Their mouths clicking like insects

I've been to two gigs in the past week, and haven't ranted about either of them. How remiss of me.

On Tuesday, at the "legendary" TJ's in Newport, four bands took it in turns to play to a crowd consisting of the other three bands, The Boy and myself, and a handful of other people.

Black Cesar played first; they started out sounding a bit like Hey Colossus (another sludgy stoner doom band that no-one's ever heard of), but with a bit of slide guitar, which was interesting for the first three minutes; but a bit tedious by the end.

Next up, Zonderhoof. Zonderhoof have a cool name, and sound a lot like Black Cesar. Their final song, whilst blighted by technical difficulties caused by a recalcitrant bass lead, was a mini doom epic, and made me wonder; if they could do that all along, what was the point in the first three songs?

We saw Johnny Mental a while back, playing with the now sadly defunct Mea Culpa. They have perhaps the tiniest and angriest singer in the world. That is all.

Finally, The Mirimar Disaster took to the stage. The Boy and I have seen these guys before too, touring in support of Will Haven despite having parted ways with their singer just a few days beforehand. They've not bothered to find a replacement, which is good because a) guitarist Frank and drummer Slomo seem to do alright by themselves, and b) they just really don't need much in the way of vocals. The music is strong enough to stand alone, eschewing the tedious verse-chorus-verse formula in favour of something a bit more sprawling and inventive, with just a smattering of crushing riffs; and their new material is their best to date. Not that it mattered on this particular night; they played well and with enthusiasm, but there was no getting away from the fact that this was one of those "one man and his dog" shows. A shame, they deserve better.

Fast forward to Friday night, and The Boy and I are at The Academy, wondering what the hell we have done to deserve having to watch local death metal tykes Trigger The Bloodshed again. Dammit, that's three times now... I wish I liked them, I really do, because everyone else seemed to be into it, they did everything right, and still have one of the best drummers in the country...

Thankfully, all memory of TTB's white noise mediocrity was annihilated the moment that Swedish tech-metal behemoths Meshuggah took to the stage. It should be noted that a certain amount of risk is involved when watching Meshuggah play live, due to their love of odd time signatures and lung-collapsing heaviosity. The chances of the person next to you moving to the same beat as you is as close to nothing as makes no odds, and I now have a splendid black eye as testament to this fact. One of the best live acts I've ever seen/squinted at.

I couldn't find any good photos of the band, but I did dig up some shaky camera-phone footage of the very gig we attended. Thanks YouTube.



I realise that most people won't have the patience to sit through more than the first five seconds of this; but it's got the most amazing space-rock outro. Silhouetted against blinding white light, standing a billion feet tall with smoke billowing all around them, they were as gods to us. Gluttons for punishment can see more of the gig here.

Due to Friday being the usual club night for The Academy, the gig had an early start/finish time; so we had time to zip up the road to the pub, to meet up with Matt and other visiting luminaries. Jeff "The Large Hardon Collider" McDeath was there; and so too was The Infamous Willard Foxton, who entertained us with tales of how in the last year he has tamed lions, faked moon landings, fought in the Israeli/Palestinian war, and been fired from at least one job because he opposed public hangings.

At some point he complimented me on my dragon ogres - Matt had outed me as an emo blogger, and sent him a link. Will expressed a general disinterest in my rubbish life, and my ambitions to own various Japanese sports cars (unless I was going to paint one white, put a giant red sun on the bonnet and crash it into an American aircraft carrier); but he did like my toys. So here's a picture for Will.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF DAN FRAN CISCO

Back in black (t-shirt)

Ah, the long awaited post. The technical difficulties I was experiencing just after Christmas have now been resolved; in fact, they’ve been resolved for quite some time now, but I’ve been far too busy/lazy to write anything.

Until now. Except, I’m still quite extraordinarily lazy; so instead of anything of literary value or worth, you’re going to get a brief review of the last three months of my rubbish life.

If you’ve some deep-seated aversion to bullet points, I suggest you look away now.

