My Beautiful Laundrette

I love going to the laundrette.

We have a washing machine but sometimes, if there’s an especially big load to do, or we have to wash the bedclothes, which are too big to hang out to dry in the flat, I’ll go to the laundrette and wash them there; all washed, and then dried, warm and fragrant, ready to take home. Magic!

It seems, in these days of easy domestic washing machine access, that most people also use the laundrette for just those reasons, and I’m glad that these wonderful institutions haven’t ceased to exist in the face of neglect. We would be all the poorer for their absence, and the writers of Eastenders would have to find a new way of stirring up the plot a bit.

In any case, I’ve openly declared my love for these wonderful places and told you the instances when I go, but haven’t really told you where that affection springs from, so here goes:

Since childhood I’ve often been followed around, probably for good reason, by the feeling that I’m not quite doing it right. Not a specific It, you understand, but just a general edge on almost everything I attempt that I’m kind of bodging it slightly and that, at any given moment, someone’s going to tap me on the shoulder and tell me off for Doing it All Wrong. Don’t get me wrong, this is neither a complaint of a terrible, crippling complex which haunts my every waking moment, nor a plea for responses of “don’t talk such nonsense, you do lots of things very well, and you know it”; I’m well aware that I’ve developed a certain degree of ability in a few areas that’re considered rare enough for me to occasionally get paid for them, but irrational feelings have no respect for such details. You see that semicolon just before that last sentence? The questionable appropriateness of that mysterious symbol is likely to bug me imperceptibly for the rest of the day.

Anyway, those of you who’ve been kind enough to serve as my free therapist and read this far may be wondering what all this self-indulgent twaddle has to do with my love of the laundrette.

In the laundrette, this feeling completely disappears.

I put the coins in the slot, the machine whirrs into action, the dial clicks into pre-wash and I exhale, just very slightly further than normal. For the time it takes for that dial to complete its circle, I can read the paper in silence and nobody can tell me I’m doing it wrong. While the load is spinning hypnotically in the dryer and the room is filling with the beautiful, bakery-hot smells of freshly washed clothes, I am truly happy. It’s like being on holiday, but without the feeling that you’re doing Being on Holiday wrong.

When it’s through, I pack it all up into a big, blue Ikea bag, and head home, and my breathing constricts again so very slightly as I begin to think of the other jobs I have to do for the day. It’s not a big change and, if I wasn’t thinking about it I’d miss it altogether, but it’s there.

Twitter, Happier, More Productive – The Week of Weird

Weird things have been happening recently.

The first and main weird thing is that The Internet has taken yet another step toward Skynet by replacing the law courts of the UK and putting instant justice in the hands of the pitchfork-waving masses, cheered on by national treasures via the medium of Twitter.

As it goes, said masses didn’t do a bad job at being outraged and succeeded firstly in overcoming a Super Injunction imposed by evil toxic waste dumpers Trafigura (I totally didn’t understand how this one worked, but I’m sure it was once the plot of an episode of Captain Planet) and then in proving that, despite the suggestion of her column’s byline, they most certainly weren’t thinking what Jan Moir was thinking.

It’s strange really, cause essentially what people are doing is talking about current affairs just as they always have, but a combination of the permanence and weight of ideas being written down and the speed at which global conversations gather pace seems to mean that if there isn’t some kind of consensus, news report and groveling apology within a few hours, then a story is moving very slowly and may just disappear altogether.

In any case, for better or worse, the whole business showed me that Twitter is slightly more than people writing ‘I’m watching TV LOL’ for their mates to read and, with the added incentive of a new iphone to play with, I signed up. So far, I haven’t learned much (except from Ben Goldacre who seems to be a kind of one man bullshit detecting agency) but it seems like fun and if you’d like to follow my tweets on a life of music and procrastination, click on THIS LINK and then the ‘Follow’ button at the top.

As if that wasn’t enough, an entirely more positive, less angry type of weirdness occurred this weekend; The JJ horns were playing with Man Like Me at Jamm in Brixton, so Tucker suggested he and I dine at his favourite local Turkish restaurant. Being the enthusiastic fan of good Turkish restaurants that I am, I eagerly agreed, chucked on a suit (not cause I’m especially smart, but because I couldn’t be arsed with lugging a suit bag to Brixton in the middle of the night along with a saxophone) and headed off to Camberwell.

We were greeted exceptionally warmly at the door and shown to our seats. Before I’d even sat down, I was complimented on the fact that was wearing a suit and that I was carrying a saxophone. We were soon joined by Tucker’s flatmates Tom and Hannah and made our order. The waiting staff were attentive. Like really attentive. We were provided with rounds of beautiful grilled bread on the house each time it ran out and, every time they left the table were told “Thankyou so much” by the waitresses. As if that weren’t enough, we were bought a bottle of wine (on the house) and a round of Turkish liqueurs (on the house!) and, when the bill arrived, it was embarrassingly small, and didn’t really seem to add up to the stuff that we ordered that wasn’t on the house. We were then handed a hand written card that said we could have another free bottle of wine the next time we came.

All this would only seem only marginally absurd if we weren’t the only people in the restaurant being treated with quite such wonderful friendliness. Let the record show that this isn’t, for the merest nano-second, a complaint of any kind, and I wish all restaurants felt so much like the home of a loved one,  but do you think they thought we were someone else?

Death of the Snack Attack

In my job (or should that be ‘job’) I spend a lot of time schlepping around town. On a fairly typical day, I’m likely to visit a couple of students’ houses for a lesson, then travel to a gig in the evening, so naturally that involves a few uses of public transport every day.

This isn’t an entry to attack the public transport system in London (which incidentally, I love) though. This entry is about the terrible compulsion to snack.

It started with the occasional can of Dr Pepper for a bus journey and the odd nostalgic Mars bar to keep me going in place of a proper lunch but then, as work got more frequent turned into an unthinking bee-line made for a newsagent whilst waiting for the bus.

What was once something to look forward to quickly became a dutiful ritual: Click, fizz, gulp, crush. It’d be a self-indulgent exaggeration to use a word as severe as addiction where this particular vice is concerned, but the compulsion is undeniable; That instant sugar spike induced by a can of coke quickly establishes itself as a necessary part of a journey from one place to another.

Anyway, having realised the plain absurdity of drinking several unwanted and unhealthy cans of fizz every day, I’ve banished all needless snacking from my daily routine. If I drink anything on the go, it’s a bottle of water and, if there are soft drinks available at a gig, I take the diet option which, incidentally, isn’t quite so inferior and off-putting as I remember. Not only am I saving money but, excluding the first headache-filled day, I’m actually feeling far healthier generally. It may be a placebo, but I don’t mind.

Anyway, in the absence of anything properly significant to talk about, here’s the JJs playing in a pub with The Pogues(ish) earlier this year.

Goodbye, Old Friends

As P will all too readily tell you, I’m the type who doesn’t buy new clothes very often. Increasingly, my wardrobe is becoming home mainly to stealthily acquired band t shirts and things I’ve been wearing (or not) for the last decade.

Sadly, there is the inevitable casualty from time to time, and I have to chuck something out. I accept that this is simply a fact of life and that, eventually, all clothes wear out, but recently I’ve had to come to terms with losing two items who’re especially close to my heart: My D&G loafers and my Colorado State University t shirt.

The Condemned

The loafers were bought for the occasion of my 21st birthday, cause I didn’t have any particularly smart shoes at the time and I wanted to look nice. I parted with a king’s ransom for them, and they seemed to be able to arouse either intense admiration or hatred in all who witnessed them. Now though, the soles are riddled with holes and have let in too much festival-related, sock soaking water this summer for them to be of much use any more. I suppose I could get them re-soled, but all change is positive, isn’t it?

Me and the t shirt go back far further; When I was 14, my school elected to send a small group of students who were deemed to be under-stimulated to Colorado to do community service volunteer work. It was a kind of one way exchange programme, and we each stayed with a host family, attended junior high school and hammered nails into fences and the like for a week or so. It was an enjoyable time from which I’m still surprised by fond memories on a fairly frequent basis. It was also my first personal experience of America, and I remember being bowled over, despite all my childhood years glued to the television, by the realisation that this was actually a different country, with different dialects, food, smells, humour, institutions and social expectations, as opposed to just a big, far off version of the UK.

My host family, the Comforts, bought me the t shirt when we went to a CSU college football game, and I’ve treasured it and worn it regularly ever since.

Anyway, sentimental nostalgia aside, I was very lucky to be joined at my residency at The Prince Albert in Camden on Saturday by bassist Tom Herbert (of Polar Bear and The Invisible fame) and 7 string genius, Jo Caleb, a brief segment of which you can hear below.

Check out how much we sped up! Tut tut…

Take Another Little Pizza My Heart

Since childhood, which contained hundreds of hours spent watching Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (apparently, British children in the 1980s were unaware of what ninjas are), I’ve loved pizza. Those steaming, spotted (with what I soon learned was pepperoni) cartoon discs served to arouse the instant feeling of mouth-watering hunger each time they appeared on the screen.

This love affair continued to develop through my teenage years when, on a slim budget, my friends and I used to eat out at La Porchetta, where we’d be astounded at the sheer size of the pizza that arrived in front of us mere minutes after ordering, all for about a fiver. It was also about this time that I realised delicious pizza is a very thin, slightly blackened, crispy affair, as opposed to the doughy mouthfuls I remembered from takeaways earlier in life.

Anyway, all these memories were bought back today when I made my first ever attempt at making a pizza completely from scratch, with the help of a newly purchased pizza stone. Here is a pictorial document of my maiden voyage into the world of pizza making.

First, I laid out all my ingredients in photgenic readiness.

Next, I prepared my tomatoes for roasting. Each have their own little sliver of garlic to make them taste extra delicious.

Then I combined two types of flour, Italian OO and plain old white, some yeast and salt, to which I added warm water and olive oil.

Once kneaded to an encouragingly smooth dough, I popped it in a fresh bowl, ready to rise.

By this stage, my tomatoes had just begun to take colour, so I took them out of the oven…

…and passed them through a sieve to make my sauce. Take a moment to marvel at the magnificent pink spoon P purchased for us the other weekend in Suffolk.

Soon, as if by magic, my ball of dough had grown to twice its original size. The properties of a few grams of dried yeast will never fail to amaze me.

Now, my pizza was ready to assemble, so I rolled it out nice and thin and added some tomato sauce, olives, anchovies and goat’s cheese.

Lo and behold, after a few minutes cooking at the hottest temperature my oven could handle, and a handful of torn up basil and a splash of olive oil later, my pizza was complete. Very delicious it was too.

I realise that hearing about the cooking of someone’s lunch isn’t many steps lower on the banality scale than hearing what they dreamed about last night but, considering the amont of time I spend thinking about, and boring my friends with talk of food, I thought it wasn’t especiially well represented on this blog.

So there!

If you’d like to cook a pizza like this, then do as I did and follow Dan Lepard and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe from The Guardian weekend magazine which can be found HERE.

Ricktorian Improvisation

After a summer of playing almost exclusively in horn sections, today I got together to play some music with my friends Rick, a pianist and Victoria, a drummer.

For a while, I’ve been wanting to play in a group where I can improvise, play my saxophone, make a lot of noise, stretch out on original music and bill alongside rock bands, as opposed to being restricted to playing the pubs and clubs which are associated with the jazz scene.

It might be quite a tall order, but it might also be the case that, if the music is good and the band and audience are willing, then all the other stuff doesn’t matter.

In any case,  we spent two hours today in Rick’s bedroom in Bounds Green improvising some ideas together. We went down the road of basically not planning anything beforehand and playing completely off the top of our heads. It also all got a bit more off the hook than I anticipated, which is certainly no bad thing. Hopefully it’ll spawn a few ideas for music, so watch this space to find out.

