Tuesday 8th of August, 2000
On the plus side, however, they're very nice
The Scientologists here in Edinburgh have the single scariest Scientologists' office I have ever seen - an open doorway with A4 posters either side saying "Employees wanted - apply within". If you look up, there is a sign above the door that says "Dianetics - The Book", and in the murk at the end of the corridor, you can see the familiar board offering personality tests (perhaps Edinburghians are too sure of their personalities for that to work, perhaps it only works on mercurial Londoners and the like). Any jobless person desperate enough to answer an ad as ... peculiar as that will find themselves condemed to a life of audits and treating Battlefield Earth as though it were a good film.
I managed to do sell myself a bit today - I sat down and phoned the Festival Revue (the open-air stage in Princes Street Gardens - they now have me down as someone who can turn up (hopefully) at a little bit of notice to fill in in the slow bits), Lizzie Wynn (doing a festival preview show at Grassmarket - I'm on this Friday at 3:00pm) and the Bongo Club (another preview thing, but they want a demo, so it remains to be seen whether I can get my self organised enough to provide one).
I feel a bit better after all that.
It was our day off (from the Jeays extravaganza, anyway) and I squandered it. Nothing appealed - or at least appealed enough for me to get up and go to it and put my money down. I did pop out to check out some of Becky Duke's set at the Tron. Another astonishing guitarist. I rushed back and practised some odd things in the hope that I can absorb technique by osmosis.
All we can get with any reliability on the black and white set we have is Channel 5 (!) and BBC 1, so watched the Channel 5 doc about serial killers (particularly nasty) and The Lost Boys in BBC1. We also get Channel 4, but with no sound (good for the test match, but nothing else).
One by one everyone drifted back, having done something useful with their day off - Dave had some hot tips for shows which I'll try to check out on my next free evening (maybe even next Tuesday if I'm not too shellshocked after playing to another screaming, enthusiastic, empty room).
Bed at 2:30 - earlier than the last few nights - does this mean the turning of the tide against the tendency to stay up all night eating biscuits?
(On the biscuit front, I have eaten a packet a day of Chocolate Hobnobs this week - I must try to tell myself that it doesn't matter how much exercise I do if I eat that many Chocolate Hobnobs. On the plus side, however, they're very nice).