• Christmas/New Year: Was all quite drunken, and therefore bearable in the extreme. Mum bought me a nice coat that was entirely appropriate for a thirty year old man looking to make a career for himself in engineering; fortunately, she kept the receipt, and so I was able to callously refund it and spend the money on entirely inappropriate metal CDs. Ungrateful? Perhaps. I’m just not quite prepared to start dressing my age. My new year started with me mullering my left foot whilst capering about in a drunken manner at Matt’s house. The following three days were bleary and full of sweet, sweet painkillers. Nice.
• The Pub: From now on it shall be known only as The Pub – names have been changed, partly too protect the innocent, but mainly to protect the guilty. It’s working out okay: we’ve gone almost a whole month without anyone getting glassed. Living above a pub is a little bit like living next door to a house that’s always having a party. Mostly you just learn to block the noise out; and if that doesn’t work, you can always go downstairs and get smashed. The only other problems are mostly to do with the fact that it’s an old building, with a convoluted system of plumbing that has been added to and modified numerous times throughout the years; so whilst it is apparent that there is some kind of leak in the system somewhere, no-one can figure out exactly where it is or how to fix it. The basic upshot of this is that all the hot water disappears completely once per week, and standing underneath the shower is not entirely unlike being weed on by four kittens strung together just above your head. Despite all this, it looks like we’ll be staying for a while; Dozer has passed his three month probationary period, signed his contracts and is now officially landlord of The Pub. So as long as he doesn’t get caught doing something stupid, like sub-letting to his old housemates, or paying his bar staff in cocaine, he’ll be alright.
• Housemates: Much the same as they ever were, except we’ve now got a new one. He’s a ferret. He has cute whiskers, no sense of balance, and a musky scent so pervasive that once you’ve handled him you’re best off burning any clothes you may have been wearing. He does not have a name – suggestions on a postcard, please.
• School: Has been all a bit frantic, with lots of deadlines piling into each other in a most undignified manner. Still scrabbling about trying to find a placement to do in three/four months time… I’ve got an interview coming up with a company called MBDA, but all in all I’d rather not work in the defense industry; and whilst with a company like Airbus, to whom I’ve also applied, there is some grey area (since they make commercial aircraft as well military wotsits), MBDA make missiles, and guided missile systems, and that’s it. No grey area there, unless there are applications for guided missiles in other industries that I was previously unaware of, such as agriculture, dentistry or childcare. As Jeff “Hammer Of Thor” McDeath quite rightly pointed out, “there’s only two things you can do with a missile: blow things up with it, or have sex with it. And you’d have to be some kind of crazy twisted fuck to do at least one of those things”.
• Work: I put on my Big Gay Department Store costume, pull the right moves and make the right noises. They all think I’m great… though my patience was sorely tested in the run-up to Christmas, when we were given special scorecards with funny words and phrases (‘Christmas Pudding’, ‘Christmas Cracker’, ‘Amy Winehouse’, ‘Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining’, etc.) that we had to try to work into conversation with customers, to make everything more ‘fun’. Enforced Wackiness = Suck My Balls.
• Gigs ‘n’ that: Been to a few of those. On one glorious night I got to see Taint (legends), Kylesa (two drummers – bludgeoning) and Baroness (bearded prog-doom-space-rock). The day before that I saw Henry Rollins (ROLLINS) doing stand-up; and a few days after, Gay For Johnny Depp (homoerotic hardcore sodomites). I saw Earth a week or so later, a drone band most (in)famous for the fact that their frontman, Dylon Carlson, was the guy who bought Kurt Cobain that shotgun. They were awesome. And then a few weeks back, The Boy and I went to see Mea Culpa (shouty, and apparently now defunct) at The Junction, along with The Death Of Her Money (surprisingly good, although very derivative).

And that’s pretty much it, really. I might start to update a bit more regularly again…

…but then again, being lazy is much easier, so don’t hold your breath.

Lazy Blog, Lazy Blog, Does Whatever A Lazy Blog...

A little over a week ago, the infamous Jeff “Stupid Sexy Ghetto Blasta” McDeath emailed me wanting to know how my Warhammer GT weekend went. So I told him.

