Together for a birthday lunch

Lookalike spotting

We had a quick beer after cricket yesterday. In the Athletic Club with us were Kenny Dagleish and Irvine Welsh. Or their stunt doubles, anyway. Neither had a Scoash accent. Kenny Dogleash, strangely for the hottest day of the year, was sporting a biker black leather jacket, and Mervin Welsh looked able to prove that, actually, not everyone has a novel in them. I got some praise for my abilities with spotting these and other lookalikes. Qualified by the caveat that it was about time I showed some ability at something, and that cricket isn't in any way something I can claim to have any ability at. At all. Whatsoever.

Good food and scary pandas

Birf'day lunch for TBG today. Good Chinese food and fantastic to see K and J after too long. I was laughing from sitting down to paying the bill, the company was really fantastic, and for an HR bod, BLISS truly lives on the planet 'PC what's that?' MM pointed out the pandas on the mirror, that were freaking him out. The artist's intent probably was to depict two jolly black and white bears having a friendly roll in the bamboo, but badly misjudged the alignment of one paw...

Haircut day

BLISS, aided and abetted by TBG cut my hair today. There was a fair amount of giggling and laughter going on, and I've not yet looked at the outcome, so this could be interesting.

Animal Collective restored my sanity...

We have some neighbours. They either think that it's perfectly OK to inflict their abominable music on their neighbours, or that the hedge has huge acoustic attenuation properties, or that, rather than being too well mannered to have music on the house, loud, so that we and everyone else can hear it in their gardens, we don't have the will or the equipment to do so. Added to this the woman neighbour thinks she can sing. She's had lessons. She warbles in that old-lady clenched cats-arse mouth way making a noise like a large number of large and angry cats meeting up with Clarence the Cat-Strangler.

This afternoon it was a bootleg Pogues band. Why listen to the Pretend Pogues or the Shane Mock-Gowans or The Rogues or whatever they call themselves when you can listen to the real thing? We were even treated to a surreal trip to Val Doonigan land with Molly Malone. “It'll be Paddy McGinty's ****ing goat in a minute” I said.

Anyway, I'm now safely indoors (manacled to the computer for my own good) playing Merriweather Post Pavilion and back to sonic sanity.

Your patience will be rewarded...

...so said my fortune cookie. Five other people said, as one, “what patience” as I read that out. Apparently, I'm perceived as impatient by my family. Now, if I could only slip out of these chains and take the large hammer to next door's music collection and audio equipment.