At the moment I’m doing some work that means that by the end of this week I’m going to have put a fair whack of travelling under my belt.

On Friday I went down to London and met up with Swanny for some post-work drinks. We’d decided just to keep it a quiet one, and went for some food on Fleet Street near his offices. I ordered superfood, and despite my initial skepticism, discovered it was well and truly super. “Super food for a super guy” the waitress said.

Inevitably, the plan to have a quiet one failed pretty quickly after the fairly noisy second.

On Saturday I had to be up and in Victoria for 11, so after a fantastic slap up brunch courtesy of Mrs. S, I headed into town where James, Tom, Luciana and myself met up.

The Channel 4 building is a fantastic bit of architecture and from our meeting room we had a good view of their newest bit of art – a giant sculptured ‘4’, viz. their idents.

A few hours and a good number of workshopping activities later we wound up at around half four. Being at a loose end until 8pm, I went and found John for a lightening-quick pint in between band practise and a concert, before sushi, then met up with Brown in Clapham before heading home.

A very busy day, but both enjoying and satisfying.

Tomorrow I go to Sheffield.

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Yesterday was a fantastic day, but probably not a very productive one.

After being woken by UPS with the delivery of my iMac (woo yay for technology and unpacking stuff) I spent most of the day in the tedium of transferring everything over from the Windows machine.

Anyway, work aside, I finally saw the Foo Fighters last night at the NEC Arena in Birmingham. I can well and truly say that was the best gig I’ve been to, and my high expectations were all met.

My sister and her friend came down from Aber to watch, and we arrived in plenty of time to see the support act, Serj Tankian and lead vocals of System of a Down do some solo material. He was good and the music more appealing than I had maybe guessed at, but of course I was far too preoccupied with the idea of the main event.

I was surprised and very happy by the variety of stuff they played, especially from the back catalogue. I’ve been to gigs before where you only hear the new album, but all the classics came out and they mixed up both the best of their rock and acoustic.

I managed to get about one to two rows back from the front of the stage by the end of the night (by accident rather than intentionally) and so had the whole four song encore up-close.

So much energy, so much great music. I had a fantastic time.

Photos here.

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Of all the cities in the UK that I haven’t visited, Manchester has been top of the list for a long while. Finally this weekend I managed to remedy this and took a train up to see Mike.

Swan met me up there and we hooked up with Zoe for some early evening drinks and food.

We ended up at some foam party in the middle of the city (something I’ve not done for a few years…) and dancing to Oasis, Happy Mondays, Joy Division and a load of other indie stuff which felt quite appropriate.

I’ve currently in the middle of a Macathon, unpacking the folk’s new iMac and installing Leopard. It’s all very, very nice. And mine is due to arrive tomorrow.

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The first time I saw this programme, I watched for about ten minutes then switched over. The music video inside a comedy show didn’t seem to be as funny as the trailers seemed to allude to.

However, a couple of weeks later and a few more episodes caught, I now think Flight of The Conchords has to be one of the best sit-coms (although it doesn’t follow the traditional format) in recent months and years.

The current show is appearing on BBC 4 (Tuesday, 9.30pm), converting to screen after a successful run as an Edinburgh Festival show in 2003 and also as a radio series on BBC Radio 2.

If you’ve not seen it, the premise is two Kiwis living in New York (Brett and Jermaine) trying to make a living as a band (formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo). They are guided by their keen but slightly misguided band manager, Murray, and pursued relentlessly by their number one fan/stalker and all round scary girl, Mel.

The dialogue is genius and the jokes are subtle, but the characters are really well formed and my advice is that if you haven’t seen it you should really have a look.

For a few clips, YouTube is a good start…

• Band Meeting
• If You’re Into it
• More…

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What does it take to turn one perfectly packaged letter into a papier-mache mush?

1. One perfectly packaged envelope, posted to the wrong address
2. One hand-delivered attempt to rectify the problem
3. One idiot (me) leaving it in a friend’s house in London by accident
4. One attempt by said friend to forward the mail on a rainy day
5. One postal strike
6. Four weeks later

That is how you turn a perfectly packaged letter into a papier-mache mush.

I might have just as well just had it posted to the correct address in the first place, put it in a blender with the rest of the ingredients for a banana smoothie, hit ‘Turbo’ then pour after a month.

It might not have been so bad if the contents hadn't been electronic.

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We seem to have missed out on a string of sporting successes this week. What with our football hopes hanging by a thread, Lewis Hamilton’s unfortunate near miss at the F1 Championship, the rugby boys’ valiant defeat to the ‘Boks, and me forgetting to take my googles when I went swimming this evening – all in all it’s been pretty disastrous for the English these past few days.

On the flipside, we still know how to celebrate whatever the result, and thankfully last night Will arranged for his birthday to coincide with the Big Match, so we ended up down the Foley Arms before heading into Stourbridge for the night.

Tom and George made a surprise visit, and what with Gwyz over, the girls, and a few other faces it was a good little crowd. Plus we managed to talk our way into a couple of bars after they had said no; always a bonus, never a disappointment.

I can sense the next few days are going to be keeping me on my toes. There are one or two projects that need to get a good kick start at the beginning of the week and I can’t see it getting much quieter.

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Saturday marked the beginning of the third year of the Multipack, and so to celebrate we returned to the home of the ‘pack and all round superstar town, Walsall.

It wasn’t as busy as the same event last year, but Si’s attendance being as rare as the attendance of free cake at meetings (which also showed up) made it a good little gathering which eventually stopped at the Hogs Head.

One of the ideas banded about was universally applauded and so it has been decided to have a bit of a hack day (‘Multihack’ if you will… stop booing, it’s not that awful) in the offices of OneBlackBear for the November meeting in order to get the website well and truly refurbished. For more info, check out Upcoming.

In the evening I headed over to Beth’s house for the first time in years for a rugby-fest and OSH reunion. Did I think we’d win? Well like most other people I know I think I was still stunned by the fact we were in the semis, let alone going any further up the ladder. After what was 70 minutes of mediocre rugby, finally England showed some flare and the final ten were pure gold. I was a very happy chappy.

Thankfully that wasn’t the end of the night, as there were plenty of people who I hadn’t seen in ages like Oz, Tim, Beth, Jo, Mitch, Rog, Baz, in fact, pretty much everybody apart from James and Helen. Good times.

Sunday was more for family time, and with my cousin heading off to Australia for a year, we went over to Stratford to see him before he catches his flight.

On a completely different tack, there has been one big mystery this week. Imagine my surprise when flicking through the channels a couple of nights ago I discover that directly after UKTV Gold, a new channel called ‘Dave’ has appeared, followed closely by a ‘Dave +1’.

It turns out that UKTV G2 has rebranded itself to this strange new name and although I sort of see why they did it and how they came up with the idea (I’d put money on it being a team of young graduate types who came up with it), I think it’s a little strange. It’s a little too odd, mainly I think, with a questionable amount of staying power.

Anyway, the whole channel is geared to 18-25 year old men, so plenty of Top Gear, Buzzcocks, Have I Got News For You etc etc which can’t be a bad thing, unless you are not a 18-25 year old male.

I met two girls last night who were taught Economics by the current Home Secretary. How’s that for name dropping…

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