They don't have September in the Americas.

In Which: Our Hero Travels Home To Enjoy The Bank Holiday Surrounded By Devonshire Rain, Having Had More Than A Few Pints During The Day And Thus Not Coping Too Well With His Handheld Gadget's Less-Than-Accommodating Approach To Creative Punctuation And Colourful Language.

Well several things. First I am writing this from an iPhone, or 'cocking iPhone' as I like to call it. So forgive me if the letters don't make sense, but the touch screen is literally a fifth of the size of my normal keyboard. I must say though, I'm genuinely chuffed to have the pointless addition of interminable connectivity in my itchy hands.

At the moment I'm on a train, heading down to Devon for the weekend. As disinteresting as this may sound, there are a couple of noteable points to the journey.

1) I've just whitnessed the most magnificent of rainbows on the train. The weather today has been unusually what-the-eighteenth-century-barometer-on-my-grandmother's-wall-would-describe-as changeable to the extent to which, the conditions were swapping between blistering sunshine and dismal grey spit so promptly and repetitively that at one point there was a huge high contrast divide-line diagonal across the sky. I suppose that's pretty useful if you're a mild conversationalist or a rainbow.

2) I'm going down to my aunt and uncle's house, which is effectively a smallholding in Devon. They bought a crappy delapidated barn and lived on squalor for eight years whilst they made it habitable. And when I say squalor, I mean, they lived in a grotty little caravan that is smaller than my kitchen now, and had three rooms. If that's nor valient I don't know what is. The sacrifices you make for the perfect pad.

I'm quite excited about it because I visited five years ago, when the barn was far from complete, to build a 'Devonshire bank' - a wall built into the side of a small bank along a path. The idea in this is to stop erosion and crumbling from flood water or leaping animals. Considering my skills as a manual labourer, I will be most surprised if it is all still standing.

I'll let you know.

I should probably explain that I'm quite pissed right now, having spent the afternoon drinking in the pub for someone's leaving do. Good way to end the first week at Global Patrick Industries Incorporated, I think. Especially given how all over the place it's been since Monday.

Hair Traffic Control played a genuinely tremendous gig in London for the 405, which came with plenty of good music from the likes of Elks, hundreds of very nice people saying very nice things, and an accompanying scandalous interview. I went trumpet shopping, only to find out that trumpets are expensive and second hand ones not readily available. Bollocks. Drank some Chapoutier Hermitage 'Sizeranne' 1996 (intensely strawberry and blackberry like) and Jaboulet Hermitage 'La Chapelle' 2000 (like coal/wooden boxes). I learnt that my job is probably going to involve opening up new Havanas accross the country (ten cities to be exact), so I'll just be travelling around choosing properties and talking to solicitors and estate agents and builders and designers and finding staff and all that sort of exciting thing. And also I'm to be chief in charge of the Norwich Film Festival, which is three weeks away, and there's fucking loads to do, such as booking the awards ceremony, making sure people come to the awards ceremony, printing all the advertising material/tickets, getting licences, and so on and so on.

So to start things, I phoned Take Five on the way to the station, in order to be vaguely racist to one of the staff (Canadian it turns out.) If you ever want to do this yourself, always phone a hippy establishment, they tend to employ 'others'*. We are going to have an amazing afterparty to the awards ceremony there, in the underground, through a pub. The celebrities will love this because it gives them a chance to mingle with commoners they might otherwise not see.

So yes yes, I think that takes us roughly to the present. I am officially on my way to becoming a callous yuppie cunt.



*technical speak for foreignies.

Goodbye Buy The Case, hello... something else which isn't Buy The Case.

In Which: Our Hero Excuses His Last Absence Of Wine, Drinks The Most Expensive Wine He Has Ever Encountered (And Possibly The World Has Too), Moans About It, And Gentrifies The Situation In These Things Called 'Words'.

Today I worked my last day for buy the case. It was entirely unceremonious, given that I had to deal Wight the same things I had been all week. Trying to extract money from people who for the most part hadn't had invoices. Al somehow seemed to miss the fact that all these 'cunts' probably weren't paying simply because they didn't have any paper work (and indeed probably didn't know who to pay given nobody had told them that their wine supplier was going into administration in order to avoid paying any wine bills, and rebranding). Just because BTC never kept accounts, doesn't mean everyone else doesn't need their invoices. Hilariously we lost yet another account due to the fact that we had no wine to give them. Oh well. I ended up walking some wine round to franks as they were so desperate for it, having not had a delivery all week. And later on when I went to the rose for a quick pint, I was moaned at because they too had no wine. "Ha, fuck you!" was my quick riposte. "I no longer care! I am free!" Makes you wonder though, doesn't it.

The one good thing about my day was the champagne Al opened to celebrate, some of Bollinger's Vielles Vignes Blancs de Noirs. It's made from some of the oldest vines in Europe, and certainly some of the only ungrafted. Not even an acre's worth of vines, it stands with maybe two or three other vineyards in bhaving survived the Phylloxera plague that wiped out almost every other vine in the Western World. It is the only window we have to what wines may have tasted like in centuries gone by. We've never sold any (for obvious reasons) and I've never seen it anywhere else, so I can only guess that it sells for about £500-600. So it was rather an honour for Al to have bestowed that upon me. Except, no, wait, he didn't actually pay for it.

