Return of the King

Yo homeslice. It's been a couple of days and I am reloaded and back for more. So English Language exam today! That was a lot of fun - I always feel that getting completley wired helps me concentrate. My efforts to this end included three black coffees and the discovery of something called Paracetamol Plus in my kitchen cupboard - an interesting combination of paracetamol coated in caffiene. So armed with this volatile combination of drugs and beverage swilling around my bloodstream, I proceeded to write the whole thing at the speed of light. This gave me some convenient thinking time which I used to read all the little messages people had written on my table; the lyrics to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song, an ode to COD4, which had been subsequently "flamed" by later posters, and my favourite - "Fuck, my pen is leaking..", with the nice touch of the ink fading towards the end of the sentence.

After this monumental effort of writing about semantic derogation and the like, I was understandably low. It was Funky Monkey's first birthday and I had a hot chocolate to cushion the blow; the cutest baby in the world smiled at me and it was like the whole shop lit up. Aren't children delightful.

So yeah, by the time I got to politics class I was pretty sluggish. I think Will asked me how I was and I answered "June 1st", which is a new level of irrelevance for my subconscious mind. I think I drifted through the entire class, somehow actually managing to get a hell of a lot of questions right. I guess the revision (read: Babel-fish with a copy of Paxman's The Political Animal) is sinking in. Ironically politics followed me home; I returned with Beth to find a BNP propogranda leafelt smoldering like the One Ring on my porch floor. After flicking through several pages of uninformed rants about immigrants stealing our children's souls accompanied by pictures of suspiciously Aryan-looking familes I tore it up and binned it.

After Beth left, I had my tri-annual haircut at Trims (the excellent, though sometimes slightly rightwing barbers around the corner). It's the same shape and everything just shorter really. Cue applause. In a fit of soccer fervour I loaded up the ancient Championship Manager 5, a game enshrined in my memory as a complete waste of time. The years had not treated it well and it seems that this is one PC game engineered towards making the player fail. My team conceded four penalties. FOUR. We was robbed. This brings me onto another pressure-point; my PC has contracted a particularily virulent form of the disease Bacillus Chaevvus: it can't be bothered educating itself and hangs around street corners with thirteen-year old girls and a can of Strongbow.

So to the actual point of this post: I've had a couple of musical epiphanies this week. First, The Miserable Rich's album Twelve Ways To Count, although released in 2006, is in the running for my "sound of Sam's summer". It's relaxingly brilliant, a hybrid between the sublime quirkiness of Belle & Sebastian (of which said band I procured a wondrous collection of rare/live tracks not on studio albums), the simple beauty of Laura Marling and the mellowed sounds of Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. Secondly, Ultravox's classic New Romantic 80's ballad Vienna has got me hooked. It's hauntingly addictive, a song charged with ghostly electric undercurrents that pull you under and submerge you under an ocean of melancholy. Go listen, now.

On a final note: my dream last night involved punching David Cameron's serpent face until he bled black and looked human instead of the well-fed magpie he resembles. It's become inevitable that Wormtongue will be sleazing his way into office next year but I can still have my fun. And last but not least I have decided Lady GaGa is scary. I don't trust women who look like they're from the future and the start of Just Dance sounds like an alarm. A nazi death-camp alarm. She's blonde too. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.