oddverse.com

One thing about increasing age is that it brings with it an increasing lack of acceptance of the etiquette of "gigs".

Example: "Doors at 7.15."

Doors do what? Open? Sit slightly ajar? Rotate in five dimensions? When is the support on? When is the actual event? Are they just trying to screw up your entire evening?

These questions were high in our mind as we queued outside the venue on Saturday night. The people behind us in the queue milled around, unconcerned with the world. Gradually, they became the people next to us in the queue. And then slightly ahead of us in the queue. Completely unaware of the world around them, or of the curious pressure I was feeling. Fortunately, the queue started moving, and they were no longer in front of us. Indeed, much of the queue moved past them...

Many people there knew the venue. We didn't. They knew where to stand and mill around to stand a good chance of getting seats. We didn't. We were, however, early enough in there to get a stonking place to stand - just next to the sound desk, handy for the bar, and with a fantastic view of the stage.

But was it any good?

Why yes. It was simply sublime. The support act, Heidi Talbot opened for Eddi, and performed six or seven songs from her album In Love and Light, accompanied by the always excellent Boo Hewerdine on guitar. I believe it's her first tour as a solo act, and she was a pleasure - a slightly nervous stage presence, but when she sang it was clear and confident - a faintly ethereal quality to her voice without it being contrived in any way.

Eddi Reader took to the stage about 9. And for a shade over 2 hours, she filled the room with a mixture of material from her new album ("Buy the bootleg because I need a new Dyson"), her Burns album, and the occasional song from the very early 90s. Funny, approachable, stunning, and a pleasure to listen to - the highlights would be when she performed a song with just her and drums, and when she dragged Brian Kennedy on to the stage to join her for an encore.

That said, it was the first gig I've been to that I can remember where they skipped that business where the band go off, and the audience clap, and the band go back on again. It turned out they were tight for time - at 11.30, the venue had to become a night club, people had to pay to get in, so the band had to clear out. A shame, because you really felt that they wanted to play on for hours. And I'd have been happy to watch them.

The charm of the Tomb Raider games is fairly simple. You get to look at a lot of shapely bum and shapely breasts. You get to shoot things. You get told a story, with enough interactivity to keep you interested. And in the recent games - I'm playing Tomb Raider: Underworld - you get some fantastically realised caves and ruins to go raking around in, kicking priceless artefacts and shooting rare endangered species.

In other words, it's a "Boy's Own" story.

We're now up to game 100 in the series. Now the first one was a classic - but these days it's virtually unplayable. If you're clever, you can get it running in a DOS window, but it's so bulky and blocky as to be almost unwatchable. That gives some idea of how old it is - if it was much older it would have Ascii graphics and Lara Croft would be a mere (*)(*). In green.

Back in the 1940s, the thing I remember most was the grid system the game was played on. Everything was square and blocky and you sometimes had to position Lara in just the right spot prior to jumping. She could only really face in four directions, but she was relatively easy to control, which made all that precision jumping much easier. But there were some stunning moments - I remember looking down at a sphinx in a cave and being actually damn impressed, for instance.

These days, the grid system has pretty much gone. You can run and jump anywhere and you don't need to be quite as precise in the old jumping. That's probably just as well, because the additional graphics features, sudden random panning, and changes to the control system mean that Lara is much harder to control than ever before. Personally, I set the game to "so easy a kitten could play it", and focus on the problem solving rather than shooting at things. But that's just me.

And Tomb Raider: Underpants is a sumptuous game, beautiful to look at. I'm at early stages yet, clambering around ruined cities in Thailand, and I can almost feel the heat and humidity around me. Total immersion. Fantastic.

On the way to work today, I had something of a revelation.

New stuff happens all the time. New work is created - art, music, graffiti, political speeches, journalism, theatre, cinema, TV shows, web sites, photographs, dirty limericks, malformed half-cocked pub theories, bigotry, food, drink and doodles.

How cool is that?

And what's more, this has been happening for years now. So there must be something out there that I've missed. And so, I thought I'd try to expose myself to something new. Well, new to me.

And so, this week, I have watched the first seven or eight episodes of Smallville.

