Bank Holiday TV presents: live from Scarborough, it's The Annual World's Stupidest Man Contest
I think I'm just about awake again now. It's been an eventful few days; the band looks set to be playing another show in London on the 18th of this month. I'd been under the impression we were taking May off, but aparently a promoter liked our stuff from before and wanted to do another show... I hadn't made any plans for that date, so I have no problem in principle, just as long as we can get that damned pedal working again! The rest of the details of the night are, naturally, TBA nearer the time.
After an absense of a couple of months, my depression decided to rear it's head again last weekend. It's frightening really, how one day I can feel normal and the next I can feel utterly shit and look in the bathroom mirror and see somebody I despise. I don't know what triggered it this time; I could write a whole sperate post of possible causes - but I won't - or maybe the part of me that's responsible for making seratonin just decided to go on holiday for a few days without warning me. Whatever the reason, I snapped out of it by Thursday anyway and have been pretty much right as rain since. It's bizarre.
My friend ollie, who I've known since I was about thirteen, has announced that he's moving away to Ireland with his fiancee some time in the next month or two, so we had a send-off drink for him in Croydon on Thursday night, just in case we won't get a chance closer to when he goes. That was fun, as we seem to see less and less of each other these days and it was just like old times. Sad though too, of course. After we'd left the bar and gone our separate ways, I was heading for the stop to catch my bus and found my way blocked by a man who suddenly fell over and sprawled all over the pavement. I asked him if he was alright but his eyes were rolled back in his head and he wasn't conscious... I didn't feel entirely comfortable leaving him there in that state but have only very basic first aid knowledge, so I checked he was breathing and tried to drag him into something that resembled the recovery position. Then he vomited all over himself but fortunately woke up as well. By this time some other people had stopped too and we dragged him onto a bench and I dialed for an ambulance. Then he started to get aggitated and telling me I mustn't call an ambulance because "that's really out of order." He still looked like he needed one but I really wanted to get home and go to bed rather than stand in a bus shelter for half the night arguing with a sick-covered man, so eventually I cancelled the ambulance and left him to his own devices. I don't know if that was really the right thing to do, but it pisses me off that his friends must - presumably - have left him in a state like that in the first place. Oh well, he was at least barely clinging ont othe bench unaided by this point. Croydon, it's a magical place where dreams come true!
On Friday evening I headed up to Camden to join the pre-Inferno crowd in the Devonshire Arms. Christine came along too - I'd been saying for months that she ought ot join us but then, mainly due to my own crap organisational skills, never quite made it happen until this month. She seemed to get on well with the rest of the group and we had fun (we had a contest to see how many psychos we could attract during the night but I lost 1-0, which was very bad form for me). The music was generally pretty good and I seemed to be more or less glued to the dancefloor for a period of about two hours, although the place mysteriously seemed to empty of half the punters at around 2am.
I managed to haul my arse out of bed around ten and get into Croydon for a long-overdue haircut, then on into central London again to pick up some cheap & nasty sunglasses, a noodle lunch and waste valuable time trying to hunt down a pair of trainers which no longer seem to be on sale anywhere. Then back to Croydon again in time to catch (most of) Kreuzdammer's performance at The Brief. It was a bit of an odd thing, putting on a three day metal festival in Croydon, which I never really thought of as that sort of place - it seemed disappointingly quiet in there during the afternoon but hopefully the crowd picked up later on in the evening. I didn't stick around to find out though, as I was feeling too shattered from the previous night's festivities and I could hear the sofa and Doctor Who calling to me.
The fossilised remnants of "Mr Potato" - a friend of Mike and I,
from our Berlin period, now preserved in a glass case at his place.
Some clubby place Sandra showed me in Second Life. No door staff, no
queue for the bar, no night bus home... this technology is dangerous!
(it was a bit quiet at that time of the day)
Other points of interest this weekend have been going over to see Mike S and Janina at their place and spending a night in their kitchen, working on a bottle of vodka, waxing about the old days in Berlin, making silly kung-fu-type sound effects and getting a tub of mint yogurt dip spilt all over me. In fact, Janina probably didn't need all that going on while she was trying to sleep in the next room. Whoops! I also found the time to go out for a lengthy walk, do some more work on (but still not finish) my animation project and meet up with Sandra in Second Life and hang out in some German bars - sort of a virtual reality dry-run for WGT, hopefully!
