| Babyfaces FTW |
[May. 11th, 2009|07:54 pm] |
Woman in Science Museum: Are you guys students?
My brother: Ha, we wish.
Woman: That'll be £14 then.
Me: But that's the children's price! And not only are we twenty seven and twenty five, but this is the second time we've been taken for under eighteens this month. w00t! Is it just because we want to see the Wallace and Gromit exhibition...? |
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| I Do Like The Pub And The Pub Likes Me |
[May. 11th, 2009|07:47 pm] |
Discovering delicious new drinks. Agreeing with new people. Finding hitherto uncharted common ground with acquaintances. Realising the depth of your affection for friends.
Going to the pub's rather splendid, isn't it? I'd quite like to do it more often! |
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| Mini-Skirts Were In Style, When She Danced Down The Aisle |
[May. 11th, 2009|07:38 pm] |
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Two years after a fourteen-hour Megabus journey made me swear off coach travel for life, I take the National Express, cos my finances are in a mess. But the driver cheerfully mocks everyone (taking exception to my Motorhead hat as he's a mod), and the man behind sings football chants to himself on passing Walsall and Aston Villa stadia. And when I saw the film "Human Traffic" at the cinema, I'd only been clubbing once and found both experience and portrayal dull, but since then, motorways and sunny Friday afternoons have been the perfect mood-enhancer for that "the weekend has landed" feeling. |
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| Theft |
[May. 2nd, 2009|02:47 pm] |
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I seized my mother’s library book from the telephone table and left a post-it note saying, “Muahahaha!” |
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| Pointless Dreams |
[Apr. 29th, 2009|02:42 pm] |
In my dream, I have journeyed to Worcester to buy kvlt CDs, but they won't fit in my bag, as it contains all my teddy bears.
How mysterious! This wouldn't happen to mean I'm struggling to juggle the comforts of home and the lure of metal and travel, would it? Surely not, because I don't need reminding of that: I think of little else. Isn't my subconscious meant to put on masked dramas, withdrawn from dusty vaults? Are they empty now, their scripts strewn, splayed and annotated and so deemed unworthy of secure storage? Or muddy-minded with trivia, has it forgotten the locks’ combinations? |
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| Incest! |
[Apr. 27th, 2009|02:41 pm] |
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I don’t think my subconscious likes me very much. |
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| Dead Bodies Everywhere! |
[Apr. 26th, 2009|02:41 pm] |
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In my dream, I am having a party and dozens of old friends and strangers turn up. But I don’t trust some of them: I seek my boots, afraid for their security, and I find them, but I also find a girl covered and labelled on a stretcher, and I think, well, it’s not a party without some carnage, but then I find another body, and another, about twenty of them in all, and I wake horrified. A friend I envy often dreams of bodies, but it’s a first for me. |
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| Presents |
[Apr. 21st, 2009|02:40 pm] |
Shockingly, at this year's Ragnarök festival, saying "I'm not spending the night in the bushes, my mate fancies you" had almost the intended effect.
Evile said they'd name their new song "Bulging P*n*s" at the crowd's request. The drummer offered to sign something for me, but I said no, I just wanted more thrash metal and money. The guitarist offered me a hug, which I accepted, after insisting we locked horns first. The singer offered me twenty quid to go and see them the next day, but sadly he was joking. The bassist had skidaddled before we could hunt him down, but not bad a bad haul for five minutes' work. |
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| Exchange |
[Apr. 20th, 2009|02:39 pm] |
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On the train, I reassured a worried depressive and helped her fasten her watch. She gave me a bottle of pop and I drank it in the sunshine. |
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| Edinburgh |
[Apr. 15th, 2009|07:39 pm] |
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Funeral fog fell between Carlisle and Edinburgh. I am in the Plant Biology room again, though in the bed called Coconut this time. |
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| Summer Is Icumen In |
[Apr. 7th, 2009|02:36 pm] |
1: Tennis Balls
On a number of occasions in the winter, I looked at the black beyond my sloping window and thought, "I wish I could go and play tennis." But after the clocks changed, I acknowledged this venture was still impossible, since I'd have to amass a racket and a ball, and a cycle helmet, so I could reach the warehouse doors without tiring myself out. But Mum found all these things under the stairs. The ball was reluctant to bounce and she didn't think I could find another in our small town, but Dad was convinced I could get them on Amazon. A sixty-five-year old shouldn't have known more about online shopping than I did, but sure enough, I could get a can for 49p plus £3.95 P&P.
I played the clarinet and was annoyed at the difficulty I had finding places to breathe. I was going to flippantly change my Facebook status to "Metal Zed can't be bothered breathing", but my relatives had been befriending me and I didn't want them worrying.
My brother came to stay. He'd kept himself entertained on the train with his iPhone. It had an 8GB hard drive, making it 163 times bigger than the computer that had stood me in good stead until 1999 and larger, too, than the one I'd used until 2002. The doorbell rang at 8.30pm. "I wonder if it's my tennis balls?" It was impossible, but I envisioned them bouncing arhythmically on the door step, glowing, ripe to be plucked from the air.
It was my half brother and he sat with us for the next hour. I couldn't remember the five of us ever doing this. I had little to say though, since the conversation centred on ridiculous health and safety policies, something I'd had mercifully little trouble with, and I didn't like to complain anyway.
My bed, my enemy, manacled me for some time after I woke, but when I found the will to switch on my phone, it was 6.45. The prospect of getting to work at this hour distressed me, but I remembered, I didn't have to, I could read instead. So I put on Demolition Hammer quietly and finished Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent". This inspired me to try "On The Road" again, which I'd started a few years ago, but had put down after the first chapter for reasons I couldn't recall. As I placed "The Lost Continent" beside my computer, reminding myself to add it to the "books I'd read list", novel paragraphs swelled in my mind, but my chair was covered in bulging envelopes of German vocabulary, so I stuck to my original plan.
The introduction quoted, "the ones that never yearn" while the text said, "the ones who never yawn", but these amounted to the same thing. I yearned too much, but I discovered why I'd stopped reading last time: I had to go, with or without my tennis balls, and I had to write. I had wasted too much of the last ten years. Pre-occupied with my reflection and finding this in my words, rather than my faded hair dye and the lines carved in my forehead, I looked at my website every week and beheld the gaping gaps between the stories, where dashed-off juvenilia had been razed. But I wanted a city, not the ideal Estonian landscape where a man lives four miles from his nearest neighbour. I had to get down to the scrapheap of my harddrive and reconstruct and I had to make the most of the sun. The Beats never made lists of books they'd read and flashcards to help them learn the names of albums they owned.
I brushed my teeth till the foam turned brick. When I finished my exercise, my brother was in the shower, so I went to eat and found water dripping through the ceiling. Like Neil in "The Young Ones", I cast around helplessly for a receptacle, settled for a plate, and caught the last seven drips. I decided to delay my shower until my Dad could patch the ceiling.
I spoke to Georgina on Skype while I waited. Clouds exploded in the sky. I tried to speak to Louise, but her words were robotic and then she disappeared altogether.
2: Words
I was always thinking of sentences I needed to add to my novel, only to find I'd already done so. I didn't give my younger self much credit. I was perpetually amazed that my naive twenty four year old self had toured the Baltic and enjoyed far more popularity with the opposite sex than I did now.
I'd seen a programme called "Why Reading Matters", which claimed Shakespeare was brilliant because some of his phrases, such as "they godded him" made people's minds react in unusual ways. But they perked up in a different manner upon seeing the phrase "they printed him", the bizarreness of which I preferred. It hadn't said why the first manner was preferable to the second, or why either was useful, but I was using it as an excuse to let words evacuate their natural habitat.
Every evening my parents and I took it approximately in turn to invent terms, rarely bothering to ascribe meaning to them. I preferred monosyllabic ones which I thought should exist, such as "soam" and "prange". The current word was "nutricable" and the trick was to recall them for the next twenty four hours. Mum thought this was good for us. I thought it was tying up valuable brain cells.
3: The Walk
Despite the clouds, Mum and I went for a walk. An evil landrover passed and a stumpy-legged brown dog chased it for a while, then joined us when it vanished into the dust. Another dog had befriended us last time we'd come here. When this one spotted another party, we reached a path we'd never taken. "We should go down there one day," Mum said.
"Why not today?" I asked and we followed it down to a house by an unknown river and a crumbling shack soon to be torn down and replaced. A sign banned us from a clearing. The water was eerily peaceful. Satanic rituals?
There was a choice a bridge and an upward-winding path. We took the path because we had to make a choice somehow and there might have been a troll beneath the bridge. We found a house with a wind turbine and several cars parked outside, but no road leading to it. A grassy indentation promised an idyllic primary-school-sports-day hollow and another offered a route to the sun, but we found a way to our original destination, thus turning the expedition into a partial-loop.
Walks were always better when you didn't have to turn round. The brown dog was gone too. But one of my socks, a favourite, had developed a hole in its sole and when I got home my slippers braised my feet.
