A Christmas hamper

of random bits today, rather than a coherent post.

* * *
Ruth was working on Christmas Eve, in a little bar a couple of towns along from my parents' house. I drove along to pick her up after the pub had closed and they'd had a chance to close up, at about 1.30 am. When I arrived, there were still a few die-hards downing the last of their pints, so I hung my jacket over a bar stool and settled in to wait.

"This is my brother," Ruth said to her inebriated boss, who was perched precariously on another stool at the end of the bar.
"Oh aye," he said, "so the Saab is yours then?"
I'd loaned Ruth the Trøll while I was on holiday. "Yes. Nice to meet you too," I replied.
"They're great cars they are."
"Yes. Yes they are."

I waited a bit longer. The last group of drinkers were getting their stuff together, and on their way past an old schoolmate said hello. "Long time no see! You've got the Saab 900, right?" she said. We talked for a bit, and then they were off.

Ruth introduced me to the very last punter, a youngish regular, on his way out. "Hi there - so you're Ruth's brother?" Then, in slightly hushed, reverential tones: "That's a great car you've got. I love those Saabs."

These people do not get out much. "A 1992 900 S! And with the Aero kit, if I'm not mistaken. So rare that such an objet d'art comes to our humble village."

* * *
The hot water in our flat is, and has been for the last year or so, only intermittently functional. We have an odd setup whereby the hot water for the shower room and the heating comes from a modern combi boiler at one end of the flat, while the hot water for the bathroom and the kitchen comes from a grain elevator-sized immersion boiler at the other end. Needless to say, the apparently Victorian-era immersion heater functions reliably, if inefficiently, all year round. (The environment audibly groans when we fire it up.) The shiny new combi boiler is rather more of a prima donna.

A while back we discovered, after a succession of visits by largely moronic plumbers, that the heating system has a small leak somewhere. Evidently it's not large enough to easily detect, but it did let the pressure drop until we had neither warm radiators nor a hot shower. The final, competent plumber showed us how to open a top-up valve to refill the combi boiler until a proper fix could be applied.

Of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and although the leak goes unfixed (hell, if anyone of our neighbours noticed a jet of scalding water gushing into their flat, I'm sure they'd let us know. And we did tell the landlord about it. Honest), we now merrily poke around with a screwdriver every few months to make sure the pressure's up.

Last week, though, a new problem arose. The shower became a turbo-sauna. It was like washing on the sun. I developed a technique for showering, which was to plaster oneself up against the tiled wall furthest from the geyser emitting from the shower head and let the superheated steam remove the outer layer of one's skin. Woe betide you if any of the actual water should graze your unprotected self.

Fortunately, and for no discernible reason, the temperature dropped back to a tolerable level during the week. This pleases me because I can shower in safety, and disappoints me because I am deprived of a punchline for this little anecdote.

* * *
In preparation for the upcoming CF gig, I plugged in my bass last night and played away for a while, gazing idly down at the twin curiosities of the gay-bar-for-neds and the brothel above it visible from my window. I was reminded of an evening a month or so back. On the way to Café Royal, I'd rounded the corner onto Rose Street when a drunken buffoon on a stag night stumbled out of a nearby pub, cornered me and asked where they should continue boozing. "And find some wummen tae, like."

He stank like a brewery and I sorely doubted his chances of both getting into any pubs or getting any once he was in there. But I was brought up well, and I tried to be helpful. "Hmm. George Street has a load of pubs, but they're all a bit posh." I had a rather evil notion. "You're already on Rose Street, and it's pretty good for pubs. There's one just across the road, actually-" I said, pointing down the alley to the gay bar, and right on cue, two people physically flew out of the door.

"And dinnae come back!" bellowed the barman.

My drunken friend went to George Street.

(Sort of) World Tour Redux:

Antipodean boozing and American rambling:

• Brisbane (photos)
  • The terrorists have already won
  • J'arrive!
  • The holiday gathers momentum
  • Torpedoed!
  • Insectile armageddon
  • Due to my sudden apparent respiratory dysfunction...
  • The eve of the wedding
• En route
• USA (photos)
  • Memphis
  • Tupelo, Hazelhurst
  • A week in New Orleans
  • The Gulf Coast
  • Mobile, Chattanooga & Nashville
  • Return to Memphis

Work in progress.

I've just moved the RF to Blogger's new layout system, and there are a few changes and glitches compared to the old layout. If anything is completely broken, please leave a comment on this post! Cheers.

The Manhattanite/Orwellian nightmare before Christmas.

For the first time in almost a decade, I've done most of my Christmas shopping before the day itself. I still needed to get something for my Mum and to pick up some wrapping paper and cards, and so on Sunday I walked along to Stafford Street to make my yearly pilgrimage to Studio One and Paper Tiger. I browsed around Studio One, comparing elegantly minimal, Scandinavian knick-knacks and settled on a sort of candlestick-thing. My credit card went into the machine and I duly punched in the PIN. Into Paper Tiger; select some suitably tasteful wrapping paper and some cards; debit card into slot and enter PIN #2.

The sheer Sex and the City-ness of it all assailed my senses. Here I was, on a crisp winter's evening, dressed in an accidentally fashionable pea coat bought six unfashionable years ago, ferrying home designer charity Christmas cards (like they say in Friends with Money, why not just give the money straight to charity?), wrapping paper so restrained as to be conceited and an Ikea-but-more-expensive candlestick. I didn't mind per se, but my God, did I feel ridiculous.

As soon as the pseudo-respectability turn had passed, I started thinking about the bizarre act of tapping in my PIN to identify myself as the appropriate card's owner. The reduction of this act to typing four digits into a keypad make the world seem a step closer to 1984. To the Man (the state is too inept to count as such, while your common or garden retail corporation is continually trying to extract the largest possible amount of money from me and isn't held back by troublesome ethics), I am quite literally just a number. Granted, I've been just a number for years now - to the electricity company, the telephone company and my bank among others - but the removal of any truly personal acts of identification, like matching a photograph or signing my name, seems like a step too far.

And then piled on top of any vague metaphysical concerns, there's what would seem to be the oddly lax security behind Chip & PIN. To wit: four digits isn't a big number to crack; a photo would massively restrict fraud should anyone get hold of my card (and assuage my increasing feeling of nothingness to boot), and I haven't yet seen a keypad with a worthwhile guard to shield your PIN from prying eyes. If these four numbers are all that stands between me and the supposed legions of identity thieves waiting to relieve me of all my money (ha! Give me three weeks of Christmas shopping and I'll do it myself), maybe a token effort at bolstering their security might be a good idea, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway.

Bookending this journey through ill-defined concerns about self and self-worth (in monetary terms at least) were a couple of pleasantly festive evenings hosted by Jez & Max and Jeff & Devon respectively. At Jez's we quaffed mulled wine and ate homemade mince pies, and at the old flat we ate and drank ourselves into a happy stupor. All in all, a moderately inebriated and wholly tasty weekend. Roll on Christmas...

A musical interlude:

Tuesday's gig went really well! We independently got to Glasgow and set up our gear in the Liquid Ship, then retired to Gambrino's Pizzeria for some food. After all, man cannot rock on lunch alone. We threw the grub down our throats with nervous energy, talked ourselves up over a calming beer and headed back to the bar to catch the last acoustic act before we took to the stage ourselves. Charlie's fellow medical types had turned out in pleasingly large numbers, as had the Captain (a man who really, really wants Coba Fynn to do well but who thinks we're crap) and Hannah.

After Davis/d(e) and Charlie had minutely tuned their guitars with the volume all the way up for the audience's benefit, we gamely skiffled our way into the Belle & Sebastian stylings of David Lynch's Lunchbox Blues. Apart from some slightly over-loud bass (at least I'd remembered to turn it on), it slipped past in three short minutes of indie goodness. We finished, they clapped, and the 'Fynn was back.

We proceeded through old and new songs for the next twenty minutes or so. Cracks in the rhythm section's composure appeared and healed up periodically, while the tuning of Charlie's guitar proved somewhat elusive. We got to Locomotive Blues, barrelled messily but (I think) winningly through it and ended on a high note. G, if I remember rightly. They clapped again and a few die-hards shouted "More!" We politely declined (Charlie: "We don't know any more,") and called it a night. Even the Captain was impressed. The first test is over, and a few more practices are all that stand between us and the main event at Cabaret Voltaire on the 29^th.

This band shit is awesome.

On Saturday night, the musical shenanigans continued. Ash, Jez, Serena and I went to Henry's Cellar Bar to watch an acoustic set by Mark Morriss of the newly rehabilitated Bluetones. We wound up in the Cameo Cinema bar; I wound up drunk, and Mark wound up being subjected to a half-hour, blow by blow account of our recent tour of the South. Good times!s

Ben, an ex-workmate

with a penchant for buggery motor sports, was up visiting over the weekend and so Dave had industriously coordinated a corresponding return to the go-karting track. It was raining on and off, so we struggled to put on rubberised romper suits over our fireproof overalls (we were covered come hell or high water) and waddled out, gangster style, to the karts. There's nothing like howling winds, biting cold and the grating buzz of a two-stroke single to fire the petrol in one's veins, n'est-ce pas?

These were newish karts by the looks of things, with lots of mudguards and heatshields to guard against the dangers of burns and lawsuits, and yet they already felt somewhat...run in. After the heats, it became obvious why: put a bunch of bumpers on a go-kart and it turns into a dodgem. I was nudged onto the grass, into tyres and occasional head-on collisions and by the final I was determined to stay out of absolutely everyone's way, whether ruthless veterans or hapless newcomers.

