Hmm, blogger title thing won't work...


i have a bad back. i think i strained it while being over-ambitious at the gym* so today after week of pretending it would go away i went to see an acupuncturist.

talk about weirdville! the nice lady put the pins in my back and the back of my knees and said don't move for 20 minutes... a stiff arm and a quick nap later she took them out again and gave me a quite surprisingly vigorous massage... then she stuck a herbal smelling patch on my back and i went back to the office £28 lighter...

now at first i couldn't feel any pain in my back - hurrah! but about an hour passed and the stiffness came back - does this mean that it is a muscular pain and will go eventually? answers on a postcard to... haha
i called my gym and they said 'we don't have anyone here qualified to advise you on your back pain' helpful! not!!! it's a good job i'm not litigious!

so i'll keep y'all posted but in the meantime please send me sympathetic thoughts!

*being overambitious is a little bit of a bad habit of mine, it leads me to be continually frustrated with myself and my abilities (or lack thereof!)

we are all tiny dancers

oh my god. i went out last night for the first time since the smoking ban and it was amazing!!!

i didn't stink when i got home! unbelievable! i didn't have sore eyes half way thru the night! welcome to the 21st century!!

the only place i've been before with a smoking ban is New York and i remember it being a stressfree night out, i'm so glad they finally brought it in over here - live entertainment is so much better without the stinky extras!

i went to see The beautiful Thrills perform an upclose and coast to coast gig at night and day cafe promoting their new album Teenager out later this month... i love The Thrills and have bought every record so far so if you haven't indulged yet, go ahead - you'll like them! They played a mix of old songs and new (though Conor nearly lost it with a guy who kept shouting 'Corey Haim' out - he said ' stop shouting it out - we'll get to it!') and seeing them in such an initmate venue was really special...

supporting them were a band who sounded like i'd heard their name before but hadn't quite filtered thru to knowing who they were yet - the Tiny Dancers. they're from Sheffield i hear, and they're quite fabulous! so much so that on the way i purchased their album Free School Milk - i recommend! they've got a a really upbeat sound!

hearing all this good music live has certainly has put a smile on my face, which is great cos tmro i go to Kinsale in Ireland with my mum for a weekend of guinness! i might have to take the Tiny Dancers with me on the old ipodus!

precipitation in july

its enough to make you wanna leave the country!

i complain about the weather far more than is healthy my friends... but what gets me down is it isn't even notoriously unpredictable British weather - it's just depressingly predictable Mancunian weather!

i also have a leak in my room - which my landlord promises me is being sorted asap now he's found the hole... i know i've mentioned it already but it's still not sorted! in the meantime i have leaky guttering that keeps me awake at night with its night time pourings and a very unattractive brown water mark on my ceiling! i'm only glad it's in the corner by the window and nowhere near my bed!

if i lived in a part of the country that didn't have quite so much rain none of this would be happening to me!!! manchester has a lot to answer for! i checked the online weather report - Brighton is warm and sunny as you'd expect... Dear Brighton, any writers needed down there? haha

july should be a warm sunny time - a time for cocktails and summer dresses - not winter coats and damp ankles! boo to Manchester weather! at least we haven't been flooded out like nearby Sheffield...

like my grandad used to say, it's good weather for ducks...

i don't wanna go to school...

don't wanna be nobody's fool/i wanna be free/ i wanna be me...

this is my recollection of Toyah lyrics...

i owned a couple of Toyah 7" singles when i was a lass and thought her crazy hairdo quite the thing in 1982... i'm guessing the year cos i was little... my mum took me to see her live at the Liverpool Royal Court and i remember being a bit scared of all the noisy youths rocking it out! haha

it irks me to know that if you were born in the 80s you missed out on all of this and worse are still in your 20s! haha i'm swift becoming the next generation, soon i will stop shopping at topshop and head for marks and spencers! no!!!!!

in 1982 i also enjoyed Adam and the Ants down the local disco 'Prince Charming' - it seems such a shame that anyone should miss out on these fabulous bits of pop culture as they happened... a retro look at anything is always rosetinted you only ever experience something properly if you live in the same moment it was created... i love The Beatles for example but i have no clue how exiting it was to hear that kind of music for the first time - that memory belongs only to the kids of the 1960s...

