It doesn't matter anymore

This week has all been about the Puressence gig - they are my favourite band and after 10 years of listening to them I have finally gotten round to seeing them live.

In short they rocked, the songs sounded as good if not better than the album versions and James the lead singers sheer arrogance as he parted the crowd and walked through us all while still singing was brilliant.



The gig was at the Water Rats Theatre which is near Kings Cross station. The venue was small but made the whole thing much more personal. I met with my Emma (my sister) and Laura (girlfriend) at Victoria and made our way from there. At the venue we met with two of my sisters friends who had managed to get into the pub although we had all the e-tickets. The venue was one half bar and the other half the stage/floor. We thought best to get in the stage room early before the support act but found just space to stand right at the front. The support band My Architects were really good although it was a bit strange just standing at the front with them playing at us. I had already listened to one of their tracks (Under the Pines) on their site and recognised it straight away when they started playing. I think this track will really get the band noticed when it gets released next month.

When Puressence came on everything changed, all those who had been content to stand at the back all of a sudden wanted to walk through us to stand in spaces that bearly existed. The band lifted the tempo quickly and soon no-one cared where they were.

Standing near the front helped as we saw the set list from the beginning, so we knew that most of our favourites would be played and more importantly that they would be playing 2 encores.

For those who are interested here's the set list:

I Suppose
Drop Down <-- Currently featured on their myspace.com page
Don't Forget To Remember
How Does It feel
Sold Unseen
Standing In Your Shadow
Bitter Pill
Make Time
Baby Moonbeam
Life Comes Down Hard
Burns Inside
----------
This Feeling
Sharpen Up

After the gig I had the short hop to the Bowers Hotel near Victoria. This was so good as working 10mins from Victoria meant I didn't have to get up until 9 to get in work for 10 - Greeeat!!

Back to reality

Had a hectic week at work, final got everything sorted today which turned out to be the deadline to everything so it's nice everything got resolved, back to normality tomorrow. Hopefully!

Spent the weekend watching movies, sport and movies about sport. I started watching the rugby at Bluewater on Saturday which was rather disappointing as France ended up winning the 6 nations. Watched GOAL! that night which was quite a good Football film that even my girlfriend liked. Sunday consisted of watching Liverpool beat Newcastle and on a lighter note The Constant Gardener, which was interesting but even after the film I didn't understand the title of the film, maybe I would have done if I had been watching the film 100% and not mending a pair of headphones with a soldering iron and no solder!

Sunday night I saw V for Vendetta which I thought was much much better than the reviews made out. Lots of English actors, a 1984 feel to the film and the dry wit of the main character made for an all round good flick.

That's all for now, tomorrow I'm going to see a gig of my all time favourite band - Puressence - review to follow.

Oh yeah Happy Birthday to my workmate Arup - and cheers for the donuts!!

Leaving on a jet plane

Eurgh.... More drinking this weekend than I have done in months

Started Friday by buying a box of 12 Krispy Kreme's following a KK fund being setup at work. Useful as not eating donunts before going out drinking can make you more drunk (so i've heard).

Started the evening by losing a pool match in a league that I'm in, I think I'm still top though but probablty not for long.

The evening then moved to works regular haunt the Masons for Steve and Arup's leaving doo, although Arup is not actually leaving just moving to another department. Funnily enough most people hadn't been there before as we haven't been out after work for yonks.

Some of us were hungry so we headed uptown to get a chinese, stopping while others on a street corner while some parked. While there me,Harsh and Gary debated whether the smell wafting around was Chienese Food or Indian, including passerbyes we established it was Thai, the give-away being that we were in front of a Thai Restaurant (oops). While standing in the cold three people emerged from a street. My drunk brain shouting, you recognise those people, go say Hi! , so i did. These were people I had never met so I strool up and ask do you happen to know someone called Pan (my mate from work and blog hoster), yes they replied "We were just making fun of his name"!, they were three of his good friends the sad thing is that I only recognised them from pictures on his blog!! (A real crossover between the real world and cyberspace)

Here's a vid of us at the Chienese, abusing the spinning table. It was my idea to put the camera on it and spin it but not sure if that was genius or not...

Saturday I went and saw Last Holiday which was one of those films where your meant to come out and re-think your whole life, but not sure it was quite powerful enough to have any impact on me though. Nice film but not worth cinema prices.

Saturday night went to dinner at Cafe Rouge in Chelmsford it was Laura's old school friend Beany's birthday.

Here's Me, Laura (my girl) and Beany (birthday boy):

Martin and Tracy got him a shot drinking game, queue lots of shots of Pinot Grigio being drunk at under 2 seconds. After some groving in Yates it was over to Dukes. More drinking and dancing. Best tune of the night had to be the remix of Britney's toxic by John Marr - Toxic Rhythm, me not normally a big fan of garage music think this tune rocks and seems to always get a good response from the crowd. If you can find it since it's a bit old now give it a listen.

That's all for me know except to say:

Pan outdid himself when he turned in his "Champ Bear" romper suit

Home Sweet Home

My street:

My Dad was playing on Google Earth the other day and he showed me that they have improved the res of where I live, great but where was my car?

So I followed my route to my station and found it! Just about to pull into the car park. The car park was full and it was light which must have meant I was on the late shift. If only the pictures were live it would be like the real Big Brother.

This means nothing to me ah....V...enice?!

No update over the weekend as I was in Venice Friday - Monday not so much of a holiday, more of a long weekend. The picture above is of St Mark's Square on Saturday which was rather wet even for Venice.

Had an eventful flight out as when we got to 17,000 ft the plane filled with the smell of sulpher like something was burning, so we had to do an emergency stop back at Stansted. We pulled up trailed by 5 fire engines and a fire car! We quickly swapped to another plane and we were back on our way.

We stayed in a nice hotel called Hotel Leonardo in the Jewish Ghetto area (in the Ghetto...)

Loads of people dressed up on the streets as it was Carnival time, so mask wearing was order of the day and even me and my girlfriend Laura went out one night wearing them. Unfortunately the one picture I took came out badly so you don't get to see. (Shame)

We had a very nice day on Sunday which included a gondola ride. The gondolier we had was very OTT and did a tour like a young history teacher "before we see Venice we must first understand what made Venice" he had a bit of a fixation with the special Black Mud that the city was built on repeated this many times which all added to the comedy. It was however still very romantic and a group of tourists even gave us a round of applause as we set off, very embarrassing.

Got to Treviso Airport 4 hours to early as we had nowhere to go (as we had our luggage and it was cold). It turned out we had the wrong time for the flight back and we ended up having to wait another hour!! Got back to Stansted at midnight and I was home by 1.30am caught a few zzz's and then back to work.