And the final was good. A good clean race and a respectable 5^th out of 16 doesn't make for a thrilling story, but I was far happier (if rather bruised) by the end of it. I can't believe it's been so long since the Nürburgring trip, and our day of pretend racing has me wanting to do it again.

In the absence of any other excitement, this is going to have to be a short entry. But remember: Coba Fynn are playing the Liquid Ship tomorrow night. We'll be on last (erk - is this the "headlining" of which they speak?), at around 11.10 pm. Come along! It'll be a spectacle, regardless of which way the cards fall.

Lying low:

turns out working five days a week is pretty much not as much fun as exploring the deep south and attempting to extract some half-baked cultural conclusions from DIY disaster tourism. But lo, we are back and making the best of it.

Ash and I drove to Glasgow at the weekend: me for a Coba Fynn practice and Ash for some Christmas shopping. I don't think I've ever noticed how grim Glasgow is before. As convenient as the M8 is, there's nothing like a motorway spearing through a city to give it that urban wasteland feel. The city centre manages to be both gaudy and tatty at the same time (especially around Christmas with all the lights, all the shoppers, all the rubbish and the ever-present mish-mash of architecture) and is clogged with traffic despite the hellish one-way system. It'd be almost like downtown Memphis if it wasn't for the throngs of neds giving it a higher population.

But I digress. The practice went remarkably well, given that we haven't played together regularly for a couple of months, and I'm feeling very relaxed about our next gig. We're playing as part of a Free Candy session on Tuesday the 5^th of December at the Liquid Ship on Great Western Road in Glasgow. Notionally this is an acoustic night; in reality we'll deprive Doug of his tom-toms and hope for the best.

This is all in preparation for a balls-out New Year bash at Cabaret Voltaire on the 29^th of December with the Green Day-baiting Proxy. The gig description isn't up yet, but perhaps Charlie's first draft:

Coba Fynn are a most precocious talent. Missing this chance to see them may be an error.

will convince you to go anyway.

In other news: Casino Royale really is very good; The Departed is not, and Davis has pimped a Creme Egg. That is all.

Our final destination

was Memphis for two more days before we left for home. When we arrived the weather had changed from clear and bright in Nashville to grey and overcast, and downtown Memphis was as grim as ever. We checked back into the King's Court (crack whores or not, you can't argue with $40 a night plus tax) and, with the weather clearing up in the evening, walked over to Beale Street to look for some food and drink. Asking the Tap Room's friendly barman where we could find some cheap and cheerful food, he pointed us in the direction of a place called Ernestine & Hazel's. "I've only ever been there once, and I went there just for the burgers. It's over on South Main."

So off we traipsed, taking our time to walk the few deserted blocks along Main Street with the trolley clanking past every now and again for company. A neon sign signalled the bar, and in we went. The three customers swivelled towards us from their allotted bar places and chairs and then went back to drinking. Behind the grimy bar was a hotplate tended by the barman/cook, and I ordered us a couple of beers as Ash took a table and tried to look inconspicuous.

"What kind of burgers do you do?" I asked.
"With cheese or without," he replied. We were dealing with a sort of down-home In-n-Out Burger then.
"Right. With, please."

We sat down and drank our beers, politely fending off the drunk, middle-aged divorcee who was persistently trying to draw us into conversation from the bar and tried to ignore his story of a recent shooting in the lounge upstairs. Our burgers arrived; we ate them (and were pleasantly impressed by how good they were*), downed the rest of our beers and exited stage left. I can heartily recommend Ernestine & Hazel's, with the added caveat that it should be enjoyed only by packs of people.

We had a few more drinks in the Tap Room - this place I can recommend without any reservations - and called it a night.**

The next (last!) day we decided to visit the Civil Rights Museum. On our way to our burger adventure the previous night we'd seen some signs for it and so we made our way back there through the chilly side streets of the city centre. I didn't know what to expect; I knew it was partly built within the old Lorraine Motel but that was all. By the time we finished, I was really glad we'd made the effort to go. There's days worth of material in there and we just skimmed the surface of it because we arrived relatively late in the afternoon, Most affecting is the motel room exhibit, where the room habitually rented by Martin Luther King is preserved more or less as it was in 1968, and the boarding house building across the road, where it's possible to look down through the window from which he was shot. Similarly to Graceland but in an entirely different way, the museum was an incredible time capsule of its era.

For our last night we headed back to Beale Street to hunt down some good old rock & roll. (It sounds repetitive and touristy to visit the same area so often, but we'd singularly failed to find any other areas of interest. As a case in point, a friend of Ash's had recommended an allegedly interesting neighbourhood about fifteen blocks east of the downtown area and through which we passed on the way in to the city. We duly stopped off to look around and found it crumbling, grey and more or less uninhabited. With only a couple of days left, and bereft of the car from the next morning, we took the safe/boring option!) Ending up in B.B. King's, we ordered some food and sat down to watch the show.

I wasn't overly impressed. The food was expensive and mostly fried; the music was run-of-the-mill, even if it was being played by a rising guitar genius, and the atmosphere was more office party than authentic juke joint. Maybe I missed the point, but I couldn't escape the general feeling that we were in a tourist-trap chain bar. Down, dirty and slightly dangerous it might have been, I much preferred the previous night's grungy combo of greasy burger and pool-room bar. There's still a bit of bit of my imagined Memphis to be had, but it ain't in B.B. King's.

We caught a cab for the airport the next morning to begin the three-flight marathon home. I was sad to leave, Ash was moping and despite all of the grimness that comes with inner-city deprivation and hurricane-struck coastal towns, I think I'd seen why most Americans are proud of their country.

* I have finally realised what makes American burgers taste so good. It's the cheese, pure and simple. Your humble Kraft single, both evolved and devolved from its more natural relatives (roquefort, for example) provides the necessary injection of sweetness into an otherwise savoury snack and elevates it from merely an instance of burger to its Platonic ideal. I am depressed that a foodstuff so processed as to be indistinguishable from its plastic wrapper is responsible for such a transformation, but simultaneously elated that I have divined the true nature of burger perfection.
** One thing that only struck me that night, near the end of the trip, was how expensive alcohol is in the States. Accommodation, petrol, food and cars are cheap, but beer is expensive. Factor in a tip of a buck or two per round and it's at least as expensive as the UK.

We dispatched Alabama in a couple of days

in a cross-country dash to Tennessee. Mobile provided antiquated, grand accommodation, helping us by degrees back to earth from the rarefied heights of the Quarterhouse, while Birmingham was so deserted in the Biblical silence of a Sunday afternoon that we decided to press on to the next big city. The swampy land around Mobile gave way to more mountainous and spectacular scenery as we drove north, and I was put in mind of some the more picturesque parts of the Highlands.

We reached Chattanooga as it was getting dark and found a room for the night before heading for Nashville. The next morning we asked the hotel receptionist about any notable things to do before we left, and decided to visit the delightfully unhinged Rock City as a result. It begins with a nice (if trite) walk through some curious natural rock formations accompanied by calming music piped through hidden speakers, takes you over a springy suspension bridge to a look-out point from which seven differnt states are supposedly visible, and finally leads to a fluorescent vision of Lynchian hell. The decision to build an underground grotto filled with fairytale vignettes lit by ultraviolet lamps is not one that I can understand, but it certainly livened up the visit. Take your children only if you feel the need to punish them. We laughed all the way to the car and joined I24 to head all the way to Nashville.

Nashville follows the same the downtown-and-sprawl pattern we saw in most cities, only more so: the city centre is squeezed between the Cumberland River to the south and the railroad to the north, and outside of that it's rare to see a building of more than a few stories. We crossed the river and threaded our way through downtown Nashville, then crossed the railroad marshalling yard and found a motel just on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. As Ash napped I took a walk to find some guitar shops I'd looked up before we arrived.

What a farce. "Music City USA" has two worthwhile guitar shops: Gruhn Guitars and the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase (i.e. the Gibson banjo factory). Gruhn had some awesome basses. Unfortunately, being a vintage guitar specialist, they sported equally awe-inspiring prices. The Gibson shop, on the other hand, was prepared to knock the odd dollar or six hundred off the advertised prices but had a terrible selection of their own range. (This theme extended to New Orleans, aka the home of jazz, and Memphis, aka the home of rock and roll. New Orleans had a single shop within walking distance of the quarter, and again most of its stock was unattainable vintage perfection or modern basses I just plain didn't want. Memphis boasted another Gibson factory with an equally limited range, and as far as we could tell, no other guitar shops. Oh well. eBay here I come.)

We tramped along the deserted sidewalks and dashed across the busy roads to Broadway, on the fringes of downtown Nashville. Buskers playing Dobros and wearing ten-gallon hats stood between honky-tonk bars with neon signs in a country and western echo of Beale and Bourbon Streets. After eating some generically glutinous Southern food in a characterless sports bar, we went looking for something a little more authentic. We plumped for Robert's Western World, recommended by a helpful record shop clerk across the street. I didn't know what to expect: we could see a band setting up, but the place was dead as yet, so we bought a couple of drinks and sat down to wait.

After a while, a few more (mostly older) couples had drifted in and eventually the band - John England and the Western Swingers - appeared. They were excellent. John introduced the band and off they went, playing what he called "Western Swing" music. Initially I thought "wow, these guys are great musicians," and as they continued and the audience grew, I found myself completely rapt. I don't think I've ever seen such an amiable band play live: they swapped places at the mic, bantered among themselves and with the audience and generally came over as the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. The attentive waitress kept us furnished with drinks until they finished a couple of hours later, and for perhaps the first time during the holiday I didn't begrudge dropping a fat tip into the box for the band as we left the bar.

