Random words and pictures with a great soundtrack

One of the wackier newspaper stories I read recently quoted a new study that, in terms of an annual carbon footprint (or should that be pawprint?), owning a dog is more damaging to the environment than running a Toyota 4x4 Landcruiser; and owning a cat is equivalent to running a Volkswagen Golf. We have four cats.

Last Sunday with our children back at uni and the snow generally limiting our horizons Mrs Darce and I were at a bit of a loose end, so we decided it was time to sort out a little corner of our bedroom that had turned into a general dumping ground. We needed some furniture to put there so we took ourselves off to Ikea (not difficult as we have a store only about a mile away) and amazingly found just what we wanted straightaway.    

Ikea are of course renowned for the quirky names they give everything they sell (or at least they sound quirky to your average English person – there is in fact some logic to it apparently). And so it was that last Sunday I spent the afternoon assembling some little Trabys. Traby could be a Swedish place name, or possibly an occupation by the looks of things. Except that with a slight change in spelling it becomes Trabi and therefore immediately makes me think of the Trabant, the East German car that was, pre 1989, thought of as something of a joke, especially in the West, but is now increasingly fondly remembered it seems.        

So there you have it – not only does our household have enough Volkswagen Golfs to go around:

we can now also call on a small fleet of Trabants too:

Whilst building my “Trabi”s last Sunday I went appropriately retro and dug out some cassettes to play. They included a couple that I assume were Mrs Darce’s as I can’t remember buying them. One was Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” and the other was the Tavares’ “Hard Core Poetry”. One side of an album typically didn’t last long in the early 70s. It seemed like I was turning the cassette over every five  minutes! Anyway, I was completely blown away by one of the Tavares tracks. I can’t recall ever hearing it before but the play-stop-rewind-stop-play buttons have been exercised a lot this week playing “Too Late”. Some quick research tells me it was a single in the US, making 59 pop and 10 r&b. As far as I know it was never released in UK. Do you think this is maybe where EWF got some inspiration for “September”? Apparently this has started to get some action on the Northern/Modern scenes recently. Rightly so, it’s fab.

Tavares – Too Late 1974