Well,

that was très civilised. Christmas Day passed in a pleasant haze of food and enough beer, in an alternate universe, to have drunk myself under the table. On Boxing Day we walked along the beach to the Crusoe in Lower Largo, and if you kept the power station behind you, it was a genuinely picturesque scene. Grey clouds rolled over the Forth, the water was choppy and it looked for all the world like somewhere up beside Inverness or Skye.

And then the next day I had to come back to Edinburgh to work, and after eight hours banging my head off my desk, we had less of an "aha!" epiphany and more of a "how on earth did we miss that earlier?" one. The next five hours were spent frantically trying to capitalise on the glaringly obvious so that I could come back home to view a car.

I'd seen the car - an '85 Porsche 924 - on the web, and my Dad and I took it for a test drive today. Initial impressions weren't good. First and second gear were either entirely absent or temporarily out to lunch, and we made several crawling starts in third on the way to the motorway. Once we were rolling, things looked up: steering was precise and if presented with a reasonable gear ratio, the engine pulled nicely with a convincingly snarling tone.

As we came off the motorway and were pulling onto a B-road, I switched the wipers on against the snow. Almost as soon as it came it went, and so I flicked them off.

Unfortunately, the wipers didn't stop moving. Things took a surreal turn when the horn started to randomly sound itself.

"Was that you?" my Dad asked.
"Er, no."
"Hmm. Let's stop to see if we can get it into first."

So, crawling along the B-road looking for somewhere to stop, we saw a guy out for a bracing afternoon stroll. The horn, in an act of near-perfect comic timing, gave a cheery beep as we rolled past him.

He gave our sentient car a deadpan wave, and we waved back, convulsed with mirth.

After a bit of experimentation ("Hit it harder. Harder!"), I managed to reliably get it into both first and second, and engaged in some light caning back to Kirkcaldy.

In the end, the gear problems are almost certainly down to some worn out 50p bushings, and the Herbie-esque horn and wipers is probably a pair of dodgy ground connections. Now all I need is the RAC inspection to tell me that I'm not about to buy a complete lemon...

Jesus Christmas.

What a farce - work has descended into chaotic wailing and gnashing of teeth with one day to go before everyone gets the hell out of Dodge and stays as far from it as humanly possible for the next week and a half. Your correspondent, of course, is still here, confronted with a Sisyphyean task in clearing the decks before rushing to the shops to complete my typically half-baked Christmas shopping and then scrabbling to catch the last possible train home.

I'm feeling particularly Office Space today.

The work Christmas bash didn't even come up with the goods this year; everyone was on mostly good form and there was a slightly wistful nod to my old days as the office's nominal enfant terrible (suggesting a couple of pints on a school night sends thrills of displeasure through the management here) as I won the Golden Colon award for forgetting to turn up one day, but even that failed to really put a shine on things. Also, the white wine tasted like cough syrup, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway, a few days off will no doubt sort me out. And I've had all of two days detox in preparation for some more seasonal excess. Have a good Christmas, dear readers!

As per usual,

the festive season has resolved itself into a constant stream of enjoyable nightly boozing and less enjoyable financial stress.

On Friday I went along to a mini bash at Vanessa's small but perfectly formed flat. We drank mulled wine and ate fun-size sausage rolls; I used the sentence "I'll need to consult the board on that one," in polite conversation and my (requested!) music choices were repeatedly passed over for Jewel and Ryan Adams in a kind of alt-country Christmas armageddon.

I met up with a load of workmates after the party started to wind down and when Broughton Street closed for the night, we hiked along to our flat to continue what was turning into a rather classic evening. The flat was still well-stocked with excess booze from my Dad's 60th and we tore into it with gusto.

Around 3 am I cornered some hapless girl by the stereo and proceeded to mercilessly castigate her for her lack of enthusiasm about Led Zeppelin. We engaged in a preposterous, bourgeois iPod battle over who had the coolest next song to play, swapping the cable between them every ten minutes or so and all the while lambasting each other's parochial and narrow-minded choices. Eye-wateringly middle-class, post-ironic and utterly, utterly top. I may even have been wearing a brown T-shirt with a wanky logo as well.

For my next trick, I will disappear completely up my own arse.

The end result of all this is that I've formulated a thesis (a bastard child of Godwin's Law) relating to debates about rock and roll:

As any debate about rock and roll grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Led Zeppelin approaches 1.

And as with Godwin's Law, the person that makes the comparison is assumed to have lost the debate. I say this not because the Zep are not the greatest rock and roll band ever to have walked the earth, but merely because my own chat will improve immeasurably if I can stop banging on about them after 6 pints or so.

On Saturday, the usual TM practice went particularly well: a new, Franz-tinged song is sounding remarkably good and we discussed the possibility of getting one of Jez's friends in to try out as a backing vocalist. I tell you, Russ Abbot has infused us with a renewed sense of purpose. What a guy.

Josh, up visiting from York this weekend, had asked me to organise an outing to Christmas Vegas that night. I duly assembled a crack team of no-shows and apologised profusely to him as we had a pre-club drink in the Outhouse. I made numerous passive-aggressive, pleading phone calls to everyone and in the end it all came together with only a moderate amount of fuss.

Josh, Jeff and I arrived early and warmed up by winning a few beers at blackjack and by then the rest of our crew had started to turn up. Michelle mentioned later that she thought it was a little quiet, but I really enjoyed it: Josh was off like an oiled whippet in search of ladies to dance with, and even I trotted out a few swing moves on the mostly empty dancefloor with Michelle and Kate.

Dave and his mate Bob turned up a little later, and then sometime even later in the crowded, sweaty depths of the basement, Keef appeared and we talked prog rock while keeping a weather eye on the particularly appealing Christmas crowd. There's a distinct Vegas mafia emerging, I think...

All in all, a rather splendid evening. I'd write more but I have to be off to the pub again now!

Come with us

on a journey through time and Broughton Street.

Tiny Monkey practices of late have been getting a little routine, and we were all feeling varying degrees of frustration with them. We'd turn up, go through the same tunes (some of which we've been playing for almost two years), make a patchy attempt at a new cover, fail to expand on a riff or chord progression and then go home feeling that we hadn't really accomplished anything.

We thought that the answer might be to have a band meeting to talk through the various problems, so we met up in Baroque on Thursday evening.

That was not the answer. The answer, in fact, was to get loudly, boorishly drunk and have a band photo taken with Russ Abbot.

Things started off sensibly enough; we booked a table in advance and once sorted out with some food, got down to business. We took turns to go through the band's issues as we each saw them, mediated by a bottle of HP sauce that the speaker claimed until he was finished. (As an aside, a bottle of HP sauce is not an ideal chairman for this sort of discussion. When all is said and done - and never let it be said that I disrespect that bottle of HP sauce in any way - it was a bit too hands off.)

We crossed the road to the Phoenix, tongues loosened by beer and only barely stayed by the meal. We talked on, tempers fraying and our personal frustrations coming to the fore. It wasn't a band meeting any more; it was a voyage to the core of the collective Monkey psyche. Laugh you may, but you weren't there, man. Kashmir loomed large in the background noise, for once on the jukebox as opposed to playing unbidden in the recesses of my mind.

We abandoned the Phoenix for a venue willing to host the continuation of our journey and came latterly upon Pivo. I spent a lifetime at the bar, willing the barmaid to come to my aid. She did so only barely ere I collapsed from thirst (or inebriation; who can truly say?) and I returned to the tumultuous Monkey fold. The denouement came then as I came upon the sight of Martin, as our alliterative Marlow, deep in conversation with the brooding, Kurtzian figure of Russ Abbot.

As in Conrad, so with Tiny Monkey.

That's my reading of the night, anyway.

We had a practice on Saturday and you know, it was pretty good. There's nothing like getting trashed with Russ Abbot to really focus the mind.

* * *

With reference to some past...scheduling errors, I managed to forgo two gigs on Friday and Saturday night and then failed to capitalise on the resultant free time as I had promised to do. On Friday I said to myself that I'd give Porcupine Tree a miss in favour of Bell X1 (named after the first plane to break the sound barrier, in case you're interested. As everyone else seems to have been) on Saturday night.

On Saturday, I then remembered a party that night that I'd already said I'd go along to. So, rushing back from the practice, I met up with everyone in the pub at a more or less reasonable hour, beered up and ready to go.

I then stayed in the pub with Ashley and Neil while everyone else, having waited for me to arrive, left for the party. I am a bad man. That I actually went home at a sensible time - something of a record for a Saturday night - you may choose to see as a doubly idiotic, wilful compounding of broken promises, or actually quite good from a drink-related health problems point of view. Publicly I choose the latter, inwardly I cringe that it's the former.

On Sunday I failed to do any Christmas shopping and went down to Devon's flat in the evening for dinner with Jeff, Annabel, Antonio and Carolyn. The conversation veered from scatalogical anecdotes about Norwegians to desserts served with breast milk cream, and it was the perfect way to end a rather good week.

Look on, ye mortals, and tremble.

Tiny Monkey salutes Russ Abbot. Russ Abbot. What a night.

Just as I was starting to get into the Swing of things

they go and try to teach us something that requires an honest-to-God ability to dance. Michelle was schoolgirl-giddy when they announced that Thursday's lesson would be covering blues dancing; we'd seen a couple doing it on the dancefloor (and that marginal double entendre is far closer to the truth than you might imagine) at the Bongo club one Tuesday and she'd loved the look of it. I, on the other hand, had goggled in an "Is that legal?" way and thanked my lucky stars that up until that point at least we'd stuck to stuff that didn't require, basically, any soul.

