I’ve been doing work experience with a theatre company who also have a sister company which create heritage-based audio-visual projects. They’ve been working with the National Trust to do this big Bonfire Night celebration at Lyveden New Bield, which is a half-built hunting lodge in Northamptonshire, and I have to say, there was one point last night when I thought they’d accidentally set fire to the place. Proper awesome special effects.

It wasn’t just fireworks and stuff though; there were a load of performing arts kids that were dancing with these umbrellas that were all lit up and glowing in the trees, and then there was a soundtrack that taught us all about the history of Lyveden New Bield and how the dude who started to build it was involved in The Gunpowder Plot. It all got really gruesome as well, with a bit about how the conspirators had their “privy parts” and bowels removed, and how one dude was quartered while he was still alive because the scaffolding had collapsed when they were trying to hang him. And all these performing arts kids were standing with their heads lolling like in a zombie film, then they filled the place with smoke and projected flickered flames through the windows. It all ended with another spooky umbrella dance and then some sweeeeet fireworks.

I wasn’t even bothered that it pissed it down most of the way through.

Oh, and mates of one of my colleagues invited me to join the Women’s Institute. Apparently they’re doing belly dancing next month. I AM SO THERE.

I’m not sure which is more disappointing; that Booker-winning author Yann Martel’s follow-up to The Life Of Pi is going to be another animal allegory, or that this is what he looks like.

I’d always kinda imagined him to be tanned and dashing, writing from a Greek balcony and doing yoga at sunrise.

So yeah, anyways, he’s finally cut down on all that yoga and hard sex in order to write a new book. It’s apparently about the Holocaust, and while The Life Of Pi was incredible and had a similar formula, I don’t want Martel to be a stick-to-a-formula kinda guy. I want him to be a Greek balcony kinda guy. A yoga kinda guy. Not a Jewfro-and-formula-sticking kinda guy.

Not at all.

I need a rich sugar daddy to pay for me to fly to New York to see this.

Applications of no more than 500 words should be sent to megan.vaughan@live.com by the 10th of November. Please attach your most recent bank statement and any property deeds you deem relevant to your application.

I fucking love twitter. I love how I can make an offhand comment about being unable to choose between the Carole King and James Taylor versions of You Got A Friend, then have a load of replies about similar dilemmas, and for someone to link to the Merry Clayton version of Gimme Shelter, which I have no idea how I’ve never heard before.

Gimme Shelter by The Stones has my favourite intro of all time, and I’ve banged on about its genius at great length in the past. So much so that my mate Daz will put it on at parties and say “watch this - Meg’s about to jump out of her seat and start shouting about electric guitar”. So anyhow, turns out Merry Clayton sung on the Stones’ version, then did her own. Blaxploitation-tastic.

In many ways, living in Leicester is ridiculously difficult. I always thought that living in ‘the digital age’ would make it so much easier to be apart from friends and family, but what it actually means is that you get countless Facebook invitations to gigs and parties that you cannot possibly attend. There’s a Red Deer Club gig coming up with The Miserable Rich, Inspector Tapehead and Kathryn Edwards all on the same bill, and I just can’t get there. I have to work in order to even do this degree in the first place and I can’t just go gallivanting around the country because some people are going to play some songs 150 miles away.

I did, however, make it down to London on Thursday night to see The Travelling Band, who sound like a cross between 2007 (the greatest year ever) and home. They were doing a free gig for Lee Gorton at Kings Cross Social Club, and I drank lots of cloudy cider and heard stories of my Dad’s adventures at Larmer Tree Festival this summer. (Don’t worry - I won’t tell Mum.) And for a few hours I was listening to a great band and talking about illegal downloading with people who interest me. It’s not impossible.

Carole King - Smackwater Jack

Fuck Halloween. Halloween is for kids and I am an adult. Fancy dress is for people who need help appearing interesting and then they all just look like wankers.

I hereby rename the 31st of October ‘International Carole King Appreciation Day’.

1. Wolfmother (23) 
2. Florence + The Machine (14) 
3. Carole King (14) 
4. Mumford & Sons (12) 
5. Midlake (11) 

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whiskeyandgoatsmilk:

Marvin Gaye- Lets Get it On

givin yourself to me
can never be wrong.

Ha ha ha. Just played that Wolfmother track again.

They are so brilliantly hilarious.

UPDATED: Look! It’s a giant fucking egg hovering over marshland, in front of a rainbow AND A LOAD OF FUCKING CROWS. A-MAZE-IN.

UPDATED AGAIN: And who is that topless kid in the bottom right? Probably checking out the FUCKING GREAT BIG EGG. (I love this band.)

Wolfmother - Sundial

I totally got my Mojo back today. I’ve had a really shit week; a combination of work and money and having to come back to Leicester after a weekend with my friends in Manchester. I’ve been a proper miserable cunt and I haven’t even tweeted much or anything. That shit is serious.

Then today I spoke to my Mum and listened to the new Wolfmother album stupidly loud and suddenly everything was fixed. This song is in honour of today’s Mojo recovery.

I also went to work tonight and, for the first time in a week, didn’t have to spend six lonnnnnnng hours making coleslaw jacket potatoes for ungrateful people in the café bar. Instead I got to watch two hours of The Fastest Clock In The Universe, which was one of the most completely filthy plays I have ever seen, and quite brilliant for it. Jamie Winston is incredible, and totally lifts everyone else’s performance too. The most annoying thing happened near the end though. There was this dude who kept getting his mobile phone out, but he was on the other side of the audience so wasn’t responding to my ordinary Evil Look Tactic. I ended up having to run round the outside of the studio to give him a bollocking (I am a power freak - I learnt all about it in my Cultural Leadership module at uni, dontchaknow) and in the space of me moving about ten yards, the actors went from a perfectly normal conversation to all-out unbridled mentalism, with flashing lights and fist fights and, amazingly, one dude had even found a gun somewhere. I was all like “I’ve been gone about fifteen seconds. What the fuck did I miss?”

Very good though, and it only added to my Wolfmother joy. Oh, and The Travelling Band are playing a free gig in London next Thursday and if I get the night off I am SO THERE. Leicester’s not so bad really. It’s like when we used to have to do averages at school. The average of Manchester and London is pretty much exactly Leicester. See? Not so bad.

And here’s another one from Bournemouth Air Show.

Let it not be said that I don’t cram a fucking stupid amount of stuff into my life.

Before I went to Kristine’s on Saturday, I went to The Lowry to see their immersive army theatre thingy, Beyond The Front Line. It was only short, and I thought there was a lot of time wasted by some daft rearrangement of hospital beds, but there were real-life pyrotechnics out on the Quays and we were shut up in the back of army trucks to hear a monologue from a dude who created software for the MoD. I love all that immersive theatre stuff, where you get to walk around and touch stuff and you might have an entirely different experience to someone else.

I going to write about it for one of my uni modules. MAJOR NERD ALERT.

1. Alberta Cross (16) 
2. Mumford & Sons (13) 
3. Air (12) 
4. Adam P Gorman (2) 
5. Adjágas (2) 

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