The Roquefort Files

2007-08-08T22:30:00.000+01:00

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

2007-08-01T17:09:00.000+01:00

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.

2007-07-24T17:53:00.000+01:00

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

2007-07-17T17:07:00.000+01:00

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

2007-07-09T20:48:00.000+01:00

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!

2007-06-30T18:44:00.000+01:00

Diving in Pula and culture in Venice:

Pula
Venice

Venetian blind

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

2007-06-30T17:52:00.000+01:00

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..."

2007-06-30T17:42:00.000+01:00

...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:

2007-06-20T16:51:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-06-12T17:49:00.001+01:00

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:

2007-06-04T22:45:00.001+01:00

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

2007-05-29T20:57:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-05-22T17:30:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-05-15T17:12:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-05-07T20:07:00.001+01:00

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:

2007-04-30T23:31:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-24T16:15:00.000+01:00

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?

2007-04-17T23:21:00.000+01:00

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..."

2007-04-09T13:41:00.000+01:00

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

2007-04-03T14:09:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-03-26T21:57:00.000+01:00

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:

2007-03-19T20:54:00.000Z

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:

2007-03-11T01:09:00.000Z

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

2007-03-02T13:12:00.000Z

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:

2007-02-23T13:57:00.000Z

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,

2007-02-18T23:53:00.000Z

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...

2007-02-12T14:50:00.000Z

...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.

2007-02-12T14:41:00.000Z

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

2007-02-05T19:10:00.000Z

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

2007-02-01T16:01:00.001Z

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...

2007-01-23T13:18:00.000Z

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:

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.
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.
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

2007-01-16T10:35:00.000Z

See, I did go on holiday.

Until Thursday,

2007-01-15T18:54:00.000Z

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:

2007-01-08T18:18:00.000Z

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!

2007-01-03T14:11:00.000Z

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.

2007-01-03T14:00:00.000Z

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!

A Christmas hamper

2006-12-27T18:32:00.000Z

of random bits today, rather than a coherent post.

* * *
Ruth was working on Christmas Eve, in a little bar a couple of towns along from my parents' house. I drove along to pick her up after the pub had closed and they'd had a chance to close up, at about 1.30 am. When I arrived, there were still a few die-hards downing the last of their pints, so I hung my jacket over a bar stool and settled in to wait.

"This is my brother," Ruth said to her inebriated boss, who was perched precariously on another stool at the end of the bar.
"Oh aye," he said, "so the Saab is yours then?"
I'd loaned Ruth the Trøll while I was on holiday. "Yes. Nice to meet you too," I replied.
"They're great cars they are."
"Yes. Yes they are."

I waited a bit longer. The last group of drinkers were getting their stuff together, and on their way past an old schoolmate said hello. "Long time no see! You've got the Saab 900, right?" she said. We talked for a bit, and then they were off.

Ruth introduced me to the very last punter, a youngish regular, on his way out. "Hi there - so you're Ruth's brother?" Then, in slightly hushed, reverential tones: "That's a great car you've got. I love those Saabs."

These people do not get out much. "A 1992 900 S! And with the Aero kit, if I'm not mistaken. So rare that such an objet d'art comes to our humble village."

* * *
The hot water in our flat is, and has been for the last year or so, only intermittently functional. We have an odd setup whereby the hot water for the shower room and the heating comes from a modern combi boiler at one end of the flat, while the hot water for the bathroom and the kitchen comes from a grain elevator-sized immersion boiler at the other end. Needless to say, the apparently Victorian-era immersion heater functions reliably, if inefficiently, all year round. (The environment audibly groans when we fire it up.) The shiny new combi boiler is rather more of a prima donna.

A while back we discovered, after a succession of visits by largely moronic plumbers, that the heating system has a small leak somewhere. Evidently it's not large enough to easily detect, but it did let the pressure drop until we had neither warm radiators nor a hot shower. The final, competent plumber showed us how to open a top-up valve to refill the combi boiler until a proper fix could be applied.

Of course a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and although the leak goes unfixed (hell, if anyone of our neighbours noticed a jet of scalding water gushing into their flat, I'm sure they'd let us know. And we did tell the landlord about it. Honest), we now merrily poke around with a screwdriver every few months to make sure the pressure's up.

Last week, though, a new problem arose. The shower became a turbo-sauna. It was like washing on the sun. I developed a technique for showering, which was to plaster oneself up against the tiled wall furthest from the geyser emitting from the shower head and let the superheated steam remove the outer layer of one's skin. Woe betide you if any of the actual water should graze your unprotected self.

Fortunately, and for no discernible reason, the temperature dropped back to a tolerable level during the week. This pleases me because I can shower in safety, and disappoints me because I am deprived of a punchline for this little anecdote.

* * *
In preparation for the upcoming CF gig, I plugged in my bass last night and played away for a while, gazing idly down at the twin curiosities of the gay-bar-for-neds and the brothel above it visible from my window. I was reminded of an evening a month or so back. On the way to Café Royal, I'd rounded the corner onto Rose Street when a drunken buffoon on a stag night stumbled out of a nearby pub, cornered me and asked where they should continue boozing. "And find some wummen tae, like."

He stank like a brewery and I sorely doubted his chances of both getting into any pubs or getting any once he was in there. But I was brought up well, and I tried to be helpful. "Hmm. George Street has a load of pubs, but they're all a bit posh." I had a rather evil notion. "You're already on Rose Street, and it's pretty good for pubs. There's one just across the road, actually-" I said, pointing down the alley to the gay bar, and right on cue, two people physically flew out of the door.

"And dinnae come back!" bellowed the barman.

My drunken friend went to George Street.

(Sort of) World Tour Redux:

2006-12-21T11:15:00.000Z

Antipodean boozing and American rambling:

Work in progress.

2006-12-21T01:23:00.000Z

I've just moved the RF to Blogger's new layout system, and there are a few changes and glitches compared to the old layout. If anything is completely broken, please leave a comment on this post! Cheers.

The Manhattanite/Orwellian nightmare before Christmas.

2006-12-18T18:09:00.000Z

For the first time in almost a decade, I've done most of my Christmas shopping before the day itself. I still needed to get something for my Mum and to pick up some wrapping paper and cards, and so on Sunday I walked along to Stafford Street to make my yearly pilgrimage to Studio One and Paper Tiger. I browsed around Studio One, comparing elegantly minimal, Scandinavian knick-knacks and settled on a sort of candlestick-thing. My credit card went into the machine and I duly punched in the PIN. Into Paper Tiger; select some suitably tasteful wrapping paper and some cards; debit card into slot and enter PIN #2.

The sheer Sex and the City-ness of it all assailed my senses. Here I was, on a crisp winter's evening, dressed in an accidentally fashionable pea coat bought six unfashionable years ago, ferrying home designer charity Christmas cards (like they say in Friends with Money, why not just give the money straight to charity?), wrapping paper so restrained as to be conceited and an Ikea-but-more-expensive candlestick. I didn't mind per se, but my God, did I feel ridiculous.

As soon as the pseudo-respectability turn had passed, I started thinking about the bizarre act of tapping in my PIN to identify myself as the appropriate card's owner. The reduction of this act to typing four digits into a keypad make the world seem a step closer to 1984. To the Man (the state is too inept to count as such, while your common or garden retail corporation is continually trying to extract the largest possible amount of money from me and isn't held back by troublesome ethics), I am quite literally just a number. Granted, I've been just a number for years now - to the electricity company, the telephone company and my bank among others - but the removal of any truly personal acts of identification, like matching a photograph or signing my name, seems like a step too far.

And then piled on top of any vague metaphysical concerns, there's what would seem to be the oddly lax security behind Chip & PIN. To wit: four digits isn't a big number to crack; a photo would massively restrict fraud should anyone get hold of my card (and assuage my increasing feeling of nothingness to boot), and I haven't yet seen a keypad with a worthwhile guard to shield your PIN from prying eyes. If these four numbers are all that stands between me and the supposed legions of identity thieves waiting to relieve me of all my money (ha! Give me three weeks of Christmas shopping and I'll do it myself), maybe a token effort at bolstering their security might be a good idea, n'est-ce pas?

Anyway.

Bookending this journey through ill-defined concerns about self and self-worth (in monetary terms at least) were a couple of pleasantly festive evenings hosted by Jez & Max and Jeff & Devon respectively. At Jez's we quaffed mulled wine and ate homemade mince pies, and at the old flat we ate and drank ourselves into a happy stupor. All in all, a moderately inebriated and wholly tasty weekend. Roll on Christmas...

A musical interlude:

2006-12-11T21:04:00.000Z

Tuesday's gig went really well! We independently got to Glasgow and set up our gear in the Liquid Ship, then retired to Gambrino's Pizzeria for some food. After all, man cannot rock on lunch alone. We threw the grub down our throats with nervous energy, talked ourselves up over a calming beer and headed back to the bar to catch the last acoustic act before we took to the stage ourselves. Charlie's fellow medical types had turned out in pleasingly large numbers, as had the Captain (a man who really, really wants Coba Fynn to do well but who thinks we're crap) and Hannah.

After Davis/d(e) and Charlie had minutely tuned their guitars with the volume all the way up for the audience's benefit, we gamely skiffled our way into the Belle & Sebastian stylings of David Lynch's Lunchbox Blues. Apart from some slightly over-loud bass (at least I'd remembered to turn it on), it slipped past in three short minutes of indie goodness. We finished, they clapped, and the 'Fynn was back.

We proceeded through old and new songs for the next twenty minutes or so. Cracks in the rhythm section's composure appeared and healed up periodically, while the tuning of Charlie's guitar proved somewhat elusive. We got to Locomotive Blues, barrelled messily but (I think) winningly through it and ended on a high note. G, if I remember rightly. They clapped again and a few die-hards shouted "More!" We politely declined (Charlie: "We don't know any more,") and called it a night. Even the Captain was impressed. The first test is over, and a few more practices are all that stand between us and the main event at Cabaret Voltaire on the 29^th.

This band shit is awesome.

On Saturday night, the musical shenanigans continued. Ash, Jez, Serena and I went to Henry's Cellar Bar to watch an acoustic set by Mark Morriss of the newly rehabilitated Bluetones. We wound up in the Cameo Cinema bar; I wound up drunk, and Mark wound up being subjected to a half-hour, blow by blow account of our recent tour of the South. Good times!s

Ben, an ex-workmate

2006-12-04T13:54:00.000Z

with a penchant for ~~buggery~~ motor sports, was up visiting over the weekend and so Dave had industriously coordinated a corresponding return to the go-karting track. It was raining on and off, so we struggled to put on rubberised romper suits over our fireproof overalls (we were covered come hell or high water) and waddled out, gangster style, to the karts. There's nothing like howling winds, biting cold and the grating buzz of a two-stroke single to fire the petrol in one's veins, n'est-ce pas?

These were newish karts by the looks of things, with lots of mudguards and heatshields to guard against the dangers of burns and lawsuits, and yet they already felt somewhat...run in. After the heats, it became obvious why: put a bunch of bumpers on a go-kart and it turns into a dodgem. I was nudged onto the grass, into tyres and occasional head-on collisions and by the final I was determined to stay out of absolutely everyone's way, whether ruthless veterans or hapless newcomers.

And the final was good. A good clean race and a respectable 5^th out of 16 doesn't make for a thrilling story, but I was far happier (if rather bruised) by the end of it. I can't believe it's been so long since the Nürburgring trip, and our day of pretend racing has me wanting to do it again.

In the absence of any other excitement, this is going to have to be a short entry. But remember: Coba Fynn are playing the Liquid Ship tomorrow night. We'll be on last (erk - is this the "headlining" of which they speak?), at around 11.10 pm. Come along! It'll be a spectacle, regardless of which way the cards fall.

Lying low:

2006-11-27T13:51:00.000Z

turns out working five days a week is pretty much not as much fun as exploring the deep south and attempting to extract some half-baked cultural conclusions from DIY disaster tourism. But lo, we are back and making the best of it.

Ash and I drove to Glasgow at the weekend: me for a Coba Fynn practice and Ash for some Christmas shopping. I don't think I've ever noticed how grim Glasgow is before. As convenient as the M8 is, there's nothing like a motorway spearing through a city to give it that urban wasteland feel. The city centre manages to be both gaudy and tatty at the same time (especially around Christmas with all the lights, all the shoppers, all the rubbish and the ever-present mish-mash of architecture) and is clogged with traffic despite the hellish one-way system. It'd be almost like downtown Memphis if it wasn't for the throngs of neds giving it a higher population.

But I digress. The practice went remarkably well, given that we haven't played together regularly for a couple of months, and I'm feeling very relaxed about our next gig. We're playing as part of a Free Candy session on Tuesday the 5^th of December at the Liquid Ship on Great Western Road in Glasgow. Notionally this is an acoustic night; in reality we'll deprive Doug of his tom-toms and hope for the best.

This is all in preparation for a balls-out New Year bash at Cabaret Voltaire on the 29^th of December with the Green Day-baiting Proxy. The gig description isn't up yet, but perhaps Charlie's first draft:

Coba Fynn are a most precocious talent. Missing this chance to see them may be an error.

will convince you to go anyway.

In other news: Casino Royale really is very good; The Departed is not, and Davis has pimped a Creme Egg. That is all.

Our final destination

2006-11-20T17:58:00.000Z

was Memphis for two more days before we left for home. When we arrived the weather had changed from clear and bright in Nashville to grey and overcast, and downtown Memphis was as grim as ever. We checked back into the King's Court (crack whores or not, you can't argue with $40 a night plus tax) and, with the weather clearing up in the evening, walked over to Beale Street to look for some food and drink. Asking the Tap Room's friendly barman where we could find some cheap and cheerful food, he pointed us in the direction of a place called Ernestine & Hazel's. "I've only ever been there once, and I went there just for the burgers. It's over on South Main."

So off we traipsed, taking our time to walk the few deserted blocks along Main Street with the trolley clanking past every now and again for company. A neon sign signalled the bar, and in we went. The three customers swivelled towards us from their allotted bar places and chairs and then went back to drinking. Behind the grimy bar was a hotplate tended by the barman/cook, and I ordered us a couple of beers as Ash took a table and tried to look inconspicuous.

"What kind of burgers do you do?" I asked.
"With cheese or without," he replied. We were dealing with a sort of down-home In-n-Out Burger then.
"Right. With, please."

We sat down and drank our beers, politely fending off the drunk, middle-aged divorcee who was persistently trying to draw us into conversation from the bar and tried to ignore his story of a recent shooting in the lounge upstairs. Our burgers arrived; we ate them (and were pleasantly impressed by how good they were*), downed the rest of our beers and exited stage left. I can heartily recommend Ernestine & Hazel's, with the added caveat that it should be enjoyed only by packs of people.

We had a few more drinks in the Tap Room - this place I can recommend without any reservations - and called it a night.**

The next (last!) day we decided to visit the Civil Rights Museum. On our way to our burger adventure the previous night we'd seen some signs for it and so we made our way back there through the chilly side streets of the city centre. I didn't know what to expect; I knew it was partly built within the old Lorraine Motel but that was all. By the time we finished, I was really glad we'd made the effort to go. There's days worth of material in there and we just skimmed the surface of it because we arrived relatively late in the afternoon, Most affecting is the motel room exhibit, where the room habitually rented by Martin Luther King is preserved more or less as it was in 1968, and the boarding house building across the road, where it's possible to look down through the window from which he was shot. Similarly to Graceland but in an entirely different way, the museum was an incredible time capsule of its era.

For our last night we headed back to Beale Street to hunt down some good old rock & roll. (It sounds repetitive and touristy to visit the same area so often, but we'd singularly failed to find any other areas of interest. As a case in point, a friend of Ash's had recommended an allegedly interesting neighbourhood about fifteen blocks east of the downtown area and through which we passed on the way in to the city. We duly stopped off to look around and found it crumbling, grey and more or less uninhabited. With only a couple of days left, and bereft of the car from the next morning, we took the safe/boring option!) Ending up in B.B. King's, we ordered some food and sat down to watch the show.

I wasn't overly impressed. The food was expensive and mostly fried; the music was run-of-the-mill, even if it was being played by a rising guitar genius, and the atmosphere was more office party than authentic juke joint. Maybe I missed the point, but I couldn't escape the general feeling that we were in a tourist-trap chain bar. Down, dirty and slightly dangerous it might have been, I much preferred the previous night's grungy combo of greasy burger and pool-room bar. There's still a bit of bit of my imagined Memphis to be had, but it ain't in B.B. King's.

We caught a cab for the airport the next morning to begin the three-flight marathon home. I was sad to leave, Ash was moping and despite all of the grimness that comes with inner-city deprivation and hurricane-struck coastal towns, I think I'd seen why most Americans are proud of their country.

* I have finally realised what makes American burgers taste so good. It's the cheese, pure and simple. Your humble Kraft single, both evolved and devolved from its more natural relatives (roquefort, for example) provides the necessary injection of sweetness into an otherwise savoury snack and elevates it from merely an instance of burger to its Platonic ideal. I am depressed that a foodstuff so processed as to be indistinguishable from its plastic wrapper is responsible for such a transformation, but simultaneously elated that I have divined the true nature of burger perfection.
** One thing that only struck me that night, near the end of the trip, was how expensive alcohol is in the States. Accommodation, petrol, food and cars are cheap, but beer is expensive. Factor in a tip of a buck or two per round and it's at least as expensive as the UK.

We dispatched Alabama in a couple of days

2006-11-12T19:57:00.000Z

in a cross-country dash to Tennessee. Mobile provided antiquated, grand accommodation, helping us by degrees back to earth from the rarefied heights of the Quarterhouse, while Birmingham was so deserted in the Biblical silence of a Sunday afternoon that we decided to press on to the next big city. The swampy land around Mobile gave way to more mountainous and spectacular scenery as we drove north, and I was put in mind of some the more picturesque parts of the Highlands.

We reached Chattanooga as it was getting dark and found a room for the night before heading for Nashville. The next morning we asked the hotel receptionist about any notable things to do before we left, and decided to visit the delightfully unhinged Rock City as a result. It begins with a nice (if trite) walk through some curious natural rock formations accompanied by calming music piped through hidden speakers, takes you over a springy suspension bridge to a look-out point from which seven differnt states are supposedly visible, and finally leads to a fluorescent vision of Lynchian hell. The decision to build an underground grotto filled with fairytale vignettes lit by ultraviolet lamps is not one that I can understand, but it certainly livened up the visit. Take your children only if you feel the need to punish them. We laughed all the way to the car and joined I24 to head all the way to Nashville.

Nashville follows the same the downtown-and-sprawl pattern we saw in most cities, only more so: the city centre is squeezed between the Cumberland River to the south and the railroad to the north, and outside of that it's rare to see a building of more than a few stories. We crossed the river and threaded our way through downtown Nashville, then crossed the railroad marshalling yard and found a motel just on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. As Ash napped I took a walk to find some guitar shops I'd looked up before we arrived.

What a farce. "Music City USA" has two worthwhile guitar shops: Gruhn Guitars and the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase (i.e. the Gibson banjo factory). Gruhn had some awesome basses. Unfortunately, being a vintage guitar specialist, they sported equally awe-inspiring prices. The Gibson shop, on the other hand, was prepared to knock the odd dollar or six hundred off the advertised prices but had a terrible selection of their own range. (This theme extended to New Orleans, aka the home of jazz, and Memphis, aka the home of rock and roll. New Orleans had a single shop within walking distance of the quarter, and again most of its stock was unattainable vintage perfection or modern basses I just plain didn't want. Memphis boasted another Gibson factory with an equally limited range, and as far as we could tell, no other guitar shops. Oh well. eBay here I come.)

We tramped along the deserted sidewalks and dashed across the busy roads to Broadway, on the fringes of downtown Nashville. Buskers playing Dobros and wearing ten-gallon hats stood between honky-tonk bars with neon signs in a country and western echo of Beale and Bourbon Streets. After eating some generically glutinous Southern food in a characterless sports bar, we went looking for something a little more authentic. We plumped for Robert's Western World, recommended by a helpful record shop clerk across the street. I didn't know what to expect: we could see a band setting up, but the place was dead as yet, so we bought a couple of drinks and sat down to wait.

After a while, a few more (mostly older) couples had drifted in and eventually the band - John England and the Western Swingers - appeared. They were excellent. John introduced the band and off they went, playing what he called "Western Swing" music. Initially I thought "wow, these guys are great musicians," and as they continued and the audience grew, I found myself completely rapt. I don't think I've ever seen such an amiable band play live: they swapped places at the mic, bantered among themselves and with the audience and generally came over as the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. The attentive waitress kept us furnished with drinks until they finished a couple of hours later, and for perhaps the first time during the holiday I didn't begrudge dropping a fat tip into the box for the band as we left the bar.

We left the Big Easy behind

2006-11-06T17:56:00.000Z

on a clear, sunny Saturday morning and took the coastal road towards Pass Christian. Josh, Dave and I had stopped there for lunch on our way into N.O, and I had so enjoyed the journey last time that I felt morbidly compelled to see how this part of the Gulf Coast had fared during Hurricane Katrina.

The devastation was evident even before we'd left the city proper. The highway ran along a thin strip of land with houses either side, and in most cases there was very little left of them. Dinghies, yachts and even what looked like some fishing boats were stranded along the road, along with piles of rubbish that on closer inspection appeared to be the entire contents of destroyed houses, up to and including the kitchen sink. Some plots had new buildings on them - most of them stilted like the Queenslanders prevalent in Brisbane - but far more just had trailers parked beside the remains of the previous home. The trees in the swampland that ran intermittently alongside the road were bent ragged by the wind, and piles of broken limbs cleared off the road still lay where they'd first been pushed. (Is this a problem of "small goverment"? Is it the case that someone will come back to tidy up the mess left after the first hasty clear-ups or is this part of the Gulf Coast destined to look like a landfill for years to come? Is it something so minor there are no tax dollars left to spend on it? I wish I knew, because the whole area desperately needs a shot in the arm and living amongst all this debris can't be particularly morale-boosting for the inhabitants...)

We reached Bay St. Louis and then Pass Christian, taking the long way round to avoid the road bridge we'd used last year, now in the process of being rebuilt after the hurricane. Both towns were, to be honest, a mess. I stopped at the beach where we'd gone swimming last year and took a couple of photographs of the damage: the wooden shower and toilet block had gone, leaving only the metal supports standing, as had the boardwalk around it and the bench where we sat in the sun to dry off. The slatted wooden bungalows that had faced the Gulf from behind Highway 90 were more or less all destroyed and had been replaced only by a couple of Waffle Houses. We drove on to Mobile, and I was relieved to see a town that hadn't been trashed beyond recognition.

(Intermission):

2006-11-06T11:59:00.000Z

we're back! There's another entry to come about the post-Big Easy part of the trip, and then normal service will resume. It's good to be back!

We spent almost a week in New Orleans,

2006-11-04T10:09:00.000Z

staying in the Quarterhouse on Chartres Street. The place was palatial! We had a comically over-decorated (cf. gilt-framed oil painting of a violin-playing monkey dressed in 19th century costume complete with pince-nez spectacles) two bedroom apartment to ourselves, and it was way beyond anything we could have afforded by ourselves. Mad props must go to Ash's parents for giving us their unused time there.

We spent a good portion of the week just wandering around the French Quarter, soaking up the atmosphere while trying to avoid inhaling any of it. The eye-watering eau de Rue Bourbon was still in full malevolent bloom, lying somewhere evil between putrefying crawfish and stale vomit, although away from the Canal Street end (frat central) it mercifully decreased to background levels.

The quarter was quiet during the week, and if anything was more welcoming than last time I was here. We pottered around museums, gawked at some of the landmarks and emerged blinking (and weaving slightly) into the afternoon light after stopping for the occasional restorative Hurricane. In the evenings we stuffed ourselves silly with gumbo or some other death-by-protein banquet, got elegantly wasted to a greater or lesser degree in a suitable establishment and generally revelled in our genteel Southern surroundings. We talked to a friendly off-duty U.S. soldier who bemoaned the difficulty of getting stoned on base, listened to some jazz (nice!) in Preservation Hall, and propped up the bar in a dingy sports pub near the edge of the quarter while Ash coached me on the rules of baseball.

One afternoon we drove out to the Garden District, independently recommended to us by a few different people. It didn't seem to be much more than an affluent residential area comprised of grand old mansions, but we ambled around for an hour or so, marvelling at the gnarled old trees cracking the pavement slabs with their roots and shadowing the upper stories of the houses. If we'd been there after dark it would have been prime horror film material. A few of the houses were still in the process of having storm damage repaired, but like the French Quarter, there wasn't much evidence left of last year's hurricane.

The tourist map of the city we'd picked up (in one of the handy welcome centres sited where the interstates cross state lines) showed a suggested driving tour route including the quarter, so we decided to follow it home. After a single wrong turn off a broad tree-lined avenue, we were suddenly on the wrong side of the tracks. The houses were wooden bungalows with peeling paint, household debris littered the yards, rusty cars cannibalised for spares lay immobile in the driveways and the streets were full of people with no jobs to go to. It was instantly depressing and oppressive, and it was obvious that most of the people sitting on their faded porches were watching us as we rolled by in our ridiculous lifestyle car - I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd jumped to the conclusion (however wrongly) that we were doing a DIY disaster tour and taken a justifiably dim view of it. We found our way out and headed home.

All this sounds a bit down on the city, but the reality is that I think overall we got a far better idea of what it would be like to actually live there. We saw some of the seamier sides of it; we spent a night out in Faubourg Marigny, an area populated by locals as opposed to the tourists; we saw the bohemian neighbourhoods around Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets, and in visiting them all we saw that for the most part, it's just like any other city. An enjoyable one for all that!

After leaving Memphis,

2006-10-29T03:23:00.000Z

we drove southeast towards Tupelo, intending to complete the Elvis experience by visiting his birthplace. As soon as we turned off I55 we were in stereotypical Bible Belt country: almost many churches as homes, and as many trailers as permanent houses. Abandoned cars and trucks lay rusting in driveways and ditches every half mile or so beside dilapidated wooden shacks discoloured by age. Every now and again a pristine plantation-style house on a bowling green lawn would appear, bordered by less fortunate properties.

Driving along one particular stretch of road with with dense green foliage on the left and rolling fields on the right, some movement caught my eye among the trees: a big bird of prey (we weren't sure what kind, but it looked like an eagle of some sort) took off low and wheeled across the road, only to fly directly into the path of an semi truck coming the other way. There was an audible thump as the truck passed us, a few feathers flew up and I spun round to see the truck carry on down the road. We'd seen plenty of roadkill already but this was a bit of a shock...!

We carried on to Tupelo and found the Presley house more through luck than judgment and stopped to take a few pictures. We ambled through the Elvis Aaron Presley Memorial Chapel (what was that I was saying about a pilgrimage last time?) and hit the road again, this time along the Natchez Trace Parkway to Hazelhurst, where we stopped for the night.

Hazelhurst was a perfect example of most of the towns we stopped in on the way to New Orleans: we'd hit an identical strip of chain motels and fast food joints, fill up with gas and coffee and set out to find "downtown", or whatever constituted the original part of the town. Once off the neon-lit main drag we'd crawl through street after street of bungalows in various states of repair, but more often than not we'd be completely unable to find anything resembling a town centre. The sprawl seems to take over so rapidly and spread so wide that I can only assume that downtown is maybe three solitary streets hidden somewhere within a huge expanse of homogeneous suburbs.

The next day, though, we found an honourable exception: Laurel, midway between Hazelhurst and New Orleans, looked at first to be exactly the same as every other strip-mall town so far - if even a little scrappier around the edges - but then after half an hour of fruitless to-ing and fro-ing around the 'hood we discovered the original town centre in all its antebellum glory. Granted, it was only about three by three blocks in size, but it boasted a good few imposing gothic edifices and made for a pleasant ambling stroll before we drove the final stretch to New Orleans. Pity the one café in town didn't have any tomato sauce...

We arrived in Memphis

2006-10-24T17:01:00.000+01:00

to find it warm and muggy - a happily faint echo of the sweaty furnace of the last time I was in the South - and took a cab to our salubrious lodgings. "The King's Court Motel?" said our incredulous driver. "Lemme just say, if it was just you sir, you'd hear a knock on your door at midnight askin' what kind of woman you be wantin'. Short or tall, blond or brunette. Or what drugs you be after."

Happily neither came to pass, although it wasn't the most opulent place I've ever stayed. We dropped our things, made damn sure that the door was locked and walked the two blocks to Beale Street. On this particular evening the street was closed off and given over to hordes of bikers: on one block, bloated Hell's Angels-types reclining against massive chromed hogs and on the other, home boys revving neon-lit Japanese racing replicas. We found a street-side bar and took in the scene for a while and then stumbled back home, jet lagged to the hilt.

The next day was clear and cold, and the streets were devoid of life to match. We got some breakfast and then caught a bus (complete with garrulous and faintly menacing nutter) to Graceland, taking us through a grey and dreary sprawl. A sign on the road in from the airport had hailed Memphis as "America's Distribution Center" and this moniker was, on the surface at least, a damn sight more apt than "The Home of Rock 'n' Roll". The Memphis that rolled past us in the gathering rain was boxy and concrete, frayed with weeds around the edges.

Graceland hove into view, and we bolted from the bus. Ash elected to sit out the tour, having already been there a few years back, so I jumped lonesome on the mandatory shuttle bus for the hundred yard journey across Elvis Presley Boulevard, slipped on my electronic tour guide headphones and crossed the hallowed threshold.

The tour was great! I knew nothing about the King before it other than he'd had some excellent tunes and had ignominiously died on the bog, and while I didn't become an instant Elvis fan or scholar, it was consistently intriguing nonetheless. The mansion was a shag-pile '70s time capsule, the cars satisfyingly bloated and the planes just jaw-droppingly extravagant. The weirdest thing was the nature of the tour itself: with everyone listening to a personal voice-over through their headphones, the house was mostly silent when you took them off and it felt more like a pilgrimage than a tourist attraction.

We took the free shuttle to Sun Studio after that (a bit of co-operative marketing that would have seemed opportunistic had not both tours been genuinely worth the money), this time for a guided tour by a Jack White-lookalike called David. The studio is only two rooms in size, but again the tour was flawless and this time our guide's enthusiasm - and the revelation that the studio is still active at only $75 per hour (Coba Fynn, do you read me?) - made it seem far more relevant than Graceland had ever been.

The next day we picked up our rental...vehicle. Having run out of compacts, or intermediates or whatever it was we'd originally reserved, the woman at the desk "upgraded" us to a Chevy HHR, a faux-gansta exercise in retro ugliness and reputedly a complete vacuum of driving enjoyment. I pleaded with her but to no avail; it was the HHR or nothing. I bitched and moaned all the way to the motel where we loaded up our gear, backed up and headed towards the exit, crawling past as we did so a distinctly real gangster type who threw me a gesture that seemed to say, "Word. I respect your choice of transport, yo."

I nodded helplessly and we got the hell out of Dodge.

En route:

2006-10-21T02:50:00.000+01:00

Neil and I both took our leave from Brisbane on Monday, after a final day of fine hospitality from Chris and Leyla. I was sad to leave - it had been great to be around C&L again for a while; I'd just started to appreciate the pastoral side of the country, and even though I woke up every morning in a portable nylon sauna drenched in my own sweat, the weather was starting to agree with me.

The flights to Heathrow were mercifully quiet, and I tried to stay awake as long as possible on the flight to Kuala Lumpur and then get some sleep on the second leg to Heathrow. Once the sun was down and the lights out, I stretched out on the row of empty seats and shook out my blanket. Hundreds of little sparks of static discharge lit up the blanket as I unfolded it - rather a pretty spectacle in the circumstances, 35,000 feet up in the pitch black with the odd accompanying flash lighting up storm clouds outside the plane...

I met up with Ash in Gatwick (a bit of a crappy airport, but a welcome reunion just the same!) and we left again for Memphis the next day. We were flying with Northwest Airlines, or NWA. Oh yes. I was this close to asking the stewardess if I could have an Ice Cube in my water. She was very stern, and I did not. I think she would handed me my white bitch ass had I done so.

Instead I mused on the fact that incidences of turbulence occur exactly when there is a cup of scalding hot coffee placed on a tray inches from one's lap, and additionally whenever some sleep is in order.

Anyway, we have arrived. Next up: we hit Memphis, and set phasers to tourist.

The eve of the wedding arrived,

2006-10-19T23:36:00.000+01:00

and with Leyla off in the Stambrook Plaza hotel to prepare, the groom and his compadres did the same. Chris and Brian picked up the kilts and I took the opportunity to have a last-minute bagpipe practice. And then we all got drunk.

So it came to pass that on the day of the wedding, where I was required to don the proud national garb of my country and rouse the wedding guests to attention with the skirl of the bagpipes, I was prone on the couch watching Empire Strikes Back and trying very hard not to barf. In our collective defence (Brian was perceptibly wan-looking as well), we'd had a very light dinner of pizza and beer, with a dessert of beer and some beer as a digestif. In hindsight perhaps a little Cointreau instead would have sorted us out.

Fortunately an excellent breakfast of freshly-laid eggs (what else?) and Weet-bix (the vowelly challenged antipodean version of Weetabix ideal for the bowelly challenged) raised me from my torpor once my stomach had stopped churning. The photographer arrived around 1 pm to take some 'candid' shots of the Chris and his groomsmen getting done up in their kilts - no, not that candid - and by 3 we'd arrived at the Botanic Gardens to set up the red carpet, chairs and so on.

Neil, Davis/d(e) and Jenna wandered away from the body of the open-air kirk to help me tune the pipe drones before Leyla arrived, and so I played through a few tunes to warm them up. As I was finishing up Neil pointed through the trees to another wedding that I'd accidentally subjected to an atonal aural battering. We surreptitiously slunk back to our own wedding and I judged the pipes to be as tuned as was necessary.

Almost immediately, Leyla turned arrived with her Dad and I had to stop worrying about playing and get on with just doing it. Somehow it all more or less came together: I got to the end of the aisle just as the tune ended and I stopped without the bag deflating too slowly (in which case it tends to bray like a stricken donkey). I took my place alongside the rest of the kilted contingent and breathed a relieved sigh.

The ceremony was entertaining as well as solemn, and there was a palpable joy to the proceedings - despite the legalese involved in a civil ceremony, it was less grave than a church wedding and in the leafy surroundings of the gardens felt much more celebratory. As the register was signed, I retired to a discreet distance - as discreet as possible with the pipes, anyway - and played a few more tunes. Davis/d(e) wandered over as things were wrapping up and looked bemused; I took this to be the sign to finish up and did so.

We took to the river on the Kookaburra Queen for the reception and to admire fabulous Brisvegas as it slid majestically in the gathering twilight. There were speeches, there was eating, drinking, mingling and even a very little dancing from your host. Anyway, I've been writing this entry for four days and three continents, so I'm going to call it a day now and post this sucker. Next up: rock and roll, baby - we hit Memphis.

Due to my sudden apparent respiratory dysfunction,

2006-10-13T05:37:00.000+01:00

and deprived of the week's planned aquatic adventures, I jumped on the coat-tails of Neil, Bryan and Chris as they ploughed a tourist furrow through Brisbane and its environs. First up on Tuesday was a prescient re-run of my introduction to Brisbane from three years ago: along the Brisbane River on the CityCat ferry, a wander through the manufactured (but pleasing) cultural epicentre of the South Bank* and then a drive up Mount Coot-tha. This time we stopped off at a trail that led through the woods to an abandoned (and wholly unsuccessful) gold mine shaft on the back slopes of the hill. Wending our way through the pseudo-bush, Neil displayed a borderline obsessive desire to find deadly spiders and a competing tendency to freak out at the merest suggestion of anything brushing exposed skin. Three quarters of an hour later, the collective paranoia of impending paralysis** or death propelled us out of the bush and back to civilization.

"What are the inhabitants of Brisbane called?" someone asked during the drive back to Chris' house. Idle speculation ensued.

"Brisboneers, perhaps?"
"How about Bris-boners? Heh."
"Brisbanians, I heard."
"Brisoners," said Neil. "Brisoners." Genius. I can't imagine many Aussies thanking us for that one, but I intend to promote it wherever I can.

On Thursday, with Chris embroiled in wedding preparations, Neil, Bryan and I decided to go to Australia Zoo on the independent recommendations of three different Brisoners. We borrowed Chris and Leyla's warhorse '87 Mazda - an oldie but a goldie like the Trøll - and headed north, passing within sight of the striking Glasshouse Mountains and arriving at the zoo about 11.30. We paid our entry fee - a fairly hefty A$43 (!), although reduced to A$32 by a promotional token kindly provided by Leyla - and were hurried by the staff towards the Crocoseum for the main show. (Yes. The Crocoseum.)