For the uninitiated, blues dancing is frottage recast in a rather more graceful, dancefloor-friendly light. "This is all about connection," the teacher told us on Thursday as she proceeded to fairly liberally connect with her partner. "Don't think. Feeeeew," she might have said, but didn't.

Blues dancing is not really the sort of thing it seems proper to try with just anyone. In fact, I'd probably limit it to those people you've seen naked, and if you're feeling either particularly optimistic or especially lecherous, possibly those you'd like to see naked. It is emphatically not a dance I wanted to learn with my workmates, flatmates or the various pensioners in that night's class.

Needless to say my bodily coordination was reduced to that of a gangling teenager and I sucked mightily. This is roughly the expression I sported for the rest of that evening. Never in my short, uneventful swing career have I been happier to get to the pub after a lesson.

Anyway...

I was at home over the weekend for my Dad's 60th birthday, and as always, enjoyed myself but was still vaguely relieved once the extended family merry-go-round was over and we could relax with some of my parent's friends at the end of the night. Always seems to be a bit tricky to make sure that family, friends and neighbours are all enjoying themselves when they only meet up once every couple of years, and especially when some of them are about as communicative as rocks. Still, it was a mostly fun night, rounded off by a surprisingly sensible and heartfelt toast by one of my Dad's oldest friends.

(As an aside, my Mum asked if I wanted to say something as well, but for some reason I couldn't think of what to say. I'd been lucky to avoid any particular traumas or dramas pretty much throughout my childhood and my memories of my parents back then are a kind of blur of them being caring, accommodating and encouraging in equal measures. Unfortunately that doesn't really translate into a snappy toast.)

On Sunday night my Mum, Dad and I had a meal back in Edinburgh and later on I met up with Ashley and Scott, a friend of hers and a fellow bassist, albeit a somewhat more successful one than your host. Excellent chat all round, and I was inspired into taking Monday off and subsequently squandering it by playing GT4. Good times!

P.S: Dom and Alice got engaged last weekend - congratulations, guys!
P.P.S: We've got a Christmas tree! Nice.

In a nutshell

the week was a vertible orgy of slightly inebriated chat, mostly with the Mafia and my new crony/foil Ashley, bringing to the party the unique perspective of a Canadian archaeologist turned chef. If there ever was a person qualified to use the word "dude" in a really convincing way but who I have never heard say it, it's her.

I had a slightly odd experience on Saturday on the way to the TM practice in Glasgow. With both Davis and I suffering from fairly fierce hangovers, we stopped in an out-of-town retail park type place to get some cholesterol and drove through a McDonalds there. (I must admit to feeling slightly guilty - it's been ages since I've bought anything from the Great Satan of fast food - but it did get the job done.) We parked in the centre of the place, surrounded by single story chain restaurants, a bowling alley and hundreds of car parking spaces. I was staring out of the steamed up window and had a niggling feeling of familiarity that I couldn't place.

Then, as I was slurping the remains of my coke, a colossal Dodge Ram pickup burbled past us and I had a weird moment of cognitive dissonance: it felt exactly like we were in the US. Sitting in the car with cartons of fast food, with a massive (and massively pointless) truck rumbling by and surrounded by acres of tarmac and plastic chain restaurants it could have been any one of a number of places we stopped at in June.

That holiday has had more of an effect on me than just about any other in the last few years; it's not that I actually remember a great deal about it but I find myself reminded of situations we encountered or places we visited at the most unexpected times.

I think it was probably the 4°C temperature and persistent rain that finally broke the illusion. We left just in time to A) hit a load of traffic and consequently B) arrive half an hour late. Nice.

I had dinner with my infuriatingly culture-hopping, jet-setting and generally interesting parents on Sunday night; freshly back from Milan and Cologne, my Dad's now talking about building a Lotus 7 replica and my Mum is already planning a return trip to Cologne to buy some new furniture. This Nürburgring trip can't come soon enough - with Ruth off in Australia and apparently having an excellent time, I've been relegated to last place in the Most Exciting Family Member stakes. The more cynical/realistic among you might well argue that I've already been there for ages.

P.S: My hair continues to grow in a ludicrous fashion. I'm starting to resemble the kid from Flight of the Navigator. Starting to dress like him as well, which is perhaps more worrying.

Q: "What's it called?"

A: "Cumbernau- what the hell is that thing?"

A few post-work drinks on Friday night became a rather enjoyable evening and ended up with me staggering home at some ungodly hour and then getting up half an hour before I was due to meet Davis for Saturday's TM practice. I took a taxi (a rather warm one - not good for the old nausea) to meet him and we headed off towards Glasgow. There were signs advertising a 30 minute delay on the M8 so we took the plunge and headed for Falkirk instead. Or rather, Davis did while I lolled near insensibly in the passenger seat and tried to avoid befouling the interior of his car.

Just after we left the M8, a sign declared that there were 60 minute delays on our new route. From my point of view, the delay probably saved the practice; by the time we crawled into Cumbernauld and grabbed ourselves some food, my body was rallying and the threat of disastrous digestive problems was receding. The town centre delivered the final mental defibrillation by the mere fact of being completely, unreconcilably hideous: I ranted and spluttered as we drove through its monstrous shadow and felt almost normal again.

The practice, short as it was, went quite well, but I think we're in need of a gig (possibly at the end of January) to get us properly up and running. A new song or two wouldn't hurt as well, but general injury is still keeping us from playing at our best. It'll come, no doubt.

We got back to Edinburgh sans delay, and I was almost joyously healthy again. I ironed a shirt and put on my current pet ridiculous suit, aiming for 'swing' but unfortunately hitting 'mod' instead, and headed out.

I'd go into detail about the night but suffice it to say that it was a fun, breathless rush from party to party to Vegas, encompassing a near-monopoly of the first dancefloor by the usual swing suspects; an unwitting abandonment of your host by the same; a happy reunion half an hour later and a night at Vegas marked mostly by some thoroughly ridiculous dancing by, of course, me.

A few of us wound up at Michelle's flat afterwards and had it been summer, the sun would have been coming up by the time I walked home. A good night!

On Sunday I had a burger. That was it.

In the style of Papa Lazarou: "Hello Dave."

Tiny Monkey got together for a slightly crippled practice on Wednesday night. My finger was still painful if I applied any pressure with it, and Mart's voice seemed to have started to re-break. I popped a load of Ibuprofen, we ate and drank heartily at the Basement and got to Banana Row more or less on time.

Doug and Davis were there already; we set up in something approaching record time and started battering away at some random riffs. Despite the absence of singing and the occasional muttered profanity as I forgot not to use my staved finger, there was a perceptible energy (God, I hate using that word in a non e=mc² way) and I was pleased with how quickly things got back to feeling like a normal session.

So, just as we're getting into the swing of things, the door opens and in wanders a dreadlocked blonde girl.

TM: "Uh, hello?"
DBG (sporting a strange hybrid American/European accent): "Hi! Davey said I could sit in for a while."
TM: "Davey?" <all point at Davis> "You mean Davis? Dave? David? This is Dave."
DBG, sitting on the couch: "Davey said I could listen to you guys for a while."
Davis: <shrug>
TM: "Do you have the right band- oh, never mind."

We looked at each other, then we looked at the now making-herself-comfortable girl on the couch.

"Christ. Oh alright then."

We played away for a while, exchanging a combination of meaningful and nonplussed looks as we did so. And then, much as icing is applied to a cake, Davey himself made his entrance, shaven headed and baseball capped.

TM: "Ah. That Dave. Hello Dave."

As an exercise for the reader, I'll leave it to you to ponder the implications of a vocalist returning unannounced (although mercifully bereft of a particular toy Casio keyboard) to a band that has spent the past three months adapting to a radically different, vocals-included lineup.

An interesting practice. And at the risk of offending any one of at least five interested parties, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that the new TM lineup is going to remain intact.

Jazz! Nice.

It's been one of those disjointed weeks without any one really big event; I managed to do something mostly fun and mostly interesting each night without feeling the need to write home about any one of them. Lucky for you, then, that I seek validation through publishing verbose accounts of prosaic boozing and everyday chat.

Thursday night - see Flat Booze Destruction Day. Civilised post-swing drinks turned into a 2 am session where we reminisced with an old Pear Tree barman and argued over the nature of relationships. Ironic, really, that none of us appear able to hold one down without severe, repeated mental trauma.

Ah well. We commiserated, and it was good.

On Friday night I absconded from a work leaving do to join Jeff, Jez and the French girls for retro flat booze destruction. I dragged myself home at about 4 am after a drinking game, involving bouncing beer bottle caps into shot glasses, degenerated into straightforward drinking because the game was too dull.

I woke up with a bit of a cold on Saturday. And yes, I do know the difference between 'cold' and 'hangover', thanks. This always happens: I can't remember the last sick day I took off work and whenever I do suffer from anything approaching ill health it's at the weekends. Anyway, I struggled through the day (by stumbling around in my dressing gown and whining a lot) and that evening I went out to the Jazz Bar with Dave, Ali and some of her mates. It was a great night: lots of excellent chat with Ali's all-round top friends; plenty of booze and some jazz that was genuinely engaging as opposed to impenetrably wanky. The cover of High and Dry was perhaps a step too far, but I'll let it slide for the time being.

At one point I was in the toilet cubicle, noisily emptying my clogged-up nasal tract and then just sniffing like a bloodhound. I came out of the cubicle and bumped into a friend of Ali's (name redacted!) who rubbed his nose conspiratorially and said "Got some charlie, mate?"

"No," I replied. "I've got a cold."

Maybe you had to be there.

[As an aside to anyone who cares: what is it with jazz bassists and the monstrously over-engineered basses they invariably play? It looks to me that a six string neck the width of an aircraft carrier serves only to allow the average jazz bassist to play in a fractionally more relaxed fashion, without having to move out of a four fret range.

