The Divine Comedy

Last night we flew - over the houses, the streets and the trees - away from the children for the first time in years - or so it felt - to see The Divine Comedy play in Newcastle University. The venue is great - for great, read small. I was half-hoping the electricity would cut out, as there were enough acoustic instruments (violin, cello, percussion, acoustic guitars), and enough voice in the spectacular Neil Hannon to have filled the room without it. Nevertheless, all electricked up, it was still music divine.

I saw them once before in Sheffield, but last night's gig was better, there was a real connection between the band and the audience, yes, I think intimate is the word I would use to describe the gig. Up there with the "solid gone"ness of Radiohead playing Videotape at Meadowbank earlier this year was the performance of "Our Mutual Friend" (my favourite DC song) and surprisingly "When the lights go out all over Europe". Why don't you listen and see what I mean? No really - listen to streams of those songs below (if I'm online) and see them performed live on Youtube. You can't beat being there though. John & Bex were there. Oh, they also did a killer version of Prince's "Raspberry Beret" (!) which someone else managed to grab at an earlier gig on the tour

Our Mutual Friend [Youtube]
When The Lights Go Out All Over Europe [Youtube]

Education, Education, Education...

Joni started nursery today. So begins a long and winding road...one which her daddy found himself rejoining about five years ago. So half the family are now in education - I don't think there's a better place to be - can't I stay in Uni my whole life? Oh if only... I started the final year of my degree on Monday, and it's not about playdough and sandpits anymore. It's about nasty interesting things like building windowing interfaces to an existing reversible virtual machine written in RVM Forth (i.e written in itself!? - and C and assembly language) using tcl/tk. No, I don't get it either. Someone pass me my milk carton - and don't forget the little blue straw.

So anyway, here's a long and winding video of my little girl's first day at nursery (there's a long winding googled version here). Becky said loads of kids were crying, but Joni just said "Bye Mummy!" and ran off into the class to play with the (non-crying) kids. That's my Noni.