The Roquefort Files

are all grown up and have moved into their own place: roquefort-files.net. So long Blogger, and hopefully see you all over at the new site!

P.S: the new feed is here; this old one will no longer be updated.

The other day I whipped out some lube

and applied it liberally to my bike's chain, which was starting to sound a little dry and rattly. Pleased with my handiwork, I cycled stealthily to work. At lunchtime I jumped on the bike again to head over to Leith Walk to buy some lunch. The sun was out and I was enjoying the break after a particularly taxing morning; I gazed around at the dog walkers, smokers on their breaks and the pastoral scene in general and let myself relax into the rhythm of the pedalling and the warmth of the day.

I then shat myself as a middle-aged woman walked directly into my path from behind a parked van. I rammed on the brakes, tipping up on the front wheel and barely avoided body-checking her. I plopped back down onto the back wheel and stared at her, all of a foot away.

We mutually and profusely apologised and set off on our respective ways. I reckon we'd been about half a second from broken bones, but there we went, off for lunch or a meeting or whatever. I had a compound spring/twitch in my step for the rest of the day.

It's been a bit of a week for birthdays: Ash's was last Tuesday, so we went out for a little meal round the corner with a bottle of Tesco's finest (very definitively a lowercase 'f') left over from the dinner party a couple of weeks back, and came home both surprisingly early and surprisingly drunk. CSI is our current TV drug of choice, what with the Virgin/Sky spat cutting off our supply of the highest grade, and we settled in to loll off the wine. Incidentally, Mogwai seem to get fairly regular outings on CSI and I was prompted to dust off Young Team for a few listens. Glaswegian neds they may be, but they can rock the ambient-prog-soundscape (ack) genre with the best of them.

On Saturday morning Ash and I did a bit of hurried antique shopping, and managed to buy a set of six 'Ercol' Windsor chairs for the downright indecent price of £42.50 for the lot. These bad boys are '50s design icons that go for upward of £200 new. They're curiously small (if they were Ikean they'd be called Bilbo or Frodo) but with the addition of some cushions they'll make excellent dining room chairs...and I've just spend a paragraph talking about furniture.

That afternoon I drove over to Fife with Jeff and Devon for the second of the week's birthdays, this time Bryan's, deep in the heart of Methil. It was great to see him again, and the supporting cast (cousin after cousin and a corpulent neighbour - "Youse guys have waistlines, ah've got a coastline,") kept us entertained while the weather switched arbitrarily from cold to hot to wet and back again. We made our excuses after a pleasant afternoon and headed home, the sky visibly brightening as we crossed the Forth Road Bridge. I'm going to miss Edinburgh!

If it ain't baroque, don't fix it.

I'm typing this on my phone as we sit under the awning of a closed taverna, watching the elegantly weatherbeaten Campo San Giacomo da l'Orio* being further beaten by the current weather: a sudden, relentless downpour dramatically accompanied by rolling thunder and bursts of lightning. It's about 6pm and trying for an early dinner is so un-Venetian we're being cosmically punished.

* * *
A couple of days earlier, the morning we were due to take the ferry from Pula to Venice, the ship was conspicious by its absence. A company rep arrived instead and told us that the Adriatic - doing its best millpond impression at that point - was too rough. They'd drive us to Venice by bus.

Five and a half dehydrated, hungry hours later and the best thing I could say about the journey was at least we could tick off Slovenia. We tumbled off the bus at Tronchetto, Venice's ferry port, found an ATM to load up on euros and headed for the most likely looking water bus stop. We wobbled aboard the vaporetto and sat back for our first, slightly proletarian, trip along the Grand Canal.

It is exactly as you imagine. Dashing water taxis weave between vaporettos and barges; baroque palaces sit right on the water, their front doors opening onto private docks or even the water itself; barber-striped mooring poles cluster along the banks and every scrap of dry land is utterly heaving with tourists.

The vaporetto stopped just past the Rialto bridge and we were plunged straight into the morass of bodies between us and the hostel. We got there, inspected the mosquito-encrusted walls with furrowed brows and headed out to get our bearings. We made it as far as the Campo San Polo, eating a doughy slice of steaming takeaway pizza along the way. The bus trip had taken it out of both of us (odd how sitting still for so long will do that) so we found our way back to swat a few mossies and pass an otherwise uneventful night.

The second of the Bs in B&B Rota turned out to be a cup of coffee and a lucky dip pastry from a Chinese café next to the hostel. This was our designated Obnoxious Tourist day, so we joined the other visitors inexorably pushing Piazza San Marco into the lagoon by taking in the Basilica and ogling the rest of the square's architecture. (Standing in line for the Basilica, my phone rang and I spent about a quarter of an hour and a fortune in roaming charges making an offer for a flat that was rejected a couple of hours later.) We dutifully shot a few photos of the Doge's Palace and Bridge of Sighs, then repaired to a streetside café in which we got drunk as only tourists on an island free of motor vehicles can.

That night we went for dinner at 6, and paid the karmic price for it.

* * *
The following day, I had a grand plan for us to take the water bus out to the cimitero on San Michele to check out the real state of death in Venice, but although we took the correct boat it happened to be going in the opposite direction. There followed an impromptu tour of the south-eastern tip of the city, passing by the Bond-villainous bulk of the Maltese Falcon berthed behind a prole-resistance cordon and finally ending rather anticlimactically back at Piazza San Marco.

We wandered around the Accademia area for a while, and I decided to tick off another box by visiting the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. I took in the Picassos, Magrittes and Dalis and emerged exactly as hopelessly philistine as when I'd gone in. I got more aesthetic joy out of reading The Elements of Typography over the last couple of weeks than I did out of my first Guggenheim museum, so I may well be doomed to forever under-appreciate modern art.

For our last night we walked over to Campo Santa Margherita in the Dorsoduro area. We had a couple of drinks outside as the light faded, moved over to a restaurant and stuffed ourselves with the sort of bog standard Italian food that tastes fantastic even though it's basically just tomatoes and pasta. The dull tourist roar had been replaced by a pleasant local buzz, and it was a nice way to round off the trip.

It may sound a bit anticlimactic, but for a city quite so alluring to authors, artists and tourists alike, I can't really recall any great ephiphany or occurence that suddenly opened my eyes to its appeal. What happened instead was that over the few days we were there, the place sort of seeped into my mind so that by the time we left it seemed to embody the archetypal European city. It's ludicrously grand, with church after church of Renaissance friezes and burnished gold fittings; literal palaces are everywhere and even the most humble apartment building is warped with age and history. Then, to a greater or lesser degree, there is a universal patina of decay - if a building isn't visibly leaning or fringed with lichen or exposed brickwork, another creeping inundation is only ever a few months away to help it on its way.

Venice is old Europe to a tee: grandeur, decay, culture, history, fashion and caffeine-heavy breakfasts in one handy package.

* In other news, the internet is now so bloated that it contains reviews of town squares.

I'd like to apologise

for failing to organise my screed of notes from Venice into something suitable to post here. In my defence, since we got back I've been dividing my time between looking for a flat over in Glasgow and fretting that once I found one I'd be in hock to the bank for the next 25 years.

Well, no longer I have that excuse because I've just bought one. Henceforth the fretting takes over full time.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum

The day after our respective diving adventures, we spent the day indulging in some of Punta Verudela's local entertainment. During the day we basked in the sun down on the rocky beach with our Teutonic neighbours; in the evening we ate at the local Russian mafia pizzeria (as evidenced by a Russian-sounding gent who monopolized a corner table, barking occasional orders down his cellphone and eschewing food for vodka) and rounded the day off with a nightcap at a deserted sports centre/bar hybrid with WWF Smackdown playing on the big screen. Back at the flat, we were serenaded to sleep by some German-accented karaoke from a nearby apartment. "Killing Me Zoftly," indeed.

On Sunday we packed up and caught the local bus into the town centre. Pula has ping-ponged from empire to empire since the Romans, and there's an impression of peeling off the skins of an onion as you travel in. You get Communist-era apartment blocks on the outskirts, petering out the further in you get, then baroque Austro-Hungarian façades, the odd angular Venetian edifice and finally, nestled among them all, scattered Roman monuments.

Our apartment was within spitting distance of the Arena, a mini-me colosseum parked on the edge of the town centre, and we wandered past it and around the circular Kandlerova Ulica which seems designed to entrap disorientated tourists in a never-ending parade of ice-cream parlours and shoe shops. James Joyce taught English here at the turn of the century (which might account for some of the indecipherable menu items) and at the end of Kandlerova we sat with his statue at Café Uliks for a spot of people watching. I came to the conclusion that Pula might only be a couple of miles north of Punta Verudela, but it's about ten years ahead in sartorial terms.

I wanted to do some roman' around the next day, so in the morning I took the camera and popped next door to the Arena. It's certainly impressive that it's still standing after a couple of millennia, but there was precious little context to all of it. I know next to nothing about the Romans (well, enough to feel slightly uneasy about the divers' signal meaning 'descend') and there were no information boards or the like, so I snapped some pseudo-arty shots of the Adriatic framed by the colonnades and wandered back to pick up Ash. We duly saw the sights - the Cathedral, the Temple of Augustus, the Venetian fort on the hill in the centre of town - but none of them really caught my imagination, and not one of them deigned to explain anything about themselves. Odd.

