This evening, Nicola and I made the 45-second trek (!) to our local, the Robin Hood, where we met our friends Lindsey and Howard. A couple of months ago, we gave Lindsey a Mah-Jongg set for her birthday, and this evening we made fine use of the warm, comfortable environment in the Robin Hood and learned to play the game. And what a fine old game; almost feels like we need another winter to give us an excuse to sit round the fire in the Robin Hood, playing Mah-Jongg…
In between the usual dribs and drabs of weekend domesticity, I managed to complete my Mercury Rev album collection with the purchase of ‘See You on the Other Side’, from 1995. The band’s first album with Jonathan Donahue as leader after the departure of David Baker, this album is more clearly a product of the band behind ‘Deserter’s Songs’ – simultaneously luscious and fragile, with a courage to embrace melodic naivety with a total lack of irony. The Flaming Lips link smacks of facile journalistic barrel-scraping (it’s 13 years since Jonathan Donahue’s one-album tenure as a Flaming Lip) but it’s difficult not to draw parallels between the two bands. Read the last-but-one sentence above – that could so easily apply to much of the Flips’ output.
Finally, I just drank a cup of tea and ate an oatcake with some dry-cured ham. Deadlines all overdue… it’s going to be a long night…