We left the Big Easy behind

on a clear, sunny Saturday morning and took the coastal road towards Pass Christian. Josh, Dave and I had stopped there for lunch on our way into N.O, and I had so enjoyed the journey last time that I felt morbidly compelled to see how this part of the Gulf Coast had fared during Hurricane Katrina.

The devastation was evident even before we'd left the city proper. The highway ran along a thin strip of land with houses either side, and in most cases there was very little left of them. Dinghies, yachts and even what looked like some fishing boats were stranded along the road, along with piles of rubbish that on closer inspection appeared to be the entire contents of destroyed houses, up to and including the kitchen sink. Some plots had new buildings on them - most of them stilted like the Queenslanders prevalent in Brisbane - but far more just had trailers parked beside the remains of the previous home. The trees in the swampland that ran intermittently alongside the road were bent ragged by the wind, and piles of broken limbs cleared off the road still lay where they'd first been pushed. (Is this a problem of "small goverment"? Is it the case that someone will come back to tidy up the mess left after the first hasty clear-ups or is this part of the Gulf Coast destined to look like a landfill for years to come? Is it something so minor there are no tax dollars left to spend on it? I wish I knew, because the whole area desperately needs a shot in the arm and living amongst all this debris can't be particularly morale-boosting for the inhabitants...)

We reached Bay St. Louis and then Pass Christian, taking the long way round to avoid the road bridge we'd used last year, now in the process of being rebuilt after the hurricane. Both towns were, to be honest, a mess. I stopped at the beach where we'd gone swimming last year and took a couple of photographs of the damage: the wooden shower and toilet block had gone, leaving only the metal supports standing, as had the boardwalk around it and the bench where we sat in the sun to dry off. The slatted wooden bungalows that had faced the Gulf from behind Highway 90 were more or less all destroyed and had been replaced only by a couple of Waffle Houses. We drove on to Mobile, and I was relieved to see a town that hadn't been trashed beyond recognition.

(Intermission):

we're back! There's another entry to come about the post-Big Easy part of the trip, and then normal service will resume. It's good to be back!

We spent almost a week in New Orleans,

staying in the Quarterhouse on Chartres Street. The place was palatial! We had a comically over-decorated (cf. gilt-framed oil painting of a violin-playing monkey dressed in 19th century costume complete with pince-nez spectacles) two bedroom apartment to ourselves, and it was way beyond anything we could have afforded by ourselves. Mad props must go to Ash's parents for giving us their unused time there.

We spent a good portion of the week just wandering around the French Quarter, soaking up the atmosphere while trying to avoid inhaling any of it. The eye-watering eau de Rue Bourbon was still in full malevolent bloom, lying somewhere evil between putrefying crawfish and stale vomit, although away from the Canal Street end (frat central) it mercifully decreased to background levels.

The quarter was quiet during the week, and if anything was more welcoming than last time I was here. We pottered around museums, gawked at some of the landmarks and emerged blinking (and weaving slightly) into the afternoon light after stopping for the occasional restorative Hurricane. In the evenings we stuffed ourselves silly with gumbo or some other death-by-protein banquet, got elegantly wasted to a greater or lesser degree in a suitable establishment and generally revelled in our genteel Southern surroundings. We talked to a friendly off-duty U.S. soldier who bemoaned the difficulty of getting stoned on base, listened to some jazz (nice!) in Preservation Hall, and propped up the bar in a dingy sports pub near the edge of the quarter while Ash coached me on the rules of baseball.

One afternoon we drove out to the Garden District, independently recommended to us by a few different people. It didn't seem to be much more than an affluent residential area comprised of grand old mansions, but we ambled around for an hour or so, marvelling at the gnarled old trees cracking the pavement slabs with their roots and shadowing the upper stories of the houses. If we'd been there after dark it would have been prime horror film material. A few of the houses were still in the process of having storm damage repaired, but like the French Quarter, there wasn't much evidence left of last year's hurricane.

The tourist map of the city we'd picked up (in one of the handy welcome centres sited where the interstates cross state lines) showed a suggested driving tour route including the quarter, so we decided to follow it home. After a single wrong turn off a broad tree-lined avenue, we were suddenly on the wrong side of the tracks. The houses were wooden bungalows with peeling paint, household debris littered the yards, rusty cars cannibalised for spares lay immobile in the driveways and the streets were full of people with no jobs to go to. It was instantly depressing and oppressive, and it was obvious that most of the people sitting on their faded porches were watching us as we rolled by in our ridiculous lifestyle car - I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd jumped to the conclusion (however wrongly) that we were doing a DIY disaster tour and taken a justifiably dim view of it. We found our way out and headed home.

All this sounds a bit down on the city, but the reality is that I think overall we got a far better idea of what it would be like to actually live there. We saw some of the seamier sides of it; we spent a night out in Faubourg Marigny, an area populated by locals as opposed to the tourists; we saw the bohemian neighbourhoods around Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets, and in visiting them all we saw that for the most part, it's just like any other city. An enjoyable one for all that!

After leaving Memphis,

we drove southeast towards Tupelo, intending to complete the Elvis experience by visiting his birthplace. As soon as we turned off I55 we were in stereotypical Bible Belt country: almost many churches as homes, and as many trailers as permanent houses. Abandoned cars and trucks lay rusting in driveways and ditches every half mile or so beside dilapidated wooden shacks discoloured by age. Every now and again a pristine plantation-style house on a bowling green lawn would appear, bordered by less fortunate properties.

Driving along one particular stretch of road with with dense green foliage on the left and rolling fields on the right, some movement caught my eye among the trees: a big bird of prey (we weren't sure what kind, but it looked like an eagle of some sort) took off low and wheeled across the road, only to fly directly into the path of an semi truck coming the other way. There was an audible thump as the truck passed us, a few feathers flew up and I spun round to see the truck carry on down the road. We'd seen plenty of roadkill already but this was a bit of a shock...!

We carried on to Tupelo and found the Presley house more through luck than judgment and stopped to take a few pictures. We ambled through the Elvis Aaron Presley Memorial Chapel (what was that I was saying about a pilgrimage last time?) and hit the road again, this time along the Natchez Trace Parkway to Hazelhurst, where we stopped for the night.

Hazelhurst was a perfect example of most of the towns we stopped in on the way to New Orleans: we'd hit an identical strip of chain motels and fast food joints, fill up with gas and coffee and set out to find "downtown", or whatever constituted the original part of the town. Once off the neon-lit main drag we'd crawl through street after street of bungalows in various states of repair, but more often than not we'd be completely unable to find anything resembling a town centre. The sprawl seems to take over so rapidly and spread so wide that I can only assume that downtown is maybe three solitary streets hidden somewhere within a huge expanse of homogeneous suburbs.

The next day, though, we found an honourable exception: Laurel, midway between Hazelhurst and New Orleans, looked at first to be exactly the same as every other strip-mall town so far - if even a little scrappier around the edges - but then after half an hour of fruitless to-ing and fro-ing around the 'hood we discovered the original town centre in all its antebellum glory. Granted, it was only about three by three blocks in size, but it boasted a good few imposing gothic edifices and made for a pleasant ambling stroll before we drove the final stretch to New Orleans. Pity the one café in town didn't have any tomato sauce...

We arrived in Memphis

to find it warm and muggy - a happily faint echo of the sweaty furnace of the last time I was in the South - and took a cab to our salubrious lodgings. "The King's Court Motel?" said our incredulous driver. "Lemme just say, if it was just you sir, you'd hear a knock on your door at midnight askin' what kind of woman you be wantin'. Short or tall, blond or brunette. Or what drugs you be after."

Happily neither came to pass, although it wasn't the most opulent place I've ever stayed. We dropped our things, made damn sure that the door was locked and walked the two blocks to Beale Street. On this particular evening the street was closed off and given over to hordes of bikers: on one block, bloated Hell's Angels-types reclining against massive chromed hogs and on the other, home boys revving neon-lit Japanese racing replicas. We found a street-side bar and took in the scene for a while and then stumbled back home, jet lagged to the hilt.

The next day was clear and cold, and the streets were devoid of life to match. We got some breakfast and then caught a bus (complete with garrulous and faintly menacing nutter) to Graceland, taking us through a grey and dreary sprawl. A sign on the road in from the airport had hailed Memphis as "America's Distribution Center" and this moniker was, on the surface at least, a damn sight more apt than "The Home of Rock 'n' Roll". The Memphis that rolled past us in the gathering rain was boxy and concrete, frayed with weeds around the edges.

Graceland hove into view, and we bolted from the bus. Ash elected to sit out the tour, having already been there a few years back, so I jumped lonesome on the mandatory shuttle bus for the hundred yard journey across Elvis Presley Boulevard, slipped on my electronic tour guide headphones and crossed the hallowed threshold.

The tour was great! I knew nothing about the King before it other than he'd had some excellent tunes and had ignominiously died on the bog, and while I didn't become an instant Elvis fan or scholar, it was consistently intriguing nonetheless. The mansion was a shag-pile '70s time capsule, the cars satisfyingly bloated and the planes just jaw-droppingly extravagant. The weirdest thing was the nature of the tour itself: with everyone listening to a personal voice-over through their headphones, the house was mostly silent when you took them off and it felt more like a pilgrimage than a tourist attraction.

