Starting as I hope to go on
The first 'week' back at work turned out to be mercifully low-impact. There wasn't much of anything urgent in job-I'm-keeping, and I managed to sort things out in job-I-quit to the point where I was able to send a handover email on Friday (only a week after my official leaving date) and go in to return my laptop, keys, pass etc. This meant that I got to take a complete weekend off this weekend. It's a very long time since I took a weekend off which didn't involve me having plans or commitments away from home, so that's been quite odd. Besides catching up with various chores and non-work-paperwork, I managed to read a book and go to a gig.
The book was Stephen King's 'Finders Keepers', loaned to me by my mum, and it was a fairly solid thriller, with the usual King quality in terms of plot and characterisation. I could, however, definitely have done without so many casual references to rape (mostly, but not all, male and prison-related) or the thing where a key (educated, middle-class, positively-presented) black character occasionally drops into 'character' playing a weird-ass jive-talking stereotype.
I went to the gig mainly because of the main support, Evi Vine, who I liked a lot when I first encountered her at Latitude Festival a good few years back and has since gone substantially more overtly goth. This, of course, was more than fine with me, and I bought her 'new' (when I say 'new', it says it's from 2014...) album to go with the previous one. The bottom of the bill was a guy with an acoustic guitar going by the name of Naevus. I have an idea that he may once upon a time have been in a quite good band called Leisure Hive, but I can't quite recall where I got that idea. Anyway, his stuff was not at all bad musically, with occasional hints of Bauhaus, although the singing wasn't helped (he said) by his having a cold. The headline act was a band I knew literally nothing about prior to the gig, called Rome. My best attempt at describing them would be that Covenant might sound a bit like that if they ever used guitars. My interest was piqued, pre-gig, by all the French titles on the CDs and vinyl on the merchandise stand but, sadly, at least for the forty-five minutes I stayed of their set, everything they played was in English. I guess they thought a British audience wouldn't cope with anything else. :(
[Re the previously-mentioned dental thing, I managed to find somewhere a couple of days ago which would see me at short notice and where the dentist poked at my gums, managed to partially drain the suspected abscess and sent me off with a prescription for antibiotics. For a number of reasons, I have my doubts about the guy's competence, and if - as I expect from brief research - the lump doesn't clear up by the end of the course, I plan on making an appointment somewhere else.]
The book was Stephen King's 'Finders Keepers', loaned to me by my mum, and it was a fairly solid thriller, with the usual King quality in terms of plot and characterisation. I could, however, definitely have done without so many casual references to rape (mostly, but not all, male and prison-related) or the thing where a key (educated, middle-class, positively-presented) black character occasionally drops into 'character' playing a weird-ass jive-talking stereotype.
I went to the gig mainly because of the main support, Evi Vine, who I liked a lot when I first encountered her at Latitude Festival a good few years back and has since gone substantially more overtly goth. This, of course, was more than fine with me, and I bought her 'new' (when I say 'new', it says it's from 2014...) album to go with the previous one. The bottom of the bill was a guy with an acoustic guitar going by the name of Naevus. I have an idea that he may once upon a time have been in a quite good band called Leisure Hive, but I can't quite recall where I got that idea. Anyway, his stuff was not at all bad musically, with occasional hints of Bauhaus, although the singing wasn't helped (he said) by his having a cold. The headline act was a band I knew literally nothing about prior to the gig, called Rome. My best attempt at describing them would be that Covenant might sound a bit like that if they ever used guitars. My interest was piqued, pre-gig, by all the French titles on the CDs and vinyl on the merchandise stand but, sadly, at least for the forty-five minutes I stayed of their set, everything they played was in English. I guess they thought a British audience wouldn't cope with anything else. :(
[Re the previously-mentioned dental thing, I managed to find somewhere a couple of days ago which would see me at short notice and where the dentist poked at my gums, managed to partially drain the suspected abscess and sent me off with a prescription for antibiotics. For a number of reasons, I have my doubts about the guy's competence, and if - as I expect from brief research - the lump doesn't clear up by the end of the course, I plan on making an appointment somewhere else.]