I woke up this morning,

and thought "Where the hell am I?". Comfortable bed: check. Pleasantly warm room: check. So it certainly wasn't my flat, anyway.

Then I remembered I stayed at Kate's after Faye and Donnie's engagement party. Claire and Dave were staying that night as well, so I got up to say good morning (or afternoon). Here's a blow-by-blow account of the next few astonishing minutes.

Minute 1: the search. I get dressed and wander through the flat looking for people. No-one there, apart from Suzie the cat, who wakes from her slumber.

Minute 2: disbelief. I put on my jacket and make to open the door. Shit, I think. It's deadlocked and I don't have a key. Starting to get hungry. The cat is looking at me with vague suspicion.

Minute 3: abject fear. I weep with abandon and curl into a foetal position, wailing "Why? Why?". I could really do with some breakfast to calm my growling stomach. Cat still there.

Minute 4: resignation. I phone Kate (who's in Aberdeen) and leave a pitiful message telling her that I've been locked in. Getting very hungry now. The cat is looking A) tasty and B) at me, with narrowed eyes.

Minute 5: any second now, a titanic battle for survival between me and Suzie is going to erupt. Man versus beast in elemental struggle. Fortunately my phone rings and Kate tells me that her flatmate Velma is coming back from work to let me out. I salute my feline nemesis and settle down to watch the telly until Velma arrives.

A tale unlike any you've ever read, I'll wager. Hard to believe it all happened, really.

"Das ist ein Unikum,"

exclaimed Joseph II on first tasting the Hungarian digestif in 1790.

"Dear Christ," I exclaimed on first tasting it, "that's utterly revolting."

"God, I feel terrible," I exclaimed rather more quietly the next morning as the Unicum (yes, really) wreaked havoc on my stomach, along with the other ingredients of the Monday night's arbitrary and enthusiastic boozing. Digestif my arse. All it helped me digest was my stomach lining.

Fortunately work on Tuesday was rather quiet, and it crawled by more easily as the day went on. TM got together for a...patchy practise that night. Had it been an album, it would have been the canonical difficult second album. Everything was present and correct: everyone turned up more or less on time; we played reasonably well, but the ol' magic just wasn't there. Christmas fatigue, I think. Still, we got another couple of new tunes (blatant crowd-pleasing ones as well :) sorted, and the gig looks to be on track.

Christmas Day was a damn sight less exciting than last year, although I was fairly happy for that to be the case. Ruth was working until early Christmas Day morning, so we drove back around 11 am and spent the day lazing around our parent's house, opening presents, eating and so on. I scarpered back to Edinburgh on Boxing Day to avoid the usual family merry-go-round that starts on the 26^th and lasts until Hogmanay.

The last two days have been a pleasurable blur of GTA, leftover turkey sandwiches and laughably execrable holiday season TV. All play and no work makes your host a dull boy, and I'm revelling in it, I tell you.

Next up: I spend five days straight watching Pimp My Ride and genuinely enjoying it.

A return to form, of sorts.

After a disjointed week (ironically so, because I'd actually organised things more than a day ahead of time) this week drifted back into a more familiar pattern: booze, practise in the flat, rehearse with TM, booze, see a film.

TM's first Big Practise started at 2pm on Saturday. The five hour session was supposed to let us record some backing tracks for Dave to practise vocals with and to get to know some of the new songs we've chosen for the gig.

The reality was that two hours of recording without a singer is soul destroying. It's like Tango without Cash. The sight of Dave singing directly into Doug's ear (silently to me, ear-splittingly loudly for Doug) so that he knew when to change the drum rhythm will stay with me for some time as despair embodied.

Also, a bass is fucking heavy if you have to wear the damn thing for five hours straight.

Despite all of this (and it was mightily frustrating at the time), it was worthwhile. We have the sans-vocal tracks out of the way, and at least a couple of new tunes are sorted out. Post rehearsal, we worked out a set list over some curry and beers, and now it's set in stone we have something concrete to aim for. Rehearsals should, from now on, be a damn sight more productive from an actually playing a gig point of view. Which is nice.

