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Apparently Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell wrote ‘Leave Me Alone’, off their debut album on the number 29 bus. (“…Borrell worked stops from the route of the Number 29 – the London Bus he wrote the track on – into the song“)

Hey! That goes right past my house. In fact, sometimes I catch that bus down to the tube, when it isn’t too busy to get on. Can’t say I’ve ever felt the inspiration to write a song while shoved up into the armpits of some smelly commuter, though, let alone take my guitar with me…

Paris excepted, all of my recent trips to Europe have been to countries where I have no language skills whatsoever. Having got completely fed up with feeling like the stupid uneducated Brit abroad, I resolved to do something about this, and at least make some cursory efforts to learn a few words of the language of any future countries I plan to visit.

My first brush with Estonian might have had to wait until we caught the taxi from the airport, but I am wonderfully well prepared in comparison for our upcoming trip to Budapest: this morning, my latest Amazon package arrived on my desk, and within it was the Time Out guide to said Eastern European city. Surely the single page of basic expressions at the back of this rather small book will set me well on the way to conversing fluently in one of the most difficult European languages. However, I am rather concerned that, amongst perhaps 20 or 30 expressions that the illustrious editors chose to include–the phrases they expect visitors to the city will find most useful, and need to use most often–is this one:

Getting Around

When is the train for Vienna?
Mikor indul a becsi vonat?

Not exactly the ringing endorsement of the city’s charms that I had been hoping for.

My afternoon was enlivened considerably by an email from Camden council. Nothing to do with the contents of the email, but all to do with the fact that they have configured their email server to show just the sender’s surname in the “From:” field, and this email happens to be about my council tax account, so shows just my account number in the “Subject:” field.

So this missive appears in my inbox as:

From: Prime
Subject: [7 digit number]

I can only presume that “Prime” is the evil robot that has taken over the council, and this email contains my instructions for the next phase.

in an old school hall
celeb fame academy
on my way to work

It was only this morning, and I think the jumbo red nose stuck to the entrance might have been the give away, that I realised why there’s been crowds of youngsters hanging around the old lambeth college every night for the last week as I walked past it on my way home from work. Turns out, as the InterWeb confirms, that after it closed down as a college last year, it was bought by Endemol (or perhaps it closed down as a college because it was bought by Endemol), and is therefore the location for filming of Celebrity Fame Academy. So if you were ever wondering where to go to tell Patrick Kielty what you think of him, now you know.

And before I forget:

Justin Lee Collins
At the first friday club night
Heading for the bar

After finally getting completely fed up with the ISP that likes to charge for no service, I told Virgin.net that I’d like to move off their £25 a month “no service” plan, and picked myself a new ISP.

This time, I plumped for Homechoice, who were prepared to offer me broadband at twice the speed of Virgin.net (when they deigned to provide a service at all) plus TV on demand through the phone line, at not much more than I was previously paying Branson’s lot (they also offered the option to take all the Sky Sports channels, much to Sal’s displeasure…). Seemed like a good deal to me, and for about 4 hours after it was installed, it was. Unfortunately, since then, and for the last week, we’ve been having some interesting interference problems between the TV service/broadband, and the phone (basically, you can hear the data traffic coming through the phone line, and if you happen to be trying to use the net or watch any of the Homechoice TV channels when you pick up the phone, the TV picture freezes, and you lose your connection). Unfortunately, it seems that Homechoice’s “technical” support might not be all it’s cracked up to be. My conversation with them last weekend went something like this:

Me: …the phone line works fine when there’s only a phone plugged into it, but as soon as I plug the Homechoice Set Top Box into the line as well, I can hear the modem dialling up, and then all the data traffic…
Customer Service Monkey: You’ve got a modem plugged in to the line?

Me: Er, yes. It’s inside the Homechoice Set Top Box that you supplied to me. That’s how it connects to the network…
CSM: Well, it sounds like a filter problem.
Me: I don’t think it is–I’ve tried three different filters, one of which you supplied to me, and two I used with my previous supplier with no problems for the last year.
CSM: Sounds like a filter problem to me. Do you have any other filters you could try?
Me: Er, no. Just the three…
CSM: Can you hang on, I’ll just check with my supervisor.
[a few minutes later]
CSM: Yes. We think it’s a filter problem.
(repeat ad infinitum…)

Of course it’s not a filter problem (or at least it is not a problem with the filter I have plugged in to the phone line, although it may be a problem with the filter at the exchange), and the engineer they eventually sent out agreed (it’s also not a problem with any other equipment inside the house). It’s not a problem with the line, because a BT engineer has already been out to test that. As I say, it may be a problem at the exchange, but Homechoice don’t seem to know/care, or be able to get anyone down there to find out.

Hmm. Which leaves me with a working phone line, and a working broadband/TV connection, but not both at the same time*. So InterWebNet, what’s going on, and what can I do? I’m stuck.

*Needless to say, it may not be a good idea to phone our landline any time there’s a live Everton game on Sky Sports…

Clearly it’s all downhill from here: the second 10,000 days of your life are obviously going to be nowhere near as good as the first, are they?

Maybe this is why 27 is the Rock Star Death age?

Further updates to come in 2032 if/when I clock over to 20,000 days…

It’s just as well that Rob pointed it out, or I might have missed out on celebrating my 10,000th day birthday. If that’s not enough to make you feel old on a random wintery day in March, then I don’t know what is.