Despite being underwhelmed by what should have been historic marvels and instead were just ordered piles of rocks, after a couple of days pottering around I felt thoroughly at home. There's a nice bit of cheerfulness to the place (probably down to everyone getting plenty of vitamin B); it isn't too crowded, and the ability to sit outside to eat, drink or read any time of the day made me think that maybe Joyce wasn't far wrong in coming here for a while.*

* Actually, had he been staying in our apartment he'd probably have hated the damn place. The attic bedroom was too hot to sleep in, and downstairs the mosquitoes absolutely plagued us all night. In a delirious rage at about 4.30am, I swatted a particularly bloated one leaving a massive bloody streak against the wallpaper that I had to swab off with a kitchen towel. Urgh.

Ritorno!

Diving in Pula and culture in Venice:

• Pula
  • Ryanair strikes again
  • FEF_25-75% be damned
  • Man vs. mosquito part I
• Venice
• Venetian blind

Baby's got the bends / oh no (she doesn't)

Having ditched our luggage we sought out the diving school, situated down on the waterfront and in the shadow of the awesomely retro Hotel Histria. The hairy-chested manager pointed us through the TV lounge (it has a TV lounge! Excellent) and down the stairs, where we came upon it on a short stretch of concrete promenade covered with lobster-red Germans. The view across the bay was Mediterranean in the extreme: blue sky, bluer sea, pale rocks and dark green trees.

Ash, an out of practice rescue diver, had booked a refresher dive for the next morning, and after some discussion with (i.e. good-natured derisive snorting from) the attendant diving instructors, I was throwing caution and medical advice to wind and doing a beginner's "discovery" dive after lunch. I hung around while Ash got kitted out, helped them lumber down into the shallows and watched with increasing surprise as they took a few experimental breaths and sank beneath the waves. It's not that you don't know that this is what happens, but to see your girlfriend disappear with the merest traces of bubbles left behind is rather unnerving. I half expected them all to come up for a big breath any second; they didn't, so I took a seat among the barbequing sunbathers to wait for them.

After about forty minutes they surfaced again and I could tell Ash wasn't all that impressed. Apparently, Marco the guide was disinterested and workmanlike, the house "reef" was mostly a pile of rocks and the fauna (listlessly prodded by Marco, which is apparently considered extremely bad form by PADI) was restricted to some hermit crabs and the odd starfish.

I had a different guide: a friendly Dutch guy called Patrick who was both enthusiastic and serious about diving. We did a half hour of theory, most of which seemed sensible to a lapsed physicist like your correspondent (main take-home tip: fail to breathe out as you ascend and your lungs will explode), along with a few signs meaning "OK", "My ears hurt" and "It's getting a bit tricky" among others. The gist of the dive itself was that he'd hold onto my left arm the whole time and also manage my buoyancy by inflating or deflating my BCD for me. All I had to do was to swim in the directions he indicated and try not to freak out.

I got into my wetsuit, complete with hilariously ripped ass seam, and waddled down the the stony beach. It's not obvious when watching experienced divers, but in the shallows you're about as mobile as a newborn baby. I floundered around like a beached whale trying to put my fins on, eventually coming to a vaguely composed halt by kneeling on a rock with Ash's help while I waited for Patrick to get ready. "Put on your mask," he said, "try out the regulator by sticking your face in the water."

Here goes then, I thought. I put the regulator in my mouth and took a couple of exploratory breaths; it seemed fairly natural above water, although you do need to breathe in fairly emphatically to start the air flowing each time. I stuck my head in the water and lasted for about three breaths, reflexively jerking my head back out again exactly when a single lungful of air would have run out.

"OK?" asked Patrick.
"Yup!! "It's weird! It's very weird," I prattled. I didn't know how to phrase "Good God, what the hell have I agreed to here?" such that it didn't sound bad, so beyond that I kept my trap shut.
"You'll be okay. Now what we're going to do is we're going to swim out to that pontoon" - he pointed to the edge of the floating pier, maybe ten metres away - "face down, with our jackets filled with air so we're buoyant, then we'll stop and dive to a sandy bowl about six metres down."

I listened, mechanically put the regulator back in my mouth and swam with him over to the pier. With the air tanks on our backs we were mostly submerged and there was no way to avoid breathing entirely through the regulator. Through my mask I watched the sea bed slide past and drop away from us and the whole time (although it was only about thirty seconds) tried to ignore the part of my brain emitting a continuous silent scream. We got to the end of the pier and righted ourselves so we were bobbing vertically on the surface, the water rolling around at mask level. I snatched a couple of breaths of fresh air, not quite believing what we'd just done.

"OK?" the instructor signed.
"OK!!" I twitched back.

He pointed down with his thumb, indicating that we were about to dive, then deflated my BCD and his BCD in turn. We dropped slowly downwards and I concentrated very, very hard on swallowing to equalise the pressure in my ears while breathing as regularly as I could. The mental effort almost exactly balanced the urge to freak out, so that for that first descent I was teetering on the edge of a sort of existential rather than physical panic.

The number of different sensations is overwhelming: the effort needed to breathe through the regulator initially feels like shortness of breath, while the mouthpiece itself is pulled slightly to one side by the hose and threatens to come out if you relax your jaw for a second. The exhaled bubbles rush past your ears with a deafening roar, your inner ear snaps, crackles and pops as the pressure changes and the water swilling around the bottom of your mask makes it feel like something critical is leaking. Oh, and being completely submerged - not only that, but six metres below the surface - leads to utterly perfect cognitive dissonance. "Why am I not drowning?" your brain quite reasonably asks. "You've got me," you reply. And there's another curiosity: you can't talk to your diving buddy, so all of your conversations are with yourself: the internal monologue becomes a dialogue.

"Holy crap, this is weird."
"I know! You don't have to tell me twice."

We settled on the bottom in the patch of sand. Patrick inflated my BCD until I was more or less neutrally buoyant and motioned for me to swing up so I was horizontal, facing the sea floor; he did the same and we slowly kicked off.

I'd managed to wall off my incredulity by now and followed his lead as we swam forwards and down, popping my ears all the while. We pointed (with slightly disproportionate enthusiasm) at the fish and crustaceans we saw along the way.

"There! Could that be a herring?"
"My word! I do believe it is a veritable shoal of them."

Stopping on the bottom again a few minutes later, he pointed at his depth gauge: 14.6m! As I looked up at the cloud of bubbles floating up to the barely visible surface, I had the thought that "I could just take the regulator out at any time," in exactly the same way that when peering over the edge of, say, the Grand Canyon you might be inclined to think "it would be so easy to jump." The fact the I didn't immediately spit out the mouthpiece reassured me greatly.

Patrick gave me the thumbs up and we followed our bubbles to the surface, my ears crackling as they equalised themselves. We popped up on the other side of the floating pier, I ripped off my mask and, oddly worried that I might suddenly be unable to breathe, took out the regulator. "Well done!" he said, "that was about seventeen minutes, you've used about a third more oxygen than me and we got to 14.6 metres. How do you feel?"

"Intrigued," was the best way I could put it. I don't know if I could call it fun - I was too busy suppressing the urge to wig out most of the time - but it was such a novel experience that we're already talking about a diving trip next year!

Update: Hooray! We remembered my instructor's name, and it is Patrick.

"The sheer bloody awfulness of air travel..."

...is a phrase I once read in a newspaper article, uttered with confidence by the head of Eurotunnel, and that seems particularly apt to the journey Ash and I made to get to Croatia last week. Until Ryanair (remember them?) moved forward by two hours their single weekly flight to Pula, we had an early but feasible start to get to Stansted and then to fly on to Croatia that same day. After they moved it, we not only had to book new flights to London for the night before, but we were faced by the choice of spending the night in the airport or finding a hotel near Stansted. (easyJet's cancellation fees are so high it was cheaper to buy entirely new flights - and the aviation industry is whining about being scapegoated for carbon emissions? No wonder, when it's cheaper to leave seats empty than to amend a booking.)

Turns out there are no hotels near Stansted; at least, none costing less than £150 per night. With neither standby rates nor in fact any rooms available at the exorbitant inn, we spent a truly grim night on a plastic bench in Domestic Arrivals, kept awake - or rather, in a hideous semi-waking nightmare - by a hippie student arythmically banging a djembe so his compadres could practice capoeira into the small hours.

For the record, they were all crap at it.

We slept through the flight and woke up circling Pula International. The plane went from temperate to sauna as the doors opened and we ambled slowly across the scorching apron to the single gate. The airport is small, plain and refreshingly matter-of-fact: there are no airbridges, covered walkways, shuttles to the terminal or any of that jazz: if you get sucked into a jet engine then it's your own fault for displaying such rank carelessness. We got on a ancient transfer coach (either it or the equally ancient driver had an inbuilt speed limit of about 40kph) and trundled to Pula bus station.