Below are two clips from this afternoon. Enjoy!

The Exeter Factor

This weekend the JJ horns, my unexpectedly productive source of employment this summer, joined the Pogues in Exeter in Devon at the Levellers’ Beautiful Days Festival. The whole event had a kind of olde world festival feeling about it and, by the time we took to the stage at 10:30, pretty much everyone in attendance seemed to have taken their place in front of the main (and basically only) stage to enjoy the set. It was a really lovely gig, and warm and friendly feelings were zipping about the place willy nilly by the time we headed back to the hotel.

The makeshift recording studio on the bus designed to stave off boredom

The following day, the JJs practically had the tourbus to ourselves on the 4 hour drive back from Devon so, as a measure to weather the journey, we collectively numbed our brains with live sampling on Dan’s Macbook and Jackass 2.

I’m not sure what it is about the comforting inanity of a certain brand of trash TV, but it always leaves me wanting more and thus, as I finally flopped down on the sofa when I got home, the spectacle of the first episode of a new series of X Factor was more than my puny, addled brain could resist, so I switched on ITV, poured a glass of wine and let that comatosed feeling of barely interested apathy wash over me. Lovely.

The major change in this series, as anyone who is still reading this is likely to know, is that the audition process is now held in front of a live audience, as opposed to merely in front of a panel of judges (and producers, and camera crew, and lighting guys, and sponsors, and presenters, and grief councillers etc…) as in previous instances. This makes the whole experience ever more indistinguishable from Simon Cowell’s other ITV programme, Britain’s Got Talent, the main difference being that the judges in X Factor don’t have buzzers with which to stop a performance and have to do so just by asking.

Presumably the thinking behind this is amongst other things, partly to avoid the aching stagnation of other long running formats like Big Brother (which apparently has people switching off, or more likely over, in their millions) and partly to prop up the bank balance a little by flogging a few thousand tickets to each regional audition. In any case, it means that the auditionees are now singing to a backing track in front of a huge audience, rather than accapella in front of a small one.

Strangely though, the biggest change the new format has effected seems to be that the judges feel a more urgent need than before to play their ‘characters’ up to the audience, making the whole thing more predictable and pantomime like than ever and giving the whole thing a scripted feel that was always alluded to but never quite so blatant: they’re happily pulling back the curtain on the whole thing, all but screaming “It’s fake! It’s all a big set-up!” and, I suppose, proving that credibility never was the thing that kept the show watchable in the first place.

The show reached its predictable nadir when a returning auditionee said her family had been evicted since the last show and had to spend some time living in the family car, pets and all. X Factor excels in the backstory, so I was waiting for the sad piano music, but it never came: the whole thing got completely played for laughs. They may as well have played some humerous tuba music in the background as Simon responded “so, let me get this straight, your singing got you evicted?”.

This person also happened to be morbidly obese and not the sharpest tool in the box, and it became clear that she, in this show, was a comedy character and that, not only was sympathy for the fact her family were made homeless not part of the plot, it was actually used as a comic turn. That’s pretty dark stuff.

Thus continues the great British tradition of putting down the unfortunate and ugly (this girl) and rooting for the unfortunate but attractive (that guy whose wife died in the last series), all to the accompaniment of sad piano music and a crying footballer’s wife.

Roll on next weekend.

Post Traumatic Patronising Syndrome

It’s official, I’m becoming old:

Today, over a bottle of wine and a Turkish meal with friends I had a proper, fully fledged ‘in my day’ moment where, in a sombre tone, I loftily intoned a speech concerning what the youth of today are missing out on (through no fault of their own, not that it was mentioned) in terms of outdoorsmanship and how, as a lad, I’d been sent out in my flat cap after breakfast with nothing but a pasty for lunch and a maternal wave, free from the attentions of drug dealers, dirty old men and religious fundamentalists and didn’t return home until Mother called from the door that tea was on the table, at which point I snatched up my hockey stick and ran for the door, ready to wipe clean my grazed knees, comb my hair and sit down to a silent, hearty meal.

