I spent most of the day in the flat, trying to work, not doing too well, so doing admin stuff like updating the gig guide (
Pretty much all the preview gigs are in there now, sorting out my receipts for my accountant (I don't think he uses them for tax purposes, he just likes seeing what I've been buying) and starting work on this year's tour programme - I've extended the deadline on the programme sponsorship to the 7th June, so you can still get your name in it if you
donate here.
It was all a bit boring. Maybe things will pick up when I am back in the city - we went to see the house earlier in the week and though there's still a long way to go, it's all taking shape and there's a possibility we'll be able to move back in (albeit with work still going on around us) at the beginning of July.
I drove to London in the evening for a preview gig. For the second time in two months I put one address into the sat nav but something went wrong and as I got to the city I realised I was being directed home. The logical explanation is that my chubby fingers pressed the wrong bit on the touch screen, but maybe I have got a possessed sat nav from off of the Twilight Zone that tries to take me where it wants to go. Or maybe my sat nav is just homesick and misses London and its more complicated streets and wants to get me away from Hertfordshire whenever it can. Maybe I am homesick and I subconsciously press the home button without myself realising. It was annoying that the sat nav (not me) had screwed up as I got stuck in traffic on the North Circular and it was only on the way home that I realised that there was a much quicker way that totally avoided the M1.
On the way home I was listening to 5Live on AM, where the reception is always a bit dodgy. I was getting a mixture of 5Live and some ethereal music from somewhere else, which I didn't mind as 5LIve is a bit shouty at that time of night. But as I went through a quiet country lane near to home the radio also seemed to become possessed and the radio station went faint and there was a very loud and very clear sound of something very like a man heavy breathing. I mean it's possible that somewhere nearby a man was broadcasting himself masturbating, but it seems unlikely. Maybe the static just resembled this sound, but if so, it did so for a good minute and was an amazing impression for something with no sentience. I wondered if there was a man hiding in the back of my car who had one of those devices that can broadcast to a nearby radio and if so was I about to get an axe through my head. Or was there another ghost in the machine? Are my car and the devices in it becoming slowly sentient? And if so will it be like Herbie or Kit from Knight Rider or will it be a horror film where my car wanks all over me and then makes me drive over a cliff? Or worse will my car take revenge by getting on my back and making me carry it everywhere it wants to go. After ten years of me using it as my mechanical slave I don't think anyone wouldn't think that was a justified response.
The heavy breathing stopped though and the mad people saying why the Queen's Jubilee was a good/bad idea came back on more clearly. Perhaps the heavy breathing was the producer or the host of that show who had accidentally turned on his mic. I can't understand why you'd want to spend every evening working on such a maddening programme - it's like you work in the bottom half of the internet, but have to respond to every mad utterance - so I can only presume that the people who are employed on that station at this time only take part because they are sexually aroused by the insane views of the UK's strangest and loneliest people.
Whatever the case, whether a human or some strange atmospheric condition I did not enjoy being the victim of the localised heavy breathing. And I won't be driving down the same road at the same time every night to find out if it's a regular occurrence.
