quiet is the new loud

oh dearie, i seem to be turning into some sort of hibernating creature obsessed with my cat. i am working at getting this winter out of my system somehow, maybe by going to some good gigs... by all accounts the pedigree falcon gigs this month have been good but i've not been able to attend due to too much bloody work on a sunday but this week sees loose and forecast putting stuff on midweek: hooray for february!

on saturday 24th i was an usher at the mr and mrs clarke production CABBA HEY! which was a big load of pretentious fun. how to describe mr and mrs clarke? have you ever seen that bit in chitty chitty bang bang when dick van dyke and his girlfriend pretend to be dolls for the king? mr and mrs clarke are like the raggy doll version of that. childish, sexual, extroverted, they perform dance pieces and sing songs and tell jokes like those dirty kids from down the estate who were cleverer than they let on. with a fantastic turn from jayde adams as a post-christmas christmas tree it was a great show that didn't let itself get taken too seriously.

monday is pub quiz day in our 'ouse. i am not naturally competitive or ambitious until it comes to board games and quizzes. we do the pub quiz in the halfway on cathedral road with our friends gary, markie, liam, ol and lyns. every week i aim to win and it was looking good for the first few rounds until we came to the always-tricky round 4, where the questions are toughies and the sinking feeling of loserdom comes creeping in. happily, however, the only really important thing at the pub quiz is if there are too many people and we have to split into two teams, that i beat gary. and gary was beat HA! this all depended pretty much on me remembering the names of the children of jr and bobby ewing in dallas, who sat impishly on the tip of my tongue, a very difficult task and the pressure was on since i LOVED dallas and had public expressed so on facebook this week. all eyes on me for those names. i didn't get em all but my friend anna's gibb spotting won us the round. woohoo!

wednesday was an exciting day. chapter arts centre is having a refurb, which is painfully obvious to the freezing staff who work there and have to listen to drilling through most of the day. but a part of it has been completed: cinema 2! the staff had a free screening to test out the new seats and very nice it is too. it has twinkly fairy lights that look like stars and very comfy seats, a big contrast to what went before. but it has less capacity, which i was slightly disappointed with, but it does make for a more intimate feel. we saw les liens du sang - rivals, a french film about two brothers in the 1970s. it was all right but i wouldn't have seeked it out myself. the nicest thing was sitting there with my colleagues and feeling all warm and fuzzy that SOMETHING was finished and that the end of the project was in sight. lovely.

it was also book group day! the STAR centre in splott does an excellent little book group in the library at 7pm the last wednesday of the month. its a good way of getting into some things i wouldn't normally read. this month was the woman in black by susan hill. i read this on new year's day and bloody scary it was too. its quite deftly written, fantastic descriptions of the weather and she builds the tension to make it really creepy. apparently its been on the stage for 20 years and on the tv lots but i've never seen it so didn't know what to expect, just that it was a classic ghost story. happily most people in the book group loved it and we had a nice little discussion about it and the recent guardian "books you must read" list.

after that we dashed like lightening over to clwb to see max tundra. as the group didn't finish till 8pm we missed pagan wanderer lu's set, which was a shame but we caught ben butler and mousepad's fantastic synth jibes. close your eyes and you'll feel like you're riding a chopper in an 80s kids movie. my friends were insanely happy since it was joe from gay against you's new project and they are massive fans. i was feeling a bit unwell and stuck to water which was quite a good thing since i got horribly ill all the way through max tundra's set. £8 in clwb (bloody expensive too!) and i heard it from the toilet. never mind. what i did see was a very good little mix of yelps and squelchy electro and it was very good. he told a few good jokes too. but hey ho, home for me and my stupid belly.

luckily i got over my illness by.... going to newport, not everyone's ideal cure-all. we wanted to check out the museum and art gallery. the museum was ok, bits of it were shut and the art gallery was in change over period so no art. harumph. it was odd for me as i was a teenager in newport and found it difficult to get my bearings. this was never more apparent than when i proudly took my boyfriend to diverse record shop. well, tried to. i bought many albums in diverse with my babysitting money and haven't been there for about 13 years. i marched determinedly up to where it should be, then spent the good part of an hour trudging around newport confused and lost. diverse has MOVED. i asked the man in a music shop nearby and he told me it moved 10 years previous. has it been that long since i've been back? evidently. we had a good time talking to the very lovely matt and scanning the racks for treasure. i was overjoyed to see the sale rack, where i purchased my first throwing muses album and got all kinds of flashbacks about shyly asking the man at the counter his opinion about pavement and tom waits albums, it was really nice to go back there. i bought the kitty, daisy and lewis album and had a punt on a tom verlaine cd i hadn't heard of and an art of noise lp, as well as buying a big selection of vinyl for the wife. a good day all in. and dodgy tum seems to have calmed down.

this week promises much. gigs! matinees in cinema 2! unfortunately no scrabble sunday, as i'm working again but i will try and play some at home instead once i've finished. word!