now we’ll say it’s in god’s hands//but god doesn’t always have the best goddamn plans;

An entry in which my cha cha is praised in a most resounding manner, and a good time is generally had by all as Lis discovers that WordPress has had a bit of coding that is the equivalent of an lj-cut all this time. Which means I can hide that X-Files quiz that’s fucking up my layout! YAY!!

I’m in Brighton, a city denounced by Married Andy as “full of poofters”. Since I’m ever one for bucking the trends, Stevie and I went to a gay bar before I even got here. My glamourous hostesses are already in bed, and I’m sitting up with only the sassy cat to which I am so sorely allergic that I can barely see to type this for company while I skim huge quantities of music from Lola’s iRiver. I’m only updating really as I am under orders to tell the world that I have the BEST LITTLE SISTER IN THE WORLD, EVER, who braved all kinds of madness to somehow score T in the Park tickets for myself and Roberta in the one-hour window before they sold out – and just as the Strokes announced too!! Chacha is currently at a Kelly Clarkson concert, who I believe is something to her like Jenny Lewis is to me only more so. I hope she is having the acest time.

Like I am down here! Last night there was Chinese food and Eddie Izzard and Krispy Kreme donuts (which are nice an’ all, but really don’t live up to the hype). Today the birthday girl had a lazy morning before we set off into town, where I burst into tears in Borders because I found out that Joan Aiken had actually finished the Wolves of Willoughby Chase series before she died (long-term readers will perhaps remember that I discovered a late edition to the canon of what were my favourite books as a child last year, which finished with the potential for at least another story, only for subsequent Googling to reveal to me that the author had died). The Witch of Clatteringshaws was short enough to read in under an hour (a nice break from the headfuck that is One Hundred Years of Solitude), and while the story was perhaps a little lacking the afterword broke my heart.

I knew that it was going to have to be a short book, as I am growing old and didn’t have the energy for a long one. But I knew it would be better to write a short book than get stuck in the middle and fail to finish it. I have read some books that didn’t get finished… and they are very, very teasing. You want so much to know what the writer had planned, what would have happened next, how it would all have ended… So I determined that I would get to the end of Clatteringshaws, even if that meant taking some wild leaps in the story and leaving some things unexplained.

And that ending is such that the characters who have lived in my head for so many years, in whom I had such emotional store, cannot help but to live happily ever after.

We also found a shop that sold Smiths t-shirts for babies and CDs with punk rock classics redone as lullabies, and I swear if I had any access to money at all this week I would have bankrupted myself in there. There were also some rather nice framed Carl Barat photos that wouldn’t have looked to shabby on my bedroom wall…

Speaking of characters in which I have emotional store, I brought season one of The X-Files down with me and Lola and I spent a pleasant couple of episodes giving Kaite a run for her money in the geek stakes, poor girl. It must have seemed like the world had turned upside down.

Have realised I’ve rather gotten into the habit of saying “my best friend and her fiancee” for flippancy or convenience’s sake; which almost makes it sound as if I’ve forgotten that it was not so very long ago that Kaite and I stormed through a city together, and made it our own. As if I ever could.

And I’ve missed her calling me a moron. Who else could I say that about?

Plus she was standing by the sea today, hair streaming out behind her in the wind in a moment of perfect cinamatographic adaptation of a Bronte novel, when a wave came up and drownded her before she could scurry away; and it was seventeen shades of adoreable and also funny as fuck, but only because we were able to get her home and safe and snuggly pretty quickly.

Will review Ryan Adams when I get home and see how my photos turned out (speaking of which, I don’t suppose anybody reading this has the photograph from when I met Ryan last time kicking about their computer?? I won’t be creeped out, honest… it’s just I only ever had it uploaded on a Diaryland paid account, and I really need it to PROVE A POINT. Cheers )

PS BEST T-SHIRT EVER (link courtesy of The Friday Thing, do not click if you are an easily offended lily-livered Guardian-reading pseudo-liberal who can’t take a joke blah blah BLARGH).