Each sunset now is flecked with tears, and the tears are dripping into my beers

So the two week holiday just went by in about 20 minutes. I haven't covered myself in glory blogging-wise, but what can I say - I've been busy. Ish. A run of heavy drinking coincided appallingly yesterday with a two hour visit from the landlady. The lowest moment came with a lengthy and interactive tutorial on how I could optimise the performance of the dishwasher (you're supposed to put salt in?), which I hummed and hawed at like an utter moron, standing as far away as was politely possible to try to contain my tramp-like booze odour.

I did discover an excellent book - One Day by David Nicholls - which introduces two characters, Dexter and Emma, with a drunken bunk-up on their graduation day and revisits them on the same date every year for the next two decades. Brilliantly well-written, funny and readable. Much to the missus's vocal and violent disgust I was nose-deep in it until about 3am a couple of days ago, and when the light went out spent quite a while worrying about Dexter's creeping alchohol problem and Emma's terrible love life. I then forced myself to think about the real world, which meant I ended up re-running the horror show emails I'd seen on my Blackberry earlier that day. I decided I was much safer with Dexter and Emma and turned my full attention back to them. Not a viable option from tomorrow morning onwards, sadly.

I went to see the glorious Luke Haines playing live at The Garage in Islington on Thursday. Seeing him is always a double-yolker of a night, because as well as hearing music I love the whole experience boosts my self confidence enormously. LH attracts quite a specific type of dangerous loner, who tends to stand rigidly still and stare, unblinking, up at the stage and mouth the more alarming lyrics while somewhere in a bedsit far away the girl he trussed up that morning tries to fray her rope handcuffs on the edge of a VHS copy of The Matrix. It's rare that I'm in a room with 300 other people and am utterly confident I'm among the coolest 5%. It did mean I missed the electoral debate ("worst Kraftwerk gig ever" - Popbitch) but I imagine I'd have been making a cup of tea within seconds if I had been at home.

This is utterly brilliant - classic computer game characters destroy New York:



And finally, Adam Buxton sums up how I feel about the end of my holiday: