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!