Our accommodation for the first few nights was south of Pula, in an area called Punta Verudela. Despite having booked everything months in advance, we were almost studiedly unprepared for everything after the transfer bus and it took us two hours of blistered feet, aimless wandering and constant whining from yours truly (I will never wear flip-flops again, I can tell you that much) until we finally collapsed, sweating and exhausted, in our '70s apartment.

Flat pack:

It's not every week one hangs on a knife edge between solvency and debt to the tune of £100k. In other words, having given up on buying a place in Auld Reekie (it's not so much a property ladder here as a greasy pole), I've put in a note of interest on a flat over in the benighted west. My affable solicitor, who is clearly far more used to handling sums of money that make the eyes water than I am, assures me that there will a decision, for better or for worse, by the beginning of next week. Fingers crossed and buttocks clenched, I await his call.

What with interminable trips through to Glasgow to look at flat after flat, the week has shot by without leaving much of an impression on me. The highlights: Annabel and Antonio are both leaving imminently, so we headed along to the Cumberland for some pints and reminiscing; for Father's Day la famille had a sedate Sunday lunch in the tourist heaven/resident hell of South Queensferry, and on Tuesday night we went out with Josh, up for a few days from the Big Smoke.

Josh filled me in on what sounds like a worthy successor to 2005's Berlin trip and we meandered onto rather more geekish ground, as is our nerdy wont. He waxed lyrical about the virtues of Facebook for a while, but I must admit I can't see the attraction. At this point I'd normally start on a gentle, nostalgic rant about the good old days of the more informal web, but I have to catch a bus for the first leg of our long-overdue summer holiday. Adieu!

Week(end) inversion:

I did nothing at the weekend. I'm glossing over a letterbox-eyed, four-hour Resident Evil 4 session (we had to break the TV in somehow, and MGS3 is just so dashed cerebral sometimes) but in effect, we wore a path from the couch to the kitchen and back for two days straight. Lofty plans of a picnic on Arthur's Seat and a visit to the Taste of Edinburgh festival came and went without a whimper. In short, a slothful, indulgent and pleasurable weekend, but nothing to write home about. Happily, the week was substitute enough.

On Tuesday Ash and I went for a post-work drink in the Blind Poet and then headed across the road to Phenecia to stuff ourselves silly with garlic-bomb houmous and tzatziki. It's been a while since we've been out for a meal together and I really enjoyed it! We had the restaurant to ourselves and the waitress gave us exactly the right amount of inattention. I attempted heroically but failed to clean my heaping plate (a Little Chef/free lollipop bit of Pavlovian conditioning if ever I saw it) and so replete with North African comfort food we took a slightly desperate stroll home in the damp evening air to ward off the threatened gastric distress. The Phenecian Gentlemen's Club (of which I was a sub-associate honourary member or something) may be gone, but it is not forgotten!

Davis came over to the flat for recording duty on Thursday night so I could finish off a couple more bass lines for our demo. We drank cheap red wine, talked Macs and fiddled with cabling and I even managed to get some bass playing in amongst it all. Almost as an afterthought I asked about and Davis showed me some basic blues soloing; I was flabbergasted by the simplicity of it and yet utterly incapable of using it to any great effect. So, not only is the 'Fynn website back up but we have a demo tape/CD/web page/whatever in the offing and come the next gig I shall gamely ruin Locomotive Blues with an abortive attempt at "improvisation". Full steam ahead!

Back in black:

Coba Fynn are back in action. Having said that, don't bother clicking on that link just yet - our esteemed internet host switched us to a different server recently, breaking our site in the process. Normal service should be resumed in a day or two.

Anyway, we managed a more productive return to form in a mini rehearsal/recording session on Sunday. Davis had mixed down some tracks from our last session, so I took the opportunity to monopolize the afternoon for the purposes of laying down the bass lines to a few songs. We stuck to the easy ones (rather a relief after two months of failing to practice) but I was still surprised at how good they're sounding. It may just be the case that after almost four years of trying I've finally reached the giddy heights of mediocrity. With a bit of luck (and a functioning website) we'll have some choons up for your edification and enjoyment within a month or so!

And other than that, things are ticking along quite nicely, thank you very much: 28 Weeks Later is bloody good (har har); being evacuated from the cinema because of a fire alarm is not; mid-afternoon drinks in the Star Bar are good; recovery is not.

Limpet Bizkit

Last week I had the notion that Ash and I should have a day out of some kind: a mini road trip, in effect, to blow away the cobwebs of too many 40-hour weeks since our last big holiday. I brought the Trøll back from work on Friday evening so we could hop in and enthusiastically drive off at daybreak the next morning. Subsequently we went out with Austen, Maria and Angela for a few drinks and hit the sack rather later than intended.

Saturday morning came and went in a couch-potato haze but with my idea stubbornly refusing to die a death, I dragged a justifiably complaining Ash round to the car. Truth be told, I was feeling pretty ropey myself but if there's one thing I've learned from my parents it's that you will enjoy yourself, dammit! Our one errand for the day was to buy a new TV to reduce the eye-strain meted out by Ash's portable set, so we stopped by Cash Generator to pick one from the graveyard of dubious legality and loaded it into the back of the car.

"So where should we go then?" I asked, having failed to settle on a sensible destination despite my insistence that we go there, wherever there happened to be.
"I don't know," wailed Ash, "I feel awful. My eyes hurt!"
"Let's go to Gullane," ever my fall-back position for pleasant weekend drives.
"Okay, okay. Let's go then."

So we set off. Mindful of the vacuum tube in the boot, I took it easy (not that the sunny day traffic and continual roadworks afforded much chance to pick up any speed) and so we crawled out east to arrive around three with the sun still high in the sky but producing no palpable warmth. We rolled to a halt in the gusty beach car park and hurried gingerly down the path to the shore where the beach opened up before us. Some hardy outdoor types were picnicking and watching a solitary, insane kite-surfer battle the wind.

"Man, I feel terrible," I said to Ash. We looked pathetically at each other, turned and bolted back to the car.

Stuck in a fifteen minute traffic jam just outside Portobello with hunger, fatigue and seemingly unending headaches bearing down upon us, Ash pointed at a Burger King sign just visible across a deserted car park and said emphatically, "We need burgers!"

We practically skipped back to the car. Or we would have done if the saturated fat hadn't been weighing us down.

P.S. The title, by the way, is in reference to a game that Scott and Angela introduced us to on Sunday night: try to come up with band names that involve fishy or otherwise marine terms. Try it. B:Ream. Sole 2 Sole. Bob Marley and the Whalers. Sweeet.

Catching up:

Last week at work we apparently we had a deadline for a trade show at which a customer wanted to demonstrate our product. I say apparently because it came and went with obscene ease; by the time I had noticed a slightly raised level of collective blood pressure around the office, we'd done all the required work and our boss took us out to the pub for a couple of pints on Friday lunchtime to congratulate us on a job well done. The afternoon passed in a Zeppelin haze and set the tone for the weekend: leisurely, enjoyable and with a healthy dose of late '60s rock providing the soundtrack.

Having bought a new (old) camera from Amazon the other day, we toddled up to Princes Street gardens on Saturday afternoon to try it out and had an expectedly awesome tourist interlude for a couple of hours. We ate overpriced hot dogs and drank coffee on a patio in gale-force winds, took in the 3dinburgh design exhibition and pottered around my favourite graveyard in the shadow of both St. Cuthbert's and St. John's. I can't put my finger on quite why the afternoon was so much fun, but I think it's just a happy confluence of a number of factors: my diary is joyously empty for the next week, Ash's visa quest is out of our hands (and hence out of our minds) until her appointment through in Glasgow at the end of July, and work is rather obviously running smoothly.

I was feeling conspicuously relaxed in advance of the evening's entertaining, when we had Jez, Serena, Neil and Vanessa round for dinner. I think we've been a bit remiss of late in getting together with the usual suspects and I must say I was replete with joy to have everyone round. Ash cooked a monstrous Southern feast (I tried to help, honestly; but whenever I turned my back for a moment some new dish had materialised and all I could do was serve it up) and I acted as barman for the evening. After some amaretto-fortified coffee I unpacked the stereo and slipped on some CCR under the radar whenever no-one was looking.

On Sunday morning I paid in full for the previous evening's indulgences but it was damn well worth it: food, friends and a few snifters is a nigh-on foolproof recipe for a perfect night.

TM troika:

I met up with Mart and Dom, the original Tiny Monkey triumvirate, in the wanky upper reaches of Bruntsfield last Tuesday for some good old fashioned food and booze. In Henrick's, I was gratified to see Mart choose Peeterman Artois instead of the usual Stella, propelled, I think, by the same desperation that caused me to swear off the hard stuff myself. "It tastes like water," opined Dom, hitting the nail on the head in a most concise fashion. Compared to the Irn-Bru fizz and chemical tang of Stella, the newcomer is pleasantly neutral in both taste and pH terms and lacks the mule-kick to the frontal lobe characteristic of a wife-beater-induced hangover.

