Item - Tonight I was lucky enough to play at Vashti And Friends at the Hideaway in Tufnell Park, one of those rare lovely gigs where everything is completely laid back and relaxed, the music is all good, you don’t want to drink more beers than you have money in your pocket to pay for, and you get to play everything - something you’ve rehearsed with a friend, something of your own, and something completely random you were just asked to do the night before. This was good.

Item - I am feeling quite strange right now.

Item - I got to have Tom Fry playing bass with me on ‘Drinking On My Own’ tonight. Since he absolutely has to be one of the best bass players around at the moment, this was just great. As a bassist of sorts myself, with a big enough head to think I am not all that bad on it really, I am horribly, horribly picky about bassists, so to have someone I would happily pay to teach me bass doing the job was a fine fine thing. Plus Gemma Fuller was there with her trumpet, so I didn’t have to make silly noises in lieu of an actual proper solo on the solo verse. Another win.

Item - No, really. Strange. I’m not sure what it’s all about.

Item - Life among the London Underground buskers is more than a bit odd at the moment. One of our number committed suicide not so long ago and another one, I hear, was recently rushed to hospital following a heart attack suffered just after playing a pitch, where he remains. The fact that TfL’s recent management of the scheme is nothing short of disastrous (banning us from selling CDs just before Christmas, making us pay to phone in and book pitches for no obviously clear reason, attempting to stop us from sharing pitch cancellations among ourselves on an ad hoc basis, etc) is surely coincidental. But it’s not good right now for the buskers. There were a few buskers at the gig tonight as it happens. Alcohol was drunk, and a few tears were shed at emotional moments. I’m not going into detail. Things will and must improve, but until they do. Fuck. I don’t bloody know.

Item - You see? This is what I am talking about.

Item - Well, maybe not. I was going to link to all kinds of interesting things on the internet that I have seen recently, but you have probably seen them already, and if you haven’t, you probably will, if that is the kind of thing you like to do. And if not, there’s little point me linking them here, since you won’t be bothered either way. I’m not talking about that video of the stoat, nor of the one about the cat on the piano. But whatever I am talking about I can’t really remember anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter.

Item - Posting this here means I don’t post it anywhere else. This, my friends, is what your own blog is for.

Item - That’s probably enough items for now.