Musings and Ramblings – Or The Curious Incident of the Lava Lamp in the Amp
So, Sunday Thoughts pieces sometimes come to mind during the week when I’m watching something on the telly, listening to the radio, or just doing normal, run-of-the-day boring stuff. This one comes to you after a couple of weeks “off” where we’ve been travelling and playing house with a new HiFi PiG Towers.
Today’s Sunday Thoughts (it might get published a little later – find out why later on in this article) came to me whilst in the shower on Halloween night. Don’t worry, it wasn’t anything like the shower scene from Psycho or anything like that.
This particular Halloween happens to be the third anniversary of my Mum (Grandma HiFi PiG) pegging it, and earlier in the day we’d heard that Lin’s uncle had died. Panic not, this isn’t going to get maudlin…much. Three years ago, on Halloween, I was at our friend Lukasz’s (him of Lampizator fame) house when I got the call that ambulances had been called to Mum. A few minutes later, the call came that she’d died. Lukasz was perfect, treated me as a brother would and let me get on with everything whilst being there and not being there. There’s been a lot of similar friendships made through HiFi over the last fifteen years, and I’m not sure that, when we first started out on this whole HiFi PiG adventure, we’d have envisaged just how many people we’d come to count as proper friends.
Tonight, Saturday night, I find that Poland is in uproar and everything seemed kind of connected somehow. We’ve just come back from the Warsaw Show (read all about the show here – plug, plug), which was held a little early this year! I’ve a lot of friends in Poland, and a lot of folk will naturally be very worried about the current geopolitical situation. It’s odd how your mind makes connections between things, and how events that you might once have seen on the news and thought little more about take on a rather different significance when you know and care about people who live there. All this is just rambling thoughts at the moment, I’m well aware, dear reader, but rambling thoughts are pretty much what you signed up for when you clicked on Sunday Thoughts.
Now, a few months back, Lin and I made an offer on a new home and that offer got accepted. Late afternoon last Wednesday, that home became ours. New adventures are ahead of us. But, of course, before we can settle into this new home, we have to get loads of things ticked off our to-do list. The list is a big one, but in essence it could be boiled down to a single phrase of “get your shit sorted, Lin and Stu”, but I like to break getting shit done into smaller, manageable and tickoffable comments on a list. There’s a certain satisfaction to be had from ticking things off a list, even if, as seems to be the case at the moment, every time we tick something off, another three things get added to the bottom of it.
When we knew we were moving – in fact, whilst we were first looking around the flat – we were thinking about HiFi, where it would go, should we go horns again, or do we stick with more conventional speakers? The amps and pre are staying; cables are staying. Of course, we also need to decide what is staying in terms of normal stuff as well, but a good deal of time has been spent talking about the HiFi, where it will sound best, etc., etc. To the normal person, all this might seem a little excessive and superfluous, but to the intrepid audiophile, these things matter a lot. I suspect there aren’t a great many people who, whilst being shown around a potential new home, are mentally positioning a pair of loudspeakers and wondering what effect the ceiling height might have on the sound, but there you go.
We’d kind of earmarked a space in the new apartment, with the knowledge that that space might well not be the HiFi’s final resting place. Indeed, having now been in the flat and adding to this draft article, it’s become clear that the HiFi is not only going to have to be repositioned, it’s going to have to change rooms. This is one of those things that you can think about, draw little plans of and discuss until you’re blue in the face, but until you actually get into a space and spend a bit of time in it, you don’t really know how you’re going to use it. And, of course, until you get a pair of speakers in there and fire them up, you don’t really know what it’s going to sound like either.
Of course, all the crap (sorry, the wonderful accumulation of “things”) of life needs to be sorted, decisions made about whether things are to be kept, and packed up ready for the final move south. The packing of the records started a while ago and we have a minor Alpine peak of boxes awaiting shipment. The HiFi will have to wait until the very last minute, but then there are things like artwork, ornaments, lamps…oh, lamps.