Anyway, I figure it's time for me to change the heading on this blog. No longer shall it say:

Like the Antichrist of the recordshop world, I sell wine for money and make music for pleasure. This is the frightening and unsavoury result of the two.

I would henceforth like to inaugurate the following header, and take great pleasure in wishing it a long and fulfilling reign over my page.

Wine could not contain me, nor the black hole of crumbling businessmen stand in my way, thus I escape the world of wine, to embark upon travels oe'r hill and dale, planting late night clubs (and all that follows in their wake) and on occasion clattering multi-instrumented franticism in small dark music parlours, in hitherto attractive and unassuming small cities. This is the unlikely and frankly quite disappointing result of my continued adventures.

To Cure A Weakling Child

Following Dan's and my foray into Adem videos on the intermanet last week, I would like to draw attention to this video, not found on YouTube due to it's being hidden in the depths of Myspace. It's not the best Adem song ever, but it is very nice to see his big smiley face. Unfortunately you have to endure a little bit [but still too much] of mindless babble, and it's slightly to the punch-inducing side of twee, but there we go. Don't let that put you off!

Welcome to our TV Show the 7.1: Adem/Jeremy Warmsley

There are many things out there I do not understand...

This is one of them. I'm not sure if this is meant to be arousing; it's just so ridiculous that I can't suppose it is really. What I find the most utterly bizarre is just how incestuous it all is. Did the person who sat down to draw these not at any point stop to consider that not only is this highly sad, it's also channelling something deeply emotionally disturbing from the depths of their brains...?

Anyway, check these out if you have negotiable tastes or standards.


Simpsons

Simpsons

Family Guy

Beauty And The Beast
This one is especially upsetting for me, considering the esteem in which I once held Belle.

We Have Been Here Longer Than We Realised

Michelin star already in the post, apparently

In Which: Our Hero Toils For Days To The Rapture Of Norwich's Formerly Moribund Culinary 'Scene', Storms Up A Cook, And Stoves A Hot Slave (In The Face).

I spent the last week or so working in a kitchen. Unfortunately The Wine Cellar lost two kitchen staff in the space of a week (either because they weren't paid on time or because they cannot stand Alistair, or more likely both), the same week that the head chef went on holiday. There was literally no-one around to cook the food, so Alistair and I stepped up to the task, despite neither of us having every worked in a kitchen before. I stepped foot in one a couple of times, but only to try and steal food so I don't think that counts.

Proof.

Surprisingly it was quite fun, the food went down well enough, and to my knowledge, nobody has died as a result. Working in a commercial kitchen is pretty good because everything you could possibly need is lying around in droves around you, which is splendid if, like mine, your style of cooking generally involves chucking as many ingredients at as many utensils as is humanly possible. And then some chump cleans up after you! Brilliant. Cooking in a commercial kitchen sucks, because everything is slightly hotter than you expect or want it to be. I've never sweated so much for so long in my life. My hands are now hairless rubbery blistered wrecks, because the ovens are just carved out of huge blocks of steel, so as soon as one is turned on, the whole sodding thing becomes a million degrees.

Here's the menu we cooked:

Soup de Jour - my favourite soup. Shame no-one knows French in a restaurant pretentious enough to bill itself as making french infused cuisine...

On top of which I added my amazing special of spiced tomato and red pepper soup, acclaimed by some to be the best soup to ever leave the kitchens. I also cooked spaghetti carbonara, although this didn't quite work out as anybody planned.

Al wrote on the menu 'Chicken and bacon spaghetti carbonara in a creamy sauce.' Firstly we didn't have any fucking spaghetti lying around at all. The only pasta we had was Penne. Useless wrinkly tubes of Penne.

One of the weird things about working in a kitchen is that everything needs to be sort of half cooked, and left there so that it can be quickly finished off if someone orders it. This presents a constant challenge because half cooking pasta involves somehow, at precisely the right moment, swapping all the boiling water in the pan with ice cold water, leaving the pasta in tact, and not down the sink. Something which I spectacularly failed to do by virtue of the fact I forgot about the pan until all that was left was a vat of boiling squelch.

Al asked me how I was going to time cooking the dish, and the following conversation ensued:

“Well I'll fry the bacon and chicken with some onion, now, and when it gets ordered, I can chuck it in with the pasta and add the cream and eggs and just-”

“Eggs?"

“Well yeah, I'll put them in at the last minute and gently warm it through so it gets hot but doesn't cook too-”

“You're putting eggs in?”

“Well yeah, it's carbonara...”

“What, so...”

“Do you even no what carbonara is?”

Pause

“Not really, no.”

“Well for a start, it doesn't have cream in it. Or chicken for that matter. Or Penne.”

“Shit.”


After all that, no one fucking ordered it anyway.

An absolute triumph. Kitch levels went through the roof when I was asked to make duck wraps for 50 people. Not sure my tacky Chinese vibes fit into the middle class winebar theme though. At least it's authentic though, right?

Kinema

In Which: Our Hero Discovers Old Videos Which Are For The Most Part Very Embarrassing And Thus Posts Them On the Internet.


Check it out.

I do miss my old white shoes. I used to write people's birthdays on them. Otherwise I forget them. BECAUSE I DON'T CARE.