Alright kids!
This is only the second day that I've been in work this week. The dentist got me again.
As I mentioned in my blog of last week I've had sore teeth since my last visit to the dentist. From Thursday till Tuesday the pain got worse every day. It sort of spoilt large parts of the weekend trip to London for me, which was a shame because bar the whole tooth thing it was a quality weekend. More about that later…
Anyway, I was taking large quantities of powerful painkillers for about four days and they only seemed to take the top 20% off the pain. Eating was a horrible experience and sleep was also very difficult. I remember sitting at the bottom of the hotel bed rocking back and forth with my head in my hands at 6:00 am one morning.
I went back to the dentist on the Monday after we'd returned from London. The dentist drilled my tooth again (without anaesthetic but hey, what the hell, it fucking killed anyway), and told me to see how that felt. Well it feels a bit better now; I still have a dull ache in the left side of my mouth but any painkillers will now give complete relief.
Problem was/is that the tooth pain subsided just at the time that my sinuses flared up in reaction to what was going on in my mouth. I also felt really warm and sick (probably due to the amount of painkillers sitting on a mostly empty stomach).
So I've had a few days off. The doctor gave me some antibiotics (which thankfully haven't made me puke my liver up like those mental evil ones I had in January) and I feel 60% better. She said I appeared to have an inflamed throat / mouth and sinuses, and today I feel like I have something stored in my left cheek hamster-stylee. It looks a bit "puffy". Fucking hell, I've had a shitty run of annoying health problems since 2002. Still, touch wood (touches artificial testicle) there hasn't been anything serious (cept the fucking parotitis) and I think if I had anything life-threatening I'd kill it with the power of worrying. Fretotheraphy I'm gonna call it.

London then.
Well we went to London on Friday, mainly to see Embrace at Shepherd's Bush Empire on Friday night.
Yes, the "bush" does belong to shepherd, just like the "court" belongs to the Earl, and the "cross" belongs to the King. It's important that you know it's King's Cross as opposed to Kings Cross. Therefore if you bump into him you know he'll own a cross of some sort, and that he won't be really angry at something. Well he might be but it won't be for definite. Probably best to give him 5 minutes to himself anyway, just so you're sure.
We stayed in Hammersmith this time, which is a bit further out of the centre, but not much of a trek. It was near enough to Shepherd's Bush so we could walk to and from the gig. The Empire is on Shepherd's Bush Green, which is a bit of a fucking dump and made it difficult to find somewhere decent to eat. We eventually opted for one of those pub/food places, which seemed to have a fairly extensive menu. I opted for a mushroom pizza, which I noted contained Gorgonzola but thought nothing of it at the time.
WHO FUCKING EATS GORGONZOLA? IT TASTES LIKE FUCKING SICK! IS IT A SPECIAL CHEESE SECRETED BY THE DEAD, AS THEIR BLOATED CORPSES ARE LEFT OUT IN THE SUN?
Anyway my pizza was fucking rank. As it hurt to eat it, I didn't want to endure all the pain to eat a sick and mushroom pizza. It was my own fault as I'd ordered it, yet I don't understand why any restaurant would try and sell something so fucking foul.

Embrace do a series of secret gigs, which are advertised using special codes dished out on the website. You then have to enter the codes on a different site to find out when and where the "guerrilla" gig will take place. Anyway, secret gig 13 took place on Shepherd's Bush Green at 6:30. We were told to go down the side of the Empire building at 6pm where we would be given a balloon. And we were.
We then sat on the green with about 100-150 other embrace fans and waited. I've taken some pics of the secret gig and all the balloons, and I know I constantly say I will, but I'll put some pictures up soon.
The band turned up promptly on time and treated us to four songs, 'Wonder', 'Gravity', 'Come Back To What You Know' and 'All You Good Good People'. It was great, everybody sang along and as the band had hardly any amplification (Danny had a mini-amp for his vocals), it sounded a bit like a church service but with better music.
Danny asked us not to let our balloons go as we were on The Heathrow flight-path, but a few were let go. Local kids greedily mopped up most of the rest of them.
The secret gigs are great. It's not often you get to stand around with your favourite band and about 100 or so other obsessives and have a big singalong. People kept wandering over and asking what was going on. The police also showed up but decided that no harm was being done in a gathering of fey indie wimps. I can't think of another group of people who may have offered less of a threat.
We were left with about an hour for drinkies and balloon biting before we piled into the old Empire building. It is one of those places with a floor but two rows of seats in a circle and balcony. We'd seen the band from right at the front in the last week so made the decision to hang back a bit, mainly because it would be nice to actually hear them properly without getting ruptured ear drums. We weren't that far back though, as you'll see when I pop those pictures up.
The gig was amazing, the sheer fucking love from the audience clearly stunned the band, halfway through 'The Good Will Out' the venue broke out into a round of applause and the band had to stop what they were doing. It was clearly validation for all they'd been through over the last three years; being dropped by Hut, being penniless and forced to take part-time jobs, being slagged off as has-beens in the press, having potential songs turned down by the record company, how mad the whole recording of the album was etc. etc.
They played several of the new songs, and they were probably surprised by how many people (myself included) had started to pick up on the words and tunes. Still, when they played old songs like 'Retread' and 'My Weakness Is None Of Your Business' I found myself utterly transfixed. Over the last few years there have been times when I've thought I'd never hear any new Embrace stuff again and maybe even wondered why I was still checking out the website and hadn't moved on. I mean I'm not 22-23 anymore. Then when you hear a song as beautiful, as lifting and joyous as 'Retread', sung by a man who really does fucking mean it, and thousands of others who really fucking mean it too, then any doubts just vanish.
The last song they played on Friday was 'Fireworks', and bar maybe the rather peculiar reason why 'Gay bar' holds special significance for me, it was the most beautiful experience I've ever had with or due to music in my entire life. Almost every voice in the place sang it's heart out, proper fucking singing as opposed to mumbling, and it was the loudest mass choir I've heard in my life.
Standing about five feet away from us was Edith Bowman, who went mental throughout the entire gig and suprisingly knew all the words. That wins her cool points, maybe even enough to allow for the fact that she was wearing dungarees. She looked not unlike one of the gangs in The Warriors.
I've been listening to the new album this week and it sounds fucking ace. It won't appeal to everyone, I have friends with similar music tastes who like things a bit more subtle, quieter and understated. Yet there are songs like 'Ashes' and 'Someday' which are so euphoric and full of joy, it's hard not to stand there and sing them doing a big 'T' for TUNE! Fuck it man, anything that can stir the emotions in such a way can't be a bad thing.

