Christmas Movie

OK, so we have just got over the strange annual ritual in the west that is Christmas.

It was even stranger for me this year, as my family decided not to do Christmas any more, so we had a kind of un-Christmas. It did feel good though, not having to push through crowds to buy things that people probably don't want anyway.

I usually enjoy doing these "travelogue blog" entries - but, having done the Scotland - San Francisco trip so often, I didn't feel I had too much of interest to report this time round.

My Christmas movie, which is below, seems to capture quite nicely all the highlights. Having messed about with iMovie for, what is almost certainly too long, I feel that this is quite representative of the trip.

There are probably too many airplanes and Edinburgh bars in this, but my trip was kinda like that. There are some very nice shots of central Edinburgh though, I always feel my former adopted home town looks at it's best in Winter. I also enjoyed finding a bottle of Buckfast in the Pizza Hut toilet. I must google "Buckfast", so see if my non Scottish readers will get the significance of that.

Oh well, looks I'm back to India in mid Feb, that may make for more interesting travel blogging.

The movie had to be split into three parts due to youtube's limitations (I'm not really moaning, I know it's free). A tiny part at the beginning was shot on a Sony Ericsson cameraphone, all the rest was shot on my Leica d-lux 3 compact camera. It's amazing the quality of the video that the camera produces, shame the compression of youtube has reduced the quality a bit - it actually looks great on the big screen.

We didn't mind the gap, Van der Graaf Generator in London, April 16 2007

Being the bands first gig without sax player David Jackson, we were a touch nervous about how they would be. Would there be a big gap in their sound?

In the end they were phenomenal. They did a great set. They didn't seem to be consciously doing too much to make up for DJ not being there, but it worked a treat. They even played two new songs, the first one being really good too.

The audience was really great too, really appreciative, huge ovation for them at the end. The band seemed to be really, really enjoying themselves too. Peter Hammill so much so that I saw him skipping away at the end, and he seemed to be so overcome at the occasion that I caught him looking down at his set list to see what the song was that they were going to play for an encore.

I didn't take my camera to the gig as it had run out of battery, and anyway I'm always wary of losing cameras at gigs. We were up in the balcony anyway, I'd have needed a huge zoom lens to get any shots of the band.

I downloaded this above pic from Flikr, it's from a great set of photos taken by a guy called Sean Kelly at the gig. I could see loads of people taking photos with cellphone cameras, but I haven't seen any posted on Flikr yet. These photos were taken with an Olympus compact, according to Flikr. However all the cellphone photo usage has made me do some research into cellphone cameras though, and I have found that you can get a Sony Ericsson phone with a 3.2 mega pixel camera in it for around $350. Amazing, I was happy with my old 3 mega pixel Olympus for long enough, and now I can have one with more mega pixels bundled into a cellphone.

Anyway, long live Van Der Graaf Generator. On the strength of this performance, I hope there are many more to come. We worked out that it's now 19 years since we first saw Peter Hammill (the bands main man, pictured above). That was in London too, Queen Elizabeth Hall, February 14th 1988. Peter was only 41 then and now he'll be 60 this year!

Kirriemuir, Angus, Scotland - April 19 2007