After an absense of a couple of months, my depression decided to rear it's head again last weekend. It's frightening really, how one day I can feel normal and the next I can feel utterly shit and look in the bathroom mirror and see somebody I despise. I don't know what triggered it this time; I could write a whole sperate post of possible causes - but I won't - or maybe the part of me that's responsible for making seratonin just decided to go on holiday for a few days without warning me. Whatever the reason, I snapped out of it by Thursday anyway and have been pretty much right as rain since. It's bizarre.
My friend ollie, who I've known since I was about thirteen, has announced that he's moving away to Ireland with his fiancee some time in the next month or two, so we had a send-off drink for him in Croydon on Thursday night, just in case we won't get a chance closer to when he goes. That was fun, as we seem to see less and less of each other these days and it was just like old times. Sad though too, of course. After we'd left the bar and gone our separate ways, I was heading for the stop to catch my bus and found my way blocked by a man who suddenly fell over and sprawled all over the pavement. I asked him if he was alright but his eyes were rolled back in his head and he wasn't conscious... I didn't feel entirely comfortable leaving him there in that state but have only very basic first aid knowledge, so I checked he was breathing and tried to drag him into something that resembled the recovery position. Then he vomited all over himself but fortunately woke up as well. By this time some other people had stopped too and we dragged him onto a bench and I dialed for an ambulance. Then he started to get aggitated and telling me I mustn't call an ambulance because "that's really out of order." He still looked like he needed one but I really wanted to get home and go to bed rather than stand in a bus shelter for half the night arguing with a sick-covered man, so eventually I cancelled the ambulance and left him to his own devices. I don't know if that was really the right thing to do, but it pisses me off that his friends must - presumably - have left him in a state like that in the first place. Oh well, he was at least barely clinging ont othe bench unaided by this point. Croydon, it's a magical place where dreams come true!
On Friday evening I headed up to Camden to join the pre-Inferno crowd in the Devonshire Arms. Christine came along too - I'd been saying for months that she ought ot join us but then, mainly due to my own crap organisational skills, never quite made it happen until this month. She seemed to get on well with the rest of the group and we had fun (we had a contest to see how many psychos we could attract during the night but I lost 1-0, which was very bad form for me). The music was generally pretty good and I seemed to be more or less glued to the dancefloor for a period of about two hours, although the place mysteriously seemed to empty of half the punters at around 2am.
I managed to haul my arse out of bed around ten and get into Croydon for a long-overdue haircut, then on into central London again to pick up some cheap & nasty sunglasses, a noodle lunch and waste valuable time trying to hunt down a pair of trainers which no longer seem to be on sale anywhere. Then back to Croydon again in time to catch (most of) Kreuzdammer's performance at The Brief. It was a bit of an odd thing, putting on a three day metal festival in Croydon, which I never really thought of as that sort of place - it seemed disappointingly quiet in there during the afternoon but hopefully the crowd picked up later on in the evening. I didn't stick around to find out though, as I was feeling too shattered from the previous night's festivities and I could hear the sofa and Doctor Who calling to me.
The fossilised remnants of "Mr Potato" - a friend of Mike and I,
from our Berlin period, now preserved in a glass case at his place.
Some clubby place Sandra showed me in Second Life. No door staff, no
queue for the bar, no night bus home... this technology is dangerous!
(it was a bit quiet at that time of the day)
Other points of interest this weekend have been going over to see Mike S and Janina at their place and spending a night in their kitchen, working on a bottle of vodka, waxing about the old days in Berlin, making silly kung-fu-type sound effects and getting a tub of mint yogurt dip spilt all over me. In fact, Janina probably didn't need all that going on while she was trying to sleep in the next room. Whoops! I also found the time to go out for a lengthy walk, do some more work on (but still not finish) my animation project and meet up with Sandra in Second Life and hang out in some German bars - sort of a virtual reality dry-run for WGT, hopefully!