Oh, I see that Glasto ticket details are up on the website. Basically as you were (Sunday April 3rd, 9AM, Aloud “Sorry we are experiencing Technical Difficulties, please Try Again Later” .com, and the expected price increase), but one bit of added hassle (for me at least) is the new ID requirements: it’s photo ID this year, but as a non-driver, the only form of acceptable ID I can produce is some silly Blanketts-esque Citizen Card thing that I’d have to apply for.

(Insert your own joke here about the irony of Glastonbury of all places pushing the whole entitlement card thing–perhaps I could organise a ceremonial burning of the cards once everyone has gained entry to the festival). And I don’t suppose there’s a Doctor, Solicitor or Civil Servant reading who could act as a referee for me…

I’ve also been browsing the logs again. Yes, I know that’s always makes a poor, lazy excuse for a blog (ah, but isn’t this always…), and only one step above just writing blogs all the time apologising for not writing any new blogs, but it does provide consistent amusement. From yesterday’s log file, I can see that Paste is being hammered again by the poker comment spam idiots (none of which is thankfully making it anywhere near the site), but there are some revealing search gems in amongst all the Texas hold em crap. Yesterday:
– at least two of the original contributors to the magazine independently googled themselves
– someone was looking for “the fish shop in Islington” (well I hope they found what they were looking for…)
– assorted other people were after “Victorian morals AND breasts“, “cartoon orang utangs“, and “merged photos of john lennon and jacky chan”
– and finally, my favourite: someone wondered “who is writing David Hasselhoff reviews amazon“. Ok, I admit it, it was me all along. All 1000 of them.

Continuing our tour of the accession countries, Sal and I, and a couple of our friends, are off to Budapest at the end of the month. One of said friends has already booked us in to a posh restaurant for the Saturday night, and, in an idle moment at work, I was checking out the restaurant’s website.

I’d only just got over the delights of the psychedelic menu navigation system, when I spotted their excellent references page (top of the list on the right).

Fantastic. If it’s good enough for the Hoff, it’s good enough for me…

On Saturday night, as the slowly fading stamp on the back of my hand suggests, we headed out in our new neighbourhood to enjoy the delights of drinking in a couple of slightly too crowded venues. After a few drinks at the typically heaving Lock Tavern, where we were forced out onto the terrace, we made our way to the Barfly for what we had hoped would be a suitably indie-themed evening of randomness. The music policy was a touch too eclectic for my liking, and the DJs were largely unresponsive to Sal’s requests, despite the fact that she had self-consciously plumped for choices at the cooler end of the spectrum of our shared interests (although she did manage to extract a few moments of The Killers out of them, and they also came through with a sublime electroclash remix of Seven Nation Army). Upstairs, we caught a couple of ok bands: the Edwyn Collins-esque Vincent Vincent and the Villains (who prompted Rhys to alert me to the recent sad news about said Scottish crooner), and the strangely entertaining Metro Riots, fronted by a rather shouty chap wearing army uniform and a captain’s armband, who prompted the front half of the tiny performance room to begin moshing furiously.

I spent most of the rest of the evening spilling beer over myself, although there was just time to squeeze in a celebrity spot, which brings to two the number of presenters I’ve seen off of T4’s shabby music show…

Celebrity Spotting Haiku

that girl from Pop World
drinking in the Barfly club,
looking a bit bored

Sunday

On Sunday, we eventually decided to sort out what remained of our hangovers by heading for leafy, gentle Hampstead. Rather disappointingly, the pub we suggested for Sunday lunch (the Freemason’s Arms) has been taken over in the 6 or so months since I was last there. What used to be a lovely little pub has had its charm and atmosphere ripped out to be replaced by what amounts to a slick but rather soulless restaurant. The last time we were there, (also a Sunday, and at about the same time of day), the place was packed full of people enjoying a leisurely Sunday lunch. Now, most of what used to be a very large pub has been turned into a restaurant that you can’t sit in if you aren’t eating and that stops serving food at 2.30. You also can’t sit in the restaurant part when the restaurant is closed because “we need to set up for dinner”. Luckily, the fact that this limits your choice of seating to the four or five tables they’ve deigned to leave available near the bar doesn’t actually matter because the new management appear to have successfully turned a thriving and busy pub into one that is almost empty. Given that the only food on offer was a small bowl of nuts at £2.50, they successfully turned us away too, and we took our hungry business somewhere else.

To the Brixton Academy, on Saturday night, to see the 21st century’s answer to Shed Seven: The Killers. It was a particularly crowded academy, too, and there was a palpable sense of expectation in the air when we arrived. Somehow we managed to squeeze into a spot down the front just in time before the band took to the stage, but in the event it probably wouldn’t have mattered where we had been located in the venue–at most gigs there is a clear divide between the excited few energetically enjoying themselves at the front, and the crossed-armed masses nodding their heads and tapping their feet at the back. On Saturday night The Killers did away with all that–for most of the gig it seemed as if the entire standing audience was merrily jumping up and down in unison.

I suppose that means that The Killers specialise in unchallenging, crowd-pleasing indie guitar pop. Then again, I like unchallenging, crowd-pleasing indie guitar pop. All of which made this one of the most enjoyable gigs I’ve seen for a long time.

The ghost of Rick Witter lives.