And now, despite the fact that I said I wouldn’t, I am reproducing this email detailing my less-than heroic escapades of two weekends ago below. If this makes me an Arnold J Rimmer wannabe, then slap and H to my face and call me a smeghead. It’s my blog and I’ll post what I’ll like. (plus, I’m too lazy/busy to write anything original at the moment...)

****************************************************************

What I Did At The Weekend

Or, How I Got Mashed Up In Four Games Of Warhammer.

Game 1: High Elves.

He was a cool guy, with a not very bent army. When he rolled for Intrigue at Court, it turned out that his general was the poxy little hero in the poxy little unit of Silver Helms directly opposite my dragon... Solid victory to me.

Game 2: Wood Elves.

My old boss Rich Packer's Wood Elves, to be precise. Treeman Ancient with Nettlings, another Treeman, Wildriders, Wardancers, two wizards and a battle standard bearer, and some other pointless crap... my general got killing blow'd by the Wardancers in turn two or three. The rest of the battle mostly consisted of me choking on giant gnarled Wood Elf tree-cock. Massacred.

Game 3: Dwarfs.

As we all know, the thing to do against Dwarfs is to ignore the big units with the big characters to start with, pick off all the shitty little units of Thunderers and war machines and what have you, and then surround the big units and smash them to bits with your entire army.

What I did was creep forwards tentatively, as though little people inspired some kind of special terror in me, then panicked after his first round of shooting and charged his big unit of Ironbreakers with what was left of my knights. They... (sob)... they put it in me... I felt so used... and dirty... Massacred.

Game 4: High Elves.

This was a game of Dicehammer, played on a table with just one hill in each corner and two very small forests just outside of each player's deployment zone. Here's what he had:
· 3 units of 10 archers
· 4 Bolt throwers
· 5 Shadow Warriors
· 10 Swordmasters
· 2 Lvl2 wizards with some bling
· Teclis
He deployed his army 4" onto the board and won the dice roll for first turn. Game over. I did have one tiny chance to claw some points back, when my three surviving knights charged into his unit of Swordmasters (joined by Teclis) stood right on his table edge. The knights fought like kings and cut down seven of the fairies, pretty much guaranteeing me victory just as long as Teclis didn't drink his Potion of Manliness, and then hit and wound with all three of his attacks.

Guess what happened? To add insult to injury, my dragon - which by this point was riderless, my general having long since been reduced to ash by a multitude of fireballs - was perfectly set up for a charge into what was left of Teclis and the Swordmasters next turn. But instead of winning the game for me, it failed its panic test for the knights being destroyed, and fled off the table. Massacred.

Game 5: Dwarfs.

Having learnt my lesson from game 3, I charged in and fucked up all his rubbish stuff as soon as possible - though not soon enough to prevent his cannon and 2 S7 bolt throwers from killing my chariots and taking half wounds off the dragon. Then my knights spent the entire game in combat against his Anvil of Doom (which shall henceforth be known as The Anvil of Cheating), either failing to hit, failing to wound or failing to get through all the armour and ward saves, whilst simultaneously dying. Very slowly. I didn't have enough stuff left to wallop his big unit, and had already given away too many VPs. Solid defeat.

Game 6: Chaos.

One of those dream games, where everything in your opponent's army is a bit slower and a bit shitter than everything in your army, and it can't really shoot you either. He had:
· A big scary Daemon Prince
· 2 Lvl2 Bray Shamans
· 2 units of Plaguebearers, one of 10 and one of about 20
· 3 bases of Nurglings
· 2 Beastherds, decent size
· 6 Minotaurs with great weapons, standard bearer and champion
I just ran at him and killed everything. Massacre to me.

And so I finished 102nd overall, meaning that I did slightly worse than when I was using my "fluffy" army with Warriors and a Hellcannon. The tournament rules state that either a top 40 finish or a Best Army nomination is required to qualify; and as luck would have it I won Best Army outright, so I'm through anyway (along with Rich, who finished 30-something, and Beautiful Steve, who finished 20-something with his Tomb Kings as well as getting nominated). I was awarded a funny looking trophy, which we have dubbed “The Ticklefist”.

