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.