Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I have returned from London. In fact, I’ve been back over an hour now but I’ll rewind a bit for clarity’s sake and do this in chronological order.

So, I spent the day doing very little. That’s what I do during revision week. At Half 3 Tom and I went to catch the Oxford Tube, which we did, and henceforth we travelled to London. Arrival at Marble Arch occurred at pretty much the expected time, and in order to save money and to prevent further delay, we walked up Oxford Street.

The problem here was that Oxford Street turned out to be pretty fucking long, and indeed, filled with Humans. At one point we considered buying a machete to hack our way through the rapidly advancing crowd. We’re not sure what it is, but for some reason where everyone else just piledrived ahead we had to weave in and out, dodging people and generally getting in the way. We assume that when you’re from London you have some kind of repellant aura that means you force other people to walk around you. We tried not moving and just ended up walking in to a lot of people.

Nevertheless, we did save both time and money, if not energy. I forget the name of the Wetherspoons we convened in, but it claims to be London’s largest freehouse. The same place Dan, Rachel, Nikki and I were in last time I was in the godforsaken city of London. I was just standing around texting Josh, when he too arrived, but minutes after us. He now sports a smallish beard which makes him seem not unlike Mirror-Universe Josh. I couldn’t tell if he was evil. We all had a drink but no tables became free - for London’s largest freehouse, it seems remarkably under-tabled. I abandoned plans for proper food, and we instead went to McDonalds.

Following the filthy fast-food, we went to the Astoria. In the 3 seconds it took to walk from the end of the barrier to the door of the place, I somehow managed to get given about 9 leaflets. They were handing them out faster than I could receive them! None of them seemed useful though, so I chucked them all in a large box. We then stood around for about an hour waiting for the damn gig to start.

But start it did, and let me say, TMV are a very diffierent gig experience to what I’m used to. For a start, Cicatriz, a song that’s 12 minutes long on the album was stretched to almost 40. They played for just over an hour an a half, and fit in 6 songs - the album is only an hour long and contains 10, such is the extent of their jamming and improv. Televators was excellent live, especially considering I don’t like it on the album really. In the end, I was pleased to have seen them play though, while I had the chance. I expect I’ll see them again should the chance arrive.

Josh and I waited around for Tom after the gig, having clawed our way out of the crowd, and got offered drugs twice by the same guy, who reminded me of Lenny Henry’s homeless rastafarian from “Lenny Henry in Pieces”. After Tom arrived, we got the Central line to Oxford Street, where Josh parted ways with us, with a leaving salute. I like to think he was being shipped off to the front line, if only because it’s an enduring image, leaving your friend to his doom. Tom and I navigated the maze-like underground station and got back to Victoria, then on the Oxford Tube again for some return-journey fun. We sat at the front because the view is much more interesting there, or at least might’ve been if we didn’t drive back through heavy fog that made it impossible to see more than 20 metres ahead.

Oxford was as we left it - cold and damp. I came back home, talked with Nikki for a bit then she went to sleep and I gave Paul a hand with his website validation. Always a pleasure to turn someone to the light-side of valid source code. If you’re reading this and your site isn’t W3C valid, you really have to start asking yourself some serious questions about your own attitude towards life, don’t you?