it's my only joy...

Someone asked me today if I was having a dry January.  I think I may actually have recoiled in horror at the very thought of it.  Hell no!  January is one of the darkest and most dreary months of the year; everyone is fairly miserable because they're back to work after a nice break over Christmas.  Why the hell would anyone think that this was a good time of year to be giving up anything, nevermind the sweet consolations of alcohol?

But of course, that's exactly what loads of people do every New Year: give up drinking, give up smoking, join a gym, start eating more healthily.... good luck to them, I say.

Perhaps this is taking things too far though:

(This prompted uproar on Facebook, and I was particularly tickled by the comment in response "Sometimes if I feel a little weak, I'll treat myself to a big cry and drink my tears with a small squeeze of lemon and enough rage to see me through till home time." Also, showering *before* you run? Really?  It's okay though, guys.... she likes Creme Eggs.  Although perhaps not since they changed them? That doesn't explain the whole shower-before-exercise thing, mind.....)

I like a beer.  I really do.  I look forward to a beer at the end of a long week.  The idea of giving up strikes me as a needless act of self-denial.  I like drinking beer and I like shopping for interesting beer in the interesting beer shop just around the corner.  Oktoberfest beers were great, but then we were into Christmas beers and I've been very much enjoying the Belgian festive brews that he stocks.....

Then I thought about it: I barely actually drink at all and I don't especially like being drunk.  I enjoy beer but drink perhaps four pints a week, maybe five.  I also quite like wine, but I've still got a bottle open in the kitchen that I started drinking at the beginning of December.  I actually don't drink during the week at all.  Compared to some, I'm practically teetotal.

But I like beer!

In fact, to hell with it: I'm going to have a beer right now.  On a Thursday night and everything.  I'll use it to wash down my kale salad with pistachios, olives, dried cherries, argan oil and just a tiny amount of apple cider.

Rock and roll.

I get by with a little help from my friends....

Caption Competition Time:

Any suggestions for an appropriate caption for this photo?  The prize for the winner is the £1 hat I bought on the sea-front and am modelling in this picture.... Never mind the quality, feel the price.

It was a marvellous weekend.  Whilst Ringo was enjoying crazy golf, archery, and drinking £2 pints of cooking lager in the worst hotel in the world, his Barbara Bach-to-be was in Amsterdam drinking cosmopolitans, eating Michelin starred food and...er... visiting the Purse Museum.

WE WIN!

A good time was had by all (Johnny Cash made an appearance or two, anyway), and as far as I'm aware, we all survived the weekend mostly intact and made our ways safely home.

As Roger Murtaugh would doubtless have said:

I'm very much looking forward to the wedding next month.  Less karaoke, but doubtless more of the same reckless drinking.  This time in suits.  As it's at my old school, that will be just like old times.

remember me to one who lives there....

At about midnight on Saturday night, I met some students just about to start their first term at University.  It was in Scarborough, and they introduced themselves to us because wanted to know why we were taking photos of a guy dressed as Ringo Starr from the Sergeant Pepper's album cover as he posed on a lifeguard hut on Scarborough beach.

To be honest, I thought that was self-evident: we were clearly on a stag do, and Ringo - the stag - was clearly having a Hasselhoff moment.  What else would he possibly be doing up there?

Anyway.  We got talking.  It turns out that Freshers Week started on Monday, and they had just moved up to Scarborough and were having their first night out on the town.  I'll be honest and say that I didn't even know the town had a University, and although it's a nice enough place for a weekend on the sauce with your mates, I'm not sure that I'd like to spend three years there..... but their enthusiasm and excitement was infectious and they were good company for the hour or so they spent with us and the increasingly dishevelled groom-to-be.

It's one of those landmark moments in a life, isn't it?  Going up to University.  Except that I'm not sure it really was for me.

