It has been, to be honest, a pretty mundane couple of weeks. I’ve been been inexorably pulled back to work in the office (rather than at home) by a day more each month, and now I’m back up to four days in, one day out. Coupled with this, I’m not convinced I can ride my bike safely yet: the big, wide mountain bike handlebars donated when I was building it are a stretch too far for my elbow and anyway, my arm is still a bit weaker than I’d like it to be. So, I end up spending alarming amounts of both time and money on public transport while any degree of fitness I possessed slowly ebbs away.

Okay, so replace “mundane” above with “rather depressing”. To cut a long story short, I was starting to get a bit scunnered.

There is light at the end of the (train) tunnel, though. My consultant, the estimable Mr Oliver, now opines that the smallest of the three pins in my arm—the one at the olecranon, put in there to hold the ulna together—can almost certainly come out in a few months’ time. This is good news, because that’s one that I can feel rubbing against the bone when I put my arm down on a desk, and might just be restricting the extension a bit. And hell, I almost enjoy surgery by this point. Hit me with some more of that sweet, sweet morphine, Christoph!

Next, in case that doesn’t happen, or the joint is just fundamentally restricted for good, I’m rebuilding the bike with a pair of aero bars to shorten the required reach. Through a process of deliberately flawed reasoning, I’ve used this as a justification to invest in a pair of disc brakes and hence a whole new epic bike-building project with which to regale you, dear reader, and which commenced last week as the first new parts arrived.

Things finally started happening again at the weekend.

On Friday evening I hurried through a sunlit George Square to meet up with Ash in Ad Lib in the Merchant City, collapsed into a booth and then ate myself silly. Ash murdered a steak and I took apart a seafood risotto as we drank a few beers and talked about nothing in particular. The restaurant has a bit of a ’30s feel with marble and tiling all around which shone in the reflected sunlight, and I was as happy as Larry for not much more reason than I had a beer in my hand, king prawns in my belly and my girlfriend across from me. We hit the 13th Note for a couple more, then sat outside Mono until the chill in the air finally got the better of us and we jumped on the last bus home, full, fou and unco happy.

The next day I took the Trøll over to a Saab garage in Govan. The MOT is in the offing and the clutch is bordering on absent, so I wanted a professional estimate of the financial damage. The owner took it for a spin round the block to check it out and I was slightly shocked by the sheer volume when it burbled back into the garage, that oddly distinctive exhaust note echoing off the walls.

“It’s loud, isn’t it?” I said to him as we regarded its oily bits, up on the ramp.

“Aye, it’s the 16-valve,” he replied. “I used to work on these when I was a lad. Really great motors all round.”

I am not ashamed to say that I felt a bout of intense, faintly ridiculous man-pride at that moment, my choice of retro-Swedish yuppie glamour making this lifetime Saab mechanic misty-eyed with nostalgia. We shook hands and I promised to bring it back next weekend.

The rest of the week shot by in a blur of train journeys and deadlines at work. I visited Jeff at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as he recuperated from an operation to reattach his Achilles tendon (I hadn’t thought I’d be returning the favour quite so soon), and then charged back to Glasgow last night for a Coba Fynn gig at the Liquid Ship. Charlie and I though we were good; Doug was ambivalent and Davis was hopping with morose rage. The ‘Fynn returns!