Aside from the karting,

last week was an enthusiastic but not unwelcome partying merry-go-round. Wednesday was a few random drinks in the pub; Thursday was a Tiny Monkey summit (not quite the 'musical differences' Josh suggested, but important stuff nonetheless); Friday was a joint birthday bash for Carolyn, Neil and one of Carolyn's workmates and Saturday, finally, was Michelle's cheese and wine party.

At last! A house party unmarred by blood, piss and tears. (It was brought to my attention that last week's entry about the interesting party round at Dom's missed out the blood and piss parts. I must have blocked them from my memory. Anyway, there was piss - lots of it; blood - somewhat less, and an open flies situation that just made it all that bit more distasteful.)

The party was excellent. I took some camembert, having failed to get my hands on any roquefort, and some special wine I like to call 'beer'. The chat was fantastic; Josh and Gill busted some smooth moves for the benefit of the non-tangoing plebs and we walked home into the gathering dawn. Top show.

Go! Karting!

Went karting on Saturday. Dave had booked an outdoor session at Raceland for sixteen of us, and despite a couple of last minute drop outs and replacements, it all went terribly smoothly and we lined up on the grid about 4 pm.

The outdoor karts are twin engined beasts, harnessing the awesome power of two lawnmower engines. They can apparently do 70 mph, and after a few practice laps, I was getting the hang of it; most of the lap is flat out, with a few hairpins to weed out the men/maniacs from the boys/those with a sense of self-preservation.

In the first heat, I was starting from the front of the grid alongside Dave. The kart had crawled out of the pit lane and I was franctically waving at the marshal using the internationally accepted gesture for "Help! I think the centrifugal clutch is shagged and my kart is behaving like an asthmatic 2CV."

Helpfully he ignored me, and the race started. I lumbered forward as the rest of the field thundered past, waving my hands in exaggerated "Oh, I give up" irritation, to yet more studied ignorance of my plight.

Getting out of the kart at the end of the slo-mo 'race', I asked a marshal to look at it. "Ah," he said. "You were driving on one engine."

Ah indeed. After a quick word with the race manager it turned out I'd actually managed to come 12^th and not last, with a fastest lap of 1.17. "One seventeen? On one engine? No way!" he said, and I was slightly mollified.

The next two heats had me starting half way down the grid and then right at the back, and I finished 3^rd in both. I had an excellent scrap with Andy B in both of them; we swapped places for a good few laps each time, pushing each other to make mistakes and driving three abreast with back markers at points.

The final was great fun as well: I started 6^th and finished 4^th, seven tenths of a second off third. So close!

Now I have only the fond memories of it all, and symmetrical bruises on my left and right hip where they constantly banged off the plastic bucket seat. Good times!

Oh, and I almost forgot.

Dave has pretty much sealed a job in Portsmouth after his previous employers went bust. Tiny Monkey, it is 99 100% certain, are now without a vocalist and lyricist.

Shit.

J---- X.

On Saturday evening, we had a very pleasant meal at the flat, cooked by Neil, Jeff and Devon. (I really, really must return the favour at some point.) Dom was having a party that night, so after stuffing ourselves with food, Josh and I hauled ourselves round to the Outhouse to meet up with Tobias before wandering down to Abbeyhill.

We were at the party for a while when suddenly an ex-workmate (the lucky-to-be-alive one) appeared. "Hey, <censored>! Long time no see. I thought you were camping this weekend."

"Nope; it looked like it might possibly rain. Maybe. So we stayed here instead."

<censored> was certainly plenty happy with the beer, but we blethered amiably for a bit. I mingled for a bit, then Jen, one of the aforementioned new acquaintances from Friday night's drunken parent action, turned up with Jim, a friend of hers, and I said hello and chatted to them for a bit.

<censored> appeared again, clearly now the worse for wear, although still good naturedly pissed. "Blah de blah!" he said. "Yadda yadda wibble," and then slapped me a couple of times in what I assume was plastered affection. And then, rather bizarrely, tried to grab Jen's stomach. Just sort of clutched clumsily at her midriff with rather excessive vehemence, still grinning happily to himself.

