As a starter for 10 - mine are fairly prosaic. (In addition to following Charlton H&A) Eating out - manage to do it most nights. Gambling - manage to do it most days. Have a nice collection of decent “name” watches - 4 at the moment. You can’t go wrong if you know your stuff & get the papers with them. I wear one & keep the other 3 safely stored. Whenever I have enough spare disposable I buy another.
Laser Discs. Remember them? Magnificently old fashioned technology now, but a generation ago like the very first Compact Discs, Laser Discs seemed like science fiction marvels. They look like giant DVDs but they usually have all the picture quality of VHS just without the horizontal lines you get when the tape has been chewed up. They do have digital sound and chapter markers you can jump to, but nothing else that modern DVD users take for granted (no menus, no language options, no extras...) Also depite their huge size (12" diameter mostly, though a few smaller ones were produced) Laser Discs can only hold one hour of video on each side. So a movie which is 2 hours 15 minutes long for example had to be sold in a two disc set. Many of the mid-range or budget LD players could not read both sides of the disc, so half way through any film the watcher has to eject the disc and turn it over. And of course you cannot record on them. Also the subtitled Laser Discs (like all the English language movies produced in Japan) have the foreign language subtitles 'burned' onto the video image, so they cannot be turned off. I have a good quality player - one of the last to be produced as it has a separate DVD player built in as well - but even on my machine the loading and unloading of the Laser Discs sounds like a small diesel car, and even when the disc is spinning there is a low frequency mechanical hum much louder than any CD or DVD player. In their brief heyday before DVD totally blew them away, Laser Discs were considered the last word in video entertainment. The machines were never cheap and the discs themselves were much more expensive than video tapes. A surprising number of movies and even some TV series were sold in LD format, and there is a nice market in second hand ones nowadays. Prices can be very reasonable to a bit silly, but it depends on how badly a collector might want a particular title.
Music, playing it and listening to it. Anything with melody, rhythm and structure. Making and drinking beer. Walking. Kent mainly, but also walking holidays in Britain and abroad, since we got shot of the kids. An allotment next to the Five Bells. I cook a mean curry.
Drama- I direct Plays, I also have been in hundreds of Plays through the years, since I was 16 Outdoors- I propagate a wide range of plants, also grow veg. Enjoy walking and do between four to six miles every day. Music- Go to see many concerts from rock to folk. Last concert seen was Phil Beer. Also The Unthanks.
I build model rockets and launch them. My latest project is Atlas LV-3, my last two launches was the Saturn V (first one failed to get off the pad so had to reprogram and get new parts). The Atlas has some space that I'm hoping to stick a GoPro on. They don't go that high, still need to get permission from Civil Aviation Authority. So space... Pretty much my other hobby apart from women and whiskey.
Macbeth was broadcast live in Orpington last week from the RSC. I was not altogether convinced by Christopher Eccleston as Macbeth. Did you see it?
Some great post on here - I thought DP would mention acting & FHB home brewing. We need to hear from our resident iconclast @Ponders Revisited and our pet trainspotter @baraettmattesvensson Not to mention property magnate @AllHellLetLoose
i do a lot of running, 10k, half marathons. i make my own beer every summer (failed at converting the apples from my apple tree into cider).
When I started going to football around 1975 it was almost automatic you bought a programme(now sales are around 20% of the expected attendance). I may go to the odd London away game and get a programme and as they were so different when I'd go to the club shop at The Valley I'd buy various other away programmes from games I had not been to. To date I am missing about 50 home and away back to the 65//66 season. In the 80's I was into Depeche Mode and Ultravox. Whenever I bought a 7" vinyl I would buy the 12" if it was available. This led onto getting remixes, coloured vinyl, and also imports. I would probably have around 500 vinyl now, a small collection but probably have a few quid here as I reckon I could get about £5 on average per record. The above is probably where I get my groundhopping from, collecting new grounds. At present I have been to around 500 over here and worldwide.
I used to collect records as well back in the mid 1980's. Still have about 100 albums and a couple of hundred singles (7", 12" and a few 10") mostly common ones but a number are unusual. Got the yellow cover 12" US version of 'Master and Servant' by Depeche Mode (rather more edgy than the single version) and a white label alternative 12" remix of 'The Sun Goes Down' by Level 42 among a few others, including a double 7" gate-fold edition of 'Everybody wants to rule the world' by Tears for Fears, which has the excellent 'urban mix' version on one disc. When CD began to take over my interest faded, but I still hold onto that old vinyl for sentimental reasons.
Ten inch singles? They were rare but not unheard of back in the day. Mostly they were sold by the big record stores in the West End like Virgin, Our Price, HMV or Tower Records. A bit surprised you haven't come across them Elf. Got a 10" single of 'Linger' by the Cranberries, beautiful song that one.
I did find one 5" single on a hunt in a second hand record shop once (believe it or not) 'Another nail in my heart' by Squeeze. It played at 33rpm because the track space was so narrow. The label in the middle took up almost the whole thing! If I can find it I'll take a snap.