www.betika.co.uk
This extremely pink flyer (created by our friend Frances aka Animal Magic Tricks) has written upon it all the important details pertaining to the gig we're doing on Wednesday next week, which also happens to be an important day for greetings card manufacturers, florists and chocolatiers. Curious about St Valentine and what he did in order to become patron saint of greetings card manufacturers, florists and chocolatiers, (oh, and "secret admirers" (stalkers)), I looked him up on Wikipedia, and it turns out that not even the Vatican knows exactly who he was (he could have been one of three people) or a single thing about him (regardless of which of the three he actually was), leading me to conclude that it is far and away the most tenuously over-commercialised of the formerly religious feasts. I'm not at all against the whole love and affection thing, just the idea that we should feel more loving and affectionate on an arbitarily chosen date, and demonstrate this with the purchase of certain traditional tokens at artificially inflated prices. You should treat your significant other the best you can every single day. So cancel the supposedly romantic dinner you had planned at a restaurant that crams doe-eyed couples in like battery hens and bring the love of your life along to see us and the other fine bands! And if the poster is to be believed, a squirrel and a shrew slap-fighting each other to the death! We will be trying out a few new songs; we have one about a biblical curse, one about the ever-present threat of demonic possesion, and one about things getting better. We've also been working on a couple of songs dealing with triumph in the face of disfunction, and I've foolishly begun work on a song written mostly in phrasebook Japanese (with at least one line of German), to be sung in four-part harmony. I can't see the band thanking me for that one.
Last night we saw a male and female deer, and about thirty seconds afterwards a pair of Barn Owls. This morning we saw a five-car pile-up.
