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.