In a strange twist of fate,

the timely winding up of one band has led me to suddenly be involved in three separate projects, thus removing at a stroke any and all free time I might have enjoyed as a result. This does not in itself displease me; quite the opposite, in fact, but has nevertheless turned me into a permanently knackered robotic* husk of a bassist devoid of free will and creativity. Not quite what I expected to happen.

Over the past couple of weeks, Mart and I have been prodding a few song ideas that were roughly contemporaneous with the death of the Monkey into sort of shared-source ideas for future use. Keef and I attempted to kick-start the K Project in much the same way the other night, but I've just run out of energy and ideas.

This, along with the fact that I've listened to nothing other than Lynyrd Skynyrd and Drive-By Truckers for the past month or so, has led me to renounce all claims to modernism for the time being and I now cling to the lifeboat of 12-bar blues with the chaps from the 'Fynn. I think I'll learn how to actually play a bit better before returning to the indie rock-face (ha).

On a slightly less me-me-me note, I went along to Finlay's gran's funeral on Wednesday. In an odd echo of things past, the last time I saw him was my own gran's funeral a couple of years ago, and it was heartening to see that he's much the same as ever. Marriage, fatherhood and mortality haven't changed him a bit, and with any luck we'll go out and get plastered sometime soon.

Which leads me neatly onto the weekend, which was both defined and destroyed by ye booze. On Friday night, Dave and I met up with our flatmate Ali and some of her friends before drinking ourselves into ludicrous oblivion. Jeff turned up with Paul, over from Berlin for other Ali's stag do (perhaps for Paul it was a Reichstag party? My sides!), and I wittered incoherently at them for a while. Ash also turned up, and when some dimly functioning sense of self-preservation finally made itself felt, I managed to leave the pub and wander most of the way home before realising she had not yet, in fact, left it herself.

Saturday morning and afternoon just did not happen.

Saturday night, on the other hand; well, it was almost exactly like the night before, only with the addition of hats, Hawaiian shirts, Josh, fake moustaches and very, very bad dancing in honour of Ali's last night of independent revelry. We survived a visit to Dropkick Murphy's and were about to make a last stand in Medina when we found out that our companion hen party was in Negociants. This was clearly a sign, so we collapsed with them instead and drank the rest of the night away.

Sunday morning and afternoon just did not happen.

In the evening, Josh came round for some bacon-based food and some wistfully nostalgic GTA, and after some pleasant catch-up chat, the weekend came to a gratefully early close.

* Speaking of robots, this lot clearly have the right idea - it could have come from the school of Hat Night itself. Good times.

Normal service is resumed:

i.e, I've had an enjoyable but not particularly noteworthy week. Let us enumerate said fun but eminently normal events:

Jez hosted a mini dinner party round at his flat. We came, we saw, we ate, and it was good. Jeff said something about sausages that almost reduced me to tears of laughter, but my long-term memory is a cruel mistress and I have absolutely no recollection of what it was. Off to the pub afterwards for some top-up boozing, and a mostly sensible night. That I remember. O terrible memory! Thou dost add mystery and excise knowledge in equal measures.

It's been a bit of a filmic week for the first time in months; Ash and I went to see both M:I:III (if ever there was a time to use arabic numerals, this was it) and The Da Vinci Code. Am I the only person who thinks it's hilarious to just call it Da Vinci Code in a Mockney accent? Someone help me out here.

I'm a bit of a misanthrope when it comes to mainstream Hollywood films, and MI3 didn't do much to disabuse me of that feeling. Bizarrely though, The Da Vinci Code completely hit the spot. The book is so badly written I wanted to set it (and Dan Brown) on fire, but it is a page turner par excellence. I can't quite put my finger on why I enjoyed the film so much: it's adequately acted for the most part; the plot is an entertaining enough conspiracy theory to a Godless heathen like me and it clearly had plenty of money spent on it, but no single element is outstanding is any particular way. Maybe it was the spectacle of Hollywood being so openly anti-religion (at least until the obligatory fudge at the end) that warmed the cockles of my black, secular heart. Regardless, I thought it was rather good.

