I was referred to as an ‘Englishman’ yesterday on a newsgroup. That startled me. Initially I wasn't sure why it startled me, since it wouldn't particularly surprise me to be referred to as English, and it's been some years since I had that reflexive am-I-sure-I'm-grown-up-yet hesitance to think of myself as ‘man’ rather than ‘boy’; after a bit of thought I decided that the reason is analogous to the way ‘girlfriend’ has a specific meaning distinct from ‘girl’ + ‘friend’. It wouldn't cause me cognitive dissonance to think of myself as an ‘English man’, but an Englishman is a stock character in Englishman-Irishman-Scotsman jokes!

I was listening to some Mesh the other day. A thing I keep meaning to mention in here is that for some years I've been unable to hear their song ‘Safe With Me’ without giggling, because the very first line, sung with almost no instrumental backing, is ‘This is my space, no-one can ever get in here’. I think I managed to take that vaguely seriously the first couple of times I heard it, but now I'm unable to parse it as anything other than ‘This is MySpace’.

Like last year, Sainsburys stopped stocking grape juice over the Christmas period, so I had to resort to temporarily buying it from Asda. To my increased annoyance, Sainsburys have now come back out of Christmas mode, and still aren't stocking white grape juice; it isn't in the online catalogue any more either, so as far as I can tell it's been permanently discontinued. (They still do red grape juice, but it's not the same.) So now I'm probably going to be making a special trip to Asda every month or two just for that. Gah.

When I was at school, a friend of mine wrote a program to delete lots of files at a time (since the school computer system neglected to provide a ready-made tool for this). He wasn't content with having it just delete files, though; he thought it would be cool to have it delete files while scrolling up the screen some thoroughly bloodthirsty-sounding lyrics which he said were from an Iron Maiden song.

Several of those lyrics have stuck in my head since then, and just occasionally bubble to the top of my brain when I'm doing bulk file deletion of my own. But last night – and I'm really not sure why it hasn't occurred to me to do this at any point in the intervening seventeen years – I actually got round to googling the bits of lyrics I could remember, tracking down the original song, and arranging to listen to it in full.

It turns out that the song in question is ‘2 Minutes to Midnight’, which surprised me a little because my vague memory was that he'd said it was called something like ‘Killer’. Several details of the lyrics weren't how I remembered them either, and worst of all the tune was noticeably different from my memory of it. It's unclear to me which of these various discrepancies were due to transcription errors originally made by Will, which were due to me not paying attention at the time, and which are due to distortion of my memory over the intervening decade and a half (although I suspect that the errors in the tune are largely attributable to the latter by way of my music theory training, which I've noticed before tends to obscure the fact that I can't remember how a certain bit of a tune goes by seamlessly making up a believable but uninspired substitute and pretending I can remember it going like that).

But the combined effect of all those errors is that although I recognised most of the song as being unquestionably the source material for Will's lyrics, I have a lingering feeling of not having listened to the same song I've really been thinking of all these years. Strange, and slightly annoying.