Still Busy

I had a bit of a hectic weekend. An early start on Saturday (12pm is early for a Saturday) was necessitated by my participation in a Clapham based treasure hunt. I’d hoped we were going to be able to make up a team of four, but as things turned out, only myself and my friend who’d told me about it, were able to make it. I was actually a little shocked that nobody else wanted to come. Firstly it was, at least, something different to do. It wouldn’t simply be a night out at the pub. Secondly it looked like fun. And it was. Sure we got rained on a few times and yes, we only managed to come 17^th out of 21 teams (I think a lack of local knowledge played a part. Now that we’ve walked most of the way around Clapham I’m sure we’ll do better next year) but it was al still a lot of fun. In many ways, walking around and solving clues kind of made it feel like a Graphic Adventure from days of yore (sorry, geeky comment I know). After the first question I actually thought that we’d do an awful lot worse than we did, especially since we’d managed to completely fail to follow the predetermined route. In our defence we thought it logical to answer question no. 1 first and didn’t really notice that there was a red route marked on the map. Actually we had a fairly good stab at answering the first question, considering the fact that half of it was missing. The question had consisted of a clue and an equation that needed to be solved to work out where to go to get the answer. Unfortunately part of the equation was missing so that it didn’t actually look like an equation at all. And that’s why we managed to waste 20 minutes walking up and down a street desperately trying to work out the answer to a question that we could, as it turned out, only answer through blind luck. At least it turned out that we weren’t as big a pair of idiots as we initially thought.

Oh, and I also managed to properly meet the girl my friend is currently seeing. She was actually one of the organisers though he didn’t tell me who she was until after we’d left her company. I managed to properly meet her at the drinks at The Microbar afterwards. She seemed really nice. I finally got home a little before 12am and went to bed, absolutely knackered. But I wasn’t going to be able to rest for long. The next day I was off to see, amongst others, Kaiser Chiefs at the O2 Wireless festival in Hyde Park.

I woke up the next day, still tired from the events of the day before. Luckily I’d had the foresight to download a copy of the previous nights Dr Who just before I went to bed. Since I wasn’t meeting up until 3pm I’d have plenty of time to watch it whilst I ate breakfast. Of course, no matter how much time I have I always end up rushing to get ready, and that morning was no exception. Despite my customary unpreparedness I still managed to make it to Marble Arch Station (TFL, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to close the whole Piccadilly line, including Hyde Park Station, for the weekend) more or less on time. That’s more than could be said for my friend, who kept me waiting another 15 minutes. Ah well, I can’t complain, it was because of him that we’d managed to get half price tickets, £23 instead of £46. Besides, I had to get some cash out. Central London is full of cash machines, but is one within five minutes walking distance of Marble Arch Station. After buying a couple of 500ml bottles of Coke at Superdrug (2 for £1.40 instead of 95p each. I couldn’t resist) I gave up my search for an ATM and waited for my friend. It turned out that he was in need of cash, so we both set off on our quest for a cash machine. I really can’t believe that there aren’t any within a 10 or 15 minute walk of the park. Unbelievable. Eventually we found and HSBC bank. I’d initially assumed that it was some sort of heat induced hallucination. No way could we have finally found somewhere to get cash. As it turned out, we hadn’t. The bank was bereft of an external cash machine. Our quest continued. Finally we found some sort of Arabic bank. Wary that they might charge some sort of fee for cash withdrawals we ended up taking a trip across and a bit up the road to the Natwest. At last we had our money. Walking back, my friend noticed something odd. All of the newsstands sold only foreign papers, not a News of the world or a Sunday Times on view anywhere. Very strange. Perhaps we’d stepped through a portal and into some strange foreign land with no ATMs. Perhaps we’d stepped through another to make it back to our country, resplendent in all its bank-having glory. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just nonsense. There’s no such think as a trans-continental portal. Still, I have a friend who has a theory about Ikea. My friend thinks that there is, in fact, only one Ikea in existence. All the other sites are simply gateways, or portals that teleport you to the solitary store. It would certainly explain why there are some many people speaking in foreign languages inside each store.

Anyway, I digress. After we’d got our money we headed off to meet my friend’s friend, who actually had the tickets. As it turned out, the tickets were stored as a sort of barcodey thing MMS message on my friend’s friend’s phone. It wasn’t actually a barcode, more a sort of 1cm square thing with a randomly pixelated pattern on it. Scanners read the pattern and allowed us to gain entry to the event. Quite cool, and quite high tech, but I do miss not having a printed ticket stub as a memento of the day.

