THIS IS WHY I LOVE TO BLOG.....

I got back from a weekend break in London on Monday night - this posting would have been up yesterday if it hadn't been keepingitpeelday.

It was an action packed weekend.  Saturday saw a trip out to Kingston-upon-Thames to watch what turned into a hugely entertaining football match and then a cracking and, for Central London, an inexpensive Italian restaurant that was even better than the on-line reviews that led me to make the booking had indicated.

Sunday saw a venture to Portobello Market followed by the main reason for being down there, a sporting occasion at Wembley Stadium with a full-blown regular season match-up in American Football (my team lost incidentally....)

Monday saw my first ever visit to Camden Market which was great fun and as quirky as I thought it was going to be, rounded off with a quick jaunt to Covent Garden before catching the tea-time flight home from Gatwick.

But even better than all of the above was how I spent my Sunday morning......fulfilling a long-held ambition to meet up with one of the top bloggers out there.

I don't get down to London much these days, and when I do it is inevitably in transit en route to somewhere else with any overnight stays being in hotels close to one of the big airports.  This time, knowing I was in the city for a couple of days, I was determined to do something that I had wanted to do for almost as long as TVV has been going and that was meet ctel, the genius behind the Acid Ted blog.

Newish readers who take a visit to Acid Ted will perhaps wonder why, given that there appears to be so little in common with the sorts of music featured there and what nonsense I inflict on you every day, that I have such an affinity with ctel.  But our links only have a little to do with music and so much more about love, life and the universe.....

Many many many moons ago ctel was one of the first to pop by and leave comments on TVV.  As he reminded me, it was while on a search for Bourgie Bourgie that he stumbled across my 'work'.  In those early days I was wont to follow a trail of folk who left comments if they had any sort of profile rather than just leaving an anonymous quote.  This led me to ctel's first blog which, to this day...and I suspect will always be the case.....remains the most moving, articulate and brave thing I've ever seen on the internet. For those of you not familiar with what I'm talking about, this was a very public diary of one little boy's fight against brain cancer and how mum and dad were doing there best to cope.  Ctel was dad.....

The use of the past tense shows that this was a fight that was ultimately unsuccessful and the little boy - L - passed away just over four years ago.  Even afterwards ctel kept the diary going for a bit and shared his feelings with how he was coping with the grief.  Please.....if all this sounds very voyeuristic then you've got it completely wrong.  Despite not having met ctel or any of his family, a friendship had developed....not one that was merely imaginary but one that very strong akin to the 21st Century equivalent of pen-pals from faraway places.  Him writing about his circumstances and others like me reading about them were very much part of the way to cope and to heal.  My own small tribute is to provide a permanent link to a charity that is researching ways to prevent these sorts of devastating illnesses.

Since then, the friendship has gone from strength-to-strength with ctel stepping in on more than one occasion when TVV ran into problems.  First of all he composed pieces when my PC crashed and I lost everything - albeit I was able to rescue old posts a few days later. Later on when I had personal tragedies of my own to deal with he helped me beyond a way I can adequately describe or do justice to.  There were a number of lovely and uplifting e-mails as well as the fact that he took it upon himself to run TVV for quite a few weeks.

I knew before I met up with him on Sunday that it wouldn't be a disappointment.  But even I was amazed by just what transpired over about 90 minutes that felt as if they had passed in ten.....

I had a gut instinct he'd be a top bloke and it was predictable that we'd have a fair bit to talk about music and blogging wise (and he was just as interested to hear stories about all those Scottish bloggers who I see on a regular basis).  I also had an idea that we would at some point reflect on the tragedies that have visited us both in recent years.

But what was truly amazing was just how the conversation flowed so very easily and comfortably, notwithstanding my occasional lapse into Scottish slang.

Before we knew it though it was time to move on to where we were due to be in the early afternoon.  This wasn't a case of two middle-aged blokes getting all maudlin and sentimental while either getting pissed or stoned.....this all happened at a street cafe in North London over breakfast where the liquids being consumed were coffee and tea.  It was just the most naturally comfortable feeling you could ever care to imagine.

There's a lot of things have happened in the five years of TVV and I've tried to highlight them within the various postings.  But right up there at the top was the couple of hours in a pavement deli/cafe in the Queens Park district of London on Sunday 23 October 2011.  When JC met ctel.

mp3 : Blink - Happy Day

And that's why I love to blog.