Wichelstowe (Wednesday 3rd August 2022)

I needed to stretch my legs today having strained some muscles a couple of days ago kneeling and crouching in a cramped position trying to sort out an emergency hi-fi problem in the kitchen which took far longer than anticipated. On the Tuesday I had been hobbling quite pathetically and had problems getting up from a seated position.

I took a picnic up to the Wilts and Berks beside Waitrose on Swindon's outskirts, but it was a bit too drizzly so I ended up eating further back along the canal at the Studley Grange stretch on the way home.

The Dragonfly is owned by the Wilts And Berks Canal Trust and raises money doing short round trips from a spot behind Waitrose. For some reason it didn't turn round there but chose a much narrower spot a little further down and had to do a 12-point turn with all the passengers on board. I had walked up to the next bridge to see if the next section west had advanced since my last visit. A digger was hard at work in the next field but it's a long way off becoming watered or walkable.

At Studley Grange I could see both pairs of swans on either side of the road bridge and sat on a sheltered bench beside the pair on the east side to have a belated lunch in their company.

L.
Wednesday 3.8.2022 (2033 hr)

Blip #3710 (#3460 + 250 archived blips taken 27.8.1960-18.3.2010)
Consecutive Blip #000
Blips/Extras In 2022 #147/265 + #060/100 Extras
Day #4514 (1061 gaps from 26.3.2010)
LOTD #2852 (#26921 + 160 in archived blips)

Canals series
Swans series
Wilts and Berks Canal series

Taken with Pentax K-1 Mark II and Pentax HD P-D FA 28-105mm f/3.5-5.6ED DC WR lens and HD Pentax-DA AF Rear Converter 1.4x AW

The Kinks - I Need You (recorded 14 April 1965, Pye Studio 1, London)
Ray Davies (vcl, gtr), Dave Davies (gtr, vcl), Pete Quaife (bass), Mick Avory (dr) with Rasa Davies (vcl)
By the time of the Kinks' single Set Me Free, released in May 1965, Ray Davies had steered the Kinks into a more introspective, melancholic musical area, contrasting their first two hit singles You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, recorded in July and September 1964 respectively. I Need You, however, on the B-side and recorded just a month earlier, had all of the qualities of those first two that pre-figured heavy metal rock and punk, and was much played by me at the time when I bought the single. Decades later John Peel played it as an early favourite of his, too.
I sometimes wonder about the order of these things. I don't know when I Need You was composed, whether it was an attempt to recreate the magic of those earlier singles or a composition from that time that lost out to All Day And All Of The Night and stored away. What if I Need You had been their follow-up, not All Day And All Of The Night? It was a style they never returned to after this B-side.