For almost two decades I featured new music from aspiring artists on my radio shows, Leigh G Banks’s The Trip and Leigh G Banks’s The Dinner Party.

Last year I changed tack and now have a cable TV show and make documentaries, so radio has taken a back seat.

For now.

Meantime, performers are still sending me their work for promotion – and we have used a few over the past few months on the Preservation Society site.

Here’s another one … can’t tell you who he is, cos he is a Masked Singer called The Foole … here’s what he has to say about himself. And one of his songs.

The quite beautiful Don’t Call it Love…

“The Foole is an artist and a concept.

In olden times, the Fool or court Jester, under the guise of entertainment, would also make social statements and speak truths about the human condition.

Born out of the streets of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, this masked multi-instrumentalist  puts the emphasis solely on the music and the stories that are being told.

Stories of love lost, lingering feelings for past relationships, struggles with one’s mortality, infidelity, and a few upbeat romps that everyone needs to distract from mundane and sometimes negative world views.

Much like The Beatles later work, no two songs are alike in mood, sound or story,except  the sounds you hear were written , performed, engineered and produced by the man behind the white mask with  a little help from his friends. 

The Debut album “…from this point of view” while a thoroughly modern sounding recording, pays homage to the great artists of the past and present; The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Prince, Radiohead, and David Bowie.

The first single “Don’t Call it Love” is a response  to when the one you love decides to leave, and they say “but I still love you “…the one left behind thinks…”if you love me you wouldn’t leave”, so “Don’t call it Love”  is a song that could easily fit any playlist that includes such huge artists as Adele and Coldplay,etc.

There are tracks on this album that may be challenging  for some to listen to, from the hauntingly beautiful ballad “Hey Suicide” which talks to suicide as if it were a character or a person.

Then there’s “The Fool”, about a friend of the famed “Major Tom” in the song “Space Oddity”  the Foole laments with pain ” I miss Major Tom, now that he is gone now” as a tribute to  losing the character and the artist David Bowie that created him.”

The Songs

PRELUDE TO ROK U

THE FOOL

LOVE LIES  BLIND

DON’T CALL IT LOVE

PAIN IN MY HEART

JUST NO GETTING OVER U

HEY SUICIDE

TAK ME HOME

U MAKE ME SMILE

I WILL ROK U

All songs written, performed , produced and engineered by The Foole except

Aldo Vaccaro Lead guitars on Prelude to ROK U and I WILL ROK U

Chris Jackson back Vocals on PAIN IN MY HEART,JUST NO GETTING OVER U, HEY SUICIDE,TAKE ME HOME, U MAKE ME SMILE, I WILL ROK U

Tony Moretta  solo guitars on Prelude To Rok U and I WILL ROK U 

middle solo and back vocals on Hey Suicide and I WILL ROK U

Kelly Noseworthy back vocals on THE FOOL , HEY SUICIDE, TAKE ME HOME, U MAKE ME SMILE, I WILL ROK U, JUST NO GETTING OVER U

TRACY GOULDING back vocals on I WILL ROK U, and HEY SUICIDE

WEBSITE thefoole.com

FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/nicki.thefoole.1/

TWITTER  @thefoole1   INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/thefoolemusic/

Has lock-down really got you feeling blue? How do you think about life AND yourself after a year of uncertainty, health threats, financial worries, loneliness, not seeing family and friends …

And does it show in your body, mind and spirit?

Well, we’ve just come across a website that addresses all these issues – and much, much more – with a bit of intelligence, seriousness and real practical pampering ideas. But it also packed with loads of humour – and even looks at the funny side of getting back into the dating scene!

This is the site, Mammas HQ https://www.mammashq.com.au/blog

Visit it – yep, it’s for women who want to improve themselves, look and feel better and become more positive and confident.

The owner, Sara B, has been through the mill – Covid, a bad break-up and she ended up a single mum.

Sara says: “I’ve always been good – without knowing it – at taking the time to pamper myself with a face mask or going to my local salon to get my nails, hair and other beauty treatments done.

