Friday 1st July 2005
Wednesday
Overly keen, I arrived at Paddington with 40 minutes to spare, and spent the time sitting on my rucksack round the back of Burger King, contemplating the gradual concertina-ing of my spine. Carrying three tents plus other Glastonbury essentials from Clerkenwell to Paddington was already taking its toll. The atmosphere on the train was boisterous, carriages full of festival goers, who eventually spilled out into the sunshine bathing Castle Cary station and joined the queue for the free festival buses.
I found myself on an old coach, sat just behind the driver, a late middle-aged and affable man with a strong West Country accent. At one point, as the coach was trundling along the road, he left his post at the wheel to stroll across the vehicle and open the door ("for air") showing the kind of disregard for human life acquired only by ferrying charabancs of day-trippers around the country for forty years. Every now and again he'd bend the microphone down to his mouth to give his passengers news of the treats awaiting them on the farm, such as that, because of the hot weather, there was already a lot of nudity on the site -
"...and I mean nudity. There's going to be some burnt nipples tomorrow morning."
As if to underline the nipple theme, we turned a corner and the Glastonbury Tor hove into view. And then, to the left, the sprawling festival site unfolded, the sun glittering off the windscreens of hundreds of cars, the serpentine superfence shimmering in the haze.
Soon I was again stooping under the weight of the rucksack, staggering towards the campsite above the Pyramid Stage, sweat pouring off me. Already I was in need of a shower - unfortunately the nearest one of those was Monday afternoon. I didn't stop until I heard the buzzing of the power lines at which point I cast down the rucksack, pulled out the tents and started construction. There was a moment, hands full of indeterminate poles and awkwardly shaped canvas, when I wondered if really this was just a colossal waste of time, but suddenly the shells of three tents were there, pegged down and ready for the weekend. Meanwhile, I had spread the flysheet of one of the tents out to reserve an area for a fourth tent - being brought by Matt in the evening. I sat in my camping chair, watching over the space, like Greyfriars Bobby over the grave of his master, silently snarling at anyone who looked like encroaching on it. By the time Claire arrived onsite at about 6 in the evening, a Eurohike sponsored shanty town covered the hillside, an empty field six hours earlier. The space for the fourth tent was still there - but at what expense? I hadn't brought any suncream and Claire politely avoided mentioning the smell of burning flesh, as the skin of my arms and neck bubbled gently under the sun.
Matt arrived an hour or so later, and put up the tent intended for George and Rohan, turning up the next day to complete our little camp. Finally we had four tents (the others for Claire and me, Matt and Sally and a spare one) circling a small but adequate 'sitting around' area and I could relax - and as I did I realised the pain thundering around my head. Sunstroke - not so bad that I saw pink goblins scuttling down from the Stone Circle towards me - but painful and disorientating all the same. That was it - I escaped into my expertly erected tent for the evening.
Thursday
A day with nothing to do - but dozing sluglike in my luxurious sleeping bag wasn't an option. The unforgiving sun was turning the inside of the tent into a furnace, and we had to struggle outside after blearily pulling on clothes and poking in contact lenses. On wandering through the site I got the impression that most people had arrived - the place was packed, the dusty stall lined streets of the festival buzzed with people, the constant conveyor belt of the paths, a familiar feature of festivals, had begun.
At my insistence, Matt, Claire and I spent most of the time darting from shady area to shady area, since my burnt skin started to tingle the moment the sun's rays fell on it. We eventually took up refuge at the Avalon Stage, a blue marquee near the circus field. A good spot for people watching, we whiled away a few hours with a couple of bottles of perry. Pleasantly drunk, we resumed our wandering of the site, through the Tipi field and up into the Green Fields. In the Green Fields it was business as usual - one of the first sights that greeted us was a tree planting ceremony. A couple of hippies were in paroxysms of joy as earth was packed around the base of a small sapling. The intestinal belch of a didgeridoo and a child throwing confetti everywhere accompanied the spectacle. Eventually we found a shady corner of the Greenpeace Kids Field within which to doze off the effects of the perry.