Those of you in your mid-twenties who grew up in North London may well smell a rat at this juncture and realise that the above could possibly be the remembrances of a fellow sporting a newly acquired pair of red lensed bifocals; Never one for over-physical activities, I moved around little whilst in the playground, favouring the swings and, while I may have spent many a happy afternoon outdoors, none were happier those filled with the gleeful hours I managed to steal playing on my neighbours’ Super NES or watching their hired videos of Andre the Giant on Royal Rumble.

In fact, if I’d had an Internet to go on, I can quite imagine myself logging on and not coming back. It’s a small wonder my 10 year old self had no access to broadband, else I may not be the semi-self-sufficient musician I am today.

No, the truth of that matter is, the innocence and wild spirit of youth is alive and well (as it ever was in any case), and there’s bugger all those of us who wish to assert our own good fortune over those who follow can do about it, but that doesn’t mean that nothing’s changed or, more specifically, that nothing’s gone; Over the lamb, mezze and Carminere, and after the realisation that today’s youth may have been much maligned, we began to catalogue the genuine losses:

• When did you last pop around, unannounced, and knock for someone?
• When did you last wander over to a common meeting point, knowing there’d be someone there or, if there wasn’t, you wouldn’t be alone for long?
• When did you last arrange a time and place to meet and, with no contact for 24 hours beforehand, actually do it?
• When did you last write a letter?

Of all those cultural losses, the last one struck us as the saddest.

One of our friends spoke about letters he still had from friends who’d left to join the army, and another of postcards, of the free cinema advertising kind, from a favourite aunt, filled with throwaway messages which managed to be important in their unimportance.

I don’t hold myself up as one of life’s great letter writers (my Christmas thank-yous, if written at all, probably arrived in the summer) and I’m not saying that this particular storm-cloud isn’t jolly well lined by heaps of shining silver, but it has to be said that, after its assassination at the hands of email, the letter has left a hole in our lives that hasn’t been completely filled:

Can a deletable file, whatever it may be expressing, replace a small (not quite A4, not quite A5) piece of paper filled with hand written tidings from an absent friend, or a witty postcard which needs no more than a sentence and a photo of the Statue of Liberty to fill you with excitement when you see it on the mat? What is more, it’s all for you! A battery of words which, through the time they took to be written, sealed, stamped, sent and delivered, express more than the sum of their parts, and are a proper one off.

HERE is my facebook address (did you really think I’d put my postal address online?) with which to send me a message so please furnish me with addresses to which i can send letters.

If nothing else, we might save the Royal Mail.

‘A Logistical Nightmare’ or ‘My Weekend’

So, in this past week, me and my old muckers The JJ Horns have been out playing festivals around the country with the marvellous Pogues.

It’s always a pleasure to take to the road with the Pogues, if only to admire that well oiled machine that is Professional Level Touring; having all cut our touring teeth on the more DIY end of the scale, the simple ease of having everything sorted out in advance to the point where you literally have to think of little more than getting on the stage and playing seems almost too good to be true, yet it happens night after night with relatively few hitches.

This past weekend however, fate clearly decided that life was getting too easy for me when she compelled me (this time as a member of Down I Go) to go and play at the Mighty Sounds Festival in the Czech Republic.

It was never going to be easy, flying over at the crack of dawn, playing around midnight, then flying back early the next day, but i don’t think any of us were prepared for the physical and emotional marathon we ended up running.

We were travelling with our old friends The Display Team (with whom we share a drummer) and, despite cutting things a little fine, we made it over to CZ with fairly little fuss. We touched down onto a drizzly runway, picked up our instruments and were met by two friendly drivers ready to take us to the festival. So far, so good.