“This is definitely something I struggled with when I had my son two years ago and just like everybody else I still need me-time!

“That’s when I had the idea for Mammas HQ!”

Another brilliant feature on Mammas HQ is her blog about the trials and tribulations of dating…

Like she says ‘dating is self-care too!’

The Preservation Society is going to feature Mammas HQ regularly, it’s such a good idea and really supports the world’s women.

#Mammas #me-time #pampering #allbymyself #changes #beauty #hair #makeup #divorced #splitup

Ladies! join the Gentlemen’s Rant. What did actually happen at the Sarah Everard vigil and was the debacle disrespectful to Sarah’s memory?

Was it reasonable to call for a 6p.m. curfew for men?

#SarahEverard #mothersday #equality #womensrights amazon #mensrights

Now a friend of Sarah Edwards has spoken out about the disrespect in the UK towards Sarah’s death and her family.

Her friend said (see full report in link below) : “Her abduction and murder is not, in my opinion, a symptom of a sexist, dangerous society. When something awful like this happens there is a rush to look for reasons and apportion blame. If the suspect police officer in custody is eventually tried and found guilty of her murder, then I will hold him alone responsible. I will not be blaming ‘men’ or ‘the police’ for the actions of one individual. There will always be the odd psychopath out there – male or female – and there can be no accounting for that fact.”

The murder of Sarah, a 33-year-old marketing executive, has not been been treated with dignity and sorrow – it has become synonymous with law-breaking vigils, violent clashes and the demonisation of men by calling for a 6pm curfew.

A Government source said it would be a “massive curtailing of basic freedoms and rights” and would never work.

Caroline Nokes, Tory MP and chair of the Women and Equalities Committee said: “You can’t go around slapping curfews on one gender.”

Then Patrick Strudwick, former UK LGBT editor for the news website Buzzfeed, stuck his two-pennorth in and tweeted: “’It’s horribly telling that, so often, as soon as a woman realises you’re gay you can sense a reduction in hyper-vigilance. The threat level has fallen. U often find myself making my gayness very clear ASAP for this reason. I don’t know if straight men realise the extent of this.”

Here family and children’s campaigner Sophie David has responded: “In our a society we are constantly told to be ourselves, except if you are a heterosexual man.

Every other gender and preference is protected. But not straight men.

It is like a constant message drilled into a man’s head – they just aren’t good enough.

And we wonder why male suicide is so high.

Why should a normal man have to think to appease others?

Men shouldn’t have to skulk around, heads down, frightened to say a word to a woman because she might take it the wrong way!

Here is another way of looking at it: a woman would never emasculate a man to make herself feel better or safer. Dehumanising someone else for your own selfish needs is lower than low.

Sarah Everard was murdered by one sick individual and its awful but I’m sure that in her life she loved the men around her, father, family, friends.

One excuse of a man does NOT represent the whole of male society. We are living in truly despicable times when social media is giving people ridiculous ideas to spout, often to the detriment of basic human rights!

People are painfully selfish nowadays. I would never expect all men to avoid me so I feel ‘safe’. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

It’s up to me to take whatever precautions I feel necessary!”

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/03/13/this-is-not-what-sarah-would-have-wanted/amp/?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR3GF5HUmyENYZ84tZYIJYN-jGf51nq93xBUdRLfs3scznifCrWu74pP0gE

#Saraheverardmurder #men #riots #vigil #curfew

Slovakia’s health chief Marek Krajčí has resigned for ordering Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine.

He had been coming under pressure from the country’s four-party ruling coalition.

Slovakia followed Hungary in buying Sputnik V which doesn’t have EU authorisation.

“Two coalition parties made my resignation a condition for them to stay in the coalition. In such a situation, I think there was no point arguing… I am not glued to my seat at the ministry,” Reuters quoted Mr Krajci.

Slovakia and Hungary have sought out Sputnik V as the EU grapples with limited supplies for its vaccination campaign.  

Like the Czech Republic, Slovakia is registering weekly per-capita death rates among the worst in the world. 

