On Tuesday Ash and I went for a post-work drink in the Blind Poet and then headed across the road to Phenecia to stuff ourselves silly with garlic-bomb houmous and tzatziki. It’s been a while since we’ve been out for a meal together and I really enjoyed it! We had the restaurant to ourselves and the waitress gave us exactly the right amount of inattention. I attempted heroically but failed to clean my heaping plate (a Little Chef/free lollipop bit of Pavlovian conditioning if ever I saw it) and so replete with North African comfort food we took a slightly desperate stroll home in the damp evening air to ward off the threatened gastric distress. The Phenecian Gentlemen’s Club (of which I was a sub-associate honourary member or something) may be gone, but it is not forgotten!

Davis came over to the flat for recording duty on Thursday night so I could finish off a couple more bass lines for our demo. We drank cheap red wine, talked Macs and fiddled with cabling and I even managed to get some bass playing in amongst it all. Almost as an afterthought I asked about and Davis showed me some basic blues soloing; I was flabbergasted by the simplicity of it and yet utterly incapable of using it to any great effect. So, not only is the ‘Fynn website back up but we have a demo tape/CD/web page/whatever in the offing and come the next gig I shall gamely ruin Locomotive Blues with an abortive attempt at “improvisation”. Full steam ahead!

Having bought a new (old) camera from Amazon the other day, we toddled up to Princes Street gardens on Saturday afternoon to try it out and had an expectedly awesome tourist interlude for a couple of hours. We ate overpriced hot dogs and drank coffee on a patio in gale-force winds, took in the 3dinburgh design exhibition and pottered around my favourite graveyard in the shadow of both St. Cuthbert’s and St. John’s. I can’t put my finger on quite why the afternoon was so much fun, but I think it’s just a happy confluence of a number of factors: my diary is joyously empty for the next week, Ash’s visa quest is out of our hands (and hence out of our minds) until her appointment through in Glasgow at the end of July, and work is rather obviously running smoothly.

I was feeling conspicuously relaxed in advance of the evening’s entertaining, when we had Jez, Serena, Neil and Vanessa round for dinner. I think we’ve been a bit remiss of late in getting together with the usual suspects and I must say I was replete with joy to have everyone round. Ash cooked a monstrous Southern feast (I tried to help, honestly; but whenever I turned my back for a moment some new dish had materialised and all I could do was serve it up) and I acted as barman for the evening. After some amaretto-fortified coffee I unpacked the stereo and slipped on some CCR under the radar whenever no-one was looking.

On Sunday morning I paid in full for the previous evening’s indulgences but it was damn well worth it: food, friends and a few snifters is a nigh-on foolproof recipe for a perfect night.

I had an 80/- instead, as is my current wont. The resultant hangover from these bad boys is an entirely different matter. Where Stella neatly dangles a red-hot poker directly into the nerve centres of one’s conscious mind, causing flashes of truly criminal pain to strike whenever one moves (hence the couch-bound nature of the typical Stella afflictee), an 80/- hangover is a more pastoral experience. The entire brain is enveloped in a slowing, treacly fug that retards one’s movement and thought processes and which gently encourages one onto the couch. I cannot help but think fondly of such mornings, in stern contrast to the near-death experiences meted out by la famille Artois.

Anyway, Dom and I blew any sort of controlled hangover experiment out of the water by sharing a bottle of wine next door in the Apartment while Mart stuck chastely to bottled water. I’ve been to the Apartment once before, back in the mists of time, and could remember nothing about the experience apart from the fact that the waiting staff are either wafty model wannabes who move only from the waist down, or cheeky chappies who confuse absolutist browbeating over menu choices with friendly service.

This time round we had a friendly waiter who could actually have been a little more forward with menu suggestions, a so-so meal (waiter: “Oh, the chunky healthy lines are a bit dull sometimes. You should have gone for the sea bass if you’d wanted fish. And here’s your bill.”) and a seat at the window, and I can’t really complain. The food might have been dull but the company most assuredly wasn’t and we talked non-stop until we decamped (decanted might be a more appropriate term) to the Traverse for a final jar. A great night!

Apart from that, and a nice evening round at Neil and Vanessa’s on Thursday, it feels like we’ve been a bit static of late. Ash’s visa travails seem to be occupying most of the spare mental energy we both have with scouring websites and phoning contradictory helplines whenever we get the chance. The idea that a Canadian national should find it so hard to live here for an extended period of time without having to jump through flaming bureaucratic hoops is starting to annoy me!

With a remark of Jeff’s in the back of my mind (“You and Dev should write restaurant reviews,” he’d said offhandedly as we were walking up to the cinema the other night, and the idea stuck), I must admit that I was already grasping for Brysonesque anecdotes to throw nonchalantly into an entry about the weekend. Maybe I’d poke fun at the tiny starter or the fact that the radiator next to the table and the wonderful meaty kitchen aroma were sending me into a blissful old-before-my-time daze, or perhaps—hang on, is that a bone Ash just pulled out of her mouth?

Ah no. It was a piece of clear white plastic.

That pretty much holed the dining experience below the waterline (along with, alas, my positively droll 5-star review) although the head waiter/maître d’ did an excellent job in dealing with it, somehow communicating directly into my mind not to worry about paying for that particular dish without letting on to the diners around us that anything at all was amiss. I guiltily shovelled the rest of my (tasty, entirely organic) steak into my mouth and despite a residual sense of vague surprise at the poulet au plastique, we polished off a slice of apple pie and the rest of our beers.

Bizarrely, I’d rather recommend the place: keep the containers out of the food and it’d be on the money for a night of indulging oneself in pleasures of the (bovine) flesh.

In other news, Coba Fynn are gearing up for a two-pronged attack on the Scottish music scene: a gig is booked at the Liquid Ship on the 5^th of April, and a recording is in the offing, driven by Doug and Davis’ obsessive, shared love of intricate wiring diagrams and four-track recording. Of course I imply nothing by the term “shared love”, and I posit that without their obsession we would still be flailing around wondering why every recording sounds like arse. Keep it Coba (is what all the cool kids are saying)!