We walked inside the walled area that played host to the festival and immediately saw two things. Firstly, a beer tent that sold, quite moderately priced Tuborg beer, something I hadn’t had since my trip to Copenhagen a few years ago. For £3 a pint, I expected it to be terribly watered down, but it was actually quite tasty. This, I thought, was a good omen. The second think we saw was an array of cash machines. Shit. Sure they would have charged us an extortionate amount to get at our money, but it would have saved our odyssey across the bank free wilderness of Hyde Park’s surrounding streets. Anyway, after joining up with another friend and his girlfriend, we got some beer and extortionately priced food (there had to be a catch and £6 for a burger was it. I actually went for the less wallet busting £3 spicy potato wedges with all the ketchup I could fit in my plastic tray. I went a little bit crazy with the condiments, but when don’t I) we found a place to sit. An orange jumpsuit wearing Japanese band were leaping about excitedly on stage. Not bad, but possibly a bit too manic for the first act. Of course they weren’t the first act. The day was, after all, already four hours old by the time we got in. Anyway, the orange jump-suited guys were followed by Mumm-Ra (Named, I assume, after the bad guy in Thunder cats), a band who’s songs I heard a little on XFM. Not bad, but not all that memorable. Unlike Pigeon Detectives, who were absolutely brilliant. As soon at the Mumm-Ra set ended there was a mass exodus from the main stage to the XFM tent where they were playing. Demand to see the ‘Detectives (or maybe the Pigeons) was so high that they had to turn people away from the tent. They played a great set and put on a good performance. They really seemed to be communicating with the crowd. There was even time for a bit of a sing-along. Throughout the 35minutes they were on stage they consistently proved that they were a band to watch out for. After they finished it was time for the last two acts, Editors and Kaiser Chiefs.

If I’d have written a review of Kaiser Chief’s latest single, “Everything is average nowadays” it would have simply read “Q.E.D”. That’s until I saw them perform at the wireless festival where they flagrantly failed to make their own point. They were, in fact, nothing short of spectacular. The animated antics of Ricky Wilson were in total contract to Editors who were about as interesting to look at as five static blokes playing instruments. That’s not to say that they didn’t playa good set, they just didn’t look entirely comfortable on such a large stage. Of course I did spend an awful lot of my time looking at my friend, who’d come along with his new special lady. That sound, in some way, twisted, but I can assure you that it wasn’t. I was mesmerised only by my friend who, throughout pretty much every song, simply stood, peering up at the stage as if straining to see what was happening but couldn’t quite make out what all the fuss was about. Obviously this kind of behaviour induced my other friend and me to hurl empty beer cups at him. I scored a direct, albeit only to his back, whilst my friend managed hit him with a cunningly crafted (or exceedingly lucky) ricochet shot which bounced of the ginger noggin of an innocent bystander and caught my friend on the back of his head. He did at least become slightly more lively during the ‘ Chiefs (chief’s performance of “I predict a riot though I suspect that his limited bouncing was more as a result of trying to remain upright when faced with the problem of a near riotously jubilant crowd who clearly had no time whatsoever for inactive bystanders.

I like festivals and gigs because everyone’s so friendly. I did get a little upset, however, when somebody said that I didn’t look very Rock and Roll. I was, initially a little perturbed, I almost let it ruin my weekend (I tend to dwell on irrelevant details and minor critiques on my character and appearance, perhaps because I’m actually a touch self obsessed and narcissistic as well as being, conversely, quite insecure.), but then I thought of Hunter S. Thompson. He didn’t exactly look Rock and Roll, did he? Take the image we get of him from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” He most certainly doesn't look cool. Basically, he looks like what he is, a writer. Despite all the though, he was, without a doubt, Rock and Roll. Perhaps even more so because he didn’t conform to any self-consciously cool image. He was who he was. The guy got his remains shot out of a cannon by Johnny Depp for fuck’s sake. If that’s not Rock and fucking Roll I don’t know what is.

Anyway, it was a great weekend, but I was unbelievably knackered at the end of it. Shame, since I had to go to work the next day. Let me put it this way, it was not an easy week, and the quiet weekend in that followed was extremely welcome.