Births, deaths and marriages.

The funeral on Thursday came and went, and I think life at RF HQ is returning to normal. And by normal, I mean I went out to the pub, got drunk and generally revelled in not having to wear a suit.

Finlay came to the funeral. I think the last time I saw him was at his wedding and now it turns out he's a father! Bugger me. I remember when we still called him Finners and drove radio controlled cars around in his cul-de-sac in Liff. I look forward to meeting little Emily and holding her awkwardly until she cries and someone takes her away from me with a roll of the eyes and a suppressed tut.

If I was a sentimental type, I'd say something about beginnings-​endings-​circle-​of-​life-​yadda-​yadda, but fortunately I'm on the emotional mend and I think instead I'll just tell you a crap joke:

Two fish are in a tank. One of them says to the other: "Do you know how to drive this thing?"

I'm here all week.

My gran,

who had been in hospital for the last four months or so, died on Friday morning. It wasn't expected that she'd live beyond Wednesday night but in the end she was tougher than that and held on for a little longer.

I got a phone call on Thursday night saying, basically, that this was the penultimate one about my gran's condition that I should expect to get. I got the final one about 10.30 the next morning at work, from my Dad.

My family are innocents as far as this diary is concerned, so I'll keep them out of it. Suffice it to say that by now everyone is doing okay, apart from a little drama with an in-law which staggers me: how anyone could be thinking purely of themselves at a time like this is almost beyond belief, but thankfully it's been defused now. By my Mum of all people, who really shouldn't have to be dealing with stuff like this at the moment, but there you go...

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who has been about for the past few days. The Tiny Monkeys' emails made a truly gash day at work on Friday more bearable. Kate, who was around for only a few hours the evening before and the day after, managed to keep me on the straight and narrow by being in the right places at the right times and saying just the right things. Also she made me laugh when my mind didn't know which way to turn, and that made things easier.

Josh, Neil, Jeff and Devon kept me occupied on Saturday night when I got back from Fife and handled my occasional bouts of ire and quietness as they always do: by prodding me with gentle mockery and buying me a pint. Which, incidentally, were exactly the right things to do. I wouldn't have taken being handled with kid gloves very well.

I'm feeling curiously okay now. I think having witnessed my gran's decline over the months - and especially after a CT scan made it apparent that this was something she wouldn't be recovering from - I understood what was going to happen a long time ago, and had time to come to terms with it gradually. The past couple of days have just been the final part of something longer. The funeral is on Thursday, and it'll be good to say goodbye properly and close the door on everything.

Normal service will be resumed shortly.

P.S:

I forgot to mention that Friday's Vegas action was in honour of Josh's birthday, which had been on the 5^th of August while he was off in Rwanda. Have a read of his journal! It features neither a booze-laden, five-hour comedy gig with added funk goodness (as Saturday night did) or quiet late-night few in Pivo, bookending the weekend nicely (as Sunday did), but does actually has some real worth as opposed to self-promoting navel-gazing. Which I suppose might have a place in the world.

What a cracking couple of days.

Thursday's TM practise was, I think, the best yet. It got off to a shaky start - we've been playing some songs more or less since we started, and I suspect we're not as strict with ourselves when we play them as we should be. Once we got on to Sister Isabel*, though, everything just seemed to fall into place. Doug put together a drum rhythm after a couple of runs through, and we just basically fucking rocked, I am extremely happy to say. I cannot wait to play it live!

Towards the end of the session, Mart started to play something Zeppelin-esque - reminiscent of A Whole Lotta Love, but not quite the same - and I played along. Suddenly Doug joined in with an astonishingly good impersonation of John Bonham's drumming, and we were playing what I'm going to call MonkeyTwo until I can A) come up with a better name, or B) write some vapid lyrics that suggest a suitable title. Chris mentioned once that all you need to know about music is the twelve bar blues, and it turns out that applying this to MonkeyTwo magically produces a '70s rock tune that wouldn't sound out of place on a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or Kings of Leon album.

Alright, maybe I'm getting a smidgen over-enthused about it.

Anyway, we retired to the pub and got healthily mangled. We got some deep-fried goodness from the Rapido (hell, it could have been any fish and chip shop in Edinburgh for all that I remember) entirely too late to stop the onslaught of beer and I crawled into work on Friday feeling simultaneously chuffed and dreadful.

On Friday night (after an unsurprisingly pointless day at work) the Mafia got decked out in our gangster finery again, this time for Vegas. Aside from the usual lounge lizard/swingers theme, on this particular evening - Friday the 13^th - anyone dressed as the undead got in free. Cue fake bullet wounds, bloody handkerchieves and burst noses. We got there about ten, picking up Kate and Eliza and some of Josh's Teviot mates on the way. The doorman wasn't convinced that my stylishly applied, single-bullet-to-the-temple wound counted as making me undead, so he proposed that we toss a coin to see if I could get in free.

I won :)

Naturally, as soon as we got in and had sorted a round, three women (Devon, Eliza and Kate), one after the other, all decided that the time had come for me to just fucking dance, and no two ways about. The following conversation was repeated almost verbatim each time:

"Oh, come on. Dance."
"I don't want to! I'm crap! Wait, what are you doing with my beer?"
"Come on."
"Oh Jesus. Alright then. On your head be it."

And of course each time I was dragged up, a small, pure evil part of my brain secretly enjoyed itself immensely. So, Devon, Eliza and Kate: <fx: mumbles>thanks</fx>. God, I hate it when someone actually knows me better than I do.

