I heart Boogie Shoes!

Boogie Shoes at the Moseley Dance Centre. For the uninitated, Boogie Shoes was the epicentre of dancing in South Birmingham for most of the 1990s, especially if you were a 30 something Moseleyite like me. When my brother went to a rave in about 1990 and had to be ambulanced out due to an adverse reaction to Ecstacy, I knew that I was biologically unsuited to anything more hardcore than vodka and disco. This was confirmed at a party in 1999 when I managed to get high on Tizer - it must have been the sunset yellow.

Featuring a playlist of mainly 1970s tracks, some more leftfield than others, Boogie Shoes attracted a very broad clientele, and I personally had some of my best nights there of the decade. I lost track of the number of men I snogged in what was basically a glorified community centre.

My best friend Sandra, from school, was living with (now married to with a couple of kids) Andy Collins, and Andy together with his brother Sid, were the DJs from the beginning to the end of the Boogie Shoes decade. I was still living in Manchester when I came over to Birmingham with Bill for the first time to Boogie Shoes. And I loved it. In September 1994, I met a psychopath called Mike there, and following a destructive but thankfully short-lived romance, I moved to Birmingham and that's how I came to be living here. Two months later, on November 5th 1992 Boogie Shoes, our romance came to a spectacular end as Mike poured petrol all over his back garden then set fire to it, and later that night, after Boogie Shoes itself, threw out all my belongings onto the street at 2.30am, leaving me (pregnant) and my friend Jo with no obvious place to go. [ A few years ago I told this story - on request - when out eating with a group of people, and my husband Dave ended up in tears listening to it, so hey, happy endings do happen.]

But all of this is just a self-indulgent digression.

Last night Boogie Shoes reformed, for the second time, at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath. Definitely scaled down compared to the cavernous MDC, the new 21st century Boogie Shoes did alright on the night, and we had a great time. A lot of people I knew were out, which is always an agreeable surprise when you're washed up and in your mid-40s like me. I danced myself dizzy like Liquid Gold (not on the playlist thank god) and here is my top 10 of all the tunes Andy and Sid played (not in order):

1. Last night a DJ saved my life - Indeep

2. You've got the love - Candi Staton

3. The Night - Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons

4. I feel love - Donna Summer

5. Step on - Happy Mondays

6. I believe in miracles - Jackson Sisters

7. Superstition - Stevie Wonder

8. Everybody dance - Chic

9. Thinking of you - Sister Sledge

10. Is it love you're after? - Rose Royce

Thanks everyone for a great night. Knees were twinging by the end though.

My favourite things

I've just been onto Amazon and I've ordered everything I want at the moment - that is the following three things:
- Bartok's Viola Concertos
- The Wire Series 1 on DVD
- De Profundis by Oscar Wilde.
I am officially happy, and I'm off for a run.

I've got the fantasy football blues

Andy Collins has just sent out the first fantasy football email update of the season and it's bad news for me. I'm currently positioned 18th out of 22 in our league. And there was me thinking that my finely-tuned research methods were infallible. This is my worst start since I can remember and in 2 or 3 weeks, when the season has settled down a little, I'll have to do a bit of analysis to see which players are letting me down. In the immediate term, hopefully Gerrard's goal yesterday will have made a bit of a difference.

Both the initial selection of players and transfer decisions in fantasy football would be a lot easier if the data were open. I've been arguing, at an informal / social level, for some time within Talis that the biggest semantic web opportunity out there is not education, but is in fact sport. Sport is something that loads and loads of people, from all sorts of backgrounds, are interested in, and certain sports in particular, e.g. football; cricket; baseball, lend themselves to both statistical and qualitative analysis. Crucially, it's not just the sports professionals that engage in that analysis, but lay people as well. The ongoing success of fantasy football / cricket / baseball and so on demonstrate a widespread hunger for active engagement in professional sports, and many many people like myself are part of leagues that may be organised by the media, notably the Telegraph and the Times in the UK, or more grassroots e.g. the league that Andy organises for his friends. It's easy to see that there would be considerable demand for semantic data services around sports, but equally, there's a significant number of people who would be willing to contribute data, in my opinion. Neither the Telegraph nor the Times provide APIs for people such as Andy, and as a result he has to perform a lot of the calculations manually, and the data is nowhere near as rich as it could be. The semantic web could enable relationships to be discovered in the performance of individual players, clubs and countries that aren't immediately apparent, as well as making statistics more accessible. My friends and I each pay £23 a year into Andy's league, so monetisation possibilities are readily apparent.

