Apart from TM's amiable demise

(if that doesn't sound too oxymoronic), last week was blissfully quiet. I have absolutely no recollection of what I did most days, and generally that's a good sign - presumably nothing went badly awry.

One notably excellent event was the mini dinner party Ash and I threw in her flat on Sunday evening. She cooked while I whisked, chopped and drank and despite a huffy oven that switched itself off as soon as we gave our attention to something else, everything came together rather nicely. The guests were on excellent form and I happily slid into the role of Inappropriate Comment Boy (sorry, Lisa!). The night wound down after a mercifully small number of Dubrovniks - I'd had quite enough by that point - and I slept the sleep of the plastered. Good times.

The preparation of the Trøll for next week's Nürburgring insanity is now almost complete. While being re-tyred at ludicrous expense, I asked them to check the exhaust - it was sounding a little loud, and I was curious to see if there was a hole that could be patched up.

There was a hole alright. There were three of them, and the silencer was on the verge of falling off completely. Another £200 later and I'd managed to increase the car's value by half in a single afternoon. I did get a free DVD of The Italian Job with the tyres, and it conspicuously didn't reduce their cost by one penny.

So now, post haircut (I said: "Can you just shorten the sides and the back a bit; they're a bit long," and he heard: "Turn me into King of the Mods!"), we're almost ready to rock. Hopefully Ash can travel to the continent without being summarily deported and hopefully the car won't spontaneously catch fire. Wish us luck!

From TM.net:

"It's curtains for the Monkey

Ladies and gentlemen, after two years, three gigs and more line-up changes than both put together, Tiny Monkey has decided to call it quits. It's been a lot of fun, but marshalling a five-piece band both in terms of logistics and musical direction* has taken its toll and it's time to call it a day.

It's not quite over for the Monkey though, because we're splitting off into a many-headed rock chimera that's going to keep on coming atcha like a...a, okay I've let that metaphor get completely away from me. Suffice it to say that Mart will be putting his creative talents into Stroma, Doug, Davis and I will be keeping the hope alive for Coba Fynn and I'm recruiting for the soon-to-be-awesome K Project. Listen out for Monkey tunes from our descendants!

We'd like to say thanks to everyone who has supported us by coming to our gigs - playing live for all of you was the highlight of everything we've done over the past couple of years! - and give a special plug to the excellent 8 Million Ways To Die and Proxy. We predict big things for both of them!

So until the inevitable cash-in tour once we're all independently famous, this is Tiny Monkey signing off.

* Yes, I did in fact just use the term musical direction."

So yeah, the K Project is slightly more urgent than it was last week.

Special K:

but I'm talking neither about breakfast cereal nor horse tranquilisers. Keef of 8 Million Ways To Die came round to the flat the other night to borrow some bass gear and we started talking again about The K Project: a band composed entirely of people called Keith. We were beaten to the punch to the obvious name. Bastards. You'd think we could claim copyright infringement or something at least.

If any guitar-playing and/or singing Keiths are out there with a predisposition towards Queens of the Stone Age or Mogwai-esque prog rock, get in touch! Together we will rock hard, in a Keith way.

Chris and Leyla came by Edinburgh again on their way to London and then to Oz, and a load of the old guard went out on Wednesday night. It's a crying shame they live on the other side of the world - it was a cracking night. We drank, talked of weddings and watched Neil fall over and empty a pint into his lap. Good times.

I had two Easter meals this week: the first, at Ash's on Thursday was a pleasant and very mature affair, at least until the chat turned to testicles; the second, on Sunday, was a marvellously boozy affair that thundered on into the night. Devon cooked an unequivocally awesome ham with Coke (sounds ludicrous but tastes like the Pig of God), and once we finished gorging ourselves on that we continued to booze over a couple of boardgames. We carried on to the Basement and rolled home once the drink had overcome the bellyful of food. An excellent day!

Epilogue redux: the car is alive again. My internet-aided guess was right; the part arrived during the week and I borrowed Ali's car to get to Glasgow with Steven's axle stands and jack.

If I was slightly paranoid about sticking my head under the side of the car to fix the exhaust, I was absolutely horrified at what I had to do this time. I jacked the car up and stuck the stands in place, then slid under the car from the front until I was directly under the engine. I was about three inches of clearance and a split second from a really, really painful accidental death.

