We drove back from the Brecon Beacons on Sunday afternoon. One side of Jenny's family hail from Merthyr Tydfil, so we took a diversion to try and find the house that her dad grew up in. Merthyr contrasts alarmingly with the rolling hills to the north of the town; the only rolling going on is fat children attempting to make cigarettes out of green rizlas and vegetable stock cubes. I rang my mother. “We're in Merthyr Tydfil.” “Why on earth did you want to go there?” she asked. As we drove aimlessly around for ages, looking for St Illtyd's Church but finding only run-down terraces and industrial estates, this question became ever more pressing. A subplot of finding something to eat provided an interesting distraction, but in the end we did what the residents of Merthyr Tydfil must dream of doing: we got the f*ck out, and sat in a nearby service station on the M4, shaking our heads.

On Monday morning I got up at 7am, having had bad dreams that the piece I wrote for The Independent about Battle Of The Bands had been savagely cut and tucked away on page 10 of the Review section. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I got up and went to the petrol station to buy a copy; the piece had been savagely cut and printed on page 6. It's good to know that my dreams are accurate to within 4 pages, I guess.

The day was spent putting off a journey across London. At 7pm I made a dash for it and met up with Will and Anthony on Kingsland Road with the intention of seeing Lightning Bolt do a secret gig. However, there was a queue of 300 people around the block, which made it the opposite of a secret gig and thus totally without appeal. So we wandered to a pub that wasn't hosting America's loudest noise-duo, and so only had 25 people in it. We mused about All About Eve's 1988? performance of Martha's Harbour on Top Of The Pops, “ruined” by a technical fault, and whether the follow up single was called “Betty's Jetty”. That took about 3 hours, by which point it was time to go home.

En route, I saw a photocopied sheet of paper stuck up on an empty market stall. “Tired Of England? Thinking Of A Move To The Sun?”

“Ooh, Jeremy, you're looking awfully red.” “Yes, I know. It would be lovely to spend a holiday here, but the unrelenting, searing gas does make one a little, you know, weary after a while.” “Yes. It's a very dry heat, wouldn't you say? Jeremy? Jeremy? Oh, he's vaporized.”