200,000 Sputnik V doses have arrived in the country and another 800,000 doses are due to be delivered by the end of April. A million more are scheduled for May and June.

Foreign Minister Ivan Korčok, of Freedom and Solidarity, was among the most vocal critics of the vaccine purchase, taking to Facebook to call Sputnik “a tool of hybrid war [that] aims at casting doubt on the workings within the European Union.”

Meanwhile, with the European vaccine roll-out facing delays, both Slovakia and Czech have started to look outside the bloc’s borders for solutions. 

In search of an answer to the pandemic, some are putting their faith in a drug for which there is no positive evidence. 

https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/coronavirus/2021/03/how-covid-sceptics-were-duped-wonder-drug-ivermectin

Issues relating to ivermectin had been raised in the run-up to Interpol’s announcement that there were major busts of criminals peddling fake Covid-19 vaccines and masks in countries including South Africa and China.

Slovakia received a delivery of 9,000 doses of ivermectin after the Health Ministry temporarily approved the medicine for the treatment of coronavirus patients last month.

But doctors lack the basic medical information necessary to prescribe it.

“A doctor needs to offer the patient information on the indication, contraindication, dosage of the medicine and potential side effects of the medicine,” the association wrote in the letter, as quoted by the TASR newswire. “The Health Ministry has not made any of that information available to healthcare workers in Slovakia.”

Meanwhile, a new app that will serve as a virtual waiting room for Covid vaccination in Slovakia is currently in the making and should be ready in a few days.

The app comes after much criticism of the ministry when vaccination registration turned into an online hunt for vacant slots. The ministry will provide the option to sign up for vaccination using your birth number.

#slovakia #Marek #Krajčí #vaccine #covid #ivermectin #sputnik

Piers Morgan has left packed in Good Morning Britain over the Meghan Markle debacle.

A statement from ITV said: “Following discussions with ITV, Piers Morgan has decided now is the time to leave Good Morning Britain. ITV has accepted this decision and has nothing further to add.”

The decision after Ofcom said it was investigating after receiving 41,000 complaints.

Piers had said he “didn’t believe a word” the duchess had told Oprah Winfrey in an interview. He had also stormed off set after a row with co-star Alex Beresford.

This photograph shows it’s all over. No fighting back, it’s the time of the end.

Hough Hall, Moston, is going going gone.

Its fate was sealed at the end of last year when it was sold at auction for a measly £165,000.

And very soon 500 years of the history our little suburb three miles from the City of Tall Towers – the industrial metropolis of revolution – will be replaced by 12 houses and six apartments.

What a sad day it was when Alan Hampson, who writes for the excellent local internet magazine Another Music, took this photograph. Thank you for sharing it Alan.

What a travesty.

The Tudor mini-mansion is smashed and broken, its windows stare with black emptiness, its buttresses are twisted and the spine of the roof is breaking and exposed. Hough Hall is falling to the undignified throws of its cold harsh death as Spring arrives.

But once again there is a mystery?

Why is the council taking at least part of the hall down?

Why isn’t the builder doing it?

The note pinned to the old oak door says baldly that the city council has not contacted the owner and is going ahead with the – at least – partial demolition because an area of the hall had become dangerous.

Surely, it was potentially dangerous before a few days ago? After all our diminished piece of history has been horribly neglected for all the decades of my life.

If you were brought up in Moston, Hough Hall has been a sentinel of history for you. It was, as far back as I remember, the dirty rugged enigmatic, roughly romantic, mysterious inspiration that began me thinking of, and respecting, the things of the past, how history shaped us, how we lived and how architecture fitted in with us and protected us.

***

Everyone you know someday will die. And places and buildings almost always go on far beyond us. Hough Hall didn’t make it.

But there are so many stunning and evocative buildings in Moston that we need to do everything we can to protect, save them from the ravages of time, weather, business and those who have dominion over us and what is ours.