Four strings, please. Four. You want chords, you play a guitar.]

As a last hurrah, I went out for a couple of quiet pints on Sunday night, having accidentally locked myself out of the flat. Fortunately Dave, or 'Fate', as my phone's predictive text would have it, intervened to let me back in.

And predictably, I feel completely fine today.

Email from Doug re the weekend's amusements:

B2: "Hello, Berkeley 2."
ME: "Hi. We have a rehearsal booked today at 3 o'clock under the name Tiny Monkey."
B2: "Uh huh, yes."
ME: "I'm afraid to say that bass player has a broken hand from street fighting last night and the rest of the band are cripplingly hungover. So we will have to cancel the rehearsal."
B2": "AAAARRR HAHAHAHA HARHARHAR HAR HAR HAR HAR"

I laughed, anyway.

Saturday night's alright for fighting, part 2:

Katie's off to Glasgow for a new job there and so she threw a flat cooling-type party for all of her Edinburgh mates. It was really good fun; I spoke to a load of people I hadn't seen for ages (as is always the way at Katie's parties, it seems - the definition of 'for ages' in this case is probably just 'since Katie's last party') and happily ploughed through a load of beer.

I knew maybe half the people there; the rest, I think, were Katie's old and new workmates and some of their friends. Jeff and I had a small chuckle about a wide-boy stoner type who refused (in a hilariously earnest way) to take off his beanie and hoodie indoors, citing a medical condition that made him too cold. He seemed a little sketchy for the party - didn't quite seem to fit in, and I was rather glad when he wandered off to talk to some other people.

At some point I became aware of sketch-boy and another guy having a heated disagreement over, of all things, whose joint he was smoking. Somehow a third guy got involved and before I knew it, I was standing outside the front door of the apartment block with Jeff, Devon, some random others and the three protagonists. The second guy, a workmate of Katie's as far as I could gather, really wanted beanie man to leave. More, accurately, he wanted him to "Just fucking GO HOME and take your prick friend with you! You always manage to spoil these parties."

A neighbour was understandably interested in who was shouting like an about-to-be-murderer, so he stuck his head out of the window and I trotted off to reassure him that we were dealing with it. Hard to be convincing when some near-lunatic is shouting bloody murder behind you at 2 am.

Anyway, somehow beanie man and Katie's workmate were separated and I think beanie man left. (It sounds a bit clichéd, but it really was 'heat of the moment' stuff and I wasn't exactly keeping a blow-by-blow diary of the evening, so I may be getting some of this back to front. Jeff or Devon can maybe put me right.) The third guy, brought along by beanie man, wanted to pick up his jacket or wallet or something so he ended up back at the party and immediately started acting up, having a go at Sam of all people. Sam is the very definition of laid back, and I cannot possibly imagine what caused this idiot to throw a punch at him, but we got him downstairs (again, Jeff, Devon and I) and made sure he didn't come back in.

Everything was just about okay: this guy was clearly angry, drunk and quite possibly on something or other, but we were keeping him calm enough to not quite attempt to fight with us.

His mistake was first trying to kick me, clipping my left hand in the process, and then throwing a punch at Devon. Both of these things annoyed me, so I wrestled him to the ground to stop him getting any more lairy and then shouted at pretty much everyone to calm the fuck down. (I've just re-read that paragraph and realised that it sounds ridiculous. But seriously, that's pretty much what happened.)

Eventually he wandered off. We went back to the party, sporting various minor designer injuries - cuts and bruises to hands and faces, mostly - and I lightly shook for a while until someone stuck a glass of whisky into my hand.

Once the party was winding down and I was less concerned about being accosted by any of the nutters involved, I walked along to Stockbridge with a friend of Katie's (trust me, this was for my security as much as hers!) and then up to the flat without incident.

I woke up the next afternoon with an absolutely killer hangover. I mean truly epic. I called Doug to beg off the afternoon's TM practice because I couldn't play the bass without my left hand twitching with pain and went back to bed. And then, right on cue, my parents arrived to witness the spectacle of their hollow-eyed, bruised and scraped offspring attempt to make coherent chat. Terrific.

Swing when you're winning.

I made a conscious decision to do absolutely nothing this week. In the end my resolve cracked on Thursday (see below), but Monday to Wednesday were filled with nothing other than mundane domesticity: work, cook, watch crappy TV, play bass, and booze. Gill's a boozehound par excellence:

RF: "Guys, dinner's ready."
Gill: "Thanks!" <sound of wine cork popping> "Splashy splashy?"

Swing on Thursday was chuffing great. It was the last session in the beginners' block and we were taught a few new Charleston moves. Although I came dangerously close to freaking out in the middle of the lesson (I have a finite and rather low capacity for getting to grips with new moves, after which my brain starts generating rather more heat than light), I gathered my shit enough so that by the end of the evening I managed to dance with, and lead Gill for all of three minutes without abruptly stopping and apologising profusely.

Ya dancer!

Afterwards we went to the pub and congratulated ourselves with lots of beer. Excellent evening all round.

Doug and I went along to Waxy's birthday bash in the west end of Glasgow on Friday night. It was a rather good night - I met the semi-mythical Jesus Andy (turns out he's neither mythical nor much resembles Jesus anymore, but still has excellent chat) and his girlfriend Lou, and after the pub closed we sat in their flat eating kebabs, drinking their beer and listening to Lou shame us all with her guitar-playing virtuosity. It was...kebabylon. That's the second decent kebab I've had in as many months. Fortunately, it's also only the second kebab I've had in as many months.

Back in Edinburgh on Saturday, I was fashionably late for Katie's dinner party being held in honour of Ben and Joanna's return to the fold. My pirate gear from last Hallowe'en had apparently been looted (alright, I'd thrown out a load of old clothes that had previously been deemed piratical) and so I donned instead my RAF gear and pretended that I'd misheard.*

Once Jez arrived with the French girls in tow, we took a pair of taxis into darkest Leith, looking for a party Katie had been invited to. "I didn't tell Laurence that I was bringing anyone," she said, "but I'm sure it'll be okay." It was. The party was taking place in four flats around a central courtyard, best summed up by Devon as a yuppie commune.

"You're a waste of taxpayer's money!" a short, slightly posh man said to me as I cracked open a bottle.

"I'm not actually in the RAF," I said. "You twit," I almost followed it up with. Instead I said: "This is a fancy dress party, right? Look - there's Teenwolf. I'm dressed up."

On reflection, an RAF uniform probably only really works in context. Like at Vegas, for example. Or if one is, in fact, in the RAF. I'll stick with Vegas for the time being.

* <snort>

I've had

a rather stimulating week.

TM convened in the Brill Building on Tuesday night for a practice. We'd been stagnating for a while, to be honest: concentrating on recording apparently made us incapable of coming up with any particularly, y'know, good original material, and we were automatically steering clear of playing too many covers because mostly we'd done them to death.

Then Mart suggested that we play a certain cover. After moaning that I hadn't had time to practice it (for some reason I was in an unreasonably foul mood that night), I caved in and after a few listens to get the bassline fixed in my mind, we played it. It rocked. It's a bit...zeitgeisty, so it probably won't stand an outing at more than one gig before it sounds old, but it's going to fucking rock your socks off when we do play it. I shit you not - it's the best cover we've done since the epic How Many More Times / Seven Nation Army segue. And that one is still being talked about today. By Doug.

The practice had been shunted to Tuesday so that I could go along to Myriam and Frauke's farewell dinner party. Apart from the burning shame and tacit admission of alcoholism of turning up with booze but no food, it was a very pleasant evening. At one point I looked out over the civilised throng and thought "Christ - we've all grown up," and then immediately followed that with "but I do miss the drinking games."

Swing morphed into jitterbug on Thursday, and it was good. The constant march towards being taught every swing move in existence was suspended in lieu of a new dance, and I was very, very happy for the respite.

This was the first weekend I've had without any things to do during the day for something like three months: no band practice; no meeting up with parents and no colossal hangovers restricting me to the couch. Coming to work this morning, I felt like I was returning after a week away.

I don't mean to say that I actually used the time profitably or anything, unless you can count attempting to rewrite TM.net, which is currently held together by elastic bands and spit, in a more sensible way. And given the number of TLAs I'd need to describe what I was doing, I certainly don't count it as anywhere approaching interesting for non-spod types.

On Saturday night I headed down to the Cumberland for Devon and Neil's joint birthday bash. An excellent night out, and again civility reigned. I blethered away to a load of people I hadn't seen for ages and talked variously about football journalism (seriously!), Scapa Flow (again) and Tom Waits vs. Teenage Fanclub (again). One particular conversation went:

Dee: "I know you!"
RF: "Yes! Hello, Dee. How're you doing?"
Dee: "You're clean shaven! And you've had a haircut."
RF: <checks chin and hair> "Uh, not really either. But...thanks. Are you sure you know who I am?"

On Sunday I'd promised to try to sort out the network at the old flat. (In Josh's absence, I seem to have become the default computer person. Much to my chagrin.) After a fruitless hour of farting around, I gave up and was about to leave when I was invited to stay for dinner, chat and Lost, all of which combined into a thoroughly pleasant evening. (The cheesecake! Good Lord. Incredible.)

Not a weekend exactly stuffed with hilarious anecdotal fodder, but I haven't felt this refreshed and chilled on a Monday afternoon for ages.

As an aside to Saturday's post,

I thought I'd mention an article by Irvine Welsh in the Guardian that seems rather appropriate to the weekend's fucked-upness. Also Devon writes about the associated but more genteel, urine- and vomit-orientated Edinburgh night out.

Sunday afternoon's alright for driving:

at least on the east coast.