Needless to say, she wasn't best pleased and stormed off downstairs to join Jim outside, having a cigarette. I headed after her to apologise for <censored>'s odd behaviour. As we waited for Jim to finish his cig, <censored>'s girlfriend, face red from crying, burst out of the stair door, and proceeded to weep inconsolably.

Followed a couple of minutes later by a louder commotion, which turned out to be Josh and four other male partygoers lugging the near-comatose <censored> down the stairs. I gaped, Jen tried to comfort his girlfriend, and Jim said something like "Bloody hell."

"Take his arm," Josh said. "Otherwise he'll try to punch someone."

I took his arm, and a tag team of coffin bearers carried the half-belligerent, half-limp <censored> round the corner to his flat. It was like trying to take Father Jack home at the end of the night.

After a brief discussion at the bottom of his stair, with <censored> flopping about like an angry beached fish on the ground, we dragged him upstairs to his flat. His girlfriend protested: "Leave him on the ground!" Us: "He'll choke on his tongue. Either that or his vomit." We plonked him onto his bed, made sure she was alright and came back to what was left of the stunned party.

Observations:

A) a person is really heavy
B) a psychotic corpse is a complete bastard to carry
C) probably won't be seeing <censored> again for a loooong time

I took a half day yesterday

so I could go along to the private view of Katie's After the Tsunami exhibition (see some of her pictures here). The plan was for Ruth and I to meet our parents afterwards for dinner, and then to rejoin the rest of the guys for a Friday night out.

Instead, we A) went to the exhibition at 2 pm and then B) stayed in the pub until 1 am, drunken parents included.

Most amusing.

Paul and Jenny were suitably mortal, and my mum made a sterling effort to keep up, but I don't think she has the sheer abandon the Gillons boast. In the end my dad, fortunately sober after arriving later, drove them all home. Excellent work, guys! And Paul made us some new friends after cornering a hapless pair of innocents and assuming they were with us. Fried gold, my friends. Fried gold. You couldn't write this stuff.

A weekend by rote

is pretty much how it went. Couple of après work drinks in the 'sun', followed by meeting up with Annabel, Antonio et al to celebrate Annabel finishing her finals, followed by a party thrown by a bunch of DJ types in Bruntsfield (which inevitably turned into a mini club in their front room - not necessarily a bad thing, mind). All well and good, but singularly without incident.

Saturday morning passed in my sleep. Saturday afternoon was a world of pain. Saturday night was a carbon copy of Friday evening, except instead of winding up at a party thrown by a group of DJs, we wound up at a party thrown by Josh's old uni committee mates. Our collective heart wasn't really in it, though, and we caught a cab home around 3.

On Sunday I finally broke the mould and got out in the sun for a while. I looked around a few flats, one or two of which were surprisingly reasonable, then went for a cycle around Arthur's Seat and Calton Hill, new and non-geriatric iPod in tow.

Music -> Artists -> Led Zeppelin -> All -> Play

Bliss. Lying in the sun, watching the odd seagull drift overhead (and politely not crapping on my face), listening to guitar riffs not so much written as discovered, is a fine way to spend an hour or two of a Sunday afternoon.

Berlin, day two:

in which we have a gay old time.

We decided to do a bit of light sightseeing on Sunday, so after a leisurely breakfast we headed off towards the centre. Paul was a good tour guide, taking us along Unter den Linden (the Champs-Elysée-esque main avenue of Berlin), under the Brandenburg Gate and past the Reichstag.

It turns out I'm an architectural communist. We didn't see as much of the old West Berlin as we did the East, but I much preferred the mixture in the East of blocky communist bombast and pre-war elegance. Plus the really, really fucking tall Fernsehturm just defies description. "Make it look like an olive on a cocktail stick, comrade. But make it twelve hundred feet tall!" <maniacal laughter>

We passed the Holocaust Memorial, not open yet, oddly, given that Sunday was the 60^th anniversary of VE day, and Berlin was crawling with riot police and protesters of various persuasions. At the Potsdamer Platz, we called it a sightseeing day and the boozing kicked off. A couple of drinks later, having returned to the flat to gird ourselves for the evening's entertainment, we set off for a restaurant chosen by Josh as serving typical Bavarian food.