The campsite was alive most of the evening, people sitting up and talking until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning, notably a group camped nearby who were yabbering away incessantly, a worthless stream of repetitive cretinous crap spewing from their diseased mouths. I quite enjoy sleepily eavesdropping on other people's conversations at festivals, but in this case, all I enjoyed was fantasising about bursting into the night, grabbing my mallet, tearing up all the pegs I could find and pitching a tent in their eyes.
Friday
By four in the morning, the campsite was quiet. Suddenly, from nowhere a strange wind coursed through the humid night, rippling the canvas, shaking the tents. I dozed off. I was woken by the clatter of heavy rain on the roof of the tent. There was a flash, then a few moments later deafening thunder crackled across the sky.
I retreated deeper inside the sleeping bag, waiting for the storm to move off. But the rain was unrelenting and the lightning got more frequent and violent, the thunder sounding like volleys of undisciplined artillery fire, increasing gradually in volume. At times the gap between the lightning and thunder grew longer, but not for long - the storm moved away from the valley only to circle back, returning with even more vehemence. I wondered if the deluge was focussed exclusively on the site, God finally deciding to kill all hippies.
At around 9am, I decided that I'd have to venture out. I pulled on jeans, trainers and a T-shirt, and with an umbrella headed into the storm. The rain continued to tumble down, heavy drops already accumulating into puddles, the hard earth unable to soak up the water. I splashed down the hill, past the Pyramid Stage. The flags aligning the path, that had flittered so colourfully the day before, were sticking limply to their poles.
At Joe Bananas, the famous blanket stall, business was brisk. I managed to grab a pair of size 11 wellies (a size too small, but inevitably "they only go up to 11") and a waterproof poncho - all of which set me back 30 quid. The prices at Glastonbury are remarkable - stall holders exploiting their captive audience. I don't think paying 4 pounds for a sausage in a bun is really in tune with the fair trade messages promoted incessantly elsewhere on the site. I headed back to the tent with my spoils, where I hid until the rain slowed to a light patter, and eventually, after a couple of deceptive lulls, stopped for good. Matt took up residence into the spare tent, apparently dissatisfied with the 'Indoor Rain' feature that came with his.
The music had been delayed for two hours. A beer tent had been struck by lightning (mmmm...electric beer). The site was crippled by power cuts. A hundred yards away from our tents, other campers found their temporary homes were pitched in the middle of a river - or otherwise discovered that these homes had already disappeared downstream. But the damage here was mild compared to the flooding at a campsite on the other side of the festival, where the tops of the tents peeked out from 4 feet of water.
Safe in my wellies, walking around the place was fascinating - there was shit everywhere. The paths were already past saving, deep with heavy sticky mud. Lakes had appeared, cutting off stalls while the garishly painted recycling bins bobbed around like debris from a ship wreck. Amongst the waterproofed wellied-up festival goers there were those painfully unprepared, shivering in their shorts and T-shirts, great clods of mud where their trainers used to be. And inevitably, the swimmers and divers were already out in force, covered from head to toe in sludge. If you ask me, it takes a considerable quantity of drugs to fling off your clothes and happily paddle around in what is essentially the excrement of thousands of strangers.
I popped into the Guardian Lounge - mainly to see what it was all about (sitting around on sofas with coffee and a copy of the paper) and caught the opening song of Brakes's set. The noise was a bit painful so, with Claire, I headed to the Pyramid Stage to watch The Zutons, who got the music proper off to an excellent start, although Claire didn't seem particularly willing to get involved in a discussion with me about whether or not Abi off The Zutons is fit.
