just back from a long weekend road trip with a good friend of mine, S.

headed to quite a few places in the midlands over 4 days.. mainly cambridge, manchester, lake district national park, liverpool, some unpronouncable northern wales towns, birmingham and oxford...

do check out the pics here.

da da de da

there's nothing more tantalising than sipping a glass of 15 year old single malt in one hand and listening to great jazz... live.

had been eyeing a certain jazz group for some time now... the San Francisco Jazz Collective or SFJC for short... the interesting and special element of their music is that there's that abundance of material, both the re-imagined old and new... and from some of the best jazz musicians on the scene now too.

so what better way to end off a hard day's work than to sit back and bask in the rythmic dance of chords and instruments...

to be honest, there were particular moments in time when i was so into the music that the audience around me seemed to fade away.. yes i really did enjoy myself last night.

It has been a while since i last went for a jazz concert... but i do remember one that i went for in the Esplanade with a couple of friends called the Shanghai Jazz Concert or something... it was mixture of both vocal and instrumental but what really stood out was an occasional pair of dancers fleeting gracefully to the music, and the vocalist having a rest on the side table while having a drink and fag...lol

Particular moments did stand out more last night.. especially when Joshua Redman and Miguel Zenon had a playful and heated exchange between the tenor & alto saxaphones that really got the crowd jiving in their seats... when Bobby Hutcherson worked his magic on the vibraphone... and a bass solo by Matt Penman that was simply amazing...

all in all, despite the grey and rainy skies in this part of the world, it was certainly far from gloom in the Barbican Centre concert hall last night...

on a totally new different topic, all thanks to the sharp eyes of my flatmate Y who spotted an ad in the papers, we headed off to Bilbarough Street... where a Ted Baker sample sale was happening! hee... it was in a small town hall kind of building called Camden Centre.

one thing i reckon i rather fancy about the English is that they usually don't take themselves too seriously... there's always a tinge of humour injected into every daily aspect of life, be it work or play...

and it was clearly reflected when we looked at our receipts for our purchases:

Top up

i have generally not been writing much i know.. but i kind of work that way..
will start ranting properly when i feel like it.. =)

the 27th of March was my project's topping up ceremony.. where all of us were herded onto the rooftop of the building site to commemorate the completion of reaching the highest structural level within the project!

haha so there was a reception with juice n such, a speech amidst freezing spring winds, alot of walking up site ladders, everyone signing on a beam, taking group photos, yada yada.. was good really. i've left my mark on British soil now.. haha.. wheee..