On vegan food and the DJ getting it wrong...

On two separate occasions recently, I have been in a suitable situation to get up and dance. On the second, on a Sunday afternoon in T'Leadmill, (yes, you read that right: Sunday afternoon! Some sort of children's and parents' rave up... Don't ask!) the correct 'song' was very much out of the question. The DJ seemed to be intent on recreating perhaps his own youth, but certainly the youths of the mid-thirties-and-up parent crowd in attendance. What a strange experience, being in the Leadmill on a Sunday afternoon. It still has that stale beer smell, although long gone is the tobacco that always went with it in my memory. Not quite Proust's Madeleines, but the same general idea, at least. 
On the first of these two occasions, the promise was of rock music. Bands that I had heard of. In some cases, bands I have referred to on this very blog, or in the past, posted their videos. But the DJ did that thing... The thing where he didn't play the most obvious (and generally the best) song from that band. Except, weirdly, he did do that when it came to bands that I would refer to as 'Drop' bands. So we heard Linkin Park do Crawling, but we heard Jimmy Eat World do Sweetness. Which is simply not the correct choice when you have The Middle or Bleed American at your disposal. Even if - and I want to make this absolutely clear - more people have heard of The Middle. It doesn't actually make you less cool to play the one we all want. He even managed to play two My Chemical Romances and neither of them was Helena. Disappointing. He did select the correct Panic! record, though, which was his one seeming anomaly. They would never have made it on to the Drop playlist, and they might even have been too arch to get on the one down the hallway at Mystery Machine. But then, Mystery Machine was all about the Smiths early on, and Panic! are probably channelling them as much as anyone.

What of this vegan food? Well, since half of my household is now at least vegetarian, we thought we'd see what the restaurant at Kelham Island could do. Turns out that they can do a pretty good job, with food that doesn't need to be marked up as 'vegan'. It's just good. If the world could be persuaded to visit, things might just start to change. With another climate strike just gone, and a sense that (some? most?) politicians are taking the issue seriously, perhaps a change is going to come.

It's been too hard living, but I'm afraid to die
'Cause I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will

​I'd have danced to that.