It's not bad. I wouldn't call it great, but then I wouldn't call the first series of Buffy great either, and that went on to great things before disappearing up itself. It's got a fair amount going for it - the leads are sympathetic and easy on the eye, the effects are great and the scripts don't jar too much.

However it suffers in a number of areas - the plot is the same every week, the message of the week is sometimes layed on with a trowel ("I sometimes feel like I have a secret identity - do you ever feel that way, Clark?") although it's nowhere near as bad as Heroes in that respect. However there's a bit too much of a reset button about the relationships - episodes seem to try to develop the relationship between Clark and Lana only to have everything going back to normal the week after. And when Clark's performing his hugely alien feats to rescue people they're almost invariably unconscious.

I suspect I will stick with it, though - it passes time, it's not something I feel the urge to share with Mr Twinky, my evil sidekick cat, and I'm prepared to give it first-season-benefit-of-the-doubt.

The Beatles have a lot to answer for.

Without The Beatles, we'd never have had Sowing the Seeds of Love, The Frog Chorus or the entire Oasis songbook.

We'd also never have had this gem. Lyrically it's not the most complex truffle in the box, but musically it's a big production number with hints of musical theatre but a huge dollop of the bits of Sergeant Pepper that were written when McCartney was in danger of being able to focus on the real world. That's a compliment.

Like most homosexualists of my age, I appreciated Take That in their early days mainly for their dancing, for speculation about their sexuality and for their unashamed pandering to their gay audience. As such I watched their reinvention as besuited respectable faces of Marks and Spencer with interest, wondering if it would be a spectacularly misjudged effort, degenerating into a whiny bitchfest. Instead we're presented with four respectable figures not making tits of themselves by prannying around like teenagers, still sharing the vocals so they're not Gary Barlow plus a backing group.

In the olden days of The That, my undoubted favourite single was Never Forget, which is mainly sung by Howard. These days, it's Shine - mainly sung by Mark.

The reason is not just the sheer exuberance, not just the production, not just the quirkiness of having such an upbeat song that's basically about trying to cheer someone up, but it's the line in the break in the middle of the song. It's a simple enough line - "You're all that matters to me", but it always brings a lump to my jaded cynical throat. Because it's such a simple declaration of love, and always makes me think of Mr Twinky (my evil sidekick cat) and it's teamed with cunningly manipulative music.

It's also because although it's simple, it's almost more powerful than "I love you", After all, lots of other things matter to most people. Their health, their family, cake. That line is effectively saying that none of these matter at all - which is bordering on psychotic, really.

Fortunately, it's not overplayed, and it's coupled with an upbeat song. And it gives me goosebumps. Every time.

I've got you under my skin where the rain can't get in.

I discovered The The, ruined by google way back in 1986. I think it was down to Thatcher, actually. In the midst of miner's strikes, I went off to University and met a generation of mullets, jackets with sleeves rolled up, cheap Bulgarian wine and 80p pints in the late night bar that closed earlier than the bars did back home. It was the era of the mix tape, of Enya recording Orinoco Flow for the very first time, of discovering the social value of owning a record player, and of Sainsbury's Bramley Apple Swiss Rolls.

Soul Mining came out in 1983, although I didn't come across it until late 1986. It was the music that was listened to by the guy with the beard who was quiet and understood politics and had deep thoughts.

We were 18.

So, I thought he had deep thoughts and understood politics. In practice that would usually mean knowing a few sound bites and latching on to nursery rhymes that claim to be political comment.

Uncertain Smile is my favourite track on the album - possibly my favourite track of all time - a good place to start, I think.

What makes it for me isn't the lyrics, which were undoubtedly deep when I was 15, but the lengthy piano solo at the end. At the time, I hadn't heard of Jools Holland, but this was the point where I fell in love with his music.

And now, a month later - I have a bed.

Constructed by my own fair hands, with help from my glamorous assistant - one month after "moving in" to new flat, I spent my first night on a real bed.

It wasn't good.

For some reason I really did not sleep well. The bed was comfortable, the carpet is luxurious, but my mind was full of... well, stuff. Mainly to do with Doctor Who, bizarrely.

The downside of living in our luxurious new apartment is the fact that it's not quite finished.

Oh, it's perfectly habitable if you like using boxes as furniture, if you like the fact that there are no curtains, and if you like the fact that the floor is not quite finished. It's got heating and hot water and lots of potential. And it's vaguely fit for human life.

