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.