Post monkeycide, it's all been very quiet on the musical front. On Saturday though, Coba Fynn (or at least the three fifths of it that don't live in another country or on another continent) got together for a practice/jam on Saturday. I've only played CF stuff a couple of times before, but blues rock is rewarding for a self-taught and self-confessed bad musician like your correspondent and we had a couple of CF originals up and running in short order. I thought it was an excellent session: with Davis capably in charge, all I had to worry about was coming up with vaguely acceptable bass lines and keeping mostly in time with Doug. Done and done, with enjoyable results.

Lastly, I watched the awful majesty of the Eurovision song contest from the comfort of the Arcade Bar on Cockburn Street with Ash, Austen and Maria. Only this time, a glittering rock jewel rose from the tawdry pop ashes and wiped the floor with the lot of them. The entire place was cheering for Finland, and I almost wept with joy when they won. ROCK!

Road trip redux II: Nürburgring folly.

Pan-european driving malarkey:

• Edinburgh; Dover; Ghent; Adenau.
  
• Nürburgring.
  
• Adenau; Luxembourg; Paris.
  
• Paris; Dieppe; Dover; Edinburgh.
  

Ah, Paris!

We picked Sally up near Opéra after a couple of restorative drinks, then negotiated the Métro to glittering Saint-Germain for another gut-busting meal in a very Jackie O al fresco café. Saint-Germain seemed to be devoted more to shopping than drinking, and so we caught the Métro back again and had a few in a very local bar back in Montmarte.

Ash and I spent the next day doing the usual tourist rounds: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre-Dame and the like. I've been to Paris before, and both then and now it seemed to me that we weren't so much scratching the surface as feather-dusting it. It's sprawling, but quite apart from that is obscenely well populated with notable buildings, monuments and parks. We retreated to the hostel to regroup after being blasted by the afternoon sun.

That night we decided to soak up a bit of the faded Montmarte grandeur instead of the sleek glamour of the city centre. Our hostel was on the less touristy side of Montmarte - pretty much slap-bang in the middle of the 'hood, really - and we headed towards the streets in the shadow of the Sacré Coeur instead. We found a café serving gallettes and crêpes at surprisingly non-Parisian prices and settled in for a very pleasant evening. It was still mostly warm enough; the streets around our little square bustled with scooters and pedestrians and the alcohol flowed most gratifyingly. In fact, it flowed with such vigour that it must have appeared to the locals that we were absolutely caning it. Everyone else in the place was daintily sipping espresso or minute glasses of wine but we, on the other hand, knew the word for "big glass of beer" (sérieux! Thanks, Ben) and were not afraid to use it. (In fact, I can look back to the night we all first met the French girls and perhaps begin to understand their bemusement at our collective state.)

Having finished our meal, we climbed a little higher up the hill to another café. By now, Ashley was overjoyed that Paris knew about cider and our bouncy (speeding?) American waitress furnished us with a bottle of Brittany's finest. Getting ready to down the last glass, I stopped when I noticed a considerable blob of...phlegm, for want of a better word, in the bottom. We took our leave and I switched to wine for the latter part of the evening.

Before leaving the next day, we climbed to the Sacré-Coeur, took a quick look round (ach, you've seen one Romano-Byzantine influenced basilica and you seen 'em all) and headed to Dieppe. We arrived in the late afternoon, found a suitable hotel and then met up with Sally and Jez to eat. Dieppe went from sunny tourist town to dustbowl eerieness in about half an hour flat: our chosen bar started to close around us at the same time the weather turned grey and we wandered the empty streets until happening upon seemingly the only lively joint in town. We took a quick break from boozing to eat some excellent pizzas at a miniscule pizzeria around the corner, then got back down to business. Finding and patronising a Scottish bar on the way home capped the evening off in a weirdly full-circle way.

There's not much to tell about the rest of the holiday; we got to the ferry in the nick of time after a frustrating crawl along the Normandy back roads, headed to Oxford to visit a friend of Ash's and finally came to rest in Edinburgh the Sunday before last. Conclusions? Driving on a track is excellent; driving a thousand miles to get there isn't, but do it with the right company and it'll be a great trip!