I had an 80/- instead, as is my current wont. The resultant hangover from these bad boys is an entirely different matter. Where Stella neatly dangles a red-hot poker directly into the nerve centres of one's conscious mind, causing flashes of truly criminal pain to strike whenever one moves (hence the couch-bound nature of the typical Stella afflictee), an 80/- hangover is a more pastoral experience. The entire brain is enveloped in a slowing, treacly fug that retards one's movement and thought processes and which gently encourages one onto the couch. I cannot help but think fondly of such mornings, in stern contrast to the near-death experiences meted out by la famille Artois.

Anyway, Dom and I blew any sort of controlled hangover experiment out of the water by sharing a bottle of wine next door in the Apartment while Mart stuck chastely to bottled water. I've been to the Apartment once before, back in the mists of time, and could remember nothing about the experience apart from the fact that the waiting staff are either wafty model wannabes who move only from the waist down, or cheeky chappies who confuse absolutist browbeating over menu choices with friendly service.

This time round we had a friendly waiter who could actually have been a little more forward with menu suggestions, a so-so meal (waiter: "Oh, the chunky healthy lines are a bit dull sometimes. You should have gone for the sea bass if you'd wanted fish. And here's your bill.") and a seat at the window, and I can't really complain. The food might have been dull but the company most assuredly wasn't and we talked non-stop until we decamped (decanted might be a more appropriate term) to the Traverse for a final jar. A great night!

Apart from that, and a nice evening round at Neil and Vanessa's on Thursday, it feels like we've been a bit static of late. Ash's visa travails seem to be occupying most of the spare mental energy we both have with scouring websites and phoning contradictory helplines whenever we get the chance. The idea that a Canadian national should find it so hard to live here for an extended period of time without having to jump through flaming bureaucratic hoops is starting to annoy me!

The weekend in review:

On Saturday, we went to see Spider-Man 3. On Sunday, we mostly whined about how crap it was. Ash made banana bread on Sunday evening (in time for an impromptu visit from my parents, who were most appreciative) and that one cake tin of baked goods was better than $258 million-worth of Hollywood's finest produce. The film wasn't quite so dreadful as Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - how could it have been, unless it had been the vehicle for the return of Satan, the great deceiver and Lord of the Flies to this mortal plane? - but still, how is it possible to spend such a colossal amount of money and fail to come up with a decent script? Ah well. The banana bread of joy soothes all ills.

(And yes, it was a quiet week :)

The other side:

I went to see Travis on Tuesday night at the Liquid Room with Mart and Alice. Ash was feeling a bit under the weather and I was loathe to leave her, but the final episode of the OC was on and I had a sneaking suspicion she'd be in good hands. My bike bag was searched at the door and the bouncer confiscated my poncy, minuscule tyre pump for the duration, presumably in case I decided to maliciously inflate someone. We filed in, bought a pint and waited for the show to start.

I'd do a long, meandering review but it isn't necessary: Travis are really, really good live. I lost interest in their albums after The Man Who, but each time I see them in person they rock my socks off. Truly astonishing. CF would do well to take notes!

* * *
Ash and I drove through to a sunny Glasgow on Saturday to take a look around the university precinct and the West End in general. The area has a rough and ready bustle about it that Edinburgh lacks: the emotionless cattle that graze the shops on Princes Street on a Saturday put me in mind of the words "brainwashed" and "consumerism" in very close proximity, and it's just plain depressing. The West End, on the other hand, has an atmosphere that might reasonably be accused of vibrancy* and even the neds lend it a bit of colour (admittedly from a limited palette of green, blue and white) like so much sociopathic bunting.

The university area has that same mixture of ornate sandstone charm and forehead-smacking Brutalism that George Square does in Edinburgh, and just like George Square it's surprisingly attractive in the sun. We wandered around a bit: past the Hunterian and Ash's putative department, along storied Ashton Lane and then took the subway into the centre of town. There's a certain worldly feeling imparted to cities with a subway (even one so minimal as the Clockwork Orange) and again, it's something Edinburgh lacks. We're civilised over on the east coast, but we're not genuinely cosmopolitan, I think.

Alternatively, I may be reading rather too much into the presence or otherwise of a single underground train line.

We had some pub food at the Ubiquitous Chip on the way back to the car and took a scenic route home so lengthy that I began to wonder if I'd accidentally strayed into England. Back on the right road eventually, I let the Saab stretch its legs and the sun set just as we hit the outskirts of Edinburgh, lighting up the countryside briefly before descending into a damp greyness. A most edifying day, if I do say so myself.

* Yes, I know: "vibrancy". Very Rough Guide of me.

Lack of focus

is great.

Coba Fynn's mini tour is at an end (two out of three ain't bad, if I do say so myself); work has settled down to a dull roar that can be drowned out by some music and I've set aside, for the time being, my self-improving worthy novel reading project. To fill the void with meaningless trinkets, I went on a bit of an Amazon bender and I'm luxuriating in a spot of unabashed consumerism for the first time in ages. As a result, Crosby, Stills & Nash are taunting me with deceptively simple hippie-rock brilliance, and The Graduate soundtrack has me wishing for summer sun and an Alfa Duetto to drive in it. The Count of Monte Cristo has lost out to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and even more shamelessly, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men.

Over the weekend we drank with a pleasingly full house of the usual suspects (including the usually-absent Jez and Serena) on Friday, and on Saturday were entertained by Angela and Steve up at Ash's old flat. I ate until I suffered mild digestive distress, quaffed wine and beer and blethered at length about Victorian novels - I was lapsing back into reputability even against my better judgement. On Sunday the sun returned and we debated what to do. "Maybe drive along to Gullane?" I suggested. Our inertia overtook us and we made the weekly pilgrimage to the Star Bar's beer garden instead. In the end it was just as well we hadn't gone to the beach, what with a tonne of sewage a second spewing out into the Forth. Moral of the story: go to the pub instead. It's closer and one is less likely to contract hepatitis.

Prescient?

So we played two gigs at the weekend: on Friday we opened at Fury Murry's and on Sunday at the Universal.

Friday was the 7^th anniversary of the 'Fynn's first ever gig, and although we weren't playing in the same place as we had done back in 2000, Coba Fynn had a long and illustrious history of rocking Fury's before I joined and I was intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. Ash and I jumped in the Trøll, dribbled through the glutinous Edinburgh traffic* and then hared along the M8 in time for the "strict" 6-6.30 setup window.

Just to give a bit of context, Fury's lurks on a tributary of Glasgow's no-way traffic system, with a strip bar and the carbuncular St. Enoch's Centre for its nearest points of reference. It shares genes more with a fallout shelter than a club and to say it has sound quality is something of an oxymoron. We rose to the occasion and churned out a mediocre set. It really did blow: the sound on stage somehow went south between the soundcheck and our set, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't the presence of the crowd (thank you both for coming) altering the acoustics. So, unable to hear much of anything, we played shoddily through an abbreviated set and got the hell off the stage.

That is the last time I make a Titanic crack about a gig.

Fast forward to Sunday though, and everything that went wrong with Friday night was miraculously reversed. A practice beforehand tightened up the playing and sorted out three new songs; a venue small enough for un-mic'd amps gave us a great sound and an appreciative audience made all the difference. The Average Folk Band, headlining after us, were stonkingly good and provided an excellent soundtrack for the rest of the night. Hurray for the Universal! I sincerely hope we get to play there again, and I think Fury's has been edged out of the 'Fynn pantheon...

The gigs were bookended with a pleasant day in the sun with Ash: we lounged around beer gardens (drinking coffee, oddly enough, but then cafés with outdoor tables are few and far between round these parts) and ambled along the north sides of the New Town streets to keep the sun on our pasty faces. It feels like summer, or something like it, has finally arrived and everything looks rosy from here!

* I don't whether it's a hardening of the mental arteries as I get older, the fact that had I've more occasion of late to use the car than usual or whether the traffic really is worse, but my God! I can't drive within the Edinburgh city limits between 8.30 and 6pm without being overtaken by A) insensible rage and B) chancing bastards in the bus lane.

"Must be somebody famous..."

Coba Fynn played the Liquid Ship on Thursday. We soundchecked and retired upstairs for an hour or so, then filtered back downstairs with Charlie's massive entourage of medic mates as the hour drew near. Martin and I were hanging around near the door, waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, when I inadvertently overheard a Mum-and-Dad couple talking to their son.

"Wow - why are there so many people coming down here?"
"Must be somebody famous playing," remarked the son.

I pretty much cracked up right then.

We aimed for (and mostly hit) a relaxed, acoustic vibe and although we each managed a few technical howlers, it seemed to go across pretty well. I drove back to Edinburgh around midnight under a yellow moon, ominously silhouetting a jagged mass of cloud and giving the impression of a fell peak in the sky. All this visual drama was wasted on me, and I mostly spent the drive trying to remember what the word "gibbous" meant*.