To the "player" who successfully develops a semantic platform for sports lovers, then, the spoils.

New running shoes!

This morning I've been out to "test drive" my new running shoes - Mizuno Wave Rider 11. I bought them yesterday at The Birmingham Runner Shop and they cost my £80, which for some reason is cheaper than my last pair of Mizuno running shoes.

Earlier on in the week, I went onto www.physiosupplies.com, and ordered some new insoles (in common with 70% of the population - apparently - I have dropped arches and need support when I'm running to avoid over-pronating, which is when your feet sort of roll inwards, causing tendonitis and shin splints in my case). My friend Graham, who's a physiotherapist in Manchester, recommended the site. He also has dropped arches and pointed me towards the Orthaheel Sports Orthotic Insole. A snip at £20. Incredibly they arrived less than 24 hours after ordering, on a standard delivery charge. These people should be running the country.

So out I went this morning on a 2.2 mile run. A pathetic distance I know, but I'm building up my fitness again and I'm very overweight. Well the Mizunos gave me the comfort that I'm used to now (the first time I tried a pair of Mizunos on, it felt like my feet were enveloped in a combination of air and cotton wool) but the insoles were the real stars. My feet feel properly supported for the first time ever and it's so reassuring. Maybe I'll never suffer the agonies of shin splints again? Who knows.

Overall, though, I felt like shit. It's hard to believe I'm the same person who ran the Manchester 10K race effortlessly as recently as June. But thankfully it's like childbirth (not that I'd know) - by the time the next run comes along, I've forgotten how awful the last one was. Time for a shower.

Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir

Like most hispanophiles of my generation, I’ve always been struck by the utter appaulingness of Spanish pop music. Basically it’s poor quality heavily derivative soft rock, as John Hooper notes in the latest edition of The New Spaniards. I spent 6 months studying in Santiago de Compostela in 1985, and the only pop music I liked, apart from British stuff, were records that reminded me of great nights out – so that was a handful of Alaska y Dinarama tracks and the very acceptable (at the time at least) Colecciono Moscas (I collect flies) by Golpes Bajos. [I wouldn’t mind betting that if I played Colecciono Moscas on Youtube I would be horrified, so I think I’ll let the good memories lie.]

I reflected on this most disappointing aspect of Spanish culture over the summer as Dave and I spent a happy 3 weeks touring around Galicia – the first time I’ve been back to that part of Spain for 23 years. I needed to listen to the radio to try to “retune in” to the Spanish language, but the music nearly drove us both insane. This came as a genuine surprise to me, as I’d assumed that globalisation, and the internet in particular, would mean that previously heterogeneous countries would be levelling out culturally. After all, France has produced Air, Daft Punk and more besides, whereas in the 80s French pop music was more or less as dire as that of Spain. Spain clearly hasn’t moved on though, even though it’s a strikingly musical nation.

So why is this? When trying to understand why it is that British music is so effortlessly superior to any of its European counterparts, the conventional wisdom seems to highlight the urban concentrations of Britain’s population. But does that really explain the chasm-like gap? Spain has, since Franco’s death in 1975, become almost overwhelmingly urban, and this is particularly true of the younger generations. Spain’s got loads of cities and the vast majority of them are growing at an impressive rate. Admittedly it’s not always easy travelling between them, simply because Spain is incredibly mountainous, but that doesn’t strike me as a defining factor, especially in this day and age.

What I think might be the case is that there is almost too much continuity in Spain between its old traditional musical forms and the present. My friend Bill and I went to a fiesta in Granada in the early 1990s and flamenco was clearly in vogue among young people, for example. British teenagers and pop artists, on the other hand, aren’t constrained by the past, for reasons that will be culturally and historically complex but probably have a lot to do with the rapid industrialisation that Britain underwent and the rupture with feudal traditions that resulted. It’s only an idea and I may be wrong, but I do think I’m onto something.

Towards the end of the trip though, I finally heard a Spanish pop record that I liked. In fact, I absolutely love it. It’s called “Pretendo hablarte”, it’s by Beatriz Luengo, from the album Carrousel – yes, thanks to a combination of http://www.google.es/ and Youtube, I’ve managed to track (sorry) it down. It has the heart wrenching chorus “Tu me quieres querer; yo no quiero sufrir”, which doesn’t translate well but basically means “You want to want me; I don’t want to suffer”. It’s the perfect articulation of the painful yearning of love so if you’re feeling lovesick, or if you’re simply curious, go enjoy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prfdtq3_EXs. Apparently they love her in France as well.