The problems only really began when we reached the festival site: it was flooded. Seriously flooded. After several vehicles getting stuck in the deep, gloopy mud, the decision was taken not to let any more onsite, so we tied plastic bags to our feet, put our equipment on our heads, and began to slowly wade down toward our stage, which was right in the middle of the site.

Moving around the site was absolutely exhausting. The combination of balancing on the slippery ground, not dropping any guitars, picking routes across mostly impassable roads and pulling up the constantly slipping leg bags was a relentless challenge, and progress was slow. Finding somewhere dry to rest was also fairly difficult. It’s hard to convey in words how tough the moving around was but I assure you, on so little sleep, it’s one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do in life endurance-wise.

After several hours of mud negotiation and sorting out of onstage equipment with very helpful staff, we played our set. In a mire of unavoidable difficulty, it was a very welcome release, and we all had a great time. We also held on to a surprising amount of the audience, considering the relative inaccessability of the music. One guy had even travelled 300 miles to watch our set.

The Display Team pulled off their set with the breathtaking efficiency, vigour, energy and accomplishment that, to them is normal and, from that point on, there was one topic of discussion: how to get out.

We waded back up to the production office, sorted out getting paid, thanked everyone for their help and all that business and then were informed of the terrible news: so many vehicles had been trapped in the mud that there were now literally two vans to transport literally one hundered people back to their hotels, some hour’s round trip away.

Cause of the earliness of our flight, we’d resigned ourselves to a brief nap before going to the airport so, to our tired ears (remember, we’d already missed one night of sleep) this information was devastating. Also, it had started to rain again.

An hour and a half later, and the wonderful, wonderful woman who was single handedly co-ordinating the transport informed us that there was a car waiting to take us to our hotel. There were still no vehicles allowed onsite though so, one terrifying 3am walk through a pitch dark forest later, we found our driver waiting for us by the side of the road. The feeling of standing on hard, solid tarmac was indescribable and welcome.

Our ride to the airport was due at 7am on the dot, so we were able to get our heads down for a full two hours. It was some of the most beautiful, undisturbed sleep I’ve ever had.

We woke up at 6:45 in readiness to leave. The 7am departure left us basically exactly enough time to check in comfortably and catch our plane. By 7:15, we’d all begun to start the mental calculations as to whether it was logistically possible to still catch the plane. By 7:30, we’d woken up a helpful but tired festival organised to ask for help. By 7:45, we were all feeling a bit sick and were sitting in silence, straining to listen for the welcome sound of an engine. By 8am, we’d essentially given up on the idea of catching that plane and were making plans for how we should get back to the UK when finally, we heard the puttering sound of a diesel engine fast approaching round the corner.

We just made the flight. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever nearly missed a plane and I never want to do it again.

So yes, there was the weekend. Sorry to have written such a long and rambling entry, but it really was a form of therapy for me so, even if you got bored, consider your reading of this as having done me a favour.

Also, as  a disclaimer and a footnote, let it be known that everyone at Mighty Sounds went WAY above and beyond the call of duty in terms of helpfulness and competency, and there was never a point when we weren’t offered help, reassurance or guidance in a situation that was utterly beyond the organisers’ control, so a massive thankyou to all of them.

Bangkok and Beyond

P and I have been in Thailand for the last 11 days or so.

So far, we’ve had an incredible and busy time that’s taken in a huge city and two islands, and I couldn’t possibly sum up every detail without boring any unassuming readers into a listen-to-how-interesting-our-holiday-was induced coma. I feel however that it’d be wrong to let the experience pass without jotting down a few thoughts and observations, so feel free to dip in and out at your leisure: this’ll be a self indulgent one.

We spent our first few nights in Bangkok at our old favourite, the New Siam II Guesthouse. New Siam is located just around the corner from Th Khao San Road but, crucially, not too close . Khao San Road serves as a kind of hub for tourists and travellers visiting Bangkok. It’s thick with brightly neon-signed bars, ‘Irish’ Pubs (in the 30+ degree heat they manage to feel fundementally wrong) and endless stalls selling the same five comedy t shirts in endless different colours which, coupled sunburned musclebound lads, mini-skirted girls and lampshade-hatted street vendors, create the feeling of a weird very sweaty Blade Runner version of a bank holiday weekend in Blackpool.

