Right – been too busy and lazy and sick to write for a while, so now I just have to skim over it all.
First gig of the year – Ani DiFranco at the Union Chapel. Cool gig, talented lady – did an improvised song with a crowd member playing guitar for her – after somebody requested a song, and she claimed to not be able to play it anymore. A crowd member reckoned he could, so he did – and it turns out she remembered how to play it fairly well also. But yeah – cool. Legitimately improv’ed? Not sure – the crowd member turned out to be a fairly successful musician himself – Declan Bennett. She seems fairly genuine, and it didn’t happen the following night – so I’m giving the whole episode the benefit of the doubt.
And then – France. Caught a train over to France on the 14th, and spent the week there – helping Dom celebrate his 40th. This was done by learning to ski, then doing actual skiing, interspersed with large amounts of food and drink, and very little sleep. But now I can ski. By the end of the week, I was going down red pistes comfortably, and trying stupid things like jumps and off-piste which I really had no right to be trying. Amazing weather – clear blue skies for the entire week, until the final day which was pretty much constant snowstorm, with zero visibility, and lifts closing all over the place (doing red slopes). Here’s a video of my new skillz (warning, the music might not be to everybody’s taste, and has naughty words):
http://player.vimeo.com/video/35439665?color=fedf91&autoplay=0
And then we came back to London, drinking the bar dry on one of the trains, and discovering the tube between Kings Cross/St Pancras and my place was closed. I eventually crawled into my place at about midnight, drunk and exhausted – and immediately came down with a terrible cold or influenza or something. Bah, London.