ISTJ

This week; family shenanigans, interspersed with experiential leadership training through the medium of mental and physical torment in the frozen north.

The latter took the form of a week long course in the Lake District. The Lake District looks a bit like this...

...except in my experience much more dramatic and much, much more bleak. I can only assume that the adverse weather conditions have been photoshopped out (you can tell because of pixels, or something). Or it was taken on 1 of the 145 days that it does not rain in the Lake District. Specifically, not at the end of November. How the hell should I know.

Point is, I spent the time getting to know myself and others much better by jumping off bridges with them, dangling off cliffs attached to ropes tied up by them, and huddling together in blind terror at the top of wobbly poles with them. There was also plenty of time for self reflection at the local pub, where the wild-eyed landlord with unruly hair would stay open as long as the amount of money being spent on booze significantly outweighed the cost of the collateral damage we incurred.

In spite of my deep seated inherent cynicism, it was a good week in which I learned a lot of things that I expect to be forgetting very soon.

Before all that was mum's birthday thing. This involved bimbling to London to see The 39 Steps (which was excellent), and to enjoy a poncy meal* (which was frankly a bit too poncy for me to really enjoy). How poncy? Poncy enough that as we were about to leave, Paul McCartney sat down at the table next to us with whoever he's married to nowadays. So now mum can tell everyone that she had a meal with Paul McCartney on her birthday.

After the whole Lake District outdoor activity death misery was the other family doohicky, a get together for a meal in lieu of grandma having to buy presents for anyone. Which is fair enough, since her failing eyesight, hearing, memory and just about everything else makes it more or less impossible for her to do... well, anything really. To underline her encroaching senility, she spent much of the day calling me by cousin (Simon)'s name. But that's okay, because she's been doing this for about twenty years now; and I like a good running gag.

At some point, I had a birthday too; wherein my splendid friends and a mischievous Pixie showered me with gifts including, but not limited too, an OCD chopping board, a pirate-shaped USB stick with Monkey Island 3 on it, toys and comic books, and some more GARY FUCKING NUMAN.

Thanks gang.

*I couldn't remember the name of the restaurant we went to, so typed "poncy italian restaurant london" into Google. The restaurant we went to, Bocca di Lupo, was the third result returned.

i learn it from a book

Hmm. I seem to be getting rather slack at this blogging malarkey... now where was I?

Ah yes, the wedding of Dr Sister and Mr Dr Sister. Essentially, it was a splendidly drunken shenanigan. There was lots of free booze and sweets, no-one had to get nailed to anything, and I discovered that I have loads of ghastly second cousins who are all anonymous to me, but all seem to know my name.

Pockets bulging with liberated sherbet and hangovers slowly fading, the Pixie and I fled to the New Forest for a few days. There we stayed in a delightfully tumbledown thatched cottage full of expensive tat...

...checked out some motorised roller skates from the 50's...

...and poked around a coastal fortress full of massive guns and dank rooms that reeked of unspeakable horror. The ice creams were nice, though.

Upon our return, there was car-poking galore as Matt, Laura and I (with the kind assistance of Sam, who fetched tea and hammers) set about further devaluing our track slag by taking everything out of it that wasn't bolted down, and a great many other things that were.

The net result of our collective efforts is that we now have a big pile of crap and a slightly lighter track slag that doesn't work any more. It doesn't work because an individual (who shall remain nameless) accidentally shorted out the car's electrics, possibly in an attempt to gain superhuman abilities that would make them so powerful that they could take over the world. All the people of the world would be united in their fear of their terrifying new tyrant-deity, and skies will blacken with the dense smoke of heavy industry as Mexico is destroyed to make way for colossal rockets that will propel our very planet into the void in search of new civilisations to enslave and devour.

This all just idle speculation, of course. We might have just cut through a wire somewhere. On the plus side, we found 31p in loose change whilst we were pulling bits out; so the slag is already starting to make some money back for us.