After a few hours squelching here and there, and meeting up with Matt (who had been exiled to dry land - what was left of it - until Sally arrived with his boots) Sally, George and Rohan, I squelched about a bit more, but to the sound of The Killers who played a reassuringly familiar set, before Fat Zorro Jack White and his ex-wife Meg took the stage. The White Stripes were entertaining - in between messy and irritating bursts of noise and mini-tunes, they sounded great. However, I decided to trudge off before the end to find Lou Rhodes, and the others, less impressed by The White Stripes than me and emboldened by a few boxes of wine, decided to follow.
Up in the Small World Tent, far away from the heaving masses at the Pyramid Stage, Claire and I squeezed ourselves into a couple of seats (a.k.a the ground and a low table) next to a charcoal burning fire. On stage a refugee from the 1970s was leading a funky sounding band and playing jazz flute in between singing lines like:
"I want to leave, I want to leave, I want to leave the world of LSD, haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh."
The Small World stage was beautifully kitted out - red lanterns hung from the roof, their pleasant but muted glow meant the seated festival goers chatted in gentle semi-darkness, occasionally rising to get a hot drink from the bar at the back, or to let a man through to top up the coal on the fires. The others had disappeared - stuck in the mud and lost - but when they arrived half an hour later Lou Rhodes wasn't yet on stage, late for her half past midnight slot. When they left half an hour after that, the music still hadn't started. In the end, because of sound difficulties and a very slow set up, Lou and her band didn't appear until about 1:30am. But of course, naturally, inevitably, unsurprisingly, predictably (etc) it was worth the wait. Lou's new songs are in the vein of the Lamb lullabies, achingly beautiful, finely crafted and measured. Her voice is exquisite, aural treacle and I left the Small World Tent calm and happy. Claire left it fancying Lou Rhodes's double bassist.
It was the middle of the night. We strolled around the Green Fields a bit and poked our heads into random tents. In one, three of four people were sitting in the gloom watching a skinny bearded man playing the mandolin and singing about globalisation. The weak light pulsing out of the electric bulbs and the amplifier boosting the twanging of the mandolin were being powered by two men sitting astride a tandem, fixed to the ground. Their legs cycled continuously and the music was accompanied by the constant hiss of the turning wheels.
Eventually we headed back to the campsite through the quiet Green Fields, passing muffled pockets of sound - chanting in the distance, from the darkness somewhere near the path a guitar and elsewhere, the ubiquitous bongos. And then we were back in the centre of the festival, where the lights still blazed and people wandered, more aimlessly than before, looking for that one last unexpected discovery before they called it a night.
Saturday
For the first time ever, I found myself at the Pyramid Stage for the opening band of the day - Hayseed Dixie, who famously perform bluegrass covers of rock classics. Pushing their new album, A Hot Piece of Grass, their hillbilly front man uttered a refreshingly un-Glastonbury like question - "Can you feel the evil?". As the redneck joke got a little tired, we took another trip across the site, through the Leftfield Stage, the circus field and past the acoustic tent, where Morris Dancers jingled their way through the morning.
Back to the Pyramid Stage to watch an high-energy set from the Kaiser Chiefs, a band I really don't want to like, but can't help doing so. At one point I turned my head (wishing to avoid the sight of Ricky Wilson's 20 foot high builder's crack on the video screens as he struggled into the crowd for a bit of surfing) to appreciate the 'audience furniture' around me. There was the usual dismal contingent of national flags, but also a great variety of other, less nationalistic and more fun stuff - an inflatable monkey and a Saddam Hussein doll, both on long poles and both of which, at different times, were seen desperately humping the leg of the life-size cardboard cut-out of Kylie. Elsewhere a giant inflatable brontosaurus bounced around, eventually making its lumbering way onto the stage. Near me, men with pigeons on sticks harassed unsuspecting punters by gently pecking them on the head or knocking off their hats
Then to the Guardian Lounge. After catching the last few minutes of a set by a weather beaten growly old man (who the stage listing informed me was known as 'Shuffle'), we took up an excellent position beside the stage to watch Emiliana Torrini. Ignoring the supposed 'Make Poverty History' moment at 4pm, the set started with the winsome Icelander singing a few of her laid back songs, and amiably chatting in between - it was during part of her patter that she came up with perhaps the quote of the festival - "I always wanted to be in a thrash metal band".