The winning army was two Steam Tanks, two Great Cannons and a Popewagon. Apparently heat two was won by 2 steam tanks and Karl Franz, on a dragon, with the Hammer of Sigmar, and I think heat one was all about the Steam Tanks too.

Oh, and someone got DQ'd on day one for using loaded dice.

****************************************************************

There will be (slightly) less nerdalicious content soon, I promise.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime, doubly so.

Is it really only a week since I last typed out reams of gibberish? It seems like less than that, and yet if I try to recall the contents of the last post… well, basically I can’t. I had to visit my own blog and read my own words in an effort to understand what happened and when, and to try to jumble recent memories into some kind of chronological order.

Perhaps I am drinking too much.

In any case, it would seem that when I last wrote I had secured relatively undesirable employment with the impeccably dressed people at The Big Gay Department Store. My only hope lay with the bookstore Waterstones, with whom I had an interview on Tuesday. If I’m honest, I think it went a bit shit. I’d prepared quite well, and felt reasonably confident going into the interview, and gave some good answers to most of the questions… but there were bits where I just knew I was screwing it up.

However.

Waterstones phoned me back later that day, offering me a weekend contract that paid less per hour than The Big Gay Department Store, and offered fewer benefits too. This was a result.

However.

It turns out that despite what I was told when I originally applied, they were only recruiting for temporary positions… whereas The Big Gay Department Store had already offered me a permanent part-time position…

And so today I bought myself a natty shirt and tie combo, and started to contemplate a life in retail which didn’t involve toy soldiers, and where you couldn’t tell kids they were gay for liking Wood Elves.

Some other stuff happened this week too. On Wednesday I went with Charlie and The Boy to see popular beat combo Reuben at the Academy, where the substantial main stage area was closed off for ‘soapy love time’. This meant that we had to watch the two very mediocre support acts and the very splendid Reuben in the tight and sweaty confines of the upstairs bit, where the sheer combined mass of the audience distorts laws of physics such that;

1. The band appear very small, and difficult to see.

2. The cheap domestic lager becomes surprisingly expensive.

3. You emerge from the gig soaked in sweat, but it’s not all your own…

Despite all this, Reuben really were excellent, and quite charming too, the intelligent wit of their song lyrics flowing over into the between-song banter. Highly recommended.

Naturally, there was further drunkenness and Warhammering with Jeff “My Body Is Nothing More Than A Pedestal For My Wang” McDeath, although this has all but come to an end now. The Beef Iron Sex-Plough has secured himself employment in London as some sort of shark/estate agent hybrid, and so will now be selling houses and preying on women some 140 miles from here.

But, as is the way of such things, no sooner does one nerd depart than two others arise to take his place; Dom has just returned from a thrilling summer of Living With His Parents, and my old part timer (yes, another one) Matt has just moved into a flat over the road. The drunkenness and Warhammering will continue unabated, pausing only briefly for Mechanical Engineering lectures.

Which start tomorrow.

News just in...

Yet another late, late post. This one comes at the end of an action-packed day that consisted of painting toy soldiers until teatime, watching telly until bedtime, and playing Theoryhammer with Jeff “Stupid Sexy Jeff” McDeath until way past bedtime. Playing Theoryhammer is essentially the same as playing Warhammer, but without such tedious constraints as tables, scenery, toy soldiers and dice rolling. Kind of like a ”who would win in a fight between…” sort of argument, but with more stats and probabilities thrown in.

And whilst this may definitively prove definitively that we are geeks, we are now pretty certain that a unit of 6 Stone Trolls is damn good, just as long as you keep them close to your Warboss.

In other, only slightly less boring news, almost nothing else has happened this week.

