London Calling...

Okay so yes I stole the title from the Clash, but it was the first song that the Boss played on Sunday. Staring a rather bleak looking week in the face, I went out and found some tickets for Saturday's Hard Rock Calling concert. Its a weekend long festival of live acts in Hyde Park. I got tickets to go on Sunday.




The headliners for the weekend were Friday - The Killers, Saturday - Neil Young and Sunday Bruce Springsteen. With the added benefit of having Dave Matthews Band right before the Boss, Sunday was an easy day for me to pick to go to.
We had awesome weather, with only a little rain but more sunshine. While this week is already seeing heatwaves that are causing local authorities to issue warnings and all sorts of things. Apparently too much sun and heat is bad for you... but I digress. It was a great show, having never seen DMB or Bruce live, I was happy to go and had a great time. There were an estimated 45,000 people in the park and it seemed like the average age was definitely in the upper 40s... yea lots of Bruce fans from way back. Unfortunately it meant that most people had no clue who Dave Matthews were. Oh well, maybe they will now. They played some of their biggest songs (Ants Marching, Don't Drink the Water, Crash) and so did Bruce (Born to Run, Dancing in the Dark, Glory Days). It was a great time and glad I got to go.

Monday (yesterday) I spent the day near Canterbury doing a stocktake. Now anyone from work - we'd call this an inventory count. The amount of confusion that interchanging these terms can cause is actually pretty entertaining. Anyway, this particular stocktake was at a coal depot. Yes coal. So I took a train to the middle of nowhere down southeast of London. It was more or less a one stop light town, which unfortunately means that I don't think they had taxis... not good for me. So I knew the office (in this case a lot with HUGE piles of coal) was just north of the station. After orienting my self (sun in the sky on the right means that north is straight ahead right..?) I started walking. After about 20 minutes I found the place. But by then I was not exactly happy to be walking in the blazing sun with jeans on and little idea of where I was going. It was somewhere in the low 90s. For the next couple hours I got to climb around the massive piles of coal (one was just short of 400 tonnes of coal) to measure and count them. Yes I know, it sounds a bit ludicrous, trust me, it was. Thankfully I got back home at a decent hour, albeit covered in coal dust especially from the knees down where I kept sinking into the piles of coal...