From the age of seven to the age of eighteen, I attended boarding school.  By the time I left, I was already well accustomed to staying up late, drinking with my mates and more-or-less doing whatever I pleased.  I enjoyed University, but it wasn't the formative experience that it seemed to be for many of the people around me.  Looking back, I don't think it's any coincidence that I'm barely in touch with anyone I met at University, and almost all of my closest friends are old school friends.

As we walked up from the beach towards the next bar, I discovered that Ringo felt almost exactly the same way as me.  He's getting married in the chapel of our old school in October, and he asked me if I enjoyed school as I always seem to be so negative about the place.  Well, it's true that I certainly wouldn't send my own children to a place like that, and I wouldn't want to get married there either, but it was nevertheless one of the most shaping experiences of my life.  For better and for worse, it played an enormous part in making me the person that I am today: arrogant, opinionated, emotionally withdrawn.... and no doubt a few negative traits too.  University was good enough, I suppose, but I don't think had anywhere near the same impact on me as my school days.

Still, looking at these excited kids, just starting out on their University careers, and even I'm not curmudgeonly enough to wish them anything but the best.

Not just yet, anyway.

close my eyes and drift away....

After a huge blowout "help us drink our excess booze before we go away" party on Saturday (2 bottles of decent champagne, several bottles of white wine, some proper cellared red-wine that needed drinking, some other assorted bottles of red wine and a bottle of cellared Sauternes dessert wine.... all *after* a quick two hour trip to the pub), I think it's fair to say that I had a fairly quiet Sunday.

A lazy pub lunch before we said goodbye to our visitors and retreated back to bed for book, "Ghostbusters", CSI and the Simpsons.  I did get up again, but only to come downstairs to read some more of my book in front of the fire with some homemade soup.

I've had worse days.

.... and I could have done with more of the same today, to be honest.  Still, four more days of this and then that's me done for the next few months, so I'd probably best not complain too loudly, eh?  My boss even managed to get around to announcing (via email) that I was leaving to one set of my customers today.  Perhaps he'll tell a few more before I actually go.  Less than a week's notice.  Not bad going when he's known for 3 months.  I doubt they'll really notice I've gone.

...nor any drop to drink

Ten days ago, I went to dinner with a few friends round at someone's house. It wasn't a formal thing, but we had a nice joint of roast lamb, a good old chinwag and drank wine. A lot of wine. We started on the champagne, and although the champagne kept on coming throughout the night, at some point we also started on the red and I ended up with two glasses on the go. It was one of those nights and it was a lot of fun.

Inevitably, when I woke up on Sunday morning, I felt a little bit groggy. It wasn't one of those hangovers that completely knock you for six and give you a huge pounding headache and all the rest of it - I hadn't been that drunk - but it was one of those ones where you just feel a touch wonky; off-centre somehow.  I tried dozing for a while, but after a bit, I just gave up and got out of bed to go for a swim. It was as I got up that I noticed that my arms and shoulders were feeling particularly weak. Although the symptoms of my multiple sclerosis affect my whole body, I seem to have been particularly affected in my upper body, and over the last few years I have suffered a degree of muscle wastage across my arms and shoulders and they have become weaker (it's a bit chicken and egg this: the MS leads to weakness, and the weakness leads to muscle wastage...which leads to more weakness). I've noticed in the past that I tend to feel my symptoms a bit more heavily the morning after I've been drinking, and I sometimes have to be quite careful to "feel" the floor as I put my feet down when I get out of bed the morning after the night before. On the whole, it's something that I've tried not to think about too much, but this particular Sunday morning, the conclusion seemed inescapable: drinking seemed to have flared up my MS symptoms.

I did some googling and found out that other people have felt like this too, with red wine apparently being a particular culprit. Some people found it so bad that they had just given up drinking altogether. I like a drink, and I suppose you roll the dice with a hangover every time you have a few, but this was something else. I had plenty of time to think about it as it took a few days for the feeling in my arms and shoulders to return to something approaching normal. Suddenly, the decisions I make about how much alcohol I drink had become more complicated.... a hangover is one thing, but a flare up of these other symptoms? That's maybe something else altogether.