The sun was out when we left, and eventually, after a pint on the way, we found the restaurant as it was getting dark. We got seats easily enough, and ordered something of a sausage fest (oh the irony): three huge platters of various forms of pig. It was great. We ate, drank, and wondered about the 'Sergey' magazine we found down the side of one of the seats, featuring a cover with two muscular chaps in sailor uniforms.

At this point Antonio mentions there's a rainbow flag outside.

We've managed to stumble inadvertently into a gay-friendly restaurant. I had no idea restaurants were such hotbeds of homophobic feeling that this one needed to declare its open-mindedness, but there you go. Of course Josh maintains that his choice was entirely innocent.

We finished our hog and caught the train (we'd walked that far away) back towards the Alexanderplatz. Josh had found a club called Café Moskau nearby, and we strolled down the socialist Legoland of Karl Marx Allee. After a fortifying beer and tequila at a disturbingly Wetherspoons-alike bar across the street, we headed into the club, handing over the €8 entry fee and getting our hands stamped with a logo spelling "GMF".

Josh was grumbling about the apparent lack of ladies, and we all told him to stop moaning and enjoy the sleek, minimalist decoration and tasteful lighting. Granted, it did seem a bit empty - apparently the clubs don't really kick off until midnight or so - and there was a distinct lack of women, but we ploughed on to the bar and ordered our first UK-priced (i.e. expensive) drink of the holiday.

We settled into a table. "Wow," I said, seeing a quite astonishingly good looking girl near the bar, "that girl's really pretty. Look!"

She was, and she was also the only one we saw in the entire club. "Uh, there seem to be rather a lot of sleeveless T-shirts around, guys. Also very muscular looking blokes in tight jeans."

Paul, looking at the stamp on our hands and a projected GMF logo on the wall, mused: "You know, I thought the club here was called WMF, not GMF."

"Oh," I said. "So what does the 'G' stand for- ah. Right."

Josh's unerring, unconscious gay spider-sense had struck again.

We had a couple of drinks, admired the surroundings a bit more (the venue had been an officers' club in communist times) and resolved to find yet another bar. So, a couple of taxis later we finally got to another minimal, sleek, tastefully lit bar, only for Paul to fall asleep and Jeff and Josh to monopolise the fußball table.

I still haven't been able to quite get the bastard stamp off my hand.

* * *

On Monday morning, we rolled out of our various air, camp and sofa beds and got slowly ready to leave. Paul's bathroom suffered that day, I can tell you. If there's one lesson we all learned in Berlin, it's to stay upwind of Josh.

FIN

P.S: Must say thanks to Paul for putting us up and for being a combined tour guide/holiday rep. Thanks, man - hopefully see you over here in November!

"For the next three days, you will drink only beer and eat only meat,"

is not what Paul said to us on arrival in Berlin, but he might well have done. On the way to his (extremely nice and ridiculously affordable) flat in the old East Berlin, we picked up a crate of Erdinger and began the drinking.

We headed out after some food (and vodka, much protested by your correspondent) to a bar in a dilapidated old cinema to meet up with Steve, a friend of Paul's. The bar just oozed bohemian cool: an impressive building that had seen better days, messily redecorated and overlooking both traditional old and stark new buildings.

Our pirate hat fitted right in.

Towards the end of the night, for reasons that escape me now, we split up into two groups. Jeff, Steve, Antonio and I headed for a club on the 14^th floor of a communist-era tower block on the Alexanderplatz, with the ludicrously soviet TV tower looming over it. Josh and Paul would meet us there later.

Apparently the club was tres (or sehr) cool, so we ambled up to it as coolly as we could manage, and were turned down flat by the bouncers. Fortunately, it wasn't that they didn't like the cut of our jib, but that we were conspicuously without attractive female company. Or any female company, for that matter: the evening's sole attempt to strike up a conversation with some ladies had been when Josh and I sat beside a group of girls who studiously (and correctly) ignored us.

Ah well; we ate some excellent kebabs and went home, plastered.

Friday night after work:

went out with Dave and Ben to meet up with Andy, one of the boarding guys, for his birthday. Knowing that I had to get up at 7 am the next day to catch a train and then plane to Berlin, I did the sensible thing and drank twice as quickly to account for the curtailed night.

