It’s Saturday night 3am, tomorrow’s my only day off, and I’m here writing my latest blog entry – something’s gone wrong somewhere, surely. It’s been a heavy week. Wednesday was Vikter Duplaix at Mercado – on a school night too, Thursday was Jorge’s Birthday, so by Friday evening, I was ready for a quiet night in. My Slovenian housemates had other plans. They’d planned a ‘Bad Czech’ party. But what’s a ‘Bad Czech’ party I here you ask? Well I guess it’s kinda the equivalent of a ‘Bad Taste’ party only with slightly more emphasis on combining the worst fashion crimes of the 80’s and 90’s – a rich source admittedly! Only I hadn’t planned for it, so had to improvise. My pastel ensemble, B-boy 'fly for a white guy' kinda look was pretty effective to be fair (peruse the photos if you’re unconvinced). Although I found people’s reaction to my blue shoes a little harsh, particularly the ‘where on earth did you get those things?’ type queries. “Well actually they’re my favourite pair, I wear them all the time.” bounced around my head, but never quite made it out of my lips. The music was also a fitting array of badness, with some pop nastiness from the last few decades, sprinkled with some dirty obscure electro (I even became acquainted with the wonders of Slovenian ‘Magnifico’, despite their Bosnian influence, which is painfully obvious to your average listener, no?). This heady cocktail, along with a few Caiprinhas to wash the beer down, fuelled a bit of improvised living room/ dancefloor tomfoolery. The liberating effect of knowing you look like a complete tosser is intriguing. You’ve just got to let the inner-geek free and by surveying the scene it would appear there were quite a few in attendence. It was like I'd suddenly been teleported to the sweaty last dance of their annual conference, decked in ill-fitting tennis shorts, cardi and sporty head-band to keep the ginger afro in check, with Napoleon D on the decks and dancing in a way only he (and Erland Oye) . By 3am the geeks had generated enough collective self-confidence to venture out into enemy territory, and were aiming for the Bairro. But it seems the true geek in me was stronger than I’d bargained for, so I decided to decline and head to bed, the inner geek needed to sleep.

The only other notable event to recall would be my night at the Numera Projecta, to see Akufen play. He was on last after 3 other performances. First up, some guy playing bizarre instruments – very fourtet – nice, then came a couple of VJ’s from London, playing dance tracks set to film and Tv scenes. Very watchable, if not a little predictable with the choice of clips, but a little odd to sit watching them play when you’re sat in a cinema.

I’m not sure that any venue, would have helped me understand the next set – I wanted to understand it, but the seemingly random sequences of noise, blips and distortion, remained a mystery - the sonic equivalent of a magic eye picture that never reveals itself no matter how hard you stare at it. If you wanna try, the guy’s name is Kim Cascone, think he’s worked with David Lynch before if that makes things clearer. Akufen to the rescue, and on he came, thankfully playing in the foyer area of the old cinema – a bit surreal but it worked. Maybe all the sitting around had taken it out of the crowd, but they seemed reluctant to move. A few resistant pockets of head nodders and groovers held firm and eventually it spread to the rest – then it went off. I don’t mean that in any kinda cool, happening lingo – I mean the electricity, lights, music, the works, followed by a 10 minute gap of silence and darkness before it returned. Finally power was restored and things had just about got going again, to be halted by another power cut. A further two power cuts later, and the crowd’s patience was almost spent. It was still good but so frustrating and Akufen cut the figure of a man unamused by proceedings, by the end of the night.

Ello again,

Still working a fair bit, but also packing in plenty of weekend fun too! Oh the mixed blessings of insomnia. The folks were here too for a week, which was nice, particularly as I’m now free most evenings, so we could squeeze a few slap-up meals in (bonus points if you know the origins of that saying), with Picanha on Janelas Verdes being a high point – I thought they’d like it, so had saved it for their last night. For the luck we had with good meals, the same was certainly not true of the weather, as it pretty much ‘p’-ed it down the whole week! Talking of colourful language, the lads from football have also asked me to apologise to the ‘rents for their utterances during the Wednesday night’s game. I just laughed and told ‘em not to worry about it - knowing our words would pass for pleasantries at any given Sunday game between pub-teams of the Don and Dearne, where I used to play (Which is handy ‘cos they’re probably gonna read this – I apologise now mum, but he was).

Well the Sun did show its face, as my parents made their way to the airport – and it hung around for the weekend. Sod’s law, they haven’t had much luck with their visits weather-wise, despite the frequency of visits. That weekend was a blip though, the only constant feature of the last few weeks has been the rain and it sure has come down – impressive thunderstorms though!

On the (extended) weekend front, I’ve been taking advantage of a couple of slack Friday mornings, and managed to meet up with Rui and Tomas and friends for a few, and last Thursday even saw a return to Oka with Wendy and Jo (back in Lisbon for the weekend) and the Slovenian Marmite fanclub (“It’s like smelly marmalade”), Sadly Friday night was their leaving party, Sanka and Guia (shit no idea how to spell their names, maybe I should have tried spelling Fatka instead – Polona, if you read this please help!!) had become part of the household after their 10 day stay. And it was with teary eyes, we said goodbye. (Genuine sadness, nothing to do with the Caipiroskas and vodka shots we consumed) If only I’d picked up more Slovenian than the word for ‘Wait’ /Chucki/ -cute innit? I couldn’t wait tho’ I had to get to Lux for none other than Mr Kenny Dixon Junior aka Moodymann “I don’t play music for the masses to dance to, I play music for the minority to listen to”.

  If it wasn’t so pretentiously tossy and if I thought the door staff would share the joke,  I’d probably find the door procedure at Lux quite amusing and an endless source of amusement. Having stood in line for 30 minutes, the door-person just stands in front of you until you ask his permission to go in – ooh the nerves as he decides how much you have to pay this week! I added the fact that my mates were already inside, in case he decided to add ‘sad loner’ tax to the entrance price! Whether the cunning ploy worked or not, I’ll never know, but I was in! It’s a curious habit, but when I’m on the dancefloor if the music is particularly good, I find it difficult not to close my eyes, and this was certainly one of those occasions, and 2 hours later having been lost in the music, I was back again – so it was kinda ironic, if not so funny at the time, when some insecure nob – decided to have a go at me in the toilets in Portuguese, then English for the heinous nightclub crime of ‘smiling at his girlfriend’ (does it count if you’ve got your eyes shut?). Well, this didn’t really phase me ‘til he said “You’re not in the UK now”, but that cracked my sheen of composure somewhat (I mean UK for Pedro’s sake, I wouldn’t call him an Insecure Iberian nob, would I, that’s just disrespectful?). What cracked his, was me telling him what he was (refer to his intro line above). At which point he advised me to watch myself. At face value this seems like sensible advice, even if a little tricky without the aid of a mirror, cos if I was it’d be a bit tricky to be looking at his girlfriend – whoever she was, I didn’t know and I’m still none the wiser? (For the record I am disappointed in myself for losing my composure – even though any physical aggression was actually unlikely). Finished off the weekend, with a couple of lessons, a touch of sleep, party at Graham and Jo’s (Cambridge gang etc), a game of hunt the live footy match around Lisbon with Jo and the pump house quiz, before back into a week of work – wish me luck!