I wasn't planning to stop drinking, but I haven't actually had an alcoholic drink since that night. In the normal course of events, most weeks I will have the odd glass of wine or bottle of beer with my dinner, a few at the pub on a Wednesday night at the quiz, and a few more at the weekend. For the last ten days, I just haven't. It's not actually been very difficult at all, and I've suddenly learned that I sometimes feel that groggy and unsteady first thing in the morning when I'm stone cold sober. On the whole, I'm not sure that's a very nice thought.

This weekend, I decided that I wanted to drink some beer, but I was on something of a no-alcohol roll, and I didn't want to break my momentum, so I popped out for some non-alcoholic beer. My dad used to buy us Kaliber (0.05%) when I was a teenager, but it's not really an item that has featured very highly on my shopping list since those days. Why would it? What's the point? I bought some Becks Blue (0.05%) and was very pleasantly surprised to discover that not only did it taste like beer, but it also tasted very specifically like Becks. I drank four bottles, and it was pretty nice to remain clear-minded throughout and to wake up on Sunday morning all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Well, as much as I ever do.

Carried away, I decided to try some different flavours, and at the supermarket on Sunday afternoon, I picked up a pack of Cobra Zero (0.00%) and a couple of packs of Bavaria Malt (0.00%). Mistake. The Cobra was absolutely foul. Undrinkable. Not only did it not taste of beer, but it was actively unpleasant. The Bavaria Malt was a bit better, but it still had a very strange aftertaste that meant I couldn't finish the bottle. Horrible. Mindful of a Christmas party I'm attending at the weekend, I thought I'd try and find some more Becks Blue to take with me and popped into Asda. They had some Becks, but they also had some Carlsberg Low Alcohol (0.5% - steady now....). Well, whilst not actively unpleasant, the Carlsberg tasted like a watery shandy, and it's not something I'd really go out of my way to drink over, say, a glass of water.

An interesting experiment, anyway.

It's funny how I was totally prepared to risk hangovers with my boozing, but when my MS is factored into the equation, I'm suddenly a bit more reticent. I'm not really sure why. I suppose it's that you know where you are with a hangover, don't you? I'm not off the booze forever, and in fact I'm planning to drink a few proper drinks at the weekend... it's just that it's not such a simple decision any more. Perhaps in time it will become just another possible consequence of a night out, but for now I'm keen to not be reminded of my limitations, thanks very much.

and so I drank one it became four.....

Gone drinking at the Nottingham Beer Festival. Well, you get a souvenir glass and everything, so....

According to wikipedia, "Beer is the world's oldest and most widely consumed alcoholic beverage and the third most popular drink overall after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal grains—most commonly malted barley, although wheat, maize (corn), and rice are widely used. Most beer is flavoured with hops, which add bitterness and act as a natural preservative, though other flavourings such as herbs or fruit may occasionally be included."

Hmmm. I'm not sure that entirely captures the appeal.



Hmm. Neither does that.

Well, I'm going to pack up my little notebook and my pens in three different colours to make careful tasting notes, and I'm going to go anyway.

There are apparently 701 different beers and more than 100 ciders (give or take).

I may be some time.

.....You know I was joking about the notebook and pens, right?

Right?

Aw, come on....

not to put too fine a point on it....

Another Saturday at the Trent Bridge test match, another set of photos of some idiots in fancy dress.



This was actually one of the easier costumes to put together, and I can't recall seeing any beekeepers in the past, so I think that -- when compared to all the Fred Flintstones, Mexicans and Nuns that turn up every year -- it was pretty original too.


