*skreeeeeeeeee*

Where to start?

Well, Thursday I guess. Not much to say there, except that I managed to bagsy a better laptop at work for my new assignment and made substantial headway in freeing myself of some of the tethers of the old assignment. Hopefully by the end of next week I'll have an idea of what the goalpost are with regards to getting shot of the old assignment altogether.

We watched the latest Buffy after our evening classes. Anne, honey, you need to catch up toot sweet so that a) we can talk about it, and b) Sham can catch up too and talk about it.

Finally, we ended the day with a Dead Or Alive 3 fest. Not sure if I mentioned in the previous entry that I rented this from Blockbuster. It's a top game, and is both a) a great laugh and b) a great reliever of tension. Alison and I take great entertainment from knocking the shit out of each other playing it, which is of course what domestic bliss is all about. It's also great for making pervy comments about. You see, it's a game when you can fight as either male or female characters. Put a male against a female and it tends to be a bit uneven. The females are faster and the males are stronger, and in every match one of these two factors ends up giving one of the characters a pretty unfair advantage - changes from pairing to pairing which way it goes.

Yeah, I'm getting to the pervy comments. You end up either playing male vs male, or female vs female. And all the male characters are ridiculously camp. And the female characters are, well, I know they're only pixels, but they're kinda hot pixels, for the most part. And given that some of them have a fire in their eyes that makes them look, well - to pick a totally random phrase out of the air - diamond hard, you're left with a recipe for gourmet femslash perviness. Or something. Especially with the mildly butch-looking female wrestler who has a habit of throwing her opponent to the floor and pinning their legs, which happens to leave her face in their crotch. I don't even have to speculate or look, I just know from having played the game that there's going to be a DOA3 slash fanfiction site.

Friday was eclectic. There was a lot of it, for starters. Gentle application of a day's leave meant that both Alison and I had the day off, thereby gaining yet another four day week (having had two around Easter and another to come with the May Bank Holiday). However, I had stuff to sort out for work all the same, so I tried to get that done as soon as possible. So much for that idea. It took longer than I expected (although playing Buffy on the XBox every five minutes probably didn't speed things up much).

It was also essential that I spent half an hour relaxing in the bath and reading (and texting people to boast that I was in the bath while they were suffering at work).

For reasons that will become clear as we go along, we were heading to London for the night. Our first port of call was my Uncle in Woolwich, to see how he was getting on recovering from being knocked down. I had a gift for him, along with Draft 1.5 (it was meant to be Draft 2, but I didn't get that far) of Pepper Rats. He has a lot of spare time on his hands lately, so I figured giving him something to read would help. And, not that it means anything to say this, because I could have just as easily not and none of you would have thought any less - I only gave it to him to read as something to occupy him. He may work in the publishing industry but he deals with non-fiction. That really had nothing to do with it.

He was in good spirits, and seemed to be coping well although he obviously found his lack of manual dexterity very frustrating. He's just about able to hold a cup in one hand now. One arm is a cast and the other is strapped to a brace. It's a little offputting to look at, but the stories about the operations he's been having were more offputting, by a long way.

The next part of the day was the Mission Impossible bit. We left my Uncle's at 5.30pm. We then had to get from Woolwich to Putney (opposite ends of the South Circular) in half an hour. My Uncle advised us to just head straight for the centre of London (which was to be our final destination for the evening) and make alternative arrangements to meet with Alison's sister + bloke. We got about a third of the way round by the time we decided to head for the centre.

I really don't want to go into too much detail at this point. Driving in London is not fun at the best of times. Driving in London during the Friday rush hour, when you've got a gig you're trying desperately not to be late for... to say I was tense was an understatement. At one point I made a comment that the one thing that could improve my mood was a baseball bat and a room full of expensive (yet paid for) wine glasses. "There's a baseball bat in the boot", Alison commented. This was true. There's been a kid-sized wooden bat in the boot of the car since our holiday last autumn, when we bought it with the plan of having a knockaround on a beach or something. My only reply to her comment yesterday was to say "Don't tempt me," through gritted teeth. And I really meant it. I don't think I've ever been that close to violence. Not even that episode way back that some readers know about.

So, skip the fact that we paid 13 quid to park by Trafalgar Square. Skip the fact that we had a MacDs purely because it was fast food and we needed food that was fast. Let's get on to the gig.

Despite the extra effort that we put in and the jeopardy I put my sanity in trying to get to the Astoria for 7.30 (which was the time on the ticket), Mr Martin L. Gore did not appear on stage until around 9pm. This did however mean that I was more or less calmed down by the time he came on.

It wasn't the best gig in the world. It became apparent quite quickly that he's really not comfortable with being the front man, expect when the song is gentle and doesn't call for him to dance about or anything.

That being said, it was still a pretty fantastic gig. It was a mix of his solo work (covers mostly from the 70s and 80s) and DM songs (all of which were written by him, after all). It was strange to see the gig when I'd barely heard the new album and as such was unfamiliar with the new material, but I think he did all of the new album bar tracks 8 thru 10, Never Turn Your Back On Mother Earth from the first Counterfeit e.p., another song I'm not sure I knew, and the following DM Songs:

• Only When I Lose Myself
• The Sweetest Perfection
• In Your Room (fantastic grand piano version)
• Walking In My Shoes (also on piano)
• The Love Thieves
• Surrender
• A Question Of Lust (piano again)
• Home (piano)
• Shake the Disease (also piano)

Today was less eventful, and since I should be in bed right now I'm not going to bother with it.