4: The Word Is Olbinth
"Olbinth" was the word of the day. Dad suggested we give it a meaning. I thought it was part of a heavy-duty woodwork tool, prone to breaking, whose purpose was unintelligible to the non-enthusiast. Mum thought it was an architectural feature. Dad maintained it was the technical name for the sort of misstep that occurs when one of your legs decides it's shorter than the other and you sway sideways. Too many of these was a sure sign of olbinthitis.
We watched "Lewis" and I felt obliged to call "Swile!" every time the program's name appeared on the screen. There was an actress in it named Ophelia Lovibond. Did having a ridiculous name predispose you to an acting career or, on becoming a famous actor, did you change your name so you could be found more readily on IMDB? I was highly disappointed to learn that Sergeant Hathaway wasn't asexual or gay, as had previously been suggested, but he might still be bi.
I dreamed I was at Cambridge University, only it was in Edinburgh and had York's campus. I was studying Maths, Physics, Cake and Orange Squash, only I was perilously behind with everything except Maths. I went to Bloodlust then left early to attend an Orange Squash seminar, where six people struggled to ask me relevant questions for an hour.
My tennis balls arrived and bubbled together when I shook the package. It was the first time I'd acquired Tennis Balls In A Can.com and when I pulled the tab, I was assaulted with a blastreek of neon.
The sky was off-white, though, and the trees were stale. The fridge had stopped working and even with the freezer on its weakest setting, after a night, the cheese spread had frozen solid.
5: Balls
I was still very fond of my middle name - what could be more metal than a three-letter word that managed to contain both a 'Z' and an umlaut? - but I felt as detached from it as my never-loved first. Zoe was tall and quiet and did things with her hair. Was becoming Zoe, narrowing the gap between my work life and private life, necessary to grow up?
We watched "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency". I tried to read Kafka's journal, but got too inspired. My brother coined the word "crispinate". "Balls" had become our favourite curse word independently and we both had balls Tuesdays. I dreamed Ragnarök festival happened in South Korea before the German edition and Victoria reported that it was disappointing.
But after fourteen months, my brother helped me remove "get computer sound fixed" from my task list, and it was bright but windy at 6.15, so, so incognito even my Dad didn't recognise me (grey jacket, magenta t-shirt, blue jeans, hair in bunches, but keeping the upsidedown cross around my neck), I made my way to the promised door.
I knew I had long found something deeply satisfying in this pursuit, but after four hundred dull sessions on the exercise bike, I knew my patience for sport had grown thin. But, despite the rapid blisters on my hand and the cold air gouging my mouth, the joy was still mine. The camp sideways readjustment prances, to the scrunch of asphalt. "Come back you little bastard *pounce* ma-hack!" I would return. |
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| Oh. |
[Mar. 21st, 2009|02:28 pm] |
"Sailing season starts soon," she says.
In December??
Hours later, I remember it’s March. |
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| You're Not Fooling Anyone |
[Feb. 14th, 2009|02:22 pm] |
Alex is renowned for not being the most masculine of fellows, but this matter wasn't discussed in the first two hours of his acquaintance with Jackie. Nonetheless, when we found a pinstriped bra in Ann Summers, she suggested, "You could get it to go with your trousers."
Half an hour later, he was looking for a black long-sleeved t-shirt.
Zed: We could try H&M. I know it's more of a girl's shop, but that's never stopped you before.
Alex: Now now, I was told I was manly the other night.
Big Issue Seller: Big Issue, ladies? |
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| Holy War |
[Jan. 3rd, 2009|02:22 pm] |
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Last time I visited my old church's Christmas tree exhibition, there was a tree covered in glittery gingerbread men. Now we found many severed heads dangling from it and a pile of mangled corpses at the foot. |
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| Liverpool |
[Jan. 2nd, 2009|09:20 am] |
New Year's Eve, at Hannah's Dad's house in Liverpool, was mint. I love Scouseland. And I met a guy called Zeb (short for Zebulon!), and contrary to expectations, the universe didn't implode, and I spent an unexpected amount of time discussing metaaal with fiends of Hannah's named Paul and Mechelle. Because the latter was from Scouseland, I cheekily asked if she was named after the Beatles song - and she was! Despite the terrifying cocktails, going to bed at 4.30 and spending most of the night trying to deter Hannah's cat (Ian, despite being female) from walking on my face and making up a death metal song about Satan visiting the Krazyhouse (the rock club in Liverpool) (???), I didn't feel too bad the next day, until everyone started singing, "I like the flowers, I like the daffodils!" over and over again. Georgina and Stacey travelled to Scumbria with me, after a fashion, because an hour into the journey, we discovered Stacey had left her wallet at Hannah's. They enjoyed playing "Outrage: Steal The Crown Jewels", hurrah. I didn't feel like drinking, but said I'd have a "waffer-thin one". Naturally, this resulted in Georgina and I getting even more wasted than we were the previous night. I blame my green teddy bear, with whom Stacey became best of pals. She is going on a date; sadly, the dude is not called Gavin and texts "lol" far too much. I have acquired a Carlisle-based Facebook fiend into metal. Hurrah for everything!
