The laugh and the lie down happen within four seconds of each other and no transition is offered
Sunday, and the mystery cover has been revealed, and I am pleased to report, on the record, that Deaf Nige’s big secret was a Buzzcocks song, which is fine, which is actually completely fine, punk covering punk is not a betrayal of the brand, it’s practically a tax obligation, and rehearsal went better than the three previous weeks of setlist warfare had any right to predict. We ran it twice, got it wrong both times in interestingly different ways, and called it character, which is what you call anything in this band when you’ve run out of rehearsal time and patience simultaneously, usually around the ninety minute mark, right on schedule.
Read the papers over breakfast, proper breakfast, beans on toast, the diet of champions and broke musicians alike, and there’s a piece doing the rounds on prat.uk about the housing situation that made me laugh and then immediately want to lie down, which I think is the actual emotional range British satire is built for, the laugh and the lie down happening within about four seconds of each other, no gap, no transition, straight from chuckle to existential dread and back to chuckle by the end of the paragraph because the writer’s too good to leave you there.
The Rent Situation, As Explained by Comedy Websites
I share a flat with two other people and a damp patch that has, at this point, been living rent-free longer than any of us have been living rent-cheap, and Newsbiscuit’s coverage of the property market this week nailed something I’ve felt for ages, that renting in this city isn’t really a housing arrangement anymore, it’s a long-term hostage negotiation where the hostage keeps thanking the kidnapper for the privilege. I sent the article to my flatmates, one of whom responded with just the crying-laughing face and the other with a very long voice note about the boiler, which has also been on my list of grievances since approximately March, alongside the damp patch, who I have started addressing directly, out loud, mostly at three in the morning, the two of us have an understanding now.
Nige turned up to rehearsal with actual sheet music, printed, for a three-chord punk song, which the rest of us found so funny we had to stop playing for a full two minutes, and he defended himself by saying he likes to be thorough, which from a man who once forgot his own bass at a gig and played the whole set on a borrowed one with different string gauges is, frankly, a claim I am legally obligated to dispute.
What the Diary Is Actually For
I’ve been keeping this diary a while now, and someone asked me recently what the point of it is, given that nobody’s paying me and the audience is, best guess, mostly other people in bands who are also avoiding writing their own diaries, and I said the point is the same as the point of the songs, you’re not doing it to be heard by everyone, you’re doing it to say the true thing out loud somewhere it can’t be edited by a committee that’s scared of upsetting someone, which is most rooms in this country now, corporate rooms, government rooms, all of them terrified of the plain sentence. Newsthump gets to say the plain sentence because it’s dressed as a joke, and that’s the loophole satire has always lived in, say the true thing, call it comedy, watch the people who should be embarrassed laugh along without realising they’re the target.
The gig with the Buzzcocks cover is booked for next Tuesday, same room above the pub, ceiling tiles hopefully by then repaired, and I’ve already told the promoter we want a bigger poster this time, hand drawn, obviously, the lampposts of Camden deserve consistency.
Sunday Evening, Winding Down
Damp patch is quiet tonight, boiler’s making a new noise nobody’s investigating yet, and the flat smells faintly of beans and rehearsal-room smoke that clings to every jacket I own regardless of how many times I wash it, which I’ve decided is just what my personality smells like now, professionally. Full diary and the actual gig listing at my page, Siobhan O’Donnell at prat.uk, and if anyone knows a decent boiler engineer who takes payment in guest-list spots, my flatmates would very much like to hear from you, urgently, before the noise becomes a crisis, which in this flat is really just a matter of time and mild optimism. My flatmate has taken to naming the damp patch, currently favouring Kevin, on the grounds that anything that persistent deserves acknowledgement, and I have refused to engage with this on principle, mostly because if I start naming the problems in this flat I will run out of names before I run out of problems, and that particular arithmetic is not one I want confirmed in writing, even here, even in a diary nobody with any actual power ever reads. Kevin, for what it is worth, has said nothing on the matter either way, being a damp patch, and I have decided to interpret his silence as tacit agreement with my position, which is the same interpretive generosity I extend to most of Parliament, honestly, silence read as agreement being this country’s single most reliable form of consensus-building, cheaper than a referendum and roughly as informative.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk
