Thursday's gig at the Pavilion Tavern went well. We were beset by technical problems, unfortunately - we couldn't get the 303 working so we had to drop 'Engines and Anvils', and the first couple of songs were affected by Pete's guitar amp cutting out, which was a bit of a shock at the time, but we kind of got on with it without too many problems. The set seemed to lag a bit in the middle so we skipped 'A Century too'. I don't know, for some reason I felt I was missing confidence this time; but all the same - I think we were good, and people were very nice afterwards. The set was

1. Get Away
2. You Should Know
3. Easy to Leave
4. John Wyndham
5. Vine to Vine
6. It's Alright
7. Freaks

And, on a couple of occasions (Easy to Leave, Vine to Vine and Freaks) I thought we sounded really great; but we need to do more gigs, I think - the other bands, Everything Crash and Feline Dream had much more in the way of self-assurance than us. Nevertheless, some things we did on Thursday we did better than ever before. It was great having the keyboards, great playing Easy to Leave, and I thought I perhaps came across better; I tried to actually talk to the audience every now and again, and that helped. We gave away quite a few CDs too, and spoke to some lovely people afterwards. And got quite drunk :-)

Had a nice weekend afterwards; I had Friday off so I spent most of it playing bits of music, listening to Momus, Bedsit Bomber, Aesop Rock and Van Der Graaf Generator and looking forward to Vic coming home. We went to the pub on Saturday with Anne-So, Sam, Pete, Mark and one of Pete's old friends, and Sam (who had started earlier than the rest of us) fell asleep, meaning that we could poke him, insult him, pour beer down his nose etc without him minding, which was nice. Went back to theirs afterwards and drank revolting schnapps and watched 'The Daytrippers' and dozed. When we left, about twoish, Vic just hared away from the front door and ran down the street. I tried to follow, running up on the high grass verge, and tripped, doing a tremendous drunken semi-somersault. Pete says the last he saw I was lying on my back on the wet grass laughing. Left my glasses where I lay, too, but rescued them the next morning. Phew.

Hangover on Sunday, which meant painful visit to Waitrose with a sore head and later, Love Actually at the Odeon. I may be tempted to go into this in some detail later, but for now suffice it to say that, even to a seasoned champion of Notting Hill and About a Boy, it was the most transparently manipulative, cynical, misogynistic and offensive film I ever seen. Utterly stunningly bad. Ah well. Charles II, a bit later on the BBC, was fine, but I couldn't help thinking it was Freddie Mercury.

j