I spent two or three days fine tuning my CERN application – which essentially means I spent two or three days procrastinating, playing solitaire, or otherwise staring blankly at the blinking cursor on the monitor, pausing only briefly to type a few words about how much I love particle physics. For a variety of reasons I seem to find it very difficult to convey my passion for particle physics; and so I find myself hoping that the European Centre for Nuclear Research doesn’t bother to read applications too closely, opting instead for a selection process that involves a lot of bits of paper with names written on them, and a very large hat.

In the meantime, I have been half-heartedly hunting around for a part-time job. Having tried and failed on three occasions to secure some kind of office-based employment, I trotted along to the Christmas jobs fair at the local mall and got a job with my friendly local Big Gay Department Store pretty much instantly.

But.

It’s really not what I want to be doing; I’ve worked in retail for eleven years already, and would quite like my CV to show that I am capable of working in a different environment; and if I am going to be working in retail, I’m not sure I want to be working there. I’ve got another interview lined up with Waterstones, a book shop in the same mall; and whilst they may be less big and posh than The Big Gay Department Store, they also seem a whole lot less uptight. For example, they don’t insist on staff wearing suits or smart trousers with long sleeved shirts (which must be either white, ivory, pale blue or pale grey, plain and sensibly opaque), with ties that must be businesslike in style and design and selected to co-ordinate with the rest of the outfit.

Plus, the store is directly beneath Games Workshop; so I can easily pop in at lunchtime for a few games of Theoryhammer with the staff.

Spilled drinks and hearing loss

One of my favourite things about going to gigs is the ‘brain flush’ effect. The music enters my cranium via my ears and forces everything else out, and for the time that the band is playing they are the only thing that matters and nothing else is real.

Of course, this only really works if I’m enjoying the music. But it just so happens that the gig I went to on Tuesday was one of those legendarily awesome billings, the kind where even the opening act is a band that I would gladly pay money to go and see.

The opening act in question was Taint. I’ve seen them a couple of times before, and am constantly impressed by the way that the three of them, with just drums, bass, guitar and throat, are able to create such dense layers of sound without resorting to any kind of technical jiggery-pokery. They’re kind of like an instrumental hard rock outfit… except there’s vocals…

Next up was Russian Circles, an actual instrumental rock outfit. Falling somewhere between the huge tectonic riffs of Pelican and the post-rock nihilism of Red Sparowes, they created music that was intricate and engaging enough that any kind of vocals would have been quite superfluous, and therefore were not missed.

And then headliners High On Fire, a thrashy stoner-doom trio who are nothing like instrumental rock, even though most of their songs are 50% guitar solo. They were very metal, and in the confines of The Cooler (which normally serves as some kind of pretentious little indie club) they were so impossibly loud that at times I felt quite dizzy. As excellent as they were, the devastating volume meant that their set was one to be endured more than enjoyed. Or maybe both.

Rather unsurprisingly, this left me quite deaf for a few days afterwards – which in turn meant that I also became quite mute. It’s not like I’m particularly talkative at the best of times, but there didn’t seem to be any point in trying to converse with others, since to me it just sounded as though they were mumbling. It was all a little bit odd.

Fortunately my hearing returned after two or three days, so I was able to get back into my routine of playing Blood Bowl all day with Jeff “I Was Raised By Hyenas” McDeath, and having loud and animated discussions in the pub with him, Charlie and The Boy. In true nerd-core fashion, these discussions mostly fell under the “Who would win in a fight between…” category; only instead of being fights between comic book characters or daytime TV presenters, they were fights between animals – a kind of King of the Jungle Arena of Death. It started out as lion vs crocodile; then brown bear vs crocodile; and then brown bear vs silverback gorilla, before eventually devolving into “What’s the biggest/most dangerous animal you could take on armed with nothing but a hammer?”.

This is of course a ludicrous debate of no merit whatsoever. And so naturally, the TV show has already been made…

Sharks don’t look back, because they have no necks

Last Monday was a bank holiday; therefore the bangers were on; therefore we went to watch the bangers. Brave knights of the road did battle with no thought for their own personal gain or safety, first in the usual assortment of gaily-coloured clapped-out motors, then in a glorious figure-of-eight Reliant Robin destruction derby, and finally in bangers towing caravans. It was pretty damn awesome.

