On Saturday night, I permitted a bloke to sleep in my bed.

Meanwhile, I was having a perfectly innocent time at Slimelight. :) I just got a couple of massages off a stranger, as my neck hasn't been quite the same since I saw Napalm Death, and my shoulder started causing me agony when I did my stompy stompy air-punching dance in the industrial room after 21 hours of being awake.

The shoulder pain hasn't let up, though, so I've been instructed to get some LUSH products, a fearful prospect for someone as opposed to acts of girliness and relaxation as myself. I will do it, though, in the name of METAL. DRAGONFORCE, Angra, The Haunted, Nile, Dying Fetus, Kreator, Dark Tranquility and Enslaved - all of whom I'm seeing in the next month - won't be the same if I can't headbang.

In other news:

1. Oxford University finally contacted me. They'll let me know the result of my application to do a Ph.D (or D.Phil, as they call it) there at the start of March.

2. I hate buses! I missed one today because it came four minutes early. So I went home, waited quarter of an hour, then set off in good time to get the next one. Which was fifteen minutes late. And it was far too cold to sit and read or do anything vaguely stimulating or useful while waiting. Gah.

3. I have done quite well for myself in the last few days. York Alex finally gave me my Christmas present (the Action Directe album, which came in a DVD case, is recorded on a CDR, has a backward-looking inlay card, cost £6, was ordered by e-mailing the band, but is apparently good), plus a couple of burnt CDs (one of them XPQ21's deleted album, courtesy of Richard - yay!) and a Valentine's card saying, "Zed, I hate you. Drop dead." Tall John, who was visiting, let me copy his Nick Cave and Hope Of The States albums, and newly-single-and-happy online friend Sarah Yoj sent me an e-card to the tune of, "Love Really Sucks - have fun laughing at all the couples."

4. Normally when I speak to my Mummy on the phone, she tells me, "Well, we've been having an exciting time up here." She normally pronounces this sarcastically, and proceeds to tell me the most interesting thing she's done in the last four days has been to write a church committee report. But on Thursday, not so: her suspicious nature had paid off.

At times, it hath concerned me: at New Year, when I told her I was staying in Nodnol an extra day, she said, "You are indoors, aren't you?" Why would I want to stay in Nodnol in January, if I was sleeping on a park bench? Nonetheless, in this last week, she prevented people from stealing two of our Steinway grand pianos in the nick of time AND was able to give the police such thorough information about schools that keep ordering musical instruments then ceasing to exist when it's time to pay, that they asked if she'd ever considered joining the force.

5. I spent most of Friday writing the story I'd started the day before, then watched "A Touch Of Frost" and various rubbish on TV with Sleeve and Emma. My feeling is that I had a slightly more productive day than housemate Alex, who emerged from his room at about 8pm still in his dressing gown. The story reached 12,000 words and is nearly finished, and since it lends itself perfectly to zine format, I've decided I'm going to publish it that way and sell it. (I think zines should be free, but need to cover the cost of printing.) Woooooo!

6. On Saturday, I did some more writing, and chatted to Sleeve and Tall John. I was about to set off to London to see NIGHTWISH, when I found I'd missed a phonecall from York Alex, saying he'd decided to accept my offer of spare ticket and would arrive at Kings Cross station before I could get there. Since he has no mobile, meeting him and getting to the gig proved to be something of a mission, but we made it in the end. We ended up a few inches above most of the audience and separated from them by a barrier, but while normally I like to get down wi da sickness, as it were, as we had a perfect view (the drummer was visible this time too), we stayed put.

I was a bit disappointed with Tristania, the support band. Like Nightwish, they're perpetrators of symphonic metal and I'd heard good things about them. But while their three(!) vocalists were brilliant, and I liked the band's sound and look, I thought there was scope for their songs to be much better than they were.

This was the first time I'd seen Nightwish, and I'm not always convinced about them. While they're undoubtedly talented songwriters and musicians, recorded they don't half sound soppy at times. But live, Tarja's voice is even more amazing than it is on the albums, and songs that are slushfests are simply POWERFUL. They are also anything but ugly (I saw fit to buy a poster afterwards), and from where I was standing, I couldn't smell them, anyway.

They mostly played recent material - that which I know the best - and the sound quality was as good as I could ask for. And they covered a Pink Floyd song. (Who are stalking me, by the way - my brother recently went to see a tribute band (Off The Wall, apparently good), they're the main character in my story's favourite band, and Sleeve and Tall John started talking about them earlier that day.) The only disappointment was the absence of the once-ubiquitous "Over The Hills", but I'd so go again if I could afford it!

7. It was one of those weekends for People Having Your Stuff. There was a guy in the Nightwish queue wearing the same Arch Enemy top as me, which I've never seen before. I've only ever met two people with "my" backpack, but when I collected it from the cloakroom, the girl next to me mistook it for hers. And I've never met anyone who uses "my" ringtone, but on the bus home (the trains were being useless, so my hour-and-a-half journey took three-and-a-half), there were two people with the same one.

8. After a mostly enjoyable Slime, I sat in *upsidedownly crosses herself* Starbucks, awaiting never-before-met livejournal friend Steph, her one-year-old daughter Alex (hereafter referred to as Ally Pegs, as there are enough Alexs in this entry already) (who I'd also, unsurprisingly, never met) and bloke Peter (who I've met once before). We spent what I found to be an enjoyable few hours in various locations, even though Steph and Peter kept trying explaining my presence to Ally Pegs as, "That's a goth!" (I'm a metalhead, beep it! Just a metalhead who happened to be wearing fishnet stockings. Sadly, some uber cyber people in Starbucks also took me to be one of theirs, but I'm sure they'd taken, erm, vision-impairing substances.)

I got to use a "bleep your own goods" thing in a supermarket for the first time, and made a payment of 35p with my debit card! We dined in a Wetherspoons, where they were showing an exciting football match, yet, in the middle of it, a two-piece jazz band started playing. Peter, veritable compass, led us up Primrose Hill, where none of the rest of us had been before. Blur were quite right about it: it's windy there and the view's so nice. And we went to ANOTHER Starbucks (eep!), where Ally Pegs took to integrating a sticky lollipop into Steph's very cool very red hair, much to her dismay.

9. Managed to stay awake for 38 hours without any sort of "uppers" (not including a bit of something that was 40% alcohol). Rock'n'roll.