And finally, I had the viva for my individual project this week. I'm not sure how well it went; but it has somehow led to me helping an Iranian man improve his written and spoken English.

Indeed.

All is brown exploding into grey infinity

Reason notwithstanding, the universe continues unabated.

My life continues to barrel along at breakneck speed, a dizzying blur of procrastineering, putting receipts in bags and passing out drunk. The Luncheon Club Dedicated To The Destruction Of Stuff has been victorious two weeks running now, a glorious accomplishment that I feel I would celebrate more, had I actually been involved in the slightest way at all. I was still on my way back from the GT when No-Face choked on luncheon-shaped justice; and I missed out on the smiting of Skeletor and his Minions last weekend due to the realisation of a plan that had been some 18 months in the making...

Not that it was a particularly intricate plan. At my grandad's funeral back in 2008, Doctor Sister suggested that it might be nice if all the Brooks cousins could get together for a reason that didn't involve death or marriage for a change, and noisily proclaimed that she would play host. We all decided this was a super idea, and so agreed to get ourselves organised and make it happen. The next time we all met, it would not involve death or marriage.

The next time we all met was at cousin Anita's wedding last year. It was broadly agreed that we'd made a bit of a hash of the whole thing, and that we should definitely get together for a reason that didn't involve death or marriage.

And much to our collective surprise, it actually happened last weekend when everyone turned up on my sister's doorstep at lunchtime - apart from me. I rocked up about an hour and a half after everyone else, owing to the fact that there are better things to be doing at 9am than driving 100 miles down the M4. Snoozing, for example.

In any case, a good time was had by all. There was much drinking and merriment, delicious little duck-filled spring rolls, and no grown-ups. Not proper ones, anyway. The day ended with Doctor Sister attempting to orchestrate the reconstruction of an old photo of all of us, that I think was taken about eighteen years ago at grandad's house.

And here's the 2010 version...

Close enough, I reckon.

say no to crunk

There's a handy little gadget attached to this piece-of-shit blog called Stat Counter. It lets me spy on you spying on me, and has a "keyword analysis" function that shows when this dreary bunch of rambling bollocks turns up as a result of someone's internet search, and what keywords were used in the search.

For ages the list has been pretty sparse, and mostly composed of variations on "umbrella graveyard" - presumably from folk that

can't remember/can't be bothered to type out the full web address. But recently, the list has grown; and in the absence of anything more interesting/worthwhile to drone about, I thought I'd share some of this crap with you.

• Dutch Steamboat. It is pretty much guaranteed that if a sexual act, or even something that sounds like it might be a sexual act, is mentioned on the internets, then google will find it. That's what the internets is for. As it happens, dutch steamboating (or similar phrases) currently makes up 70% of all search terms that lead to this tirade of piffle. Of course, there is always the possibility that all the searches come from people who are genuinely interested in Dutch steamboats. Maybe even the person who searched for dutch steamboat sex act.
• www.picturesofgoat.com Someone, somewhere, needs pictures of goats. To be honest, I was less surprised by this search than I was was by the fact that www.picturesofgoat.com doesn't actually exist.
• gayest goat picture. I hate it when I finally manage to find a picture of a goat on the internet and it's not quite gay enough.
  
• willard foxton war. I have to admit that I didn't study history past the age of fourteen, so it is understandable that I know little of the infamous Willard Foxton Wars. It is now difficult to obtain any solid facts on this subject, since most accounts are exaggerated beyond all comprehension. All that we can be certain of is that the Willard Foxton Wars mostly took place on the moon, and involved pirates.
• philippa's boobs. Fair enough, but this keyword analysis thing only throws up regular web search terms, not image searches. So someone is only interested in reading about Philippa's boobs. Missing the point of the internets, I think...
• burning zombie. As it happens, www.burningzombie.com does exist. I just don't know why.