Luckily for the bee, the weather wasn't too hot, so he didn't bake. Sunday was a totally different matter weather-wise, and if he'd been wearing that costume up in the stands today, even though it didn't take England long to wrap up an emphatic victory, he surely would have melted. The rain delay on Saturday morning did however mean that we had a few hours drinking time uninterrupted by anything as inconvenient as cricket, and this meant that there was at least one casualty snoozing in his seat during the afternoon session (...that'll be you, mr. Poll). Still, I was the same at Old Trafford in 2005, so I shouldn't be the one to cast any stones.

Another excellent day, and I take my wide-brimmed and veiled hat off to the Oompa Loompas, who were superb, and also to anyone and everyone else who went to the effort of getting dressed up to partake in this most ridiculous of English traditions. I could do without seeing a fat bloke dressed up as Pamela Anderson and wearing his red swimsuit in a thong stylee. I know it's your stag do, but I'm fairly sure that NO ONE wanted to see that. Special mention here too for the girl from Wolf Blass who asked if she could have her photo taken with us and made a special request for the wasp to be in the picture. Er.... do you mean the bee? No, he's definitely a wasp.... right. So the costumes are not a visual clue for you then? Dear oh dear. Right up there with the NPower girl asking me last year if the legs contained in my viking costume were all mine....

See you next year, although sadly not at Trent Bridge as we sadly haven't got an Ashes test. We'll be back here in 2010 though, I'm sure.



Some people are easily distracted. This one was supposed to be *taking* the photos....

Well done everyone. Another good effort all round.

white wedding....

Congratulations to two of my very best friends, Keith and Tracey, who tied the knot on Friday afternoon. I first met Keith around 8 years ago when he came to interview for a room in the shared house that I used to live in. It was pretty much a formality, and over the years I don't think we ever turned anybody down, but for some reason, our landlady used to think that it was essential that we went through the hoops and had a formal meet up with prospective housemates. I remember the first message he left on the answering machine to arrange a time, as he sounded like the campest man alive - an impression that was only reinforced when he turned up on the doorstep wearing what can only be described as a pair of trainers that looked like ballet pumps. He seemed nice enough though, so in due course he moved in to the room at the very top of the house.

It was a brilliant decision - Keith is probably the most generous person that I know - and before long he was willingly doing every single task around the house: cleaning, washing up, ironing, charging up the electricity and gas cards.... it's also a real struggle to beat Keith to the bar to buy the first round, and he has been known to sneak away during meals to settle the bill before anyone else thinks to pay. He's a lovely man. Judging by the stream of young ladies who I met on the stairs on their way out in the morning, he certainly wasn't gay either...

Perhaps there was genius in our landlady's insistence on the interviews in that house, after all. I first moved in after I broke up with my last girlfriend in 1999 and was looking for somewhere to live in the classified section of the local newspaper. I ended up living there for about five years, and I only moved out when I moved into a little house with C. It was a really happy house and I made a lot of good friends there. In fact, I think it's fair to say that I'm still really close friends with almost everyone who passed through those rooms.

A couple of years after Keith moved in, my friend Kate's job moved to Birmingham, and the little room on the middle landing became available. As usual, the room went to the first person that we interviewed. In my interview, I had clinched my spot in the house by dint of the fact that I had a video recorder that would replace the one the departing housemate was taking with him. This time, all it took was the promise of plentiful supplies of biscuits (and the clinching statement that she disliked both M-People and Simply Red) and the blonde girl who was a production manager at a biscuit factory became a part of our lives. It was a promise that Tracey only came though on once, that I can remember, although we've done a bit better out of her since she started working at the Walkers crisps factory. She was a brilliant addition to the house though as she is the most fantastic value for money, whether that's sitting in front of the telly watching 'Eastenders' or out on the town after a couple of glasses of wine. On one occasion in the Nottingham Irish Club, a slightly tipsy Tracey flirted so outrageously with one guy that he started to respond, sending her running back to me. She threw her arms around my neck and told her now rather confused looking suitor that I was her, presumably very long-suffering, boyfriend. He apologised to me and made himself scarce, as Tracey tried not to choke on her barely stifled giggles. Bless her. She's vulnerable underneath her bluster though. She doesn't often let it show, but there's a definite softer side to Tracey, and maybe because of that, I love her to bits. She's like the little sister I never had.



