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It’s just as well that I haven’t really got any work to do today, because it’s meant that I have been able to spend most of the working day making travel arrangements for our upcoming holiday in Croatia. At least now it’s a holiday in Croatia. Until this morning it was a holiday in Venice, that being the closest place we could get an even remotely reasonably priced flight to at short notice. Now I’ve at least got us as far as Split on the Dalmatian coast, via an overnight ferry crossing from Ancona, in Italy (on which, for comedy value, but mostly owing to it being rather fully booked, we will be travelling out in a first class cabin, and back in–hopefully–a seat each). That arranged, I just had to get us down to Ancona, and I may or may not have booked that journey via the TrenItalia website, given that the online booking only appears to work in the Italian version of the site. Italian being a language I don’t speak, I had to stumble through with a mixture of educated guesses, based on my knowledge of French and Spanish, and Babelfish.

Ok then, mostly Babelfish, but fantastic tool that it is, it does seem to mostly come up with things like this, from my confirmation email:

Kind MATTHEW ARMSTRONG, we confirm to Them that l’acquisto of the travel from demanded She e’ state concluded with happening. In the ringraziarLa in order to have chosen Trenitalia.com we supply Them here of continuation the relative data you to its purchase.

(I mean that’s just sloppy: it hasn’t even bothered to translate some of the words, half of it is just gibberish, and even I can work out that “con successo” means “with success”, not “with happening”).

So, really, I could have booked anything. Which sort of adds to the fun, really.

Last night, Sal, myself, and a couple of friends (some of whom for some reason choose not to describe the minutiae of their lives on the InterWebNet, but most of whom do) went along to see how Richard Herring would produce an hour’s worth of comedy entertainment out of the series of modern-day Herculean tasks he’s been attempting (and documenting on his own corner of the Internet, thus cementing his position as “king of the nerds”).

His erstwhile comedy partner Stewart Lee had also initially been on the bill, but having “got a better offer” he was replaced by some young comics about to head off to Edinburgh and lose a lot of money, interspersed with the “talents” of compere, Logan Murray, performing (according to the copy of Time Out on my desk) as the character of Ronnie Rigsby, whose act was either meant to be awful in an ironic way, or just genuinely sub-Harry Hill rubbish. Given that he was actively encouraging the audience to heckle, (because his act mainly consisted of telling said hecklers to “fuck off”), I’m tempted to plump for the former, but either way it created the curious effect that, whenever one of the acts got into his stride and started to warm the crowd up, he had to go off to be replaced by the compere who cooled things back down nicely. Out of the five acts on the bill, four of them were passably amusing in a “I’ve seen a million stand ups do this sort of thing at this level” kind of way, and one of them was a man whose entire act consisted of encouraging the audience to throw chocolate bars at him.

Hercules… itself turned out to be a lot better than I thought it was going to be, although judging by his blog today it sounds like this was the first time the show itself really came together. It’s a shame I probably won’t get to see the finished version, if only because I won’t find out how he’s going to get all 12 tasks into a one hour show, given that he got through about 4 last night (and despite encouragement from the audience refused to carry on with the rest of his material), but what we heard was very funny.

After the gig, he did look rather taken aback by the gaggle of slightly drunken fans (curse those cheap Red Stripe pitchers) chatting to him at the bar, including the actually not drunken Angel, who settled for having parts of her body signed, having failed in her initial plan to throw her underwear at him (in an ironic way, of course. Aaah.)

After that we stumbled out of the venue and into Chinatown for a quick Chinese meal that I can barely remember, during which I made a rash promise to try out some hair product for the benefit of a certain large chemist store’s magazine, before catching the last tube home. I awoke this morning to find a monumentally painful splinter of indeterminate origin in my little finger that Sal helpfully suggested I should leave in there “until in grows out”. Painful business this comedy lark.

On one of those Evening Standard headline boards by the train station yesterday: “CLIFF RICHARD TICKET RIP-OFF”.

I didn’t have time to stop and find out, so does anyone out there know what the rip-off is, exactly? Perhaps the fact that they’re actually tickets to a Cliff Richard show?

Almost 8 months after moving into our flat (that’s 8 months into a 12 month lease), we’ve finally managed to persuade someone to charge us for our energy supplies. Unfortunately, in what is no doubt an affectionate tribute to the metric martyrs, the cheeky scamps at London Energy are clinging to the Imperial system and trying to charge us for our gas as if we had an old meter measuring usage in cubic feet, rather than a modern metric meter (thereby effectively charging us three times as much as they should be when they multiply our already metric reading by 3 as part of the imperial to metric conversion). I’m only two phone calls into the process so far, but I can already tell that what might to you or me seem like a simple thing to resolve (involving, oh, I don’t know, maybe looking at the meter, and paying particular attention to the bit where there is a huge letter m and a superscript 3, and then changing you records), is going to become another saga. The best bit is that when we move out in 4 months time, we get to do this all over again. Fantastic.

So said Sydney’s Alex Lloyd, two songs into his set last night on breaking a string. “No, I only brought one, ’cause I couldn’t be arsed to carry two”. He recovered well, though, sending his roadie (a spectacularly underemployed chap, given that there was only Lloyd, his acoustic guitar and his keyboard player onstage, who had spent almost the entire half hour it had somehow taken to set things up taping up some leads with gaffer tape) out the back to grab him a stack of spare strings. Lloyd then proceeded to perform the impressive feat of stringing and tuning his guitar while singing the next song, something that he repeated later in the gig after breaking a second string. (Presumably it was only the fact that it was a different string that prevented him from having to finish the gig with just five remaining on his guitar).

