lucifermourning

After a couple of years away, K & I had arranged to go to one of the days of Victorious festival again. We selected the Friday once we saw that both my favourite band (October Drift) and her favourite band (The Charlatans) were both playing then: when the stage times came out we were aghast to see that, not only were they playing at the same time, but they were both playing very early on in proceedings, at 1pm. So I headed down to Waterloo pretty early on Friday, caught the train to Fratton and wandered down to the familiar Southsea sea-front site on another sunny day. En route, K had got in touch to say that she was having a child-related crisis [well an emotional crisis on the child's part, anyway] so I headed over to The Castle stage to say hi to some of the other OD nuts and watch Man/Woman/Chainsaw, who were playing there before them and I once again enjoyed. I was pretty familiar with October Drift's half-hour festival set at this point but that didn't make it any less enjoyable: there were quite a few people there, given the time of day and clash, but it's quite a big space so hard to feel full. In honour of K I popped over to the Common (main) Stage to catch the end of The Charlatans, then stayed there for most of Sprints before heading back to the Castle to watch first The K's and then Ash (I'm noticing the patterns of with which bands are doing the rounds at this stage of festival season!)

K had resolved her crisis but there was little point her coming to the festival now (especially having missed, what was for her, the main event), so I bailed to go back to hers: to be honest, our plan had been to probably only stay for one more band after that point anyway, one of the options for which would have been The Mary Wallopers, so I missed all the drama of them having the plug pulled for displaying a Palestinian flag. I ended up Uber-ing all the way out to K's, did a run to her local shop with its perky young shopkeeper, and then we immersed ourselves in our usual entertainments before crashing out at around 4a.m. Neither of us had to be anywhere Saturday morning so we did a whole lot of lazing, counting down to when the pizza delivery places opened; around lunchtime she took me to the station, I headed back to London and home for a nap. I had a gig booked in the evening, which Ketch was coming to, so I was committed, and by the time I got there I'd perked up a fair bit. We got to the Camden Assembly during a band called Cereal Milk, who seemed refreshingly to be in perhaps their late 30s, then watched The Number Twenty, young Essex lads who ticked off covers of Oasis, Arctic Monkeys and (delightfully) Killing In The Name Of, but whose own songs were good too. We were there for The Pedals, who I'd only seen once before: their songs kinda blended but it all made me want to dance.

It was sunny again on Sunday (it seems to alternate at the moment) and N & I had brunch in Stoke Newington, the headed over to the Heath where we had a pleasant wander and sat on a bench outside Kenwood with the Bank Holiday crossword before moving on and meeting up with M. N headed off whilst we headed to the playground and paddling pool, chilling while E played. We eventually went our separate ways and back home I had Family Zoomtime in the evening. Monday was the August Bank Holiday and I had a relaxed morning doing Stuff and my shop, then I met N after lunch at Abney Park Cemetery, where we sat and did more of the crossword before tea on Church St. Back home I cooked in the evening.

I was once again due to meet my guest at the Polish Consulate on Tuesday morning but it was once again a bust, although he swore he'd sent me a message cancelling. I didn't hang around long though before heading over to the office and was at home in the evening. I was covering the Earls Court day centre again on Wednesday then we attempted to have our Round the World Dinner (sans N, who's been fighting off some lurking lurgy for a couple of weeks now): I'd booked an Angolan place in Brixton but once we got there, the guy told us that they only really did the Angolan food at the weekend and his Mum (the chef) was on holiday in Portugal. We decided to bail and walked round to the Algerian place we'd been to before: after much sucking of teeth, the one-man-operation who runs it gave us a table; it was great food again, although we felt slightly like we had to rush it. Thursday I was back covering the Stamford Brook drop-in and home in the evening.