House of Cards

Well this is a first. I am writing this first bit of this week’s blog at a Mustard gig on a Friday night. Firstly, I never pre-write these things, certainly not on my phone as the spelling will be carnage and at most gigs there isn’t time.

Tonight is different as there are two bands on and so we have some down time whilst the other lot do their thing.

We have done our first “spot” and they are now on their second before we close the night in a bit. The place is rammed and therefore the band not currently on stage (us) has nowhere to sit so I am tucked away in a stairwell listening to a long string of songs I’d forgotten and frankly I was glad to. Well executed they are, but a bit too predictably pub rock for my tastes.

I’m also starving as I had to come straight from work (well I shot home to walk the dogs and load the gear) so all I can think of now is what I’m going to eat when I get in. You see, it’s this rock and roll lifestyle that has denied me a six pack. Eating that late is not a good thing no matter how amazing it tastes and feels. It’s those thoughts of food which will normally distract me mid set and cause me to make a right ricket in a song or two.

The week just gone has been another meeting fest. After a while, sitting in meetings, just contemplating all the stuff building up that you should be doing but can’t, as you are in a meeting, just gets stressful. Again, I can drift off mid meeting thinking about that and of course what I’m going to eat. That’s pretty much a constant if I’m honest.

At this point, Friday’s writing stopped, I did some bass playing and writing was resumed on Sunday.

The other theme of this week has been that our house is falling down. I am not one to over exaggerate the negative as you will know, but things are just getting stupid now. We have a broken dishwasher, which refuses to run a cycle and instead puts on a dazzling performance of flashing lights. I have googled this stuff and the results are full of all men who can handle a tool belt talking about how easy it is to just take the thing to bits, clean some sensor or other and then put it back together.

In our house that just leads to a dishwasher in a thousand pieces, me in a rage and dishwasher sales going up by one. I am in the process of securing a repair person to come and make the problem go away.

We also lost one of our curtains in our bedroom. They just fell down. They were hung on rickety old tracks/runners or whatever you call them and I’ve just been ignoring the fixing or replacing of that as there are literally 671,234 things I’d rather do instead. So now we are paying the price and it serves me right that Louise is using the opportunity to look at some of these fandangled shutter things. Again, folks will be arriving to measure, quote and bankrupt us.

Then on Saturday, Louise was opening one of our fancy, hydraulicy, lift up doors on one of our top kitchen cupboards and that fell off too. How we laughed. Again, having spent moments looking at it, drawing on previous countless similar experiences, I declined the urge to try and fix it myself and I shall again support the local tradesman economy and hopefully they are coming tomorrow.

This series of unfortunate events has been taken as a message that the house may now be showing the signs of all our great holidays and we need to sort it out. A list is being drawn up and projects are beginning. I am a little bit afraid.

Amidst all this carnage a normalish weekend was attempted. Bean went for a haircut yesterday and has spent the hours afterwards shivering and giving us dirty looks.

Then, in the evening Louise and I went out for some tea at our local authentic Italian restaurant, Frankie and Bennys….. I over use the Kevin Spacey gif but it does serve almost every purpose and would work again here….before heading to the cinema next door. Twice in two weeks. Crazy I know.

This time (and I’ll just point out here that again it was Louise’s choice) we watched Glass.

We both loved the previous film in this series, Split, and thought James McAvoy was excellent in it. He was again very good in Glass, but alas, in our view the film itself was, and I shall try to be all highbrow and analytical here, a bit shit.

The premise is that McAvoy is a person with multiple personalities and struggles as they battle for “the light”. In this film, seeing that Samuel L Jackson and Bruce Willis were in it, it looked like little could go wrong. It did.

I won’t spoilt it, but there’s a comic book theme to this one, which, not being in any way a comic book fan or indeed very fond of any super hero films to be honest, it left me and Louise a bit cold. The film didn’t really feel like it knew what it wanted to be and the dark, evil themes of the first were lost as demonstrated when the last twenty minutes sees Samuel L Jackson sat in a wheelchair in a car park in a purple shiny suit. It was, at best a lost opportunity to showcase McAvoy’s incredible range playing the 20+ characters in one body. Anyway, my ice cream was delicious. A three scoop, Rum and Raisin, Chocolate and Strawberry bowl of pleasure, so every cloud etc.

Right, I must away, to secure other parts of our house of cards before this anarchy gets any worse.

Till the next time…..