With a worrying amount of force I got the broken part out and with some help from a helpful mechanical engineer who was fixing his Land Rover in the next parking bay, got the new one in. The shift worked again, and Road Trip II: Nurburging Folly is back on extremely dangerous track.

This man

is a car collector. A car collector. Why was this never on the "suitable jobs" form at school?

Chris and Leyla

are across in the UK at the moment, and Doug and I took the opportunity to head up to Aberdeen in the the Trøll this weekend to spend some quality time with Chris before their departure for Oz. We picked him up and headed out into the sticks towards his mate Brian's farm. On the way, the car seemed a bit reluctant to shift into 2^nd gear, but it still worked after a fashion and I forgot about it when we arrived at the farm in the midst of the hills and dales near Banchory.

The farm was excellent. I'm not an fundamentally outdoors type but I still compulsively want to buy myself a place in the country whenever I see or stay somewhere like this. The scenery was gently windswept and rugged as opposed to the bare rocks and ground-hugging heather of the Highlands, and the farm itself was set in nine acres of land variously populated with horses, goats, pigs and hens.

Below the farmhouse was a static caravan (or for you American types, a trailer) for visitors. We settled in for an evening of pseudo White Russians (ah, nostalgia) and badly-played bass guitar in a cut-price version of the typical rock star country retreat. The next day we were shown around the farm while bandying some city-folk banter with Brian.

"We had a bonfire here last year. It was really windy, and I could hear the trees crackling as sparks were blown into them. I was a bit worried they'd catch fire."
"Would that kill them, do you think?"
"What, being burned to the ground?"
"Point taken."

We left on Sunday afternoon, dropped off Chris on Sunday with a promise to meet up in Edinburgh on Wednesday, and headed towards Glasgow. After filling up with petrol on the outskirts of Aberdeen, 2^nd gear abruptly stopped working. It happened without any crunching, grinding or other mechanical drama: I clutched, put the gearstick into 2^nd, declutched and remained in 3^rd.

Bugger.

Shortly later, 1^st stopped working. Clutch, stick to 1^st, declutch. End up in 3^rd. It seems the Saab is doomed to develop exactly the same faults as the death-trap 924.

There ensued a three-hour journey very much like a Formula 1 race I once saw where Michael Schumacher was stuck in 3^rd gear, in that we drove far too fast and tried to avoid coming to a complete halt at all costs lest the clutch disintegrate. The glamour factor was admittedly slightly lower. We pulled into Doug's car park after alternately crawling and caning through the Cathedral quarter, piled out of the stricken Saab, hailed a taxi and arrived at the TM practice a full hour late.

All in all, a slightly more stressful Sunday than I had been anticipating.

Epilogue: after a bit of research, it looks likely that a single part of the gearshift linkage has broken. There's a rubber block designed to shear off in a crash so that the transmission can slide under the car instead of through the occupant's legs and apparently it can perish, leading to, for want of a better term, a shafted gearchange. So, one £15 rubber block that can cripple an entire car has been duly ordered and I'll be back under the damn thing again this weekend.

In case anyone worries

that I'm abandoning the wicked crazy life of rocking, rolling and Trølling in favour of pursuing a career in cookery writing, worry not. I had in fact intended to chronicle this last week's escapades along with its foodie highlights on Monday, but somehow they didn't gel. (Or caramelise, perhaps.)

Dave and I went to see the Mighty Boosh the Friday before last. Dave and the Scotsman both loved it; I was a little underwhelmed by the recycling of jokes from the TV series and earlier stage shows, but the odd new one ("Unicorns. With AIDS!" intoned by a dwarf wearing a parka is always good for a laugh) rescued it.

TM reconvened for our first post-gig practice in Bridge Court Studios, in the semi-dereliction of the industrial estates by the Clyde. We've tried maybe seven or eight different rehearsal studios, and only Berkeley 2 and the Brill Building/Core Studios/Q10 Studios/whatever-the-hell-it's-called-this-week rise anywhere above mediocrity. There's a simple recipe for constructing a decent rehearsal room:

• Make it exactly like Berkeley 2.
  