We took the free shuttle to Sun Studio after that (a bit of co-operative marketing that would have seemed opportunistic had not both tours been genuinely worth the money), this time for a guided tour by a Jack White-lookalike called David. The studio is only two rooms in size, but again the tour was flawless and this time our guide's enthusiasm - and the revelation that the studio is still active at only $75 per hour (Coba Fynn, do you read me?) - made it seem far more relevant than Graceland had ever been.

The next day we picked up our rental...vehicle. Having run out of compacts, or intermediates or whatever it was we'd originally reserved, the woman at the desk "upgraded" us to a Chevy HHR, a faux-gansta exercise in retro ugliness and reputedly a complete vacuum of driving enjoyment. I pleaded with her but to no avail; it was the HHR or nothing. I bitched and moaned all the way to the motel where we loaded up our gear, backed up and headed towards the exit, crawling past as we did so a distinctly real gangster type who threw me a gesture that seemed to say, "Word. I respect your choice of transport, yo."

I nodded helplessly and we got the hell out of Dodge.

En route:

Neil and I both took our leave from Brisbane on Monday, after a final day of fine hospitality from Chris and Leyla. I was sad to leave - it had been great to be around C&L again for a while; I'd just started to appreciate the pastoral side of the country, and even though I woke up every morning in a portable nylon sauna drenched in my own sweat, the weather was starting to agree with me.

The flights to Heathrow were mercifully quiet, and I tried to stay awake as long as possible on the flight to Kuala Lumpur and then get some sleep on the second leg to Heathrow. Once the sun was down and the lights out, I stretched out on the row of empty seats and shook out my blanket. Hundreds of little sparks of static discharge lit up the blanket as I unfolded it - rather a pretty spectacle in the circumstances, 35,000 feet up in the pitch black with the odd accompanying flash lighting up storm clouds outside the plane...

I met up with Ash in Gatwick (a bit of a crappy airport, but a welcome reunion just the same!) and we left again for Memphis the next day. We were flying with Northwest Airlines, or NWA. Oh yes. I was this close to asking the stewardess if I could have an Ice Cube in my water. She was very stern, and I did not. I think she would handed me my white bitch ass had I done so.

Instead I mused on the fact that incidences of turbulence occur exactly when there is a cup of scalding hot coffee placed on a tray inches from one's lap, and additionally whenever some sleep is in order.

Anyway, we have arrived. Next up: we hit Memphis, and set phasers to tourist.

The eve of the wedding arrived,

and with Leyla off in the Stambrook Plaza hotel to prepare, the groom and his compadres did the same. Chris and Brian picked up the kilts and I took the opportunity to have a last-minute bagpipe practice. And then we all got drunk.

So it came to pass that on the day of the wedding, where I was required to don the proud national garb of my country and rouse the wedding guests to attention with the skirl of the bagpipes, I was prone on the couch watching Empire Strikes Back and trying very hard not to barf. In our collective defence (Brian was perceptibly wan-looking as well), we'd had a very light dinner of pizza and beer, with a dessert of beer and some beer as a digestif. In hindsight perhaps a little Cointreau instead would have sorted us out.

Fortunately an excellent breakfast of freshly-laid eggs (what else?) and Weet-bix (the vowelly challenged antipodean version of Weetabix ideal for the bowelly challenged) raised me from my torpor once my stomach had stopped churning. The photographer arrived around 1 pm to take some 'candid' shots of the Chris and his groomsmen getting done up in their kilts - no, not that candid - and by 3 we'd arrived at the Botanic Gardens to set up the red carpet, chairs and so on.

Neil, Davis/d(e) and Jenna wandered away from the body of the open-air kirk to help me tune the pipe drones before Leyla arrived, and so I played through a few tunes to warm them up. As I was finishing up Neil pointed through the trees to another wedding that I'd accidentally subjected to an atonal aural battering. We surreptitiously slunk back to our own wedding and I judged the pipes to be as tuned as was necessary.

Almost immediately, Leyla turned arrived with her Dad and I had to stop worrying about playing and get on with just doing it. Somehow it all more or less came together: I got to the end of the aisle just as the tune ended and I stopped without the bag deflating too slowly (in which case it tends to bray like a stricken donkey). I took my place alongside the rest of the kilted contingent and breathed a relieved sigh.

The ceremony was entertaining as well as solemn, and there was a palpable joy to the proceedings - despite the legalese involved in a civil ceremony, it was less grave than a church wedding and in the leafy surroundings of the gardens felt much more celebratory. As the register was signed, I retired to a discreet distance - as discreet as possible with the pipes, anyway - and played a few more tunes. Davis/d(e) wandered over as things were wrapping up and looked bemused; I took this to be the sign to finish up and did so.

We took to the river on the Kookaburra Queen for the reception and to admire fabulous Brisvegas as it slid majestically in the gathering twilight. There were speeches, there was eating, drinking, mingling and even a very little dancing from your host. Anyway, I've been writing this entry for four days and three continents, so I'm going to call it a day now and post this sucker. Next up: rock and roll, baby - we hit Memphis.

Due to my sudden apparent respiratory dysfunction,

and deprived of the week's planned aquatic adventures, I jumped on the coat-tails of Neil, Bryan and Chris as they ploughed a tourist furrow through Brisbane and its environs. First up on Tuesday was a prescient re-run of my introduction to Brisbane from three years ago: along the Brisbane River on the CityCat ferry, a wander through the manufactured (but pleasing) cultural epicentre of the South Bank* and then a drive up Mount Coot-tha. This time we stopped off at a trail that led through the woods to an abandoned (and wholly unsuccessful) gold mine shaft on the back slopes of the hill. Wending our way through the pseudo-bush, Neil displayed a borderline obsessive desire to find deadly spiders and a competing tendency to freak out at the merest suggestion of anything brushing exposed skin. Three quarters of an hour later, the collective paranoia of impending paralysis** or death propelled us out of the bush and back to civilization.

"What are the inhabitants of Brisbane called?" someone asked during the drive back to Chris' house. Idle speculation ensued.

"Brisboneers, perhaps?"
"How about Bris-boners? Heh."
"Brisbanians, I heard."
"Brisoners," said Neil. "Brisoners." Genius. I can't imagine many Aussies thanking us for that one, but I intend to promote it wherever I can.

On Thursday, with Chris embroiled in wedding preparations, Neil, Bryan and I decided to go to Australia Zoo on the independent recommendations of three different Brisoners. We borrowed Chris and Leyla's warhorse '87 Mazda - an oldie but a goldie like the Trøll - and headed north, passing within sight of the striking Glasshouse Mountains and arriving at the zoo about 11.30. We paid our entry fee - a fairly hefty A$43 (!), although reduced to A$32 by a promotional token kindly provided by Leyla - and were hurried by the staff towards the Crocoseum for the main show. (Yes. The Crocoseum.)

For the uninitiated, Australia Zoo is part zoo (if a fairly benign-seeming one), part theme park and part Church of Steve Irwin. The most surprising part is that it hasn't managed to make the transition to shrine yet. The place is still festooned with banners, signs and sayings of the man himself and is still billed as "Home of the Crocodile Hunter". It's as if they haven't quite come to terms with the fact that the man whose personality drives the place, whose enthusiasm permeates it and who basically provides its reason for being, is no longer here to give it legitimacy. The present tense abounds.

We sat down to the show, and some terribly venomous and entirely apathetic snakes were paraded in the centre of the arena. Next some parakeets and parrots buzzed the audience, and finally the big screen lit up to show an intro by the man himself to the main crocodile show. The host skipped lightly over the fact that big Steve had shuffled off this mortal coil ("Ah, we love him don't we? God bless ya Steve. Now, on with the show!") and Monty the croc swam silently into view.

There's an odd disconnect between Steve's posthumous, almost childish enthusiasm for his reptile quarry and the respect with which they have to be treated. The fact that the zoo staff effortlessly toss food into the slavering mouth of this million-year-old apex predator in front of a rapt audience sits uneasily with the fact that he met his untimely demise in just such a situation, contrived to place him in harm's way for our entertainment. I got the feeling that one doesn't go to Australia Zoo to see the animals so much as to hope, subconsciously, that Bill, Jimbo or Frank slips up this one time and trips into Monty's gaping maw.

We watched the informative but curiously flat show - a real live crocodile swimming around is admittedly quite impressive, but only for the first five minutes - and then tramped off to look round the rest of the place. We saw kangaroos, wombats, inconceivably deadly snakes and mighty birds of prey, and yet it never really grabbed us by the throats, so to speak. We took our leave and headed back toward Brisbane after a couple of hours.

On the way back we stopped at the eponymous village nestling amongst the Glasshouse Mountains and ate a rather excellent fish supper for lunch while debating what to do. Mount Ngungun presented itself as being closest and only moderately challenging, and after a five minute drive we abandoned the Mazda and commenced our climb. It was difficult enough in parts, and midway up a particularly vertiginous stretch Neil shouted, "Bloody hell! Look at the size of that thing!" or something to that effect. A massive spider, black with yellow spots on the joints of its legs, hung sphinx-like on its web beside the path. This single hand-sized beast - I haven't been able to identify it yet - was suddenly infinitely more compelling than any number of crocs, wallabies or tigers from Australia Zoo. Not a metre from a well-travelled path, we'd come across just the sort of arachnid fiend that we'd all been looking for since we arrived. It may have been poisonous or it may not, but it was right there and the three of us marvelled at its size and proximity. We climbed on, avoiding the numerous leviathan ants that scuttled towards our feet, and reached the exposed and spine-like summit after half an hour's climb. The flat brushland and verdant forests of Queensland were laid about us and from them shot the monolithic Glasshouse Mountains, their colors attenuated by the hazy distance. So close to the end of the holiday, and on a whim, we'd accidentally discovered our most truly Australian sight yet.