Let’s fight to keep those things that are part of what made us who we are today…

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/the-life-and-times-of-mostons-vanishing-ancient-hall/

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/how-mad-chester-gave-up-on-the-ghost-of-an-artists-500-year-old-house-of-memories/

https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/lets-stop-them-stealing-any-more-from-north-manchesters-history/

Nurses are heroic, but should they be threatening to go on strike at this time in our recovery from Covid?

And lots more to have a shout about, the best opinion show on TV today.

Take a look, it’s funny, it’s shocking and above all it’s entertaining.

A BIT OF BACKGROUND:

Rodney Hearth is the boss at Air TV International, a station that goes back across the decades and is a big pull in the US, Europe and the UK.

Leigh G Banks is a former national newspaper reporter and editor and is a newspaper and magazine designer. And is making a name for himself in TV documentaries. Leigh also writes and edits https://leighgbankspreservationsociety.blog/

#covid #NHS #nurses #LGBGT #shameofthehorseracingworld

Manchester writer, Dorrie Bridge asks a question that matters for our elderly sacrificial lambs.

One of today’s headlines in the press is that a fair percentage of the over 80s, having had one dose of the vaccine – or two in some cases – have been breaking the lock-down.

In the main it seems to be that they are ‘mixing’…

… meeting people outside their ‘bubble’, and they are meeting indoors.

Now, we in this age group have been the ones who have stayed at home and, basically, been asked to Save the NHS. Again, some of us have followed the rules to the letter because of being warned by our GPs of our High Risk status.

Let’s get this straight, being over 80 doesn’t make you suddenly become sheep. The vigilance asked for by government and by science has been adhered to by individuals prepared to make the sacrifice, having thought through the reasons as they would have BEFORE they were 80.

You don’t suddenly stop reasoning or having logical thoughts – you are the same ‘thinking’ people in the main as you were at sixty five or seventy five.

Many who have made sacrifices have suffered great distress and anxiety. They have quite rightly occasionally thought they were being made into sacrificial lambs.

Now having been invited to the vaccination, being the first guinea pigs to take it so to speak, they are trying to pick up some kind of life.

Unfortunately the powers-that-be are not giving out the message clearly enough – the vaccine will not stop you getting the disease, it will mean that (in the older group) you are less likely to go into hospital and die.

However the vast majority of younger people are not yet vaccinated and the spread of Covid is still very high. This fact alone means that nobody can mix freely, whatever your age. I gather that the overall message which needs to given to the entire population is that when we get as near as possible everyone vaccinated, twice, that could result in ‘herd immunity’.

The attainment of this aim is some way in the future and also subject to confirmation and a close eye on the rest of the world to avoid re-infection from countries who may not have reached our ‘herd immunity.

I know that the figures out today about the over 80s feeling a false sense of security are not just statistics. We are all sick and mentally drained with isolation but can someone get this message across – and give us all a chance of freedom in the future.

Obviously this message needs broadcasting far and wide.

It isn’t just a percentage of the over 80s who are deciding they can now ‘mix’ – the more people who are vaccinated, in all age groups, the more they will precipitously mix. Keep up the precautions, ease them as advised and little by little our lives may start again.

#over80s #covid #vaccine #warning #mixing

HARRY and Meghan appear to be motivated by grudges, image building, self-obsession and pretending to be the victims of stolen privacy.

Oh, I wonder what Oprah would say? Oh, and, of course, they are obsessed by  getting money to spend in the celebrity land they’ve chosen to make their twee middle-class empty lives in.

But what are they hoping to win in the war they appear to be waging against the Royal Family they said they wanted to leave behind?

Now going on telly and denouncing  94-year-old Queen and her ailing husband, 99 as liars works doesn’t it. And denouncing the press, the one thing they need to promote their twisted convoluted pretence of not being celebrities is just silly.

But they are now fallen out with family, her husband her ’s family, her former staff and a Press and public which greeted her wedding to Harry with rapturous adulation.

Yes, they’ve got it right haven’t they?

#Harry #Megan #harryandmegan #royals #Oprah #privacy #LA #thepress #celebrity #diana