Ash and I spent a superbly pedestrian Saturday afternoon loafing around Princes Street and the gardens, eating ice cream and generally indulging in a bit of unbridled consumerism. After a bit of filmic horse-trading ("Hmm. Spiderman 3 - well clearly we're going to see it whether we like it not, so...") we decided to go to see Sunshine later that day. Ash was more enthusiastic than I was, which is odd when the subject of the discussion was a science fiction epic with more than a passing resemblance to 2001, but then Danny Boyle squandered my Trainspotting goodwill with 28 Days Later and I'd been a bit sceptical since I'd heard about this new film. We had a coffee, bought our tickets and took our seats.

I was blown away from the word go: my jaw was either gaping in wonder or clenched in fear the whole way through. It wasn't without its flaws - the South Park-inspired spacesuits look like they were designed more with iconic appeal than practicality in mind, the "bomb"'s ambiguous, improbably picturesque physics were a little cheesy and there were a few other common-or-garden holes in the plot - but taken as a whole it was incredible. The imagery is mostly convincing and occasionally amazing: the apocalyptic, claustrophobic observation room scenes are excellent and the burnished, Grecian shields of the two ships rolling together as they dock is pure Kubrick but spectacular nonetheless. The action is perfectly judged, exquisitely tense and brilliantly shot. In short, I loved it. I have a feeling it's going to rather eclipse poor old Spiderman.

* Man, I need to wean myself off florid 19^th century fiction.

Sunshine

Ash and I took advantage of the balmy weather on Saturday, promenading serenely through Inverleith Park and over to the Botanics, petting friendly dogs along the way. I remember walking through the "desert" glasshouse in the botanics a few years ago, standing on a yellow(ish) brick road with the Sahara behind me and Death Valley ahead. It's such an odd conceit but so fundamentally Victorian ("Let us bring the Empire to the citizens, a thousand cubic fathoms at a time!") that I can't help but look at the gardens more as a time capsule than a museum. Another glasshouse has a tiny, darkened aquarium room that was opened in 1967 (and last cleaned out in 1968) and again I couldn't help but gleefully embrace the notion that I'd stepped forty years back in time. Frankly, I learned nothing about plants or fish but I had a great time anyway.

In the afternoon I took the iron steed for a ride up and around Arthur's Seat. I'd been using it week in, week out for about six months now without tackling anything more challenging than Broughton Street, and I thought it was about time I worked up a sweat.

Turns out one gear is easier than twenty-one, which is very odd: there's a fairly small range of speeds that are comfortable with a ratio of 44/16, so I found myself sprinting up (relatively speaking anyway) the steep bits and easing off on the smaller gradients and before I knew it was up by St Margaret's Loch and stretching out my noodly, unexercised arms. I freewheeled down the rest of the way in the sun with mechanically-minded passers-by grimacing at the racket.

On Sunday morning we toddled round to Jeff & Devon's for a masterclass in french toast making for me, and brunch for everyone else. Fortified with excellent breakfast grub and culinary knowledge, I headed off to Glasgow for the final Coba Fynn practice before our mini tour commences this Thursday at the Liquid Ship and would almost certainly applied my big fat "excellent weekend" stamp to this entry were it not for the arrival on Monday morning of a letter threatening legal action on behalf of BT. One phone call later and it transpired that in addition to barely meeting the definition of "telecoms company", they are incapable of properly maintaining (ex)customer records. If my eyes roll any further back I'll be examining the inside of my skull.

Gigtastic:

out of the blue, the 'Fynn find themselves practically touring. We're back in the Liquid Ship on the 5^th of April, then the Universal on the 15^th. And then, with a cosmic inevitability, a prophecy is fulfilled: Coba Fynn play Fury Murry's on the 20^th of July. In diligent preparation for these feats of musicianship, I've spent hours updating the website. Funny, it doesn't look look any different, nor am I any better at the bass as a result.

We also had a practice session at the weekend over in Berkeley 2, with the express intention of recording Doug's drumming for a few tracks. The 6 5 hour session (stupid British Summer Time) was a bit of a marathon, but we're looking good for putting together a few demo tracks during Doug's inter-gig sabbatical in Japan, which we'll then use to get some gigs.

Hang on a second...

And really, that's about all I've done this week! We, on the other hand, have spent an inordinate amount of time couch surfing, pottering round Tesco and other mundane but fuzzily pleasant chores. We met up with a load of the usual suspects on Thursday for some tasty pints n' excellent chat in the Rose & Crown, and I think on reflection I shall declare it a good week.

Plastic fantastic:

Ash and I went out for a night of pints and food, winding up at the Buffalo Grill round the corner on Raeburn Place and feeling marginally drunk after a rather paltry amount of booze in Hector's. They gave us a table at the window (so that every potential customer looking at the menu hung in it felt compelled to inspect us for signs of enjoyment or annoyance) and we ordered a couple of beers. The menu is pretty good, and the words "Roquefort Rib Eye" predictably imprinted themselves instantaneously on my consciousness.

With a remark of Jeff's in the back of my mind ("You and Dev should write restaurant reviews," he'd said offhandedly as we were walking up to the cinema the other night, and the idea stuck), I must admit that I was already grasping for Brysonesque anecdotes to throw nonchalantly into an entry about the weekend. Maybe I'd poke fun at the tiny starter or the fact that the radiator next to the table and the wonderful meaty kitchen aroma were sending me into a blissful old-before-my-time daze, or perhaps—hang on, is that a bone Ash just pulled out of her mouth?

Ah no. It was a piece of clear white plastic.

That pretty much holed the dining experience below the waterline (along with, alas, my positively droll 5-star review) although the head waiter/maître d' did an excellent job in dealing with it, somehow communicating directly into my mind not to worry about paying for that particular dish without letting on to the diners around us that anything at all was amiss. I guiltily shovelled the rest of my (tasty, entirely organic) steak into my mouth and despite a residual sense of vague surprise at the poulet au plastique, we polished off a slice of apple pie and the rest of our beers.

Bizarrely, I'd rather recommend the place: keep the containers out of the food and it'd be on the money for a night of indulging oneself in pleasures of the (bovine) flesh.

In other news, Coba Fynn are gearing up for a two-pronged attack on the Scottish music scene: a gig is booked at the Liquid Ship on the 5^th of April, and a recording is in the offing, driven by Doug and Davis' obsessive, shared love of intricate wiring diagrams and four-track recording. Of course I imply nothing by the term "shared love", and I posit that without their obsession we would still be flailing around wondering why every recording sounds like arse. Keep it Coba (is what all the cool kids are saying)!

Air rage:

Ash and I are in the process of booking ourselves a summer holiday in Pula (in the Istria region of Croatia) for a bit of scuba diving, followed by a ferry across the Adriatic to Venice for a few nights of renaissance culture. We had the distinct misfortune to find that the cheapest flight from London to Pula was provided by Ryanair. "Fly for £19.99!" gibbered the website.

Lying bastards.

A few clicks later the total had risen to £55 each - sort of a carrot and very big stick approach. For the love of God, if "taxes, fees and charges" are compulsory, just put them in the quoted price! The justification behind each additional amount makes no difference to the way it waltzes out of my wallet. Your common or garden airline provides an end-to-end service: take me, and my stuff (for an extra £5 if you're the money-grubbing spawn of Gordon Gecko. Oh, hello again, Ryanair) from here to there. I don't care if airports charge you to land there. I don't care what taxes the government makes you pay. And I care most especially little about how much jet fuel costs. Supply and demand, people - you sell more tickets, the price of fuel goes up. Welcome to capitalism!

Aaggaaarrgh. Where was I? Ah - summer holiday.

The name 'Istria' felt vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place why. I racked my brains and eventually remembered: "Hot damn!", I thought, "there's a Rally of Istria in Gran Turismo 4." Said road rally happens in a fortified town built on top of a hill, with narrow roads, vertiginous drops and louche Italians spectating from doorways opening directly onto the track. (Italians? A seed of doubt took hold in my mind.) Maybe we could take in a rally there, or perhaps hire a car to speed irresponsibly round the hills. Hell, perhaps they'd hand me the keys to a '67 Alfa GTA with a pat on the back and send me haring off down the cobbled start/finish straight.

"Oh," I realised. "Rally d'Umbria, not Istria."

Still: Venice, eh?

I've been afflicted with a pleasant form of inertia since we got settled ("embedded" might be more apt) in to the new place, but we finally seem to be making an effort to socialize again. A friend of Ash's was up from Oxford last weekend, the visit occasioning a trip to the Bailey for a few pints, and the other night Jeff and I took in Hot Fuzz. I didn't know quite what to expect - that's bollocks, actually; I expected to laugh until I shat - but something didn't quite click. Spaced's quirky little flights of fancy were bang on the money and to take them to their logical conclusions, as in Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, makes them seem a bit sterile in comparison. It's easy to laugh along with Tim's Resident Evil paranoia but not quite so funny when there actually are zombies involved.

