It's my first unlocked post for about a week. I'm sure the wider internet has missed me. Suffice to say, juicy gossip has been flowing freely here, and if you've not seen it and have the urge to, well, you could get yourself a LiveJournal. On the other hand, perhaps you have better things to do with your lives. No, I'm sure you have. Really.

After shenanigans in Yorkshire and Brussels during the week, I had a Do Me Bad Things show to look forward to at The Square in Harlow. The train from Tottenham Hale was busy, and we sat in a carriage with several teens from Broxbourne who had been to London for the day. “What did you buy?” asked one. “Oh, a magazine, a can of Coke and a bottle of water,” replied another, for whom a trip to the corner shop clearly lacked that exotic quality that you can get from Oxford Street. One girl had been to Harrods. “God, right, we were outside, and this woman offered me ten quid to take her baby!” The response to this sentence was phenomenal, and the questions rained down over her. What did they look like? Where was this, exactly? What did you do? The girl was delighted by the response, and spent the next 10 minutes embellishing her story, to the point where asylum seekers had pursued her across much of Kensington waving wads of notes in her face and thrusting not one but two babies at her. Slowly her credibility ebbed away, and the conversation moved on. None of them were particularly fond of a girl called Trina. One boy had become so frustrated with Trina's inability to fit into their clique that he'd beat her up after a German lesson. “I tell you what,” he said with a certain chivalry, “She can't fight for sh!t.”

Time was when would put on fantastic gigs at Harlow Square and I'd be a regular attendee, but that was long, long ago, and when I showed up with Jenny at about 8.45, there were kids queueing up who wouldn't even have been BORN when I first went there. “It's like a school disco,” said Jenny, nervously. We were reassured by the presence of a man in his 50s about 4 places behind us in the queue, but he might have been there to check the boiler or serve a noise abatement order. We finally gained access, and I headed to the bar, passing several girls who hadn't seen each other since 4pm and screamed in each others faces to make it clear that they were very much still friends. Jenny went to the toilet. She came out looking pleased. “Some girls said they liked my skirt,” she said, “and they weren't even taking the piss.” But apparently they lost interest when she told them it cost 50 quid.

Do Me Bad Things were almost perfect. They played the whole of their album plus a few extras, and I only had my drink spilled down my front once. Chanteuse, Chantal Brown, is staggeringly good. Afterwards Tommy, their drummer, gave me a CD by The Profiles, the band who are supporting them in Wrexham, Brighton and Swansea this week. It sounds like Barry Manilow fulfilling a contractual obligation with a jazz fusion pickup band, which, in case you didn't know, is a good thing.

I'm currently working on a piece that involves me visiting a derelict lunatic asylum with a man I've never met before. He's just emailed me to confirm the date, and offer a few extra details. There's no security fencing that I know of, but I believe there are patrols and the police train dogs there. All the best, Simon. All the best, haha. To say that I know no fear is a vast understatement. I know plenty of fear. Climbing through broken windows with alsatians snapping at my heels is the kind of thing I have nightmares about. So the strategy I've decided to adopt is to think of the money. Not the dogs. Anything but the dogs.