Another breathless weekend?

Yes please.

Alright, I'm being a bit melodramatic. Last year, Josh, Ally and I went through to Glasgow to meet up with Josh's siblings for the art college's degree show party thing and had such a good time we decided to go back again this year. The two other Casswells were there as well, with Josh's brother having flown back from a work placement in Austria just to get in on the action.

This time, Ally dropped out but Luc, Marie and Kate came along instead. Josh and I collected some beers on the way to the station and we settled down to knock a few back during the train journey. Except, of course, that none of us had brought a bottle opener. Skint knuckles and helpless, resigned hilarity ensued. Josh eventually levered one open with a karabiner and a keyring, and there was much rejoicing.

Once we got there, Kate & I headed to Doug's flat to collect him while everyone else went straight to the party. We met up again with them and the junior Casswells around 10 pm, by which time, of course, the street party was winding down and everyone was herding towards the union. A mercifully unguarded side door let us in without too much hassle.

A few beers later, V-twin (one of the bands I managed to see last weekend) played a shortish set and then the music went...a bit mental.

Turns out your correspondent and dancing emphatically do not mix. I suppose that I've always usually had some alternative to (very, very badly) shaking my indie white-boy booty in a given venue, whether it's been to hang about with other Mafia refuseniks, meet up with friends at some alternative venue or just pick a reasonable vantage point to suck back a beer and enjoy the atmosphere. Occasionally, when plastered, I will attempt to dance like a freak. Usually these occasions are the ones where my goldfish memory shields me from the worst of it until someone gleefully recounts my antics the next day...

Anyway, hard house plus an intense aversion to hard house do not play well together and I didn't exactly revel in the latter part of the evening. Doug, Kate and I left around 2 am. A brief bout of self-examination (seriously, try a dance-ectomy and then stand immobile in crowd of people who are really enjoying it, and try to avoid wondering why exactly you don't like dancing) and some late-night bhajis later and I was more or less back on mental track. My weeble-esque mindset usually recovers from this kind of prod with a minimum of fuss.

Which was good, because the next day, Doug and I embarked on a four hour pub crawl/philosophical journey back to the train station. Doug's company always brings out the introspective in me (if that's not a contradiction in terms, and it's certainly a laudable trait on his part!) and we spent the afternoon sifting through, among other things:

• my aforementioned dancing idiocy
  
• the usual 20-something neuroses concerning the opposite sex
  
• which is the best Zeppelin album, and
  
• about five pints
  

In fact, I've come to the conclusion that everyone has an inner Doug, looking something like the goblin in the current Sprite adverts, that provides philosophical guidance (but no straight answers, of course :) in the same way that Disney cartoons assume the existence of an angel and a devil, one on each shoulder, providing moral guidance.

But I digress.

To sum up: something of a voyage of discovery this weekend, mixed in with a dash of rock, a slap of hard house and a considerable amount of amateur psychoanalysis. And now, I'm just fucking knackered.