Weekly round up 3

- My album of the week is the new Warpaint LP, which is really their first album as far as I’m concerned, as I never really listened to their first – just the odd song on a radio that sounded to me (possibly incorrectly) like they were trying to do a The Cure thing. I caught them live at End of the Road this summer, where they sounded a bit rusty, but listening to this now I can see what they were getting at; a big, spacious, deep, lazy pop vibe. It’s a lovely lovely album, I think – a bit like a lot of the stuff I used to listen to when I was a teenager.

- This week I overheard some kids on the train discussing which parties would be in the next coalition. It made me realise how quickly things change, or at least how little the young know. Already for a lot of people in the country, a coalition is a normal state of affairs, what one might expect from a government. Perhaps they’re right, now, but it wasn’t long ago that coalition politics was just ‘a foreign thing’.

- My eyebrows join up in the middle. I have heard this discussed as a major problem (although more as a general rule than in reference to my own). Sitting in a barbers this week, with a slightly distracted guy gutting my hair, I had to do that thing for a moment of staying completely still while he stared into my eyes, fixing my fringe. He trimmed it a bit, then rocked back on his heels, staring at me. He leant forward, hacked another clump of hair out of my eyes, and then, as if on an un-quashable impulse, lurched forward and neatly snipped a path through the small patch of forest which sits atop the bridge of my nose, separating my two brows for the first time in many years.

We both pretended nothing had happened.