The drive From Santa Barbara to Los Angeles went smoothly enough; mid-morning, the traffic was still reasonably fluid and we made it to West Hollywood without too much drama. We dropped the ‘car’ off at a Hertz branch at the Renaissance Hollywood and lugged our bags the few blocks west to our humbler lodgings. Just [...]
December 21st, 2009
November 12th, 2006
We dispatched Alabama in a couple of days
in a cross-country dash to Tennessee. Mobile provided antiquated, grand accommodation, helping us by degrees back to earth from the rarefied heights of the Quarterhouse, while Birmingham was so deserted in the Biblical silence of a Sunday afternoon that we decided to press on to the next big city. The swampy land around Mobile gave [...]
October 11th, 2005
The juggernaut of Hat Night ’05
swung inexorably into action on Friday evening. The usual crew assembled at the old flat and the games began: hats were assigned and Josh concocted (I can’t bring myself to say ‘made’, not when the end result tastes like 100° proof cough medicine) a batch of ‘Liquid Gold’ to fuel the proceedings. Ali A wasn’t [...]
September 26th, 2005
Joy of vests:
vests are great. As I approach 28, I find myself unaccountably interested in wearing them. Fortunately, Jez led a small expedition to the wanky bars of the west end on Friday night, and I proudly lowered the tone by attempting to rock the Swingers look in the vastly unsuitable surroundings of Halo and Indigo Yard. [...]
June 28th, 2005
Vegas Two Times.
First thing the next morning (okay, 11 am) we had a blackjack lesson, supplied free of charge by the casino. The croupier was entertaining, although by the end of it I was more bemused than I was at the beginning: blackjack is entirely a game of predictable chance, and I couldn’t quite grasp why anyone [...]
February 7th, 2005
I’ve done nothing worthy
of writing about this week, apart from vegetate in front of films and spout bad chat afterwards. And look for flats, but trust me: writing here about that would turn the RF from merely dull to so boring that you’d hunt me down just to make the torrent of asinine, self-referential tedium stop. This is [...]
August 14th, 2004
What a cracking couple of days.
Thursday’s TM practise was, I think, the best yet. It got off to a shaky start – we’ve been playing some songs more or less since we started, and I suspect we’re not as strict with ourselves when we play them as we should be. Once we got on to Sister Isabel*, though, everything just [...]