Badger's Bank Holiday

Spent the rest of the weekend in Suffolk celebrating my youngest niece's 3rd birthday, watching another niece horse riding, getting acquainted with Spongebob Squarepants and sinking a few pints of Adnams in between. Met some goats at the stables and noticed that they have rectangular pupils. My brother-in-law Marc's theory is that this has something to do with them living on slopes, but perhaps he was just, ahem, kidding.

Silver Machines

Purely by accident I found myself taking part in Critical Mass in Parliament Square tonight. Cycling away, I got called a 'fucking weirdo' by an irate lorry driver. If only he'd known that as everyone was chanting 'More Bikes! Less Cars!' I was fighting the urge to tell them that 'Fewer Cars' would actually be more grammatically correct.

Hey Nonny Nonny

Tonight in the middle of London I saw Morris Men and a fox. I don't remember the last time I saw either in the countryside.

43

An action packed week with the highly talented Ed Seed and Petra Jean Phillipson at Acoustic Suicide on Thursday and great return sessions from Sandy Dillon and Congregation on Saturday. Sandy was playing with the Speakeasys, featuring ex-Mott the Hoople Man Ray Majors, who does a very good Peter Lorre impression. Saturday was also my 43rd birthday, for which a select group of ne'er do wells gathered in the doorway of the Royal Oak to talk of punk rock and corporal punishment, with the hardcore ending up in Steph-toe's flat until the small hours. Felt very rough today but managed to get out for lunch by the river with the Adams family. Which was nice.

Here lies the man who wrote Bamboleo

Selston churchyard, Nottinghamshire

Oh Mr Christie

After failing to get in to both a play and a screening of the Lives of Others, we watched This Is England last night. Pretty good actually - best British film I've seen for a while in fact, which isn't saying a whole lot but it does contain the phrase "goggle-eyed twat', which is surely worth the admission price alone. Even better than that was Phil Mulloy's 'The Christies' which we saw on Wednesday night at the Roxy. It's an animated sitcom and a very dark and funny blend of Punch and Judy and Samuel Becket involving rockabilly, nazi decorators, paedophile Japanese blues guitarists and penis transplants. The characters are all voiced by computers, but are strangely human. It's written in episodes but has a fantastic narrative that runs through the whole thing. See it if you can!

Arms of Milton

Saw Team B at the Milton Arms Resonance fundraiser on Saturday night. Very good stuff indeed...they sound like they come from Sheffield in 1984 but probably weren't even born then. As Shelly and I headed back to South London, the place was erupting in a disco dancing frenzy to the sound of a bearded man called Grosvenor. Spent the rest of the weekend in Suffolk, not taking photographs, quaffing pints of Adnams and using the first rainfall that had collected in my mum and dad's water butt for 38 days to clean the birdshit off my car.

Widow Dressing

Getting into the swinge of running the show from the live room at resonance now. Gerry Mitchell and Little Sparta supplied today's session and were in extremely fine fettle. With a six piece band plus a poet, Dan Edelstyn and Ean filming, Robin and Michael engineering and Richard and I manning the desk (with help from Chester and Miranda), it was a bit of a squeeze but went rather well I thought. Spent the afternoon sauntering around East Street, (inspiration for Charlie Chaplin's 'Easy Street', don't you know), where I saw a box of hair and a poster for a lost dog, appropriately pinned to a tree.