So, anyway, it turns out that Elvis Costello was at the show last night, but he had to leave before we went on. Oh, and Mary Margaret O’Hara was at the Toronto gig. Just saying.

I woke up at the Howard Johnson hotel – not the Howard Jones hotel, which has a bald bloke in chains miming in the lobby – to the grim discovery that we had scant minutes before we had to check out. Days and nights have been blurring into one another in an alarming fashion; this is best illustrated by the experience of our engineer Andy, who had to ring down to reception at 10am this morning and shamefacedly ask what day of the week it was. Poor guy. I wandered downstairs, remembering that last night bandmate Dave asked me if I’d like a beer, to which I said yes, slapping six dollars down on the bar next to him, and saying “six” to indicate the number of dollars I’d slapped down, and him saying “six?” and me saying “yes, six”, and then him buying six beers, meaning he was about $30 down on the deal. Poor Dave. He’s had a number of mishaps over the past three days, of which his nosebleed in Philly is the only one I could possibly reveal on this blog.

Ravenous, I immediately walked into the Jewish bakery next door to buy a bagel. The proprietoress didn’t want to give me a bagel, though. She shrugged her shoulders. “How about you have a knish?” she said. “Well, I don’t know,” I said, “what’s a knish?” She gestured to a range of knishes in the shop window, which were alongside a sign saying “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy a knish!” Fair enough. I pointed at a particular knish which had spinach in it. She put it in a bag along with a small tub of mustard. I exited the shop, tried a moutful of knish, decided it was disgusting, threw it in the bin and walked to a deli further up the street to get the bagel I wanted in the first place. You don’t need to have taste buds to enjoy a knish.

A small black van took us over the bridge to the bohemian epicentre of Williamsburg, where we played a hastily improvised instore performance in Sound Fix to an enthusiastic crowd, one of whom had flown in from Miami especially. Eeek. A few of the crowd had been to a number of the recent gigs. Jim was one, and another was the lovely Brian, who is pictured here second left:

I can’t remember the names of this particular group of Scritti Politti fans, but I’m digging their clothing immensely:

With three spare hours to kill before driving overnight to Boston, Dicky and I have just attempted to go and see the Borat film on 2nd Avenue, but were thwarted by immense interest in the film from New Yorkers. A huge queue stretched down the street, and I engaged one of the queuers in conversation. I asked him what he was queuing for, and he said “Borat”, and this prompted us to retrace our steps down 2nd Avenue back to the hotel. We can watch the thing in London without queueing, for chrissakes. And what were we thinking, spending our last hours in New York in a dark room which could be anywhere in the world?

On the way back, we amused ourselves by thinking up mundane pieces of software whose names signify something vastly more exciting – e.g. something that remaps the number keypad to macro commands in Microsoft Excel that’s called Mind Annihilation, or a no-frills text editor called Earthquake! (the exclamation mark is important, obviously.) With giggles rippling through our supple bodies, we were reduced to helpless lumps of jelly – or is it jello? – by this:

Yum! Now we’re sat in the hotel, watching Curb Your Enthusiasm series 5 on a DVD with the curtains shut. Honestly, it’s pathetic, really, isn’t it.