We made a picnic, in a very DIY kind of manner.

T’Nealle was very proud of her pink socks, I was not wearing my matching pair.

We didn’t go swimming because we didn’t walk far enough to find the ladies ponds, so it was picnic, then a wander down through Hampstead. We visited Glen who took T on a tour of Air Studios.

T and I went to a pub for a while and waited for Glen to get sorted before we briefly went back to Rackham before going to another pub.

I had pointed out earlier that the pubs seemed more ‘legit’ in Hampstead. I really like them much more than the rest of London.

If only I could afford to live up there.

You can read the account of our visit up The Heath from T’Nealles side of things here:

http://wehavealwayslivedinthecastle.blogspot.com/2010/08/i-want-to-go-surfing.html

On the way to the tube station, we passed this snail mural.

The band played a good show, to a bunch of local Luton folk. A reasonable crow came, I was skeptical at first because Luton at 6pm was a bit of a ghost town. It turns out there are a lot of bored young people.

After they turfed out the indie kids at 3am, they started a hip hop afterparty from some other event. We hung out, obviously the least hip hop people there. Zach made a request for the DJ to play Lil’ Wayne, the DJ asked him in a not polite way, what he was still doing in the club. The DJ still played Lil’ Wayne. Win for Zach.

T and I ditched him though, we wanted to go drink in the hotel, so took our swag from the rider and took it back to the Red Lion.

In the room, I turned on the TV to find music TV with sign language. We watched this intensely for around half an hour.

The sign language people were awsome.

We also found a programme which was a ‘how to’ show. I was convinced I could break dance. Glad I didn’t try.

In the morning T and I went to Primark for some sweet £1 fun times.

On the bus back into London, I passed down Baker St. A few nights before I’d been watching the new BBC Sherlock Holmes and we had collectively wondered whether there was really a 221B Baker Street, turns out there is and its a Sherlock Holmes museum.

It is a really nice portrait. Well not quite a portrait. You know what? I’d like to recreate this image someday with a friend. I think it is very cool.

It was posted on fffound which is an image sharing site. So sorry, I have no idea where to credit this to.

Bang Bang Eche came back to stay for around a week, give or take a few days of them disappearing to play some other shows around the Greater LDN.

So they arrived on Friday while I was at work… I asked T’Nealle to bring my camera to Kokos where they were playing.

Later on I found they took a few snaps with the camera before delivering it.

This is Sheridan, their tour manager. He has a good blog which chronicles their tour across Europe.

http://thegospelaccordingtopapafox.blogspot.com/

Koko’s is very red. You can’t tell how red in these pictures.

After the sound check we went wandering round the backstage area of Koko’s. It was a crazy maze of doors and stairs. The Bang Bang Eche dressing room was at the top of the longest set of stairs

It was pretty quiet early on, Koko is such a massive venue I guess it would have been hard to tell how many people were there, but by the time Polka Party and BBE took the stage things were pretty busy.

Liz and Maria were in the crowd. Meg had decided not to stay in honour of being able to catch the last tube home.

Maria had a package for Charlie from Kim which had been sent to her house.

They spent a lot of time dancing with it in the crowd.

After a while, in my slightly vodka educed state, I suggested that the package didn’t seem breakable and we should just throw it on the stage so we didn’t have to carry it round.

After the show, we found Dan and Rory too, so we decided to drag our team of Kiwis backstage and have a little New Zealand appreciation party.

So I went to see one of the ‘Proms’ performances at the Royal Albert Hall on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was pretty entertaining. They are recorded for BBC radio 3 and played on the TV in the evenings.

The one I went to was pretty abstract and weird. It was a piece made about anti-religion. The choir sung pretty weird sounds as opposed to words.

West Ken tube station. (I think)

The real Brighton.

The one with the Royal Pavillion:

That brought some flashbacks to architecture school.

Following from my Carousel obsession… I rode the Brighton Pier Carousel. It rates a 7/10 for carousel rides. Rating under Luna Park and the awesomeness of the Central park one… which I will at some point upload pictures of.

Every day I walk past a set of warehouses called Omega on the way to the set of warehouses where I live.

Most of the ones up at Omega seem to be full of musicians and people who throw massive parties. Also a few artists up there seem to have constant exhibition openings.

One of the art studios has these tags on the bars over the windows.

I pass it every day.

Its probably the most interesting of an otherwise quite dull walk down from the main road.

I swear my mind just keeps telling me that all the people I’ve lost haven’t passed on, just gone away for a while, and someday, they’ll all be back.

I still feel like life is a big sack of shit when people pass away so young.

It was based kind of on streets of London.