018. No worries, this is still the Week that was I shall keep the review at that. Mostly. And this time I got a whole lot of pictures, so I might even get away with less text. But that we shall see… The regular reader, or those now heading off to do read up on the previous 4 posts, will have had opportunity to realise that these write-ups pretty much follow a stream of consciousness path. Therefore I myself usually don’t know what the week will have brought, once we’ve reached the grand finale. It is, of course, always based on a true story…
Talking of true story: True story – last week, I’m no longer sure if it was Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, all of a sudden the song The Timewarp from the Rocky Horror Show pops into my head. I have no idea why. And then, on Friday I’m on the phone with my mum back in Austria who tells me that she and my aunt went to see the musical last Wednesday. I immediately had to think of C. G. Jung’s concept of synchronicity.
The Week that Was – 24.06.2018
The week that was was rather unremarkable.
Sure, things have happened in the world. Good ones, bad ones, the world keeps turning. I’ve spent enough text ranting on politics in last week’s post, this week I’ll keep it short. After all a lot of things have been discussed at length elsewhere. Just to say that I, too, am of the opinion that anyone who separates children from their parents and then puts them into detention centres with the sole purpose of fighting migrants – you are not fighting migration, you are fighting migrants you worthless excuse for human beings – is a/are fascist(s). We can discuss politics of controlling/preventing migration, but treating migrants as second class humans is beyond discussion. Whether this is in America or Europe. (Btw. The Guardian released a list this week of the know casualties of the European Migrant crisis. Here.)
OK then, that off my chest, let’s, once again, look at the wonderful world of not politics. There was a story making its rounds that we may be the only advanced civilisation in the observable universe. Personally I would, even in that case, put “advanced” in quotation marks. But that may be just me. Anyways, this raises a bunch of questions: Are we really alone? Are we, as Arthur C. Clarke pondered a while ago, maybe the first such civilisation with others to follow? Do we not know how to look properly? And if the latter, why? Is it that we are simply not capable to find a civilisation like ours with our means? Or could it be that an alien civilisation is so fundamentally different from ours, that we wouldn’t know if we saw one? This speculation makes me think of examples thought up by Stanislaw Lem – Fiasco or even Solaris come to mind – or Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud. Either way, we mustn’t forget the Fermi Paradox & Drake equaton. And we mustn’t forget that a story such as the one that we’re likely to be alone, coming from some scientific study, is a great treat for any sensationalist media.
The Week that Was – 17.06.2018
Another week gone by quickly.
Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if this theory that sometimes pops up on the fringes of weirder ideas, which states that time is actually accelerating, might be true after all. And would that, considering what the General Theory of Relativity says, even be felt? Or are matters rather subjective? But let other speculation-inclined minds ponder this for now. Hit me up when the results are in!
Meanwhile, there never seems enough time to do all the things one wants to do. Even less so when you want get a proper night’s sleep, or two, in there as well. And after last week I had to prioritise that for a bit – less successful as hoped. In part I have my lovely cat Schnitzl (Full name & title: Tiger, Lord Schnitzl. Best of Cats) and his nocturnal activities to thank/blame for that. But, honestly, my tendency for night-owling are strong and seem to be coming to the foreground again recently, miraculously shifting bedtime to later and later hours in the process.
The Week that Was – 10.06.2018
We are back with our review… a day or so late, but one thing I didn’t get all that much of was sleep. So it took me a bit longer to get this finished.
This bygone week was, again, heavily in the sign of Necronomidol. After having had a chance to meet them at the record signing session at Sister Ray Ace in Shoreditch I was in for two days of waiting – following all the tweets and fb posts about their gigs up north (Manchester, Birmingham) with excitement and growing anticipation – before finally being able to see them live at The Underworld in London’s Camden Town. Now, I’m well aware that I sound full-on fanboy here, but if it hits you, it hits you. Music has always been something pretty well able to wake my inner enthusiast, and while – and because – there have been time where I’d become pretty jaded, I now know to cherish this excitement and go with whatever entertains me.