I actually ended up more or less "dancing" the night away with whichever unfortunates happened to be nearby, and was in the last lot of the Mafia to stagger out at 3 am. Bit of a turn up for the books, really, what with the total abandonment of self-respect and being the last out of a club, so something obviously went right (or so very wrong) with the evening.

Kate (not Kate, but the girlfriend of a friend of hers) and Ruth (not my sister, but a different person altogether) came back to the flat with Josh, John, Neil and I and we talked about cars and music until 5 am.

I'll say that again: cars and music. What a top night.

* Sister Isabel is a Del Shannon song that was covered by Frank Black & Teenage Fanclub a while back. This sort of collaboration yields incontrovertible proof of the existence of a benevolent indie deity, in my opinion.

Old and busted:

losing at poker on Tuesday night, receiving the poker nickname "Fluffer"*. New hotness: running 10K for the first time last night. Newest of new hotnesses: running out of stuff to write here. You lot had better pray something interesting happens to me soon. And by 'you lot', I mean me.

* For reasons I'm clearly not going to explain here. No, they're not sordid or titillating, just boring.

I'm finding it hard

to separate anything I did last week into a meaningful, discrete activity. Whenever I try to isolate a given incident, my brain does something like the following: <mental deep breath>​work-​french-​work-​bandpractise-​work-​running-​work-​badminton-​work-​boozing-​running-​bluesgig-​running-​visithome​<and relax>

It is doubly concerning to me that for at least half of the spare time I had, I voluntarily chose to do something either physically or mentally edifying and forewent the option of getting plastered.

About the only point at which I just sat back and joyfully did nothing was for a few minutes on Friday evening after work. I sat on the quayside at the shore in Leith, waiting for my next pint to be ferried back from the bar, listening to Grandaddy on the iPod - a track called The Warming Sun, coincidentally enough - and watched the sun set.

After the genius of Buddy Guy last weekend, I jumped at the chance to go to another free blues gig with Kate on Saturday night. It was Jason's birthday that day as well, so I dutifully knocked a couple back with him and then headed over to the Caley Brewery about 9.30 or so. The gig was never, I think, going to be as good as last Sunday's, but even then it was a little disappointing. The Caley's hall becomes sauna-like maybe half an hour into any given event there, and the sweat was dripping from the ceiling joists by the time we arrived. The audience had the look of hardened blues aficionadoes, displaying just that level of disregard for personal appearance that marks the true musical enthusiast. (The Buddy Guy crowd seemed more normal to an extent. Given that the tickets were £32 for the non-freeloaders, perhaps they were rich blues aficionadoes, dressed by personal shoppers.)

The band sounded just a fraction perfunctory, like they were going through the motions without ever really approaching genuine enthusiasm. We bought some drinks, headed to a table outside and soaked up A) the festival atmosphere and B) the haar.

Sunday has been a bit of a drag, to be perfectly honest. I went for another run, feeling fairly confident after a couple of 7K+ runs on Wednesday and Saturday, but my cardiovascular system wasn't really in it. I called it a day after 4K or so and headed back to the flat to stew in the muggy air for an hour or so. I got the train back home to visit my gran in hospital, had some dinner with my parents and then got back on a train bound for Edinburgh.

So after a good, if busy week, I'm left feeling a bit pensive and disconcerted.

Summer here?

I feel like I've had more of a cultured weekend than of late. We'll discount Friday night, which consisted of getting plastered and then walking an even more plastered, weepy Australian back to her flat at 2 am, though. That wasn't culture. That was drinking in the trenches.

On Saturday, I went out for a run. A while back, one of the guys on my team at work spammed us all with an invitation to run the Water of Leith 10k race in September. It's an alternative to the Capital Challenge 10K, done for charity instead of being a 'real' race, and this year it's on the same day.

I made a conscious effort to go running a couple of times a week last autumn and winter, mainly in an effort to get a bit of exercise beyond just cycling to work. Unfortunately, Christmas and the associated mountain of food and booze finished off my will to do so and I've let it slide since then. The 10K looked like a good target to aim for, so I printed out a training schedule and got to work. Saturday's supposed half-hour run went tits up when I got lost in Leith. And trust me, Leith is not somewhere you want to get lost while wearing 50% camp running shorts (they're nowhere near as '70s paedophile as Neil's, thankfully) and a 100% camp, clingy t-shirt.

On Saturday night, I went to see Before Sunset at the Cameo with Kate. (Yeah, yeah. We've been compared to bickering siblings and an old married couple by now.

"So how long have you guys known each other?"
"Oh, not long."
"Oh, too long."

No wonder I'm single - I'm already married.)

The film was great. It's incredible to watch a film that feels so authentic; once the scene was set up (two people meet up after a chance encounter nine years ago), it progressed more or less in real time. The acting was almost invisible, and the script - which was so good as to feel completely spontaneous - contained a ridiculous number of truisms from both sides of the conversation. It really is worth watching.

On Sunday I tried, rather more successfully, another run. I stuck to the cycle paths and managed a respectably timed 5K. The thought of doubling this in six weeks is a little daunting.

That evening, I went to see some random blues gig in the Queen's Hall with Kate (yeah, yeah x 2) and a couple of her mates. She'd gotten hold of some complimentary tickets through her job and so I gamely trooped along, having no idea what to expect. Turned out the gig was by Buddy Guy, apparently a bit of a blues legend. It was absolutely fantastic! I sat with a grin on my face the whole time: the playing and music were excellent and he worked the crowd - all clearly in love with him anyway - like a pro.

Seeing such an enjoyable show has given me a bit more of an impetus to 'do' the festival this year. Normally in August we just 'do' the Pleasance bar three or four times a week.