Shortly after I moved out of the house, at a get together shortly before Christmas, Keith and Tracey rather sheepishly revealed to us all that they were a couple. Perhaps they were worried about how we'd all react to this news, but to be honest we were all as pleased as punch and found the idea that they'd spent a few months creeping around the landings of the house after dark quite funny. A little while later, they moved out of the house and into rented place together, and shortly after that they bought a place of their own. Things were obviously going well for them, and although Tracey used to talk big about how Keith didn't want to get married as he'd been married before, we all realised that Keith knew he was onto a good thing and would marry her as soon as she was ready. As it turned out, she announced she was ready at the back end of last year and they set the date for May 2nd 2008 - last Friday.

It was a lovely day. The venue was lovely and the church next door was very small and pretty (even if I can't get my head around the fact that although the Vicar was happy to take their money in a commercial arrangement to carry out the marriage, he can still somehow insist as a condition that they turn up in his church twice a month for six months, even though he knows he will never see them again after the ceremony. What's the point? When the vicar announced during the ceremony that there would be a collection to provide for something the church lacked, we wondered what that might be. I thought 'a sense of humour', but LB reckoned 'proof'. I kept my wallet in my pocket.... ).

It was good though. We laughed, we ate well - not least C's delicious handmade and eventually tiered wedding cake), we danced and we drank (lots of) toasts to two of my very best friends on the occasion of their marriage.

Hurray!

Might I just say that I thought that the wedding photographer was fantastic. She was an understated presence throughout the day, and although we did have a few formal poses, I reckon that there are going to be plenty of fantastic shots of the happy couple and their guests enjoying the day.

Not that I'm biased or anything.... nosiree.



So, all in all, a really happy day, and hearty congratulations once again to the Bride and the Groom, who are now off in Cape Town enjoying their honeymoon, which will also see them enjoying a safari and a few days in Mauritius.

Lucky them, eh?

And yes, when we went down to reception on Saturday morning, we found that Keith had beaten us to it and had already paid for the room. Bloody man!



...and perhaps I will just leave you with this rather striking image of two titans of the dancefloor strutting their stuff at the reception.

we only want to get drunk....

The cold that I've been enduring for the last week or two has had one slightly unexpected side-effect: I've stopped drinking. It's not that I don't want to drink, it's just that when I'm busy coughing and spluttering, a nice cup of tea is much more soothing than a pint of beer or a glass of wine.

I’m not a massive drinker by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like to have a drink and NOT drinking has made me realise quite how much it is embedded into my routine. It’s absolutely normal for me to have a glass of beer or wine – perhaps two – almost every night of the week. It’s just something that I do when I have my dinner. I generally won’t have more than one or two beers, and I’m not one of those people who finds it impossible to leave an open bottle of wine overnight, but I do like to drink and having an alcoholic drink with my dinner seems like the most natural thing in the world. I’m not really the binge drinker that I was in my youth either, but come a Friday or Saturday night, I think nothing of going out with friends and catching up with them over a drink. It’s always over a drink though, and I think the drinking I do with my friends is actually an integral part of the catching up. We go out and we drink steadily and talk nonsense until we go home. It’s now pretty rare – the odd night out on the cider excepted -- that I will get completely bladdered, but on nights like that, it’s probably not unusual that I will drink my weeks allowance of alcohol on a single night. This (mild) abuse of alcohol is an important part of my life.

