Back To Shore

I had a vague idea of how to start this post about the past week: my short trip to Paris. Two days at an inspiring work conference after. Another long day at work. Lots of chilling out on the weekend.

When I sat down at my computer this afternoon I decided to move the ton of photos from my cameras SD card to my computer, before I started typing up my thoughts. While moving those Paris files I somehow managed to shred the SD card they were on. I don’t know if it would have worked better, had I only copied instead of moved the files. I’ll never know. But the many many Paris photos were and remain lost! Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, some bridges and monuments, the Louvre and Tuileries Gardens at dusk… all gone! I’m not ashamed to admit that I cried hot, angry tears over that for a bit this afternoon. But… it’s just photos. Yes, it would have been nice to have them to remember the trip by. To share some of them here and on Instagram. To show off a bit, I admit that as well. I try my hardest to not be too hard on myself for messing this up. No amount of being pissed at myself over it, will restore these files. “Be More Kind” starts with oneself, right?

Here are the few not as high-quality photos I took with my phone.

I had a good time all in all and that’s what matters, right?

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At the start of the year I had considered taking a week or two off in July to just relax and recharge. Or maybe even use the time to start working on stuff that needs to be done around the family home, which I still plan to move into at some point. The nearer to July I got I realized neither would be feasible for a variety of reasons. One of them was that it became clear that my work load / deadlines and such would not allow for me to take two weeks off in July. So I decided to make the most of this mini break of time away from the office (vacation time and conference time) to at least get some distance from everything. I used the time in Paris to unplug for a bit or at least I tried. I had thought about doing another “Charlie in…” Insta stories installation, but that would have been the opposite of unplugging. So I rarely took photos with him. Here is one though. Like I said I had a good time in Paris. 

It rained more than I had liked, but I used that time in my rented apartment to just catch up on my reading. Newspapers. Online articles. Novels. Two around 400 pages each in the span of 4 days. Lots of rain and long train journeys make that possible and I loved that. 

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The main reason for me to travel to Paris was the Brandi Carlile gig on Monday evening. It was her first time proper touring in Europe and she did not disappoint. I wouldn’t call myself a fan of her as such, but I like a lot of her songs and I had wanted to see her live for a long time. It was so nice to be be able to experience the energy in the room with a bit of emotional distance, but of course it also swept me away. Think of hard core music fans being able to hear the songs live for the first time in no idea how many years. It was a loud crowd and I loved it. The concert took place in theatre with great acoustics. Here are two clips from that night (not filmed by me, obviously).

“The Story” – Brandi Carlile in Paris, July 2025

“Cannonball” – Brandi Carlile in Paris, July 2025 (totally unplugged)

I took my small point and shoot camera with me to the show (and didn’t mess up moving those files from the SD card, obviously).

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More on the conference and other stuff later this week. Maybe.

“Angels” – Robbie Williams, 1997

Life I: It’s been busy. More on it later. I’ve been starting to finalize this one-quarter-done draft about the gig last week, while I was on the train to Paris for another gig on Monday. WiFi on the train sucked and we arrived in Paris with almost one hour delay. One careless bus-driver and a busy, under-staffed reception later I’m finally in my apartment, ate my packed lunch/tea (sandwiches) and was able to wind down a bit.

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Fangirling: These past few weeks / months I have mentioned a few times how I can relate to some of what Robbie Williams is singing and these past few years has been talking about. Anxiety, lack of self-worth, worrying, self-sabotaging and all that comes with it. In regards to the “what he’s singing about” there needs to be an amendment though. A few days ago I watched a clip about the, let’s call it, business relationship between professional songwriters and singers. It’s not necessarily a close relationship, from that clip it felt a bit like a pick and mix buffet, from both sides. To some extent it was quite eye-opening. I for instance didn’t know or maybe have forgotten about it, that a singer gets a songwriting credit even if they just change one word of the lyrics. A tiny bit disillusioning, maybe. Anyway, I still like to believe that even Robbie has either contributed more than the occasional word to the songs that make him so relatable to me. Or at least still like to believe that he picked those songs for a reason, as in that he related to the words as well.

