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.