Hurrah! Bryn's agreeable to not visiting me on the weekend of 11th and 12th December, which means I have a FREE WEEKEND! Yes!

Next year I'm going to stay at home a lot. I have three trips to the south I can't get out of, but that will be it, even if it means getting someone to confiscate the gig listing page in Terrorizer before I can see it.

So, the story so far. Normally, a family member gives me a lift to Carlisle station, but Noj and Dad were out moving pianos (a task Noj isn't entirely fond of - on one occasion, delivering one to the local art college, a film crew started videoing the process), and Mum had to see the accountant type person. So I had to get a bus at 8.23 in order to make my 10.16 train. But Helen (who's recently moved to the student house from 1910 and so is now one of the handful of people from my town I like) ended up being on it, so it wasn't all bad.

I wandered around the shops a bit. Do any shops or restaurants now *not* have a cafe, cyber or otherwise, in them? I could have sworn Marks And Spencers never used to, and last time I was in London I was most disturbed to find computer terminals in McDonalds and a Costa Coffee (I think) in Virgin. Are people really incapable of spending a few minutes in a building without a fix of caffeine and cyberspace?

The train journey was ok. I had a quick look in some of my old haunts in Canterbury: the old bloke in Third Eye asked me which new bands he should be getting in merchandise for - ha ha, I'm an authority! Then I went to The Pit.

I am renouncing vodka. I don't say this because I drank far too much, threw up everywhere, got off with a complete minger and ended up sleeping in a skip. I say this because it is useless! It's anti-alcohol! I'm a novice drunk, so six shots is the absolute maximum it takes to make the room start spinning. But! On this occasion, four had me pleasantly buzzing, but the next double made me more sober than I was to start with. What a waste of money. Time to find a new drink I can stand the taste of.

The Pit was rubbish! Oh, there were cool tunes and cool people, and I found out what that totally mint song I heard at the Beercart back in April was (the B side on "Disposable Teens" - much better than anything else Marilyn Manson's ever done, in my opinion) - and there were good times, although getting to watch Goth Chris and UKC Alex doing gymnastics to set the lighting up and nearly getting locked in the dining hall was the extent of the insanity. They had two bands on (a pleasant addition to the Pit formula), who were both better than the majority of Kentish bands I've seen, and the second one thanked everyone individually before the last song. But the fact that this only took half a minute speaks volumes. I only knew about ten people there, and the only ones I knew well were Bryn, Sleeve, Alex, Ian and Chris, all of whom agreed on the major disintegration of The Scene. What's gone wrong?

Myself and Bryn stayed chez Chris, and we spent Saturday morning watching "Da Bungalow", much to my regret, for it is the weakest successor in the line of children's programs to be aired on Saturday mornings yet. (The "Da" says it all.) It seems to be trying to be rubbish in an off-the-wall sense, a la Playschool, but Playschool's brilliance owed to its effortlessness. Its participants were seemingly unaware of their absolute weirdness: it came naturally to them.

Nonetheless, it had its moments. The child contestants were asked to rate two utterly useless dancers and a troupe of men performing "Synchronised Sandwich Eating" (finishing with them smearing the sandwiches on their faces). One boy gave the first two negative scores and the last one "1/10 Boring" and one girl said of the worse of the dancers "This is me when I'm older".

The presenters (a pale imitation of Ant and Dec) also apparently hold a weekly competition where they say "Bogeys" increasingly loudly in public places. (This time, at a yoga class.)

We also watched "Top Of The Pops". Now I understand what "fratboy music" is, can I move planet?

Having moved all the Pit equipment back to Bryn's house, Bryn and myself went to Nodnol, where we met his brother Dave and Dave's friend Andrew in a pub called The Marlbrough Head, which was cool: nifty music, nifty cocktails, and among other good decor, the toilet doors are disguised as bookcases. Nifty! Sadly, the interior of the ladies, at any rate, wasn't as pleasing, although it seemed to be designed to look like a dungeon, so it fared well in this respect.

Then to see Motorhead. Support band #1, Class Of Zero were mint. I don't really know how to describe them, so I'll call them "festival metal", as they sounded precisely the way a warm-up band at a metal festival should and really got me in the mood.

I wasn't too impressed by Sepultura. I could have done with another band on first, but the same acoustics that made Class Of Zero sound so great worked against them in my opinion, thinning their sound. Motorhead didn't blow me away either, but I'd seen them before and didn't expect them to. They were solidly good, though, and played the last song on their latest album, which features acoustic guitar and harmonica, and sounded sweeeeeet.

Bryn and I then went to Slimelight. As I hadn't slept well the night before, and am still ill enough that viscous snot keeps seeping from my nostrils, I spent a lot of it asleep. The bits I was awake for were quite good, though.

Nowhere to stay seemed to be forthcoming, though, and I really wasn't up to staying out in London all day as planned. Bryn wanted to get the first train back to Sittingbourne, I couldn't stay with him, and I didn't suppose anyone in the Canterbury region would be awake. So I went back to Canterbury and made the forty-minute uphill pilgrimage to my second home of Eliot computer room, where I could be seated in the warmth. (Where I'm obviously not really supposed to be, but hey, vagrancy, rock 'n' roll!) It rained and a dearth of metal nights in recent months had left me deeply unfit for that sort of thing.

Not good. Next lifetime, I am going to become a hermit.