I tried to do a bit more Christmas shopping on the Sunday. I seem to have perfected Christmas-shopping-as-thought-experiment: I don't buy anything, but the act of shuffling zombie-like through shop after shop focuses the mind marvellously on anything at all apart from the gaudy trinkets I'm actually looking at.

Finally, on Sunday evening, I went to see Garden State with Kate. It's a good film - it's about the closest I've seen of late to be charming without becoming cloying or overly slapstick. Maybe Igby Goes Down is a good comparison. We had a few pints in Favorit afterwards, and it was good.

We had our office Christmas party last night

and it was completely uneventful.

Having planned to break at least seven of the Scotsman's ten office party rules, I didn't get much beyond two. And they weren't even the risqué ones. I'm losing my safari suited, colossal boozefest office party touch in my old age.

It's been a bit of a disjointed week.

Whereas I used to feel that I did stuff that I'd decided maybe the day before, the last few weeks seem to have been predetermined from some time in the past that I can't remember. I pick up my phone, look up the day's calendar entry and think "Oh. Really? I'm doing that today? When the hell did I decide to do that?"

Not that I've been up to anything particularly interesting, mind. It's not like my diary has entries saying "Defeat Godzilla, buy socks", or anything. It's more like "Cook tea tonight, buy socks". Which is less exciting.

Meh. Anyway.

I did manage, with Martin, to come up with a basic demo for TM's next song. We're planning to play our first live gig in January (get this - it's going to be invitation only. Ah, the conceits of rock and roll) and we're starting to get a little anxious at the lack of our own songs, hence the burst of creativity. The only problem is that the basic demo doesn't seem to lend itself to being anything other than a basic demo.

The weekend was fairly quiet. Marie has just finished her degree and her show is now up at the art college. I missed the original soirée in its honour (Wednesday, while Martin and I were plugging away at MonkeyThree), so on Friday night we had a few at the Phoenix. And that, strangely, was it for the weekend's boozing.

On Saturday, I mostly woke up the rest of the flat by playing Seven Nation Army until I was satisfied that it sounded just right. Took about three hours.

Sunday was marginally more productive - I dragged myself out of the flat to do some Christmas shopping and on the way back, had a look round the Masters of Design show at the art college. Marie's stuff was very good, along with a lot of the rest of it. Tobias'…er…Self Portraits With Furniture Built By Self were amusing, but his chairs-and-table combo was pretty cool. I may forgive him.

Well,

that was a spectacularly uneventful week off. Apart from going to Glasgow on Tuesday to watch Doug's plays, the rest of it was taken up by the following, in order of time spent on said activity:

1. Sleep. I slept a lot. Got up around 11 am each day, wandered through to the living room and flicked on the PS2, in order to…
   
2. Play GTA: San Andreas. Excellent game. It's absolutely huge and completely devoid of any kind of social conscience. Once I'd had my fill of car jacking, cop baiting and pimping, I'd have something to eat and then…
   
3. Booze. Not much to report here, apart from some drunken swing dancing in Teviot's Middle Bar on Saturday night. So classy.
   

Despite writing myself a list of Things To Do With Valuable Time Off, I spent the rest of the time trolling snowboarding shops for new bindings. I got them, set them up and then stared at them in impotent fury because there is no rideable snow within at least 600 miles.

Gah.

Spaced,

series 2, episode 7.

Tim: "Aren't you going to ask me how it went?"
Daisy: "How'd it go?"
Tim: "Really badly."

Apologies for brevity again, but there's not a lot about the weekend worth going into here. Once again a question of keeping personal stuff away from the unkind gaze of the internet. Maybe some other time.

On the up side, last night I watched three radio plays performed live by Doug and co. (Doug: "...metamorphosis,") and then we got drunk and ate kebabs.