The past few days have been remarkably busy. On Thursday I went to Birmingham with Sister One, primarily to escape the house during the nice weather and secondly to do some cultural stuff.

We visited the IKON gallery, an Victorian gothic building (which looks like an old art college) near Brindley Place which has been converted into a display space. The building and the gallery fitting was very good, although I wasn't all that bothered by most of the exhibits. There were one or two things that caught my eye however. Firstly an interactive experiment to judge how we all see colour differently (although I do wonder how accurate it could be) and a date project which showed a ridiculous level of commitment. The artist had made a piece every Sunday since 1966, the day's date carefully painted on a stretched canvas in the language of the present locality. If the piece was not completed before 12 midnight on that day, it was destroyed. Apparently the artist is still adding to the collection. That means they are doing one right now.

Saturday was Multipack day. I met Stu and Matt on the train in Birmingham and then met everyone else in the Pitcher and Piano in Nottingham. Another Victorian neo-gothic conversion, the pub fills the entire building and Kate had made sure we had seats in the choir stalls.

There was much beer, food and discussion about the return of comic sans (*spits*). There was also a discussion on photography and Gaz and I sidetracked on freelancing/travelling for a while before we were chivvied out of the choir stalls to be replaced by a stag-do.

There were a few new faces once again and at about 7pm we all went our separate ways (unfortunately the trains from Nottingham never run later than about 9pm on a Saturday so there seemed little point pushing it). Upon getting within two blocks of the station we were however stopped by the police.The street was filled with emergency services and we found out that there had been a controlled explosion a few minutes earlier. Thankfully we only caught the tail-end of whatever excitement had been, and ten minutes later we were (surprisingly) on a train back to New Street.

Other things of note from this week include hearing from Swanny, who let me know that once again Mike had come down to visit him in Romford. Bearing in mind the last time Mike went down he was refused entry to all the venues he tried as he didn't have any ID on him, he had hoped this trip would have been more of a success. Apparently he was wrong. Being a quiet night, only one place in town was open and when he tried to go in the bouncer stopped him and told him he couldn't come in. The reason? He was carrying his insulin pen. Mike argued that this was a critical piece of medical equipment, the bouncer argued it could be used as an offensive weapon. Mike argued that it would be a silly idea to go around stabbing people with his insulin, especially since he was diabetic and this was his lifeline. This went on for a few minutes before the manager thought Mike had been talking to the bouncer for too long, told him he didn't want to hear it and sent him and Swan away. Denied entry because you've got diabetes. Hmm.