The smells, Esmerelda...

            After the last week, what with a visit from parental units A & B, the suspense of various meetings and/or fashionable dates taking place, and our rather disconcerting and looooong experience at Cargo last Friday, I ended up performing an accidental biological experiment on myself, inspired by tiredness.

            If you’re in any way squeamish, I suggest you plug your nose and eyes…

            …mmm…

            …now.

I sweated A LOT during our last gig. What with the stage lights, a full room, a long day, and various stimulants (entirely legal, fact fans) plugging my system…yeah. I sweated a lot. I slept that night on a dirty sofa, and wore those same clothes in a fit of fatigue for maybe three days before changing into my ‘sweats’, as I believe the colonies call them.

Today - seven days (or one Craig David) later - I showered.

This is the kind of insight that you simply don’t get from other musical acts. Such is the nature of a newswire maintained by a man who watched All Dogs go to Heaven one too many times as a child. What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine. The more we share, the more we’re gonna get. I assumed as a little lad that those dogs were of course referring to intimate states of mental arousal and opinion, rather than material goods which should be hoarded at all costs. And a fine job of that we are doing, too.

So I showered and changed my frilly undercrisps for the first time in a week, today. What did I find on my journey of soap and Darwinian Beagle-y wonder? Weird red blotches in bodily creases that I did not know existed. Enough belly-button fluff that I won’t need to buy a Christmas jumper this year, and, according to my topmost follicles, that my flat in fact has its own microclimate where it regularly snows whenever it’s not raining butter.

The reason why it took this long to succumb to ‘common personal hygiene’ was not just laziness, but also that I’ve been tying up my time in various creative projects, none of which involved leaving the house. Writing for extended periods of time? So long as the solidified crust around my arms doesn’t prevent me from reaching the keyboard (of my laptop which often sits on my lap, breathing its humid breeze around that most coveted of unwashed areas, fact fans), then why bother presenting myself, visually or nasally? My little partner in love doesn’t care, or at least she says she doesn’t, so, apart from out of loving respect for her, what possible reason do I have to ‘clean’ myself? I’ll only get dirty again.

Of course, things grew on me, things lived on/in me, and things…changed. I am now my own eco-system, supporting strange, reddened, bulging life forms. I am one with my cotton t-shirt.

Using the hairdryer to better dry my body actually sent wafts of strange odours around the room. This is something that has never happened before. So not only were my findings biological, they also pertained to convection patterns and other physical processes.

All in all, it was an accidental experiment that has taught me…nothing.

I am now clean, just so you all know.

 The next time I follow basic hygiene protocols will be at our very exciting gig supporting Efterklang on 28^th October. This is a damn cool gig to be involved in. We’ve been listening to them for years, so it’s a little ‘Hurrah!’ in the Phoria logbook.

Very exciting.

We’re also currently number two (by far my favourite number below sixty-eight) in the ReverbNation chart. That’s pretty good. It would be nice to be number one, but number two is fine, you know. We’re happy with that.

If you’re not happy with that, by the way, then feel free to tell your friends to click and listen to us on ReverbNation and just everywhere and buyeverything and listen to everything.

I’m on toothbrush strike until we reach the top.

The new stuff is still underway.

Gingivitisly yours on this energetic Friday,

Tim