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Today marks Bruce Springsteen’s sixtieth birthday.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have seen ‘The Boss’ about seven times over the last thirty five years.

The band lost Danny Federici to cancer last year, and with both Bruce and the band not getting any younger, I’m conscious that each tour might be the last.

We saw Bruce and the band at the Emirates Stadium in the summer of 2008 and Val commented that I looker particularly wistful. I replied that it had occurred to me that it might be the last time I’d hear ‘Jungleland’ live.

I was wrong, I saw Bruce this summer at Hyde Park, and he played ‘Jungleland’ just as the sun was setting, it was a great concert and a magical moment.

As we get older we need to grasp those magical moments, because, as I learned from Jon Cheese – who should also have been celebrating his sixty seventh birthday today - our time here is short.

Anyway, thanks Jon, for being a good mate, and thanks Bruce for being a companion through the years.  

“Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night”

Okay, I confess, it’s a guilty pleasure but I quite enjoy Dan Brown’s books, they’re distractions and right now some distraction will come in handy.

I first read ‘Angels and Demons’ before ‘The Da Vinci’ code came out. Ever the early adopter I found the book at Schipol Airport as I recall - and what with flight delays I had nearly finished it by the time we got home.

Dan Brown writes good airline novels (IMHO), page turners with no pretensions to being literature.

Okay, the plots might be both pretentious and portentous, but not the writing style.

So, when this morning I stumbled across the new hardback ‘The Lost Symbol’ (on its publication day no less) on sale for a fiver I figured why bother waiting for the paperback?

Of course this one could be particularly interesting as Dan Brown turns his attentions to Freemasonry, something I know slightly more about than the Illuminati or Opus Dei.

Add to that a new collection of Stephen King short stories for less than four quid in paperback, and Rick Stein’s new hardback for half price and I was sorted.

I’ve mentioned before that I have deliberately resisted turning this into a job-seeker’s blog… applied for this, rejected for that, and such and such an agent won’t take my calls…

Well, I was talking the other day to Paul, my Financial Adviser; I do this occasionally, despite being unemployed and enjoying the bounteous sixty quid a week Jobseekers Allowance the government grudgingly allows me. At least until November when even that stops. Maybe I should try changing my accent.

Paul and I got round, as is inevitable, to discussing job opportunities, and so on. I explained that the month of August seems to be like December in recruiting terms. It seems to be almost impossible to get decision makers, or the right decision makers, lined up to make decisions. Consequently the job market grinds to a temporary - or at least I hope it’s temporary – halt.   

In recent months my CV has had me considered for roles in Cambridge, Cleveland (Ohio), Crawley, Derbyshire, Gibraltar, Heathrow, Manchester, Qatar, Sri Lanka, Swindon and ‘the west country’.

All interesting roles but all involving around 4 hours travelling daily, or overnight stays.

Paul observed that we seem to be in a new age of “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” – you have to be prepared to travel inordinate distances to go where the work is, and the trend in recent years for companies to relocate away from the capital has only compounded this. My neighbour, Bob, ‘commutes’ to Birmigham every week.

Except the roles I would be looking at would be solo overnight stays, not as part of a team. We’ve all seen them, the lone business traveller in the hotel restaurant with a paperback book.

But hey, it’s a job.

Please.

For one reason or another this site got a bit screwed up… it’s taken a few reloads, reinstalls and so on to get the site close to where it was and should be, but some of the picture links have gotten a bit screwy. I’ll get them sorted.

In the meantime, please bear with me.

And yes, I took the picture ‘up there’. That’s the Red Sea at Sharm El Sheik.

Another one of those “where were you when” days occurred forty years ago this week, and yes I can remember where I was. During the Apollo 11 mission my family and I were on holiday in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight , throughout the week my tiny transistor radio was never far from my side.

As a twelve year old schoolboy I was transfixed by the whole Apollo programme, I had the ‘Airfix’ models, the wall charts, the ‘Magpie book of space exploration’, the lot.

At that time I think I could recite all the Apollo astronauts as my schoolfriends could recite the members of various football teams.

Theres a great article about Apollo 11 here.

During that holiday I also bought my first Arthur C Clarke book, and devoured it on the long drive home. From that slim volume of short stories (which is still on my shelf somewhere) I became a lifelong fan of Clarke’s work, reading all his fiction and non-fiction, but drawing the line at the dubious Mysterious World junk he put his name to in the eighties.

Many years later, in 1999, on our first visit to Sri Lanka I happened to look in the local phone book, and saw that Arthur C Clarke’s number was listed, athough we were never close enough to Negombo to actually go and visit.

I confess didnt have the courage to phone my boyhood hero.

I bottled it, and to this day I regret that, but as the song would have it “regrets, I have a few, but then again, too few to mention” – that’s one of them.