* Bribane hosted World Expo '88 and by all accounts went from an inward looking rural town feared by sheep everywhere to a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis.
** There is a paralysis tick here. A paralysis tick. Dear god.

Insectile armageddon.

In slightly happier news, it was my birthday yesterday and I've now reached the ripe old age of 29. (Although arguably, the first clause in that sentence should be revised.) The household was sluggish at best after Chris' stag/buck's do the night before, and that suited me fine. We ate some freshly laid eggs for breakfast* and once the menfolk were up and about, we headed over to the park across the road to throw a rugby ball around for a while and otherwise bask in the afternoon sun.

After some dinner, Neil and I trotted back out to lob the ball back and forth during a pastoral ramble through the desiccated woods that dotted the park. We saw wild bush turkeys pecking for insects (a suicidal eating habit if ever there was one); kookaburras darting through the trees and web upon web of indeterminate spiders. Neil walked into one. There was swearing.

Australia, it appears, is a veritable zoo of fanged, taloned and poison-spewing minifauna. "Watch out for redback spiders," we were warned. "Their venom causes you to swell up until you explode all over the place. And then your corpse melts."

Neil told a story of a wolf spider that crawled onto a friend's shoulder. "It was the size of his hand. It's not poisonous but it would tear your arm off as soon as look at it. They could only kill it by tying it between two pick-ups and ripping it in two."

And the ants! The ants have reached Phase IV down here. "And then you have the fire ant. It's deadly to all other ants. It can breathe fire, you see. And it teleports inside your brain to eat it from the inside out."

* "Ach, I think I'm egged out. I'll give them a miss."
"Are you sure? Eggs are a known appetite suppressant."
"So is all other food!"

Torpedoed!

My jet lag has now entirely disappeared but has been replaced by the lesser know tent lag. I had thought that my internal body clock had successfully set itself to Brisbane Mean Time, but it now seems to be inextricably linked to the sunset and sunrise. It gets dark, and I more or less fall asleep where I stand. It gets light, and the sun's rays blast straight through the blue flysheet and then through my eyelids and I'm awake at 5:19 am or whatever godforsaken hour sunrise occurs at today. On the upside, this sleeping pattern makes it nigh impossible to get a hangover and was fixin' to be just the job for the early starts required for the week's forthcoming diving course.

In a spectacularly cruel twist of fate, then, my diving course has been both metaphorically and literally blown out of the water. Chris dropped me off in nearby Stafford Heights today for my dive medical, where a nurse used a spirometer to measure my lung function, and then passed me onto a doctor for more traditional reflex, visual acuity and physical checks. Looking at the printout from the spirometer, he re-tested me with it and printed out the second, slightly better test.

Apparently my lung capacity is 115% of the expected size for my height and weight, but the FEF_25-75% (trips off the tongue, don't it?), measuring sustained flow of air over the middle few seconds of each exhalation, is only 73% of the predicted value. He apologetically told me that it should be at least 75% to be completely safe, and he had to put me down as temporarily unfit to dive.

As I was leaving, he suggested that I could organise some further tests to bear out whether or not I'm beyond hope. Unfortunately these particular tests are A) expensive and B) have a lead time slightly longer than the 16 hours left before the course is due to start. Oh well: bagpiping as a kid has clearly given me disproportionately big lungs, and on/off asthma around the same time has partially screwed them. Bugger.

Had it not been an unseemly hour to do so, I'd've gone straight to the pub to drown (oh, the irony) my sorrows.

The holiday gathers momentum,

even if your host does not. Chris' family - mum, dad, sister and brother-in-law - have arrived, and only this morning Neil was dropped off from his brief fishin' sojourn with another Brisbanian mate. Chris and I spent an evening erecting a tent city/favela in the back yard for the migrant Joads wedding guests and each night, replete with some native culinary delight, I stumble back there and sleep soundly until awoken by the sound of the chickens, or the soft slap of bat guano hitting the tent under the palm tree.

I've had a remarkably sedate few days since our Platoon episode on Tuesday; highlights include sitting around, sitting around reading, and sitting around drinking. A couple of events distinguish themselves: I took a trip into Brisbane proper with Davis/d(e) and Jenna to look for some culture and wound up sitting around reading in the Botanical Gardens, and secondly, I've booked myself onto a PADI Open Water diving course next week. This should take four days and hopefully my respiratory system will remain bagpipe-capable for the wedding on Saturday. Another expensive arrow is added to my poor-people-need-not-apply extreme sports quiver! It's fun to be middle class.

This afternoon the stag/buck's do kicks off, and then on Sunday I'll start reading up on the dive course. Sitting around (reading/drinking) will give way to action. Stay tuned!

J'arrive!

My jet lag has all but evaporated, and I'm now reclining in conspicuous luxury chez Chris et Leyla. The house is excellent; in fact, it's really more of a property than a house - chooks (chickens) out the back; a massive barbie (barbeque) on which to cook snags (sausages) and a fridge (fridge) full of beer (beer) in the basement. Admittedly it is slightly less full at the moment.

In addition to the blessed diminution of my jet lag, I have also returned to more or less normal impulses to eat. Airlines have this well-developed strategy to keep the cattle passengers so well fed and occupied with eating that they're distracted from their distinctly unnatural environment and hence do not descend into screaming anarchy. This strategy unfortunately means that I ate five airline/airport meals over the course of approximately a day and a half and proceeded to feel hungry pretty much all the time for the first day I was here. Luckily, a gigantic, delicious steak introduced to the barbeque for the briefest of encounters sorted that out on the first night here.

Yesterday Chris and I were driving semi-aimlessly around, looking for some generic rainforest to marvel at and somehow the conversation turned to both last year's and this year's road trips. I mentioned that in the States last year we'd considered, in passing, trying to find a shooting range. Quick as a flash, Chris was on the phone to an ex-work colleague, the car pulled a U-turn and we were heading south of the Brisbane river towards Belmont Rifle Range.

"Good God," I said. "What the hell are we playing at?"

We arrived to the sporadic crack of gunfire, parked and walked with mounting trepidation to the office. The woman behind the counter gave us a couple of forms to fill in, took our photo IDs and A$30 each and handed us a 12-gauge over-under shotgun, 25 shells and 25 clay pigeons. Just like that.

"How do we use it, exactly?" we asked.
"Oh, just ask the range officer," she replied.

We did. He didn't seem to know how to work the safety on the gun. I groaned internally. After a few minutes of dry-firing it, with the shells still safely in their box, we'd worked it out. Chris had been clay-pigeon shooting once before and had a few words of choice advice: "Hold it tightly against your shoulder."

Those were the all of the choice words he had.

I loaded the gun with the safety on and snapped it shut while Chris loaded the clay pigeon trap.

"Pull!" I said.
"What?" he said. We were both wearing earplugs.
"Pull!" I shouted.

The clay shot into the air. Bang went the gun. Smash the clay conspicuously did not go, and landed serenely on the grass. We were all still alive (including the clay pigeon); my shoulder did not hurt; the gun broke open easily enough and a wisp of smoke came out of the barrel.

"Holy crap," I said. "That was mental." And so it went for another 49 shells - the first box being expended with minimal loss of clay pigeon life - and we handed the gun back, broken open and perceptibly warm, after about 45 minutes.

"You guys still have a bit of time left on your gun hire. Do you want to try a rifle?" asked the cheerful woman behind the counter. "You could try a two-two, a triple-two or a two-two-three."
"Uh," we said. "What?"
"Well, the two-twos go pop and the others go bang."

Some confused conversation later, we were in temporary possession of a .223 rifle with a 8x scope and a box of twenty cartridges. The feeling was massively bizarre. A klaxon went off, and the range officer said through the tannoy: "The range is now open. You may fix your targets."

And so we laid the rifle on the bench, bolt conspicuously open, and crunched off into the field over the gravel-like carpet of spent cartidge cases with the other (surprisingly nerdy-looking) shooters to pin our targets on the 50 yard wooden fence. After some more reassuringly authoritative instruction from the range officer, Chris slotted a shell in, closed the bolt, sighted over the wooden rest and fired. A small puff of dust scooted up from the bank of earth behind the target.

"I think I missed," he said. Four more shots later we swapped over and I did the same until we'd fired all twenty. The range opened again and we trudged shakily out again to get our perforated targets. Adding it up later (it took a couple of goes because my mind was whirling), Chris edged it with 97 while I'd scored 92.

We handed the rifle back and thanked the range officer and the woman behind the desk. We sat in the car. "Mother of God," I said. "That was nuts."

It had been nuts, but it had also been disturbingly both easy and fun. The concept of shooting - pointing a loaded gun at something you wish to harm quite seriously - had been neutered by the good-natured atmosphere of the place and the reduction, on the rifle range, of the whole thing to a points-scoring game. Dangerously neutered, I think; we spent less money than we would have done if we'd gone ten-pin bowling and yet we'd gone from computer game snipers to pseudo-real ones in about an hour.

We drove back home, cracked open a beer and looked at our respective targets. What a mind-bogglingly surreal start to the holiday.

The terrorists have already won:

I got through the security at Edinburgh with nary a comment, and after lugging my kit to Heathrow Terminal 3, settled into the check-in queue. (As an aside, spending five hours waiting for a flight at Heathrow does feel slightly Terminal.)

