Simon Cowell is in Manchester today auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent. The Heroes of She have each received personal invitations to audition in front of Simon Cowell and have been asked to sign a contract with Syco, his aptly named record company.
Simon Cowell dominates the pop scene in Britain today. 7 out of the 8 top singles in the charts this week are from the X Factor and all 5 of the top singles for the last 5 weeks have been promoted on his show. The only problem is that it’s all appalling pap. This kind of flaccid rubbish has always been around. Teenagers (me included) were horrified in 1967 when Englebert Humperdinck’s song, Release Me beat the Beatles’ Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane to the Number 1 spot. It’s a betting certainty that Simon Cowell and that other aging guru Louis Walsh were among those who rushed out to buy Release Me. Everything they promote is sugary, derivative, soul destroying pap. Which is why The Heroes of She won’t be in Manchester today.
Archive for November, 2009
Sunday, November 29th, 2009
Heroes of She Britain’s Got Talent
Thursday, November 26th, 2009
Beelocal
![Beelocal[1]](http://www.slow-life.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/Beelocal1-300x231.jpg "Beelocal[1]")
I was delighted to hear Stuart Higginson, Britain’s Best Butcher, whose shop happens to be at the end of our road in Grange, on Radio 4 talking about “beelocal”. Stuart, a big bloke in every way, who looks and sounds the part, is one of the reasons living in Grange is special. You can’t miss his shop because it’s the one with two lines of queues out onto the street. He has some land in Yewbarrow Wood where he keeps rare-breed pigs and when I started in the pig line he gave me some stock and showed me how to look after it. Now he’s a part of beelocal a business which delivers local food and wine to your door. Just like Tesco Direct. Except that unlike Tesco Direct, all the produce of beelocal comes from local family owned businesses. This picture is of Bruce a delivery man with one of the two beelocal delivery vans. Bruce explained to me the astonishingly brilliant computerised system which enables them to deliver fresh produce for Slow Life to your door every day. Here’s the link – www.beelocal.co.uk
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
BBC TV at the Newby Bridge Hotel
The BBC chose a packed bar at The Newby Bridge Hotel today to film a piece for the early evening news. The story was about the safe haven which the staff at The Newby Bridge Hotel had given to the staff from nearby hotels which had been closed by the floods. The piece went out live and I got the chance to say on camera how proud I was of my staff in rallying round. The bar looked warm and welcoming, with an open log fire in awful contrast to the Swan Hotel lying cold and empty opposite us.
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Lakes Hospitality Association Interiors Show
When the water level on Lake Windermere rose by 9ft on Friday, closing the roads to Ambleside, there seemed to be little prospect of opening the Interiors Show at the Low Wood Hotel on the shores of the Lake as planned on the Monday morning. Cancellation would have been disastrous for Lakes Hospitality as the Show is one of the two big money events of the year. But nothing fazes Gail, the Show’s indefatigable organisor and when the roads re-opened over the weekend she declared “Business as usual”. All the exhibitors made it, but we had the bizarre experience of hearing the event being trailed on the local radio news only for the traffic bulletin which followed the news advising people not to travel to the Lakes because of the weather.
I was pleased to see Ian Steel at the J. Atkinson and Son stand, not least because he was generously supplying everyone with free cups of his excellent Java and Elephant coffees. Ian was in jubilant spirits, holding aloft a copy of the Independent, in which his coffee shop (founded as the Grasshopper Tea Warehouse in 1837) had just been named as one of the best 50 food shops in the country. Here’s the link- http://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/food-drink/the-50-best-food-shops-1823609.html?action=Popup&ino=39. I got chatting to Ian about my “Do One Thing” campaign and he told me about his brilliant “one fell scoop” idea. The way it works is that instead of supplying coffee to his commercial customers in individual sachets, he supplies it in bulk together with a scoop which measures out the quantity which would have been in the sachet. This saves him a fortune in the time saved by not having to fill the sachets and the cost of the sachets themselves. All his customers love it and he has the added satisfaction of saving the world into the bargain. Very Slow Life.
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
Floods in the Lake District
The headlines have been dominated by the Cumbrian floods, with dramatic pictures of bridges being swept away – images every bit as shocking as those seven years ago when the pictures were of burning pyres of dead cows on the Cumbrian fells. At Newby Bridge, our hotel is the only one of the four large hotels to have escaped – the others will be closed until the New Year. This footage is of the River Levens at Newby Bridge and the River Kent outside the Riverside Hotel (still standing).
Monday, November 16th, 2009
Its a hard rain…..
There’s a dramatic and moving open-air art exhibition entitled “Hard Rain” at St Martin’s in the Field, London. The exhibition, by photographer Mark Edwards, is based on the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s song “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” written in response to the Cuban missile crisis in 1963. Mark Edwards has cleverly adapted Dylan’s apocalyptic message from nuclear melt-down to climatic wipe-out. I wonder what Dylan would make of it- his protesting days are long gone and he has devoted the last 45 years to making music and money.
It was interesting to see echoes of our own “Hard Rain” artwork here at Yewbarrow House. Alan Ward’s carvings are an ironic reference to our own damp climatic conditions and the fact that the sculpture garden looks out onto the Heysham Nuclear reactor.
I photographed Mark Edwards’ pictures and my daughter Joanna has used the photos to compile a slide-show accompanied by Andy Hill and Renee Safier’s version of A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Sony blocked Dylan’s version when we tried to put it onto Youtube- what did I say about the great man’s attachment to money?).
Below, are photos of some of Alan Ward’s “Hard Rain” carvings.
Monday, November 16th, 2009
Rocket Fuel
This pile of well rotted horse manure is the fuel for the garden for the forthcoming year. It has come from Witherslack Hall Equestrian Centre- http://www.whec.co.uk/static/HomePage.htm – where Careth, who used to be our receptionist at the Newby Bridge Hotel, is the Manager.
Careth lives an idyllic Slow Life looking after more than two dozen horses and a guest house in a lovely remote location in the Lake District National Park.
The horse manure is both a fertiliser and a mulch. We apply up to 50 tons a year, which means that neither the vegetables or the flowers need any artificial feeding.
Sunday, November 15th, 2009
Magic Mushroom
This living sculpture appeared in the garden overnight. There are two of them, each about 18 inches high and growing 50 yards apart. It’s a mushroom but I don’t know what type or whether it’s edible. It has grown from the soil and doesn’t seem to be attached to any root system or decaying timber. Funnily enough, just as I was wondering what it was a letter appeared in Country Life with a photo of a very similar one asking the same question. If anyone knows, please enlighten me.
Friday, November 13th, 2009
Promoting the Heroes of She with Music Moghuls
I’m with George Ergatoudis the head of Music at Radio 1, at Sound Nightclub in Leicester square, promoting the Heroes of She’s latest single, Burning In Flames (see entry …. below). The event is hosted by AIM, (The Association of Independent Music) and is an opportunity for small labels such as ours to meet some of the big players in the industry. AIM has done a lot in persuading radio stations such as Radio 1 not to rely entirely on the output of the major record labels and to give the small independents a chance. All the radio stations are here as well as a lot of the music press, and TV stations such as MTV. When I gave George Ergatoudis a copy of Heroes of She’s press pack for Burning in Flames, which includes the 3D video he immediately recognised it and said “I’ve seen this. I was really impressed with it and played the DVD straight away”. In fact the pack drew some stunning compliments throughout the evening, which is gratifying considering the effort which the band put into it.
Below is a video of AIM Chief Executive Alison Wenham’s introduction to the event and George Ergatoudis’s presentation