Yesterday was one of stark contrasts. One of my closest friends contacted me with some desperately sad news about her unborn son, and 30 minutes later, a friend of mine I believed to have died called me up out of the blue. It’s not a funny old world by any means but on occasion it can trip you up.

I spent another evening in the chasm of sobriety, I’ve quite a schedule over the next few evenings so two days away from booze seemed ‘sensible’. I found last night quite simple to deal with, once one has accepted one isn’t going to drink in the evening as soon as one awakes, thereby quashing any acceptation that the day is going to be anything other than fucking shite, it’s sort of alright living through it fully aware of the whole world about you in stark boring anti-climax.

The bright sunny evening and bike ride home cheered me though, it’s funny how putting myself in mortal danger in order to satisfy my lust for hard acceleration gives me such a thrill, I can see parallels between that and drinking too much or taking drugs, though the latter elements are slower of course. I was thinking about this with regard to the ban on advertising tobacco in motorsport, yes, smoking isn’t particularly good for your health but far worse would be to hit a fucking wall at 200 mph.

Following supper and a documentary on the Gutenburg Press which I knew more about than the documentary, though it was enjoyable enough to watch the arcane process first hand, I watched Name of The Rose. I’d not seen it for a while and had forgotten how utterly wonderful it is, it’s not aged (of course) and still has the emotional punch I recall when first seeing it some 20 years ago as teenager, it’s almost without flaw and as contemporary medieval thrillers go, it’s without peer.

The only irksome aspect of the evening was finding lumps of James’ stomach lining in my washed clothes. I’d thrown the vomit clad sofa bedclothes into the machine within an hour of their soiling and washed them at once in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I’d forgotten all about them until early evening yesterday when I went to fill the machine and found a huge pile of wet stuff quietly retting away.

I grabbed bundles of sheets, towels pants and other ephemeral items of clothing and pulled them onto the kitchen floor, but in addition to sweet smelling linen there were large dog-food like chunks scattered about the laundered clothes, back they all went into the drum, the floor was brushed of James’ lunch and I fired up the machine again. Two hours later the same thing happened, there were fewer lumps of Chum but enough to put the clothes back in to wash, the floor was brushed a second time and the machine switched on.

Third time lucky, well luckyish, after the Name of the Rose and before I went to bed to spend an good hour reading I found myself picking small lumps of someone else’s sick off my underpants.

Here is the first of the promised youtube discoveries from Friday night, fucking great stuff…