"What hand luggage do you have?" asked the guy behind the desk.
"Just this bag (which I handily checked for size at Edinburgh) and a set of bagpipes."
"You'll only be able to take one of them into the cabin," he replied.
"What? The BAA website says that I can take one item plus a musical instrument." (No laughing at the back, please.)
"I'm afraid not. You'll have to check one of them in, or put one inside your suitcase."

With a great deal of sighing and muttering I crammed The Grapes of Wrath and my iPod into my pipe case and stormed impotently off to security.

"Just out of curiosity," I asked an attendant, "am I supposed to be able to bring on a piece of hand luggage as well as a musical instrument?"
"Yes," she said. "You are."

If I ever see that check-in desk guy again his Grapes will feel my Wrath via a swift kick to the knackers.

The calm before the storm:

okay, so this has been an even slower news week.

Josh came up to visit over the weekend, notionally for a Vegas that unfortunately went the way of an apathetic dodo. Instead we began by pre-lubricating ourselves (in a social sense) with mucho beer and then patronised Annabel's birthday bash at the Human Be-In. It was an excellent night, if somewhat blurry. I cornered Annabel and talked at her about writing websites (in both senses) and have now resolved to at least look into creating one of my own; marvelled once again at the smallness of her phone and later retired to a booth to have booze ferried my way by obliging friends.

The next day, a planned pub crawl from the Shore up to the centre of town was very nearly dead before it even began. Eventually, feeling extraordinarily averse to alcohol, I caught up with Jeff and Josh in the Wash. I forced a few down to keep up and was eternally grateful when the appointed hour for dinner rolled around. Ash joined us at the old flat for some hybrid lasagne (mmm hybrid lasagne) and we all headed very slowly back to the Wash for a few more. Jeff and Josh gamely headed off to a party twice removed and I was very, very glad to be able to call it a night.

[Next time the RF should be coming at you from the other side of the world. Return to Oz is go.]

Okay, so it's been a slow news week.

On Sunday morning, impelled by some vague desire to both recapture lost youth and grow up a bit into the bargain, I made an executive decision to make some French toast. I bought some bacon, eggs, a none-less-healthy Mother's Pride plain loaf and an Observer. The basic idea of a civilised, cooked breakfast avec lefty newspaper covered the growing up part of the equation (and oddly is something I almost never do), while the artery-hardening mix of bacon and plain loaf harked back to childhood days of pushing the token fried tomatoes to one side to get to the good shit.

Of course I made rather a meal of it and eventually sat down to some rubbery French toast that managed to be simultaneously over- and under-cooked, a cup of burnt coffee and a couple of rashers of uninspiring supermarket bacon, but y'know, the thought was there.

Ash ate cereal and yoghurt. Hippie!

On Monday night Coba Fynn - shambling behemoth of rock that it is - got together for the second rehearsal for our Second Coming. Doug and I were so late that David and Charlie went to the pub in our absence, but my word: once we were plugged in and warmed up, you could palpably feel the rock. After you sifted through the cacophonous layers of ear-splitting noise, that is. Roll on December! I predict a Christmas number one.

P.S. Jez' sister Cis (yes, I too thought she was everyone's sister for a while) has put a minor masterpiece of a video up on YouTube. Wilfred the dog: il espère. Il espère.

Business as usual:

Dave, Gill, Ash and I met up at the Car Wash (yes, I have lived here for that long) on Saturday and got utterly plastered. The next morning I felt very bad indeed. The end.

On Saturday night, afraid to go near a pub for fear of an allergic reaction, Ash and I patronised the cinema again, this time to see Right At Your Door. If you haven't seen anything about it (and I'm not giving anything away here), it's about a dirty bomb attack on L.A. and one guy's attempt to seal up his house against the airborne toxins.

I was underwhelmed. It should have been excellent. It should have been claustrophobic, but ruined that by moving the point of view outside the house for no real reason. It should have been tense, but squandered what little tension it had created by some melodramatic, unconvincing character building. The denouement should have been unexpected and shocking, but was mundane (in the context of the film) and fleeting.

Basically, as far as films costing less than a million bucks to make, Hard Candy owns Right At Your Door very hard indeed. Try that instead.

The mighty iron steed:

further to the preparations for next month's globetrotting, fund-eating trips I've been pratting around with posting to my Flickr account via email, and so I now present to you the first fruit of this astonishingly nerdy pursuit: the finished form of my over-described bike.

The last big piece to fall into place were the forks - a pair of Kona Project 2s - sized to mimic suspension forks with 80mm of travel. This suits the frame much better than the £10 under-the-counter specials I was using until this week, and suddenly it feels like a real bike. The steerer of the original forks was very slightly narrower than the 1 1/8^th inch headset diameter and so there was far too much play in the steering; the Project 2s look to be made to a much lower tolerance and everything is rock solid now.

It now goes, stops, turns and imbues the builder (i.e. me) with a trememdous sense of smugness. Job done!

I took this photo with my phone's camera, and well, it's not great. Bit of fish-eye type distortion evident on the back wheel and despite the original image being 1600x1200, there really isn't a lot of fine detail. A bit of experimentation is going to be required, I think...

Anyway, stay tuned for more similar techy high jinks. I bet you can't wait.

I really am failing to do anything of note

these days, with the exception of interminable amounts of preparation for the upcoming RF World Tour: Colonial Edition^TM. I'm now insured to the eyeballs for snowboarding, scuba diving and general holiday hijinks anywhere "worldwide including North America" which is funny because I thought "worldwide" meant just that.

I've also signed up for a new mobile contract that includes a phone the size of a planet. "That's no moon," I mused as I uncrated it on Friday. The somewhat weak/geek rationale for this purchase is to have mobile internet access so we can plan ahead in terms of accommodation and avoiding tropical storms. Of course my contract doesn't actually stretch to mobile internet in the US, and so the phone will no doubt see me skulking around business districts looking for unsecured wireless networks.

Rock. And. Roll.

The weekend was taken up with working (sigh) and some low key, pleasantly grown-up boozing in honour of Dave's birthday and then a rare visit by Waxy to Edinburgh. At some point Ash suddenly asked me, remembering a conversation about philosophy books no less: "Did you dig into my Kant?"

I almost died.

Under the weather:

your host has been a walking catarrh factory for the past five days or so, and the whirlwind of exciting, edifying and educational events that normally find their way to the pages of the RF had to be pared down only to essential drinking activities. Fortunately the week abounded with such opportunities, challenging me in my weakened state but injecting a little hazy light into my mucous-filled gloom.

I variously went out with Paul, Ash and her workmates, my sister and a plethora of mafia types for a variety of "quiet" nights out, birthday parties and leaving parties. I really enjoyed myself; despite feeling like death most of the time (yes, yes, going to the pub when one is already feeling ropey isn't the best course of action) I rediscovered the good old fashioned "night out with your mates" - it's been a while since I've been out with the mafia en masse and I felt a warm glow in the pit of my stomach. Along with some recurrent nausea, but that was just the cold making its presence felt.

Apart from that, I went to see Severance with Ash (meh; sort of a low-rent Dog Soldiers, and correspondingly not quite so good) and pulled the plug on TM.net. Despite the fact that it was cobbled together by Martin and I over the course of a few Stella-soaked evenings, and consequently was held together mostly by rubber bands and spit, it's still a shame to see it go.

Ah well: stay tuned for more news on the Coba Fynn front...

Now that I can breathe without involuntarily exhaling liquid snot, normal service will be resumed soon.

Dammit!

At the wedding, I made the hilarious comment that Dave was off to "drain his snake on a plane" in the toilets. Ze Frank has beaten me to it.

Bastard.

I have rediscovered my drinking mojo.

Dave, Martin and I drove down* to Wetherby on Friday evening through torrential rain that recalled the Journey Into Terror from last year's road trip. Just north of Newcastle the rain eased off a bit and we stopped briefly to, as Dave put it, "snack my bitch up". It became apparent later, once we were safely ensconced in Wetherby's New Inn, that a Bacon Double Cheeseburger doesn't have sufficient calorific content to defeat six pints of Tetley's. Bitter? Why yes. I felt positively subhuman the next morning.

Fortunately the wedding wasn't until 3pm and I was just about intact by then. We got there by the skin of our teeth (taxi driver: "Oh, you meant 1 pm"; waitress at lunch: "Can I re-take your order for the third time?") and I suspect that the traditional sleepy English hamlet pace of life doesn't scale well to an influx of us city folks.

The church was packed for the ceremony, and ceremony there was in spades. Church of Scotland weddings seems to consist of vows, rings and confetti all compressed into about twenty minutes but this one was sufficiently more complicated that I began to wonder which branch of Christianity was being celebrated. On account of the lack of A) Latin, B) glossolia and C) polygamy I eventually decided it must be Church of England, but only just. Perhaps the priest had defected from the Catholic Church - a loose canon, so to speak.

Anyway, the ceremony went like clockwork and I was amazed by how happy and composed Dom and Alice seemed. Seeing them afterwards, and notwithstanding the fact that I'd just witnessed their marriage, I was struck by the feeling that they were genuinely meant to be married to each other. They're going to be a fantastic (married) couple!

The reception was on the village green and was a genial affair. The speeches were great, particularly Alice's Dad's flipchart deconstruction of his daughter as property up for auction (you had to be there). I ate instead of drank myself into a stupor, though not for want of trying the latter, and stumbled to bed about 1 am after what really had been an excellent night**.