Jez gave me a lift* to Craiglockhart to view and test drive my first potential Nürburgring car. It was a 1.9 Peugeot 205 GTI and I'd been an assiduous little car nerd and printed out a load of buyer's guides for it beforehand. I prodded it, bounced the corners up and down and generally behaved like an obsessive nitpicker. In the end I couldn't really find much wrong with it that would cost more than a couple of hundred quid to fix, and at £995 I couldn't complain.

The test drive, though, was...informative. The gear shift was far too sloppy (worn out linkage somewhere?); the steering was bus-like in weight (not a mechanical problem, but a 'feature' of the car, it seems) and there was a persistent clonk noise from the rear suspension (worn out bearings, needing £600 worth of dealer work, or £125 in parts and apparently a month off work for the DIY solution). The heavy steering coupled with front drive made it feel a little reluctant to corner, although once it did it was pretty much without body roll.

Despite all of this, it was still fairly impressive. The engine was obviously still in pretty good nick and it pulled surprisingly well on the motorway without sounding strained. By the time we came back, I was seriously considering getting my hands dirty and fixing the suspension myself, and was hoping that the gearbox fix wouldn't be as nasty as all that.

It was only in the last minute that I was convinced otherwise. Selecting reverse to park, the gears persisted in crunching, even with the clutch fully depressed. We bargained the guy down to £900, but the screwed gearbox seemed like a problem too far and we politely took our leave.

Conclusions: £1000 probably isn't quite enough to buy a car that I'll be confident won't seize up at 120 mph; on reflection, 205 GTIs are getting a bit long in the tooth to ever be as problem-free as I want, and lastly, I'm more attached to rear-wheel drive than I had thought. So now I need a new model to fixate on, and it looks like it's going to have to be an MX-5 or an MR2. Unless anyone has any less hairdresser-type ideas...

* Jez is now the proud, lunatic owner of a Fiat Coupé Turbo. He took it easy on the way to see the 205, popping the clutch in 2nd gear only a couple of times. I was reminded of Jason's Skyline GT-S, the one car in which I've ever been truly afraid for my life. Coming out of Oban during a camping trip, he accelerated up the hill and I'm pretty sure that the rate of acceleration was increasing as we thundered up it. When we came to the corner at the top I thought "Right; this is it," as the forest yawned before us. He nonchalantly yanked the wheel to the left and the car clung to road with the tyres squelching and the engine roaring and we conspicuously stayed alive. Not something I want to do again. Unless I'm driving.

Saturday night's alright for fighting:

if you're in the west, anyway.

Our TM practice that day had gone encouragingly well. It was the first session for a while that felt free of the "must record!" impetus that's been in evidence of late. Finally producing something (subjectively) good enough to make publicly available (you didn't think I'd seriously forget to plug it, did you?) seems to have exorcised that demon for the time being, and we're back to messing around in an attempt to generate some new songs.

Just after dropping Mart off in Renfrew after the practice, we were pulling away from his house when Doug stopped behind a stationary taxi in the middle of the road. We looked at the scuffling people outside it and the local colour swarming towards it to wade in and simultaneously glanced at each other. Doug flicked the central locking on and reversed with alacrity, keeping a weather eye on the wrestling by the taxi. He stopped a split second later when a gentle thud came from the back of the car. We looked round at the unfortunate Renault sitting behind us and again at each other.

"Fuck", I said. "This is unbelievable."

Doug pulled forward a bit, unlocked the car, jumped out to check the damage to each car (none) and got back in, locking the doors again. The tussle had calmed down by now and the crowd was dispersing, leaving the taxi driver to shake his fist a few times and drive away.

Christ knows what the hell had just gone on. Someone trying to do a runner without paying for the taxi? Family feud? Pretty depressing, whatever it was.

We drove back to Glasgow and had a couple of pints in Mono (pretentious? Moi?) before heading off along Argyll Street, me to the station and Doug to the Arches. Doug had just come out of a shop after buying some cigarettes and we walked on, talking about something or other. Just then I became aware of three guys maybe ten yards ahead of us. One of them was on the ground, one was standing over him and kicking him in the head and the third was watching. We both stood and looked at them for a second - what the fuck was going on? People were walking by and ignoring the scene, and then a second later the two standing guys walked off past us with a laugh and a shout back at the poor bastard they'd beaten up.

I really could not believe this. We walked over to the guy on the ground and asked another passerby - a vaguely sketchy looking chap who made a halfhearted grab at Doug's packet of cigarettes right in front of our eyes, presumably hoping that we were distracted by the spectacle of the wretched bloke on the ground - what had happened. He said he had no idea, and proceeded to hover around as Doug called an ambulance and I knelt down to see how the guy was.

Luckily, he was conscious, if a bit groggy, and was trying to sort himself out. He was fairly bloody - it looked like his nose was broken; his lip was swollen and he had various nicks and scrapes but it looked ugly rather than life-threatening. I asked him how he was doing (let's face it: he was doing pretty badly, but I wanted to make sure he was more or less all there) and he mumbled incoherently as he tried to replace a shoe that had come off. It sounded like he was pretty drunk, but I couldn't smell any alcohol on him. On something, maybe?

Doug came over, said that an ambulance was on its way and knelt down to speak to the guy, giving him a cigarette when he asked. The dodgy guy asked for one as well and lit them both, giving one to the now-slightly more coherent victim. We asked him what had happened and again he had no idea. It seemed scarily plausible that he'd said something ill-advised in a drunken stupor to the wrong people; the whole thing had a feeling of utterly casual violence, and the way the two attackers had wandered off as if nothing had happened was astonishing. Here's some guy with a broken nose, blood dripping out of his mouth and barely able to string a sentence together, and the only person to bat an eyelid is some chancer trying to take the opportunity to get a fag out of the situation.

It struck me that the guy on the ground, now sitting up and puffing at his blooded cigarette, was indignant rather than shocked, and this made me think that he'd seen or experienced this sort of thing often enough for it to be utterly unsurprising. The cigarette bloke had the same kind of attitude - a sympathetic "yeah, it's a fucker when this happens" solidarity with him.

The ambulance was supposed to arrive fairly soon. We got promises from both of them to wait around until it turned up and left.

Quite probably we should have stayed around with them; I get the feeling that neither of them was there to meet it, and perhaps if we had stayed they would have been more inclined to wait. I think at the time we both just wanted to put some distance between us and what had happened: certainly I see this kind of thing sufficiently rarely that it freaks me out a little when it does happen, and then I just get depressed that it seems so mundane to everyone involved (Doug not included, obviously).

The whole episode had a slightly inevitable air about it; earlier on we'd been speculating as to why there were so many loud, drunken idiots around Glasgow Cross of a Saturday evening, and to get a brutal reminder of why this is a pretty fundamental problem was not quite as out-of-the-blue as it might have otherwise been.

[Well, that was Saturday. Sunday was reassuringly brutality free, and I'll write something about that later on.]

4-track demos, part II:

we've just posted the first MP3 of the demos we mixed the other day. It's called Dead On, and it's a whole 50% scarier than the rest of the stuff we play. Have a listen!

The juggernaut of Hat Night '05

swung inexorably into action on Friday evening. The usual crew assembled at the old flat and the games began: hats were assigned and Josh concocted (I can't bring myself to say 'made', not when the end result tastes like 100° proof cough medicine) a batch of 'Liquid Gold' to fuel the proceedings.

Ali A wasn't drinking, so we turned him upside down and poured beer on his head to compensate.

Ally G on the other hand was drinking. He needed no help in that respect.

The evening becomes agreeably fuzzy in my recollection after we left the flat. We visited the Barony and the Phoenix, which I don't imagine I'll be visiting again any time soon. It's rare to see the normally poker-faced barman there so much as crack a smile let alone a frown, and hey: I don't remember seeing him do either, but then I also don't really recall Ally dropping the four pints, Jeff and I jovially scuffling in the corner or my solo dance routine beside the jukebox either, so there you go.

Hats were placed on random punters, as per Hat Night procedure.

Later on (once the Phoenix bar staff were really starting to get antsy), an oxymoronically sober Jez shepherded us back to the flat, along with the two young French girls he'd found to take Josh's vacant room (see below) for a few months. Presumably they'd turned up for a quiet get-to-know-you session with their new flatmates. Quite what they made of the drunken carnage they were greeted with is anyone's bet.

(I know, I know: any one part of the phrase young French girls in combination with Jez is enough to give me a thrill of sympathetic fear for them.)

The evening ended, after a lengthy and earnest conversation about the intersection of scuba diving and indie music (clues: Scapa Flow and British Sea Power), with me cycling up the road in a foolish and multiply illegal fashion, and receiving a rebuke from a rather testy policeman for my troubles.

A classic Hat Night, and one that shall be (mostly) remembered.

Next day was my birthday, and I felt categorically awful. I crawled to the living room couch in an attempt to get up after fielding enough "Happy Birthday!" phone calls to feel guilty about still being in bed at 2 pm. Gill put on Swingers in response to my grunted instructions (and surprisingly seemed to like it - I'd always seen it as a guy film in the same way that certain films are 'chick flicks') and by 5 I was able to function normally again.

I walked up to the Golf in Bruntsfield, where Josh had gathered the great and the good of the Mafia for a final drink before he headed back to York. I was good to see everyone in one place; what with job interviews, theses, work, the band and so on it seems like we've all been busy for the last month or so. I hung around long enough to say hello to everyone (and to talk up vests for a while) and headed home for a relatively early night.

I'd hired a car to give Josh a lift home on the Sunday, with the ulterior aim of viewing a few suitably mental hot hatches for the Nürburgring trip while I was down there. I arrived at Enterprise to find out that my booking contained no information about A) what kind of car I wanted (an estate); B) no agreed price (a ludicrously low £51 to match Alamo, negotiated over the phone a week ago) and C) no mention that I wanted a one-way rental.

