It’s seriously, no-messingly, indisputably

HOT

. And muggy. So muggy. It’s like trying to breathe jelly. People all over europe are keeling over with heatstroke, but England continues to firmly shun any suggestion that we should all be using air-conditioners, with the stiff-upper-lipped resoluteness that will probably result in my death later today.

Last night was Brodie’s brithday. The Fish Brothers played the Rosemary branch and many many people turned up and drank too much….including the man himself, who became very tired and emotional and it took three of us to get him upstairs and into bed. Good gig tho. One of Brodie’s friends who lives in Ireland was looking at the Fish Brothers’ website and noticed the gig in honour of his birthday, so came all the way over! He ended up staying round at ours as the host had an early bath.

Thanks to Andy, I now have a copy of the radio show from the other night. Have a listen. I don’t actually appear until about 28 minutes in to it, but the non-me bits are much better listening anyway.

Smile were kind enough to send me a copy of the fraudulent cheque. It was made out to somone with a name that can only belong to a Columbian drug baron or ficticious identity. Obviously I can’t publish this name, but suffice to say that his first name is “Pedro”….honestly…

Yesterday included one of those random injections of weirdness that makes life bearable. I got a phonecall from sebastian in the DoC (department of computing) inviting me up to their 12th floor barbecue. Apparently there was a “geek” there who wanted to see me. The geek was a thoroughly bloody nice chap called Andrew, and with him were Jenny and “Tyndall”, who turns out to know a friend of mine Peter. They wanted to know if I was interested in going onto the radio that night to talk bollocks. Seb and Claire had obviously tipped them off that I was very adept at it. Their friendly manner and the beer I’d consumed convinced me it might be fun so I agreed.

8pm I was waiting on Charing Cross Road, full to the brim with dutch courage and a paranoid feeling that the whole thing was probably a wind up, but they arrived and up we went into the cramped studio of Resonance FM 104.4, situated in the roof of a curry house. Even though it’s a legit station, it had such a pirate feel to it with everyone shuffling past each other, pulling cables about, and knocking things over while someone was trying to do a radio show. It took about 15 minutes for the “sound engineer” to get the desk working properly – which of course was 15 minutes of airtime. As a result the output must have been pretty bizarre, consisting of the same gamelan tune twice and “busy line” by Rose Murphy played through a flanger…..but hey, this is art radio! All the better for it. The programme was called “Big Ears” and although
I never actually heard the final output, it was essentially a peculiar soundscape of ambient noises, strange music and a chat between me and Andrew, where he asked me all kinds of jocular tech questions and I gave jocular bullshit answers with the sound of running water over it. Good fun tho’. After an hour and a half we made way for the next turn, who appeared to be a large Turkish family, and went to the coach and horses for a couple. Ian, who’d been in the west end for teh past few hours, met up with us and was in a tired and emotional state. All most amusing.

A perfect day. Zap called me at about 10am to see if I was up for goint to the computer fair in Sratford. The prospect of yet another day in, working, or rather pretending to work, while the sun’s out, persuaded me to accept his offer. What a wise choice.

The weather was HOT. We went around the fair getting a handle on the prices, and eventually Zap bought a SmartCard reader while I bought some RAM and then we went to the pub.
A couple of pints later we went back to the fair.
If you’ve never been to one of the computer fairs, you’ve missed out. They’re reminiscent of middle-eastern bazarrs, only more high-tech. There are almost no white people working there. It’s essentially middle-eastern, Indian, African or Pakistani people who are selling their warez. Whilst people haggle over the price of motherboards and RAM with women in muslim dress, kids behind the tables solder, strip and chip people’s playstations. Haggling with people over the price of hard-disks, DVDs and all kinds of hardware really does make for a good holiday.
After our hagglefest we got on the DLR, scanned a few wireless networks and reired to the Gypsy Moth in Greenwich for a nice sunny drink. Beautiful.

A trip to Eltham to visit my parents followed. The 286 brought back many memories, mostly tedious, but Stella managed to cook a splendid Salmon dinner and we ate, drank and laughed until hometime. Cathy and Kate from next-door came round too – altogether a nice evening.

Primary Colors could be summed up as:
“Power corrupts,
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”