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We’re off to a thing on the London Eye tonight (see! What with this and U2 if poverty and trade aren’t history and fair by 9pm tonight, I will be very cross*), so as a result I “packed” for Glasto last night. Consequently I’ve spent most of the day remembering things that I probably should have put in my bag.

For example, it’s slightly possible that my festival experience this weekend will be improved somewhat by taking my sleeping bag. No doubt I will remember other equally unimportant items during the course of the day (and surely also tomorrow, when it will be too late for me to take them, unless I ask Sally nicely).

Like Rob, I’ve been perusing this year’s clash finder. It’s not looking good: Chas n’ Dave or The Futureheads? (Ok, probably the Futureheads, but I’m only half joking.) The Killers or Willy Mason? Bright Eyes, The La’s, or Primal Scream? Kasabian or the Magic Numbers (or New Order)? (Or should I just go and see The Proclaimers–for a laugh–instead?)

Oh, decisions, decisions…

[* Respectively, obviously. I wouldn’t want to “make trade history”, or “make poverty fair”, no matter how many sweatshop-produced wristbands I happen to be wearing. That would be terrible, clearly.]

As a small postscript to my U2 review, I’ve just remembered that at one point Mr Bongo asked us all to kindly get out our telephones and Make Poverty History. I’m not sure if we made poverty history, but if not, I think I know why: it’s nothing to do with the reluctance of the G8 leaders to cooperate, but rather because of Mr Ox’s appalling grammar. Our specific instructions, displayed on the video screens to the side of the stage were as follows:

Text ‘africa’ followed by ‘your name’ to 80205

Why, why, why, are there quotation marks around “your name”? Do they actually want to receive millions of messages that read “africa your name”? Or did they mean “text ‘africa’, followed by your name, to 80205”?

Say what you like about Irish megastars U2–and you might indeed think them to be slightly pretentious, self righteous middle aged rock stars (hey, you might even want to pick yourself up a “MAKEBONOHISTORY” T-shirt and wander around with it on, I think I might when we see them in Barcelona later this year, you know, just to test the Spanish sense of irony)–they certainly know how to put on a good show. Several songs into Saturday’s Twickenham concert, Mr Vox, their diminutive lead singer, spotted a girl in the crowd with a silver helium balloon in the shape of a heart, which he proceeded to take off her and release towards the heavens while throwing his hands to the sky. Now, if you or I stole someone’s balloon and let it go, we’d probably get slapped, or worse, but when Bono does it he has 80,000 people enthralled. There’s just no justice.

We’d arrived at Twickenham much earlier, and spent our first couple of hours there in the pleasantly shaded beer garden of The Cabbage Patch, a pub I used to frequent rather too frequently back when I lived in the area. And we made the right decision, as well, because even though we spent our first few hours in the area sitting comfortably outside the pub, and not sitting in the full sun outside the stadium with the other overly keen standing ticket holders, we still managed to arrive there in time to bag ourselves the hallowed green wristbands that allowed easy entry to and exit from the enclosed standing section right at the front, where the stage juts out into the crowd. We had plenty of room to move around, as well, although perhaps this goes some way to explaining the slightly confusing conversation I had with a chap standing near us while we watched the second support band, Athlete: he’d moved in front of us, so Sal and I stepped around him to the side to get a better view of the four skinny indie kids onstage playing their lightweight rock songs.

“Excuse me, do you mind telling me what you’re doing, standing beside me?” he asked. Now, I know I’m tall, and I could understand “What are you doing standing in front of me?”, but beside me? That’s a new one on me: perhaps he was expecting to have Twickenham to himself and was working his way around the crowd one by one asking everyone.

U2, of course, were a lot of fun. Pretty much what you would expect: lots of wandering out into the crowd on their protruding stage bit (although sadly despite our being only a few feet away, at no point was Bono quite close enough for us to tell if, as we suspected from a TV interview last week, he does indeed dye his hair, and cover up his impending baldness with a weave…), the obligatory hauling up onto the stage of at least one member of the audience (who was handed a camera with which to film Mr Edge and yer man Bono–who my spell checker keeps wanting to call “Bongo Ox”–and then failed to notice for the whole length of Mysterious Ways that she was holding it upside down, as 79,999 people simultaneously turned their heads to the side), and lots of impressive flashing lights once the sun had gone down. And much jumping up and down from our section of the crowd.

They closed with a second run through Vertigo, in a slightly endearing, “it’s as if we’re a new band and we’ve only got one album” sort of way. The cheeky scamps.

