The Book of Sifty

93 Feet East and Mr Scruff 12:52PM

So Friday night we headed up to Brick Lane. On the way was an aborted attempt to meet Craig at Paddington tube station, he'd forgotten that the station is huge since it does trains as well as the tube. He was also late so that didn't help. London Mike, Mike from Reading, and myself made our way off to the gig without Craig.

Brick Lane is pretty cool. More my scene than most of the hundreds of other club/pub areas in London. (A little more 'Cuba' , then 'Courtenay' if you come from Wellington) Apparently according to some marginal publication I read the other day it's the 'new' Soho. So in about 10 years it'll be packed with over priced yuppie apartments, soul-less bars and car alarms. But currently it plays host to some reasonably priced nights filled with non-suits, students and the sort of music I really like.

After some of the usual navigation issues, and parting with '8, we were sitting on a leather couch in the upstairs bar. We'd been downstairs but it just seemed to be lounge bar with no DJ to be seen. Upstairs there was a guy playing some vinyl behind a couple of turntables, so although a little downbeat it was better than standing around downstairs.

Mike wandered off to see if he could find Craig and some beers. On his journey (in fact on the way back from the downstairs toilet) he found the main room, with a DJ called Mr Scruff whom we'd come to see! Bloody lucky since we'd probably have spent most of the night on the couches in what was really the chillout room, totally oblivious to the existence of the main room. This room was much bigger than the other two and had a whooping big PA, lights and about 500 people rammed into it.

A most excellent set, and wicked night. Starting off with some old school west coast hip-hop tunes, then progressing through some very danceable jazzy stuff to the most lush deep funky house I've heard for a while. Cool to see a Dj who could play such a wide variety of music that kept the crowd jumping for 5 hours.

Sunday we convinced Mike to drive us down the Thames to see the Thames flood barrier. Mike was supposed to fly out to Canada on Thursday but his flight was cancelled after the unbelievable events on Tuesday. So he worked a couple of extra days, hence we had a van to go places we wouldn't normally be bothered getting to. The Thames flood barrier is a massive adjustable dam like thing over the Thames so they can control the tide upstream, stop the flooding they used to get in London and I think make the port on the other side of the barrier less affected by the tidal nature of the river. Anyway it was also a good excuse for a nice Sunday pub lunch somewhere we'd never been before.

Some of you (well if anybody reads this) may be wondering how my self-improvement goal is going. Some recent happening in my life, some people's reaction to them and other things, combined with my current lack of employment are all piling up to make it very difficult to think of much except remaining positive and optimistic about day to day things. So more later on the next goal.