i've still not quite recovered yet from what turned out to be one of my most favourite weekends of the year thus far. peep show on demand helped today and a trip to kings heath high street in which me and my housemate rickery discovered a discount freezer food store full of frozen delights, some of which were chain brand mcdonald's and kfc food, which was weird. i got 8 fairly tasty veggie burgers for 50p and a huge bag of hash browns for 60p. the man who owned it told us it was all stolen or something? for that price, who cares? plus they're fucking over mcdonalds' which can never be a bad thing.
anyway, friday day i endured a painstaking 5 hour journey in unbearable heat to london and then on to reading in preparation for cassie's grandparents 60th wedding anniversary. what a genuinely inspiring achievement. we had an awesome buffet prepared by cassie's amazing mother with her amazing culinary skills, which was just a prelude to the amazing food we'd share together over the course of the weekend. sorry if i talk about food way to much but we genuinely do love the stuff.
on saturday we got up nice and early and drove down to a little place outside of reading as we had reservations at a super posh restaurant overlooking a beautiful river which was home to lots of nice ducks and their children. the sky was bright blue and the heat was blistering. a perfect setting for a diamond wedding anniversary if ever there was one. we had such a pleasant afternoon and some great fillet of sea bass on a bed of creamy spinach. the scallops for starters were a little disappointing, i'd never eaten them before and imagined they'd taste more like chicken but in fact they were quite slimy and rubbish. after some profiteroles for pudding, a sit by the river and an amazing speech from cassie's grandad, it was home for sleep. the combined heat and eating way to much really takes it out of you. here are some photos from the dinner, courtesy of cassies mum and sister.
saturday night we headed to london to dj @
push. we arrived at the astoria 2 about 11.00 an hour before our set, we said our hello's to the tom's of
no pain in pop and made use of the free ice cold cans of red stripe.
push is not dis-similar to birmingham's generic indie mecca, panic. except it's london so naturally a bit cooler but still a lot less intimidating that i had imagined.
we were given a brief rundown of how to work the ridiculously designed vestax mixer, which proved not much help. i really don't understand at all what they were trying to achieve when they put that piece of shit into production. to make matters worse, the speaker out was broken and you could barely hear what you were cueing in. despite the set backs and a shaky start, due to us djing in a cage, where it was quite difficult to hear what was going on the dancefloor it didn't take us long to get into the swing of things. i soon abandoned the set i'd worked out because it was almost impossible to do anything i'd practised on the poor mixer anyway.
so we played a varied mix of everything from
gay against you, to
bjork to
timbaland.
it seemed to go down fairly well and we ended up djing for an hour and a half and a cute french guy even came up and asked cassie who we were and told her with his endearing accent "dis is incredible, you play
the murder of rosa luxemburg, it is best set i hear for long time", which is always pleasing.
after waiting in line for ages for some average chips and pita and buying a beer from a guy in the street who was selling beer from a wheelie bag, we set about waiting an age for the night bus, which took us back to tom kings and a lovely comfy bed.
we decided to get up quite early on sunday and make the most of the sun. we went to meet alex before we all headed off to brick lane for cafe 1001 lunch, rough trade east and sexfest. lunch was as perfect as ever, amazing mediterranean salad and veggie lasagna. rough trade managed to lure me into buying something, as ever. still, i figured i deserved a treat so i purchased
telepathe's sinister militia 12" and a
holy fuck 12" single with a no age remix on it, plus our good friend phil gave me a discount!
by the time we got to
sexfext, last nights hungover was starting to kick in and the sun was raging and thus it was much to hot to stay in doors, a sentiment also shared by the 90% of the audience i think. we eventually found a bench outside 93 feet east where we sat for the afternoon putting the world to right. eventually we decided it was to much hot and the beer was much to expensive so when cassie had to go home me and alex decided to go back to his, get some cheap cans and sit on his balcony getting drunk.
i ended up having a really great time catching up with him properly, we spoke about all things
holy roar,
stop scratching and otherwise. we got considerably drunk and after some brief youtube, went to bed.
perfect end to a perfect weekend really, good food, good music, good company. not much else i would have asked for really.
loooooookkkkkkkk whaaaaaaaatttttttt ivveeeeeeee gotttttttttttt!!!!!