In the end, I survived my displacement from our flat on Saturday with little more than a sore head the next day, but this was after an unexpectedly drunken evening at Claire’s birthday on Friday night, which ended with Sally waking me from my drunken slumber and forcibly dragging me out of the venue to catch the bus–ah, my ability to fall into an alcohol-induced sleep at the slightest provocation knows no bounds. I was particularly pleased with my Zane Lowe celebrity spot, though, which took place towards the end of Saturday evening, because, as my haiku suggests, no one believed me at first. One of our group, who spends her working days in the meeja, and is thus exposed to celebrities on a regular basis, told me that the chap over the other side of the pub was categorically not him, because “the real Zane Lowe is much better looking”, at which another member of our group pointed out the balding chap that notLowe was talking to and suggested it might be Moby. When, later in the evening, we took the radical step of asking him if he was indeed the kiwi DJ, I got to feel mightily pleased with myself when it turned out that I was right all along. Well, it’s so rare an occurrence that I have to make the most of it when I can. [Case in point: the weekend’s second celebrity spot involved my sister pointing out that her off of that dodgy BBC sitcom had just walked right past me “looking a bit rough” on her way out of the Screen on the Green].

The night ended with me struggling to stay awake for the second day in a row, so it is perhaps fitting that I nearly didn’t get my last pint at all: I asked the barman for a pint of bitter, he repeated the order back to me (“pint of young’s bitter, yes”), and promptly made me an espresso. “Er, I asked for a pint of bitter?” I said, having presumed he was making that for someone else, and not thinking that espresso could ever be misheard for bitter. Then again, perhaps he knew what I really needed better than I know myself.

On Sunday, prior to my brush with celebrity, we popped over to Upper Street to grab something to eat. Sal and I had been to a French restaurant (Le Mercury) with really good, reasonably priced food a couple of times before. I’d even taken my parents there, so we thought we’d give it another go.

Unfortunately, things appear to have changed recently: this time the food was truly terrible. Top of our list of complaints was the completely burnt Yorkshire pudding that arrived with Sal’s roast. Her request for a replacement was met with bemusement and then the arrival of a second, equally burnt, one. When we pointed out that this one was just as black as the first, the waiter switched to the hairy butter school of defensive customer service, by trying to pretend that this one wasn’t mostly carcinogens.

Oh dear. That’s another one on the list, I suppose.

Did you see that? What?
Zoe Wannamaker! No!
Yes! She walked past you.

Zane Lowe. Local pub.
Though they said it wasn’t him.
I was right, it was.

Dear Estate Agents: if you are supposed to be carrying out a valuation on a property, and you make an appointment with the current tenants to come and do this, and then don’t turn up for the appointment without calling to apologise or explain, then it is possible, just possible, that waiting A WEEK to bother to phone the tenant to make another arrangement/apologise, might result in the tenant (who probably went out of his way to be available at the time of the original appointment) not being terribly happy about it.

I’m just saying, is all.

[Note to anyone I know: the flat that hasn’t been recently valued is due to be overrun tomorrow with women performing some bizarre American ritual they’re calling “a baby shower”. As such, I will be spending most of the afternoon in our local pub with a copy of the Independent and one or more pints of bitter. Please come and join me/rescue me from the dark unpleasantness of an afternoon in my own company. Thanks.]

Sal’s a big fan of medical themed television drama, and as such, I’ve been finding myself watching a lot of the likes of ER (and it’s shabbier British equivalent Holby City) recently. I’ve always found this a bit odd, frankly, what with her being a healthcare professional and all. After all, I can’t imagine I’d ever get home in the evening eager to watch a gritty drama about IT consultants dealing with difficult situations (“we’ve got a network failure on level four! I’ve lost the exchange server…”), or perhaps a three hour Sunday night special on channel 4 presented by Jimmy Carr: 100 Greatest Typos.

Of course a large factor in my not watching television related to my profession is the fact that there generally isn’t any (well, there was the film The Technical Writer a couple of years ago, but I don’t think it ever got a theatrical release in the UK), but this is probably a good thing, at least based on my experience of the few occasions when IT appears in popular dramas or films, when I find myself unable to watch without throwing things at the television because they have just got everything so very, very wrong. I’ve often suspected that if lazy scriptwriters can utterly mangle the technicalities of something I know about, they probably do the same with things I don’t know about. Nevertheless, I’ve found myself increasingly amused by the random medical jargon that is spouted by the actors in these rubbish medical shows, and I’ve begun playing what I’d like to call Casualty Bingo: ticking off those phrases that crop up with worrying regularity: systolic and tacky-cardic are my favourites (although last week on Holby I think I heard that someone was brevi-cardic: presumably the writers learnt a new word and wanted the chance to use it). Of course, I have no idea what these words mean, and since there’s absolutely no way I can ever find out, I guess we’ll never know. Lets just say that there must just be a lot of this sort of thing about on the mean streets of Bristol and Chicago.