Aside from that, it’s been a fairly slow week; I’ve been tweaking (ie. completely re-writing) my CV for this Cern placement application thingy, and have now got it to the point where even I think it makes me sound employable. Sort of. Jeff “Smash Your Foes, See Them Scatter Before You, And Hear The Lamentation Of Their Women” McDeath has been around a fair bit too, so naturally there has been a bit of drinking and Blood Bowl. If it seems as though Jeff spends a lot of time at our house, that’s because he does. Jeff doesn’t have a great time in his own home, mainly because he regards his mother as dominating and unreasoning matriarchal dictator, whilst she regards him as a disorganised, lazy and irresponsible stoner that’s far too content to just bimble through life at his own pace. They are of course both right, which explains why Jeff failed to get onto the teaching course he had planned to do this year; and also why he is now trying to get a job in recruitment consultancy far, far away from his mother, in London. He’s had a few interesting interviews with some very self-important people in expensive suits, who mostly seem interested in how ruthless he can be, and whether or not he possesses the same kind of maniacal greed more commonly found in Bond villains.

Mr Dozer’s got himself a job, working at a friend’s motorbike shop. Here’s what he did at work this week.

That’s not all he did, of course; he also made one for The Boy and one for me, and liberated a pair of all-weather motorcycle boots for himself.

And finally, I went see the Transformers movie. I’ve loved Transformers since I was a kid, and was expecting to be massively disappointed by the film; mainly because most of the characters transform into the wrong things… yes, I’m that kind of geek.

The fact is that it’s really easy to find fault with the film. But do you know what? Giant robots are fucking cool. And theres an awful lot of giant robots smashing stuff up in that film. I give it seven thumbs up.

Man vs Nature; The Road to Victory

So, the much anticipated update. The thrills and spills of last week included live music, stomach bacteria and a spot of extreme gardening – though not all at once.

On Monday I went with Jeff “My Wang Is Black As The Night” McDeath and Charlie to The Thekla, to see Tokyo Police Club – a curious indie band from Canada. Charlie and I thought they were pretty good, but Jeff – who regards himself as the High Lord of All Indie – was less convinced, and chose instead to amuse himself by getting very drunk and describing in graphic detail to Charlie how he planned to brutally violate her. What a class act.

A few days later, I decided to try and reclaim our back garden from the forces of nature which were, at that time, very much in control. Stage One of the operation was a de-weeding mission, carried out using a serrated kitchen knife (necessary due to the inch-thick stems on some of the more established weeds), and a pair of “thorn resistant” gardening gloves – an application of the English language that quickly proved to be creative in the extreme.

After filling seven bin liners with nettles, thistles and all other kinds of crap I ain’t never seen before, it was time for Stage Two – Lawn Assault. I plugged in our recently purchased lawn mower, and went in for the kill.

I’ll admit that I’m not much of a gardener, but
I’m still pretty sure that cutting grass shouldn’t require a run-up. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the grass hadn’t been cut since October last year, and was now a good foot and a half long. This would also explain how our relatively compact back garden yielded five more bin liners full of grass, and took over two hours to bludgeon into submission.

The next day I took Sam to the doctors so that he could find out that he was suffering gastroenteritis. Hurrah! Now, as well as hearing all about his bowel movements, we get hear his wails of despair as his rebellious digestive tract sends him fleeing to the nearest toilet at very short notice. This was exacerbated today when Charlie - seeking revenge for Sam’s failure to fill up the dishwasher despite being asked both nicely and repeatedly for a day and a half - locked the downstairs bathroom that is closest to Sam’s room from the outside, thus forcing him to run up two flights of stairs to use the other one. Charlie refuses to concede that this was an act of pure undiluted evil on her part, because a) she feels it was entirely justified, and b) it’s funny.

In any case, it all seemed like a good excuse to escape from the house and pop over to Bath to visit my friend Terry. We went out to see local band Mea Culpa at a pub called The Porter Butt, officially the crummiest venue I have ever been to ever. The band were good, though – kind of metallic-post-rock-grindcore, or something. The singer did a lot of jumping about, climbing chairs and speakers, and taking the mic out onto the floor; at one point managing to get all the way to the bar, where he ordered himself a drink mid-song. It’s a shame that there were only about twenty people there to see it really.