<sigh>

It was sorted out in the end, and we made the journey in about four hours thanks to some entertaining A-road action. I found out once we arrived that the one car I'd really wanted to view had been sold an hour before we left Edinburgh. A second car turned out to be so old I couldn't get one-day insurance to drive it, so the automotive side of the trip was pretty much dead in the water.

Deprived of any car-related high jinks we ambled around York for a while, eating lunch, dropping off the hire car and finally coming to rest at Bar 38 on the bank of the Ouze about three. We had a few pints to kill time until I had to catch the train, but neither of us was exactly bursting with energy. It was the first 'holiday' I'd had for ages, and I was content to watch the tourist boats and rowers head up and downstream as the sun sank towards the rooftops. We walked to the station for 6 o' clock, I said goodbye to Josh and wandered into the ticket office, feeling a little melancholy.

At least I was feeling melancholy until it turned out I'd prebooked my ticket for Sunday by mistake and had to stump up £60 for a single back to Edinburgh, only to miss the first train back and end up sitting on the next one in a carriage empty apart from the four people singing karaoke for three bastarding hours and the snacks trolley guy hounding me relentlessly to buy a coffee made of platinum or something, given the astronomical cost of the bloody thing.

Hmph. I must be getting old...

4-track demos.

Last night TM convened at the flat to mix down the recordings we made on Saturday. The plan was to transfer each track individually from the 4-track to my laptop, and then to use that to mix them and hence give ourselves a bit more control.

Doug was, of course, a full hour late. How we laughed.

The pizza was also a full hour late. There was considerably less amusement about this. Once the delivery driver had discovered which street the flat was on, I watched him stop halfway up it - outside number 23, a single door down from the flat - and get out, then get back in and sit motionless, apparently waiting for something to happen. Divine inspiration? The small but measurable chance that the pizzas might spontaneously relocate to the flat? (Trust me on this one - it's unlikely to happen before the universe implodes.)

I went down and retrieved the pizzas. "I was going to try coming round another way," he said. "Another way? To travel six feet?" I didn't say.

Perhaps I'm banging on about this a tad much.

[By the way, the stuff that follows is band/mixing geek chat, so consider yourself warned!]

We'd recording 4 tracks: vocals, lead, bass on a track each and then drums and rhythm guitar mixed down to the single remaining track. Not ideal, but probably the best arrangement given that we were limited to 4 tracks.

We transferred each track separately onto my laptop and lined up the starts. All great, except that the timing, which started off perfectly aligned at the start of the song, was out of kilter maybe thirty seconds in. Almost at the same time, we slapped our foreheads and muttered that the tape deck in the 4-track would have been turning at a slightly variable rate each time we rewound and restarted it. So much for our master plan...

Instead, we used the 4-track directly as we've done in the past. Mart's floor effects pedal was used to process the vocal track, adding a bit of reverb, compression and the like (and occasionally, a soupçon of white noise) and after about an hour per song, we had three 'real' mixes and one extra free mix of a tired, hungry but rocking Happy 2/34^th Birthday. With any luck, they'll be up on TM.net over the next few days.

We cracked open a few cans and listened to the mixes. Job done, and no-one fell out of the window.

I went out for a couple of drinks

(My God; how many posts here begin with that phrase?) with a workmate on Tuesday night. We ended up in the Candy Bar. I say "ended up"; it was more that I couldn't be arsed to make a decision as to where to go and so she steered us toward George Street. I'd never been there.

We ordered two (2) drinks. "That's £9.95," the barman said.

I believe that I actually laughed in his face. "Dear Christ," I snorted. "Ten quid?"
"Yes," he said, stony faced.
"Fuck me."

They were tasty beverages, it must be said. But then so was every other pint of beer I've ever had.

The rest of the week was fairly standard issue, revolving around the three main things I'm doing at the moment: rehearsing with TM; learning to comport myself with some reasonable dignity on the dancefloor, and preparations to avoid a glamourous but pointless death on the Nürburgring.

The swing lesson was pretty good this week. The crazed instructor that usually takes the second half of the lesson ("Tonight, we're going to interpret the later works of Cecil B. DeMille through the medium of contemporary Balboa. Don't worry, this is suitable for complete beginners.") was in charge for the whole session and I was pleasantly surprised. Behind the smirking, I'm-a-dancer exterior there lurks a competent teacher. My concentration always collapses about half an hour into the lesson, but even by then we were all a damn sight better than last week.

Friday night was a post-work blowout in the usual style, and I dragged myself out of bed after four hours' sleep to get the train to Glasgow. We'd booked a monstrous 6-hour session at Berkeley 2 with a view to recording a few demos of our own songs.

Davis was, of course, a full hour late. How we laughed.

In the end we got three or four reasonable takes of each of the three tracks we wanted. This is maybe a little disappointing given how much time we had, but the inclination during a 6-hour session is rather perversely to overestimate how much time there is to get stuff done. More discipline next time. And less farting about.

With a bit of luck, the final tracks will appear on TM.net sometime later this week, and the "Recent News" page will once again be semantically valid.

J&J turned up with a six-pack on Saturday night for some engagingly un-PC chat. We wandered along Rose Street for some light drinking, and the libellous character assassination that passes for conversation after a few beers. Excellent stuff.

Sunday was taken up entirely in virtual fishtailing around the Nürburgring. Jez wants to buy a Fiat Coupé Turbo for the trip. He's fucking insane.

Joy of vests:

vests are great. As I approach 28, I find myself unaccountably interested in wearing them. Fortunately, Jez led a small expedition to the wanky bars of the west end on Friday night, and I proudly lowered the tone by attempting to rock the Swingers look in the vastly unsuitable surroundings of Halo and Indigo Yard.

I loved it. Every one else could not have cared less.

Vegas rolled around again on Saturday, this time as a joint birthday outing for Michelle and Ben. Josh and I had a little surprise up our sleeves: we managed to get hold of a couple of surplus RAF dress uniforms and we engineered a slightly later arrival at the Outhouse for pre-club drinks. Despite Devon's awed dismay ("My God! Those are perfectly ghastly" - I don't think I've ever seen anyone become Victorian with shock before) the uniforms rocked. Captain Ben's posh epaulettes and Hitler moustache paled into insignificance beside our authoritarian genius. (Despite being a bit of a lily-livered lefty at heart, I find it hard not to stand upright and have generally better posture when I'm wearing a suit, kilt or uniform. Fire away, psychoanalysts.)

We basked in the warmth of the heaters* in the beer garden, sipping unpronouncable beers while we waited for the club to open. During a lull in the conversation, a distinct clunk noise came from the bar. We looked up to see a damp, sheepish-looking Gordon carrying two depleted pints, and a plate glass door with beer dripping down the inside.

Vegas was busier than normal, and despite doing my best to trot out a few swing moves with Samina, we didn't really get into the swing (arf arf) of things because of the sheer number of people there. Our Vegas money went ungambled and most of my real money went unspent, so hard was it to get to the roulette table and the bar. Still, I was maneouvred skilfully about the dancefloor by Michelle, who always contrives to make cretins such as myself looked far more accomplished than we actually are.

And my word, the uniforms went down a treat.

I caved at about 2 am; great as the uniforms were, seems they were designed more for hanging around cold airfields, waiting to scramble or something, and I was suffering fairly badly from heat exhaustion. I joined a few other scabs and we cooled off on the walk home.

A good Vegas, if not quite as jaw-droppingly great as last time.

On Sunday I had lunch with Dave, Michelle, Ben et al and wandered down to the old flat to pick up the stuff I'd left there the night before.

Jez and I are hatching a plan for another road trip next year, but this time there's a point to it, rather than the because-it's-there reasoning behind the US trip. This point is to enjoy a stately drive to the Nürburgring, enjoy a rather less leisurely drive around it a few times, and not die. To this end I'm trying to find a suitably lunatic little car (205 GTI, Mk1 MR2 or the like) on Autotrader, and Jez has bought GT4 so that we can practice the track on the PS2.**

I tried a couple of laps on Sunday afternoon, and I was afraid for my life. I died three times and wrote the car off a further three. This is possibly the most hare-brained holiday idea I've ever helped conceive.

* Ah, heating up the entire atmosphere. We might not do SUVs as well/badly as the Americans, but we have our own uniquely British approach to self-inflicted environmental disaster.
** Now there's a sentence with rather too many TLAs.

Busy weekend:

I was invited to been invited to Andy B's wedding reception on Saturday evening, so I was looking forward to a leisurely day of farting around the flat and playing Killer7 before girding my loins for an evening of sober fun. (Because of the 10k, of course.)

Two unexpected things happened.

Firstly (and happily!), I was invited to the full wedding and so instead of wasting the day trying to get my head round a computer game written by lunatics, I spent an hour trying to find and buy a shirt that would make my spiv-like suit a bit more respectable.

Second, I managed to stick to my minimal boozing rule of the past week, and still enjoyed myself immensely. In a particularly amusing moment, while Michelle was trying to teach me how to jive on an empty dancefloor, it became apparent that I've passed into the realm of the embarrassing person at weddings. I'm the person you laughed at when you were dragged screaming to family weddings at the age of fifteen.

I woke up feeling terribly healthy and pleased with myself and got to the bus stop really, really early. As did a very chipper Dom, who torpedoed my beaming smugness by getting healthily plastered the night before, and yet turning up without a trace of a hangover.