For the uninitiated, Australia Zoo is part zoo (if a fairly benign-seeming one), part theme park and part Church of Steve Irwin. The most surprising part is that it hasn't managed to make the transition to shrine yet. The place is still festooned with banners, signs and sayings of the man himself and is still billed as "Home of the Crocodile Hunter". It's as if they haven't quite come to terms with the fact that the man whose personality drives the place, whose enthusiasm permeates it and who basically provides its reason for being, is no longer here to give it legitimacy. The present tense abounds.

We sat down to the show, and some terribly venomous and entirely apathetic snakes were paraded in the centre of the arena. Next some parakeets and parrots buzzed the audience, and finally the big screen lit up to show an intro by the man himself to the main crocodile show. The host skipped lightly over the fact that big Steve had shuffled off this mortal coil ("Ah, we love him don't we? God bless ya Steve. Now, on with the show!") and Monty the croc swam silently into view.

There's an odd disconnect between Steve's posthumous, almost childish enthusiasm for his reptile quarry and the respect with which they have to be treated. The fact that the zoo staff effortlessly toss food into the slavering mouth of this million-year-old apex predator in front of a rapt audience sits uneasily with the fact that he met his untimely demise in just such a situation, contrived to place him in harm's way for our entertainment. I got the feeling that one doesn't go to Australia Zoo to see the animals so much as to hope, subconsciously, that Bill, Jimbo or Frank slips up this one time and trips into Monty's gaping maw.

We watched the informative but curiously flat show - a real live crocodile swimming around is admittedly quite impressive, but only for the first five minutes - and then tramped off to look round the rest of the place. We saw kangaroos, wombats, inconceivably deadly snakes and mighty birds of prey, and yet it never really grabbed us by the throats, so to speak. We took our leave and headed back toward Brisbane after a couple of hours.

On the way back we stopped at the eponymous village nestling amongst the Glasshouse Mountains and ate a rather excellent fish supper for lunch while debating what to do. Mount Ngungun presented itself as being closest and only moderately challenging, and after a five minute drive we abandoned the Mazda and commenced our climb. It was difficult enough in parts, and midway up a particularly vertiginous stretch Neil shouted, "Bloody hell! Look at the size of that thing!" or something to that effect. A massive spider, black with yellow spots on the joints of its legs, hung sphinx-like on its web beside the path. This single hand-sized beast - I haven't been able to identify it yet - was suddenly infinitely more compelling than any number of crocs, wallabies or tigers from Australia Zoo. Not a metre from a well-travelled path, we'd come across just the sort of arachnid fiend that we'd all been looking for since we arrived. It may have been poisonous or it may not, but it was right there and the three of us marvelled at its size and proximity. We climbed on, avoiding the numerous leviathan ants that scuttled towards our feet, and reached the exposed and spine-like summit after half an hour's climb. The flat brushland and verdant forests of Queensland were laid about us and from them shot the monolithic Glasshouse Mountains, their colors attenuated by the hazy distance. So close to the end of the holiday, and on a whim, we'd accidentally discovered our most truly Australian sight yet.

* Bribane hosted World Expo '88 and by all accounts went from an inward looking rural town feared by sheep everywhere to a modern, cosmopolitan metropolis.
** There is a paralysis tick here. A paralysis tick. Dear god.

Insectile armageddon.

2006-10-09T08:00:00.000+01:00

In slightly happier news, it was my birthday yesterday and I've now reached the ripe old age of 29. (Although arguably, the first clause in that sentence should be revised.) The household was sluggish at best after Chris' stag/buck's do the night before, and that suited me fine. We ate some freshly laid eggs for breakfast* and once the menfolk were up and about, we headed over to the park across the road to throw a rugby ball around for a while and otherwise bask in the afternoon sun.

After some dinner, Neil and I trotted back out to lob the ball back and forth during a pastoral ramble through the desiccated woods that dotted the park. We saw wild bush turkeys pecking for insects (a suicidal eating habit if ever there was one); kookaburras darting through the trees and web upon web of indeterminate spiders. Neil walked into one. There was swearing.

Australia, it appears, is a veritable zoo of fanged, taloned and poison-spewing minifauna. "Watch out for redback spiders," we were warned. "Their venom causes you to swell up until you explode all over the place. And then your corpse melts."

Neil told a story of a wolf spider that crawled onto a friend's shoulder. "It was the size of his hand. It's not poisonous but it would tear your arm off as soon as look at it. They could only kill it by tying it between two pick-ups and ripping it in two."

And the ants! The ants have reached Phase IV down here. "And then you have the fire ant. It's deadly to all other ants. It can breathe fire, you see. And it teleports inside your brain to eat it from the inside out."

* "Ach, I think I'm egged out. I'll give them a miss."
"Are you sure? Eggs are a known appetite suppressant."
"So is all other food!"

Torpedoed!

2006-10-09T06:43:00.000+01:00

My jet lag has now entirely disappeared but has been replaced by the lesser know tent lag. I had thought that my internal body clock had successfully set itself to Brisbane Mean Time, but it now seems to be inextricably linked to the sunset and sunrise. It gets dark, and I more or less fall asleep where I stand. It gets light, and the sun's rays blast straight through the blue flysheet and then through my eyelids and I'm awake at 5:19 am or whatever godforsaken hour sunrise occurs at today. On the upside, this sleeping pattern makes it nigh impossible to get a hangover and was fixin' to be just the job for the early starts required for the week's forthcoming diving course.

In a spectacularly cruel twist of fate, then, my diving course has been both metaphorically and literally blown out of the water. Chris dropped me off in nearby Stafford Heights today for my dive medical, where a nurse used a spirometer to measure my lung function, and then passed me onto a doctor for more traditional reflex, visual acuity and physical checks. Looking at the printout from the spirometer, he re-tested me with it and printed out the second, slightly better test.

Apparently my lung capacity is 115% of the expected size for my height and weight, but the FEF_25-75% (trips off the tongue, don't it?), measuring sustained flow of air over the middle few seconds of each exhalation, is only 73% of the predicted value. He apologetically told me that it should be at least 75% to be completely safe, and he had to put me down as temporarily unfit to dive.

As I was leaving, he suggested that I could organise some further tests to bear out whether or not I'm beyond hope. Unfortunately these particular tests are A) expensive and B) have a lead time slightly longer than the 16 hours left before the course is due to start. Oh well: bagpiping as a kid has clearly given me disproportionately big lungs, and on/off asthma around the same time has partially screwed them. Bugger.

Had it not been an unseemly hour to do so, I'd've gone straight to the pub to drown (oh, the irony) my sorrows.

The holiday gathers momentum,

2006-10-07T03:46:00.000+01:00

even if your host does not. Chris' family - mum, dad, sister and brother-in-law - have arrived, and only this morning Neil was dropped off from his brief fishin' sojourn with another Brisbanian mate. Chris and I spent an evening erecting a tent city/favela in the back yard for the ~~migrant Joads~~ wedding guests and each night, replete with some native culinary delight, I stumble back there and sleep soundly until awoken by the sound of the chickens, or the soft slap of bat guano hitting the tent under the palm tree.

I've had a remarkably sedate few days since our Platoon episode on Tuesday; highlights include sitting around, sitting around reading, and sitting around drinking. A couple of events distinguish themselves: I took a trip into Brisbane proper with Davis/d(e) and Jenna to look for some culture and wound up sitting around reading in the Botanical Gardens, and secondly, I've booked myself onto a PADI Open Water diving course next week. This should take four days and hopefully my respiratory system will remain bagpipe-capable for the wedding on Saturday. Another expensive arrow is added to my poor-people-need-not-apply extreme sports quiver! It's fun to be middle class.

This afternoon the stag/buck's do kicks off, and then on Sunday I'll start reading up on the dive course. Sitting around (reading/drinking) will give way to action. Stay tuned!

J'arrive!

2006-10-04T01:10:00.000+01:00

My jet lag has all but evaporated, and I'm now reclining in conspicuous luxury chez Chris et Leyla. The house is excellent; in fact, it's really more of a property than a house - chooks (chickens) out the back; a massive barbie (barbeque) on which to cook snags (sausages) and a fridge (fridge) full of beer (beer) in the basement. Admittedly it is slightly less full at the moment.

In addition to the blessed diminution of my jet lag, I have also returned to more or less normal impulses to eat. Airlines have this well-developed strategy to keep the ~~cattle~~ passengers so well fed and occupied with eating that they're distracted from their distinctly unnatural environment and hence do not descend into screaming anarchy. This strategy unfortunately means that I ate five airline/airport meals over the course of approximately a day and a half and proceeded to feel hungry pretty much all the time for the first day I was here. Luckily, a gigantic, delicious steak introduced to the barbeque for the briefest of encounters sorted that out on the first night here.

Yesterday Chris and I were driving semi-aimlessly around, looking for some generic rainforest to marvel at and somehow the conversation turned to both last year's and this year's road trips. I mentioned that in the States last year we'd considered, in passing, trying to find a shooting range. Quick as a flash, Chris was on the phone to an ex-work colleague, the car pulled a U-turn and we were heading south of the Brisbane river towards Belmont Rifle Range.

"Good God," I said. "What the hell are we playing at?"

We arrived to the sporadic crack of gunfire, parked and walked with mounting trepidation to the office. The woman behind the counter gave us a couple of forms to fill in, took our photo IDs and A$30 each and handed us a 12-gauge over-under shotgun, 25 shells and 25 clay pigeons. Just like that.

"How do we use it, exactly?" we asked.
"Oh, just ask the range officer," she replied.

We did. He didn't seem to know how to work the safety on the gun. I groaned internally. After a few minutes of dry-firing it, with the shells still safely in their box, we'd worked it out. Chris had been clay-pigeon shooting once before and had a few words of choice advice: "Hold it tightly against your shoulder."

Those were the all of the choice words he had.

I loaded the gun with the safety on and snapped it shut while Chris loaded the clay pigeon trap.

"Pull!" I said.
"What?" he said. We were both wearing earplugs.
"Pull!" I shouted.

The clay shot into the air. Bang went the gun. Smash the clay conspicuously did not go, and landed serenely on the grass. We were all still alive (including the clay pigeon); my shoulder did not hurt; the gun broke open easily enough and a wisp of smoke came out of the barrel.

"Holy crap," I said. "That was mental." And so it went for another 49 shells - the first box being expended with minimal loss of clay pigeon life - and we handed the gun back, broken open and perceptibly warm, after about 45 minutes.

"You guys still have a bit of time left on your gun hire. Do you want to try a rifle?" asked the cheerful woman behind the counter. "You could try a two-two, a triple-two or a two-two-three."
"Uh," we said. "What?"
"Well, the two-twos go pop and the others go bang."

Some confused conversation later, we were in temporary possession of a .223 rifle with a 8x scope and a box of twenty cartridges. The feeling was massively bizarre. A klaxon went off, and the range officer said through the tannoy: "The range is now open. You may fix your targets."

And so we laid the rifle on the bench, bolt conspicuously open, and crunched off into the field over the gravel-like carpet of spent cartidge cases with the other (surprisingly nerdy-looking) shooters to pin our targets on the 50 yard wooden fence. After some more reassuringly authoritative instruction from the range officer, Chris slotted a shell in, closed the bolt, sighted over the wooden rest and fired. A small puff of dust scooted up from the bank of earth behind the target.

"I think I missed," he said. Four more shots later we swapped over and I did the same until we'd fired all twenty. The range opened again and we trudged shakily out again to get our perforated targets. Adding it up later (it took a couple of goes because my mind was whirling), Chris edged it with 97 while I'd scored 92.

We handed the rifle back and thanked the range officer and the woman behind the desk. We sat in the car. "Mother of God," I said. "That was nuts."

It had been nuts, but it had also been disturbingly both easy and fun. The concept of shooting - pointing a loaded gun at something you wish to harm quite seriously - had been neutered by the good-natured atmosphere of the place and the reduction, on the rifle range, of the whole thing to a points-scoring game. Dangerously neutered, I think; we spent less money than we would have done if we'd gone ten-pin bowling and yet we'd gone from computer game snipers to pseudo-real ones in about an hour.