Dear reader, allow me to digress from my train of thought for a moment and indulge me in a short interlude that I think you will enjoy, though my enjoyment of the moment that’s about to unfold before your eyes was substantially less than the enjoyment you might well get from a little schadenfreude at the unfortunate incident.
Behind the main speakers in the main listening space, we have a white SME 10 that’s not been used in an age, some pottery by Daniel at ModWright, and some odds and sods, including a lava lamp. The lava lamp was connected to voltage juice via an extension cable down the back of the record rack, and getting in there was a bit tight, what with a pair of speakers and a big Electrocompaniet monobloc sat atop its stand getting in the way a bit and obstructing access. Anyway, I shoehorned my way into a position where I could reach hopefully for the plug and release it from its multiprise shackles.
Of course, I’m not stupid and realise that I’d need to hold onto the lava lamp for fear of it falling over. Of course, I’m also so stupid as to not have remembered that the glass vessel that entraps the waxy gloop in a mixture of water and, I think, glycol isn’t actually fitted to the silver base with the lead. As I bend down to pull out the lead from its socket, said vessel tumbles from its place of safety and directly onto the top of the aforementioned Electrocompaniet monobloc. Glass everywhere, house electrics tripped, and water and whatever else now adding to the performance of the amp. I’d like to say the sound is a tad cleaner than it was, but the truth is that, having contacted the excellent Lasse at Electrocompaniet, he suggested the best course of action might be to leave the amp turned off and send it to a fella near Marseille to get it cleaned out and to assess the damage.
The conversation with Lasse went something like this:
Me: I’m an idiot.
Lasse: Yes.
Me: No, really, I’ve done something really stupid. (Then follows the explanation of what happened.)
Lasse: Schittappens tu!
Now, Lasse is Norwegian and this phrase “Schittappens tu” obviously means something in the Norwegian tongue. My best stab at its meaning is “Look, I’d rather not say it to your face, but you are a fudging idiot, aren’t you, Stu!” He’s right, of course; shit does indeed happen and I am a fudging idiot. I’m sure the amp will be fine, by the way. I’ve managed to short the binding posts in the past and all that happened was the amp politely shut down, went through its warm-up sequence and carried on as if nothing had happened. However, I am going to follow Lasse’s advice and get it sent for a proper clean and service. There are, I suspect, better ways of demonstrating the build quality and protection circuitry of Electrocompaniet amplifiers than the ones I’ve been employing over the years.
Anyway, back to the move. We decided to go and take a look at the new apartment, but to do that involved a two-and-a-half-day drive right across and down the whole of France (could we have moved any further away?), but it was a fun road trip filled with laughs and chatter. Linette is the organiser of the outfit and had planned a suitable route and consulted me at key moments. Let me explain.
I’m afraid of heights and especially high bridges, so every time we plan a road trip, Linette gets on Google Maps (it used to be real maps and me and the kids would call her the “Sat Nag”), plans the routes and inspects every kilometre (they’re like miles but about half-as-long-and-add-a-bit – for our UK and US readers) for bridges. If she finds one, she goes to Street View and brings me the computer to make an assessment as to whether said bridge is passable or if we’ll have to make a long and mostly pointless detour of dozens of kilometres because of my somewhat irrational fear of bridges.
I’ll explain my fear a bit. I don’t think it’s the fear of the height itself, and I’m well aware that, for the most part, bridges are pretty safe, though in the last few years there has been a run of bridges collapsing, sometimes seemingly for little or no apparent reason. I’m also well aware that in some cases the money that should have gone into proper support, structure and maintenance has gone to fund the lavish lifestyles of people a good deal higher up the food chain than the poor sods driving across the bridge. I actually think my fear is more of me suddenly deciding to irrationally steer the car off the bridge than any structural worries. None of this does much to allay my fears, of course, and I’m not sure that any amount of explaining the engineering behind a particularly fine example of a bridge is going to make me any more inclined to drive across the bloody thing.