Fortunately on an absolute scale Hot Fuzz is still almost infinitely funnier than My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which in turn is about as funny as colonic irrigation.

A funny thing happened

as 24 came on last Sunday night. The title came up - the flashy/bleepy "24" legend - and a plummy English voice narrated soberly over the top, "Yellow LEDs flash, resolving into the number 24".

What is this? I thought as I cracked open a beer, is Sky attempting some kind of forcible injection of poetry into the mundanity of Sunday night cable telly? Or have the voices come for me at last? The narration cut in whenever the dialogue stopped, and we realised that for some reason we were listening to the audio subtitles. We fiddled with the cable box, switching both it and the subtitles on and off a couple of times and yet still this chap continued to describe the action to us with great gravity and seriousness.

"Thomas Lennox skulks circumspectly through the corridors of the White House, eyes darting furtively as if a plotter in a Jacobean tragedy," he intoned gravely. I'd love to be able to say I'm paraphrasing. At the words "Jacobean tragedy", beer jetted from my nostrils.

Jacobean tragedy. 24. Jacobean tragedy.

I was simultaneously amused and bemused by the voice-over, which seemed to pounce on minutae at the least provocation. ("Jack waits tensely for the kettle to boil. Steam is emitted silently from its spout, clouding the glossy metal surface with an ever-changing patina of condensing moisture. With an air of pregnant finality, the kettle clicks off.") After about half an hour of this ("Jack makes a phone call, eyes flitting idly over his CTU colleagues as he silently evaluates their chances of having a freakish, terminal 'accident' before the day is out"), the box just gave up and freeze-framed during an advert. I gave up too.

Now, of course, I find out that Virgin Media is having a hissy fit that Sky is totally charging too much for its channels, and so I won't ever get to find out just who does meet a surprising, ratings-boosting death. Sigh.

* * *
It was Ruth's birthday on Thursday, and Ash and I met up with Ruth and Andy for some food at the Tapas Tree. They seated us at a bijou table in the back and left us alone to look over the menus. Having not spoken to Ruth for ages, of course, we blethered at length and entirely failed to pick anything. The waitress came back.

"Hi - I'm really sorry, but we haven't chosen yet. Can we have a few more minutes?" I asked.
She placed a hand on dropped hip and said: "What?"
"Can we have a few more minutes?"

She flounced off.

We hurriedly chose some food, and this time a waiter came through to furnish us with a (rather nice) bottle of house white and to take our order. The tapas began to arrive in batches, as is its wont, and we tucked in. A bowl of potatoes drowning in some sort of off-white substance arrived. "Does anyone remember ordering potatoes and sludge?" I asked jocularly.

"Uh, excuse me?" I said as the waitress stalked by, carrying another returned order from a different table. Oh God, I thought. We're going to get it in the neck. "Um, I don't think we ordered these. I think we asked for patatas bravas," I said, trying desperately to append a question mark to the end of the statement to make it less direct.

Hellfire burned in her eyes, which rolled towards the ceiling, and she uttered a magnificently fiery Latin tut, laden with exasperation. "So if you could...uh..." I flailed. "Si," she sighed, and ripped the dish off the table.

"Wow," said Ash, once the waitress had stormed off, "what a cow."

We finished our food (which I really can't complain about - top stuff all in all) and Andy turned into the full blast of the waitress's gaze one last time.

"Could we have the bill, please?" he asked.
"The bill?" she snorted, as if this was absolutely the last thing he might have wanted. "You don't want the desserts or the coffee?" she asked incredulously.
"No, just the bill," he continued hopelessly, writing on an imaginary cheque.

We got the bill. We got out. I'd highly recommend the Tapas Tree - the food's great, and the service is nothing if not bracing.

Domestic bliss:

Chez Roquefort has now been humming along nicely for a couple of weeks (for me; Ash was here during my week in Richmond) and I feel like we've properly moved in. To wit:

• We gots the internet! I've excised the shambling Cthulhu-esque beast that is BT from RFHQ's communication infrastructure and took great pleasure in cancelling their direct debit mandate. I'd explain the soul-destroying lethargy and incompetence that accompanied their repeated failures to connect our phone, but frankly enough of my life has been wasted being on hold to their customer "support" line, so you'll just have to imagine it for yourself. (Hint: it's sort of like death.) Virgin Media connected our phone, TV and internet in the space of a week from order to online. They win.
• Mart, Dom and I got wankered - there really is no other word to describe the state in which I found myself at 1 am after 6 pints - last Thursday. Mart is off to work in Braehead soon, so we took the opportunity to wallow in sentimental reminiscence over past Tiny Monkey glories. And to drink ourselves silly. The next morning I didn't so much worship as defile the white porcelain god.
• On Saturday Ash and I met up with Neil and the other Martin for a few in the Jolly Judge. Once again, a few turned into closing time and for the second time in a week I was laid low with an unplanned hangover.

And that's it, really; life burbles on quietly and happily. Mmm. Me likey.

Back in the dorm,

we found Ash's rucksack missing from her bed and replaced by a sleeping girl. Good God, I thought, what next? Ash started looking for her stuff amongst the rest of the gear strewn around the room while I went downstairs to talk to the duty manager.

It turned out that after we'd moved our stuff to the shared dorm and left for the day, a tour group staying at the hostel got antsy that perhaps they'd left some bags there. The (earlier) duty manager freaked out and put the single unclaimed bag - i.e. Ash's - onto the tour bus and forgot all about it. The tour group then came back four hours later after realising that the bag did not, in fact, belong to any of them. I picked it up from behind the counter and we finally got into our (separate) beds and conked out.

My welcome slumber lasted until 5 am, when I woke up in a greenhouse with an arid tongue and a parched throat. (What is it with hostels and heating?) The single, tiny window was opened as far as it could go, and the resultant 10-square-inch aperture was doing nothing at all to cool us down. Heating that had been woefully inadequate in the private room now combined with six heat-generating bodies to steam the place up to ludicrous levels. I think I heard everyone in the room get up and stagger to the toilet at least once and when, at 7 am, we could get up without unreasonably waking everyone else, we packed and checked the hell out of Dodge.

After a brief interlude to grab a room in a hotel for that night, we hit the slopes. To my surprise it was actually raining. I've never come across this while boarding except on particularly warm days in the Highlands, although it didn't seem to make much difference to the snow. We boarded and skied together until a bit after lunch, when Ash left for a hot chocolate and I left for the upper slopes. I made it as far as the Harmony Ridge by which time the weather had completely closed in; I couldn't see more than ten yards or so and I avoided the black couloirs that dropped into Harmony Bowl. Still, for a last run down (the lifts had already closed), it was fairly pleasant.

Back in our hotel room/studio apartment, revelling in comparative luxury, we stuck a frozen pizza in the oven and vegetated in front of Lost. It was positively Epicurean after the hostel, and my aching muscles thanked me for it. Ash's persistent lurgy came to a head with a mild fever that night, and thankfully the next day she was on the mend. That morning we forewent the opportunity for pay $80 for another rainy day of zero-visibility skiing and boarding and caught the lunchtime coach back to Vancouver. The scenery along the Sea-to-Sky Highway was incredible, and the tiny town/ferry terminal of Horseshoe Bay seemed really familiar; maybe there's a bit of Morvern Callar's port in that neck of the woods.

We spent the last few days trying to soak up some of the Vancouverite atmosphere, wandering around the hipster neighbourhood of Gastown, taking advantage of Dine Out Vancouver with some lavish dining in Nu and meeting up with Christina again in indie bar par excellence the Railway Club.

I must confess to finding it a bit of an odd holiday: coming right after a week of work made it difficult to get into the holiday swing of things; Whistler only intermittently avoided being utterly frustrating and the grey weather was entirely too Scottish for its own good. But hey, one drunken, starlit walk through bobcat-infested woods will make up for a lot of mediocrity.

Step back in time with me...

...to the last ever Tiny Monkey practice, and watch as we plough messily but enthusiastically through I Predict a Riot.

It's actually quite poignant for me, because Mart is leaving our shared workplace for a new job in Glasgow in a couple of weeks' time. Good luck, Mart! I predict that we shall rock again.

Man, Whistler sucks.

Okay, I exaggerate. Our experience of it mostly sucked.

The queue of cars and coaches backed up behind the accident started moving maybe three hours after it had ground to a halt, and we crawled past the rather disturbing wreckage of the crashed coach, pushed off to the side of the road. (I found out later that the driver had been badly hurt but not killed in the accident. It certainly looked pretty serious when we drove past it.)

We were booked into an HI hostel on the other side of Alta Lake and at 10 pm, an hour after the Greyhound had finally arrived, we dragged our gear wearily onto the local shuttle. The driver closed the door and dropped the hammer: we charged off into the snowy darkness, rounded blind bends with abandon and actually skidded to a halt at one point as he completely missed a turning. Fifteen minutes of vehicular lunacy later, the bus deposited us in the middle of frickin' nowhere. A signpost - I say signpost when really I mean postage stamp - pointed us down a set of stairs apparently chiselled out of the snowbank itself and into impenetrable blackness. Backpacks and boarding bags threatening to up-end us at every step, we slithered down the stairs, past a rickety barn, over a railway line and then a wooden bridge over a stream, and finally came upon the hostel. The place was dead; everyone was either partying until dawn or had already crashed out, so we picked up some sheets rudely woven from yak fur, huddled under them against the cold and passed out more or less instantly.