A few refreshments later and suddenly it was dark and my feet were stuck in the mud of the John Peel tent. Over on stage the Magic Numbers were having a cracking time, as was everyone watching them, despite the group looking like the Shire's in-house band. It was a captivating and uplifting gig and the Magic Numbers seemed genuinely overwhelmed and happy at their reception, and I could make out perma-grins through their excessive head hair.
My feet unplugged, Matt, Sally and I headed through the new Dance Village, an incredible place - the central path was lined with hundreds of flags and from either side the sound of six or seven dance stages converged. Lights flashed everywhere and large inflatable neon shapes sat in the sky. The huge dark masses in front of the stages could only be identified as people by the silhouettes of thousands of raised hands. Our destination, past the village, was the Other Stage, a strangely desolate place at the best of times, but tonight bisected by a sizeable lake and a couple of streams sourcing it. Razorlight motored through an accomplished, if oddly dull performance, after which we headed up to the Stone Circle.
The place was packed, the field already skewered with about a hundred large camping candles. A healthy bonfire blazed away in the middle of the stones while various instruments (mostly from the drum family) were played inexpertly by delirious hippies. And there we stayed. After a while, lying back on the ground I felt the cold of the earth spreading through my body. I remember thinking how lucky it was that the dead don't feel the cold and then deciding that, even though I wanted to stick around for the sunrise, it was a probably a good moment to leave.
Sunday
The sun returned, trying its best to harden the mud - and it did a good job. Moving around was notably less energy sapping than on Saturday, and there were actually places where I could indulge in one of my favourite festival pastimes - sitting/lying on the ground doing not very much.
A trip to the Lost Vagueness field was on the cards for Sunday, and we made our way towards the chapel of Love and Loathing, where Kate Moss and a frog like simpleton in the Emperor's New Clothes were supposed to have got 'married' the day before. Inside a horsey woman dressed up as a priest renewed the vows of a self-satisfied looking couple in a boxing ring. Feeling a bit irritated by the contrived 'wackiness' of it I went and sat outside to people watch. After a while I was moved on by the other less lazy members of the group and we decamped to the Jazz World stage, where, thanks to my deft queuing, I managed to pick up the last two bottles of perry from the perry bus. And so we lounged in the sunshine, gulping down the sweet pear juice. It was pleasantly uneventful - apart from the moment when I looked up to see a naked man crouched in front of me, covered in white paint and staring.
"Burrrrhhhhh" he whispered, before scampering off to disturb someone else.
A bit dazed from the perry and the naked ghost, I took another turn around the Green Fields with Matt, Claire and Sally. I felt I could loiter around there for ever - it's a lovely area, very relaxing - always with something unusual and diverting going on. We found another tent not powered by conventional electricity - this time there were no stringy cyclists frantically peddling: instead the three female violinists in tutus were benefiting from solar power.
Back to the Pyramid Stage for a performance by a dazed looking Brian Wilson, but it went down well in the afternoon sunshine. At one point, towards the end of the set, a tent tied to six multi-coloured helium balloons and bearing the Banksy tag disappeared into the sky. I wonder where it ended up.
And then Matt and I nipped over to the Other Stage to watch the overrated Rufus Wainwright drone through a number of dirgy songs, including one with his sister Martha. Maybe it was the site of Rufus Wainwright stripped to the waist, but most probably it was a heady mix of perry and sunshine that brought on the familiar feeling of sunstroke. On the way over to the Other Stage I had bought 3 bottles of water, all of which I gulped down. But as Matt and I left the Other Stage area, slagging off Wainwright, I didn't feel any better. By the time we reached the Tadpole Stage, the venue of Ms Rhodes's second performance of the festival, I was beginning to wonder if something in my head was haemorrhaging.