We ended up at the start a full half hour before the race, and went for a wander along the route to make sure we were at the right place. On the way back we stumbled across Saughton Winter Gardens, a miniature Botanics-style Victorian throwback bordered by a football field for day-release criminals and Dalry Road. If I were to trot out a helpful cliché, I'd call it a hidden gem.

The 10k went reasonably well; I kept pace with Pat (the organiser, and a fearsomely dedicated runner but with a nagging back injury) and managed to finish a couple of seconds ahead of him at roughly 47:30. Not bad, compared to last year's time; fairly good considering I answered a phone call from my Dad at the start of the final kilometre, and even more surprising when I consider how many training runs were abandoned in lieu of a trip to the pub.

That evening we met up with Veronika, over from Brussels for a flying visit. We ate, drank, pontificated and went our separate ways. Rather a good weekend, I think, but I'm too shattered to really do it justice here...!

Vegas is taking over my life:

first a great swing lesson last night, and now the official Vegas photos of our triumphant romp to "Best Dressed" fame. Brings a tear of joy to my jaded eye.

Road trip redux:

Here are the posts I made during our US road trip, sorted in terms of the dates they describe rather than when they were posted.

• Glasgow, UK; Charlotte, NC; SC; Greenville, GA: June 9^th - 11^th
  
• Greenville, GA; Decatur, Mobile AL: June 11^th - 12^th
  
• Mobile, AL; Pass Christian, MS; New Orleans, LA: June 12^th - 13^th
  
• New Orleans, LA: June 14^th
  
• Houston, San Antonio, TX: June 15^th - 16^th
  
• Roswell, NM: June 17^th
  
• Santa Fe, Albuqurque, NM: June 18^th - 19^th
  
• Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, AZ: June 20^th - June 21^st
  
• Hoover Dam, (Downtown) Las Vegas, NV: June 22^nd
  
• Las Vegas, NV: June 22^nd
  
• Las Vegas, NV: June 23^rd
  
• Barstow, Santa Barbara, CA: June 24^th - 25^th
  
• Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, CA: June 25^th - 26^th
  

And here are Josh's and Dave's own accounts and pictures:

• Josh's blog and pictures
  
• Dave's blog and pictures
  
• and lastly, some more of Dave's pictures hosted on my Flickr account
  

I won't mention it again. Honest.

The weekend: a misadventure.

So, we have a TM practice (we're steadily approaching a gig-worthy state, I think) as usual on Saturday afternoon, and then we retire to the 13^th Note for some tasty vegetarian food. We are joined by the Captain for some entertaining and edifying chat, and consume a few rounds of wanky lager, as is our wont.

Suddenly, I'm plastered. It is unclear in my mind as to when this happened. (I sincerely hope that I didn't piss off any 13^th Note staff!) Some time later, Doug, Davis and I are back in Doug's flat, drinking some very ill-advised vodka+oranges. A little later than that, I am forced to enjoy the use of Doug's barfroom.

Ye Gods. I am woken by the noonday sun, with a hangover the size of a planet. I can hear Doug occasionally moan in the other room. I absolutely have to get up so I can get back to Edinburgh to meet Rachel, so I do, around 4 pm. Doug continues to moan, and in fact does so for the next 24 hours.

On the train I recover sufficently to start using the past tense.

I finally got back just in time to meet Rachel at the train station, and we caught up over the course of a thoroughly civilised evening, encompassing some more rather good veggie food (at Bann's, and which thankfully stayed down this time), very little booze and an abundance of chat. Very grown-up, and very enjoyable.

Feels like an eternity

since the start of this week - I made notes of what I did each night and I can barely remember anything before the weekend. Slightly worrying!

Dom and I took the bus out to Murrayfield on Monday night after work, and ran the route of next weekend's 10k. I was a few minutes slower than last year, and given that my training this year has consisted mostly of going to the pub, I don't expect I'll be much faster on the day. Dom, on the other hand, had never run the full 10k distance before, and I was mightily impressed with his time.

Tuesday was Dom's birthday, so Dave, Michelle and I met up with him and his cronies for a rather nice meal in Maison Bleue. I politely declined to come to Medina afterwards; I was still dog tired from the previous weekend's shenanigans and then the run, so I begged off and collapsed into bed at 1 or so. An early night by the standards of the preceding week...

On Wednesday, Jen and I went out for a few drinks for the first time in ages. It was a good night - suffice it to say that I found myself in Dario's on Lothian Road at 1 am, eating dinner for the second time that night with a litre of wine on the table between me and a clearly plastered lady. Good times.

On Thursday (I remember thinking at this point: "Christ, when will it all end?") the flatmates plus Michelle and Samina went along to a beginners' swing dance lesson. I haven't done anything like this for about fifteen years (ceilidh dancing at school, I think. Good god, the cringing I did then...), and to put it bluntly, I was bricking it.

Fortunately A) it was easy and B) we rocked. Mostly. There were actually two lessons: the first was the lindyhop, and the teachers were mercifully gentle with us. I think I'd expected something far more upbeat, but this suited me down to the ground and we all managed relatively well. It remains to be seen just how swinging we'll be for the next Vegas though - Michelle has promised to teach me how to jive as well, so that may see more use there if we get round to it.

The second lesson was a 'stroll', an unpartnered dance that reminded me of line-dancing. And not in a particularly good way. The teacher this time had a slightly evangelical, manic glint in his eye and a style of instructing owing more to dancing skill than enthusiasm for teaching.

Still, I struggled through and I'm actually rather looking forward to next week's class. Mad.

Friday: there is no Friday. I made a conscious decision to stay in and slob out. I watched Sunset Boulevard (hmm. The Third Man felt more modern, despite being shot the year before, and Sunset Boulevard just didn't quite gel for me), read and slept.

[More on the weekend later.]

I'm in the middle

of a twelve day bonanza/marathon of stuff. My diary, usually an exemplar of lunar desolation, is a bubbling font of excitement, liver damage and financial ruin. This was the week that was:

Wednesday: Martin and I met up in the Basement for some old-school pre-practice beer and food, and we toddled merrily along to the practice without the hollow eyes and fatigued limbs that usually accompany a midweek rehearsal. It went well: our unashamed (and shaky) impersonations of '70s Zep and '90s Weezer have produced a couple of promising song ideas. An acoustic gig in Glasgow may be in the offing, so the first taste of new Monkey goodness could well be of the unplugged variety. Stay tuned for details.

Thursday: our long-serving, long-suffering French teacher Celine is moving down south to do a teaching course, so I remortgaged the house and met up with her, Ben and their crew in Centraal to say au revoir. It turned out that a friend of Celine's used to teach French to Doug years ago, before I'd even met him...Scotland is a marvellously parochial place, and Centraal is a marvellously expensive bar.

Friday: Ruth's Oz trip is coming up fast, and she and Katie organised a dinner party round at their flat. It was a great evening. I know this because my phone contained, as is becoming usual, a series of slavering notes detailing the night, increasing in incomprehensibility as the wine flowed. I ranted and gibbered about going dancing and convinced/browbeat one of Ruth's friends into coming along this week. I may have passed the point of graceful backing out. This dancing thing has assumed a life of its own.

I left once it became obvious that I couldn't talk without instead dribbling insensibly.

Saturday: I woke up with a pounding, rolling hangover. I watched The Third Man semi-conscious and prone on the couch until 2 pm and stumbled my way to readiness for the afternoon's karting.

The karting was, of course, excellent fun. Despite a few dodgy pre-race moments, sitting in the kart and having my delicate innards agitated by the humming engines (the idea of barfing in a closed full-face helmet really doesn't bear thinking about), I was fine as soon as each race started. I felt sufficiently better to repeatedly barge Ben off the track and to claim 5^th in the final - not bad out of a field of 16, I thought.

The whole day was notionally Andy B's stag do (I say 'notionally' only because he contrived to avoid being stripped naked and chained to a lamppost+inflatable sex doll by virtue of organising everything himself) and we retired to Britannia Spice, still reeking of oil and flushed with the violent enthusiasm of pretend motor racing.

The evening stretched out into a classic food / pub / polite conversation with bouncer designed to ease our passage into Pivo* / whistle theme from The Third Man at Dom until he breaks down / shots / invade our counterpart hen night party and walk home half-asleep at 4.30 am.

Sunday:Tired as a dog, I took the train to Glasgow for a TM rehearsal. The practice was unremarkable but fairly productive, taken up mostly with getting Davis up to speed. The only notable thing about the trip was the Orange marching band I had to weave through on the way in - in my old age, I'm becoming a militant agnostic. I'm just as inflexible as the people I want to shout at.

I rushed home to meet up with my friend Rachel, an old coffee shop colleague from a good five years ago now, leaving messages for her every half an hour ("I'm on the train! When are you arriving?"; "I'm back at the flat! Where shall we meet?"; "I've just eaten - have you eaten?") only to receive a bemused message about 8.30 saying it's next Sunday.

I went to the fireworks instead with the the mafia and called it a reasonably early night. Only another six days to go...

* Bouncer: "So how many people do you think the Berlin Bierhaus holds?"
RF: "Christ, I dunno. Two hundred?"
B: holds up 4 fingers
RF, feigning amazement: "Really? Four hundred? No way. What about Espionage?"
And so on.

It's slightly unreal

to look at stories like this and to think that we passed through half of the places on the map just a couple of months ago. We avoided tropical storm Arlene (downgraded from hurricane just before we arrived) by the skin of our teeth and swam in the Gulf of Mexico at Pass Christian, just beside Gulfport, when the weather had cleared up. It was one of the nicest places we visited and it's saddening to think it's just been hit by another, much worse, storm.

Thursday night

cast a long, long shadow over the weekend. Friday...I just don't want to talk about Friday. Suffice it to say that working until 9pm while feeling that bad is an experience that I don't intend to repeat in a hurry. Or, with luck, ever.