The day after that I went all the way back to my parents in Surrey for a meal to celebrate my sister’s birthday, before coming all the way back on Sunday for The Boy’s birthday party. The 90’s theme was observed by just a few of the attendees; The Boy herself dressed up as Tank Girl, her friends Chrissie and Bryony came as Lara Croft and (children’s TV presenter/wife to Fatboy Slim) Zoe Ball respectively. Sam – who by this point was feeling a bit better – also stuck to the 90’s theme, but chose a different century to the rest of us, donning some of his historical re-enactment garb and assuming the appearance of a 1690’s Dutch Merchant. And then there was me.

Guess who?

Type 6 post

Although it wasn’t intended to be, clearly my assertion that I might start posting more than once per week was no more than an empty threat. This could be viewed as either a blessing or a curse; you get less reading material, but it is (in theory at least) less banal. Probably a lot less emo, too.

I could try to claim that I have simply been far too busy to write, and as an experienced and dedicated procrastinator I reckon that I could quite easily make it sound as though the mundane activities of the past week have left me run off my feet. The truth is that aside from a job interview, some banger racing and a lot of toy soldiering, I’ve mostly just been to drunk and/or lazy to drive a computer.

Yep, more banger racing. Since it was only Dozer, The Boy and myself going this time, I had to do the driving, since neither of the other two have a car licence. In fact, Dozer still doesn’t have a bike licence, a fairly essential piece of paper for anyone wanting to be in a biker gang… he assures us that he is getting it all sorted out. We know full well that he isn’t doing anything of the sort, but it’s easier to just not care – and so that’s what we do.

Anyway, I actually remembered to bring my camera to the racing this time, so you can be bored by pictures instead of words. You lucky people.

The view out over the pit area, just behind where we were standing. That's a whole lot of Somerset right there. As impressive as the view was, what was even more impressive was the way that no matter what kind of damage had been inflicted on a car during a race, it could all be fixed with either a hammer, or a really big hammer.

As luck would have it, this was the first (and quite possibly the last) time that Mendips Raceway had ever hosted Coach Racing. The racing itself was pretty dull, what with coaches being quite desperately slow 'n' all; but the demolition derby at the end of the day was splendidly destructive, even if there were only five participants - four actual coaches, plus one light goods vehicle with windows painted onto the side of it.

The job interview was for the position of “Part-time Guest Services Assistant”, or something. Basically, driving a desk at Bristol Premier Apartments for sixteen hours a week. The pay’s pretty crappy, but it seems like a nice place to work, and it is a bit different to the retail environment that I’m more used to. The interview itself seemed to go quite well, and I should only have to wait another week for them to get back to me and explain that 11 years experience in the toy soldier retail industry is worthless, and no, I am not even fit to answer their phone.

Most of my time this week has been wasted in the company of Mr Jeff McDeath A-Bomb Urban Destruction, either getting drunk, or playing with toys, or both. He is a servant of the Dark Side of procrastination (ie. just plain lazy), and as a result missed out on getting a half-decent degree by a whisker; then applied for a teaching course in London far too late to have any realistic chance of getting in; then applied for the same course back here in Bristol even later, with even less chance of getting in. The legendary Remorseless Loving Machine is now supposed to be finding himself a job of some description, but instead is spending a lot of time at my house playing games and smoking weed. Silly boy.

Meanwhile, it seems that Sam has developed a new and quite unsavoury habit. For some reason he has taken to graphically describing his bowel movements to anyone that happens to be around at the time. Last week we all got to hear about an unpleasant and embarrassing “following through” incident when he tried to fart in bed one morning; more usually he simply insists on describing how he feels his excremental efforts have rated on the Bristol Stool Scale, a local cultural and scientific claim to fame that I had not previously been aware of.

In hindsight, I was probably far happier in my ignorance.