We drove back home, cracked open a beer and looked at our respective targets. What a mind-bogglingly surreal start to the holiday.

The terrorists have already won:

2006-10-01T12:17:00.000+01:00

I got through the security at Edinburgh with nary a comment, and after lugging my kit to Heathrow Terminal 3, settled into the check-in queue. (As an aside, spending five hours waiting for a flight at Heathrow does feel slightly Terminal.)

"What hand luggage do you have?" asked the guy behind the desk.
"Just this bag (which I handily checked for size at Edinburgh) and a set of bagpipes."
"You'll only be able to take one of them into the cabin," he replied.
"What? The BAA website says that I can take one item plus a musical instrument." (No laughing at the back, please.)
"I'm afraid not. You'll have to check one of them in, or put one inside your suitcase."

With a great deal of sighing and muttering I crammed The Grapes of Wrath and my iPod into my pipe case and stormed impotently off to security.

"Just out of curiosity," I asked an attendant, "am I supposed to be able to bring on a piece of hand luggage as well as a musical instrument?"
"Yes," she said. "You are."

If I ever see that check-in desk guy again his Grapes will feel my Wrath via a swift kick to the knackers.

The calm before the storm:

2006-09-26T17:06:00.000+01:00

okay, so this has been an even slower news week.

Josh came up to visit over the weekend, notionally for a Vegas that unfortunately went the way of an apathetic dodo. Instead we began by pre-lubricating ourselves (in a social sense) with mucho beer and then patronised Annabel's birthday bash at the Human Be-In. It was an excellent night, if somewhat blurry. I cornered Annabel and talked at her about writing websites (in both senses) and have now resolved to at least look into creating one of my own; marvelled once again at the smallness of her phone and later retired to a booth to have booze ferried my way by obliging friends.

The next day, a planned pub crawl from the Shore up to the centre of town was very nearly dead before it even began. Eventually, feeling extraordinarily averse to alcohol, I caught up with Jeff and Josh in the Wash. I forced a few down to keep up and was eternally grateful when the appointed hour for dinner rolled around. Ash joined us at the old flat for some hybrid lasagne (mmm hybrid lasagne) and we all headed very slowly back to the Wash for a few more. Jeff and Josh gamely headed off to a party twice removed and I was very, very glad to be able to call it a night.

[Next time the RF should be coming at you from the other side of the world. Return to Oz is go.]

Okay, so it's been a slow news week.

2006-09-19T17:30:00.000+01:00

On Sunday morning, impelled by some vague desire to both recapture lost youth and grow up a bit into the bargain, I made an executive decision to make some French toast. I bought some bacon, eggs, a none-less-healthy Mother's Pride plain loaf and an Observer. The basic idea of a civilised, cooked breakfast avec lefty newspaper covered the growing up part of the equation (and oddly is something I almost never do), while the artery-hardening mix of bacon and plain loaf harked back to childhood days of pushing the token fried tomatoes to one side to get to the good shit.

Of course I made rather a meal of it and eventually sat down to some rubbery French toast that managed to be simultaneously over- and under-cooked, a cup of burnt coffee and a couple of rashers of uninspiring supermarket bacon, but y'know, the thought was there.

Ash ate cereal and yoghurt. Hippie!

On Monday night Coba Fynn - shambling behemoth of rock that it is - got together for the second rehearsal for our Second Coming. Doug and I were so late that David and Charlie went to the pub in our absence, but my word: once we were plugged in and warmed up, you could palpably feel the rock. After you sifted through the cacophonous layers of ear-splitting noise, that is. Roll on December! I predict a Christmas number one.

P.S. Jez' sister Cis (yes, I too thought she was everyone's sister for a while) has put a minor masterpiece of a video up on YouTube. Wilfred the dog: il espère. Il espère.

Business as usual:

2006-09-11T22:22:00.000+01:00

Dave, Gill, Ash and I met up at the Car Wash (yes, I have lived here for that long) on Saturday and got utterly plastered. The next morning I felt very bad indeed. The end.

On Saturday night, afraid to go near a pub for fear of an allergic reaction, Ash and I patronised the cinema again, this time to see Right At Your Door. If you haven't seen anything about it (and I'm not giving anything away here), it's about a dirty bomb attack on L.A. and one guy's attempt to seal up his house against the airborne toxins.

I was underwhelmed. It should have been excellent. It should have been claustrophobic, but ruined that by moving the point of view outside the house for no real reason. It should have been tense, but squandered what little tension it had created by some melodramatic, unconvincing character building. The denouement should have been unexpected and shocking, but was mundane (in the context of the film) and fleeting.

Basically, as far as films costing less than a million bucks to make, Hard Candy owns Right At Your Door very hard indeed. Try that instead.

The mighty iron steed:

2006-09-11T15:12:00.000+01:00

further to the preparations for next month's globetrotting, fund-eating trips I've been pratting around with posting to my Flickr account via email, and so I now present to you the first fruit of this astonishingly nerdy pursuit: the finished form of my over-described bike.

The last big piece to fall into place were the forks - a pair of Kona Project 2s - sized to mimic suspension forks with 80mm of travel. This suits the frame much better than the £10 under-the-counter specials I was using until this week, and suddenly it feels like a real bike. The steerer of the original forks was very slightly narrower than the 1 1/8^th inch headset diameter and so there was far too much play in the steering; the Project 2s look to be made to a much lower tolerance and everything is rock solid now.

It now goes, stops, turns and imbues the builder (i.e. me) with a trememdous sense of smugness. Job done!

I took this photo with my phone's camera, and well, it's not great. Bit of fish-eye type distortion evident on the back wheel and despite the original image being 1600x1200, there really isn't a lot of fine detail. A bit of experimentation is going to be required, I think...

Anyway, stay tuned for more similar techy high jinks. I bet you can't wait.

I really am failing to do anything of note

2006-09-04T22:17:00.000+01:00

these days, with the exception of interminable amounts of preparation for the upcoming RF World Tour: Colonial Edition^TM. I'm now insured to the eyeballs for snowboarding, scuba diving and general holiday hijinks anywhere "worldwide including North America" which is funny because I thought "worldwide" meant just that.

I've also signed up for a new mobile contract that includes a phone the size of a planet. "That's no moon," I mused as I uncrated it on Friday. The somewhat weak/geek rationale for this purchase is to have mobile internet access so we can plan ahead in terms of accommodation and avoiding tropical storms. Of course my contract doesn't actually stretch to mobile internet in the US, and so the phone will no doubt see me skulking around business districts looking for unsecured wireless networks.

Rock. And. Roll.

The weekend was taken up with working (sigh) and some low key, pleasantly grown-up boozing in honour of Dave's birthday and then a rare visit by Waxy to Edinburgh. At some point Ash suddenly asked me, remembering a conversation about philosophy books no less: "Did you dig into my Kant?"

I almost died.

Under the weather:

2006-08-28T18:04:00.000+01:00

your host has been a walking catarrh factory for the past five days or so, and the whirlwind of exciting, edifying and educational events that normally find their way to the pages of the RF had to be pared down only to essential drinking activities. Fortunately the week abounded with such opportunities, challenging me in my weakened state but injecting a little hazy light into my mucous-filled gloom.

I variously went out with Paul, Ash and her workmates, my sister and a plethora of mafia types for a variety of "quiet" nights out, birthday parties and leaving parties. I really enjoyed myself; despite feeling like death most of the time (yes, yes, going to the pub when one is already feeling ropey isn't the best course of action) I rediscovered the good old fashioned "night out with your mates" - it's been a while since I've been out with the mafia en masse and I felt a warm glow in the pit of my stomach. Along with some recurrent nausea, but that was just the cold making its presence felt.

Apart from that, I went to see Severance with Ash (meh; sort of a low-rent Dog Soldiers, and correspondingly not quite so good) and pulled the plug on TM.net. Despite the fact that it was cobbled together by Martin and I over the course of a few Stella-soaked evenings, and consequently was held together mostly by rubber bands and spit, it's still a shame to see it go.

Ah well: stay tuned for more news on the Coba Fynn front...

Now that I can breathe without involuntarily exhaling liquid snot, normal service will be resumed soon.

Dammit!

2006-08-22T18:30:00.000+01:00

At the wedding, I made the hilarious comment that Dave was off to "drain his snake on a plane" in the toilets. Ze Frank has beaten me to it.

Bastard.

I have rediscovered my drinking mojo.

2006-08-22T17:06:00.000+01:00

Dave, Martin and I drove down* to Wetherby on Friday evening through torrential rain that recalled the Journey Into Terror from last year's road trip. Just north of Newcastle the rain eased off a bit and we stopped briefly to, as Dave put it, "snack my bitch up". It became apparent later, once we were safely ensconced in Wetherby's New Inn, that a Bacon Double Cheeseburger doesn't have sufficient calorific content to defeat six pints of Tetley's. Bitter? Why yes. I felt positively subhuman the next morning.

Fortunately the wedding wasn't until 3pm and I was just about intact by then. We got there by the skin of our teeth (taxi driver: "Oh, you meant 1 pm"; waitress at lunch: "Can I re-take your order for the third time?") and I suspect that the traditional sleepy English hamlet pace of life doesn't scale well to an influx of us city folks.

The church was packed for the ceremony, and ceremony there was in spades. Church of Scotland weddings seems to consist of vows, rings and confetti all compressed into about twenty minutes but this one was sufficiently more complicated that I began to wonder which branch of Christianity was being celebrated. On account of the lack of A) Latin, B) glossolia and C) polygamy I eventually decided it must be Church of England, but only just. Perhaps the priest had defected from the Catholic Church - a loose canon, so to speak.

Anyway, the ceremony went like clockwork and I was amazed by how happy and composed Dom and Alice seemed. Seeing them afterwards, and notwithstanding the fact that I'd just witnessed their marriage, I was struck by the feeling that they were genuinely meant to be married to each other. They're going to be a fantastic (married) couple!

The reception was on the village green and was a genial affair. The speeches were great, particularly Alice's Dad's flipchart deconstruction of his daughter as property up for auction (you had to be there). I ate instead of drank myself into a stupor, though not for want of trying the latter, and stumbled to bed about 1 am after what really had been an excellent night**.

On Sunday, miraculously hangover-free, we congregated at Dom's Dad's house for some homemade pizza and cake before the journey back and said goodbye to the newlyweds. We dropped Martin off in Renfrew and drove back along the M8 just in time for me to meet Ash and Scott at the Pear Tree. Six pints of posh European lager turned my brain to mush and I was very, very glad to collapse into bed around 2 am.

I was considerably less glad to arrive twenty minutes late to Monday's 10 am meeting, exuding stale beer through my sweat glands.

P.S. Ruth is back from Oz, and in fine form. It's good to have her back!

* I must plug the Trøll again - it breezes on past 205,000 miles with only a new exhaust and tyres on its account and continues to pretend that it's a bit sporty into the bargain. I had a hole in the still-original exhaust downpipe patched up in the nick of time on Friday morning and the note is back to its throaty best. I mentioned this to the garage owner as a mechanic backed the car off the ramp, and speculated that perhaps it might have an unusual firing order because of its half-a-V8 origins .

"Naw," he said. "Naw, it disnae."

So are myths dispelled and fanciful notions brought to earth.

** Here are some photos of the wedding:

The sleeping giant of Coba Fynn

2006-08-14T18:52:00.000+01:00

at last nears the end of its slumber, and in the antediluvian recesses of its mind, a multi-faceted thought is given sonorous voice. That voice declares to all those irresponsible enough to listen: "Light her up / cheeseburgers / whisk(e)y!" in the sort of accent that Tom Baker might possess if the Tardis has stopped in either Ireland or Edinburgh for any length of time. Charlie's threatened return to Glasgow is almost upon us and then nothing will stand in our way. We've even had a few practices, which mostly begin with Davis responsibly guiding us through CF oldies and then degenerate into ever messier covers of Crossroads after I've worn down his defences. Good times!

Speaking of Coba Fynn, Davis has oft propounded his theory of Blues as Sandwich. Were a closed-minded musical type to say that all blues is the same, Davis' response would be that said assertion is like claiming that all sandwiches are the same. I heartily agree and so the other day I pondered what form the hypothetical Coba Fynn sandwich might take. The creation of this thought-sandwich could proceed down only one path, and I was immediately seized by the conviction that it would be a majestic stilton cheeseburger such as might be ordered at Bar 91 or the Hard Rock Café.

