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.