Category: Kids
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Dua Lipa's Tiny Desk concerts
Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.
Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.
My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.
Love Again is my favourite.
She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.
Jon Batiste's Tiny Desk concert
Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.
This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).
Don’t it make your soul shake?
Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert
If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys’ Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.
This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.
We all just wanna be shown some love
My first attempt at a very simple recipe my Mum used to make fifty years ago.
Little kid: “I like onion and cheese [crisps]!”
Me: “Cheese and onion pie?”
Little kid: " Eugh!"
I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.
It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.
Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.
This lovely tree by the bridge over the canal near my kids’ school at Toplocks is gone.
Sausages
Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.
I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.
A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.
In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.
She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.
I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.
They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.