Tiny Monkey, I think, would have been an avant-garde take on a traditional sandwich. Maybe roast beef and horseradish on a ciabatta or something similar. Accompanying it would be huge lump of cheddar representing my insistence on playing Happy Twenty Thirty-Fourth Birthday ad nauseum. Which, of course, was a twelve-bar blues song and so the circle is, ouroboros-like, complete. Granted, it would be a little mouldy by now because it's been lying out for a while.

(Holy crap, what's happened to my language? A couple of HP Lovecraft books have turned me into a virtual antique. Ah well, perhaps to-morrow's entry shall be less verbose...)

Apart from some extremely pleasant festival boozing, it's been a fairly quiet week; with Dom's and Chris' weddings coming up in a week and a couple of months respectively, I've been mostly concerned with assembling kilt gear and practicing the pipes. Ash and I drove up to St. Andrews and then back through Fife to visit la famille, and also to convince me that the car is up to the trip to ~~York~~ Leeds/Bardsey next weekend. It is, and it continues to rock.

Enter the festival

2006-08-07T18:00:00.000+01:00

and hope that it does not enter you. I'm already bored of this year's festivities. Trying to get my bike up to Ash's flat on the Royal Mile - it would've been far easier with a tazer or a cattle prod - the prevalence of performers as opposed to festival goers seemed pretty plain. Maybe half of the people hardening the arteries of the old town (and providing 95% of the London accents to be heard) were actors, stage crew or assorted hangers-on. The other half were Spanish schoolchildren slouching around in jeans so tight they impeded their ability to get the fuck out of my way.

This year the flyering masses seem to have hit upon a new way of distributing their forests of leaflets: that of hitting upon the public. Ash mentioned that a Canadian "comedian" had more or less attempted to chat her up in order to secure her attendance at his gig the next night, and I suffered a similar fate at the hands of a prowling young fashionista.

EXT. Royal Mile:

PYF sits down on bike rack next to RF. Personal space is encroached upon.

PYF
You look a bit sullen.

RF
You're damn skippy.

PYF smiles sympathetically and makes visible attempt to look winning.

PYF
It must be pretty annoying to have all these people with London accents arrive all at once.

RF grinds teeth.

RF
If you say so.

PYF produces flyer for comedy show.

PYF
Well, if you want cheering up, why don't you come along to our show?

RF
Kill me now.

Ash arrived in the nick of time and we escaped to Favorit for some lunch and chat in the sun. I was ravenous, having run the Water of Leith 10K earlier that day*, and felt suitably deserving of lunch and a pint. Ash had a coke float with strawberry ice cream, and upon sampling it I declared it to be like strawberry heroin. It was fearsomely good, and astonishingly bad for one's health. At first I thought I could detect the coke and the ice cream reacting fizzily but then perceived it to be my teeth dissolving under the onslaught of sugar present in the liquid almost to the point of saturation. Tasty stuff indeed.

We wandered over to the Meadows with a blanket and a bottle of wine and proceeded to alternately read wanky books and criticise the great unwashed sharing the park with us. I rolled my eyes at a group of hippy/punk hybrids, and we speculated that the Rastafarian types making surreptitious hand gestures at each other were all drug dealers. All in all, it was a very snobbish, middle class and marvellously entertaining weekend. Maybe I like the festival after all.

* I managed it this year in 46 minutes and 30 seconds - which is a minor miracle given how little training I've done this year. I have an unhelpful tendency to run as fast as I feel comfortable regardless of how far I have to go, and so I shot away at the start only to be hobbled by a fearsome stitch as I came to Stockbridge. I slowed right down and managed to speed up again a bit towards the end and somehow shaved a minute off last year's time. Thanks to those of you who sponsored us this year!

In other less Crimewatch-worthy news,

2006-07-31T18:16:00.000+01:00

Ash and I had a splendid little meal at the Tapas Tree the other night. As befits the current ascendancy of chorizo over bacon (sorry Josh) in my home cooking, we ordered a shitload of the stuff and I wolfed it down with abandon. It truly is the processed meat product of the gods. We sat outside in the waning sun, finished our meal and made our slightly wobbly way home. Hurray for al fresco dining coupled with mildly excessive boozing! I'd say "long may it continue", but the weather looks like it has firm ideas in the other direction. One scorching month book-ended by oppressing humidity and random showers does not a summer make.

On Sunday evening we drove over to my parent's place in Fife for a meal. It was all terribly cosy and familial (in a good way!) and after a placatory visit to my gran we ended heading home up on a slightly less main road than I'd intended. A flickering orange glow in the sky grew brighter and brighter as we headed towards Dunfermline and suddenly, as we crested a hill, we saw it was the flare from the Mossmorran ethylene plant. It was a fantastically dystopian sight: the sky was bright enough and coloured just so as to suggest a distinctly non-shepherd-friendly dawn.

Something made me feel conspiratorially glad to have seen it and it was sufficiently otherworldly and unreal to blow away the cobwebs of more earthly concerns. Like, you know, seeing one's stolen bike paraded up and down Leith Walk.

Well, almost.

Another bike post, I'm afraid,

2006-07-31T18:15:00.000+01:00

but one made for an entirely irritating reason.

I was over on Leith Walk on Friday lunchtime, and as I unlocked my bike I happened to glance across the road. A guy, maybe thirty or so, was pushing two bikes along the pavement on the other side of the road. One of them was instantly familiar - it looked exactly like the bike that was stolen from the flat's stairwell in January.

I couldn't be sure it was the same bike, so I jumped on my own bike and rolled slowly down the other side of the stree and watched as he made his way along it. Eventually I was as certain as I could be. I crossed the road, jumped off my bike and said "Excuse me - that looks a lot like a bike of mine that was stolen a few months ago."

Instantly, with no shock or bafflement, he said "Swear to God mate, I got this from my cousin two years ago." How the hell do you reply by making an instant excuse if you know the bike is rightfully yours? I'd laugh openly in my accuser's face if he had the temerity to say something like that.

He stopped walking and told me he was on his way to pick up his daughter. In return I told him that I recognised the rear mudguard, held on as it was with an elastic band and as it had been when it was stolen; that the seat post was rusted in place as it had been when it was stolen and that the bar ends were familiar to me because I'd replaced them just before it had been stolen. The only different parts were the tyres and the saddle - interestingly, the only major perishable parts aside from the brake blocks.

The galling thing was that I had no way to prove to this brazen motherfucker that it was my bike, and without physically restraining him I couldn't stop him. Had I been a little less astounded at his barefacedness I'd have called the police and asked them how to handle it. In the event I muttered "Aye, right," to his claim that he was sorry my bike had been nicked, and let him go.

Unbelievable. The serial number of my current bike's frame is now noted down in a safe place, and should it ever be nicked and the thief has the misfortune to cross my path, I'll be a hell of a lot more pissed off than I was this time...

Commentary:

2006-07-26T14:47:00.000+01:00

I started writing a couple of quick, throwaway responses to the comments on the last entry but I just couldn't help myself. Here are the full-blown, ill-thought-out and rambling replies.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2: okay, first thing here is the excess surrounding this film. It cost $255 million to make and to my tastes at least, wasn't anything special. It was dull. It lacked a coherent plot. It doesn't matter how good the CGI is - show me a pirate with a head like that of a Hammerhead Shark and I know it's CGI. I can see where the money went, and it's a crying shame some of it wasn't diverted to the script-writing engine room.

The thing that hacks me off most, though, wasn't the crappiness of the film. It was the blind consumption by the world and its dog (myself included) of said crappiness. I wandered along to a film that I knew already was never going to exceed mildly entertaining mediocrity. What happened to my critical faculties, and by extension to those of the several million other viewers taken for a (boring) ride? As I write this, $540,300,444 - over half a billion dollars - has been spent by people willingly going to see it.

Why didn't several million people choose to see Hard Candy or Thank You for Smoking instead? Both of which, incidentally, are absolute gems. Flawed gems perhaps, but at least they get points for trying. Why has the world poured half a billion dollars into the coffers of an amoral ethical vacuum like Walt Disney? You can argue at least some of the 50 million or so people who've seen PotC2 must have enjoyed it, but did Disney really need to make a profit of $300 million dollars off the back of that? Of course not - it's a company driven by the market to make shitloads of money to keep its shareholders happy.

In summary, our expectations and willingness to pursue them have been worn smooth by an avalanche of gaudy mediocrity in the name of making a buck. That is what is wrong with the film.

Phew.

Optimus Prime - cocktail edition: ah, now this is the clever bit. Keef writes:

That name is not to be used lightly! It had better be a bloody good cocktail ;)

I was in the Wash the other day, idly reading their cocktail menu. The name "The Beamer" caught my eye, and I wondered what it was.

It's Jim Beam and coke. (Wow, I mistyped "coke" as "cock" there. My typed correspondence revolves around a particular type of joke - can you guess what it is yet?) I mean seriously, whisk(e)y and coke doesn't qualify as a cocktail. Cuba Libre is rum and coke, or Bacardi and Coca-Cola for the branding whores. Okay, okay, for me. You see, Optimus Prime could be something monumentally mundane and still get away with it. I propose...I dunno, Red Kola and gin. Winner!

I had the misfortune

2006-07-25T18:09:00.000+01:00

to go and see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 on Saturday evening. The fine art of the summer blockbuster has recently been reconciled to me, after about a decade of continuous disappointments, by The Da Vinci Code and X-Men 3, and so I was anticipating said nautical antics with enthusiasm.

Boy, was I wrong about that. This is the most calculatedly evil film ever made. Had it had the decency to be outright bad I might have written it off as a poor choice of movie and immediately forgotten about it. No, this was a film which somehow, astonishingly, managed to burn $1.7 million per minute and yet be relentlessly, stupefyingly boring. 'Disjointed', 'incoherent' and 'terminally dull' are terms which would adequately describe this film only if accompanied by repeated blows with a baseball bat to the head of the listener.

"It's dis-" <thwack> "-join-" <thwack> "-ted!"
"Ah, I understand now."

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 is nothing less than a perfectly encapsulated explanation of all that is wrong with the western world. It presents irrefutable proof that there is no God. In short, this film is a horrifying cultural singularity the likes from which civilisation is unlikely to recover.

Ach, what the hell. I'll give it 3/5.

In other news, Jeff and Devon are back from the States; post-viva, Jeff is now a PhD (excellent stuff!), and during a thought-experiment this afternoon I invented a cocktail called "Optimus Prime". Good times!

[In lieu of a real post

2006-07-24T19:30:00.000+01:00

(come back tomorrow for that), here's a bit of random musing/rambling about the très exciting subject of running.]

I have finally (i.e. four weeks later than planned) started running again in a weak imitation of training for the Water of Leith 10K (visit Sponsor ME on the sidebar to gain some karma points) in August. The run follows the river as closely as possible, and my usual training route is to head down to Stockbridge, up the same path as the run itself and head back from Roseburn along the main road. It's somewhere between 3 and 4 miles, and it's a nice enough route so that it doesn't feel too much like a chore.

On Tuesday I hit upon the cunning plan of doing this in the other direction. It was around 7 pm, and I'd just finished the sweaty cycle back up from work. The weather was muggy and warm but had cooled down to a pleasant level when I left the flat, and the moisture in the air made it almost a little chilly. Going in the other direction means that the first mile and a half or so is more or less flat, and it's a far better warm-up than thundering down the near-vertical St. Stephen's Street into Stockbridge.

The next section along the Water of Leith itself is probably the most picturesque mugger's paradise in Edinburgh. It's green, shady, pleasant, lined with excellent hiding places and populated exclusively by poncy middle-class joggers bearing iPods. (I make no bones about being the absolute apex/nadir of said pretentious muppets.) It really was an excellent night to be out: the little bit of moisture left meant I didn't overheat and the sun slanting down through the slightly dank undergrowth gave everything a terribly HP Lovecraftian aura.

Of course, running up the near-vertical St. Stephen's Street is infinitely worse than charging down it. Not exactly an ideal warm-down.

[Normal service will be resumed tomorrow.]

Work, rest and playing away:

2006-07-17T19:07:00.000+01:00

having driven around 50% of the company into the ground over a six month period, the management thought it'd be a splendid idea to cart their hollow-eyed remnants, plus those of the lucky escapees, to a nearby beach and provide them with a barbeque by way of compensation. Compare and contrast: six months of working late nights and weekends to meet a schedule written off as impossible before it had even begun, versus a burger in the sun. It pisses me off royally, and I wasn't even one of the 50%.