i'm having trouble writing another song on my guitar, after the flush of first song success i'm seriously struggling with my lyrics... probably concentrating too hard, that always ruins everything! but it only makes me respect the songwriters i love even more...

i think being unemployed is a key element to any good songwriter... that is you need lots of spare time!

best start getting in late to work... haha

women on the verge...

i watched the classic Pedro Almavadour film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown last night on dvd... if you haven't seen it put it on the list of films to see before you die! it's a great film featuring some great perfomances and a more than healthy nod to Hitchcock...

i watched it in bed with a chinese takeaway cos i am suffering a post-glasto cold : (

i awoke in the middle of the night to a crazy pouring sound. the guttering outside my bedroom is literally wearing thin! it has 2 holes in it through which rain pours like from a tap onto my window sill... i don't know what silly hour it was it woke me up but i think maybe 3am... honestly! this is not a civilised way to live! its enough to make me on the verge of a nervous breakdown!

rented accommodation is such a chore sometimes! i thought renting was sposed to be carefree! the guy who has all the money has all the worries right?! not so... if it's not the leak under the kitchen sink its a wonky loo seat, if it's not a leak in my bedroom its a leaky gutter! one day there'll be nothing outstanding for my landlord to sort out and then it'll be time to move out! haha

i don't want much, just a warm dry bedroom to lay my weary cold-riddled body after a hard days work! haha maybe i should write my landlord a letter... what's that i hear? the smallest violin in the world playing for all the renters out there?! haha

this call may be recorded for training purposes

hehe

this call may be recorded? go for it! listen to the jodester stick it to her bank!

i applied for a credit card balance transfer - such is life! nothing unusual about that you say!
but they made a mistake and tranfered the amount twice. they called me to tell me and i asked if there would be a charge and they said no.

then they called me again today and asked me to call my other credit card company for them to authorise the refund and i took the opportunity to ask them to refund me the admin charge of £15 to make up for the inconvenience of having to make this call for them, haha

and i was quite jovial about it cos i knew i was being cheeky and i knew they were over a barrel cos they needed me to make the call for them. i argued - i think quite fairly that if I had made a mistake the bank would probably charge me, therefore i was quite right to charge them for making the call for them, haha

the man in the Indian callcentre said this wasn't possible and i said ofcourse it is and told him to go away and speak to his supervisor again and call me back! i'm guessing he didn't get stern with me cos i kept giggling in between making my cheeky demand! i said 'so where do i send my invoice for my administration fee?' hehe

anyhoo the guy calls me back and to my delight he says they're giving my account a refund of £10 for the inconvenience! jodes wins!! yey! they really are the listening bank after all! haha

stick it to the man baby!

it's matey from the thing

there's nothing like a week of camping in adverse conditions to make you appreciate a warm house/ proper bed/ nice pizza from the supermarket! haha

tuesday night after a day of recovering from Glasto we went to see Stewart Lee do his edinburgh preview show at XS Malarkey in Fallowfield.. we've not been before as we go to the Frog & Bucket in town but i think we'll go again if the man is here mid-week another time... the mc is toby hadoke who we really like and nm has an affinity with regards Dr Who...

when you think back to a really good comedy set the list of topics seems so random but is delivered so well you can't help but think the comedian is a genuis. which, i am of the opinion, Mr Lee is. if you haven't checked him out before go to www.gofasterstripe.com and buy his dvd '90s comedian' or catch him live if you can, he's amazing. in this latest show - not called March of the Mallards, he talks about Big Brother, his mum, weight watchers, bbc2, pestival, tom o'connor and his new baby... trust me - he works it! haha

we're going to edinburgh for a week of comedy in august so we'll probably see it again - talking of comedy reviews i was alittle disappointed by phil nichol's performance at glasto, while ed byrne and jeff green were fab... my boyf keeps calling me an umpa lumpa now... haha

i think we need to join Live Comedy Junkies Anonymous...

there are 7 levels of mud

after a week of no blogs i have plenty to write about!

i've been to glastonbury festival to get pished and muddy! haha I've seen the mighty Stewart Lee live in manchester and I've just had a triumph for the little guys with my bank! haha
having taken lots of snaps at glasto i'm now considering a picture blog - just cos i like taking pictures of unusual stuff and other people might like 'em too! i'll keep you posted as and when i get round to this...

