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Tuesday, January 02, 2007

It's just a stage.It's Fatboy Slim! Well ok, it's not - I got there 24 hours too early. But the man's been through a lot of stages in his career, and this is just one of them, being erected five minutes walk from my flat on Sunday morning, in preparation for yesterday's Big Beach Boutique 3. The small green and yellow shack in the background is "the UK's first permanent beach sports venue" which is due to open in March. So that's clearly going well. The stage took 2 days to build; that shack has been on the go for six months. They should get Fatboy on the case.

But anyhoo, the phrase 'Fatboy Slim' could also be used to describe my new year so far, as I've lost five pounds in three days, which I'd like to claim is due to my strict healthy eating regime, but is in fact because I'm ill. Kind of. It's probably psychosomatic, brought on by the news that my sister's still refusing to leave the country, and is now back in Chelmsford being too ill to fly. Whatever it is, I've welcomed in the new year by feeling too rough to eat, and wondering how many calories there are in a bottle of aspirin.

The weekend was a little better though. Eighteen months ago I took Lisa and her Mum to the dogs, then followed it up by going to see The Descent, so being very unoriginal, I decided to do the same a year and a half later. At the dog track on Sunday I bet a total of £21 on eleven races, and came back with £26.90, while Lisa's Mum proved herself to be as jammy as usual, by winning £37 with just one £2 bet.

Back home, and feeling rougher by the hour, I spent new year's eve alone at my flat, watching The Descent in the dark. It's set in the Appalachian Mountains of America, and I spent the first fifteen minutes of the film thinking how lucky they are to have scenery like that in the US, and that if I lived within a thousand miles of such a place, I'd go there for all my holidays, and probably never leave. So having enjoyed the film, and cursed Americans for not appreciating the natural beauty of their own country, I watched the 'Making of' documentary which came with my DVD, and discovered the entire thing was filmed in Scotland. Shows what I know.

Anyhoo, it being the biggest party night of the year, I naturally went to bed at 10:30pm, only to be woken up by fireworks once at midnight, and then again at 12:25am. So somebody's watch was slow.

I was planning to walk down to the beach yesterday and see how near the police would let me get to Mr Slim without a ticket, but in the end I didn't have the energy. And besides, I'd read that the best vantage point for free-concert-seekers would be the pier, and as it happens, my flat is actually closer to the stage than that. So I listened to it in the bath instead.

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