The Tadpole Stage wasn't as cosy as the Small World Stage, but it was as small and also the kind of place where people sat, rather than swayed, while watching whoever was on stage. It was a lot emptier than the Small World Stage had been and Matt and I sat down on the thin benches. I was feeling woozier and the pain in my head was getting more acute. I decided to bin my plans to see Bright Eyes after watching Lou and stood up to ask Matt if I could borrow his phone in order to let Claire know - she was in a tent elsewhere watching Tori Amos. As I stood a not entirely unexpected wave of nausea surged through me, and I grabbed the phone and rushed out of the tent, brushing past Lou Rhodes on her way in. Oh God, I hope she didn't see me throwing up three bottles of water and a cheese/spinach/mushroom crepe into the recycling bins.
Empty, I lurched back into the tent. We had been joined on the bench by a rather talkative fellow, also waiting for the ex-Lamb singer's performance. Chatting away to my friendly neighbour, in between swallowing mouthfuls of bile, I learnt that on Saturday he had bumped into Lou in the Tipi field and had a rather nice chat to her. I sulkily mentioned my my non-encounter and the way I was being eaten up inside by regret.
Again the set up took ages with various sound problems arising and the guy at the sound desk seemingly incapable of doing his job. And so, Matt had to, for the second time, leave before a note was played, keen as he was to catch the beginning of Bright Eyes. And that was a shame, because again the performance of Lou and her band was mesmerising - it was a shorter, slightly different playlist this time. She was also joined by a percussionist, not present at the Small World Stage, whose principle instrument appeared to be a black clay vase.
For her last song Louise Rhodes made us all stand up, and beckoned us closer to the very low stage. Ah, it was brilliant. My brain kindly let some naturally occurring happy chemicals chug around my body, muting the pain of my sunstroke, and I felt the mild euphoria that only a superlative live music experience can provoke.
Slowly making my way back to the tent I cursed my head and the fact the festival was nearly over. I could have stayed for days.
Monday
And that's it. Over again - no more Glastonbury until at least 2007. The tents swiftly came down, the seagulls that had been ominously circling for the past 24 hours made their move, descending on the litter strewn ground. And with more ease than ever before, via bus and train, I was back in London and asleep on my bed.
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Tuesday 21st June 2005
Yesterday, stumbling through my morning routine, I reluctantly grasped the heavy curtains, to let daylight into the bedroom. Within a second the curtain rail had collapsed, the heavy fabric strewn across my bed, a riot of chintz and dust, the tall windows naked. Despite a slightly whiny email to the agents, when I arrived back from work the room was in the same sorry state. Pausing only to be pleasantly infuriated at the psychotic antics of greyhound lookalike Jayne Middlemiss on Celebrity Love Island, I started trying to work out how to cover the windows for the night. Anything to stop the unwelcome early morning sun waking me. There's also a high wattage floodlight fixed to an office directly opposite the flat, which blazes away all night.
Eventually, after rooting around in my laundry basket and raiding my pinboard for drawing pins, I hammered a bed sheet and duvet cover into the window frames, feeling a bit like Al Pacino in Insomnia (or Stellan Skarsgard for those of you with a more Scandinavian take on things). This morning, a boss-eyed maintenance man blundered into my bedroom (no knock on the front door, no phone call to warn me of this potentially terrifying intrusion) and told me he had come to fix the curtains. I left him to it, and just hope he wasn't a quick-witted burglar who had broken into the flat and, seeing the state of the curtains behind me as I challenged him, come up with the ideal explanation.