Meanwhile, my family came to visit this weekend. We went out for a predominantly wine-based meal, where I discovered that a) sea bass is a wonderful fish, and b) fish is a rubbish steak. Still, a good time was had by all, and the next day we were treated to delicious cake courtesy of Dr. Sister.

It's a Guinness cake, made almost entirely of butter, sugar, and of course Guinness. But that wasn't quite unhealthy enough for my sister; hence the tasteful additions of smarties, liquorice wheels, flying saucers and a sherbet fountain.

FOR

THE

WIN.

i hate phantom space man

A couple of weeks ago, Matt "Say What You Want About The Tenets Of National Socialism, At Least It's An Ethos" Smith and Laura decided to go to Bristol's annual Italian car show (rather than accidentally stumble upon it, as they have done for the last few years), and they were kind enough to invite me along too. Unsurprisingly, the Italian Car Show consisted mainly of Italian cars... (click each picture for more photos)

Ferrari...


...Maserati...


...Lamborghini...


...Alfa Romeo...


...Lancia...


...and Ascari, which is actually a British car, but is named after an Italian racing driver, so that's okay.


Apparently only 17 of those Ascaris were ever built; and only 9 of those are still in existence, the remaining 8 having been "destroyed" (presumably by overenthusiastic owners who ran out of talent at some key moment). You'd have thought the owner of this one might have bothered to clean it...

The day after I found myself in London with the family, visiting Dr Sister in her nice new house. Well, some of the time was spent in her shiny new house; the rest of it was spent racing around the neighbouring town of Pinner.

In a wheelbarrow.


The rules were quite simple; each team must consist of two people, and one of them must be in the wheelbarrow at all times. The other one gets to push. There are five checkpoints, and you must each down half a pint at every checkpoint. The first team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head is the winner.

As it happens, we were the last team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head, but we at least retained some small amount of dignity by not being sick at any of the checkpoints.

And the next weekend, Matt and I got dragged to some weird ass shenanigan by Alan and Dory. Dory didn't give much away about the details of said shenanigan; but our suspicions were aroused by the presence of men in faceless masks, riding impossibly tall bicycles and jousting against imaginary foes whilst we queued...

Turns out we were queuing up to get into Carny Ville, a moderately insane steam punk Victorian freak show apparition.


And it was freakin' cool. Here's a tiny bit of what happened.

• Some chick put a spoon in her nose and served tea.
• Dory played on a severed head coconut shy.
• Lobotomized twins messed about on silks.
• Matt played ping-pong with the devil.
• I got summoned onto stage for a dance-off against a guy called Barry in front of, like, a thousand people.
• Ghosts walked down the side of a building.
• The whole thing ended with an apocalyptic turn-off-the-century outdoors dance party.

More (crappy) photos here.

Amazing.

Everything more droning than everything else

And so last weekend I went with The Boy to see bands that we had mostly never heard of.



I could see what Satori were getting at. Sort of. The trouble with this kind of drone-doom is that there is a very fine line between euphoric mantra-like awesomeness, and tedious repetition. Satori fell the wrong side of this line. The problem was compounded by the fact that they are completely electronics-based, and thus have zero stage presence; and even though they employed a big screen and projector and wibbly films ("This looks like something I made in media studies when I was seventeen..." - The Boy), there was no getting away from the fact that we were watching two IT guys checking their emails whilst white noise was being played at 120dB.



For some reason that is not apparent - or indeed important - to me at this time, only two fifths of Atavist were in evidence; their support slot therefore become Atavist vs Nadja. It was all very improvised, with the first of their two "songs" never quite getting going. It was a bit more like a weird game of power-chord chicken, except that nobody won. The second half of the set rocked, though, falling entirely on the right side of the mantra/tedium line. More of that, please.

Leaving just Nadja. Initially it all sounded a bit sparse, but after a few minutes of carefully building layers of droning noise and dicking about with effects pedals it all started to make perfect doomy sense. We stumbled out with ears ringing, no memory of what had happened, but the vague recollection of it all being very awesome.

