Gigs, Exams, Coursework and Parking Tickets.

Another Monday then. Bit of a big day today, I had my exam for the end of my 1st year of degree, exciting!

I think it went alright, I usually choke up in exams and find it difficult to play the most simple things, things that I could do perfectly the night before. It happened to an extent this morning, I wasn't as good as I am on stage or in by bedroom (of course) but I think it was good enough, better than my other exams earlier in the year. The tutors were nice and understanding that it was 9am and I've spent most of my time doing coursework, they helped me out by giving me a nice third piece to play. We had eight tracks to learn, we chose two in the exam and the tutors chose 1. Results should be out in by the end of summer although we probably won't get it till autumn!

So I've got 3 days including the rest of today to get my coursework finished, I've done about half and I don't think it'll be too difficult to get done, I might even try to get it done for Wednesday rather than the Thursday deadline. This term has been quite dissapointing, most of the essays seem a bit pointless and there has been a distinct lack of playing. I think there should be more performing on this performing degree!

I played a short set with Jof last Friday in the middle of Reading town centre at rush hour, it was brilliant! It was acoustic, which was odd, but it was even odder using only a snare, bass drum and a ride cymbal, made me really think about what I played in each song. It went really well, we managed to get a bit of a crowd going from passers-by and a few strangers complemented once we'd finished. Jof, Jenny, Rachel and myself went for a lovely meal at Pizza Express after and a drink in a pub before me and Rachel headed back to the car...

...To discover I had been given a parking ticket. I didn't agree with this so today I have appealed. Apparently I should have had a permit, but according to the sign I could park there on a week day after 5.30 without one. Apparenltly not. I think they worded the sign purposely confusing so they make some money from confused motorists like my self. If the appeal system works they'll agree, change the sign and write off my ticket, if, like I expect, the system does not work and this is just another council that likes to squeeze every last penny from anyone nice enough to visit their little town, I shall pay the £35 and spend the rest of my days complaining about everything, including the bird poo on the pavement, to the council. Fun for them!

I hate councils. I suggest you do too.

Enough ranting, back to coursework. Have a nice week :-)

My Wednesday.

Want to know what I've been doing today? No? Tough.

I've been trying to do even more coursework today, only one week left before I have to hand it in. I wasn't in the mood for writing so I thought I'd do some recording for my Song Writing thingy.

Here's my little set up for recording guitar, pretty simple to record grunge, just whack the gain up to full and go for it.

Living room recording studio

I've also been practicing for my Monday exam, there's so much coursework to do I hardly have time to practice, a little worrying!

Wish me luck for Monday! :-s

Si.

When A Failed Gig Goes Well.

We played a gig last night at the Red Lion in Reading (of course), there were a few bands lined up including us. We were headlining so we had to supply the gear, this always means I have to take it all up from my parent's house, my drum kit, the bass amp and anything else stored there, this fills up my car completely, although I did manage to squeeze a Rachel into the front seat this time. We headed up to Reading after a Chinese take-away and met Jof at his flat, packing more into the car we headed for the venue, situated on a three lane one way street heading onto a rather large roundabout, hell to stop on, it's a "mount the curb and stick your hazards on" job, you can never get in trouble if you've got your hazards on, this is something I've learned from gigging in Reading.

We loaded in and I parked the car in the Oracle car park, nice and cheap in the evening it seems, then headed back to set up the kit. To my dismay I found that another one of my tom holders had snapped a bolt and was failing to hold up the floor tom, so I had to ring the warehouse (aka the parent's house) to ask if they could bring up my other snare stand. They did and I stuck my high tom on that, worked a treat. But that's another £20 I need to splash out on another tom mount. Great.

The promotor, Mr Hallett, told us that the other acts had pretty much fallen appart and that he had no idea how the night would work out, but it was turning into a jam session with some Reading regulars, including Liam of "Jets Against Giants" fame and a few of his mates. It started off a bit shakey, just a mess of guitar and bass but soon it started to form a few good jams an a couple of covers, mainly Kasabian and Kings of Leon, obviously favourites of the guy playing acoustic guitar and singing. There were a few random hints of some ace Nirvana songs but they never came to fruition, unfortunately.

As the night was so unplanned I was the only one who brought any drum stuff (it was all my gear, cymbals, snare, everything) which struck up a problem when people wanted to jam. I wasn't happy sharing all of my kit, some of which was inhereted from Geoff, I also only have one pair of sticks, so if someone broke them I wouldn't be able to play a set. I let Liam play with my brushes, I figured they couldn't do any damage and indeed they didn't. But then some other dick I didn't know sat on my kit, complained about the brushes and picked up my sticks. I jumped in, claws out, teeth bared and... asked him kindly not to use sticks. I didn't know him, he didn't even ask to use my kit and he had the worst technique I've ever seen, luckily he didn't stay on for long. I started to feel bad about it but then I thought no, sod it, it's my kit, they didn't bring anything, if they wanted to play they should have brought their own breakables, that's general law in gigging circles, how would they like it if I sat on their kit and smashed the shite out of it without asking? Gits.