Khao San Road, in all its busy gaudiness.

I don’t mean to imply Th Khao San doesn’t have its charms: The whole environment is basically designed to be enjoyable, and it’s hard not to be completely compelled by the hustle and bustle, even if you know it’s not a part of the Real Thailand which is often referred to in the guidebooks. It’s also a great place to pick up a very cold beer and adjust to the intense heat and highly charged atmosphere that’re constantly present in Bangkok.

In those four days, we visited the breathtaking Wat Pho (home to the staggeringly large Reclining Buddha), the astonishingly bustling Chinatown (home to endless street-food stalls specialising in unrecognisable yet delicious looking chunks of boiled or barbecued animal served on sticks), Ocean World (home to a lot of sharks), Lumphini Muay Thai Stadium (home to young boys beating the stuffing out of each other to the soundtrack of a thousand old Thai men shouting ‘oooh’ and ‘ni’ in inexplicably perfect unison with each blow), The Chatuchak Weekend Market (home to anything you could possibly ever want to buy and a searingly relentless heat which disabled brain functions I’d previously taken for granted), the beautiful Lumphini Park and many, many more incredible places. Bangkok just seems limitlessly eventful, and I’m sure we coud have spent ten more equally busy long weekends there and not do the same thing twice.

Lumphini Muay Thai Stadium

A couple of things were particularly striking:

Thai street-food seems to exist almost completely for the benefit of Thai people. Besides the ubiquitous Pad Thai, a whole host of incredible and unusual food sold from portable trolley kitchens is apparently enjoyed all but exclusively by the locals. I dipped my toe into the ocean of street-food by enjoying, all for about twenty pence a go, some chicken hearts and livers (on a stick), some barbecued whole baby squid (on a stick) and numerous other barbecued bits and bobs (of course, on sticks), but almost everyone else I saw whilst queuing at the stands was Thai.

and

When outside Bhanglampu (the district which includes Th Khao San Raod) you rarely see a western face, especially when travelling on the metro or visiting the parks.

Enthusiastically removing some chicken hearts from a stick.

I only point these things out as interesting because, (and it’s highly possible that I’m making this up, and it’s just an impression I’ve somehow formulated on my own) whenever Thailand is mentioned on holiday programmes, or in the Travel supplements of papers, there seems to be a general implication that most things you’ll encounter on your average trip are geared towards the engagement and entertainment of tourists, hence the search for the Real Thailand.

The reality seems to be that, in every aspect of our time in Bangkok, whether it was in a bar in Bhanglampu or on the wooden benches of Lumphini Stadium, we were constantly in the presence of ordinary Thai people enjoying whatever it was we were doing alongside us.

That’s a good thing.

In any case, after our hectic stay in Bangkok, we took the sleeper train south, headed firstly for the beautiful diver’s paradise of Koh Tao, where we spent many happy evenings with our old friend Neil (better known to some reading this as the Trumpeter/Singer of UK band Lightyear, Neil is now a Dive Master living on Koh Tao) before moving on to the larger but no less picturesque Koh Phangan, and the gorgeous Salad Hut, where we are right now.

I won’t go into too much detail about the islands, cause it’s hard to blog interestingly about swimming with tiny sharks in crystal clear seas and spending evenings on the sand, waves lapping on our toes, stars shining, cold beer in hand, all in the company of the most wonderful, wonderful people. Apart from anything, I’d make you all far too jealous.

The view from our bathroom on Koh Tao

In any case, we head home in a few days time. A part of me dreads the end of the holiday and a part of me feels a temendous musical itch (especially having just finished the downright inspirational Our Band Could Be Your Life, by Michael Azerrad) and the urge to get stuck into the various exciting projects which await my return.

I’ll be back on the 27th. Let’s go for a beer.