Beer may have been a factor in this.

Meanwhile, in actual news, my sister's boyfriend Neil made his bid to become Mister Doctor Sister on Thursday night, when he proposed to her; she of course said yes, and now has some shiny bling and a giant smile.

Huzzah!

Tiny Cakes

Another week, another extended farce in preparation for some important guy's big visit. Only this time, instead of trying to find inventive places to hide stuff, we're trying to think of cunning places we can hide ourselves. If he can't find us, he can't demote us.

Though to be honest, as a placement student I don't think I can be demoted anyway. I'm so low down the pecking order that I have to salute the vending machines in the canteen.

And yet I still seem to have been somehow instrumental in the complete reorganisation of an entire department. At the start of the week, there was still quite a bit left to do, and some folk were getting a bit twitchy. On Monday morning, I found myself in a meeting with ML (Engineering Manager, always smiling like a politician, ghastly American accent that seems to come out through his nose) and JH (Process Owner, tall and ginger with a crippling stammer, answers to ML).

ML: What do you need to get this area finished?
ME: Errr...
ML: Don't tell me now. Go around with JH, make a list of what you need - not what you think I'll get you, but what you need - to get this area finished. Get that list to me and I'll make it happen.
ME: Ummm....

And so I went around with JH, and together we made a pretty complete list of everything that we needed. JH took the list and gave it to ML; ML gave the list to my boss; and and my boss gave it to me, thus completing the cycle of incompetence.

Sometimes I start to think that I quite it like it here; but I think that might just be Stockholm Syndrome.

Meanwhile, I seem to have lost another housemate this week; a girl called Ruth, who rented the other room in the Exeter house up until yesterday. Marco didn't tell me much about her before I moved in, other than to say that we would probably get along, because she is thirty also.

I don't quite follow his logic; perhaps he thought we would hang out together and talk about cool thirty year-old stuff. In actual fact, we mostly talk about what a jerk Marco is (Ruth doesn't have any living room privileges either); if we talk at all. Her boyfriend Sam is over most nights, so they are usually hidden away in her room discussing domestic policy making processes, or whatever it is that young couples do nowadays.

But one night a while back, Sam wasn't about; and in the absence of anything better to do, we sat around in the kitchen exchanging mouse stories...

A few years ago, Ruth was living in a student house with a bit of a mouse infestation. This would usually only manifest itself in the sudden and mysterious appearance of little nibbled holes in the bottom of cereal packets, coupled with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of the cereal itself; but as time went on, the little critters got more inventive, and started knocking boxes over in order to spill their delicious contents. It all went wrong for them when they tipped over a bottle of ice-cream topping syrup. Sure enough, a pool of sticky sweet deliciousness formed in the base of the cupboard, and sure enough, the mice did gorge themselves upon it. Unfortunately, being small and feeble little creatures, they couldn't then free themselves from the Yummy Pink Tarpit of Death; and so they all drowned in it. When Ruth opened the cupboard the next day the syrup had all set; and so the tarpit (along with it's cargo of little furry corpses) had to be chiseled off of the bottom of the cupboard with a ruler...

Silly mouses.

And finally... my family bimbled down this weekend for eats and drinks and birthday merriment. My sister made cakes happen. Behold!



Many cakes were decorated with the shattered corpses of jelly babies; some crushed beneath jelly bean rockslides, some cleft in twain with deadly chocolate buttons.

Legend.

and finally

Eric Brooks died on the morning of Monday October 27th 2008.

Depending on your belief system of choice, he will either be going on to enjoy a socially awkward afterlife with his his two former wives; or he will be reduced to carbon-based molecules that will be scattered by the winds in a random manner. This will occur on the 5th of November; bonfire night. There's a black kind of humour there that I think he would appreciate.

Thank you to everyone for your kind words and thoughts. In truth, I feel sorry for you; because you never had the privilege of knowing such a stupendous man.

