peteashtondotcom

Just found out I’ve got to move again, which makes sense as I’ve been here for six months. Due to reasons I won’t go into here the landlady has to sell (nothing to do with us - it’s a financial necessity thing) so in 3 or 4 months, give or take, I’ll be looking for a new place to live. So, since this worked last time, I’m spreading the word on the blog.

Ideally I’d like somewhere in South Birmingham (Moseley/Edgbaston/Bearwood) around £200pcm + bills. If you hear of anything do let me know. Alternatively, a nice 2 bed place for £400 for the both of us.

The new place will be home number 22, so it’s not like I’m not used to this shit. Sam, on the other hand, has been in this house for three years so it’s a shitter for her. Good job I haven’t taken my stuff out of storage yet…

In the pub after the Thing, the topic inevitably turned to public transport (as it tends with with annoying regularity) and Andy R mentioned a coach service that got him to Bristol from London for a quid. A quid? How and who? Turns out there’s a new player on the inter-city coach market called Megabus who, no doubt in an effort to break the National Express monopoly, are doing stupidly cheap deals starting at £1 depending on demand. It’s London-centric on the whole, which is slightly annoying since I wanted to use it to get to Bristol from Birmingham, and is owned by Stagecoach, so if you have issues with Brian Souther’s anti-gay leanings you might want to bear that in mind, and I would rather use the train for environmental reasons. However, with inter-city public transport getting more and more expensive and fucked it’s worth bearing this loss leader in mind while it’s running.

My original post on comment spam back in October just had some comment spam posted to it. I don’t know whether this is deliciously ironic or deeply tragic. I was tempted to leave it there but deleted it.

[Update: Its happened again on the same post so I've neutered and left it there as an illustration.]

A year ago I left London and started this strange and unplanned journey. I’ve been thinking about this all month trying to put some kind of context or derive some kind of meaning, or at least compare myself now with myself then. Interestingly the person writing my weblog a year back seems a very different person, annoyingly so at times. I thought I was being really open with my blogging but it all seems so superficial and doesn’t back up my memories of what I was thinking and feeling. But then it’s probably a good thing I didn’t make them public at the time.

Anyway, just wanted to mark it. As for this time next year I have no idea…

In lieu of actually getting anything important done (it’s been one of those weekends…) I’ve been tweaking bits of this blog in the hope that it’ll make my slightly more daunting projects seem slightly less daunting. I’ll write about how I did them at length later but you can now read the Monthly and Category archives in both reverse-chronological and chronological order. Also, when you click on the month in the date-stamp it takes you to that month’s archive (unless you’re already in the monthly archives of course).

As regular readers will know, Macy the cat is something of a fuckwit. (New readers can catch up here, here, here and here.) Today she excelled herself by being not only incredibly stupid but also incredibly intelligent at the same time.

I came home this evening to an empty house. Usually I’m greeted by the cat-of-inordinate-affection at the door but there was no sign. I thought I heard a faint meow but she wasn’t out back so I carried on slightly bemused by her absence but kinda grateful for a bit of quiet before the inevitable storm of attention. An hour passed. I checked the doors again but no sign. Then I heard the meow again and thought I’d check upstairs. My bedroom door was closed, as it always is since she shat in there the first week I was here, plus I kinda want to keep it a fluff free zone since my clothes generally live on the floor. I opened the door and Macy came rushing out.

My door doesn’t shut properly. It’s one of those cheapy doors that is supposed to click shut but the spring loaded clicky thing is missing. Thanks to it hanging at a slight angle it closes automatically but it only takes a gentle shove to open it. Recently Macy has discovered how to get into my room, usually at about 11am if I’m still in bed and she’s getting bored. She must have tried this at some point today only the door closed behind her trapping her in there. There was a faint but noticeable smell of piss and it wasn’t mine.

Like I said, the floor of my small room is pretty much covered with clothes along with the books, comics and general papers I’ve accumulated over the last few months. I don’t have any furniture due to all my stuff being put in storage when I went on the farm and since I only really use the room to sleep in it’s not been a problem. Suddenly I got worried. This cat has no brain. Where could she have chosen to dump her load.

She must like me. In a corner she’d found a small stack of A4 photocopies I’d been carrying around for months intending to do something with but never getting around to. She’d dragged half of them out and pissed right in the middle spilling nothing on the carpet at all. She’d then taken a dump on another piece of paper and gently covered that with my tracksuit trousers. She’d managed to find the least important thing in my room and use that. The trousers weren’t even soiled (though I will of course be washing them ASAP) just used as a delicate camouflage exercise. A couple of minutes to clear up and after leaving the window open for a bit you wouldn’t know the room had been used as a litter tray.

Now, I must do something about that door…

I’ve been in the tampon factory for nearly two weeks now, which is the longest I’ve ever spent working in a factory, and generally I’ve found it quite exhausting. The work itself isn’t that bad, although it’s surprising how tiring repetitive stuff can be (pick up boxes, push into shrink wrap, press buttons, repeat). The people there are also fine - not particularly stimulating but nice and friendly. The commute is about an hour door to door which isn’t bad considering I get two busses. What’s doing me in, it seems, is the shift pattern. Last week it was 6.00am to 2.00pm. This week it’s 2.00pm to 10.00pm.
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In the last few months I’ve been missing gigs, so much so that I haven’t been to once since, ooh, October, and then I didn’t even know it was going on ’til I went to the toilet and noticed it in the basement. However I would probably have gone to at least one a month, maybe more, if I’d known about them in advance, but I always seem to find out about them a week or so after the event. The problem is that I’m not a huge music fan - I don’t trawl through the gig listings or have loads of gigging mates to drag me along - but I do miss listening to four or five odd folk making a blinding racket with random instruments in a pub.

What I want is an internet guide to the toilet circuit, indexed by area with filters for specific bands. For example, Jeffrey Lewis was in the country last month and I didn’t know about it. If I could subscribe to a feed that told me when he was here I would have gone along. Similarly a feed for all the small gigs in Birmingham this week would be better than all the random mailing lists I’m currently getting, some stretching ahead for months, others giving 24 hours notice. The small gigs scene works by word of mouth and pure luck, which is probably what makes it nicer than the big gig scene, but it’s also quite frustrating if you’re not in the loop.

Does anything like this exist? Is it worth building? I’ve been pondering setting up a blog for Birmingham gig scene partly as a way for forcing myself to stay on top of it but it strikes me a national version would be more sensible. Of course I have no time to actually do any of this…