hey man, now you're really living....

At the supermarket this week, I tried to liven up my mundane life by changing my breakfast cereal of choice.  Now, normally of a morning, I like to have a sesame seed bagel with some marmalade or golden syrup or something lightly spread across the top.  I do like my bread, after all.  On some mornings though, I just hanker after something different.

It is for mornings like those that I keep a box of cereal in my kitchen cupboard.  Yeah.  That's how I roll.  I've tried various sorts, but my default cereal of choice is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.  I find their advertising tedious in the extreme, but I like a cereal sweet enough without being entirely infantile or smothered in chocolate.

Anyway.  I wanted a change.  After a few seconds of consideration, I picked up a box of original Alpen and popped it into the trolley.

Living the dream.

In some ways, it's a nostalgic choice.  We used to have this at home when I was growing up and it's a very aspirational cereal from the 1980s.  It's worthy enough, up to a point, but it's not quite in the same category as some of those newer, pricier mueslis and granolas that look like unsweetened bird food - never mind the fact that anyone who has any kind of middle class pretension is mixing their own granola nowadays.  Yeah.  It might be naff, but I've never been a dedicated follower of breakfast cereal trends, so Alpen would certainly do for those mornings when I don't fancy a bagel.

It would do just fine.

My wife wasn't so sure:
"Why have you picked Alpen?"
"I like Alpen"
"But it's a woman's cereal"
"What?  Why would you say something like that?  How exactly is Alpen a woman's cereal?"
"They sponsor 'Grey's Anatomy' on the telly"
"Oh.  Right".

I bought it, but such is my disapproval of their televisual sponsorship choices that it tastes like ashes in my mouth.

if there's a bustle in your hedgerow...

Evening. I've been tidying up a few dusty, neglected corners.

The gig list has been updated. We're approaching the end of the first quarter of the year now, but is it just me, or is 2009 looking a bit thin on the gig front? Still, it's Elbow tomorrow (at the Sheffield Academy), so it's not all bad....

I've also scratched around in the cavernous, echoing recesses of my mind to try to remember what books I've been reading since the back end of last year. You can find that list here, and regular followers of this may be surprised and delighted to find that I've mostly put the comics aside and have been reading proper, honest-to-goodness books. Mostly Ian Rankin books, it's true.... I'm afraid I've discovered Inspector Rebus and have been steadily working through the series in chronological order.

I've also been doing a bit of moonlighting over at The Art of Noise. Ben's been running a feature called "Memories Can't Wait" for a few weeks now: every couple of weeks we write about songs that remind us of a particular topic. So far we've done:

New Beginnings (I wrote about "Bad Luck Blue Eyes Goodbye" by the Black Crowes)
School ("From Out of Nowhere" by Faith No More)
Winter ("Romeo And Juliet" by Dire Straits)
A Friend ("The Riddle" by Nik Kershaw and what Jim didn't fix for me)

(yes, this does so far seem to be an exercise in how much I can embarrass myself....)

Also on the Art of Noise, LB's had a crack at acting the svengali in "Conceptual Art" and has put his fantasy band together. Timberlake. Chisholm. Filan. O'Meara. Barlow. Dreamy.

My imaginary band is also now up.... and as it contains a 67 year old in semi-retirement, a dead Bahamian guitarist, an entirely fictional bassist and a 66 year old recluse who produces albums at a rate of one every 11 years and thinks a side of pork is a percussion instrument, it's got to be worth a look, right? Rock and Roll!

Right. That's it.

As you were.