Saturday was another rehearse-and-mix-recordings affair, followed by a cretin-free train home and a mercifully quiet evening with some of the usual suspects in Mather's.

I got up reasonably early on Sunday to go home for a family lunch; Ruth's going to Oz fairly soon, so this was a last toute la famille occasion. Our cousin Kerr, his wife Marie (French) and their two kids (two and four, and effectively bilingual) came along and I felt a little guilty rushing away to make the Pixies concert that evening.

The spare ticket that I'd assumed would practically give itself away turned into a bit of an albatross, necessitating call after call to just about anyone I'd ever accused of being a Pixies/Idlewild/Teenage Fanclub fan, but eventually, as I got off the train in Edinburgh, I'd arranged to meet up with Ally before heading to Meadowbank. I steered McCloy and some of her friends from Glasgow (Dochan of Soul Candy - "Ha! We stole your drummer" - and Sophie the murderous pixie) to the Café Royal to rendezvous with Ally and off we went.

We arrived in time for Teenage Fanclub (my support band jinx is finally overcome) and we found a reasonably central spot to listen from. As ever - I've seen them three or four times now in different supporting slots - the sound wasn't great. The songs, and the sheer feeling behind them, were excellent, but they were finished too soon and the indistinct bass didn't help matters.

Idlewild, it turns out, are a very good live band. Having seen them just once before playing mainly acoustic stuff, I had no idea what they'd be like with a full electric set, but they were just as good this time. I thought they were fairly brave in doing some of the more punky songs from Captain and Hope Is Important, but they knew exactly what they were doing, and even Roddy's floppy art-student angst didn't dull the impact. Excellent stuff.

Finally, just as the light was dimming, the Pixies came on. The Pixies. I honestly thought I'd never see them play. I came late to the whole Pixies thing and I occasionally kick myself for it; I came across them going backwards from Nirvana to Teenage Fanclub and then to the Pixies, via an ex-girlfriend who'd actually been paying attention at the time that they came along.

The Pixies were not there to fuck spiders. They walked on stage, picked up their gear and kicked off. I don't have much to say about the set other than bloody hell; what a band. It was incredible to see them play. They finished on Vamos and the crowd made a shitload of noise until they came back for an encore. What on earth have they got left to play? I thought. They played Gigantic, and it was good.

P.S: Two pointless observations:

1. All of the bassists played P-basses. This pleased me greatly.
   
2. Teenage Fanclub and Frank Black on one stage? I hoped, but it didn't happen.
   

Christ almighty:

what a trial.

It was Jez's birthday yesterday, so I wandered down to the Star Bar to meet up with him and a few of the usual suspects for a quiet few pre-weekend birthday drinks.

Fast forward to 1 am. Jez, despite being only barely able to stand, is dancing on the uplit dancefloor of a bizarre little subterranean club called Garibaldi's. His (married) mate Bertie, immortalised in one of a series of increasingly unhinged notes I found on my phone today as "bertie rocks", is jocularly attempting to insinute himself into a group of dressed-up girls on a night out, dancing in inimitable rugby player style. I'm mostly trying to avoid sliding off the table I'm sitting on.

Jez and Bertie contrive to disappear from under my nose. I sit down at a table of people who have no idea who I am, and chuckle inanely to myself as I send a text message to Jez, which I later find out contains the exclamation "holy god!", presumably in reference to my stunned awe at the speed of the evening's descent.

I go home and fall into a very, very deep sleep.

I'm woken up at 11:30 am by my phone ringing. I feel like death. "So, are you coming to work today?"
"Work? You mean it's not Saturday?"

A bit of failed holiday negotiation later and it transpires that our esteemed clients have a last-minute request that only I can deal with. I stand in the shower for nigh on half an hour, buoyed up on the fumes of the alcohol I'm sweating and get a bus in. The festival traffic is terrible, and the bus sits idling for most of the journey. The problem is that the engine's idle speed matches exactly the resonant frequency of the bus, and I'm mercilessly vibrated all the way here, which is where I still am at 8:15 on a Friday night.

Arse.

Festival fatigue?

The festival's always a bit trying if you live in Edinburgh, but living slap bang in the middle of post-midnight buskers playing either bagpipes* or the same three Oasis songs over and over again is starting to irritate me ever so slightly. So apologies in advance if this entry is a bit on the misanthropic side.

Thinking back to the week, I can't actually remember anything noteworthy happening other than going for a decent run (10k, including Arthur's Seat) with Jez. I must have done something else, but it's just not coming back. Your guess is as good as mine. (In fact, my own guess, involving plinking away on the bass and procrastinating about going for another run, is probably close enough to the truth. Add your own ideas below - perhaps something will jog my memory.)

On Friday night a few of us went out for some festival boozing, traipsing from over-stuffed bar to over-stuffed bar and marvelling at the sheer, awesome ineptitude of some of the bar staff. Make no mistake; a heroic few were pumping out booze like it was Iraqi oil, but we seemed to get only the preening, quiffed clothes horses who were happier shining cocktail shakers than deigning to serve us. We wound up in Teviot, the only place not packed to the rafters, and admitted defeat at 3.30 am after roughly one beer per mile travelled. Most unsatisfactory.

A jaunt through to Glasgow for a TM practice filled most of Saturday. We recorded some demos on Doug's new 4-track, and despite a generally plodding session, they're pretty promising. We packed up at 6 pm and set up the 4-track in Doug's flat, spending a wanky but pleasing few hours tweaking equalisation and volume while eating burgers from the incomparable Wishbone café. Such was Saturday, apart from a gruelling train journey home where the carriage was populated half with moronic Rangers supporters (and part-time UVF members by the sickening sound of their idiot singing) and half with sane, normal people willing them to fuck off.

On Sunday I went for a run, had a shower and then sweated copiously for about an hour an a half. Just didn't stop. If I hadn't felt absolutely fine, I would have sworn I was ill. Trying on a pair of sunglasses in a Rose Street shop, I could see the shop assistant looking out of the corner of her eye, thinking "Who is this perspiring cretin? When will he leave my poor shop and cease sweating all over the merchandise?"

I didn't buy the sunglasses, and instead went home until I could move without dripping.

Dave, two of his Kilmarnock mates and I went to see Rob Newman that night. Thought-provoking show: political polemic crossed with The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Good stuff.

[Got to be off now - we have a potential new flatmate coming round. Apologies for the rushed entry. Not often you hear that, eh?]

* Oscar Wilde once defined a gentleman as "someone who knows how to play the bagpipes but doesn't." RF 1, guy playing pipes outside our window at 1am, nil.

Vegas rocks two times:

my word, the photos just keep coming. Courtesy of DaveM.

Vegas rocks

over at jjcasswell.com. Damn, we're smooth.

After a truly uninspiring week

consisting mostly of cooking, running and avoiding the pub, the weekend arrived and decided to make its presence throroughly felt. On Friday, Dave, Michelle and I met up with a worse-for-wear Jeff and assorted Mafia types in Hector's (we're becoming terribly gauche in our old age) for a speculative few pints. Vague plans to go to the Pleasance and then the Spiegeltent instead took the hard core of Josh, Jez (J&J from now on), Neil/Doddsy, Michelle and I to Teviot, where Jez smoked a hookah.

A hookah. You filthy people.

A fire alarm went off while I was at the bar - caused by the cherry fug reeking from the hookah lounge, maybe? - and we evacuated to Medina. As you may have guessed, this was the beginning of the end and a few tequilas and some truly awful dancing from yours truly later, we went home.

Saturday arrived, and it was not welcome. I crawled out of bed around 2pm to say hello to Gill's friends Heidi and Kate, up visiting from the big smoke, and after scraping the alcoholic sweat off myself in the shower, headed out into the blinding sunshine* to obtain the last few components of the evening's costume. The combined J&J Airlines birthday flight to Vegas had been chiselled into my calendar for weeks, and all I needed to get was some gold braid and a pair of aviator specs.

This was the easy part. The hard part was doing the actual sewing. Gill had three stripes sewn onto the right arm of my suit in about fifteen minutes flat. I believe she may even have done her nails and styled her hair at the same time.

I visibly aged while doing the left arm. Empires rose and fell in the time it took me to get the bastard things on. Still, I couldn't help but feel a warm glow of achievement as I compared the wonky, unevenly spaced braid I'd done to the arrow-straight bands on the right arm. Job's a good 'un.

We were suited, booted and capped by 9pm and walked up to the Wash to meet the rest of the crew. I already had a permanent smirk on my face - even the neds were saluting us in the street ("That's pure brilliant by the way mate! What are ye? A captain or that?") - and when we got to the pub, with a fucking throng of pilots and air hostesses**, I was experiencing full-on glee.

We walked round the corner to Vegas (in the sweaty Liquid Room as opposed to the camp splendour of Ego, but possibly the better for it) and settled in for the night. We danced the night away with our lovely trolley dollies. I won at roulette (ironic, given that we entirely failed to do so in the real Vegas) choosing the numbers 25-29 instead of namby-pambying around with evens or odds. A slinky young lady purred "Hello, Captain!" to me - at least as much as it's possible to purr when one's entire body is vibrating to Frank Sinatra - to which I replied "Ah. Uh, hello," gawped a little, and made excuse-me-I-dance-like-a-fool noises.

You can't win 'em all.

Or...can you?

About 2am, collapsed in a seat, mopping my brow and having danced myself sober(er), one of the Vegas showgirls appeared and dragged about six of us on stage - three pilots and three stewardesses. Incredibly, we were taking part in the 'best dressed' competition. We blinked in the limelight as two other groups of suave clubbers were introduced to moderate crowd approval, and when our turn came, the towering figure of Josh stood out from our mob on the dancefloor with both arms raised, and the crowd went wild.

