Paul Capewell

We’re really lucky to have a lot of great cinemas within walking distance of where we live.

There’s the Vue, which is a standard multiplex in a shopping centre, for which it’s easy to get decent-priced discount tickets. It also has a not-IMAX-but-huge screen.

Then there’s the Odeon, which houses not only a generously-sized actually-IMAX IMAX screen, but the smaller screens are ‘Luxe’ which means comfy reclining seats and appropriate seats-to-screen-size ratio.

And then there’s the Kiln, which used to be the Tricycle. It’s (mainly?) a theatre, but also has a very reasonably sized screen with a decent number of seats. It’s a lovely cinema, and reminds me of the excellent Cornerhouse in Manchester (RIP) in some ways. Tickets at the Kiln are very reasonable, and local residents even get a discount on top of that.

They frequently show the latest films, as well as National Theatre Live broadcasts, and they also show older films from time to time. I get the impression the programming team get to have a bit of fun with these selections. Over the past few weekends, they’ve shown a couple of Studio Ghibli films. First Ponyo, then Kiki’s Delivery Service. We jumped at the chance to see some Ghibli films on the big screen.

I own a handful of Studio Ghibli films on blu-ray and they look fantastic. But apart from The Secret World of Arrietty which I was able to see when it came out, I haven’t seen any others in cinemas.

Ponyo was a treat as, although I’d seen it before years ago, it had faded from my memory. It looked superb on the big screen – colours popping all over the place, and the weather and storm effects felt very atmospheric.

Oddly enough, it was shown on the weekend that a devastating typhoon hit Japan, and it was a little eerie to see the more ‘realistic’ elements of the film’s response to storms and typhoons – panicked drives along dark roads to check on a remote community, the power going out, and having to prepare meals on gas stoves and using backup generators and plug-in lights.

One unexpected highlight was the cinema’s audience. When I saw that these films were being shown, I had to check they weren’t as part of the regular parent and child screenings they often put on.  Fortunately they were just normal screenings, so unaccompanied adults were welcome. It turned out that we were one of two or three other couples in their 20s and 30s, along with a six-year-old’s birthday party of about ten kids and various adults, and a small group of adults with special needs.

As a beard-scratching nerd, most of my experiences of watching Studio Ghibli films are alone, studious, with Japanese dubbing and English subtitles. These screenings were with the American English dubbing, and an audience of adults and children. And let me tell you – the reactions of the kids to some of the dramatic and beautiful scenery of Ponyo was so exciting! Gasps and cheers and chuckles and a general sense of awe, the like of which I had certainly internalised when watching these films before, but to hear it expressed out loud in such a natural way was a wonderful new experience.

Kiki’s Delivery Service was similar, although no birthday party this time – just the mix of grown-ups and a few kids-and-parents. But still a nice amount of gasps as Kiki took flight, or not-so-quiet enquiries of “but why…?” to various plot devices – and a chuckle or two at the odd line that seemed a touch out of place when translocated from the Japanese-written, fantasy-based world.

I had never seen Kiki’s Delivery Service and had no idea about its setting, the amalgamation of a sort of Swedish, northern and wester European town. I couldn’t help but immediately think of Rothenburg ob der Tauber following my trip there earlier this year. But after thinking it must have been one place, I later learned it was a pastiche of many.

Anyway, suffice it to say it looked fantastic all blown up on the screen, and I really enjoyed it. I even stopped scratching my beard long enough to enjoy the American English dubbing – including the late, great Phil Hartman’s cat Jiji – because although it’s a Japanese production, the setting is so generally and broadly European as to not need the language and dialogue to match any one place.

This weekend, the Kiln is showing Coco, which I guess is an even more Hallowe’en-themed film than Kiki (and is fantastic, of course). We have Coco on blu-ray as well, come to think of it. Anyway, I hope they show some more Ghibli films soon.

On 12 February 2008, I was listening to Laura Marling’s debut album Alas, I Cannot Swim. That was actually about the time that album came out, so I must’ve been listening for the first time. I was also listening, apparently, at just past midnight.

Obviously I can’t remember all this, but my Last.fm can, because I must have scrobbled these plays.

What I can also remember (or rather, look up), is that I was in New Zealand at the time. Somewhere between Auckland and Taupo. With my buddy James Bachellier, as it goes. We spent a week or two hanging out, attending Camp A Low Hum, and then driving round the East Cape, to Mount Maunganui, then across to Auckland for a gig.

Anyway. The act of listening (or rather, the act of scrobbling those listens) means I can try and remember what listening to music (and scrobbling it) meant in February 2008. And when I spent more than ten seconds or so thinking about that, I was kind of surprised.

I had forgotten that Spotify didn’t exist yet. I had forgotten that to start listening to new music in February 2008, I most likely had to have bought it. And then I remembered that on that trip, I was rocking an iPod Touch. The iPhone itself only launched less than a year beforehand, and the iPod Touch was the cellular-free version of the iPhone. I’d obviously convinced myself that it was a useful tool to take on a six week trip to New Zealand, and so it proved.

The iPod Touch naturally allowed one to listen to music – music imported from a computer via iTunes, as well as music downloaded via the iTunes Store on the device itself. This in itself was huge.