I jumped in and played a couple of tunes (with sticks of course) with some strangers and it was great fun, I never jam like that anymore, I used to do it all the time, at Calibre practices and even in secondary school in the drum room at lunch times with a couple of guitar-weilding mates. We stopped and had a break, I had a drink and we decided to play our set next, the standard half an hour set of tunes, the ones that Nick knows basically, we should really learn some more for our next full band gig. August 27th I think that is, plenty of time!

The set was ace, such fun, sticking a few improv jams in the middle to fill up some time, Me and Jof always seem to come up with some ace tunes when we improvise, must be a cheesy brotherley bond of some kind. I did quite a bit of backing vocals in the songs I could do, I seem to be getting better at playing drums and singing, it must be all the practice I'm getting in the band, I feel like I used to in Calibre, I'm a lot more confident in my playing these days, over the years I've been at the ACM all it seems to have done is make me less confident playing in a band but I'm slowly getting back on top of it. Jof's voice did the usual dying by the end of the set so we gave his voice a rest with an instrumental jam and then headed off into the realms of the last song. Walk Home. I love that song, especially the ending, where we tend to go a bit mental sometimes, it's such a great ender, it's our Everlong, a complete stadium gig ender!

There were a few more jams after us, and another annoyed drummer relegated to brushes. I think this was an advantage for us as when we played it must have been a lot louder and bigger than the jams, unplanned but good :-D The jams finished off and I went and got my car, loaded up, with even more this time and drove back to the parent's to unload. Not before a rather essential petrol stop, my car was struggling to start on the fumes it had left in it's over-stretched tank.

Got home around 1, went to bed. The end. What a night though. I think the promoter is thinking about doing that kind of thing more regularly, an open jam session, it's a good idea, some of the tunes that came out were ace and no one knows what's going to happen next, much more interesting that just having three bands play, much more social too. The dawn of a new era in gigs in Reading I think, and we were there at the dawn of it, awesome.

In other news, Rachel and I have found a house to rent next year (and hopefully longer) in Hawley, near Farnborough. It's a lovely little 1 bed house in a quite cul-de-sac for just the right amount of money. We move in in September and we are just working our way through the miles of paperwork that comes with property these days. Badly worded, irelevent and needless questions on page after page of beaurocracy. Fun. And being a student always seems to kick up problems. Nevermind, it'll be over soon and before we know it we'll have a brand new home, we're both rather excited!

See you next time.

Infamous Holiday Blog

Well the time has come for me to talk holiday talk now. But first a sandwich...

...Ham and cheese don't you know, I've used all the butter though, no seconds for me :-(

Right, holiday talk, yes. It's not that I don't want to write about it but I don't know where to start... maybe the beginning.

On the flight over we were made to fill in a health form, basically it asked for our name and then if we had swine flu. With a sneeze and a cough I ticked "no". More importantly than this we were also told that, while in turkey, we could not flush our toilet paper down the loo. This was devistating for me to hear. It makes the usually enjoyable task of emptying yourself something not to look forward to. I don't think I got over this till I got home the week after. But let's not focus on the trivial difference of cultural bowel movements.

Stepping of the plane must be one of the best feelings when going on holiday. That smack of warm air that hits your face as you step off the plane or out of the airport, even in the middle of the night, a reminder that you are indeed a long way from home, 1723.95 miles away from home infact, in Marmaris, in Western Turkey. Rachel and I had decided to dip into our savings and splash out on an all inclusive holiday for ourselves. Good choice!

After a deeply confusing two hour bus journey to our hotel we were shown to our room. Second floor, by the stairs with a view from the balcony of someones back garden and some magnificant mountains. We slept. Till breakfast. Which was a nice spread of eggs, toast, ham and cereal.

We spent most days by the pool, listening to the suprisingly large amount of Northeners that we were sharing a hotel with. Mainly Geordies, to Rachel's delight. There was even a tiny little Geordie girl with the best kid's accent I've ever heard! I loved the pool, it was a lovely cold break from the mid 40 degree C temperatures. We booked a couple of excursions but one was on our last day and one was moved to our penultimate day so we had all week to do what we like. We told our rep we wanted to go to the Turkish Delight factory, so she called them. The next day they sent out a car to pick us up and take us to the factory. The boss man showed us around very heistilly and then pointed us in the direction of the shop. It was basically a large kitchen with big vats of ingredients. We bought our mums some delight, got confused for Russians and got back in the car that brought us there. The driver took us to the top of the town for a picture stop and then back to the hotel. We tipped him well, he deserved it! Back to the pool we went.

