A Pause

A brief respite from the American saga while I bring you up to date with events here at home. I'm sick again. Not very, thank God, but enough to be irritable and out of sorts. The culprit is Sam again. He has had a cough and has had to be off school all week. To complicate things, Polly has been doing another Clown Doctor training week. She has been coming home with a bizarre mix of tales of dying children and improvised comedy routines. But at least the district nurses turned up this week so I could go to the loo.

I'm taking a course of antibiotics in an attempt to head off a major chest infection. The pills are the size of small tombstones. How come they can shrink a camera, music player and games machine in to a microscopic mobile phone but can't gets a drop of medicine in to anything less than a stick of chalk?

I'll also take this opportunity to point you towards my old friend Paul 'Rock God' Loader's new blog How To Be A Bonafide Rock God. If you've ever wondered what it is like at the very bottom of the music business (think barrel, scrape etc.) this funny, honest and occasionally literate blog is worth a few minutes of your precious time. And if you are a parent of a would be X-Factor contender with dreams of super stardom, point them at this and show them how they'll probably end up. I mock Paul, because frankly I don't know how to do anything else, but this is a guy who actually gets paid to perform and has done so for some 30 years. That's a heck of a long time to gather stories of the reality of rock 'n' roll.