So, yes, there was a weekend, and a moderately busy one too.

Friday: went to the Portland to see skelliga. I've been hearing good things about this band for some time now, but have consistently been multiply booked when they were playing nearby, so Friday was the first time I actually managed to make it to a gig.

mobbsy has already reviewed the gig, and said (in essence) that Skelliga seemed to have several styles of music which could do with fusing together better, while Jack's Family (support band) were more conventional and thus easier to get into. Oddly I found precisely the reverse; Jack's Family, while certainly competent and with a good beat, largely just made me think ‘Oh. Some people playing loud metal’. Whereas Skelliga's style shifts (both between songs and sometimes in mid-song) kept me interested enough to really enjoy their set.

Also discovered on Friday that moshing has a greater blast radius than I thought. I think that's the first time I've ever drunk beer within three metres of violently moshing people (which I thought was perfectly safe because I was well out of reach of even the longest flailing limb), and the number of long hairs that drifted down out of thin air and had to be picked out of my beer was rather worrying :-)

Unfortunately something unpleasant happened to my brain during the gig; after a long week at work (I'm starting to wonder if there's another kind) I wasn't at my best in any case, and then a snippet of lyrics in one of Skelliga's songs happened to ignite a very old bad memory, and that combined with one or two other things left me barely able to sleep on Friday night and in the foulest of foul moods on Saturday morning. An afternoon of B5 and an unexpected win at Siedler helped the bad mood, but by the time I got to ejde's birthday do I was still pretty knackered and (no offence to E-J or her friends, but) not really in the mood to deal with a load of people who I only really knew about five of, apparently mostly having conversations about other people I didn't know. So I wandered off to Richard's gathering in Duxford instead, at which almost everyone was an actual friend of mine, and there I got my second wind and managed to have a good time. Bonus points to the nearby fireworks, which we had an excellent view of from the park just behind Richard's back garden.

And yesterday it was my turn to host the Gallery's regular Doctor Who session, which was as usual good fun but involved me cleaning the kitchen rather more times in one day than seems healthy.