On Sunday, miraculously hangover-free, we congregated at Dom's Dad's house for some homemade pizza and cake before the journey back and said goodbye to the newlyweds. We dropped Martin off in Renfrew and drove back along the M8 just in time for me to meet Ash and Scott at the Pear Tree. Six pints of posh European lager turned my brain to mush and I was very, very glad to collapse into bed around 2 am.

I was considerably less glad to arrive twenty minutes late to Monday's 10 am meeting, exuding stale beer through my sweat glands.

P.S. Ruth is back from Oz, and in fine form. It's good to have her back!

* I must plug the Trøll again - it breezes on past 205,000 miles with only a new exhaust and tyres on its account and continues to pretend that it's a bit sporty into the bargain. I had a hole in the still-original exhaust downpipe patched up in the nick of time on Friday morning and the note is back to its throaty best. I mentioned this to the garage owner as a mechanic backed the car off the ramp, and speculated that perhaps it might have an unusual firing order because of its half-a-V8 origins .

"Naw," he said. "Naw, it disnae."

So are myths dispelled and fanciful notions brought to earth.

** Here are some photos of the wedding:

• Dan
  
• Kris
  
• Michelle
  
• Ro
  

The sleeping giant of Coba Fynn

at last nears the end of its slumber, and in the antediluvian recesses of its mind, a multi-faceted thought is given sonorous voice. That voice declares to all those irresponsible enough to listen: "Light her up / cheeseburgers / whisk(e)y!" in the sort of accent that Tom Baker might possess if the Tardis has stopped in either Ireland or Edinburgh for any length of time. Charlie's threatened return to Glasgow is almost upon us and then nothing will stand in our way. We've even had a few practices, which mostly begin with Davis responsibly guiding us through CF oldies and then degenerate into ever messier covers of Crossroads after I've worn down his defences. Good times!

Speaking of Coba Fynn, Davis has oft propounded his theory of Blues as Sandwich. Were a closed-minded musical type to say that all blues is the same, Davis' response would be that said assertion is like claiming that all sandwiches are the same. I heartily agree and so the other day I pondered what form the hypothetical Coba Fynn sandwich might take. The creation of this thought-sandwich could proceed down only one path, and I was immediately seized by the conviction that it would be a majestic stilton cheeseburger such as might be ordered at Bar 91 or the Hard Rock Café.

Tiny Monkey, I think, would have been an avant-garde take on a traditional sandwich. Maybe roast beef and horseradish on a ciabatta or something similar. Accompanying it would be huge lump of cheddar representing my insistence on playing Happy Twenty Thirty-Fourth Birthday ad nauseum. Which, of course, was a twelve-bar blues song and so the circle is, ouroboros-like, complete. Granted, it would be a little mouldy by now because it's been lying out for a while.

(Holy crap, what's happened to my language? A couple of HP Lovecraft books have turned me into a virtual antique. Ah well, perhaps to-morrow's entry shall be less verbose...)

Apart from some extremely pleasant festival boozing, it's been a fairly quiet week; with Dom's and Chris' weddings coming up in a week and a couple of months respectively, I've been mostly concerned with assembling kilt gear and practicing the pipes. Ash and I drove up to St. Andrews and then back through Fife to visit la famille, and also to convince me that the car is up to the trip to York Leeds/Bardsey next weekend. It is, and it continues to rock.

Enter the festival

and hope that it does not enter you. I'm already bored of this year's festivities. Trying to get my bike up to Ash's flat on the Royal Mile - it would've been far easier with a tazer or a cattle prod - the prevalence of performers as opposed to festival goers seemed pretty plain. Maybe half of the people hardening the arteries of the old town (and providing 95% of the London accents to be heard) were actors, stage crew or assorted hangers-on. The other half were Spanish schoolchildren slouching around in jeans so tight they impeded their ability to get the fuck out of my way.

This year the flyering masses seem to have hit upon a new way of distributing their forests of leaflets: that of hitting upon the public. Ash mentioned that a Canadian "comedian" had more or less attempted to chat her up in order to secure her attendance at his gig the next night, and I suffered a similar fate at the hands of a prowling young fashionista.

EXT. Royal Mile:

PYF sits down on bike rack next to RF. Personal space is encroached upon.

PYF
You look a bit sullen.

RF
You're damn skippy.

PYF smiles sympathetically and makes visible attempt to look winning.

PYF
It must be pretty annoying to have all these people with London accents arrive all at once.

RF grinds teeth.

RF
If you say so.

PYF produces flyer for comedy show.

PYF
Well, if you want cheering up, why don't you come along to our show?

RF
Kill me now.

Ash arrived in the nick of time and we escaped to Favorit for some lunch and chat in the sun. I was ravenous, having run the Water of Leith 10K earlier that day*, and felt suitably deserving of lunch and a pint. Ash had a coke float with strawberry ice cream, and upon sampling it I declared it to be like strawberry heroin. It was fearsomely good, and astonishingly bad for one's health. At first I thought I could detect the coke and the ice cream reacting fizzily but then perceived it to be my teeth dissolving under the onslaught of sugar present in the liquid almost to the point of saturation. Tasty stuff indeed.

We wandered over to the Meadows with a blanket and a bottle of wine and proceeded to alternately read wanky books and criticise the great unwashed sharing the park with us. I rolled my eyes at a group of hippy/punk hybrids, and we speculated that the Rastafarian types making surreptitious hand gestures at each other were all drug dealers. All in all, it was a very snobbish, middle class and marvellously entertaining weekend. Maybe I like the festival after all.

* I managed it this year in 46 minutes and 30 seconds - which is a minor miracle given how little training I've done this year. I have an unhelpful tendency to run as fast as I feel comfortable regardless of how far I have to go, and so I shot away at the start only to be hobbled by a fearsome stitch as I came to Stockbridge. I slowed right down and managed to speed up again a bit towards the end and somehow shaved a minute off last year's time. Thanks to those of you who sponsored us this year!

In other less Crimewatch-worthy news,

Ash and I had a splendid little meal at the Tapas Tree the other night. As befits the current ascendancy of chorizo over bacon (sorry Josh) in my home cooking, we ordered a shitload of the stuff and I wolfed it down with abandon. It truly is the processed meat product of the gods. We sat outside in the waning sun, finished our meal and made our slightly wobbly way home. Hurray for al fresco dining coupled with mildly excessive boozing! I'd say "long may it continue", but the weather looks like it has firm ideas in the other direction. One scorching month book-ended by oppressing humidity and random showers does not a summer make.

On Sunday evening we drove over to my parent's place in Fife for a meal. It was all terribly cosy and familial (in a good way!) and after a placatory visit to my gran we ended heading home up on a slightly less main road than I'd intended. A flickering orange glow in the sky grew brighter and brighter as we headed towards Dunfermline and suddenly, as we crested a hill, we saw it was the flare from the Mossmorran ethylene plant. It was a fantastically dystopian sight: the sky was bright enough and coloured just so as to suggest a distinctly non-shepherd-friendly dawn.

Something made me feel conspiratorially glad to have seen it and it was sufficiently otherworldly and unreal to blow away the cobwebs of more earthly concerns. Like, you know, seeing one's stolen bike paraded up and down Leith Walk.

Well, almost.

Another bike post, I'm afraid,

but one made for an entirely irritating reason.

I was over on Leith Walk on Friday lunchtime, and as I unlocked my bike I happened to glance across the road. A guy, maybe thirty or so, was pushing two bikes along the pavement on the other side of the road. One of them was instantly familiar - it looked exactly like the bike that was stolen from the flat's stairwell in January.

I couldn't be sure it was the same bike, so I jumped on my own bike and rolled slowly down the other side of the stree and watched as he made his way along it. Eventually I was as certain as I could be. I crossed the road, jumped off my bike and said "Excuse me - that looks a lot like a bike of mine that was stolen a few months ago."

Instantly, with no shock or bafflement, he said "Swear to God mate, I got this from my cousin two years ago." How the hell do you reply by making an instant excuse if you know the bike is rightfully yours? I'd laugh openly in my accuser's face if he had the temerity to say something like that.

He stopped walking and told me he was on his way to pick up his daughter. In return I told him that I recognised the rear mudguard, held on as it was with an elastic band and as it had been when it was stolen; that the seat post was rusted in place as it had been when it was stolen and that the bar ends were familiar to me because I'd replaced them just before it had been stolen. The only different parts were the tyres and the saddle - interestingly, the only major perishable parts aside from the brake blocks.

The galling thing was that I had no way to prove to this brazen motherfucker that it was my bike, and without physically restraining him I couldn't stop him. Had I been a little less astounded at his barefacedness I'd have called the police and asked them how to handle it. In the event I muttered "Aye, right," to his claim that he was sorry my bike had been nicked, and let him go.

Unbelievable. The serial number of my current bike's frame is now noted down in a safe place, and should it ever be nicked and the thief has the misfortune to cross my path, I'll be a hell of a lot more pissed off than I was this time...

Commentary:

I started writing a couple of quick, throwaway responses to the comments on the last entry but I just couldn't help myself. Here are the full-blown, ill-thought-out and rambling replies.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2: okay, first thing here is the excess surrounding this film. It cost $255 million to make and to my tastes at least, wasn't anything special. It was dull. It lacked a coherent plot. It doesn't matter how good the CGI is - show me a pirate with a head like that of a Hammerhead Shark and I know it's CGI. I can see where the money went, and it's a crying shame some of it wasn't diverted to the script-writing engine room.

The thing that hacks me off most, though, wasn't the crappiness of the film. It was the blind consumption by the world and its dog (myself included) of said crappiness. I wandered along to a film that I knew already was never going to exceed mildly entertaining mediocrity. What happened to my critical faculties, and by extension to those of the several million other viewers taken for a (boring) ride? As I write this, $540,300,444 - over half a billion dollars - has been spent by people willingly going to see it.