Most annoyingly, it was a really good day. Along with a few of the other hardier types, your intrepid correspondent went for an entertaining surfing lesson while for the less eXtreme there was some sedate horse riding. Boules, frisbee, football and rounders were played; the porta-bar was cleaned out of beer and the barbeque was a tasty affair indeed. As the sun started to dip and the breeze took on just a hint of a chill, the bus arrived exactly on cue and conveyed us back to the city, replete with food, booze and sneaking suspicions that in work terms, we'd been had.

The rat race is an odd place, really.

On Saturday, Moritz and I (where are ye, self-professed mountain bikers? Well dost thou shrink from my entreaties when the trails beckon!) burned up the trails in Glentress with a vengeance: no longer for us the tepid charms of the red route but instead the rocky (and surprisingly straightforward) black run. We rode about a quarter of the V-trail - V is the new X, I can only assume - to add a bit of variation to the normal route and it was well worth the detour. The scenery transported me back to childhood holidays in the north of Scotland and the rocky descents brought me back with a jolt, although truth be told their visual bark was worse than their physical bite.

In the evening Ash and I wandered along to La Partenope in Dalry for Giancarlo's birthday meal. It was an excellent evening: one of those rare occasions where everything falls into place and yet there's nothing out of the ordinary to wax lyrical about. The chat was good; the food plentiful and mostly enjoyable; the coffees tiny and the surroundings suitably cosmopolitan. We trooped over to the Pear Tree for a few postprandial pints in the fading warmth of the evening and called it a very pleasant night.

Sunday was taken up with some Trøll-related mechanical fumblings and a quiet barbeque in the concrete oasis behind Jez's flat. What an great week...!

More money, fewer gears redux:

2006-07-12T20:46:00.000+01:00

The art of single-speed cycling as desecrated by a first-time bike builder:

"At last!"

2006-07-12T20:28:00.000+01:00

the cry goes up, "this two-parter is finally complete."

After caning back from Culross, we split up to wipe the mud/grins off our faces and reassembled in Pancho Villa's. A leisurely carnival of tortillas, burritos (fortunately, I'm now rehabilitated enough to gaze upon said Mexican snack without an involuntary shudder. Turns out it takes a year to be free of Burrito Night Sweats^TM) and alcoholic coffees of varied international provenance took the wind out of our sails a bit. A couple of slow pints in Bannerman's didn't help and so the only thing for it was to hit Opium and discard our protective clothing of dignity.

We had a couple more pints. Smells Like Teen Spirit came on. We jumped around like knobs. \m/

Eventually staggering back from John's at about 5am, we crossed the Meadows amid the gathering dawn and I pronounced it to have been a very good night indeed. I can't wait for the wedding!

P.S: Dan has some more photos of the evening's shenanigans.

"At last!"

2006-07-10T21:56:00.000+01:00

the relieved cry goes up from the triumvirate RF readership, "a post that doesn't go into tedious detail about bike chain widths".

Dom is getting married in August, and as such we were legally obliged to engage in typically male activities such as driving too fast and drinking too much. (The '60s favourite - driving too fast while drinking too much - has sadly been eclipsed by less lethal stag diversions.)

After crawling through the treacly flow of T in the Park traffic, Dave and I finally met up with the rest of the herd in Culross for some superior pub grub around 1 pm. Fed and watered, we charged heedlessly off into the Fife countryside, eventually finding the day's entertainment through a combination of dogged persistence and blind luck.

The setup was that we were driving Rage buggies around a dusty, kinked oval track with a vertiginous climb and subsequent drop at one side, and a bumpy, twisty flat section on the other. We didn't directly race each other but instead had 3-lap practice heats to get the hang of things and then a timed 3-lap session to decide the final order.

While waiting to start, we watched the last few laps of the preceding group and grumbled about how slow it looked.

How wrong we were. The karts handled like a scaled-up version of your typical radio-controlled buggy: they skipped and bounced across the berms and kickers, and the suspension travel that looked comically over-compensatory at rest was about only thing that kept one's spine from compressing.

The crowning horror of the circuit was the downhill section on which the gradient kept increasing all the way to the bottom: the only way to tackle it was to point the kart in roughly the right direction, plant the throttle and hope. The suspension dropped as the kart steadily lightened and then compressed with a thump, smacking off the bump stops over the mini-jump about two thirds of the way down; with the kart squirming around underneath you (and while wondering in a dazed sort of way how it was that it hadn't shaken itself to pieces), you wrenched the wheel to the left and slithered around the sweeping left hander. Utter, exhilarating genius.

Dave and Steve have some photos of the day but the only one you really need to see is Dom's disappointment as I squirt my victory juice in his face :) See, some people would have let the stag win. I, on the other hand, am a closet sociopath. The voices tell me to win.

Next up: boozy mentalness in which we paint the town metal.

More money, fewer gears part 4: it is finished.

2006-07-04T23:39:00.000+01:00

After a bit of pratting around last week with the Dicta sprocket and my Diamondback's 3/32" chain, it looked distinctly like the sprocket was determined to accept only a 1/8" BMX chain. The replacement sprocket, a 3/32"-friendly ACS Claw ("Da craw! Da craw!") turned up from UK Bike Store almost as soon as I'd even thought about it. Then, while on an otherwise pointless run - I'm hideously out of shape in running terms - I bought a 3/32" Shimano chain.

A couple of 3/32" half-links* arrived today at work from St. John's Street Cycles; I fitted the chain, tightened the tensioner and it was finished.

Needless to say, it was a massive anticlimax. I have built...a bike. It has wheels, pedals, handlebars and brakes. It appears to work pretty much in exactly the same way as every other bicycle built since 1880. I'd half expected a gaggle of passing couriers to stop by to congratulate me on my Herculean feat and praise the majestic angle of the seatpost or something equally stupendous. Unfortunately, it was 7 pm and the couriers had all gone home to rest their over-developed legs and, with their atrophied arms, to shovel high-carb dinners into their gullets like Atkins-hating velociraptors**.

I cycled home from work along the Water of Leith path, then up Broughton Street and Queen Street and finally up the short, sharp hill to St. Andrews Square. The geometry is a little strange compared to the Diamondback: the short stem and wide bars probably contribute most to that, although the frame really expects to be run with suspension forks and my £10 bargain bin specials are probably not helping matters. A pair of these bad boys (I've stopped even trying to be a non-geeky cyclist) will sort that out, I think.

The most striking thing is the combination of the absolute silence while pedalling - an absence of derailleur will do that - and the obnoxious clicking while freewheeling. I'd forgotten how much noise BMX freewheels make, and amplified by a big, bendy frame and larger wheels, it sounds like a football rattle in the hands of an ADHD child hopped up on Sunny D.

Mostly, then, I kept pedalling as fast as I could. The gearing seemed almost a little low; I made it up most hills with a minimum of fuss and effort (despite being fairly circumspect in applying pressure, in case an ill-fitted bolt or half link should decide to pop out) and I found myself spinning out fairly quickly on the flat. I'll see how I do on something more challenging like Dundas Street before changing sprockets, though.

So I now have a kingsized BMX-alike commuter bike, and I'm not afraid to use it. Only one thing remains: what should it be called?

* It's worth noting, if this hideously drawn out build diary hasn't made you nauseous to even catch a glimpse of a bicycle, that St. John's Street Cycles appear to be the only UK company that sell 3/32" half links. The side plates of the links are fractionally larger than those of the Shimano chain I'm using, but this hasn't caused any problems.
** My God, I think I just broke English with that sentence.

Thank you for sucking:

2006-06-26T18:16:00.000+01:00

you may remember that I decided to auction off my very rocking and very underused Epiphone Thunderbird.

What an all-round farce that turned out to be.

Firstly, PayPal extracts an uncomfortably large fee for accepting credit card payments. Secondly, eBay requires a similarly bloated fee for any sort of reasonable item listing. Lastly, Parcelforce managed to A) turn up three hours before the booked collection time; B) fail to come back for the actual collection time and C) crack one of the pickup covers through inept handling once they did finally arrive.

I'm now left having to buy an entire pickup unit (I should have guessed the covers don't come separately - it's been that kind of experience) at a cost of around £45 to placate the understandably irate buyer.

All this because some idiot chucked a bass labelled "Fragile" into his van with inattentive gusto. Seriously, Parcelforce suck. They failed to collect on time and just plain broke the fairly robust item they had to transport. Claim form, here I come.

Oh yeah: Thank You For Smoking is excellent, as is mountain biking. That is all.

More money, fewer gears part 3: the build continues.

2006-06-26T18:11:00.000+01:00

This bike building malarkey isn't half drawn out, I can tell you. It's finally all bolted together, but while I'd like to excitedly jump up and down and write gushing prose about its many and varied unique features, it's not really finished.

I eventually got all of the minor niggles ironed out (the correct crown race on the forks, the slightly-too-short rear brake cable properly set up, and rim tape in place on the wheels) and came to the last part: the chain.

Since the frame only has vertical drop-outs and the rear wheel can't be adjusted forward or back, I was always going to have to be pretty lucky for the chain to fit perfectly. In the event, after another trip up to Edinburgh Bicycle Co-op to buy a half-link it was still just over a quarter link too long, so I bought and fitted a DMR Simple Tension Seeker and tightened everything up.

In the interests of a anyone who might try a similar sort of build, here are a few of bits of information that became apparent rather too late for me:

The Truvativ Isoflow Single Speed Chainset likes 3/32" chains.
The DMR Simple Tension Seeker likes 3/32" chains.
The SRAM PC-1 is a 1/8" chain.

...all resulting in an unpleasant grinding noise on a brief test ride up and down the street*

The final hurdle, then, is to find out whether a Dicta freewheel can be persuaded to swing both ways, and if not, it's back to eBay to find a 3/32" compatible sprocket and then to the pub to cry into my pint.

* This thread at the On-One forums describes almost exactly the same problem I have, down to the rattling of the chain of the chainguard. Admittedly, they approach the whole thing with a cheerful can-do attitude that eludes me completely.

And in other news,

2006-06-19T22:18:00.000+01:00

there is very little other news. Jeff and Devon hosted a pleasant little dinner party on Wednesday night and on Friday Finlay and I finally met up again for a bit of non birth-, death- or marriage-related chat. The chat turned quickly into a light-on-food, heavy-on-beer and ultimately messy evening that I'm in no hurry to regurgitate (even the word makes me reflexively gag a bit) here.

On Sunday Ash and I had a very refined little wander around the west end of Princes Street and St. Cuthbert's kirkyard (unconsciously inspired, maybe, by Lisa?)and then later on met up with my parents for a Father's Day meal in the Outsider. La famille was on excellent form, and everyone got on famously.

And that is the sum total of everything interesting I did last week. Rock and roll.

P.S. I'm running the Water of Leith 10K again this year, and rather than half-heartedly try (and mostly forget) to chase people up for sponsorship, you can donate some money, if you want, via the justgiving.com website and avoid some of the tax that'd normally be levied. That is all!
P.P.S. Some people have been asking how Extreme Phil is doing. Fortunately he's fine - his back's painful but nothing is broken or permanently damaged. He won't be back on a bike for a while, though...!

More money, fewer gears part 2: the build.

2006-06-19T11:12:00.000+01:00

So, most of the parts have arrived and I've started to build the bike.

I started with the front end of the bike - forks, headset, stem, bars and brakes. The first thing to do was to fit the forks and stem, and I hit the first hurdle straight away. Fitting the bearing cups in which the bearings are seated requires a headset press (costing somewhere over £100) to do properly; ill-fitted bearing cups will apparently cause the steering action to stick and the bearings to wear out prematurely. A trip to Leith Walk Cycles sorted this out.

I test fit the forks, frame and stem together and again another problem cropped up: the fork's steerer tube is, according to one's perspective, either A) helpfully elongated to compensate for the short, rigid forks or B) just too damn long. With the stem in place, about an inch of steerer tube still projected above it. A couple of headset spacers from Chain Reaction Cycles have arrived today, so this'll be sorted out this evening. As with all of the other slightly dubious bits of this build, a few test rides will soon make it obvious whether or not I should just have the steerer cut down to size.