Anyway, the evening started with the Lottery Winners, who did a good job of warming up the crowd, as I knew they would.

From a neutral point of view I worry that a few in the crowd might have thought that Thom was a bit “much”. ADHD personality and all. I like it and I’m used to it, but others…? I don’t know. I liked their set and had a good time. And Thom was back with Robbie mid-show on the C stage. More on that later.

So, Robbie Williams: As I could have expected and as I did in fact expect, this was one BIG production. The images / material on the main screen behind the stage changed quite often, but as my seat was in the upper tier close to the stage, I didn’t see much of it. There was a good sized band, two or three female backup singers, eight or more mostly female, I think, backup dancers. Those dancers changed their outfit every other song or so, along with different props and set up scenery. Like I said: big. Not the kind of show I usually go to, maybe because it often enough feels staged to rigidly. Not staged in a phony way, but in “a every word and step was the same each night”, which it has to be at a show at this level I guess. And it was a good show.

Robbie himself was quite chatty – though again, I’d like to see if he’s doing the same bits word for word each night of if he mixes it up. Definitely chattier and definitely more outgoing than I remember him from a gig in the mid-2000. 20 years ago! Anyone who followed his career and life over the decades will understand why: Mental health wise he is in a much better place now and he openly talks about that and his struggles and his journey to this state of mind as well. Let’s call the evening a public therapy session with Robbie Williams and I was more than ok with that. I probably could relate to that so well, because I have been on a similar journey myself to a happier and healthier me these past few years.

Funnily enough Robbie also did a bit I knew quite well from Frank Turner. Have they been talking? I’m kidding. But after the first two songs (the new single “Rocket” and of course “Let Me Entertain You”) he talked about how the night is supposed to lift the weight of the world for a bit and how this only works when we – him on stage and us the audience – work together and make that happen and that he can’t do this on his own. I’m a sucker for those kind of statements, because it’s true.

“And so the story starts” he said kneeling down to sing…

“I’ve sung some songs that were lame, I’ve slept with girls on the game…”

The setlist was well curated to sort of tell us about Robbie’s life over the past few decades and that narrative arc worked well for me. Mid-show or so we even saw 51 year old Robbie having a conversation with an AI generated teenage Robbie: “You’re on a stadium stage, singing your own songs? NO WAY!” Gimmicky, yes, but quite adorable, I thought.

It also made me ponder, what it must do to a person’s psyche to grow up in the public eye the way he did. How much we all (think we) knew about him and his fuck-ups. And because it mostly took place in the 21st century it’s still all available on some corner of the digital archive we call the internet. I would not want anyone be able to publicly look back on my life over these past four decades, let’s put it that way.

As mentioned above Thom and his acoustic guitar joined him for a medley of older and a bit lesser know songs on the C-stage. With a big wink, Robbie dissed the audience for only knowing half of the lyrics of these rarer songs. “There is more to the chorus than those first few lines. Man, you really have forgotten about me, have you?”

When Thom played the first chords of “Relight my fire” Robbie stopped him. “No, don’t play that, I’ve still got PTSD from it”. For anyone who didn’t know the story or hadn’t watched the Better Man movie, he talked about how he was supposed to be the lead in this song, but was then replaced by Gary Barlow. Thom just said, “It’s your chance to reclaim the song now, man”, so of course they did that one as well.

The backup dancers weren’t the only one who changed their outfits, Robbie did at least twice or even three times. At least for this one I did not notice the moment he slipped of stage to actually do that, which speaks for the well choreographed show all in all. I liked the pink.

He did “I Did It My Way” in this look and then after shedding the jacket had genuinely lovely moment with a fan in the front row. There is at least one clip of it out there, but I won’t link to it as I have no idea if that person actually wants to be memorized all over the internet. Hinting you in the right direction is only half bad, I tell myself.