I mention this as there has been some talk here recently about how alcohol consumption has been steadily rising thanks (apparently) to a combination of cheap and readily available booze and the extended licensing laws. Alcohol consumption has been rising steadily for the past 15 years, with figures suggesting a third of men and a fifth of women drink more than the recommended levels each week. Naturally, this is leading to all sorts of problems, ranging from an increase in the number of alcohol-related deaths (which have doubled since 1991), all the way though to drunken kids happy-slapping their way around our no-go area city centres, pissing on the streets and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Now clearly, I’ve not happy slapped anyone in my life and I don’t drink alcopops, but in some ways I don’t think that my attitude to alcohol is really a million miles away from those kids. I don’t call myself a heavy drinker by any means, but can I honestly say, hand on heart, that I give alcohol the respect it deserves? Do I consume in moderation and with caution? Do I think about the effect it has on my body and the effect my intoxication might have on other people? Not all the time. My hangovers seem to be getting worse as I get older, but they’re still an awfully long way from putting me off drinking for a great deal more than the time it takes my stomach and head to settle. It’s one of life’s little pleasures, and I’m not giving it up easily. Drink driving is something that is ingrained into my generation as being something that you just don’t do, but how many times have you woken up on a work day feeling a bit wonky and still driven to work? Serious alcohol abuse is clearly no laughing matter, nor is drink driving, but what is it about the British that allows us to take alcohol so lightly? In most other countries in Europe, people are apparently able to go out and socialise with their friends without feeling the need to have more than a couple of glasses of wine, or perhaps nothing at all. Do that in Britain and you are generally considered to be committing something of a social faux-pas. Here, it’s pretty much drink on drink on drink. We buy drinks in rounds, for heaven’s sake. That’s pretty much a commitment to have as many drinks as there are people in your party, and it also means that drinks will keep coming without you needing to even leave your seat. That’s a pragmatic way of making sure you get as much booze down your throat in as quick and efficient a way as possible.

Is this drinking culture all Tesco’s fault for selling cheap booze? I doubt it. I imagine it was here long before Tescos. Has putting the price of tobacco up made many people stop smoking? Nope. The simple answer is that alcohol is a drug and as a nation we seem to get an awful lot of pleasure from abusing it.

My own personal abuse preferences? Well, I generally like to have a nice pint or two of proper English beer: a Broadside or a Tanglefoot or something like that. On a hot day, I like a nice, cold glass of lager. A proper brewed continental lager by preference (Leffe, for example), but anything will do at a pinch. On a drinking session? Well, all sorts probably, but in the main I’ll settle on lager as it’s cold, relatively consistent in quality and pretty easy to drink. Over a meal? A nice glass of heavy red wine is best, but I am increasingly developing a taste for the zingy Sancerre or Sauvignon-Blanc type whites. I’m not a huge spirits drinker, but I do like a good malt – a peaty Islay malt ideally, but anything with a bit of bite. I’ve also discovered bourbons and I am a hearty advocate of Elijah Craig.

One for the road? Go on then, why not? What harm can it do? I’ll have a double.

oh, it's my only joy....

There are friends who I have known for as long as I have been drinking who will swear that they have never seen me drunk. This is certainly not because I have never been drunk in their presence, or that I have a particularly legendary capacity for consuming alcohol, it is simply because I have either been less drunk than them, or have simply appeared to be less drunk than them.

I mention this because I managed to get quite comprehensively and unequivocally drunk on Saturday evening at Lord B's stag do. We'd started with a few quiet pints at about half-past two, and I was feeling nothing more than a pleasant buzz until at some point around six or seven in the evening when I foolishly consumed about two and a half pints of some really nasty scrumpy. I wasn't trying to impress anyone particularly, but it just seemed to slip down nicely, and each time I reached the bottom of my glass, it was recharged (everyone else wisely stuck to the same pint, many not even attempting to finish that). In the amount of time it took that cider to start being absorbed into my system, I just collapsed. I don't remember there being much of a tipsy stage, and I don't remember a slurring and staggering stage... in fact I don't remember very much at all. I seemed to go from being fine directly to wanting nothing more than to go to bed. I don't recall feeling sick or getting head spin or anything like that. All I remember is my body starting to shut down and a desperate urge to get home. At one point, my homing system took me out of the house we were in and into the street in an attempt -- in my head at least -- to find a taxi. Thankfully Lord B. came and rescued me from underneath the lampost where I had abandoned my ill-fated attempt and took me back, first to the others and then in a taxi home.

