I spoke to my mum last week, apparently my sister Violet was randomly on a shopping trip to London on the day of the bombing, and was actually on the tube train behind the Edgeware Road one that went up. Jesus fuck. If she'd been at the platform a couple minutes earlier she would have been on that train. It didn't even occur to me at the time to call up my family to see if they were okay, they're normally nowhere near London. Funny how such a little thing as how long you spend browsing in a shop could decide whether you get killed or not... makes me think of that poor kid who got killed in Preston too, presumably because he just had the bad luck to be walking down the wrong street at the wrong time. Still, my sister's fine so thank god for that.

Sian's birthday was nice, she came over to my house and we did boozey things, Neil popped over from Bradford. I always feel a bit guilty when Neil visits as we never seem to have a proper conversation, as I spend the evening drunk and flighty and then the morning after hungover and monosyllabic. We should probably arrange a gettogether that features less debauchery. You can see some frankly horrifying photos from the night on Sian's photo-page-thing.

It was also the birthday the week before of the Alluring Julie Bath, in some weird exchange-program-style maneuver we went to Sian's for the event (though she had other stuff going on on the weekends before and after her birthday too). We ended up playing Balderdash and then one of those Dance Mat games. I kind of dig them on the sly, in theory, drunken dancing is always fun. But the limited number of songs you get on them is a real drag. If only they were smart enough for you to stick a cd in and dance to tunes of your own choice, sort of like Vib Ribbon does (though it kind of does it rubbishly).

Speaking of birthdays, it's mine in a month, I've almost escaped the rock star death year. Possibly by the sneaky technique of being unable to play any instruments despite nominally being in a rock band. The band's sounding really good at the moment actually, since the regime change a few weeks ago. You can actually hear the cello now, and make the vocals out, which is nice.

It looks like I'm going to stay on here in September and sign another six month contract, vague plans to move to Manchester having been stymied. Dunno who the Third Man will be, maybe Christian if he fancies it, though by then he may be rich off the house sale and feel like getting a pad of his own again. We have to have someone to fill Steve's room though when he fucks off in September, so we may just end up with some random person our landlady finds. Fuck knows. I may still get my act in gear and move to Manchester (or somewhere else) in the new year, I'm a bit sick of Lancaster really.