Something of the track demons remained

on the drive to Luxembourg, and I leadfooted it along the first stretch of the autobahn. Turns out the Saab is good for 120 mph and a further traumatised Ashley, thanks to the heedless lemming drivers darting into the fast lane as we barrelled along with only '70s brake technology to retard our progress.

We reached Luxembourg intact and had a coffee in the sun while waiting for Luc and Marie to turn up. It's very old Europe: castles, vertiginous defensive walls and narrow crooked houses set in a picturesque valley. We walked around the old town for a while, had a couple of drinks by the meandering river and almost visibly relaxed. Luxembourg felt almost like home after the sundry mad dashes from point to point so far in the journey.

Luc and Marie had booked a table in a nifty little restaurant. We gorged ourselves on tartiflette (I'd forgotten to quite what a degree cooking in continental Europe hinges around cheese and ham! Not a bad thing per se, of course) and some tasty Breton cider, then waddled to a cocktail bar guarded by a politely zealous maitre'd:

M'd: "Your jacket, sir."
Jez: "No, I'm fine thanks."
M'd: "Your jacket, sir."

A couple of excellent White Russians reminded me why I used to drink them quite literally ad nauseum, although at the price they charged they might as well have been Blow Jobs. Lulled by the near-darkness, the conversation dried up along with our cash and we called it a relatively early night. Marie's sister kindly put us up at their house, and the drive to Paris looked a hell of a lot more reasonable after the whole genteel Luxembourgish interlude.

The trip to Paris went mostly without a hitch, and eventually we found ourselves on the Périphérique and heading in roughly the right direction. Miraculously, given our usual ability to blindly avoid the correct motorway exit at every turn, we escaped the motorised hell intact (every single van I saw on the Périphérique was a mess of dents and scratches, and at least one driver was composing a text message as he drove) and after only a couple of trips along Boulevard Clignancourt, found the hostel. Doubly miraculously, a parking garage presented itself a couple of blocks away. We parked up, unloaded, checked in and headed into the city centre to meet up with Jez' nominated and four-day-late co-driver Sally.

[Apologies for the ludicrous amount of time I'm taking to get this trip down; I've managed to be utterly lazy and tremendously busy in equal measures over the last week...]

Taxi! Or not.

We rocked up at the track around 6pm or so, and it was, to all intents and purposes, deserted. On a good day, the car park is apparently packed to the brim with exotic and otherwise mental motors, but the sole flag-bearer for the speed-merchant crowd was a be-stickered Impreza with the name "Maddog" alongside an English flag (didn't see that one coming) stencilled onto the rear quarterlights.

The weather was still overcast and the track slick with rainwater, and we hummed and hawed for a bit. It's possible to hire a Ring Taxi - a BMW M5 driven by a professional driver for a single lap - for €150, but their office was closed. We bit the bullet when it became obvious that we had neither time that night nor extra days to spare.

We moved all of the loose items from my car into the Fiat's boot. It suddenly, and worryingly, dawned on me that I'd left the excruciatingly detailed 30-page track guide at the hotel. "Not to worry", Jez said, brandishing a single A4 sheet of paper with a low-res map of the 'Ring on it. Most of the 73 corners were so small as to be absent, and five or six unlabelled exclamation marks appeared at parts to be feared for unspecified reasons. I reassured Ashley that we'd come back alive and we headed out in the Saab.

It was absolutely excellent. The track's far wider than GT4 would suggest, and even although the car understeered (and occasionally, more disturbingly, oversteered) in most corners, there was more than enough space so that I never really worried about encountering the armco. We got waves from the few spectators still out and about, crawled past an accident site, were passed by a couple of scarily out of shape Alfa 75s and were finished almost as soon as we had started. I took roughly 12 minutes to cover the 13 miles; not bad for a sub-£1k Saab in the wet on my first go, I told myself. Jez reminded me that someone had once taken 10 minutes in a Transit van, but I was not to be cowed.

