'All these...moments...will be lost in time, like the smell of your shoes when you use our new product!' [Quote from 'Glade Runner'.]

            Whatever I say here, it’s the bread in my head talking.

            Right, so, what’s been going on?

            Saturday night we only went and bloody well recorded with a bloody string quartet didn’t we? Eh? Only went and strummed and pickled along with some proper bloody musicians, eh? Ed got to accompany one of the violinists ‘practicing’ some Vivaldi during one of the breaks, as you do, which pleased him so much I thought he had a banana lodged in his gob.

            We did it all in the recording studios at The University of Surrey, with the very able and amicable Oscar (Oskar? Oska? Glen?) Somethingorother who also very kindly put us up at his house after our 3am finish. The evening ended with us blearily watching the pale blue glow of sunrise appear behind net curtains while drinking some remarkably dodgy sherry. Thom-of-the-Novi was also in residence, filming all and making every mistake watchable a thousand times over. We’ve handed the footage over to Edward Snowden for safe keeping, so it’ll be viewable soon.

            Sunday was something of a write-off, then. We went to the effortlessly sterile PC World in short-notice-search of a big hard drive to take the previous night’s recording from Oscar (Oskar? Oska? Glen?) Somethingorther, and also to back up all of the work currently teetering on the precipice Trewin’s computer. Imagine. It’s all on there. It’s all on there, dangling by a thread of computer failure. One wrong website, Trewin. One wrong website…

            And I, like so many defence contractors, have already seen his search history.

            In the waning words of the world’s worst; Fred Durst: Back up, back it up.

            We also treated ourselves to a Sunday feast in Frankie & Benny’s (despite my fervent protestations) which was like eating some dinner inside an arse. Our waiter was a dude, but the food tasted like someone had read a cookbook backwards. My stomach made noises I’d never heard before, that evening. There’ll be samples of it on the new EP.

The sounds, that is.

Then, just as soon as I’d fallen asleep in the van and then the next thing I know woken up the next day in my own bed, it was time to play The Haunt with the ever wonderful Mt. Wolf.

Here’s an example of their music which both the band and their existing fans will no doubt find an achingly predictable choice, but I’ve already put the work ‘achingly’ in front of ‘predictable’ in order to emphasise it, so I’m pretty much running the risk of post-modernism as the sentence descends into a wry smile of nonsense.

(I tried everything to embed the video on here, but it seems Google are unable to integrate their services properly unless you're a Government, so here is a long hyperlink and explanatory sentence.)
 

This song’s been in my head for a very long time. It bangs the shit out of your bones if you go and watch it live. Go and watch it live, then.

The Haunt gig was good. Thanks for coming down, those who did. Those who didn’t, find Doc Brown, go back, go watch. I’ll thank you as my memory alters.

            Last night was our gig with the same band in Heaven. That’s always fun to say. Another good gig – perhaps our biggest yet! Despite my really rather painful neck problem making me feel like an emotionless statue onstage, I think we all had a really good time.

            Good work, gang. Keep following – all sorts of news and other delights are flowing freely from our rusty pipelines.

            Today, then, is a day of restful delights. I’m currently sipping my second coffee, I’m about to stand in my freezing back garden with an invigorating little cherry ended friend, and then I think I’ll spend the day inside under a blanket trying to complete Half-Life on the PS2.

            Because that’s how bread rolls.

            Have fun, whichever baked good you choose to become.

            Tim

           

George Osborne covers my girlfriend's income.

There’s this girl who lives in my house. It’s her birthday today.

For my birthday, earlier this year, she bought me (among other things) an 18” Terminator 2 doll (‘poseable battle exoskeleton’) and a Kindle. I’ve looked at the Terminator doll every day and thought ‘Oh Stan Winston, you genius. You’ve built the scariest motherfucker in the land and made a whole generation fear for the future.’ I’ve also used the Kindle every single day, taking food out of the hands of starving orphans who I would so often fund with my book-buying charity splurges. It’s all electronic, now. If I didn’t enjoy contributing to human suffering so much, I’d feel bad about the guilt.

A challenge appears: What in the heck do I now buy for her that will in any way compare to two of the best gifts I have ever received?

What do you do, Tim?

I don’t know.

You could buy her some diamonds? Perhaps an extravagant vomit of flowers delivered to our door every day of the week leading up to her birthday? A sex oven?

Get real, Tim. A sex oven would just be a present for yourself. She’ll see right through it (through the little window, at least. When the little light’s on.) At least there’s a timer. 

And she can control the amount of gas.

Anyway, I got her what I did: a mound of tat. There are two ways to approach the inevitable couple-gift-wars on a budget. 1) The nuclear gift. Pretty much what she did to me – inadvertently creating a rod for her own back when she did it. Her future is fucked. She’s peaked too soon. Or 2) Buy a whole mound of tat, substituting quality for quantity.

Worked like a charm. She totally fell for it. Who’d have thought a 4” LED illuminated perspex statue of The Virgin Mary would prove so popular?

           

Then…someone turned up at the door. An entire governmental department squeezed into a little brown envelope. One of them jumped out of the first thumbed opening and smacked me in the face with a frying pan. My girlfriend laughed. I was on the floor, bleeding from the nose and eyes. She continued opening the envelope but she couldn’t reach the end before they’d burst out of the lumpy, writhing package she’d been wrestling with. Someone ran over my head on a unicycle, and I swear the naked trapeze artist stole my design.

One of the ‘Dancing Clown Firework Army’ ran up to my girlfriend carrying a big creamy cake, handed her a fat cheque, then slammed his face into the cake (sending the cream topping flying into all of my electronic equipment) before farting Stop (Right Now) by The Spice Girls.

‘Oh yeah!’ my girlfriend hacked through fits of laughter as I lay comatose and leaking all over the floor, ‘A sweet tax rebate!’

Jesus, HMRC. Way to upstage the king. I was doing really well up until this point. I’d done pain au chocolat and everything. This Government.

So, now the only thing I can hope to get away with is fumbling my way through a cool recording session tomorrow where we’re hoping to do some live sessions of some of the tracks with the Phorchestra, and shuffling flat-footedly through our forthcoming gigs, 11^th, 12^th, and 20^th November in London and Brighton respectively.

So long as Santa doesn’t turn up in a fucking Mustang and start handing out chocolate covered credit cards, my mediocrity should go unnoticed, and even praised, just as planned, and just as I’ve gotten away with thus far.

It’s better to be the best regarded giver than to receive.

I hope you are presented with everything you hope for this weekend, whichever way you take it.

Tim