But I shouldn't be getting too precious about curtains and the other trappings of a comfortable bedroom, given that tomorrow morning I'm heading west to Glastonbury to spend almost 5 days in a tent. This morning I printed off the indispensable Glastonbury Clash Finder and, after a few minutes with an orange highlighter, worked out that this will be the most clash heavy festival to date. Friday is fairly clash free - only Willy Mason and The Killers compete for my simultaneous attention. On Saturday it all gets horribly heart-wrenching, with not just double clashes, but triple and even quadruple clashes rearing their Hydra-like heads. New Order, Kasabian or The Magic Numbers? Ash, The Futureheads, The Departure or Chas'n'Dave? Sunday is just as bad - particularly as night falls. The Clashfinder informs me that Primal Scream, Bright Eyes and Tori Amos are all playing at the same time. It's a toughie, but I've done a bit of detective work, and found a solution. At the same time Tori Amos is squirming awkwardly on her piano stool, over on the little known Tadpole Stage (not covered by the Clashfinder) Louise Rhodes will be continuing her post-Lamb career. There's no contest.
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Wednesday 15th June 2005
Ah well, I suppose I had better post something, given that people have actually started to pick up on the absence of anything new here - although if you look carefully you'll see the films on the right change a bit and that there are a few new links fill to the interest vacuum at work. What you won't have noticed, even if you cared to look, is a steady change in the books I'm reading. I used to plough through a book in a few days but recently I've regressed to my pre-school speed. Granted, in those days, reading consisted of focussing on words printed on white card held up by my demanding parents. I stammered my way through "Backhand Volley", "Sainsbury's" and "Aga" terrified they would carry out their threat and leave me out for the wolves. I currently volunteer at a primary school, nudging 8 year olds through stories about child detectives or loveable pigs. Exposing them to the same threats isn't effective - in fact threats in general are redundant and I have to resort to bribery. The key is that by the time they've read the passage to me, they've forgotten that I've promised to draw them a picture of Harry Potter with his hair on fire or 50 Cent with his hair on fire or me with my hair on fire (etc etc).
It's taking me so long to get through books because I don't get a train or bus into work - I walk. As a result, getting into work, I don't have time where I can sit down (or more realistically bundle myself into the awkward gap between two other angry, sweaty commuters) and read. I've decided this has directly contributed to the fact that I find it harder than the 8 year olds to grasp that Darius the Pig is unhappy because his Master doesn't give him sugar lumps. As a result I have decided to move house.
So at last, maybe, I will have something vaguely interesting to blog about. Because, to be honest, since I got back from East Asia things haven't been particularly interesting in my world, and work seems to monopolise most of the time I dedicate to sitting in front of a computer. But now the rich experience of crudely painted-over rising damp and offensively inflated deposits beckons - like the gnarly finger of a brylcreemed estate agent at the door of a delightful basement flat (cellar) a short walk from the amenities of West Hampstead (there's no public transport, Kilburn).
I'll miss Clerkenwell - mainly for the food. There are some great restaurants on and around St John's Street, hairy fish peddlers nothwithstanding. It was Claire's birthday on Monday, and we went to the Clerkenwell Dining Room and Bar, where I ate tongue for the first time (not a euphemism - this was the tongue of a calf) a rather salty, and not particularly pleasant experience. Aside from that I recommend the place. Before I desert the area for good I hope to force Claire to join me at St John, the offal restaurant a bit further down the street, to see if I can find anything that beats silkworm pupae as the oddest thing I've ever (knowingly) eaten.
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Tuesday 5th April 2005
It appears that hauling myself out of bed and trudging across to my office for 8.45 on Sunday morning was worth it. Despite spending the whole of Saturday at a stylishly fun wedding and despite loathing the sight of my place of work on weekdays, I was sat at my desk, 6 internet windows open on my monitor, and clicking away on the refresh button by the time the more devout were adjusting their hats and tottering to church.
It took about an hour and a half, but I managed to secure a couple of Glastonbury tickets and so will be heading to Somerset once again in late June - unless some dreadful work-related turn of events turns me into even more of a hate filled automaton. No, this particular professional life isn't going well. I'm thinking of becoming a babysitter or bramblepicker.
Delightfully, the BBC included my half-baked comments (amongst others) about Glastonbury "ticket pain" in their hastily written article of yesterday.