Still tipsy? Me?
Hannah's Friend Alex: Sounds fun . . . but you're all related, you shouldn't do that! |
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| Fireblade Force |
[Oct. 13th, 2008|02:05 pm] |
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On Thursday, I went to London and met up with Glenn, Ian, Paul and Neil in the very busy but very pretty Wetherspoons outside Liverpool Street Station. Paul discovered the graffiti "Make me your tit-pig" in the gents and we had to pen a set of lyrics with that title.
At 11, having elected to take the cheap option (the coach), I had to head to Stansted airport for my 6.25 flight. I sat in the coach station there, which was far nicer than the airport itself (as it had seats, even if they were disgusting colours), but really, I've spent far too much of my life feeling like a vagrant while I await public transport. It's something to do a few times when you're a student, but when will I be civilised and fork out for a hotel? Even when I cease to be broke, probably never. Thank Satan for whoever invented MP3 players and Slayer.
After the eye-bleeding freezing fog in Berlin, the weather in Lichtenstein (the small town in Saxony, not the country) was balmy and blue. The place had a relaxed vibe; there were lots of people loitering on the streets (including three kids who looked four, apparently alone) but the ones in tracksuits didn't say anything. I suppose they felt outnumbered by us black-clad big-booted folk. One little girl ran up behind her friend, grinned at me and threw an armful of leaves about her head.
A little more summer was hugely appreciated.
And the festival (Fireblade Force II)? MINT MINT MINT MINT MIIIIIINT! The first band, the chainmail-wearing Holmgang, were the only one I didn't love, and they were still good, showing promise and ending with the song "Holmgang", a high note. Although headliner Kampfar (who I adore)'s bus broke down(!), also preventing Elite from attending, I didn't mind: I've seen them before; replacements were brought in and the "Satanic surprise band" played a second time (albeit without the corpsepaint); and I had a great time anyway. Two days of non-stop blaaaaack metaaaaal and very late-night conversation (i.e. til 7am). No bands were particularly unique or transcendent, but did I care? No! Everyone rocked! And apart from Orlog, they were all new to me too.
Holmgang. Considering this was the second best picture I managed to take, *sigh*.
Cirith Gorgor.
Pagan Rites were my favourite and Thromos (I think - my cunning plan to keep notes and take pictures was thwarted by drunkenness and conversation with strangers) were also a highlight. Thyrgrim were the hottest, although Irrlycht were hot too, in that the singer breathed fire during a gorgeous proggy section. They were also deeply headbangable. Weltbrand had a left-handed bassist (always cool) and there's one song by the "Satanic surprise band" has been stuck in my head ever since.
At Glauchau station.
Words I use all the time I don't know the German for
Annoying
Gah |
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| Killing Joke |
[Oct. 3rd, 2008|02:04 pm] |
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I saw Killing Joke last night for the first time, playing all the old songs, and I unintentionally arrived early enough to be in the front row. So tribal. My legs wouldn't stay still for a second and my eyes were more-or-less pinned to Jaz Coleman, despite a certain other member of the band's intriguing get-up of a white suit, a white visor, a pink fleece and a red top. |
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| Wodensthrone |
[Sep. 30th, 2008|02:02 pm] |
It's the end of the world as we know it, but yesterday was good:
I check blackmetal.co.uk for the first time in ages and discover Wodensthrone (a black metal band I enjoyed seeing in London) and Dawn Of Chaos (a death metal band I enjoyed seeing in Glasgow) are playing in Trillians rock bar in Newcastle that night! For free! I haven't driven enough recently to feel comfortable on unfamiliar city roads, but after umming and arring, I decide I'll get the usual train and hostel. I'm wearing my Venom shirt (Venom being the band from Newcastle who started it all) and if that's not a sign, what is?
And it all works out. The YHA Hostel is new to me, but as nice as one could wish for. Trillians is also good and cheap [once I find it. The Internet doesn't help and they don't answer the phone. I have posted directions to metaltraveguide.com]. Dawn Of Chaos cover "You Suffer" - always welcome - and Wodensthrone are transcendent. I talk to a few people and pass on my appreciation to band members. I buy some CDs I wasn't planning to get, but hyperinflation can't get you if you're broke, if it comes to that. Afterwards, back at the hostel, I spend two hours talking to some Australians.
Impromptu decisions ftw. It's a shame such events don't happen more often. |
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