My sound

I apologise for any difficulty you may have had accessing this page. I can't work out what's wrong with the 301 .htaccess redirect I wrote when I changed the title of the page, so have just made it worse. Never mind... onward

I've just been boring talking to a Lecturer in Blood and Guts from the University of Groningen. I just met him at the bar. He had a winced facial expression as though he was suffering from something painful of which he could not speak, but maybe that's what living in northeast Holland does for you. He said that he's here to work on new drugs to help doolally people.

In the post office yesterday, there was someone he might have been able to help. An old man walked in and muttered out loud "I didn't realised there was a fucking madhouse down the street" and something about going back to "fucking Leeds."

It was Wine Club on Monday. Trina got endearingly pissed on a bottle of cheap Chardonnay in the afternoon preceeding. We turned up and acquitted ourselves fairly well, although she was irritating me by talking over the presenter to this blind woman who shows no interest in the wine. Later, in bed, Trina said "She's going to pray for me, that blind woman." Christian, obviously. The mixture of a sense of a transformative power of which she is the arrogant conduit, crap dress sense, and a desire to plane you down into their economy of neediness. "How do you know when someone's praying for you? Will you get a funny feeling in your legs?"

I went to the bar to get another drink for us. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" the barmaid shouted from the kitchen. She arrived, as they say in France. "Been a long time since a girl said that to me," I said. "Well, not in public," she said. That's a good answer, I thought, and tilted my head to tell her so.

A few minutes before wine club started, I was refreshing myself in the loos (stupidly, I did this not in a cubicle), and the most pleasant husband of Kirsty's neighbour's daughter walked in. Thank fuck I hadn't got to the rolled-up railway ticket stage. As he came in I stood up sharply and made a pretence of washing my hands. We talked for a short time about his dicky back. I walked out, leaving my mascara on the top behind the washbasins, stood outside, and fiddled with my sock until I saw him leave. I went back in to complete the insufflatory procedure and returned to Austria.

It was an excellent night of unretailed wines, single varieties, and hand picked grapes. We talked ourselves into a Zweigelt from the amusingly named Meinklang vineyard. The German language sounds comical to me. They make vegan, organic, biodynamic wines which are matured in concrete vats.

My proposal for the performance-cum-installation at the text-based art festival in Cambridge got turned down. I'm relieved, because had it been accepted I'd have had to do something about it; and at the same time disappointed, for the same reason.