Saturday 2 March 2013

Living While We're Young

I'd been going to title this post "Teenage Dreams (Adult Education)" until I remembered a blog I follow by a douce lady called Isobel who's a member of the church in Rothesay, a small town on the west coast of Scotland.

She did a post about search terms associated with links to her blog and was surprised to discover that, for some inexplicable reason "access to male showers in the military" featured highly. Any traffic's good traffic as long as it spells the name right (and isn't too rough), I say, but I reckoned "Teenage Dreams (Adult Education)" might find me cropping up in all the wrong search results were it not for the fact I'm talking about nothing so innocuous as tracks downloaded from Apple iTunes.


Yes, about 250 years after the rest of humanity, we've got into downloading tracks from iTunes.

The eponymous "Live While We're Young" is by a pre-pubescent boy band called - I've forgotten - but they won Popfactor a couple of years ago and we saw them on the tellybox at Jose Antonio's recently and Carol insisted we try and download it.



The issue about this, as ever, is the crap internet connection on this island. If we lived on an island like Great Britain, we could be living while we were young in the blink of an eye before lunchtime (although I might need a cup of tea afterwards). But out on here Flores, downloading a track is more of a struggle. Indeed such is the marital disharmony provoked ("why haven't you done it yet?"), we call it iTones.

I believe it's all to do with our internet connection being beamed down from a satellite. That sounds very space age but apparently the weather buggers it up - how very British in a corner of a foreign field! If it's cloudy (which it is quite a lot on Flores in February) you can forget it but if it turns out nice, downloading "Skyfall" might just work after the fifteenth attempt of 45 minutes before it says "download failed".


Suffice to say we've been doing the downloading off Apple thing (which you out there all take for granted) for about three weeks now and the weather has permitted us to download a grand total of twelve tracks in that time.

But today, the weather was particularly good and it allowed us to indulge in an unprecedented orgy of "Teenage Dreams" (Katy Perry, supra), suitably dampened down by a dose of "Adult Education" (Hall & Oates) administered by "My Brother Jake" (Free). I could continue in this vein but suffice to say we managed to get to "The Edge of Heaven" (Wham!) before a thunderstorm just before tea time prevented "Everything She Wants" (ditto) reaching its logical conclusion. "Same Old Scene" (Roxy Music)

 
If it's nice tomorrow, I might do "Sultans of Swing" before I go out and propagate the vine. People think it's all picking oranges on this island but there are dirtier jobs to do like getting on midnight trains to Georgia.

4 comments:

Marisa said...

That´s why they (EU) call us (Azores) RUP - Região ultraperiférica, and Flores suffers from double or triple insularity. ;)

Riccardo said...

If you had a better taste in music things might download more quickly!I think the gods are intervening to try and make you think twice

Anonymous said...

Yay!!! You are back!

Kathie said...

Marisa, I thought the term for the smaller outlying islands in the Azores was "Ilhas de Adesão." Or am I confusing it with something else?