The living room is empty, apart from the sofa and the television. It looks pretty good like that.

The main bedroom contains a lot of boxes. Some of these are builder's leftovers, some are furniture, some are architecture books and some are empty. The floor is varnished woodwork and needs cleaned.

The second bedroom is probably the most homely at the moment - it's the one I am sleeping in. On a matress. On the floor. The floor is varnished wood - and is probably the nicest floor in the flat at the moment.

The third bedroom is floored in underlay and contains boxes, boxes and boxes.

But now, within the next week or so, the carpets will arrive. The furniture can start to be assembled. Comfort can be created. Finally.

All I need to do first is move all the boxes.

So here I am, living in a tin can.

I'm spending this week in London, working from various offices and hotels spread around the city. My feet are aching, and verging on falling apart in places, my diplomacy skills have been tested to the extreme, and I miss Mr Twinky rather too much for my liking. It's too hot in my hotel room to sleep well, and the kids in the room opposite mine didn't shut up until nine last night but then woke up at six this morning. Thank goodness for the internet.

In particular, thank goodness for the fact that I've got it included on my phone. It means that I can find a bookshop if I want one, I can find something to read in my hotel, I can play games and quizzes and I can check my personal e-mail while I'm on the go.

It also means that I can call Mr Twinky if I need a chat (most days!) or, like today, I can take a photo of my new hair cut and e-mail it to him. It's not quite as good as getting the instant disapproval that I'll get when he sees it in the flesh, but it's the closest I'm going to get for now.

And the good thing about this trip to London is that I may have talked myself in to pole position for a business trip to Africa. It's quite sunny in Lagos this time of year.

It seems that every day, I smell fresh paint.

I went to site this morning, wondering what new delights would await me. After all, I was very good yesterday - I did nothing, didn't go to site to check up on the guys, but just waited. I thought they'd be doing something. But what they've done is repainted the white bits. They're now white.

In some ways this is a good thing - after all, we want the white bits to be a pure, brilliant white and they do certainly seem to be pure and brilliant now. On the other hand, so are some bits of the skirting board, and the floor. So there's going to be some more painting. Fortunately, the guys doing the work for us are painters, so painting is what they do.

On the downside, this means that the changes that are being made are small and un-noticeable. The white gets a little more pure, a little more brilliant. A single power socket, discovered abandoned behind a radiator is exposed, and covered over. Some plaster dust settles. There is more cleaning to be done.

By the end of the week, I'm told, all this will be over. I can get my deliveries on Thursday, I can probably walk in some of the rooms without my boots on by Saturday. I'm spending the weekend cleaning. Maybe, by Monday, it will be fit for a queen to see.

I live a double life at the moment.

By day, I am mild-mannered spreadsheet guru, working my way through tables and formats and formulae, working out thousands of meaningless numbers that I can then spew into a pretty graph.

By night, I am spending almost every waking minute answering security questions, in a desparate effort to prove that I am really who I say I am, and that these towels I am buying are for drying myself with and not for concealing weapons of massive distraction.

As a result, I finally have some tips for people who are considering moving house and therefore spending a chunk of money.

1. Try to spend as much money as you can out of the money that you need to spend before changing address. The first time you try to use your card after you've moved will almost certainly trigger a check and a temporary suspension of your credit. This is easy enough to fix, but it's not pleasant and mildly embarrassing when you're holding up the queue at the chemist.
2. Never try to get store credit a week after you've moved house. They'll almost certainly decide to haul you in to the back office and grill you.
3. Never try to make large withdrawals from your bank without memorising all of your direct debit details and your last eight transactions before you go in. It just makes your life easier. If you don't know the answers then you can say "pass" and go on to the next question, but it just takes up more time.
4. Always be nice to these people who are threatening to cut up your cards. It's not their fault that the computer says no - and these checks are there for your protection.

That last one's crucial. The banks would love to be easier to deal with, really they would. They've got better things to do than check up when you were last on the electoral roll, or get you to try to remember who supplies your electricity. The reason that they have to do this sort of check is a consequence of some criminals, a few stupid people, and massive pressure from consumer bodies. Think of that, the next time you are trying to get your bank charges waived.