We also had the Saturday in London. I had never been to Kew Gardens before (I thought I had but I'd got confused with Hampton Court - heehee 'Hampton') so we went there.
It's huge, it took us a good 4 or 5 hours to wander around the whole place. I suppose it helped that it was really sunny and warm (but not too warm), but it is so well looked after and has such natural beauty on display that it was a great way to spend a Saturday. I also took about 80 pictures. Because I could.
I must say I liked the spiky cactus and plants that ate animals best. Any feisty plant that says 'fuck off nature with your food chains and orders for everything' is alright by me.
We then went to the National Gallery. It was cool, I quite like the fact that amongst some fantastic works of arts by people such as Monet, there were also seem rather poor pieces. Notreally shit like as if I'd drawn them ("Mr Allan, your stick man appears to have a big spunking cock drawn between his legs. Mr. Allan, why are you giggling? Are you 10?"), but there were pictures with really badly drawn faces, some way out of scale and some just downright ugly.
I find it a shame that such large parts of the gallery are devoted to pictures from 1200-1600, as most of them are religious ones. And to be honest, unless you find some laughably poor ones, they all look much the same. Bearded holy man? Check. Chick called Mary? Check. Fat sinister babies with wings? Erm…check! It's such a shame that nobody painted what it was actually like to live in those times, I reckon a giant canvas of plague ridden medieval zombies being slaughtered by Henry VIII carrying a chainsaw would fucking rock!
People like Monet and Mannet showed a lot of invention in their pictures, trying different styles and experimenting with different looks. I also like how Mannet put all his mates in his pictures and refused to follow the "laws" of painting.
It was a shame that they put people like the above in the same room as Van Gogh, who is another who isn't as good as people say he is. I mean, he draws sunflowers which are totally beautiful things. And he makes them look really ugly. His pictures just look quite basic and not all that special. Don't start with all that 'Oh Glenn, but Van Gogh was tortured' stuff, because so was Terry Waite. AND he had a better beard.
I'd like to see Van Gogh put up with John McCarthy going on and on about Jill Morrell for 24 hours a day when you're chained to a radiator. That'd drive him fucking bananas. Well, I guess it'd depend if McCarthy was on the side of Van Gogh's one remaining ear.
Hmm, tea was nice on Saturday. We went to The Woodlands near Bond Street, which is an all-vegetarian Indian restaurant. We both had Thalis, which are dishes made up of several pots of other dishes. Jesus, it was so nice. There was so much variety in the tastes and textures, even though it was painful to eat, I wanted to try everything on the menu. I especially wanted what the table nearby had, which looked like a big inflatable bready rugby ball. Whoo, I bet that description has helped you picture what it looked like. Anyway, when you popped it, in deflated slowly. I wanted to pop its deflatey oddness into my mouth!
I found it quite amusing that Hammersmith High Street on a Friday or Saturday night looked virtually the same as Church Street in Preston. Heh, it seems that wherever you go, even if it is in the most cosmopolitan city in the country, English high streets on a weekend night will be decked in identikit Ben Sherman wearing men, and pissed ladies dressed in very little.
London pubs though are great, they all have far more character than pretty much every pub in Preston.
We had a brief shop on Sunday, before we undertook the tortuous journey home. It seemed to take forever, and when you have really bad toothache, a train is not the place to be.

In my time off this week I've mainly watched Shaun Of The Dead. Heh, I watched it five times altogether, I wanted to hear all the added commentaries. Ahhh, sick days can be good for something.

Tonight we go to the Guild Hall to see Morrissey, it should be really good. I hope he doesn't OD on pies before coming on stage, that'd be a shame.