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!

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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!