January 2010

Happy New Year to all our friends neighbours family and passers by. 

I'm out seeing the New Year in California with Mrs Wangford, my son and his family.  We saw the New Year in on Donner Lake in the high Sierra Nevada.  Hogmanay itself was spectacular, as I hope it was for you, because of the first Blue Moon on New Year's Eve for sixty years. 

A blue moon, as you probably all know, is the second full moon in a calendar month.  But up there in the winter wonderland of the Sierras the mountains and the lake were glowing blue under the Full Moon, an incandescent blue from a parallel universe. 

The next day we went up to Squaw Valley site of the 1960 winter Olympics and while all around me were skiing and snowboarding their ways down the mountainsides I had the joy of taking a cable car up and skating on an Olympic rink up on a mountain top at 8,200 feet.   I was exceeding happy. 

Now back in San Rafael in Marin County, the other side of Golden Gate Bridge and home to many happy comfortable white toothed white people, I've been retracing some of my steps in San Francisco where I hung out in 1971, still the sixties. 

I shall be touring parts of the city tomorrow to search for any legacy from the Hippie days.  My guide will be Stan Fluoride who hopefully will open a few doors in my mind and show me whether today the city still thrives on any shadows of the Summer of Love or whether the whole of Haight Ashbury has degenerated into a soulless 21st century Me Me Me nightmare. 

Back in 1968 I released a single called "Jabberwock" and called myself Boeing Duveen & The Beautiful Soup.  Sadly both sides of the single have been taken off YouTube but should be available for your listening pleasure somewhere here on this site.  The 45 is now considered one of the top 100 Psychedelic records of all time and is seriously collectible.  Search me, mate, I haven't even got a copy, but there you are.  With a picture sleeve, with the winsome photo of Boeing, it is worth two hundred pounds.  Until recently that is. 

This week a copy with a picture sleeve went on eBay for FOUR HUNDRED POUNDS (399.99 to be exact) which shows that it is an investment opportunity.  Luckily my record sales are paltry enough to keep my feet firmly on the ground and stop me from even considering purchasing an artefact like this from my murky past. 

No, let us look to the future and wish all of ourselves a Happy New Year and let us all dream on.  Peace and, as we used to say, Love. 

Hankfully yours, Hank