The next morning I wandered downstairs just after 8 am to find out about shuttles back to the village. The timetable wasn't so much regular as constipated. There were a scant five buses a day: 8 and 10 am, then 4, 6 and 10 pm, and the only other option was a four-kilometre hike up to the northern tip of the lake and then down into the village. While waiting for the 10 am bus we transferred our gear into the co-ed dorm (we were supposed to have had a private room two nights out of three, but Sunday's rockslide buggered up our timing), suited up and headed out. We traversed the stream, railway line and stairs up to the road and waited.

And waited, and waited. Some cars and trucks ambled by, the drivers looking curiously at us as if to say, "I didn't know we allowed carless hippies here." Eventually the bus turned up and took us into the village at a marvellously sedate pace. Ash had been feeling a bit under the weather for a few days before and decided to spend the day sorting out her ski rental and poking around for alternative accommodation, leaving me to charge off alone up the foggy hill.

Up the wrong foggy hill, as it turned out; I jumped on the nearest gondola and wound up halfway up Blackcomb Mountain instead of Whistler, but I made the best of it and spent the rest of the morning getting back into the swing of things. The conditions were oddly like the spring snow I've seen in France: frozen and treacherous in the morning, then thawing up towards the afternoon. Only this time the glorious spring sunshine was nowhere to be seen, and I boarded through a grey day livened up by the occasional zero-visibility fog bank.

In the evening, we picked up Ash's skis, picked the closest bar and reclined under the warm blast of a patio heater until dinner time rolled around. We spent a small fortune in an excellent tapas bar (my God, the butler steak was incredible) and decided, under the questionable influence of an equally nice bottle of wine, to walk back to the hostel. Our waiter gave us simple instructions to find the Valley Trail that would then take us "straight there, in about twenty minutes".

How we laughed, when we weren't listening for bears out there in the dark. Carrying a couple of boxes of still-warm, aromatic leftovers along a deserted forest trail for an hour with sub-zero temperatures rapidly sobering you up arguably isn't the best night out in Whistler. We eventually found the railway track and sleeper-hopped along it for the last hundred yards to the hostel. As we triumphantly emerged into the common room, one of the last poker-playing die-hards said incredulously, "You do know there are bobcats out there, right?"

Oops.

[To be continued.]

I'm typing this on my phone on a Greyhound coach

bound for Whistler, a little fearful of taking out my shiny new Mac laptop. I'm not worried about being mugged - this bus is, as with everything Canadian, exactly like its American counterpart only much nicer - I'm just worried that I'd disappear in a puff of bourgeois smoke if I did so.

We arrived in Vancouver on Friday night, creeping through streets clogged with commuters making their way both into and out of the city centre. I can only imagine that people don't so much commute into town and then leave at night as just redistribute themselves around greater Vancouver. Crossing the Granville Bridge, innumerable skyscraping apartment blocks and hotels loomed out of the fog, delineating the curve of the False Creek waterway that bounds the southeast side of the downtown island. It was quite a sight: the giant, vertical neon signs for cinemas, bars and hotels set against the modern(ist) tower blocks is probably the most striking night skyline I've seen outside of Vegas.

We arrived at our hotel on Granville Street, dragged our gear to our room and spent a quiet, drowsy night in the hotel. Ash was still fearsomely jetlagged and I was reduced to tears of gratitude to be able to avoid yet another gargantuan meal. ("May I have the bill before my digestive system fails, please? Thank you.") We channel-hopped through charmingly amateur local cable stations until sleep overtook us.

On Saturday we roamed around the downtown island area. Yaletown (the streets around the hotel) put me in mind of Memphis: back alleys with canopies of telephone wires, rundown shops and rooming hotels looking like the last resting place of many a faded rock star. While Memphis had a slightly unnerving air (I think it was the constant feeling of impending mugging), Yaletown felt lived in - well loved instead of abandoned. In the downtown proper we ate breakfast in the camp splendour of Bellagio's café, then carried on to Stanley Park. "It's amazing," a number of present and past Vancouverites had told us, "it's totally like a park right in the middle of a city." They were not wrong. It was a pleasant enough walk, and had some diverting touches like a set of totem poles and a fantastic whale statue outside the aquarium, but it wasn't enough to keep us and we headed home.

That evening we met up with Christina, a uni friend of Ash's turned to the dark side to become a lawyer, over the bridge in Kitsilano. Kits (ah, how gauche) is a mostly affluent, mostly bohemian neighbourhood with a series of SF-style streets sloping steeply down to False Creek, and consists entirely of maternity shops and minimalist restaurants. We ate in one of the latter (and my God, lawyers don't half love to talk about law) and then walked back past an entire block of the former to get drunk in Christina's flat.

The next day we met up with Christina again, along with Rowand, another of Ash's uni friends, in the Elbow Room Café. Apparently this place is renowned for unfriendly service: “the waiters dish it out and love it if you answer back!" enthused Christina. I was utterly cynical as to why the hell anyone would want to ever go to such a place.

It was awesome. If Bellagio's was possessed of a camp splendour, then this place was splendidly camp. The waiters weren't evil, just joyously mouthy: they good-naturedly ribbed you if you took more than five minutes to decide on what to eat, berated requests for coffee refills with directions to the percolator and if you didn't clear your plate, you were…encouraged to make a donation to the Loving Spoonful charity. Top stuff!

So this, now, is our second attempt to get to Whistler. Yesterday, in the queue to buy bus tickets, a security guard apologetically announced that a rockslide had blocked the Sea to Sky highway. We sighed, hailed the same taxi that had brought us to the bus station and headed back to our hotel for an extra night.

Today's bus is currently sitting immobile in a line of cars stretching over the next blind summit as we wait for the debris from an accident between a logging truck and a (thankfully empty) tour bus to be cleared off the road. We've already been forced to stop in Squamish (a sort of 'gateway to the hills' place, unfortunately more evocative of Aviemore than Bourg St. Maurice) for an hour or so, and have been in this queue for a couple more hours. This is the road that's supposed to carry all the traffic to the 2010 Winter Olympics! Anyway, with a bit of luck we'll be on the slopes tomorrow and things will be looking up.

Chez Roquefort

is now fully transported to Stockbridge. We moved over the weekend with some able assistance from both Jeff (cheers!) and the Trøll, and it all looks suspiciously like it went without a hitch. It's been so long since I've been able to call a flat mine - ours! - that it's still slightly unreal. This wasn't helped, of course, by having to catch a 6.30 am taxi and subsequently a flight to Vancouver the morning after moving in, but I'll survive.

On said flight the predictable jetlag delirium was joined by a new bedfellow. In Heathrow at 11 am, flush with the expensable company dollar, my fellow unfortunates (all three of my immediate bosses included) and I decided to have a beer while discussing the week's proposed agenda of tedium. On an empty stomach this livened things up considerably, and was helped along by a lukewarm can of foamy Canadian lager once on the flight. Some coffee and coke then combined with the above to visit upon me a truly evil dehydration headache. The airline lunch/dinner (dunch? Linner?) hit my stomach like a mallet and started it churning ferociously, so that I was firmly in the grip of a two-pronged artificial hangover and and felt unutterably dreadful for the next nine hours.

What an awesome flight that was.

We're staying in Richmond, a satellite city half an hour south of Vancouver, and (just) visible through the smog, fog, rain or whatever the prevailing near-opaque atmospheric condition is, are the distant Rocky Mountains. Their sheer size borders on the "Surely they can't be that big" front - Richmond is built on flat, reclaimed land and even though they're some hours away by car, the mountains still dominate the whole of the northern horizon. Richmond, on the other hand, seems smaller than it really is: the town itself feels vaguely frontier-like, with a set of railroad tracks near the hotel cutting a barren, weedy trail into the wintry distance, and many of the houses looking just that bit weatherbeaten and dilapidated.

Anyway, we've been eating and continue to eat like people determined to commit suicide by cholesterol, while I continue to gaze northward out of the nearest window and try to throw something pertinent into the discussion every half hour or so. This business travel malarkey isn't all it's cracked up to be! Still, Ash arrives tomorrow and Whistler beckons. I am much relieved.

Plus ça change...

On Sunday morning, in a small celebration of our first anniversary, I decided to make Ash and I some pain perdu - "lost bread" - for breakfast. This is the New Orleanian version of french toast, and although one might have surmised I would learn from my previous mistakes, one would be wholly incorrect.

Devon response's to the previous culinary disaster was thus:

Tricks with French Toast-- slightly stale bread, don't leave the bread in the egg mixture too long, butter in the pan, Not. Too. Hot.