The next day, I didn't so much feel hungover as, well, wonky. I wasn't particularly thirsty as I don't think that I had really drunk all that much, and I've certainly drunk a lot more in the past... but for whatever reason, this time around, something just tipped me right over the edge and knocked me for six.

As I tried to piece my evening together though, the thing that I kept coming back too was that I hate being that drunk, and I hate people seeing me that drunk. I think it might be a control thing: I like to feel that I am always in control of myself and that I have something left in reserve. Above all though, I like other people to think that of me.

On Saturday night, this clearly wasn't the case. There's absolutely no pretending that I wasn't in need of some help to get me home safely.

You know what though? I don't think that was necessarily a bad thing.

Oh sure, I'm not keen on having any more of that cider any time soon, and I hope I didn't really embarrass anyone but myself, but what I have learnt is that sometimes it's okay to strip away that reserve and to show people from time to time that I'm vulnerable. The really important thing is having people around you who care about you enough for it not to matter; people who will make sure that you get home in one piece at the end of the night.

I'm sure my wander in the Park will go down into legend now, and that it will be brought up from time to time for a giggle.... but that's okay, I think. I'm comfortable with that. If you can't laugh at yourself with your best friends from time to time, then when can you?

I'm fairly sure that it's the bridegroom who is supposed to be helped home at the end of his stag night, but to be honest I'm just grateful that he was there for me when I needed him.

tonight we're going to rock you tonight....

Having already displayed my geekish tendencies by spending much of last week playing Spider-Man II, I'm maybe a little reluctant to tell you about this....

Oh, go on then.

I spent several hours yesterday evening pretending that I am a rock god.



Sad, yes... but in my defence, it wasn't just me.



Sarah turned out to be an absolute natural.



...and Lord B kept being asked by the crowd to play encores (even if he had never heard "Tonight We're Going To Rock You Tonight" before. I really must sit him down in front of Spinal Tap)



Hen instinctively understood the crucial role of the "rock face" as the solo reaches its climax.



...whilst C. preferred a more "classical" style.

Guitar Hero is a very, very silly game indeed (do you think anyone under the age of 30 actually buys this?).

And as a direct and somewhat unfortunate consequence of the game soundtrack, I am now also earworming some of the most ridiculous heavy metal: "Strutter" by Kiss. "Carry On Wayward Son" by Kansas. "Woman" by Wolfmother. "Them Bones" by Alice In Chains....
Excellent!

What's not to like?

Photos taken by Hen and Sarah and available here and here. An excellent evening.

how many lies have you told today into the dark of your coffee cup?

Tina Dico @ Nottingham Social, 12 April 2007

Dearie me. I'm sure I'm getting too old for this. A gig on a school night is one thing, but at some point in the evening, it became one of those nights where one pint becomes two becomes six....I think I finally got into bed at about 2am, having inexplicably spent half an hour pottering away on my laptop after Sarah had kindly dropped me home. Hmm. Mind you, Je regrette rien. It was a lovely night. As well as the gig and the delicious plate of fish and chips at the Cock & Hoop (that we forgot to pay for), I finally got to meet Mike... and who could ask for more than that?