What's the point in having a blog if you're not going to be emo?

A couple of years ago I returned from adventures in far off lands to learn that whilst I was away, my grandfather had suffered a stroke.

When I visited him the next day I was pleasantly surprised by his condition. He was awake, alert, and seemed to be in good spirits; although his inability to speak (he couldn't form words, it was as though he was perpetually tongue-tied) kept us all guessing as to his mental well-being. Compared to the state of my dad after his stroke (mostly paralysed, very far away), it seemed entirely possible that granddad could recover fully and revert back to the fiercely independent, witty and charming 80-something year old man that I'd known before I left.

But as the weeks went by, there was no improvement. Nothing changed, other than granddad's mood - which got blacker. He was prone to bouts of intense grumpiness (a common Brooks trait, to be fair). He declined the offer of speech therapy. Eventually, he declined the offer of food.

In a number of ways, this was quite reassuring. It showed that he was still aware enough of himself and what was happening that he was able to make a choice.

It didn't stick, though. Either he didn't have the will to starve himself to death, or he was convinced by others that it wasn't the way to go. He was discharged from hospital some weeks later, and ended up in a retirement village; a small community of flats 'n' such, for old folk that aren't far gone enough for the nursing home, but have no reason to be living in house now that all the kids are grown up and they've outlived two wives.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't the same. I went with dad last Christmas to pick granddad up and take him back for lunch and presents and cheating at board games and all the other usual Christmas shenanigans. Five minutes of sitting around in that place depressed me enough that I was given to thinking of happier times; which depressed me even more, so I started to think about dying instead. Despite all this, granddad seemed happy enough. Not "all there", but content. Dad would visit him a couple of times every week (the retirement village was just down the road from the parents').

A couple of months back, dad went to pay his regular visit and found granddad on the floor in the kitchen. It wasn't obvious what had happened, whether it was another stroke, just a fall... but granddad wasn't doing so good. He's been in hospital ever since. During that time he's deteriorated quite rapidly, physically and mentally. A few weeks ago he was diagnosed with vascular dementia; a few days ago he was diagnosed with pneumonia.

The hospital - after talking to all the right members of the family - have decided that they will no longer attempt to treat granddad for any of his illnesses. At present, he is pretty much comatose; and in the next few days he will be allowed to die. Peacefully, and painlessly.

This is a good thing.

A toast: To Eric Brooks.

Fear and Loathing in Henleaze

The last week in brief.

Saturday = Big Gay Department Store = Big and Gay.

Sunday was The Boy's birthday shenanigan, a Fear and Loathing themed barbecue/drinkathon. My giant lizard outfit was in the wash, so I settled for a powerful Hawaiian shirt, of which there is sadly no photographic evidence. On the plus side, there is also no photographic evidence of Sam in his incongruous creepy scout master outfit. I was Nice Uncle Ben for a while, whilst I helped four year-old Poppy with some very important colouring in; then a little later I was Bad Drunken Uncle Ben when I dropped her on the kitchen floor and she started crying. My first reaction was to look for my drink; I am beginning to regard Bernard from Black Books as a kind of role-model.

Grown-up work was infinitely better last week than the previous three. I now have a computer with AutoCAD installed on it, which means that I am able to do stuff; and the other Ben has now left, meaning that I can take over all of his bits of work. Also, I am no longer part of the collective known for a short while as Ben Squared (engineer humour, ya can't beat it...). Coincidentally, it is also the week that an insane new project has kicked off, requiring the complete re-organisation of an entire department. Each morning, I arrive at work to discover that someone else has thrown in their two cents and the layout I drew the previous day needs to be re-done; I amend it accordingly, but by lunchtime it's all obsolete again; and then again by the end of the day. It's keeping me busy, which I like, but now all my dreams consist of me doing CAD layouts of plant equipment. It reminds me of last Christmas, when I was consumed by The Almighty Blue Orb of Engineering Maths.