The brakes were next, and apart from the chain, are probably the most complicated bits that I'll have to do myself. The actual installation was straightforward enough: screw on the calipers and levers, cut the outer tubes to size and thread the cables through everything. Of course, the hard bit will be correctly aligning them and ensuring that both blocks engage the wheel rim at the same time when the lever is pulled, but that'll have to wait until the rear wheel is built (again by Leith Walk Cycles, who are coming out on top in terms of maintenance costs pretty much every time at the moment) and I've got tyres and tubes fitted.

In a sense, it's a pity that there's so little to do: at least a few of the jobs involved in putting a bike together (headset bearing cups, wheel building, installing a bottom bracket) are either so involved or require such specialised tools that there's nothing for it but to have the local bike shop (LBS) do it. This then introduces irritating bottlenecks - I can't buy a bottom bracket until I get the completed rear wheel back to make sure that the chain will fit with the minimum amount of deflection, and neither can I fine tune the brakes; I then can't fit the chain or pedals until the bottom bracket is done. And all this is taking forever and a day because every cyclist around is having their bike serviced for the summer and the shops are all inundated with repair jobs.

It's a hard life, I can tell you. At least my credit card can breathe easy for five minutes.

eBay gum:

2006-06-12T23:08:00.000+01:00

I've become a fully-fledged internet auctioneer. Anyone need an Epiphone Thunderbird?

Phil's spill:

2006-06-12T16:54:00.000+01:00

continuing in the biking vein, I went mountain biking on Saturday. I loaded up the bike and headed down to Glentress, just outside of Peebles, to meet up with a load of workmates. Bikes were hired, boasts were made (incredibly, Shaun could in fact ride a bike backwards), helmets were grudgingly donned and we headed off into the trees.

The first stretch was up a gently inclined, gravelly access road maybe a mile long. The sun was blazing down and I was sweating fairly freely by the time I reached the start of the trails proper with Scott, Donald and Shaun. We waited until the others caught up, then suited up in our variously borrowed and long-unused knee and shin pads to try out the skills loop, a short section intended to help newbies find their feet.

It all looked very unassuming, and I negotiated the various balance beams and elevated tracks without too much fuss.

Phil, on the other hand, did not. Coming off the ramp from the last beam, a platform maybe twenty feet long and a couple high, made up of half logs, I heard a distinct thunk sound, followed by a sustained - and I mean completely unwavering for at least a minute - wail of pain. I was so taken aback by the volume and agony evident I thought that someone must have had a minor tumble and was hamming it up for comedic effect, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Phil was prone beside the beam, gasping in pain. His front wheel had come off the side of the beam, sending him over the handlebars. He'd come down pretty much on the top of his head, and his neck had taken the full weight of his body as he did so.

We milled about in shock for a minute, and then tried to sort things out: a few of the guys kept an eye on Phil, tying to make him comfortable and making sure that he didn't move too much; Bobby rode after an ambulance we'd seen on the way up and when he missed it, we called the Hub to send for another one. Dave and I led it to the foot of the path up to the skills loop. By now about an hour had passed after the accident, a bike ranger had arrived and we'd all calmed down a bit. The rangers and the ambulance men were fairly optimistic: although Phil was in pain when he tried to move he could at least still move all of his limbs and once we got him onto the ambulance's stretcher for spinal injuries, he was much more comfortable.

Unwilling to stretcher him down to the ambulance and then negotiate the bumpy tracks back to the main road, the ambulance guys made a series of radio and phone calls and finally obtained the services of a Royal Navy Rescue helicopter, which arrived about forty-five minutes later:

Those are your tax pounds at work choppering "Extreme" Phil off to the Royal Infirmiary, getting him a mention on the news in the process.

On the up side, the rest of the day's biking was brilliant.

More money, fewer gears.

2006-06-08T11:12:00.000+01:00

I've embarked on a foolish quest to build a single speed commuting bike; i.e, a bike with only a single gear and no complicated derailleur mechanisms. Mostly I like the simplicity of the concept, but partly I want to get a bit more exercise out of my cycle to work and back without making things artificially difficult by using offroad tyres or, I dunno, carrying lead weights.

Here follows an in-depth and massively tedious list of parts, prices and tenuous rationales for buying them. I'll update this (you lucky people) as I get new bits and put it all together.

Frame: Dirty Jo F-Creme. £100 plus £5 shipping. These are made by the same factory in Taiwan that makes Giant frames, so with any luck I'm getting a decent frame for a sensible price*. I looked around for a frame with track ends that would have made a more natural starting point for a single speed bike, but obvious choices like the On-One Inbred and Identiti 666X start at around £250.
Forks: secondhand, rigid MTB forks from a helpful chap at Edinburgh Cycle Co-op costing a very reasonable £10. They're heavy-ish (i.e., they feel almost as heavy as the frame) but they certainly won't break any time soon. I think this is probably the first candidate for an upgrade come Christmas time...
Bars: FSA FR-330 freeride bars, borrowed from Bobby. These look to be pretty reasonable - they have a 40mm rise which may be a little much for the sort of urban bike I'm building, but we'll see how they work in combination with the rest of the frame components.
Stem: FSA FR-230 freeride stem, again borrowed from Bobby. This particular stem is only 60mm long, and this may have to be temporary until I can lay my hands on a longer one. Again, a few test rides will make this evident.
Rear wheel: DMR Revolver single speed hub (£36 including shipping) and Mavic XM317 rim (£20 or so). I plan to have the rear wheel built by either Alpine Bikes or Edinburgh Cycle Co-op - Alpine quoted £15 to build a wheel. The choice of the hub was restricted to either DMR or On-One really, mostly through price and availability. I'd have liked a hub with a cassette as opposed to a threaded freewheel mount, but I'll survive. The choice of the rim is mostly to match up with the...
Front wheel: Shimano Deore LX/Mavic XM317 combo built by Edinburgh Cycle Co-op. This looks to be the cheapest branded wheel combo I could find. I don't really want to buy branded stuff for the whole bike if I can avoid it, but the whole point of the bike is to be a lightweight commuting bike, so spending a bit extra on the largest, heaviest components is the best use of my cash.
Brakes: Shimano Deore V-brake kit, at £30. These were chosen mostly to get a complete brake kit at a reasonable price - levers, calipers and cables are all included.
Headset: M:Part Aheadset Sport for £7.95. Not much to say about this, other than it was the cheapest compatible headset Edinburgh Cycle Co-op had. And it's black, so it rocks that bit harder.
Crank/chainset: the snappily named SunTour CW-SCSP42-PBG costing a reasonable £15. Again, not much to say other than it's cheap, black and has a 42 tooth chainring. This'll give me a gear ratio of about 2.65:1 with a 16-tooth sprocket. Speaking of which...
Sprocket: Dicta 16 tooth freewheel for £8 including shipping, from eBay**.
Chain: SRAM PC1 at £9, but if memory serves I actually paid less than this. Another workaday part - a single-speed specific 1/8" chain. I've seen some (possibly bogus) internet musings that indicate that 3/32" MTB chains are a better bet for single-speed bikes than BMX-style 1/8" chains because that's where all the R&D dollars go, but we'll see how it holds up.
Pedals: DMR V8s for £22. Seems a lot to spend on pedals, but they look bombproof*** and may well graduate to my mountain bike. Also, given that I initially thought it was £22 per pedal, £22 for both is a bargain :)
Tyres: Schwalbe Silento IIs. These are the road/trekking tyres I fitted to my Diamondback for use in town, and which I replaced with the original off-road tyres for my first mountain biking trip on it. They're not as slick (in terms of tread and also general grooviness) as I'd like, but they'll do fine for the first little while.
Seat and post: I'm going to use the seat and post from my current bike - the post looks to fit exactly into the seat tube, and the saddle has plenty of adjustment available. I'm using a non-quick release clamp which may turn out to be a hassle if I end up doing as much mountain biking over the summer as I'd like to, but it's another free component donated by Bobby so I can't really complain.

This leaves the bottom bracket and inner tubes. If this all totals less than £300, I'll have come out with a moderately spiffy single-speed bike for perhaps £200 less than a ready built one. If.

* Since I started writing this entry the frame has arrived - it's incredibly light and pretty well finished. The geometry is notably different from my venerable, secondhand Diamondback Apex, so it'll be interesting to see how the finished bike feels in comparison.
** This arrived from eBay the other day and I'm not impressed. It's shoddily cast, with a fair amount of flashing and generally unimpressive quality. Next candidate for an upgrade, I think - maybe something like this instead.
*** The DMR rear hub has also arrived, and looks to be pretty much indestructible. My mountain biking fanatic boss is très gushy about DMR stuff, and so I'm quite happy dropping some more cash on DMR pedals.

Tags: singlespeed

A long time ago...

2006-06-05T23:15:00.000+01:00

Neil showed me some of the photos of Ali's stag last week, and while the jolly japery was much in evidence, it became apparent to me that my hair was getting a trifle ridiculous. So much so that while sporting the requisite fake moustache and Hawaiian shirt I made a startlingly credible drug baron. It was time for a haircut, so on Friday lunchtime I wandered into the Demon Barber on Broughton Street, as is my wont.

The guy that came over to cut my hair was new, and looked to be a little older and richer than the rest of the staff. His hair was cut a bit like mine, if a little shorter, so I asked him to just trim mine a bit and made a point of mentioning how his hairstyle would be a reasonable guide.

"'k then," he said, and off he went.

He wasn't much of a talker in standard barber/taxi-driver/old-man-at-the-bar terms, but it transpired that he was the owner of boom barbers (the lower case name should have set my wanky spider sense tingling) and had recently bought this branch of the Demon Barber.

"Good stuff," I thought. "Hopefully he'll know what he's doing."

How wrong I was, reader. How wrong I was.

Whereas previous haircut disasters have confined themselves to the arena of the mullet, whether sincerely intended as a fashion statement by a misguided hairdresser or as a consequence of general incompetence on their part, this was an almost preternaturally bad haircut. Take the general concept of the mullet - business at the front and party at the back - and add Oasis at the sides and spiky footballers' tuft on top and you are perhaps beginning to glimpse the enormity of what he had perpetuated on my head. Havoc was wreaked with my hair, and he had the temerity to disguise it with some glutinous "product". I paid my money, not yet able to understand the utter horror of my situation, and headed back to work whereupon I stuck my head under the tap, looked in the mirror and suppressed a scream of abject horror.

I can't show you a photo of it - frankly, you'd have to threaten me with being forcibly made to watch The Core over and over again before I'd even consider doing so - but fortunately I'll never have the opportunity to do so because I went straight out to get it fixed. I briefly considered going straight back to the Demon Barber to demand that the fuckwit who cost me twelve pounds sterling and eight months of hair growth make right his mistake, but it struck me that letting an crap and angry barber have a second go at my hair would not be the best course of action.

I went straight to York Barbers (a humble, down to earth establishment with the good grace to not even have a website, let alone a useless Flash-ridden abortion of one), vented my spleen at my coiffeur nemesis and begged the guy to sort me out. Twenty minutes later I looked A) five years younger and B) five times better. And felt about five times better into the bargain.

I did do other stuff last week, like go to see X-Men 3 (another excellent blockbuster - what's going on?) and visit Holy Island with Ash (a diverting little trip on which we managed to unintentionally avoid the main reasons to go there), but dear God! That haircut will live on in infamy.

In a strange twist of fate,

2006-05-29T18:26:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday morning and afternoon just did not happen.

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

Sunday morning and afternoon just did not happen.

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

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

Normal service is resumed:

2006-05-21T12:42:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Road trip redux II: Nürburgring folly.

2006-05-18T18:17:00.000+01:00

Pan-european driving malarkey:

Ah, Paris!

2006-05-18T18:11:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something of the track demons remained

2006-05-15T18:09:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxi! Or not.

2006-05-10T17:02:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth;

2006-05-08T18:16:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More tomorrow!

* With apologies to Moby Dick.

Apart from TM's amiable demise

2006-04-28T14:26:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

From TM.net:

2006-04-24T22:22:00.000+01:00

"It's curtains for the Monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special K:

2006-04-17T20:21:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This man

2006-04-13T12:12:00.000+01:00

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

Chris and Leyla

2006-04-11T18:34:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Bugger.

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

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

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

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

In case anyone worries

2006-04-06T17:16:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

Make it exactly like Berkeley 2.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Domestic God, if I do say so myself.

2006-04-03T18:05:00.000+01:00

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

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

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

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