Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Seems like my illness is almost over, the previous assessment being grossly over-optimistic. It’s been a truly terrible week because of it. I think my decision not to take some time off work negatively affected the healing process. Without getting too graphic, I’ve had things coming out of my sinuses that could turn your hair white.

I expect there’s probably a day or two to go before I’m in top shape (for me..) but it’s not been too bad recently.

Yesterday Ian and I bought ourselves a DS Lite each from Virgin Megastore. I had been in two minds as to whether it was worth paying £100 for a slightly newer version of a console that I only got at Christmas, but I still have use for the original (pass-through card doesn’t work on the Lite) and Nikki no longer has to wait for me to finish gaming, she can just play on that one. The improved elements of the Lite make it a definite purchase if you’re on the fence, especially if you don’t already own a DS.

Today Nikki and I went to the O2 Wireless festival in Hyde Park. As previously mentioned, we managed to get free tickets - they seem to be quite literally giving them away, despite the face value of £40.

We turned up just in time to catch the tail end of Nizlopi doing their self-styled brand of “folk-hip-hop.” They were so terrible, and their style is made even more ludicrous because I grew up the same place they did and it just means that I hear nothing but middle-class whiteboy angst. Instead of sitting around being stuck with Nizlopi, we went looking for decent eateries and were very pleased to discover Shakeaway-ripoffs, the Shaken Udder had turned up, so they provided drinks for the rest of the day. Chocolate Orange milkshakes made with actual Chocolate Oranges. Excellent.

We wandered around the retail village for a while, looking for something interesting to buy, and eventually discovered a boxfull of bootleg finger-puppets knitted by some peruvians. they had piles and piles of poorly rendered characters - Winnie the Pooh, Woody Woodpecker, Snoopy, Fred Flintstone (the people running it asked us “If this is Fred, who is the short one?”, so we told them he was Barney, which they were greatful of because they’d been trying to remember, and then they told us that in spanish Barney and Fred are called Pablo and Peter, hence their confusion.) We finally settled on a Hulk puppet though.

We watched Beth Orton, then waited for the eels. During this time I managed to explode a bottle of Fanta over myself, so we were also waiting for that to dry out. The eels played a decent set, containing both old and new material. There were some truly hilarious moments, such as when they left feedback going for like 3 minutes during the middle of Souljacker. It’s hard to see whether the James Blunt crowd would get that sort of humour, much like how they covered Peaches’ “Rock Show”. After the set some Davina wannabe was doing live interviews with the artists backstage, asking generic questions, and E was giving some great answers that were leaving her plenty confused. When asked if he was happy with how the set went, he talked about how it was 100% great and the best set they ever did. When she asked what they has requested in their rider, he replied “Drugs, mainly.” and then when asked what other artists he was here to see, instead of giving a back-slapping circle-jerk answer like the others had, he started listing dead rock stars. At the end she asked him to high-five and thus ensued the most incredibly awkward exchange of hand slaps I’ve ever seen. I found it deeply funny, anyway.

After watching that, we left, just in case we ended up seeing James Blunt. A lucky escape, really. Good job it was free else we might’ve felt like staying. I imagine in the next few years as the popularity of the festival increases, it will get proportionally more engaging, but for now it was nice to be able to turn up, have a wander, see a few decent bands and get home without devoting an entire 18-hour day to the endeavour.

There’s plenty more wackiness that I didn’t mention, but for now Nikki has the photos so I’ll let those do the talking: O2 Wireless on Flickr