Snow laughing matter

Published on Wed 16 Dec 2009

It looks a lot like it's going to snow. I'm not keen on snow. It makes a noise like polystyrene when you walk on it and gets stuck in your shoes then makes puddles on your carpet. And it causes transport chaos. Bah humbug. At least it looks pretty.

The Morning People played for the first time in absolutely ages on Saturday, and I had a much better time than usual due to having a proper keyboard that I'm getting the hang of now. It's a bit more awkward to transport than the crap little casiotone though - turns out taxi drivers aren't really keen to have large items in their cars for some reason. The guy on the way there made me turn it upside down because the bottom of the case might have touched the ground at some point, and then was making a big point of checking his seats for compression damage when we took it out. Then on the way back the first guy refused to take Dave and me because we had too much stuff and told us to get a people carrier. When that eventually turned up the guy, who I'm going to call Jabba the Taxi Driver, arbitrarily said it was £15 to go about half a mile because we had luggage. I asked what difference it made, and he said because of the lifting and I said we'd be doing the lifting, and then he got angry and drove off eating some small slimy creature in a single gulp and chaining Carrie Fisher to the back seat. We should've taken it though because when Dave rang up and complained they said it'd be £16 now. 90 minutes standing around on Hills Road in the early hours of the morning. Lovely. It's a shame that there's only one taxi company left in Cambridge. Someone should start a new one that isn't run by arseholes and understands that they aren't actually doing you a favour and are bloody lucky we're all lazy enough to pay six quid a pop to be driven a couple of hundred yards.

Almost the opposite thing happened on Monday night when I accidentally went to see Leatherface at The Portland on Monday. Chris and I had gone for a quick post work pint before he went off to the gig, during which he somehow convinced me that going along too would be more fun than just going and sitting at home on my own. We left the pub, which is on a backstreet, and a for hire taxi pulled straight up. "Must be fate" I thought. I do a lot of things these days because I think they're fate, even though it's fairly obvious that if fate does exist it doesn't like me all that much. I've just bought a rather more expensive than I had planned to volume pedal for my keyboard because I was checking them out on ebay one morning and Jinder posted on Facebook that he'd just won one he didn't want in a competition. Fate. It's not turned up yet, but I bet it'll make a massive difference to something somehow. I'm not a huge fan of punk music, not so much becaue of the music itself but because of the general attitude, but the show was really good. The first act I saw, Vanilla Pod, were fun and catchy, and the second guy whose name escapes me, but is out of Snuff (who I saw supporting NOFX earlier in the year) varied from pretty dire to total genius. I might actually try and learn one of their songs if I can find a recording of it somewhere. Leatherface themselves were so loud you could physically feel it, but that kind of thing is great if you try and forget about your ears hurting. I also took the opportunity to get a bit further into credit with Charlie Boorman's By Any Means quiz machine (it's still new, so either hasn't figured out how hard it needs to be yet or is trying to entice people in by giving money away).

I'm doing my third and final full band thing of the year at The Cornerhouse on Sunday. Finding it pretty hard to get excited about playing my own stuff at the moment, and this will be the night after a stag do I'm going to in Birmingham, but maybe it'll be good. Maybe I'll be in that over tired state where I start saying funny things. We're practicing tomorrow so I'll know more then. I got given a black Santa hat with Bah Humbug on it, so I might well wear that.

Look at this I saw in Tesco - the least worthwhile piece of censorship since they decided to blank out the word "ass" in Two and a Half Men. Especially as they've not covered up the title on the spine.