Back in the shirt

Its been an odd eighteen months, redundancy, unemployment, volunteer work, crap job, unemployment and now pleasant temping.

I'm in an office, essentially pressing buttons until computer screens and printers go right, then putting bits of paper in order. I'm wearing a shirt and optionally a tie, and whilst this isn't quite the captain of industry role I thought I'd find in London, its all right.

The digital radio in the corner is telling me not to worry about a thing, cos every little thing is going to be all right.

The drive to work in the morning is averaging around 45 minutes, and to get home its around double that. To get trains and buses, it would be more expensive and an hour and a half either way.

The pay is a lot better than the sandwich factory, the hours are sociable and the work involves databases and makes London a better place.

Occasionally, I'm driven out to areas of wasteland to prod around with tape measures and count trees.

Its turned out nice again.

I'm wondering if I did something wrong eighteen months back and somehow I could have ended up in a nice job like this a lot sooner, did I just wander into the wrong agencies, fill in the forms wrong. Or was the credit crunch/recession as bad as I can blame it, things just turned out this way through no fault of my own.

Elsewhere on the internet Dirty Vicar uploaded some old photies of the last Bowie meetup from 2008, friends from a now closed down internet forum. There's still Facebook and Twitter, but the threads connecting us are frayed and stretched. Every so often I notice folk missing from my Facebook friendslist, acquaintances severed, no great loss, we were never that close, but still that old world becomes a little bit smaller.

Maybe its just me, getting further and further away from the man I used to be, Glasgow, Bowlie, popscene.

I went along to MJ Hibbett's Totally Acoustic thing at The Lamb on Conduit Street last night, I arrived in time to catch the last ten minutes of his latest Dinosaur Planet show. It was great, with rapid costume changes, new songs and jokes, it was like a Lew Stringer comic strip made flesh. Kind of sad that I missed most of it.

Then again, I've been to loads of the Totally Acoustic shows. Maybe that's not enough for gig-going and social, its a Red Queen kind of thing, you gotta run as fast as you can just to keep up. And I've been slacking.

Its been months, maybe years, since I went to HDIF, and I've never been to Crimes Against Pop, or dozens of the newer promotions that people I used to know have been putting on.

Must try harder.

Now the unemployment issue has been resolved, I can get out more.