In the beginning, I like to think that Sal was moderately amused by my small cheer every time that scouse doctor used one of these terms in relation to a new arrival on the wards (who was about to discover that his or her mother/father/partner/son/daughter is having an affair with his or her mother/father/partner/son/daughter [delete as applicable], in an oddly coincidental situation that happens to reflect recent events in the lives of the doctors treating said patient). Now, I think it’s flipped from endearing to slightly annoying. Oh well.

[These phrases were conspicuously absent from the excellent Hugh (Sometimes credited as Stephen Fry) Laurie drama House MD, which arrived on Channel 5 last night. The Casualty meets Six Feet Under “which one of them is going to get it” opening is a particularly nice touch.]

Er, hello, if there’s anybody left still reading. Sorry, I’m not entirely sure what happened to the last two weeks, and how I haven’t found the time to write anything here. I mean, jesus, I’m not Rob.

It’s not as if we haven’t been busy doing bloggable things: we have. If I hadn’t been so lazy busy with work, I might have told you about our lovely day trip to Brighton a couple of weekends ago, which contained just enough sunshine to leave us lightly toasted, and which was topped off with some excellent fish and chips. Maybe, if I had been bothered, I might have mentioned our highly successful bank holiday barbecue, during which we finally christened the February purchase that had up till that point spent most of its young life slowly rusting on the patio. I could even have told you about our multiple trips to Brick Lane, our attendance at yet another excellent First Friday (a particular highlight of which was watching one of my teenage heroes, the former Evening Session presenter Steve “good face for radio” Lamacq performing Babylon’s Burning in Punk Rock Karaoke), or our excursion to a rainy New Forest.

Sadly, I can’t tell you about any of those things, or describe any of the highly amusing japes we got up to and situations we found ourselves it. Too much time has passed, alas. You’ll just to make something up for yourselves.

Let us never speak of this again.

Now we all know that the London Underground network is mostly held together with sticky tape and bits of string, and it’s frankly surprising that the thing keeps running at all, but sometimes you do have to wonder. This morning it seemed like nobody had the slightest clue what was going on–getting a Northern Line train from Camden is always a bit of a gamble at the best of times, given that the train you want could come in first on one of two platforms on opposite sides of the station. There’s an indicator board at the bottom of the escalator, of course, but more often that not, helpfully, it’s wrong. Usually you can rely on what it says on the front of the train, but that obviously requires you to be on the platform, and isn’t much help when you realise that you actually should have been on the other one.

This morning, no one had the slightest idea what was going on. The train said “Bank”, the board said “Bank”, and even the driver said “Bank”, but the train, it turned out, was going to Charing Cross (“Sorry about that ladies and gentlemen. The driver’s always the last to find out…”) and I had to relinquish my seat and return to the platform where the announcer assured us that the next train would be a bank train. Except that the train thought it was going to Charing Cross, and, then, so did the announcer. Until he changed his mind and decided that it would only go to Euston. Er, terminate here. Er, Euston, actually, after all. Perhaps he just enjoyed the feeling of power at watching scores of slightly disgruntled commuters moving en masse to get on or off the train, as each decision was announced.

Last night, Sal and I headed over to Hammersmith to see Oasis run through a selection of their hits, alongside a few too many of the shabby songs off their new album. There was something slightly unpleasant about the atmosphere inside the venue when we arrived: I don’t know, perhaps it was just the high levels of drunkenness and testosterone in the air, perhaps it was just that your average Oasis fan isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, perhaps it was just the contrast between the inside of the Apollo and the atmosphere near green park, where Sal and I had spent the previous hour or so having a nice dinner followed by ice creams in the park. Or perhaps it was the fact that inside the gents shortly after we arrived there was a bloke who’d decided not to bother queueing with the rest of us who was casually relieving himself in one of the sinks as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Well, for him, perhaps it was.

I actually really enjoyed the gig, with the exception of the distinct lull in the middle when they chose to play the three worst songs on the new album (Meaning of Soul, Mucky Fingers, and A Bell Will Ring) back to back (it was obvious that most of those in attendance had never heard them before, but even the people who, like me, had somehow managed to have already heard the album for some reason seemed rather bored by it). But then they went back to playing the hits, so it was all ok (and, by the time they got to the Wonderwall/Don’t Look Back In Anger/My Generation encore, almost forgotten). Yeah, so I know it’s not big or clever to like Oasis, but I always did and I guess I still do. One particular highlight of the gig was listening to the girl behind me singing along–somehow the lines she was singing from Bring It On Down (“You’re the outcast. You’re the underclass….”) didn’t have quite the same force when you substituted her awfully posh and squeaky voice for Liam’s surly extended vowels.

Ah well, at least she was trying…