I took a break from the Big Gay Department Store this weekend, and headed back to the ghettos of Surrey in order to hang out with my old chum Dave for probably the last time before he and his girly Cheryl emigrate to Canada. We bimbled around Guildford for a bit, and trawled through some very used CDs at Ben's Collector's Records before heading to The Royal Oak (my old local from when I used to work around the corner as a professional nerd/toy soldier guru). Whilst there we spilled drinks over one another, and marvelled at the prodigious quantities of urinal cakes lavished on the gents porcelain.



It's little things like this that really let you know you're in a posh town.

We got back to his house, drank some more, watched a rubbish film, drank some more, played computer games, drank some more. At some point I got a text out of the blue from Charlie Cat, who revealed that she had the next day off. Being somewhat inebriated, I invited her to Sunday lunch at my parents, forgetting that also in attendance would be Dr Sister and Neil, and Dave, and Cheryl, and my Grandma; but my mum is nothing if not a resourceful and persistently cheerful host, and took it all in her stride. For her part, Charlie coped admirably with a mild interrogation from mum, some slightly racist rhetoric from my drunk and confused grandmother, and the usual frantic squabbling over the last Yorkshire pudding. Good times.

And then a frantic dash back to Bristol for the Inn on the Green pub quiz, where our team ("A Luncheon Club Dedicated To The Destruction Of Bolshevism") was carried to a creditable fourth position by Matt, who has just returned from a lengthy business trip to the US, and is not a nazi.

Happy in the haze of a drunken hour

Such was my state last weekend, when I scarpered back to my parents' bit of the country for my cousin Paul/uncle Terry's combined birthday shenanigan. It was okay, I suppose. I spent the first bit of the day drinking in the conservatory with Paul's grandfather, whom I don't recall ever meeting before. He entertained me with tales of how his Jewish friend was too fat to join the RAF, how the happiest time of his life was when he was a tailgunner in a Lancaster bomber shooting down Germans, why he doesn't trust Muslims, the way that "The Continentals" have ruined meat for the rest of us... then Dr Sister arrived, allowing me to get on with the serious business of getting quite inappropriately hammered. By the middle of the afternoon, Dr Sister, Neil The Boyfriend, my dad and I had seemingly managed to relegate ourselves to the Naughty Step at the foot of the garden; slightly removed from the rest of the party, but still close enough that we could dive in and grab delicious snackums from time to time.

Meanwhile, two great events have occurred in Sam's life in the last month. Firstly, he has shaved off his beard ("What a strange sensation; I can feel the wind whistling through my chins"), though for some reason retained a ridiculous moustache. Secondly, he has bought a new car. Well, new to him, anyway.

Clearly, the first of these two crucial developments is of little interest to anyone other than Sam himself. The second, however, is somewhat more significant to Matt and myself, as will soon become apparent. Sam's "new" car is the majestic 1988 Volvo 240 GLT (Grand Luxe Touring), commonly referred to by motoring journalists as "The Swedish Brick". It has a genuine leatherette interior.

And this has inspired Matt and I, to no-one's greater surprise than our own. You see, Sam has gone out and bought a car that is clearly rubbish, but that he really likes - although in his defence, it is still infinitely better than his previous car; a Ford Fiesta, mostly composed of rust held together with duck tape, which he attempted to run on chip fat for a while. Anyway, this is precisely the kind of irrational heart-over-head decision that Sam can make with ease (because he is a buffoon), but that Matt and I are far too sensible to ever make - as much as we might like to. What we both need is an excuse to be as dumb as Sam, and buy rubbish cars that we love, but that we know will be appalling to run.


And so we have decided that for our holidays next year, we shall go on a road tour of the British Isles in our rubbish cars of choice. In a kind of Top-Gear-esque fashion, we have budgeted ourselves a maximum of £500 for buying our rubbish cars of choice, and will then vaguely bimble about the UK doing "stuff". The finer details (like where we will go and what we'll do) have yet to be be pinned down, but of course we have already decided what our rubbish cars of choice shall be. Mine will be a Mk3 Toyota Supra; a 3l turbo, if I can find one that comes in under budget.