Why didn't several million people choose to see Hard Candy or Thank You for Smoking instead? Both of which, incidentally, are absolute gems. Flawed gems perhaps, but at least they get points for trying. Why has the world poured half a billion dollars into the coffers of an amoral ethical vacuum like Walt Disney? You can argue at least some of the 50 million or so people who've seen PotC2 must have enjoyed it, but did Disney really need to make a profit of $300 million dollars off the back of that? Of course not - it's a company driven by the market to make shitloads of money to keep its shareholders happy.

In summary, our expectations and willingness to pursue them have been worn smooth by an avalanche of gaudy mediocrity in the name of making a buck. That is what is wrong with the film.

Phew.

Optimus Prime - cocktail edition: ah, now this is the clever bit. Keef writes:

That name is not to be used lightly! It had better be a bloody good cocktail ;)

I was in the Wash the other day, idly reading their cocktail menu. The name "The Beamer" caught my eye, and I wondered what it was.

It's Jim Beam and coke. (Wow, I mistyped "coke" as "cock" there. My typed correspondence revolves around a particular type of joke - can you guess what it is yet?) I mean seriously, whisk(e)y and coke doesn't qualify as a cocktail. Cuba Libre is rum and coke, or Bacardi and Coca-Cola for the branding whores. Okay, okay, for me. You see, Optimus Prime could be something monumentally mundane and still get away with it. I propose...I dunno, Red Kola and gin. Winner!

I had the misfortune

to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Saturday evening. The fine art of the summer blockbuster has recently been reconciled to me, after about a decade of continuous disappointments, by The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3, and so I was anticipating said nautical antics with enthusiasm.

Boy, was I wrong about that. This is the most calculatedly evil film ever made. Had it had the decency to be outright bad I might have written it off as a poor choice of movie and immediately forgotten about it. No, this was a film which somehow, astonishingly, managed to burn $1.7 million per minute and yet be relentlessly, stupefyingly boring. 'Disjointed', 'incoherent' and 'terminally dull' are terms which would adequately describe this film only if accompanied by repeated blows with a baseball bat to the head of the listener.

"It's dis-" <thwack> "-join-" <thwack> "-ted!"
"Ah, I understand now."

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is nothing less than a perfectly encapsulated explanation of all that is wrong with the western world. It presents irrefutable proof that there is no God. In short, this film is a horrifying cultural singularity the likes from which civilisation is unlikely to recover.

Ach, what the hell. I'll give it 3/5.

In other news, Jeff and Devon are back from the States; post-viva, Jeff is now a PhD (excellent stuff!), and during a thought-experiment this afternoon I invented a cocktail called "Optimus Prime". Good times!

[In lieu of a real post

(come back tomorrow for that), here's a bit of random musing/rambling about the très exciting subject of running.]

I have finally (i.e. four weeks later than planned) started running again in a weak imitation of training for the Water of Leith 10K (visit Sponsor ME on the sidebar to gain some karma points) in August. The run follows the river as closely as possible, and my usual training route is to head down to Stockbridge, up the same path as the run itself and head back from Roseburn along the main road. It's somewhere between 3 and 4 miles, and it's a nice enough route so that it doesn't feel too much like a chore.

On Tuesday I hit upon the cunning plan of doing this in the other direction. It was around 7 pm, and I'd just finished the sweaty cycle back up from work. The weather was muggy and warm but had cooled down to a pleasant level when I left the flat, and the moisture in the air made it almost a little chilly. Going in the other direction means that the first mile and a half or so is more or less flat, and it's a far better warm-up than thundering down the near-vertical St. Stephen's Street into Stockbridge.

The next section along the Water of Leith itself is probably the most picturesque mugger's paradise in Edinburgh. It's green, shady, pleasant, lined with excellent hiding places and populated exclusively by poncy middle-class joggers bearing iPods. (I make no bones about being the absolute apex/nadir of said pretentious muppets.) It really was an excellent night to be out: the little bit of moisture left meant I didn't overheat and the sun slanting down through the slightly dank undergrowth gave everything a terribly HP Lovecraftian aura.

Of course, running up the near-vertical St. Stephen's Street is infinitely worse than charging down it. Not exactly an ideal warm-down.

[Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.]

Work, rest and playing away:

having driven around 50% of the company into the ground over a six month period, the management thought it'd be a splendid idea to cart their hollow-eyed remnants, plus those of the lucky escapees, to a nearby beach and provide them with a barbeque by way of compensation. Compare and contrast: six months of working late nights and weekends to meet a schedule written off as impossible before it had even begun, versus a burger in the sun. It pisses me off royally, and I wasn't even one of the 50%.

Most annoyingly, it was a really good day. Along with a few of the other hardier types, your intrepid correspondent went for an entertaining surfing lesson while for the less eXtreme there was some sedate horse riding. Boules, frisbee, football and rounders were played; the porta-bar was cleaned out of beer and the barbeque was a tasty affair indeed. As the sun started to dip and the breeze took on just a hint of a chill, the bus arrived exactly on cue and conveyed us back to the city, replete with food, booze and sneaking suspicions that in work terms, we'd been had.

The rat race is an odd place, really.

On Saturday, Moritz and I (where are ye, self-professed mountain bikers? Well dost thou shrink from my entreaties when the trails beckon!) burned up the trails in Glentress with a vengeance: no longer for us the tepid charms of the red route but instead the rocky (and surprisingly straightforward) black run. We rode about a quarter of the V-trail - V is the new X, I can only assume - to add a bit of variation to the normal route and it was well worth the detour. The scenery transported me back to childhood holidays in the north of Scotland and the rocky descents brought me back with a jolt, although truth be told their visual bark was worse than their physical bite.

In the evening Ash and I wandered along to La Partenope in Dalry for Giancarlo's birthday meal. It was an excellent evening: one of those rare occasions where everything falls into place and yet there's nothing out of the ordinary to wax lyrical about. The chat was good; the food plentiful and mostly enjoyable; the coffees tiny and the surroundings suitably cosmopolitan. We trooped over to the Pear Tree for a few postprandial pints in the fading warmth of the evening and called it a very pleasant night.

Sunday was taken up with some Trøll-related mechanical fumblings and a quiet barbeque in the concrete oasis behind Jez's flat. What an great week...!

More money, fewer gears redux:

The art of single-speed cycling as desecrated by a first-time bike builder:

• Part 1: it begins
  
• Part 2: the build
  
• Part 3: the build continues
  
• Part 4: (anti)climax
  
• Part 5: pictorial evidence
  

"At last!"

the cry goes up, "this two-parter is finally complete."

After caning back from Culross, we split up to wipe the mud/grins off our faces and reassembled in Pancho Villa's. A leisurely carnival of tortillas, burritos (fortunately, I'm now rehabilitated enough to gaze upon said Mexican snack without an involuntary shudder. Turns out it takes a year to be free of Burrito Night Sweats^TM) and alcoholic coffees of varied international provenance took the wind out of our sails a bit. A couple of slow pints in Bannerman's didn't help and so the only thing for it was to hit Opium and discard our protective clothing of dignity.

We had a couple more pints. Smells Like Teen Spirit came on. We jumped around like knobs. \m/

Eventually staggering back from John's at about 5am, we crossed the Meadows amid the gathering dawn and I pronounced it to have been a very good night indeed. I can't wait for the wedding!

P.S: Dan has some more photos of the evening's shenanigans.

"At last!"

the relieved cry goes up from the triumvirate RF readership, "a post that doesn't go into tedious detail about bike chain widths".

Dom is getting married in August, and as such we were legally obliged to engage in typically male activities such as driving too fast and drinking too much. (The '60s favourite - driving too fast while drinking too much - has sadly been eclipsed by less lethal stag diversions.)

After crawling through the treacly flow of T in the Park traffic, Dave and I finally met up with the rest of the herd in Culross for some superior pub grub around 1 pm. Fed and watered, we charged heedlessly off into the Fife countryside, eventually finding the day's entertainment through a combination of dogged persistence and blind luck.

The setup was that we were driving Rage buggies around a dusty, kinked oval track with a vertiginous climb and subsequent drop at one side, and a bumpy, twisty flat section on the other. We didn't directly race each other but instead had 3-lap practice heats to get the hang of things and then a timed 3-lap session to decide the final order.

While waiting to start, we watched the last few laps of the preceding group and grumbled about how slow it looked.

How wrong we were. The karts handled like a scaled-up version of your typical radio-controlled buggy: they skipped and bounced across the berms and kickers, and the suspension travel that looked comically over-compensatory at rest was about only thing that kept one's spine from compressing.

The crowning horror of the circuit was the downhill section on which the gradient kept increasing all the way to the bottom: the only way to tackle it was to point the kart in roughly the right direction, plant the throttle and hope. The suspension dropped as the kart steadily lightened and then compressed with a thump, smacking off the bump stops over the mini-jump about two thirds of the way down; with the kart squirming around underneath you (and while wondering in a dazed sort of way how it was that it hadn't shaken itself to pieces), you wrenched the wheel to the left and slithered around the sweeping left hander. Utter, exhilarating genius.

Dave and Steve have some photos of the day but the only one you really need to see is Dom's disappointment as I squirt my victory juice in his face :) See, some people would have let the stag win. I, on the other hand, am a closet sociopath. The voices tell me to win.

Next up: boozy mentalness in which we paint the town metal.