Hopefully if im not too lazy I shall be writing 3 blogs in the next 4 or 5 days which for me is pretty impressive. This one - busy week part 1 shall include Tuesdays cinema visit and wednesdays night out. The 2nd will be called Larrikin Love and will talk in length about the gig which I am going to tonight and then finally busy week part 2 which should cover what ever we (me and friends) get round to doing over the weekend and maybe my aunties birthday although I very much doubt that will be very interesting.

So we will start with Tuesday. On Tuesday I went to the cinema with Kalistra and thus technically, although she does go to the church I go to, we met for the first time. As it was a cinema visit I of course went to woolworths first, bought what I always do for some reason a bag of Campinos and a buy one get one free Pepsi.. being a gentleman I obviously offered my free one to the lady which she accepted graciously. She foolishly bought horrible popcorn which she went on to only eat very little of and so I deffinately think I got the bargain there.

The film we went to see was John Tucker must die which although looking like a very girly film enticed me in with a very funny trailer, luckily the trailer did not mislead, I thought the film was pretty damn good. And it of course had a happy ending which I wont spoil for all you people who still want to see it.

After the cinema went pretty much straight home and so that was that.

Wednesday night was suposedly part of the farewell to Uni celebrations and so we all went off to Oceana, the first time I was to go and my expectations were high after hearing so much good said about it. I was to be bitterly dissapointed.

The night started with the usual bus ride to Kingston.. then we saw the queue and so went straight into Lloyds where we downed a pint for some reason then went back to queue which was now slightly longer. We waited for probably nearing an hour before we finally got in. Straight to the bar got a round in and then went off to explore. Now as I have said, Ihad heard great things about Oceana, Im sure i had heard 7 floors which now I do think meant 7 levels rather than 7 dance areas.. there were only 2 a tiny little cheese room and an average sized main room.

Of course most of the night was spent in the cheese room you cant beat the classics, although I was worried when the 40+ year old DJ did start throwing in some songs which sounded remarkably like R&B which is never a good sign. As usual the night had its fair share of events. First there was the drunken ginger girl who decided to rub herself up against me, of course we cant blame her, what woman wouldnt love to do that but I wasnt impressed and thus didnt make much of an effort to keep her there. And unsurprisngly she just moved onto the next guy she could find, then 5 minutes later she did the same thing to Tate. McCulloch though got a rather different greeting from her, punched in the face twice due to her wild, drunken dancing.

There were a good set of tunes, the girls alouds the 5ives and of course the Bon Jovis but this time for the first time in a club we managed to get the guy to play the macarena. I felt like I was on top of the world.. strutting my stuff, the DJ even pointed out how sad it was to see cool indie boys (reffering to me I assume as he was looking at me and laughing) would dance to such a sad track. He can mock but the Macarena still holds the crown of best dance track of all time in my books.

We left the club reasonably early at half past one and then a few people went to buy some mangy food i.e. kebabs and chicken. I was no where near drunk enough to eat that food which was literally dripping with grease. We then walked off and got the lovely nightbus all the way home

End of Prt.1

Not a manouver that I have been practicising whilst driving, but now that you ask the lessons are going very well thankyou, my lovely kossovan instructor called Nigel says I am making good progress and I have done all sorts of pointless acts of road hogging such as parallel parking in huge gaping holes and reversing round corners. But my progress is unlikely to continue at such a rate due to the reason I am actually writing this blog.

I have completely changed my mind on my decision to take a gap year. I will admit now that my thinking for taking a gap year was largely due to the knowledge that I had infact messed up all my exams but I did have a list of fairly valid reasons for taking a year off. But since the mad decision for the university to offer me the place despite my clearly quite poor grades I have had to think quite hard about my decision.

Before I made my decision I went through the process of looking for a job, this started with going to the local branch of Connexions to ask their advice - they told me to either go to uni or get a decent job which would give me some valuable experience. So from that I went to a job agency thing who said that they could get me a job working for the home office out in Kingston but that the security clearing would take 2 or 3 months. SO I would get experience but the amount of cash I would raise would be limited, travelling to and from croydon would mean that my time would be nearly all taken up by the job and so realistically my other activities such as learning the guitar would have suffered.

So now I am going to University, I have sorted out applying for my loan (about 3 months late) and my accomodation which should be sorted properly by the time I get to Uni in early October. Am I ready?.. no, not in the slightest - I have no experience of living away from home, of catering for myself, of washing my own things of budgeting properly. I am not afraid to say my mum did all of this for me and thus the prospect of doing it all for myself is a bit daunting.

On the other hand I am quite excited about it all, getting pissed with new people, living on my own.. All will be a great experience for me. Oh and Dr. Karl Kennedy (Neighbours) is scheduled to come to perform sometime in mid November which is amazing, I am looking forward to that one.

On that note I end this blog, tarrah

Sunday 27th August 2006 saw the day that I would finally see Pete Doherty in concert. Despite him being my idle for near enough the last 2 years I had never got round to going to see him but this was my chance, not only that but to see a whole load of other good bands at this great mini festival.