I bought the tickets to this gig entirely on a whim. I do actually have a song on my iPod by Tina Dico, but I downloaded it as part of Sweeping the Nation's "Songs to Learn and Sing" feature back in November last year and I'm not 100% sure that I've actually listened to it. Nottingham has a good range of venues and attracts a decent variety of bands, but I tend to miss lots of them because by the time I spot that someone interesting is playing, tickets have long since sold out. Periodically I vow that this won't happen to me again. In the wake of missing out on tickets to see Maximo Park and the Manic Street Preachers, I popped into Rock City to pick up a flyer to see who was on in the next few months. There weren't any real "must see" acts on the lists that weren't already sold out, but as I always say that a half-decent gig is a lot better than a night in front of bad telly, I picked out a couple of shows that sounded interesting.... and ended up with 4 tickets to see Tina Dico at the Social. Well, they cost me less than a tenner each and she had been specially picked out by someone called 'Dead Kenny' on Sweeping the Nation as being an act worthy of a listen, so why not? Ever since then, I've seen her name glaring at me from the kitchen calendar and idly wondered what I letting myself in for - particularly once I had read the wikipedia entry that described her as "a cross between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan" (what a dreadful thought. Just imagine for a moment what that would look like....) *

For one reason or another, I ended up with a couple of spare tickets. Rather than let them go to waste, I cast my mind about to think of people in Nottingham who might be around and would consider turning up to a random gig at short notice. Naturally I thought of Mike, and happily he was able to attend (after sending me possibly the best voice message I have ever had. "Hi. It's Mike here. Mike from Troubled Diva. I'm interviewing Maria McKee at eight, but I'll see you after that. I'll hang around in the downstairs bar at the Social". Oh, the glamour!) Anyway, it was high time we met and he's absolutely lovely.

So. Tina Dico.

I suppose it's unfortunate that she looks so much like Lisa Kudrow. Mike immediately has Sarah and me in hysterics early on when she asks the audience if they have any requests and he stage-whispers "Smelly Cat!". It's also a touch unfortunate that she plays an incredibly straight-faced cover version of "In The Army Now" by Status Quo. Yes, I can see what she's doing there when she says that this song is sadly as relevant now as it was when it was originally released, but she seems genuinely a little surprised at the sniggers from the audience. Have Status Quo ever been relevant? Where do you go from that? Into a song originally released by Holly Valance? To be fair to Ms Dico, she actually wrote the song in question ("Send My Best"), but she seemed genuinely interested to know how many people in the audience had Holly's album, causing a fair bit of awkward foot shuffling and coughing as people tried to avoid her gaze (possibly as much from anyone present who actually had the album as from those of us who didn't). Rather distractingly, her keyboard player is also the spitting image of Julianne Moore. At this point, all three of us were busy clutching our phones, frantically sending updates to Twitter. O Tempora! O Mores!

These minor distractions aside though, I thought she was pretty good. Inevitably for a female singer/songwriter, there's a touch of Joni Mitchell in there, but at other times she also reminded me of Sufjan Stevens (one of her songs was a dead ringer for "John Wayne Gacy Jr" off Illinoise) and also that woman from the film version of "High Fidelity" (you know, the singer/songwriter that John Cusack's character has a thing for). Echoing a remark made in another Nick Hornby book, she's one of those people who sings with her eyes shut, but her material seems heartfelt and is occasionally quite touching. I initially worried that she would lapse into bad sixth form poetry -- especially as English isn't her first language --but on the whole I thought that her lyrics were good (her song about the one night stand in particular was both stark, unflinching and beautifully delivered).

The Social is only a small venue and I think it was perhaps a little over half full, the audience appearing to be mainly made up of politely respectful middle-aged guys (perhaps it's time I started including myself in that category....?). The set lasted a touch over an hour and Tina certainly didn't outstay her welcome. I enjoyed the set and I think she's one to investigate further. I also think Lord Bargain would love her.

After the gig, the three of us retired to the downstairs bar where we had another couple of drinks. I'll admit to feeling a touch groggy when I woke up this morning, but I think I've got a bit of a cold coming on..... anyway, it was well worth it.

A good night.

7/10

* Actually, wikipedia only says that she was inspired by Dylan and Cohen, but it's too late now - I'm stuck with a mental image of that unfortunate cross-breed....