As I mentioned the other week, this was our first visit to the Brixton Academy. Sorry, the Brixton Academy Islington. We arrived at the venue just behind TNT magazine, which would be reviewing the gig after finishing her bagel (“outside, thanks love”). No such food-related incidents preventing our entry, we ventured inside, to discover a room even smaller than I’d expected it to be, and almost unbearably hot for most of the gig, until half way through when the bouncer at the side of the stage decided to open the doors to cheers from the section of the crowd within range of the air flow and a sense of relief all round.

Apart from the overpowering heat, and despite his inconsiderate decision to play a whole pile of stuff off his first album, the one I don’t have, the gig was great. No Everybody’s Laughing, but we did get Amazing, Hello The End, Black The Sun, Green, My Friend, 1000 Miles, and a rousing Coming Home, amongst others. He’s a remarkably laid back performer, strolling casually onstage, nonchalantly finishing his cigarette before getting started, but then launching into a performance of ever-so-slightly slower acoustic versions of his songs that a proper reviewer might describe as emotional or powerful. Let’s just say it’s inoffensive, melodic, guitar rock and leave it at that. As I said earlier, I’m not sure that playing a single, largely unpromoted, UK date to around 800 Aussie and NZ backpackers, me and the two other English blokes in the venue (who were standing in front of us) is quite going to break him over here, but then maybe that wasn’t the point at all, and it was just an excuse for him to have a holiday over here.

On the way home we topped off the surreal experience of going to a gig in a shopping centre by popping over the road into Sainsbury’s to pick up some groceries. Rock and Roll!

Oh, there’s only so many photos you can take of a slightly chubby chap playing acoustic guitar, but some of the ones I did take are here.

In a moment of distracted boredom earlier this afternoon, I stumbled across this article from the Guardian back in April, in which 3 bloggers talk about why they do it.

Ignoring for a second the slightly surreal but probably-seemed-better-in-context-in-an-issue-edited-by-Franz Ferdinand quote at the bottom, “Franz Ferdinand say…”, the article is worth reading if only for the following quote: “What tends to happen with me is that I’ll meet up with someone I haven’t seen for a while, attempt to make casual small talk about what I’ve been up to, and get stopped in my tracks as they tell me that they’ve already read it all. “Yeah, I know,” they’ll say, disinterestedly. It’s like starting a joke and having the punchline inserted by someone else.”

Yes! That’s exactly what happens to me. It’s rather disconcerting, actually, as I realise that I only have a limited number of anecdotes, and I’ve already used them all up.

Reading the Independent travel supplement over the weekend, I couldn’t help but notice their interview with French designer Philippe Starck. I supposed he’s entitled to his opinions, but he doesn’t half come across as a bit of a twat. Apart from telling a travel magazine that “the secret to travelling is to never read magazines – they wash your brain and depress you”, “everything involved in travelling is bad”, and “only stupid people travel”, he gloats about his “16 houses around the world” (which he visits in his “own plane”, carrying the luggage he “designed for Samsonite, because they are very good – they’re very light and soft”), and contradicts himself spectacularly:

Answering the question “To where would you never return?”, he says that he “will never go to a country where there is racism, fascism or where there is the Mafia.” So presumably he won’t be travelling to his house in Italy, or in fact staying in France at all any more, then. Even worse, two questions after his comments about racism, he’s asked where he would emigrate, only to answer that “emigrating is the worst mistake that people can make, unless it is completely necessary. I think people should always live where they are born and marry somebody of their own culture.” Er…?

Work Permit-approval-tastic. It looks like I won’t have to marry Sally in a hastily-arranged-for-visa-purposes marriage ceremony after all. Hurrah!

Quote of the evening from out celebrating this last night, after I jokingingly mentioned the fact that we won’t need to get married after all:

Our friend Ilana (to Sal): Oh, you must be so relieved.

I bought some tickets for a London cinema online a couple of weeks ago and have been on their email mailing list since then. I just clicked on the “unsubscribe” link, and it opened an almost blank page web page containing only the text:

“Your account has been deleted. Thanks for your loyalty Matthew”

Fantatsic: a sarcastic mailing list.

Despite our distance from the finish line creating the slight sense that we might just perhaps have been in one of the cheaper enclosures, on Saturday I increased my English-posh-quotient by several points by attending this year’s Henley Regatta along with a gaggle of unruly Aussies (actually, perhaps not by that many points after all).

Rather like being at a sporting event in the US, any actual sport taking place seemed somewhat peripheral to the whole experience, and the occasional rowers passing the white picket fence at the edge of our enclosure only detracted from the main purpose of the day: the consumption of alcohol. At the risk of showing my ignorance about these things, I might demonstrate this by pointing out that we’d been there for several hours before realising that they had actually started the day’s racing some time ago, although I did have a red-faced Matthew Pinsent almost pointed out to me at some point after that as he disappeared into the distance behind the passing Umpire’s boat.

Overall, the whole experience reminded me of being back in the first year at Bristol, but my prevailing image of the day will probably be the sight of the reverse side of a naked man being quietly asked (I presume) by the steward, or possibly police officer, standing next to him if he might just put his clothes back on (this, I assume, being the same naked chap who had earlier raced a naked friend to the other side of the race course and back again–the guys from the table who had arrived some time before that carrying three huge buckets, nay barrels, of ice, so big that they had be carried one between two, and almost a slab of beer each, although I’m sure none of these events were in any way connected).

Since returning to work, I’ve discovered that the group from work who also attended the Regatta as part of a morale boosting event must, in fact, have been in the enclosure next to us, but judging from the pictures that have been circulated, their day seems somewhat staid in comparison, lacking in the nudity, excessive alcohol consumption, and, towards the end, bad disco music that characterised mine. (There are pictures of my day too, but I’m not sure they do it justice either, although it would help if you imagined the music to be absolutely fucking awful when looking at the last two pictures).