glastonbury was fantastic and exhausting as usual... by sunday night the rain had made my skin feel puckered and dry, my back was killing me from lying on hard stony ground for 5 nights (despite a sleeping mat beneath me!) and the cash had run out! haha
but it was worth all the pain! we saw some great music and comedy, drank some very fine pear cider and even did a bit of dancing to The Specials hits! brilliant!

it took 4 hours to get to the festival on wednesday and another 2 to get in the carpark! then we treked to our favourite field only to find it full of tents, too many gazebos and people marking out spaces for their friends-yet-to-arrive! now this was quite naughty cos gazebos take up valuable camping space and holding onto spaces for slackers who ain't arrived yet is just plain unfair! but we found a place up by the outdoor cinema and went off to find cider...

considering the festival only opens on wednesday and the music doesn't start til friday there was plenty on! its all a bit of blur now i look back, but so much fun, and on my birthday too! quite a treat...

i hooked up with my brother who was there too on wednesday night and altho we meant to hook up again the text situation was a disaster - some getting thru others taking hours to deliver - so i didn't manage to find him again... but there are 170,000 just milling about so it's understandable really...

thursday i managed to hook up with my housemate for a chat on a sofa we'd found in the green fields but not again before the end of the festival... my man was the victim of welly crime, he had to take them off to enter a tent and because they were quite generic looking green wellingtons i told himto write his name on them, which he did, but then they were taken by someone else anyway! so unsure as to whether they'd been pinched or just mistakenly taken but another bigfooted fella he had to procure a pair from the welly pile and make a sharp exit... he didn't take them off again! glasto is not a place to be welly-less!

we saw ghostbusters on the big screen i think thursday night - everyone sang along to the big theme tune and booed the bad guys - great fun! we would have stayed for the followup film but it were freezing so we made back to the tent!
friday we saw some comedy in the cabaret tent and saw bjork kick some ass! she was ace - so glad we made the half hour trek to the other stage for that one!
saturday we watched the pipettes and more comedy followed on sunday by scott mathews, mark ronson and the who, who busted out all their big hits to a very wet but cheerful crowd!

monday morning it had been raining heavily for about 12 hours and our tent started leaking so we packed up and headed for the car - we were absolutely soaked thru but it was such a relief to be in the warm again! we got in the queue to get off site and waited a very boring 4 hours! and i needed a wee! now thats a serious wait! we now realise that our leaky tent did us a favour cos our friends who left for their car a couple of hours later waited 7 hours to get off site!
then the site managers would only let us go west rather that north on the raod surrounding the site so we added about 50 miles to our journey (not very environmentally friendly mr. eavis!) and sat in traffic for a few more hours before taking matters into our own hands and taking a B road north towards the motorway! what a relief that was...
took us 12 hours in total to get home but i know it took other people longer and i'm just glad the nasty storm that hit the UK monday was a few days late or the festival would have been a complete washout!

i'm now exhuasted and catching up on me beauty sleep! roll on Glasto 08!

beating the frog

ah comedy, where for art thou?

i was at a comedy night called Beat the Frog last night in sunny Manchester to see my man* try his out his latest comedy wares... we go quite often since it's one of the best places to try out new comedians in town and last night was a good night despite it being a small crowd...

after almost 2 years of being a live comedy junkie now i do feel my energy levels for new comedy slipping, it takes a lot of sympathy to smile and have a good time if the comedy isn't up to it but my man enjoys it so he's thinking of going along to these nights without me haha

its not that i don't appreciated new comedians need a forum, its just i can't handle being it week in week out! i know i'm lucky to live in a city with such a great comedy scene but i think there's a limit to how much sympathy laughter** one person can dish out in one month! haha

i think another problem is that i get so nervous when my man is going to perform - i had proper tummy ache for him last night and he wasn't even that nervous! how rude! haha this is why i can never do it, i think you have be ever so slightly sadomasochistic to do standup comedy -- hence the bunch of misfits it attracts! haha

some dude at the frog the other week said of the upcoming contestants - right now they're all discovering that the colour of adrenalin is brown! haha - funny cos its true baby, funny cos its true...


*1min 50 - there will be no frog beating this week my friend...

**copyright nicholai, hehe