Matt, meanwhile, is wasting work time searching eBay for a cheap BMW 5-series V8 (apparently considered to be "one of the most elegant shapes of its time").

Our intention is to sell these terrible heaps o' crap once we're done with them...

That's the plan, anyway.

Super Bad-Ass Sweet Daddy Jones

I went back to visit my parents for a few days last week. My rubbish new car exceeded all my expectations by getting me there and back without exploding or falling to bits, which was nice.

Before heading back, I had to find my dad a birthday present. It wasn’t his birthday – that was almost two months ago – but since I’d failed to get him anything then, I figured I probably ought to try to find something. The trouble is, my dad (like most other dads) doesn’t really like anything, so whatever I purchased was almost certainly destined to spend a few years gathering dust on some secluded shelf, before eventually disappearing mysteriously just after one of mum’s ruthless (but infrequent) cleaning sprees. So, it would have to be something that wouldn’t take up too much space on whatever shelf it got banished to, something inexpensive enough to be regarded as disposable, and preferably something with a practical use of some sort.

I eventually settled on an Easycook Non-Stain Microwave Egg Poacher.

Let this be a lesson to us all; never go gift shopping with Dozer at lunchtime. Because now we have one too. With the Easycook Microwave Egg Poacher, eggs can be prepared in mere minutes in one of two ways; rubber, or snot. Yummy.

Fortunately, my dad has known me for long enough (my entire life in fact) that he no longer expects to receive anything worthwhile for his birthday, and so he did not have to disown me.

laziness is next to godliness

It’s been a busy couple of weeks of getting not very much done.

Not that I don’t have things to be doing; I should be ploughing on with such absorbing bits of coursework as the 3D CAD rendering of a hand drill, and then maybe a bit of Fourier series analysis of heat transfer through a three dimensional material…

But frankly, procrastinating is a far more appealing option.

My rekindled love for timewasting seems mostly to stem from Friday last week, when I got so drunk that I a) managed to make my life just a tiny bit more complicated for myself, and b) turned up to work the next day almost three hours late and still drunk. My family came to visit over the weekend, thus obliterating any hope of sobriety – I am fortunate enough to have a family with a good sense of humour, that likes to get drunk and play board games. We did a lot of eating, a lot of drinking, watched some banger racing in the arctic climes of the Mendips, and in my case managed to get threatened by a ginger cage fighter. Good times.

Of course, drinking isn’t the only great way to waste time – let’s not forget about the toy soldiers. On Tuesday Matt came over, and we built little houses for our little men.

Behold!!!

Seriously, if you were a toy soldier geek you’d be going nuts right about now. (stupid well-adjusted normal people… mutter…….)

And then there is the shiny shiny sexbox 360 that Mr Dozer has decided to plonk in the living room, for no readily discernable reason. So now, if I’m not drinking or playing with toy soldiers, I’m racing cars and blasting zombies, and wondering if maybe (in the apparent absence of any kind of self-discipline) I should cut my own thumbs off so that I can’t play the damn thing anymore.

I was actually intending to follow up the last post with a proper account of what’s been going on in my big gay life; but it turns out that I just couldn’t be bothered.

This is in part due to a sudden bout of illness that all but sapped me of what little energy and enthusiasm I usually possess. I find the worst aspect of being ill is the affect it has on my sleep; I am quite prone to having deranged “maths dreams”, which are now becoming the stuff of legends. I had one of these on Tuesday.

In this particular maths dream, I managed to combine every equation in the world of mechanical engineering (from steady-flow energy equations, to heat transfer rate through composite materials, to equations of motion... and so on) and refined them all into one uber-equation. For some peculiar reason, this took the form of a large, round and slightly spongy blue mass of mathematical symbols and Greek letters, that hovered gently just above ground level. People kept coming up to me to ask how it all worked... it was all very repetitive and confusing, and not even slightly restful.