Route suitably planned, car loaded, pique-niques packed, and bridges cleverly avoided, we set off for our first stop on the route. Eight or so hours later, we arrive at a decent enough hotel in which to get our heads down and refresh for the next day on the road. If you’ve never done this journey, it really brings home what a beautiful and quite diverse country it is. It also brought home just how different Brittany is to the rest of the country. We’ve lived in Brittany for a good many years and it’s easy to forget that what we see around us every day isn’t necessarily representative of France as a whole. The architecture changes, the landscape changes, and the further south you get, the more the whole feel of the place changes.
A breakfast of bread and lots of strong coffee had us ready to start the next day, en route for somewhere Lin thought would be a suitable stopping-off point. It was a lovely journey! Around sunset, we arrived at our destination hotel, pulled off the main road, drove around a bit bemused and came to the conclusion that the hotel had long been closed down to the paying public. It was a low building, a tatty sign was flapping from the wire perimeter fence, and we got to see a somewhat overgrown tennis court that I assume keen followers of that particular racket sport could once have played on. But now what to do? We’d booked the hotel in good faith, and where would we stop?
We drove around the perimeter a bit more and, lo and behold, if there wasn’t a proper illuminated sign, a car park, a reception and all the things you’d associate with a stop-off motel kind of affair. Needless to say, they weren’t serving food that I could eat, but no fear, we headed off over countless lanes of traffic to a wood-fired pizza restaurant for what turned out to be a rather delicious marinara. Another period of sleep and we were off again.
Our final destination reached and we were in our new home. It’s above a couple of bars in the old part of the city and we chose the place because we know we are noisy neighbours, and having noisy neighbours three or four nights a week kind of makes sense – they can’t complain and we can’t complain. It’s quite noisy, and we’ve learned that Catalans like to go out between 23:00 and 02:00 and enjoy an eclectic mix of 90s classic pop and French speedcore to help dance away the effects of the booze. I might buy earbuds.
There is, of course, something slightly ironic about someone who spends a good deal of his life listening to music at fairly substantial volumes considering buying something to stop himself hearing music being played at fairly substantial volumes. It’s a different thing when it’s your music, though, isn’t it? I can happily spend several hours listening to repetitive electronic music, the differences between one bar and the next being pretty much imperceptible to anyone who hasn’t been listening intently for the last ten minutes, but there’s something altogether different about being subjected to someone else’s choice of music when you’d quite like to be asleep. I got brought up in pubs, and I know that one does become accustomed to the noise, and I guess that in time it will get to the point where I’ll find it difficult to sleep without the glorious bass kick of Weasel Busters and Spice Girls filling my dreams.
Of course, the first night we didn’t have a bed and a blow-up air mattress was our resting place for the first night. Two things: firstly, I’m too old to sleep on airbeds. Secondly, according to the instructions, this particular airbed should not be used as a sailing vessel – the instruction manual was quite explicit on this point. I might throw caution to the wind and take it for a dip in the Med in a bit. Readers will be pleased to know that we now have a proper bed, the airbed is now masquerading as a sofa, and the musical taste of the Catalan youth hasn’t changed much, though they do seem to get louder at the weekend.
And so, what started out as a few thoughts in the shower on Halloween night has been added to and tinkered with over the course of a couple of weeks, and here we are in the new HiFi PiG Towers, with a list of things to do, a bed, an airbed masquerading as a sofa and, for the time being at least, no proper HiFi (we bought another JBL Flip 7). There’s a minor Alpine peak of records waiting for us in Brittany, an Electrocompaniet amp that needs to go and have the remnants of a lava lamp removed from its innards, and a whole new city for us to get to know. If this Sunday Thoughts turns up on a Monday or a couple of weeks late, I think you’ll understand why, and thanks to Guillaume at Boyer for your comprehension!
No doubt I’ll be regaling you with more stories of our move in the coming weeks and months, but for now, that’s your lot.
Stu