Me and my sister got to Clapham common tube station by about 11ish and followed the crowds down to the area where the gig was to be held. Of course the whole area was surrounded by 8ft high fences to ensure no free loaders could get in. We had to wait there until about 12 before the gates opened and we walked inside. Woo we had just waited the best part of an hour to get into a field. It was no ordinary field though it was a field.. of dreams.

For the first half an hour or so we scouted round the field to see where everything was and we also made a plan of who we really wanted to see and who we could live without seeing. Also we managed to pick up as many freebies as possible. From the 3 phone company van we managed to blag a sun hat, a draw string bag and two boxes of jellybeans, we got some free hair gel and some other stuff that I cant remember. So that was that and then we moved onto the acts.

The first thing we went to see was a set put on by the comedy store in the guilty pleasures tent, it was reasonably funny, there was 2 acts and a compare who were all quite good but could have been better. Nevertheless it was quite an easy start to the day.

We then made our way to the second stage as it was so cleverly called to see the 'grindie' star that is lethal bizzle. Of course I have been floolwing 'da bizzle' for many a year now.. ok so i'm not his biggest fan but I liked that one song of his that I knew where he did a rap remix of a rakes song. And despite it basically being a set of rap music I quite enjoyed it, very lively and lots of crowd participation shouting things like OI, brilliant.

We stayed in the Second Stage tent for the next act. Yes Kid Harpoon wooo, one of the must see acts of the day, he was amazing. Despite just being a man with a guitar he has a real stage presence and is brilliant. I definately recommend people listen to his stuff.

We then moved out to the main stage to see Lily Allen, my sister hates Lily Allen with a vengence but I decided that she had to be seen, she maybe a complete chav but her songs are quite good. The chav persona wasnt helped by her coming out on stage wearing a hood and huge loopy gold earrings but she still managed to put on a good set which I thoroughly enjoyed, and to you who are familiar with her work, she has a song called Alfie about her little brother and when singing it she dragged him onto the stage.. he was worse then her, he was about 12, wearing a hood and smoking. He looked like a right wanker. Also during this set some stoner and a drunk woman were having a great time in front of me pouring alcohol over each other whcih provided quite an interesting spectical.

Back to the second stage tent we went to listen to the pipettes who too were great and out of all the bands we saw the nicest to look at, for those who dont know the pipettes their lead singers are 3 women who wear 60s clothes and dance around looking nice and they actually have pretty decent songs aswell.

Now we came to a part of the day where there was nothing much good on.. we had a choice between some shitty emo band or Bez.. so yes we sat down and had some lunch/dinner type thing. It was horribly overpriced and not particularly tasty but we were quite hungry and needed a sit down after standing for the last 4 or so hours.

The next thing we saw was the young knives and we only went to see them because we had nothing else to see, I still believe that they are pretty rubbish, apart from one song which is alright they are a boring band.. but we used this opportunity to start making our way as close to the front of the crowd as possible.. also we managed to bag ourselves a get loaded beach ball which was nice.

Then there was a quick DJ set as there was between all the acts on the main stage and it was during this me and my sister decided that we would sacrifice going to see British Sea Power and the Guillemots in order to get as close as possible for Babyshambles. And so we did.

Buzzcocks were the next act to come on and already by this point the crowd was getting quite rowdy at least as much as the milburn gig and I knew that this was only going to get worse as the night progressed yet I stayed there and tried to enjoy the 30 yr old punk sound brought to us by very middle-aged looking performers.

Another DJ set followed before Graham Coxon came on stage with his band, by this time I couldn't actually move at all, I was just one with the crowd and despite the elbows being locked into my side and the sweat pouring off my whole body i was still quite enjoying the show. I would have preffered Graham Coxon to have been on earlier for me to really enjoyed it properly.

As you can see with the last couple of Acts I have mentioned more about the crowd then the music, this is unfortunately because this is how i remember it, by the time Pete and Babyshambles came on the crowd was one big mush of people, if people jumped in front of you, you jumped too because you were so tightly pressed against them, this is ok if your pushed up against some gorgeous girl (some of the time) but not so much when your pushed up against some sweaty ginger bloke (the rest of the time). For a short time I was really able to embrace the fact that Pete was singing less than 10 meters away from me but then I soon remembered again that I couldnt actually breathe properly, I was in a lot of pain and within 5 minutes or so of the set starting I was on the floor with a huge crowd of raging fans peering over me. I dont think I am exagerating when I say that was one of the scariest moments of my life.. the thought did cross my mind that I was about to be trampled to death by a large crowd. I managed to haul myself up to my great relief but I didnt want to stay there any longer.. So i tried my hardest to push through the crowd grab my sister and bring us back to the less crowded areas. My sister will probably never forgive me for doing that but I really dont care, I was shitting myself in that crowd and so had to get out. I had had my time up close to pete but I knew I wouldnt really be able to enjoy the music whilst in that crowd.

We left soon after the Babyshambles set was finished and made our way home by 10:30ish

The moral of this story is I have realised that I have a fear of being trampled to death by large crowds.. until the next time bye bye