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.
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.
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.
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.