The low petrol warning light had come on half way around because A) we'd been driving all day and B) the track was so inclined at some points that the last lot of fuel was sloshing to one end of the tank, so after a quick break to convince Ash it really wasn't all that bad, we emptied the boot of the Fiat, piled in and pulled out with Jez at the wheel.

Ash really shouldn't have come. The Fiat had an almighty snarl when revved hard and an alarming tendency to lose grip at both ends. Jez had a corresponding tendency to drive like a nutter. We got round in 11 hair-raising minutes. Ash was a bit quiet, and continued to be so for the next couple of days. I felt a smidgen guilty.

We headed back to Adenau after the second lap, out of fuel and time. I'd hesitate to say that a single lap was worth a week's holiday if only because of the ridiculous cost of getting there, but I'm definitely going back. Utter, utter genius. If you've any petrol in your veins at all, you have to do this.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;

whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses* - then, I account it high time to get myself on an under-prepared, reckless road trip to foreign climes. Only this time, I did see fit to incorporate a journey to the world's most infamous race track in a 14-year old Saab with 200,000 miles on the clock, an incorrigible boy racer in a money-pit Fiat Coupé Turbo and a girlfriend with both acute motion sickness and a healthy aversion to interminable petrolhead banter. Europe ho!

We started off in a fairly inauspicious way by failing to find lodgings in Oxford, getting lost on its satanic ring road (Jackie Stewart may have called the Nürburgring the "Green Hell", but frankly the A40 fit that particular bill to a tee) and finally driving to Aylesbury, 30 miles away, to wolf down a pizza and collapse into bed. Next day we caught up with Jez at Dover and settled in for the ferry journey. I'd downloaded a 30-page, corner-by-corner guide to the track, and made a half-hearted effort to absorb some of it, but after five pages and 20 corners, all labelled "Dangerous!" or "Can be fatal in the wet!", I gave up. "We'll just use it as pace notes once we're on the track," I told Jez.

The first 'real' journey from Calais to Ghent in Belgium, was prototypical of just about each subsequent day - we'd spend ages bumbling around the suburbs in city A, cane to city B with alacrity and again spend ages bumbling around the next set of 'burbs until we settled on a hotel. A pleasant surprise, and again a typical one, was the willingness to help of the locals. A plaster-dusted joiner and his mulleted partner pointed out the route to our hostel without us even having to ask, and I couldn't help but think a standard Brit in that situation would have regarded us with contemptuous eyes and a muttered comment about bloody foreigners.

(As a brief aside: why are the British so insular? Why is it so completely beyond us to have compulsory language teaching (for the sake of argument, let's pick French because Calais is even closer to Dover than Edinburgh is to Glasgow) to a reasonable conversational standard? Although we trotted out our pidgin French and German whenever we could, and I think had the gratitude of some of the people we met for doing so, we'd have been sunk without their ability and readiness to use English.)

Ghent had the aspect of a well-kempt, genteel Amsterdam and our brief stay there was excellent. The town centre fed and watered us brilliantly, if failing somewhat to set the party world alight, and we headed off towards Germany about 10 am.

The drive took us along the autobahn in alternating dreary and bright weather, with intermittent downpours keeping the road wet. Ash and I took the lead in the Saab, Jez still lacking a navigator, and we spent most of the journey at around 140kph, not quite sure if the road was entirely free of speed limits. I'd expected to see legions of expensive motors flash past us, but only a white Porsche 968 wandered by at a mostly unremarkable pace.

Nearer Adenau we moved onto a single carriageway with the weather settling into a monochrome Scottish greyness. The traffic in the other direction was increasingly composed of serious and ludicrous metal - sober 911s and stickered GTIs purred and blatted past, and I wondered why so many were heading the wrong way. We parked, found a reasonable hotel (short arms, long pockets moment - asking if we could skip the €16 breakfast got us a disbelieving stare), unloaded the cars and set off for the track.

More tomorrow!

* With apologies to Moby Dick.