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.