Meanwhile, the quiet corner of Clerkenwell in to which I escape after a day's drudgery appears to have been hit by a crime wave. Drive-by shootings, riots, arson and loitering crack-dealers have turned my street into a no-go area akin to the suburbs of Baghdad.
That's not exactly true. My block of flats nestles in between new media companies, galleries and a couple of painfully self-obsessed drinking establishments. As a result the street it's on tends to be a rather quiet back road. But the other evening, while I was sitting at the table writing thank you letters for Christmas presents (a tad late), I heard a loud crashing. Looking out of the window I watched a shadowy figure scamper through the hole he had just made in a production company's glass front door. Being a trendy media company, the whole office was glass fronted, and while I called the police, I watched him trot upstairs and go for a flat screen TV and DVD player mounted on the wall. However, a few other people in the flats had heard the commotion, and the burglar's accomplice, perching on a moped in the street, looked around to see windows of morally outraged residents, phones clamped to their ears. The pair puttered off on their moped empty-handed.
It was fairly exciting but soon calm returned to the neighbourhood. Or so I thought - my flatmate reports being woken regularly by young scoundrels attempting to steal mopeds parked on the street outside. To be honest, since the daring attempted heist over the road, I haven't noticed anything amiss, but it seems that soon I'll have to dodge the flying bullets and bricks as gangs of media types crack their thick-rimmed glasses and tear their low-slung jeans in disputes over video-streaming and fully outsourced IT consulting.
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Tuesday 8th February 2005
No, look, I know I've been shit, but I've been very busy you see, what with work and Christmas and going and doing things. Lots of things, which I should have blogged, but didn't. These include:
Xfm's Winter Wonderland;
Xfm's First Friday club night at the Islington Academy;
The Producers;
The Tsunami benefit gig in the Millennium Stadium;
Ian McEwan in conversation and reading from his new novel on the South Bank;
Sunday night improvisation at the Comedy Store; and
Skiing in Champoluc, Italy.
But in between flitting to and from these dazzling events, I've been mostly crouched behind a desk, fingers tapping a yellowing keyboard, back arching into permanent quasimodoism, skin sweating in fear of doing something wrong and brain spasming with horror at the fact I chose this profession: but that's earning a living for you. I only mention it as an excuse for not posting more regularly - that and the fact that I don't own a computer so anything I do post has to be stealthily written and posted during working hours.
Of course, the rolling list of films to the right might suggest that I have had some leisure time: why waste two hours of my life watching 'How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days' when I could be describing Ian McEwan's calm intellect in the face of nonsense questions from an audience desperate to impress, or delineating the beauty of gently carving a path down a piste sprinkled with powder snow? A good question, and one I intend to avoid answering, save to say that if I ever run into Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey or Donald Petrie I'd like to sit them down for 120 minutes and stab them repeatedly in the cerebral cortex with a rusty fork and see how they like it.
In an attempt to stop this becoming a blog just for the sake of it, I did do something noteworthy on Sunday night - Claire and I went to 'Funny Money', a comedy night held in support of Unicef.
Some of the better-known names were Sean Lock, Jeremy Hardy, Adam Buxton, Mackenzie Crook, Jimmy Carr (all brilliantly accomplished) and Arthur Smith (utter dross). These and others motored through 10 minute acts which were interspersed by the compares, Justin Lee Collins and Fearne Cotton. Such a shame. Without these two witless chancers each comedian could have got a few minutes more and I could have avoided squirming with embarrassment at this modern day Mick Fleetwood and Sam Fox. They failed to engage with each other or the audience at any level. Justin Lee Collins could have got away with it if he were on his own, despite his limited repertoire of gay 'jokes' and saying 'fuck' a lot. As it was, Fearne Cotton stood at his elbow looking awkward and making redundant comments, her eyes shimmering with the fear of doing something uncool: exactly the same shabby performance she turned in at the tsunami gig - where she actually came off looking semi-professional, next to the full-time cretin Edith Bowman. So it was a bit of luck that the comedy was first class, and made for a fun evening.
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