here's me riding home from that gig on wednesday. dig that accidental streetlight backlight thing.
also love that fact that on wednesay i was on my way home, half frozen wearing two t-shirts, a jumper, waterproof jacket, gloves and wooly hat and by friday and it was all the windows open, riding about in shorts and a tee and nursing slight sunburn on my bald bits.
and people wonder why the brits are so obsessed with the weather...
also went to see pete and the pirates at king's college student union last week. liked the album and had even gigged with them a few times but daaaaamn i'd forgotten how good some of those songs are. it's just perfect indie-pop. here's they. kcsu has the best view of any venue i've ever been to btw. any venue you have to get to in a lift is cool in my book.
it stopped raining for about half an hour last thursday just as i had to walk back from another storm-tosed queast post lunch meeting on a boat. it was lovely on the south bank. these are some of the things i saw between the queen mary and sea container's house. chinook!
strangely i don't have any pictures of left with pictures because i was so rapt with their performance, particularly their last acoustic version of 1952 vincent black lightning by richard thompson that i forgot to take any. only the picture of the wave pictures who were charmingly captivatingly awesomely amazing as always and lots of pictures of the non-picture named slow club even though they seemed to be having a bit of an off night. they were still fab though. harmonious, joyful and photogenic.
enough to make to forget you've got a flat tire and a wet arse.
great gig, top night, love barden's.
it took a while to get up but day 3 of last week also involved getting soaked. this time on my way to a gig in dalston, where i also got a puncture for good measure. meh, i'd kind of got used having a wet arse by then.
these were taken from my office window as i was about to leave. you can see what i rode into.
woke up this morning and thought "wow what a beautiful day!". then i ACTUALLY woke up and thought, "oh". i searched my wardrobe for something more suitable or waterproof but until i can get some new waterproofs it was back in the just-dried jeans from yesterday.
as yesterday it started raining just as i was leaving the house and started to comprehensively bucket down just a few minutes into the journey. same squelchy cold splash into work only today for some reason i ended up even filthier than yesterday.
check out my clammy trotters and the attractive line of road grime that accumulated just above my socks. nice.
big fat and surprisingly icy drops of rain started falling just as i was leaving the house on my bike this morning. by the time i'd got the the bottom of the road it was bucketing down. there's something uniquely annoying about getting out of a nice hot shower into clean dry clothes only to be soaked to the skin and covered in road-dirt 5 minutes later.
so i rode in in sodden clingy chafing jeans with a wet wind-chill induced ice-cream-headache and grumpy grimace on my face.
on getting to work, red raw and dripping wet i discovered that there was queue for the showers and that i'd forgotten my usual spare dry set of pants and socks. i managed to get my socks more or less dry with the hair-dryer in the ladies showers but the pants were beyond help really. so i'm sitting here at work with my swimming trunks on under my trousers.
thing is, one of the girls in the office just came over and loudly accused me of leaving wet pants hanging in the showers (i moved them to the gents to be fair). what would she prefer that i hung them from a flag-pole by my desk? she narrowly avoided being told to eff off and grow up. luckily for her i'd just had my second coffee of the day and ice-cream headache had departed so i just smiled and nodded.
when i was a nipper i was so obsessed with birds that i could name just about anything with feathers from nothing more than an audio recording of it's tweetings. that might sound like an exaggeration but i can assure you that i did in fact own tony soper's best selling tape of british bird calls and knew it pretty much by heart.
unfortunately for me there's not much call for that particular skill in the modern world and unfortunatley for my mum and dad i was soon to turn my auditory attention to BAD ROCK MUSIC instead. i soon forgot everything about the robin and the auriole and bopped along my own little pop culture path.
it doesn't mean i don't still take an interest though. the coot's the one with the white face right? the moorhen's red yes? christ, 7 year old me would be bursting to explain the difference between, wingspan and mating rituals of the respective species right now...
thank finches for bad rock music.
