I’m getting quite adept at putting off work until the last possible moment, meeting the deadline with minutes to spare, and filling the preceding hours with such pointless activities as downloading and watching an episode of “Don’t Ask Me” from 1974, featuring the late Dr Magnus Pyke. He’s someone who we only really half-remember via poor impressions done by end-of-the-pier 70s variety acts, but apart from a pretty convoluted and incomprehensible answer to the question “Why do we only see the tip of an iceberg”, I found him rather engaging. I vote for more eccentric, shabbily dressed scientists on our television screens. Apparently Magnus once suggested that a solution to blood donation outstripping storage space was to make a load of black pudding. Marvellous.

I then heavily cut back the list of “interests” on my LiveJournal info page to the following:

bogshed / distorted bass guitar / electric pianos / magma / prefab sprout / pubs / tv chefs

Which I think sums me up pretty well. Although actually, as I’ve got distorted bass guitar and electric pianos in there, I could probably remove magma_ I’ll think on that for a bit. I also aligned various things on my desk until they were aesthetically pleasing, realigned them a few moments later because of my fickle attitude to the whole alignment thing, went out to buy a can of Diet Coke, wondered if aspartame will actually kill me, and then finally did some bloody work.

There were two downers at the weekend. One was realising, on the way to visit some friends in their new home, that neither Jenny or I had any gifts – no booze, nothing. Jenny insisted we bought a bottle of champagne for 27 quid from a corner shop, and then pointed out that she didn’t have any cash on her. The second blow was forking out for Sky Sports on Thursday and then spending the majority of the weekend away from home and unable to watch the cricket, returning on Monday to see a lot of huffing and puffing in increasingly gloomy light. I hope you’re happy, Murdoch.

I’m posting this again because the last time I mentioned it was at the weekend when no-one reads this drivel: this Thursday (18th May) features fun in Soho. Spektacle Magazine are putting on a night featuring myself (playing Free French songs on a piano), my chum Alex (aka Alexander’s Festival Hall) and a woman known as Ninki V. More information is here; but it’s at Asylum, 28 Rathbone Place, London W1T 1DB. Only £3 to get in.