The app store wouldn’t launch until a few months later that year, and so the iPod Touch in 2008 was a device limited to Apple’s pre-installed apps, as well as a couple of other third party apps like YouTube and Google Maps (I think…).

So in the context of a pre-Spotify, pre-app store world, I can dimly remember the huge novelty of being able to buy new music on a handheld device, get it over WiFi, and then listen. It’s tricky to remember quite what a paradigm shift that was, but I can just about do it. I had been buying digital music for a while, but it usually meant doing so on a computer then syncing it to a device via iTunes. Doing it directly on the device was a paradigm shift. To browse a huge catalogue of music, then be able to press a button, watch a few progress bars for a few minutes, and then play some new music… All on the one device. Wow.

(Even downloading an MP3 via a browser – which I’m 99% just wouldn’t have been possible in 2008 – wouldn’t have subsequently allowed you add it to the music repository on the device. I think you could stream an MP3 in Safari but that was it.)

And so the very fact of me scrobbling a listen in February 2008 raises questions about how those plays were scrobbled. There was no app store, so no official apps… Perhaps there was a third party scrobbling app which could be sideloaded? Maybe my desktop scrobbling software could read previous plays once I got home and synced my iPod Touch? I cannot recall. What is clear from my Last.fm history is that I don’t appear to have scrobbled any other tracks while I was out of the country.

Anyway, I can see from some other iTunes receipts from that period that I bought some other music while travelling then, too. A Joy Division album – which I think was prompted by seeing the film Control in a lovely little cinema in Wanaka with my new pal Jamie, and which obviously made a big impact on me.

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Listening to that Laura Marling record again now, and considering all of the above, it strikes me that there are a handful of records that I can quite easily remember where I was when I first listened to them, and a lot of that is tied up in the ceremony or ritual of buying something, and particularly in buying something physical.

Now, I’m more likely to hear some on BBC 6 Music, add a track to a playlist, and maybe then save an album to listen to later. Release dates don’t matter. It’s unlikely I’ll see the album sleeve any larger than a thumbnail on a Spotify screen. Songs and artists come and go, in and out of my consciousness.

I love albums – they have edges. Now, music just sort of happens via Spotify or a playlist or the radio, and it feels like less of an event. I realise this is more about my music buying and listening choices than anything else, but this is also my blog so I think it’s okay.

…This blog post just took a meander into “old man yells at cloud” country, so it’s about time I wrapped things up.

I should add as a postscript, though, the original reason I was browsing my February 2008 scrobbles in the first place. I was trying to discover what artists and albums soundtracked my 2008 trip to New Zealand. I assumed there’d be six weeks of data of all the stuff I listened to, but of course I was on the road, and scrobbling seems not to have happened for that trip. What I can see, however, is what I listened to in the weeks leading up to the trip, and what was on high repeat upon my return home. And that’s almost as good.

The very fact I can just pull up this listening data is still a tiny miracle to me. I love you, Last.fm.

Last weekend M and I did another section of the London LOOP, a long walk which circumnavigates the capital. Like the Capital Ring before it, it’s become something we do on a random weekend when we realise we have nothing better to do and the weather looks good. As such, this latest section was our first since April. We are by no means hurrying it.

Anyway, the end of section 15 and all of section 16 took us from Stanmore (the end of the Jubilee line) to Cockfosters (the end of the Piccadilly line), with a surprising amount of beautiful countryside, pristine woodland and interesting architecture.

Having only ever associated the likes of Stanmore and Cockfosters with being wedged onto a hot tube train and hearing the final destination mentioned, it was a big surprise to see what those places actually look like.

Naturally, the actual terminus is on a busy thoroughfare, but for Cockfosters in particular, we approached it up a lovely linear parkland with views back to the city, through a quaint little village lined with interesting buildings, then passed through a kilometre or two of pretty woodland flanked by a golf course and private roads. It was not at all what we expected, and therein lies the repeating appeal of the London LOOP, and – to a slightly lesser extent – the Capital Ring.

We were caught out by the length of the daylight – which is funny as we were aware that the clocks go back next week and didn’t anticipate any issues on this walk. But by the time we entered the final stretch of woodland, darkness was setting in and the few faces we passed were difficult to make out. It was wonderfully quiet for this stretch, and although we knew from the map that we were skirting the edge of a relatively thin stretch of woodland, it wasn’t hard to imagine the slow envelopment of foliage around us taking the form of a much larger forest. And then – joy of joys, and only minutes after one of us mentioned the potential for it – we heard an owl. Not bad for a day walk reached by tube train.

We covered a distance of just over 30km and obviously took pictures all the way round. I was using a mix of my dSLR and my phone, and I was using my phone (a Motorola G7 Power) to take a few snapshots, as well as for Strava and a some checking of OS Maps.

I’ve prattled on about this phone’s battery life before, but let me tell you – when I finish a day like that with that intensity of phone usage and I still have half my battery life remaining, I continue to be astounded by the performance of this phone. It’s a small thing, but it makes a big difference to relying on it for full-day (or even multi-day) exercises.