My Top 5 Things, week ending 19th February
What a week.
What a mental, exhausting, awesome, brilliant week.
I did ALL THE STUFF.
Here are the top 5 things of the week, in no particular order.
1: Baba Israel!
Tuesday was the day I went to the Arts Council’s State Of The Arts conference and totally lost my shit over Baba Israel, the AD at Contact Theatre. He’s such an amazing, talented, SEXY man. He was doing some sort of outreach project where he took some young poets and MCs into the morning’s panel sessions and then brought them onstage in the afternoon to rap about the stuff we’d been discussing. IT WAS AMAZING. He’s so fucking powerful onstage that I just kinda dribbled into a puddle on the floor and then went into full respiratory arrest when he came and sat next to me afterwards. I swear I didn’t breathe for over 12 minutes.
2: Tattoo!
I’m not going to show you a picture yet because I’m all scabby and shit, but I had THE WORLD’S GREATEST EVER tattoo done on Wednesday and I’m well chuffed with it. The weather forecast for this week says we’re going to reach FOURTEEN WHOLE DEGREES on Thursday so it looks like I got my calf pimped at just the right time. Those pencil skirts don’t sashay themselves.
3: Old friends!
Because the SOTA conference was in Manchester, I took advantage of my prepaid hotel room and went out on the piss on Monday night with some of my homiez from the olden days. I met Daz and Andy and James in Odd and found out that Andy is a fucking vegetarian now. This is the man who used to SALT HIS OWN BEEF to store in our freezer and would look disapproving if I made a sandwich with fewer than three kinds of salami in it. My whole world was shaken. I’m pretty much blaming Andy’s massive lifestyle change for the fact that I neglected to stop drinking after my planned two glasses of red wine, instead ordering another bottle as soon as my other awesome friend, Nick, finished work. Ended up planning a Venn diagram which showed the combined careers of Alex Turner, Pete Doherty and David Bowie, then missed the last tram and got misty eyed about Guns N Roses in Fab. THEY STILL HAVE THE SAME DOORMAN. I even left my phone there and had to make the taxi driver turn back from about 10 yards outside my hotel. Aaaah, gooooood tiiiiimes.
I miss Manchester a lot. I’m excited about a move to Brighton, because this MA course is going to be the dog’s bollocks, but Manchester will always be home. I don’t know if I should move back there at the earliest opportunity, or avoid it forever because it’ll only be a disappointment compared to my 2007-08 wonder years. Life is SO HARD.
4: Jazz!
I have a housemate into jazz and a lecturer into jazz. Every so often I decide I’m going to get into jazz too, and start randomly torrenting every single band on the internet that ends in ‘Quartet’. Turns out that after all that effort I’m actually only into live jazz. Alice took me to see Arun Ghosh at The Y Theatre on Wednesday night because she works there so we didn’t have to pay, and it was fucking blinding. Perhaps because I’d still barely recovered from my MCR hangover, I thought his song about Longsight was incredible, and he even did his own Bez dancing in between playing that instrument he plays. An oboe? Some sort of saxophone? It was a blowy thing anyway. It also surprised me every time he said a song was ‘about’ something, even when it has NO WORDS. Just goes to show, it doesn’t matter how much you study ‘cultural capital’, there are still artsy things that make you realise you know fuck all.
Back when I was writing for ManchesterMusic, I went to the drinks-and-nibbles-bollocks for the Manchester Jazz Festival and started mouthing off about how the flute is a prog instrument and has no place in jazz. I’d barely heard a note of jazz in my entire life. What a fucking idiot. So I was on my best behaviour for Arun Ghosh. Didn’t even laugh when all the old jazz geezers started saying “beautiful!” and “mmm-hhmmm, play it!” under their breaths. THAT FAST SHOW SKETCH IS TOTALLY REAL.
5: Cake lols!
I’m wanking on a bit, aren’t I? This was supposed to be a quick post.
Number 5 is seeing my auntie and going into Chester for a manicure and to eat TEN TONNES OF CAKE yesterday. It doesn’t matter if your extended family are mentals when the close ones are really really awesome.
