Well it’s been pretty busy since I last wrote. Two gigs, two cinema visits, a celebrity visit to the shop, and we managed to book our Berlin flights as well!

Starting with the gigs, last Friday we both really enjoyed the Matthew Herbert Big Band gig at the Colston Hall. A brilliant mix big band jazz and electronic wizardry, topped off with the superb vocals of Dani Siciliano. Matthew Herbert was sampling sounds from the band, plus assorted oddities like wind leaving a balloon and crockery being knocked together, to create a constantly evolving sound. The surprise was the amount of visual playfulness, which also kept us entertained from the stage, a top show, just a shame that more people did not witness it.

On Saturday evening Katja and Jon came over, so that we could book our flights and start looking at accommodation for our trip to Berlin in June. Katja used to live in Berlin and Jon has visited on a couple of occasions, so it should be great to have a couple of people who really know the city showing us around. They also have friends and family to catch up with, so it should leave us with time to explore on our own as well, should be a perfect combination. After they left we went to The Watershed to see The Station Agent. One of those nice little films, where not much happens except the shifting dynamic between 3 very different people. I enjoyed it, but the ending did appear rather rushed.

On Monday lunchtime we had a mass visit from The Coral in the shop. They are spending some time recording in Bristol and it was great to see the eclectic selection of music that they purchased, truly a band with very open ears, although it did seem slightly incongruous to be selling one of them a second hand version of the first Echo & The Bunnymen LP!

On Monday evening we both finished work and made our way to Petunia’s place for some food, before the 3 of us set off to Bath to Lambchop. We were a bit shocked to the normally empty floor space of Bath Pavilion covered with chairs, but managed to find some good seats right at the front and enjoyed another wonderfully laconic gem of a show from this lovely band. People actually surged to the front for the encores and a mini mosh pit formed when they surprised us with a cover of the old Stranglers gem (get a) Grip (on yourself), most unexpected!

Last night we went to see Shaun Of The Dead with Mark and Babs and although I had my doubts before hand, I really enjoyed it. Lots of brilliant observational humour (particularly about music), we did a lot of laughing and even managed to forget that we were sitting so near to the screen that we almost got splattered by the huge amount of blood which was flying around.