Actually yesterday and today have been one of the rare occasions that Conrad's social and creative lives clash. Clash the first was the launch party of Claw The Thin Ice's new album "Exercise", performed at the Star and Garter in Manchester last night. This meant Conrad staying in Manchester instead of going home - hence no blog on Friday evening.
I hope this grim absence didn't derail people's lives too much.
| Conrad's loyal fan is a bit grim and despair-y |
Enough preambulatory wibble! Let the motley begin!
Claw The Thin Ice
The "Doors Open" was 9:00 but as Conrad intended to be fashionably late, I didn't get there until nearly 10:00, which was good, as the first of the two acts didn't start performing until 10:34. They were "Bearclaw Beware", described as a mathcore** band.
Good lord they were loud! Or maybe I'm just old.
No, they were loud. Its a small venue and I have large ears.
The bass player was positively acrobatic, throwing himself across the (small) stage in a blur of limbs and guitar neck, definitely upstaging the guitarist. And the music? Well, it did have melodic bits, but it also had a lot of thrash, different time signatures, that sort of stuff.
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| The bass player unusually static |
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| Promotional poster |
Conrad, knowing that CTTI wouldn't be going on until late (11:30 as it turned out), had conspired to get a room at the Brittania Hotel to stay overnight, rather than have to catch the night bus back to Oldham Bus Station and then taxi on from there. The room price also included breakfast, which added to the lustre.
Allow me to impress you with the room:
Er - I grant you the first one is a bit Room In The Rough, but you get the full feeling of Conrad at home, don't you?
Now, what is the disadvantage of having a third floor room in an hotel at the very centre of City Centre Manchester - on a Friday night?
Yes! The drunken revellers creating an embarrassing hoo-hah until the small hours of the morning, not to mention a drunken couple lurching around the corridors at 4 a.m.
"Gorblay", repeated the man, countless times. It may have been the female partner's name, or he may have been making words up at random.
No I was not dreaming!
Friday Did Not Begin Well
No it Dog Buns well didn't! I may have alluded to this in the rather hasty mock-up post that I did at lunchtime on Friday.
I picked up my glasses from the bathroom cabinet, walked into the Upstairs Lair, and one of the arms fell off my spectacles.
Could I find the missing screw that caused this minor calamity? No I could not. A frantic search unearthed a slightly ratty older pair of specs that, wonder of wonders, actually functioned almost properly -
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| The stop-gap pair and Conrad's cross stare |
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| Cross or happy? It's hard to tell. Oh - the old specs, before they came to 'arm |
- excuse me, it's unpleasantly silent in here, I'm going to headphone'n'Grooveshark -
Much better! What was I holding forth - oh yes -
- in which Friday packed a sting in the tale. Conrad was busy copying a post from 2014 into a new one when he rashly "Deleted" a picture via the keyboard. The proper procedure is to use "Remove" from the picture Options menu. Otherwise the cursor retains the format of the picture removed, and overlays it on the post wherever the cursor is moved. This means that your whole post ends up like a moonscape of fonts, captions and overlaid formats.
The only way to definitely remove this formatting error is - if you're lucky - to save, quit out, then go back in again.
Which didn't work this time. Conrad had to re-do the whole post after spending 20 minutes on the old one, which took another 10 minutes.^
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| Conrad, expressing his annoyance. |
As Conrad was on leave on Thursday, he took the opportunity to make not one, but two cakes.
Is this news? Yes it Dog Buns well is! Do you know how long it takes to make a cake? Not just make it, but nurse it through the baking process - checking on whether it's done or not, turning it to bake evenly in the oven, tenting it with foil to prevent the exterior burning as the interior bakes, because oh so often the time given is more a guess than anything accurate.
Hence the gluten-free Spiced Date and Walnut Loaf:
It looks a bit flat, but for anyone with coeliac disease, it won't bloat your stomach into a mini-zeppelin, with quite as much gas.
Then it was down to the gluten-free Chocolate Brownies:
Conrad, canny as a
He also used 1/4 of the raising agents used in the previous Brownie Debacle, where the batter became sentient and crawled out of the tin.
Meanwhile, In Yorkshire -
Conrad has, of course, imbibed all the Lanky biases against the Tykes because they are, after all, entirely true and firmly based in fact.
Except perhaps the weather. Whilst - I'm going to quote one of my favourite bands here, The Comsat Angels:^^^ "The rain hung in sheets from the sky" in Lancashire, over in Yorkshire we had bright sunny weather at Dungworth. Even this:
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| Words un-necessary! |
* As usual, all or none of these may be correct.
** That is, extremely proficient musically at the expense of soppy love songs.
*** Bearclaw Beware, however ...
^ You see? You see the trouble I take! That's 30 minutes of a 45 minute lunch-break.
^^ This is not a compliment. That is all you need to know.
^^^ Who come from YORKSHIRE! The Horror!
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