random

All of a sudden Brighton is cold, and we have turned the heating on. With it comes that hot rush and that warm, dry smell and I get a creeping sensation of winter, although it’s a little way off yet. I feel like I’m back at home in my parent’s warm house with a warmish glass of wine and nothing to do with my time.

Vic’s next door doing her reading for her MA and I’m just waiting for her to finish, really, so we can go to the pub with Pete; probably I should be sorting out the washing or working out what to have for dinner – or devising some useful blog post – but instead I’ve got the Tom Waits LP on and the heating still pulsing into the room and knocking me out, wishing the weekend wasn’t quite this far advanced.

We went to Hove, yesterday. Tell me, do people live there on purpose? Nothing to do except Smiths and Tescos, me convincing Vic that a cheap bottle of wine would be alright (it wasn’t) and strangely pleasurable for that; again, like being back with my parents and going shopping in Barnet every Saturday, though there is nothing there to see. In the evening we watched ‘School of Rock’, which was far better than it had right to be; you watch so many films for so many reasons without asking to be kept smiling all the way through; Jack Black is surely the most likeable central character we could ever ask for. That said, Michael Palin is on tonight.

Two good events at the end of the week, as my cold receded; first, we went to see Fuji Heavy at the Pressure Point and caught up with everybody, and enjoyed their set enormously – Andy and Ali (my band loyalty is strong – they both play in Assistant) remain my focal point, the former engaging in little twists of showmanship and rattly solos, the latter pounding his drums so hard I thought he’d faint. The songs themselves are inventive splurges of surf-punk-rock, bringing to mind The Stones or the Pixies, or Johnny Thunders masterminding Quadrophenia-era Who. One song sounds like Status Quo, hurray. Carrie urges me not to mention this.

Keith continues to do his thing of talking in a silly, overexcited voice between songs and we all look a bit embarrassed, saying ‘it’s because he’s American’, but he’s the singer goddamnit and that’s his prerogative. I have the idea that the rest of the band should look embarrassed when he does it, as if it’s a quirk they’ll tolerate cause he writes ace songs, and that that’d be a good gimmick, but people tell me to hush when I suggest this, and besides it’s undermining the singer and we’ve just started rehearsing again – I don’t want the rest of Assistant getting any ideas…

All this excitement doesn’t do much to quell my cold or my thudding cough, but hearing the next day that this blog has won the brighton web awards thing does, it sends me cheerful from work into the night, although I soon submit, back to coughing and cursing. I tell Vic, but bah, she seems unimpressed… it’s all an act, it must be :-)

A weekend of horrible, horrible news, too, which swats its way in to other things, but I read just now that some polls now have Kerry in front of Bush, please say it is so. I note Bush talked about the ‘Internets’ the other night, how wonderful. Incidentally, I am described elsewhere on the web, I note, as several things which I am not, which I shall retain my dignity about. One section does however, have me down as hating ‘George Bush, Christians and the Daily Mail’, which makes me wonder how you get perceived when you blog. I do, I suppose, hate Bush and the Mail (although I don’t have anything at all against Christians) although I’m not sure whether I’d want to be defined by it. Or then again, maybe I would. Hmm. Well anyway, I hope this doesn’t all come across as a series of boring rants.

Oh god, it does…