The meals were good, hardly any part of the day had us left hungry. Let me give you the low down on what was available; 7 till 10 (I think) was breakfast; 12 till 2 was lunch; 3 till 4 was "Snacks", basically a BBQ; 5 till 6 there were some cakes on offer and from 7 was dinner. Perfect!

We went down to the beach for lunch one day and had turkish kebabs, another day we took a taxi boat over to Iclemer, a smaller, quieter version of Marmaris. We had been warned of the locals, apparently they like to hassle, and we did get hassled, especially at the market but they weren't too pushy, acknowlage them and be polite and they don't mind, ignor them and they get a bit shitty but so would I, you get used to it after a while.

Now, the trips! The first one we did was the best day by far. We were plonked in the back of an open top Land Rover and driven up a hill side road, meeting up with 8 other Land Rovers and the entrance to a dirt track that, rather steeply, dissapeared up a hill. We were driven to the top of the hills that surround Marmaris and form the most of the south coast of Turkey. We enjoyed amazing views and some great off roading, nothing too bottom-bashing but enough to blow my hat off. Our driver was brilliant, we stopped off at one point and he took out a knife, cut some tree off and atatched it to the car, making a lot of dust to coat the car behind, he also had a melon in his bag that he sliced up and handed to us on another stop. We left the jeeps to board a boat, which took us to a crystal clear cove that we jumped into and climbed out of to a lovely lunch cooked on the boat. We were then taken to Cleopatra Island where we were shown some amazing ruins and a small sandy beach that we were not alowed on. Apparently they closed it after people nicked the sand. Weirdos. There was a complex pair of jettys that gave us access to the turquoise water. After drying off in the Sun we were taken back to the main land and eventually our hotel, just in time for dinner! What a day!

Our last day was a "departure day". Rather than hanging around our hotel with our suitcases all day we decided to go on a trip. A coach picked us up and stupid o'clock in the morning and took us on an hour and a half journey to our hotel for the evening, a lovely little villa in the middle of nowhere. We were then taken to a taxi boat that took us down the stream to some mud pools, Rachel was really looking forward to this, it's supposed to take ten years off you, which would make Rachel look ten. Worrying! We got there and got into the mud pool, we were only given one hour, pretty strict which wasn't great, but we cover eachother in mud anyway. I didn't like it, it felt horrible but I resisted getting out. We stood in the Sun till it dried, and hurt, then we showered it off. We then took a dip in the sulphor pool, which stank of egg and was a.... warm.... 30 odd degrees. It was too warm for me and I had to jump out. I took a shower and got dressed. After lunch we were taken, by boat, past ancient rock tombs carved out by slaves, onwards to turtle beach. This beach was huge, and burning hot on the feet. It hurt. The beach was closed every night at 9pm to allow sea turtles to come onto the beach, lay eggs and then eventually these eggs will hatch and tiny little turtles will wiggle their way to the waters. We didn't see any turtles.

After a few hours of napping at our hotel we were picked up by mini-bus and taken to the airport. We shopped a bit and then realised our plane was delayed by over an hour. What a suprise. We slept. it was 2am and we'd had a very long day. Although the benches in the Dalaman airport seemed to be designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. They were horrible! We persevered and it wasn't long till we were boarding our plane home. We learned that the delay was caused by a faulty nose wheel. Nice to know, and surely they can't only have ONE plane for this flight!? Madness!

Dad picked us up, which was very nice of him at about 5 in the morning, especially as he headed straight off to work after dropping us home. We slept on the way home, then we slept all day. There was a lot of sleep :-D

But what a great holiday. We met some great people, namely the bar men from our hotel who worked 12 hour days and were friendly for all of them. We took a picture with them and they asked to be e-mailed it. I sent it to them and they replied. Such nice people! I also made a massive discovery on that holiday. Without a beard I look about 10. I am indeed Samson. I think I'll discuss my beard's demise and reformation to power in another post as this one has gone on long enough. If you want to see pictures take a look at my Facebook. I can't get the hang of pictures on here, they tend to end up cut in half.

Me and Rachel and our Barmen.

Well done for getting this far if you have! I know reading holiday stories is like sitting through a slide show of boring pictures without the pictures but I'm sure some one would have enjoyed this. And I'm sure I've forgotten something, many things, and I'm more sure that Rachel will tell me but for now that's it.

Thanks people, I'll update again soon, I have a few things to moan about :-D

Now, on to do my coursework.... Oh hello PS3, is that Call of Duty 4 you have there? Ohh.......!

Si.

(Please ignor the crap spelling in this post, I'm too lazy to spell check)