We won. As far as I can tell, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. It's all downhill from here on in.

We popped our champagne, drank, and celebrated. Best Vegas ever.

* * *

On Sunday night, after a leisurely TM practice in Glasgow, I got back to Edinburgh just in time to join Dave and Kate at the Pleasance for Pam Ann, carrying on the airline theme.

We really, really should have worn our Vegas outfits. Or maybe we shouldn't, given that she mercilessly ripped the poor easyJet contingent in attendance to shreds. It was a good show: massively politically incorrect, caustic and well delivered.

Weekend of 13^th August, I salute you. And Happy Birthday to J&J Airlines!

* In retrospect, it was probably more that my eyes hurt rather than the sunlight being all that bright. Which is a little worrying.
** Devon and Tamsin were fantastic in helping us get kitted out; Gill, Heidi and Kate sorted Dave and I out with our pilot's stripes, and Josh produced cap badges, flying licences and wings for us all - it wouldn't have been the same without you doing all the hard work, guys. Thank you all very much!

Two years to the day

of inward-looking diarism strained through a "wanky filter" (© JJC). Forward the RF!

Abandon all hope/money/sobriety, all ye who enter here.

I don't know whether it's the summer, the festival or the novelty of living above a brothel, but I feel like I haven't stopped going out for bloody ages. And this isn't blowing my own trumpet. More of a cry for help. Or a night off.

On Thursday Cedric, a friend of Vanessa's (he used to go out to a bar she worked at in Brussels - tenuous connection #1), invited Jeff and I down to his swanky Stockbridge flat for a meal. We had a swift pint in Hector's beforehand and I have to admit, it's a little weird to have to organise to go for a drink with Jeff or Josh; for absolutely ages, we've lived in the same flat/cave and having to organise this kind of thing, as opposed to just shouting "Anyone fancy a pint?" is a little odd.

Anyway, the meal was rather good. A load of Cedric's workmates were there, plus a couple of people from our housewarming.

"So how do you guys know Cedric?"
"From your party. Don't you remember?
"Um."

Tenuous connection #2.

On Friday Dave and I had a couple (Christ; more like a skinful) with Andy, Barbara and assorted Bouteloup friends and family to say goodbye before they head off on their pan-African travels. We had the sense to eat before going out but not the sense to call it a night early enough, and I was suffering for my art the next day as I hauled myself onto the train to Glasgow. Fortunately, the practice went pretty smoothly, if I do say so myself.

Mart was noodling away on his guitar at one point, and I played along for a while until I got the hang of what he was doing. Doug came in with a gentle drumbeat and we gradually built up to a fairly rocking, surprisingly improvised tune that lasted for seven or eight minutes. Questions as to whether a seven minute prog rock epic belong in a TM set aside, I think it's the first time we've actually played something that really did sound like Mogwai.

After meeting up with (and subsequently losing to common sense) Davis and the Captain, and after finally eating something far too late to salvage any degree of decorum, Doug and I took a taxi to the west end to meet up with Dave and Claire, a couple of friends of Kate's who Doug has apparently been keeping in touch with since a certain party almost two years ago.

Tenuous connection #3. It was one of those kind of weeks...

Thursday

(as is becoming traditional) was flat booze destruction day. We went for a curry at Tipoo Sahib just round the corner. I say "Tipoo Sahib" while in actual fact I mean "the 1970s". Incredible place - a '70s time capsule Indian restaurant in a basement, serving a wide variety of blandly identical curries. I recommend - nay, I urge you never to go there. After we were stiffed for our change by our smiling, attentive, mostly deaf waiter, we got out and walked across the road to the Kenilworth. I think that this might become our local; they were kind enough to donate a pint of milk to us just after we moved in and now we must repay them by drinking their beer.

Our housewarming, long planned and anticipated (apart from by the legion of people who begged off because they were in other countries), arrived on Saturday night. The theme - just wear black and/or white - was, I think, an unqualified success. It appealed to the Vegas set, who like to dress up in evening wear as if we're rich and important; to quasi-, ex-, current and repressed goths, who view any invitation to wear black as a blessed relief from being needled for wearing it the whole time anyway; and to the random guy who was likened to a cross between Robert Smith and Edward Scissorhands. Especially to him.

The flat was packed, and it rocked. Tiny Monkey's rhythm section also rocked: you haven't witnessed the awesome power of the Monkey till you've seen a paralytic bassist 'play' along with Doug drumming on the end of an upturned whisky tin. (I might add that someone asked me to play, so it wasn't entirely a self-preening ego trip. Maybe 50/50.)

The next morning's tidy seems to have gone well. The morning did not go so well for me.

Once I was able to walk without fear of a spontaneous stripey laugh, I had a shower. Now it's probably because I haven't shared a flat with any girls for a good few years, but I was alarmed at the number of pink disposable razors gathered along the ledges of the shower basin. I was doing a virtual sword dance in a slippery shower cubicle while almost unable to see.

Fortunately, I still have all eleven ten toes.

P.S: Steve has just posted a nice photo of the Capp on the way back from a camping trip a couple of years ago. Ah, those were the days. Roof down; wind in your hair and money siphoning from the bank account like there's no tomorrow.

Painballing:

Dave and I caught the bus out to Dalmahoy after work on Tuesday. This was because Zoë told us, and I quote:

Stuart has kindly offered to give me a lift to Dalmahoy and he can take me and one other of us back into town.

The bus sailed (well, drove) straight past the 'Skirmish Scotland' banners and stopped two miles past it. At Dalmahoy. We got out. We ran back down the road, sweating and swearing.

Dave, Josh, Zoë and I were on the red team, and our guns had red paintball hoppers. Once we'd been issued with our camouflage romper suits and goggles, the fun began and we dived into bushes, firing at random into the greenery and shouting "Charlie! In the trees!"

About five minutes into each game, the goggles would be completely misted up with sweat and exhaled breath. Kind of like a deeply unpleasant miniature sauna for your face. Eventually it became an almost existential experience: is that disembodied green blob a green team paintball hopper? Shall I shoot it? (Invariably yes: <pock pock pock> "Ouch ouch ouch! Stop!") Where am I? Who am I? Does it really matter?

And then splat! A paintball or five would explode against your thigh or head and drag you back to the horror of paint-war.

There was a barbeque after it. Sweet.

Two things that made me laugh in the last half hour:

• Devon's account of insectile food hilarity. I'm not laughing at you, Brenna. I'm laughing with you. Honest.
  
• From the Observer, erudite writer meets GTA: San Andreas:

  'Go play your piano, bitch!' I shouted (I wasn't angry: I had to yell to make myself heard), glancing up just long enough for her to catch the look of tranced concentration on my face as Carl waded into a bunch of Latinos. This wasn't a game, this was true interactive entertainment.

In lieu of, you know, a decent post this morning.

I'm chopping away,

marvelling that roasting, as I've recently discovered, is the best way to cook just about everything. I pick up some random vegetable and stick the (8", ninja-sharp) knife into it. Except it's not a vegetable, it's my finger.

Stupid knife.

So now this weekend's TM practice is out because I can't play without shrieking like a girl as the cut opens up again. I am deeply unhappy about this. Our practice session on Wednesday had been great: we'd managed to inject a bit more feeling into the songs (most of which we've written ourselves, and all of which still sounds great to our ears at least); the distinction between quiet and loud bits was getting much better defined, and most importantly, I'd learned to pogo up and down while still playing passably well.

All in all, an excellent session, making it doubly annoying when inadvertent self-harm buggers up the next one.

The weekend was then nice, in a quiet kind of way. Josh, Dave, Gill and I purged the flat of alcohol on Friday night, as is becoming worryingly traditional, and then went to the entertaining (well, tequila always is, isn't it?) Berlin Bierhaus* to round the night off with a gawk at the fashionistas/neds grinding away to terrible dance music.

I met up with the family on Saturday for a meal at Howie's, and very nice it was too. On Sunday I did absolutely bugger all, apart from haul myself round the Meadows a couple of times to start preparing for this year's 10k. Still no dodgeball in sight, although I am going paintballing on Tuesday. Yay for pain(t)!

P.S: Tobias is on Gizmodo. Nice!

* Ha! "Unexpected level of sophistication" my ass.

Dave's gran

was shown a picture of Josh and I in the US. "This is San Antonio," was the explanation.

"That's nice," she replied, "Which one's San and which one's Tonio?"

Josh was Tonio. Clearly has some Mexican in him.

My weekend appears to be migrating. Possibly it's still jetlagged. The first weekend after we got back was terribly staid and traditional: an enthusiastic Saturday and then a flat-bound, liquor-soaked 'game' of Trivial Pursuit on Sunday. The weekend before last was dangerously bohemian, involving both Friday and Saturday nights on the lash. This weekend completely took leave of its senses and upped sticks to Wednesday and Thursday, leaving me gasping for breath, booze and motivation come the real weekend.

Fortunately a TM practice in the positively luxurious Berkeley 2 rehearsal studios was booked to arrest the slide. We rocked in a three-piece way, with only an absence of dynamic range haunting us because of our depleted guitar section. Mart's voice is getting stronger as well, and with a bit of luck we'll be back on stage sometime soon. Ish.

We discussed new band names (music to some ears, I'll bet, even if our actual music occasionally isn't) and how to acquire an elfin, indie female lead guitarist (solution: we can't. Also, I say 'we' when I mean in fact 'me') over tapas and beer, and then I caught the train home.

[Apologies for a pointless post: the week was utterly run-of-the-mill. The only potentially interesting event - a game of dodgeball, no less - fell through and led to a yawning Sunday of apathy. Ah well.]