Lots more of great songs till he ended with a sea of lights and of course his two biggest hits “Angels” and “Feel”. What a wonderful night. Thanks Robbie.

Here are a bunch more photos from the gig last week.

[The rest of my random thought on life and such, which I had typed up on the train, will have to wait for another time. I need to be awake in less than 7 hours to have a chance to reserve a slot to get into Notre Dame. At least that’s what the observation of the booking site these past few days made me hope for]

Lyrics: “Better Man” – Robbie Williams, 2001

On numerous occasions these past few weeks, I thought about sitting down to pen a blog post. About… something. Anything. There is at least one half-finished draft and various ideas stored in my note-taking app. The thing is, that I always catch myself veering into either recapping the mundanity of my every day life or being introspective about things I seem to learn about myself. The first I find pretty boring, the second too personal to share. Been there, done that and took about 15 years of blog posts offline in 2024 for a reason.

Neither do I want to start sharing my messy, confusing, contradicting thoughts on current global or national issues. There are more than enough people doing that already. Let’s say I’m trying my best to stay well informed to form my own thoughts.

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Next week I’ll be seeing Robbie Williams and The Lottery Winners at an arena show. I’ve been listening to quite a bit of Robbie’s music recently to get a reacquainted with some of the songs. There are a lot of bangers in his repertoire, aren’t there? A while ago I mentioned how I had connected on a deeper level with some of his lyrics already back in the day. I just now realize I used the same lyric for the title, oh well…. Bringing it back the introspection mentioned above: “being taught to take the blame” still resonates with me, but strangely in a different way. I’ve spent sooooo much time in my life feeling responsible for so much, that wasn’t my responsibility in the first place. And of course I blamed myself when things didn’t work out, because it was my responsibility to make sure that they would. I’m slowly, slowly learning to be more kind to myself. More forgiving. But also learn to ask for help and support and not try to shoulder everything on my own. At work at least I try to do that. Small steps. Anyway, I’m really looking forward to singing along to that line from the top of my lungs next week.

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At the moment I’m trying to catch up with a few TV shows, but I’ve – once again? – realized that for some reason my brain doesn’t like to mix it up with one episode from this and another from that. So I need to binge one show (season) before I can go on to the next. I’m almost through with season 5 of “The Rookie” (on Netflix Germany), which I mostly watch for nostalgic reasons, maybe? I liked the first 2-3 seasons, but some of the relationships or cases are getting on my nerves a bit. Some of it is just so unrealistic, I mean there is no way Celina would be allowed to be involved in the missing children case under these circumstances, would she? And I don’t care about Bailey. She is just too perfect in a way that I find annoying. But I feel like I need to see it through and some of it is quite entertaining. So when I’m done with that I can continue to watch two new shows I recently discovered. “Running Point” and “North of North”.

On Wednesday I went to see a comedy writer at a comedy / cabaret festival. It was rather short notice, as I had only heard about the performance a few days before, but there were still tickets so I went and had such a good time. A few days prior a work engagement took me to a workshop, which was held in a beautiful musical theatre foyer. While leafing through the various flyers and seasons program I was reminded – once again – that there is such a variety of cultural events going on right on my doorstep and that I should head out and see more of it more often. Instead of staying in and watch TV. Or going to London to see Operation Mincemeat. Or to Scotland to see Frank Turner :-). He is doing a few more shows in Scotland before the Lost Evening festival in Edinburgh and as I will already be in the area for my two weeks vacation, I didn’t really hesitate to change my plans a little bit. Thus on Thursday morning I scored a pre-sale ticket to see Frank and the Sleeping Souls play in a 550 cap venue up in Aberdeen. What can I say? I’m a fangirl.

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The aforementioned festival takes places in an old-fashioned looking “mirror tent” in front of an old blast furnace / industrial heritage site. Here are a few photos, because a post without at least one photo feels wrong.