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Oliver Cross: Ukulele's and Woodhouse transports schemes
Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross talks ukulele's and Woodhouse transport schemes.
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Uke power
My friend Dibbs is off to a ukulele festival at an unpronounceable hamlet just outside the obscure town of Woodbridge, near Ipswich, Suffolk.
And of course it will be packed with people from all over the world because ukulele playing is a rapidly-growing international phenomenon, like swine flu.
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Last weekend, for example, a charming female duo at the Chemic Tavern ladies-only open mic night in Woodhouse, Leeds, delighted everybody with a version of Heard it Through the Grapevine, which you wouldn't have thought could be performed by ukulele, it being, in the Marvin Gaye version at least, such a full-on, big production number.
However, stripped of all that, it reveals itself as a slightly paranoid, whiney moan-song, country and western rather than Motown in sentiment and quite suited to a scaled-down ukulele performance.
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As I think would be the Rogers and Hart classic, I Wish I Were in Love Again, which I mention only as an excuse to quote its most potent verse:
When love congeals it soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
The double-crossing of a pair of heels
I wish I were in love again
The trouble is that the only person who can sing the song properly is Frank Sinatra, who would have looked silly with a ukulele.
They can't see the trees for the carbon...
The Leeds New Generation Transport scheme, which mostly means trolley-buses, involves widening Woodhouse Lane where it passes through Woodhouse Moor.
The options are to knock down the old stone pavement and an avenue of trees on the eastern side of the road and reconstruct them further out or to build a trolley-bus lane through the part of Woodhouse Moor known as Monument Moor.
Either of which will generate so many letters to the YEP that I had better get in first with the observation that replanting trees doesn't really compensate for pulling them down because it takes decades to recover the look and feel of old trees.
This is why I distrust the modern 'green' fashion for treating trees mainly as interchangable carbon trading units, so that if one comes down another has to be planted nearby. If there's anything worth getting mushily sentimental about, it's trees
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Weather for Leeds
Tuesday 07 February 2012
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Fog
Temperature: -7 C to 2 C
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Sunny spells
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