It was all a quite rubbish way to finish off a weekend of splendid birthday shenanigans. Saturday night I rushed home from work to get changed and head off out again to see Queens of the Stone Age with Charlie Cat, The Boy, Metal Terry and his fiancée Em.

By the time we got there, the support act (The Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster) had already started playing. I saw them a few years ago with Zak at The Louisiana, a pokey little venue that’s about the same size as my kitchen. In those tight confines, their psychobilly death-punk stylings were positively apocalyptic; but in the cavernous Academy they seemed a bit flat, stifled by poor sound and a static (but supportive) audience. They still played their arses off though – good for them.

The mighty Queens of the Stone Age had no such problems. Playing beneath some really quite odd-looking chandeliers, they kicked out tunes new and old with flair and passion, occasionally flying off on great improvised tangents that included a spoken-word rendition of the Rick Astley classic “Never Gonna Give You Up”. Needless to say, they were spectacularly good, and I stumbled out of the venue with my T-shirt quite literally soaked in GigSweatTM (a heady and intoxicating mix of my sweat, the sweat of a million billion other people, spilt beer, dissolved hair product, and a minimum of 23% rock ‘n’ roll). After the gig, Charlie (whose birthday just happens to be the same day as mine), The Boy and I bimbled through a few more pubs, eat a few dirty burgers, and somehow ended up back home (eventually).

The next day I turned 30 (and Charlie turned 21); and in celebration of this fact I was visited by my parents, my sister, and my oldest and dearest friend Tim (a smutmonger whom I have known for, well, forever – though he hasn’t always been a smutmonger). Along with Sam and The Boy we all went off in search of somewhere nice to have lunch, eventually settling down in The Bristol Flyer, a pleasant little pub which is covered in giant and very colourful butterflies for some reason.

We got quite delightfully drunk whilst we waited for what seemed like an eternity for our food to arrive. When it finally did appear before us, we devoured it ravenously and headed back home for cake ‘n’ presents ‘n’ that. Highlights included:

1. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy complete radio series, which I’m ashamed to say that I have never actually owned until this point.
2. Some really quite excellent CDs, that between them cover a lot of genres; from morose and slightly pretentious indie (Interpol), to experimental alt. hip-hop (Dalek), to ambient post-rock electronica (Atlantis), to brutal death metal with a bit of drum ‘n’ bass thrown in for good measure (Ted Maul).
3. Some “Ben’s 30” insect repellant that my sister found on her travels some three or four years ago, and has been holding onto ever since.
4. Some rather natty Jesus plasters.
5. A copy of a monthly adult publication entitled “Fighting Gals”. It promises to be (and indeed is) “a galaxy of female combat”. Here is a rather pleasing photo of Sam and Tim discussing the merits of various chokeholds, whilst enjoying a good pipe.

No sooner had they all left than The Boy and I were off out again to meet up with RoboJew and his better half Ruth at The Thekla, for yet another gig. This time it was Sia , an Aussie chick better known for her role as vocalist with Zero7. Support came from an acoustic guitar toting one-man-band, playing under the moniker of Half Cousin. Inoffensive and utterly forgettable.

Sia and her four-piece band took to the stage dressed as fluorescent stick men. It’s rather hard to explain, and can’t find any pictures on the intraweb… suffice to say that if it sounds a bit weird, it’s because it was. The costumes were shed after the first song, and they carried on to play a really quite excellent set. The songs are a bit poppy, but without being too sweet or cheesy, and they still retain some of the laid-back lounge-core stylings of Zero7. Sia’s got a stunning voice, is quite mad and/or drunk, and spent a lot of time making pleasant chit-chat with various members of the audience. Plus, I wasn’t soaked in GigSweatTM when I left. Good stuff.

Little else of interest has happened this week; and besides, this post is quite long enough already.