There, I've said it. You don't need a flashy website - just tell us your phone number and address. B2 doesn't even seem to have a website, and yet Snow Patrol and Idlewild rehearse there. Rooms should be warm, well-equipped, sound-proofed and well supplied with extra power sockets. The guy on the desk should be friendly and helpful, like you'd expect in any high street shop. The number of places run by sociopathic music-business time-servers and grunting neanderthals is disappointingly high.

Core/Q10 gets away with reliving the grunge era by virtue of its innate charm and practical rooms, and Berkeley 2 blows the rest of them away by choosing to be consummately professional and unpretentious; it's as simple as that. (By the way, I don't want to knock Bridge Court entirely; it wasn't out and out bad, just had a DIY feel about it and was disappointingly small.)

On Sunday, I finally got round to investigating a clanking noise that had been coming from underneath the Saab for a couple of weeks. After a previous bit of investigation on the web, it sounded like it might be one of the rubber exhaust hangers either having come off or perished, and so given that they only came to about £25, I had speculatively ordered all the related parts.

Armed with said parts, a jack and some axles stands borrowed from Steven at work, I parked the car in the work car park (this being the only place I could guarantee that I wouldn't be run over while poking out from under the car) and jacked it up.

Now there's nothing actually interesting about what I fixed while I was under there, but the nagging fear that a ton and a half of metal is about to pulp the upper half of one's body is a novel feeling. I sincerely hope that the next thing I fix doesn't require me to risk (uninsured) life and limb - there'll be plenty of time for that during the upcoming Nürburgring madness...

On Sunday night, Giancarlo was supporting a guy called Mark Eitzel at Cabaret Voltaire, and Ash and I wandered along to offer some moral rather than musical support. Giancarlo's lot were rather good; further to my earlier rant about drummers messing with the holy trinity of tom-toms, the drummer here used only the floor tom and yet rather impressively got away with it.

I'm torn between minimal and maximal approaches to music, and I think TM is too: I'd love us to play three-chord rockers with Weezer-esque skill and abandon but at the same time the FF stylings of our new stuff, with all the attendant synth and effects magic are especially satisfying when it all comes together. What I do know is that Eitzel's set, with only his own guitar as backup, was perhaps fractionally too minimal. Maybe it was my largely unfounded antipathy to singer-songwriters making itself felt, but it seemed a little too close to performance poetry; I like my live music to be a bit more enthusiastic.

(As an aside, it turns out that Eitzel is something of a darling of the American alternative scene, and so no doubt every other audience member would disagree with me - at least I can offhandedly tell my grandkids "Mark Eitzel? Yeah, I saw him in 2006. He wasn't all that," before unpausing Grand Prix again.)

Domestic God, if I do say so myself.

On an eerily similar note to Dev's latest entry, my week was overshadowed by a cookbook Jeff gave to me for my Christmas. Not for me the completely awesome-sounding Meat Book but instead Nigel Slater's excellent Kitchen Diaries. It works as a kind of seasonal-by-default cookbook, where he describes the food he has cooked or eaten on each given day.

Unlike Devon, my knowledge of/zealotry towards responsible eating (decent treatment of animals, vegetables that are actually in season and not shipped thousands of miles from wherever is hot enough to grow them) is woefully lacking, and so I'm mostly treating the Kitchen Diaries as an informal recipe book. I was flipping through April and came across a description of a risotto-type thing that looked interesting. There was no recipe, just a bare-bones, almost off-hand description of a meal cobbled together from the remnants of a post-holiday fridge and I thought "Right then: let's have a go at that."

Unintentionally in the seat-of-the-pants spirit of things, by the time I got to the shop I had forgotten the ingredients and settled for garlic, onion, leek, chorizo and rice. (In the end, it turned out that I'd replaced spring onions with the normal onion and the leek, so not as daring as I might have hoped.) I chopped up the garlic and onion and left them frying gently, then added the leek and the chorizo as I finished chopping each one. After everything had softened up a bit, I put in a couple of handfuls of rice and about a cup of vegetable stock which I topped up as the rice took it up.

It was ready in about ten minutes, and it was, in fact, mouthwatering. It's the best thing I've made this year. And best of all was the mostly improvised nature of it - I've never really learned how one cooks difficult stuff like whole chickens or anything involving separate sauces, and I realised that I've at least come to the point where something improvised but simple like this is almost second nature. Truly, I can wave hello to middle-age.