Arbelos

It was good today. For the first time in many months the whole band got together for a rehearsal. We ran through a few favourites, and began to look again at the material for the next album, Stone Owl on the Shore. We’ve got some great songs in various states of readiness, and we’re keen to gather them all up, record them properly and make them available – hopefully over the next few months.

The gods were pleased too: they celebrated with a thunderstorm and a deluge of rain.

It was just good to play together again.

Photo Credit: NASA

There’s a really great piece of history-making music performance happening on Yuri’s Night (12th April). For the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s first manned spaceflight, Space Station astronaut Cady Coleman will be playing a flute duet with Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson. They will play an excerpt from Bouree while Cady is on the ISS and Ian is on the ground in Russia. You can follow the whole thing on NASA TV on the day. You may want to start monitoring this on the 11th as there is a marathon Yuri’s Night party running for two days in Perm, the venue for the concert. Frequent updates on Twitter from Jethro Tull and Cady Coleman.

UPDATE: You can see and hear the duet on Youtube.

I noticed that Noel was working on his ebook sideproject and got jealous. So here is a little sideproject of mine. Not being as much of a literary man as my esteemed colleague I have resorted to my own special style of story-telling. Long, long ago, around when Noel and I first met, I was a part-time comic artist drawing a monthly one-pager called Humphrey for the Bulletin of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh. This ran for about a decade and was very popular with the astronomers. A year or two ago I discovered WebComicsNation which is a site for comic artists to publish their wares electronically and I opened an account and posted a couple of my old comics.

So, this year, to keep up with Noel, I thought I’d go back there and start posting a brand new comic. For a while I’d had an idea about a realistic interstellar adventure, complete with the complications of time dilation. To write such a story I needed a group of heroes from a time in the past. Then I discovered the Air Transport Auxiliary – a collection of older male pilots and women pilots who delivered new and repaired aircraft to the RAF bases and who also ferried generals and politicians around. These people could fly anything with a few minutes’ familiarisation but, despite being superb pilots, they were all made redundant following the war, as the young fighter and bomber pilots demobbed from the RAF took over all of the civilian flying jobs. This gave a me a group of heroic individuals who would be up for a dangerous new adventure.

The new comic is called Gail Scott, Space Pilot, and it can be read at the Gail Scott page on WebComicsNation. The page updates every Thursday with the latest instalment and it’s free (for now). I hope it will keep you entertained while you wait for the new Arbelos CD that we are working on at this very moment.