Here are some pertinent points about Sunday's endeavour:

1. Pain perdu calls for baguettes rather than normal bread, and unfortunately Ash was all out of day-old french bread. In fact she rather inconsiderately had no stale bread whatsoever, only the fresh, soft, tasty kind.
2. Said fresh bread was submerged in the egg mixture for a not inconsiderable length of time while I fiddled interminably with making a pot of coffee.
3. The butter in the pan was perceptibly smoking by the time the coffee was brewing and I finally I slapped in a couple of fast-disintegrating slices.

Now last time, the result of my labours was a rubbery but essentially edible breakfast. This time, not so. Cutting into the fried carapace of one of these unfortunate cakes of doom revealed three distinct strata: first, a crispy shell of burnt butter and carbonised bread; second, a hybrid combination of partially scrambled eggs and bread and lastly, a near-liquid core of utterly uncooked sludge.

A generous application of maple syrup made the outer layer, when carefully separated from the treacherous innards, a crunchy treat. At least it did for one bite, after which my stomach was turned by the sight of the wobbly guts of the thing so that I shovelled it into the bin. I think french toast and I may just go our separate ways after this. It isn't working out. I'm tempted to try beignets next, but it all seems too much like baking, and that's a step I'm not willing to take.

In other news, Mart and I took a trip down memory lane by getting well and truly smashed on Wednesday night. The next day's nauseous bus trip (there was no way in hell I was going to cycle) and beery, aromatic arrival at work harked back to a simpler time when things like sleeping under one's desk and not carrying out a jot of work were accepted - even applauded! - by one's peers. Good (old) times.

Photographic evidence

See, I did go on holiday.

Until Thursday,

last week had been an exact clone of the preceding one. We viewed flats and episodes of 24 with more or less equal frequency, the latter compensating to a degree for the former. Then, out of the blue, we got a phone call from the landlord of the most promising flat, offering us a lease from the start of February. Winner! RF HQ will soon be transferred to the upper crust haven of Stockbridge.

We celebrated on Friday by heading along to Henry's Cellar Bar to watch The Scruffers, one of Dochan's current projects. I used to rather cynically wonder if this kind of band reciprocity was the only thing that sustained the live music scene in Edinburgh; we don't exactly have a King Tut's or 13^th Note to which the musos reliably gravitate. My cynicism was dismissed entirely by The Scruffers and then the headlining Dropkick, both of whom were excellent. Doug, Davis and Giancarlo were also in attendance, and we talked ad Ash's nauseum about recording, gigs and sundry band-related topics. Along the way we got pleasantly mortal and finally got home around 2 am.

Next morning at 9 am we hauled ourselves out of bed to meet the new landlord and I (literally) sorely wished that we'd exercised a little more restraint the previous night. A bracing walk down to Stockbridge sorted us out; the landlord was oblivious to or tactfully ignored the eye-watering reek of stale alcohol emitting from us both, and we regrouped in a coffee shop on Raeburn Place.

Stockbridge is a curious little place: because of the low buildings along Raeburn Place it gets a lot of sunlight (relatively speaking; this is Edinburgh, after all) and feels very village-like. Then, walking back up the hill to Princes Street, you look back and are struck by the opulent Georgian residences overhanging the Water of Leith along Dean Terrace and suddenly the "New" New Town hoves back into view. Despite having quite prolifically traipsed around some of Edinburgh's more salubrious areas of late - Regent Terrace, Cumberland Street and the like - I had never been able to work out where the hell all the money to build block after block of such monolithic, elegant architecture had come from. Realising it was probably the Empire diluted the restrained elegance with a touch of self-serving pomposity.

A bit like that last paragraph really.

Inaction:

In the aftermath of CF's comeback gig, Christmas and Hogmanay, I've intentionally and rather abruptly stepped off the gas. The last week has been taken up by exactly two activities: looking for a new flat for Ash and I to rent, and watching 24 Day 5. If we weren't occupied by the first of those, we were most definitely ensconced in front of the box occupied by the second. There's an established protocol to this: I loudly proclaim that some recent action (more often than not Jack Bauer has rendered someone unconscious with the butt of his gun) is a load of bollocks, and wonder aloud why didn't he just say "Excuse me Bob, I need your help on this," instead of leaving the guy with a potential brain injury, while Ash bemoans my pedantry and enjoys a worrying level of genuine empathy with the characters.

In other words, it is awesome viewing. After hour 12 I gave up even bothering to vent and now entertain a foolish pipe dream of becoming a screenwriter. Ah, the power of television.

We saw a few flats over the weekend, while I was mildly afflicted with a cold and very possibly high on nose-clearing Fisherman's Friends. I made a series of faux pas.

INT. LIVING ROOM - DAY

LANDLORD
In here is the boxroom. It's really great as a study, or just for storage.

KEITH stands in the middle of the windowless room.

KEITH
Or a cell! Ha ha.

Stony silence. The LANDLORD and ASH look blankly at KEITH.


INT. BATHROOM - DAY

ASH, KEITH and the LANDLORD are standing by the bathroom door. ASH opens the medicine cabinet above the sink.

KEITH
There are no pills for you in there, Ash! Ha ha.

Stony silence. The LANDLORD and ASH look blankly at KEITH.


EXT. FLAT - DAY

The LANDLORD opens the door to the cellar opposite the flat's front door. Some mouldy pieces of cardboard serve as carpeting.

LANDLORD
It's a bit damp in there, unfortunately. You could use it as a bike shed.

KEITH
Or as a cell! Ha ha.

Stony silence. The LANDLORD and ASH look blankly at KEITH.

You get the picture. Needless to say, we don't have a new flat, although a few times I was encouraged by how nice some of them were. Of course, immediately after viewing each of the nice ones I sank into a depression because I was reminded again how I shall never have the capital to purchase such a flat for myself.

Coba Fynn have been lying low for the last couple of weeks, and I think we can be more easily accused of inertia than momentum. (Ahaha! A little physics joke for you there. Carry on, please.) Fortunately though, we're back in the running for another Free Candy session, and the website will soon be getting some much-needed attention.

That is all.

Feed me!

It looks like the changeover to Blogger's new system means that the old Atom feed is no longer in use. Try the new one at the bottom of the page instead, if that's your sort of thing.

CF: TCB.

Coba Fynn, I think it can safely be said, are back in business. By all accounts, Friday's gig was a roaring success. We set up and soundchecked without too much fuss (despite being subjected by the sound guy to a long explanation of how, not to put too fine a point on it, he gets his rocks off to the visual memory of some of the female musicians that occasionally play at Cabaret Voltaire), spent an hour or so disposing of cars and meeting up with our other halves, necked a couple of quick beers and were straight on.

The way had been prepared by Dead Monkey — happily not, as I had initially wondered, a cruel pun directed at the late Tiny Monkey — with a fairly relaxed style of indie. We hustled onto the stage, spent a brief moment checking everything over and then didn't so much launch as amble straight into David Lynch's Lunchbox Blues. It went well. There was clapping.

By halfway through the set there was also dancing. This is a new one on me for these little gigs; foot tapping and the odd whistle abound in normal circumstances, but dancing is seemingly brought on by abandoning any pretence at musical relevance and laying down a big, fat blues rhythm. By the time we got to Hoochie Coochie Man, we'd loosened up (in my case, the angle of the neck of my bass had declined by about 5° from the vertical. This is as relaxed as I get during gigs) and laid it out with as much grit as we could muster. What a brilliant song.

We finished on She's Not There, hovering near extinction for a few bars in the middle, but pulling it together to scrape our way to the end. Except that we didn't finish. We could hear a sufficient number of voices shouting "Encore!" amid the clapping for us to throw the to-the-minute timing of the evening to the wind and to plunge through an unrehearsed but (I think) successful Crossroads.

"So what did you think?" I asked everyone I could lay my hands on.
"Brilliant!" they all said.
"Not bad," said Keef. I knew I could trust him.

Seriously though, we all really enjoyed playing, and I can't thank everyone enough for coming along. I've been periodically spamming the great and the good with gig invitations for a couple of years now and it never ceases to amaze me that they A) still come along and B) still profess to enjoy themselves.

* * *
Still riding high on the post-gig euphoria, I approached the flat's now-regular Hogmanay party with enthusiasm. Dave, Gill and I brought back a load of communal beer from Tesco (a one-party party, perhaps?), and once I'd finished loading up the iPod with suitably happy music and had concealed Jeff's personal liquor stash under my bed, I poured myself a generous White Russian. I drank it. I rinsed and repeated a number of times, welcomed the new year with flailing arms and then took a little nap. Ash roused me from my "sleep" and guided me gently out of the flat. This was a good thing, because pretty soon after that the contents of my stomach were russian back out again.

Jeff never found his spare booze, the party finished five hours after my hasty exit and the new year got off to a distinctly queasy start. A classic year already, I think.

P.S. Mart took a load of photos of the 'Fynn's return. Also, check out his post-Monkey music!
P.P.S. I must also say thanks to Thomas of the ever-entertaining Proxy for taking the gig's organisational reins over the past couple of months. Cheers!