Dan texts to say he’s spotted himself on this blog – “at last!” Fair enough, since it was over two months ago that I explained that I tend not to mentione non-blogging friends by name and he said I should feel free to name and shame him. Unfortunately, that was during my most recent phoneless period and therefore didn’t get blogged.

Flashback: Monday, 27 – Wednesday, 29 December 2004

During that long, empty period between Christmas and New Year, Dan and I had what he termed (fairly optimistically) an “arts and crafts” week. On the Monday, we went to see John Hegley and both managed to get roped into audience participation rituals (I sang; Dan’s involved a vegetable). The show was in North London at The Pleasance, a venue I realised I’d been to around seven and a half years earlier to see Cluub Zarathustra. My clearest memory of that (and I don’t mean to make this a flashback inside a flashback) is drinking in the bar afterwards and mouthing off about parts of the anatomy that are anagrams of other parts of the anatomy (to this day I can only come up with two-and-a-half pairs).

The following day, we went to Brighton. Went to a café-bar with poor service (fortunately for them I’ve forgotten its name) and then to Next where I bought a coat in a particularly exciting shade of beige.

Back in London on the Wedneaday, we popped into H&M where, encouraged by Dan, I picked up a somewhat controversial flat cap before going to see Napoleon Dynamite. That was very funny, although it couldn’t quite live up to the superlatives splashed on the posters. It was a refreshingly different type of film though with a very strong central performance. And after watching a movie’s worth of Napoleon and his awkward dress sense, my new cap seemed that much cooler.