Dave and I arrived at the Outhouse for Ruth and Katie's bash around 10 or so. "Hello everyone. This is Dave! Dave M! Mad Dave! Ahahaha. [hic]"

The next morning was not what I'd call optimum. We caught the train/sauna in plenty of time and spent an uncomfortably warm couple of hours waiting for Newcastle to arrive so the rolling nausea and headaches could be soothed away by good old fashioned northern gloom.

Lunch was a plastic carbonara and a pint of 80'/- in the warehouse that is Newcastle airport, and then we were off.

[More later. I'm still knackered in that thousand-yard stare kind of way.]

Andy:

Maybe I’m biased because I play bass too, but I think Keith’s confident bass playing really drives some of their songs, locking in with Doug’s ferocious pounding of the drums.

My God! Seriously, I'm misting up. It's nice to be appreciated!

I'll never drink another rum again.

On Saturday night, after wasting the entire day playing on the PS2, I dragged myself along to the Outhouse with Josh. Jeff and Jez were already there and unfortunately, there was a Bacardi promotion that rewarded stupid drinking with t-shirts and pin badges. Jez was already wearing two of each.

A couple of hours later, joined by Dev, we're all wearing t-shirts and badges. We look like a Bacardi promotional team gone native. The question is raised: "Can we stop drinking this fucking rum now?"

Yes we could, and we did. We trooped off to Rick's, removing the evidence of the rum drinking spree as we went. Astonishingly, we waltzed in and found a table straight away.

Rick's is jaw dropping. It's people watching taken to a sublime level. The clientele is composed half of the effortlessly rich, dressed up to the nines and paying £5 for a pint of Peroni, and half of footballers' wives, dressed up to the nines and paying God knows how much for eye-searing cocktails.

The conversation went from bad to worse (Josh: "You'd do Trinny but you'd be thinking of Susannah"); Jeff went from mortal to sober when a pint of beer was spilled onto his crotch (twice) and Devon went from sober to mortal pretty much when the clock struck 1.

We took a shortcut/trespass home through Queen Street Gardens. Excellent night.

T minus 3 hours:

The sound setup in the Subway, despite its "dingy club" shtick, was pretty good. Dougie the sound guy was straightforward and efficient, and the combined Monkey/Proxy crew sorted everything out with a minimum of fuss. It's incredible how smoothly it went, really - no-one forgot anything important; we had spare cables a go-go and Mart didn't short any amps.

So with everything sorted out, we waited. And waited. And got bored, so we started plinking away with each other's instruments (ladies, I know how long you've waited to hear that). Then we waited some more.

And finally, they came. By the time it was time for us to play, the place was heaving. By the takings afterwards, there must have been about 40 people or so, but it felt like a hell of a lot more! We took to the stage, got ourselves sorted out and after Dave's one bit of prerehearsed chat, launched into Vertigo.

It'd take screeds of monotonous rambling to dissect the set song by song, so I won't bother. In general, I think we played better than at the Outhouse. At the Outhouse, I'd been fairly tense and anxious to play well - ironically, relaxing, and thinking less about it meant that I ended up playing better.

We're really starting to get the measure of our own songs now. The new song, Dead On, has sounded good from the start and we played it at least as well as during any rehearsals. It's the first one we've done that has a really quantifiable feel - something like a cross between new wave and traditional rock.

(In other news, I've started using phrases like "quantifiable feel" with a straight face. Hot damn.)

Happy 2/34^th Birthday, despite coming initially together in about 15 minutes, has been something of a problem child since then. We'd spent hours trying to do something right with it until the second last rehearsal, where we stripped it down to its bare bones, dropped it by a tone, added everything back in again, and suddenly it worked. I really enjoyed playing it at the gig; that's probably a mix of relief that we were playing a good version and satisfaction at pretty much getting the bassline right...

Proxy came on after a brief interlude, and my word: they rocked. Great stuff. They were all brilliant, but I think Iain is possibly the best non-professional drummer I've seen. I think Proxy have a bit of a Dave Grohl on their hands! No doubt Andy will wax lyrical about Proxy's performance (as well he should) so I'll leave that to him.

The high that you get from coming off the stage after a successful gig (and by successful I mean the crowd demands that I get naked) is incredible. I'd happily have gone straight back up to do it all again and I think I have you lot to thank for that - thanks for coming along, thanks for stumping up the entry fee, and thanks for making us feel appreciated!