...today: that makes us 3/4 of the way through the year tomorrow. Amazing. How did we get this far? Those of you with jobs will think "What is he on about?". But when you don't have the benefit of such mindnumbing routine to give you a safety net then the year really does become a perilously tardy and unpredicatble mechanism in your life. This is the gypsy lifestyle - hard as hell it must be. But it's where everything came from.

I have helped build the most amazing henhouse. The last apples have disappeared from the tree and Xmas has started its annual Stealth Attack Sequence (which always catches you by surprise). I like writing these odd blogs on MySpace because its a lonely endeavour, like a Lighthouse Keeper's job once must have been, because I know no-one will read this as everyone is on FaceBook these days. So here I am, lamenting the passing of the year simply because there was something I meant to do this year which I have failed to achieve. But I can't remember what it is. But I did manage to do a gig with a guy who once jammed with my hero, and I rediscovered Fat Freddie's Cat and The Furry Freak Brothers in a book which I bought from Leeds University Bookshop. 

October arrives meanwhile: So the rain has returned with a bucket or two to spare, and the guidance of the rails in the dark twinkling night seems to be vaguely in line, and so, with such gloomy wet weather various things start appearing: baby toads all over the place and blogs. The two go together hand-in-webbed-hand. What else is there to do after you've been moving manure and leaves around for a whole morning? Watch the Political Slot of the Channel 4 News? Spin Doctor's Heaven and bullshit from start to finish.

A strange year this has been so far, with various predictable failures and then unexpected revivals. I think I need a beer. I need a colour cartridge for the printer. I need a band too. In the studio tomorrow, overdubbing - a particularly fantastic occupation as most of the hard work of the rhythm tracks has already been done. There's even a track of ours now playing on one of our websites. I went to The Forum (where we play) to collect my son from a gig last night and I noticed that they'd had a bit of a sort-out of all the posters on the walls and replaced everything with fresh stuff (as happens at venues - it used to happen on a daily basis on hoarding panels in cities but that sort of thing seems to have become illegal these days, along with the "negative feelings generated in the breakdown of a relationship" (Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004; "Til Death Us Do Part", 1969 also has a fair amount to answer for there). There, above some touring band's poster (Automatic I think) was a little notice saying "15 years and we're still here". That was The Foum's little pat on the back for itself for keeping its doors open all that time. And right next to it - a survivor of the Poster Purge - was one of our Skinbat Scramble "Remains" flyers. "28 years and we're still here too" I thought. That's really quite amazing...

Here comes Halloween, Bonfire Night and Xmas. The ghosts of our saints still haunt us. Weird.

Looks like the last BBQ of the year later on this afternoon! Carl (ex-Mumm-ra and possibly ex-Skinbat Scramble... we really don't know as he hasn't been around to explain himself) are coming round to say goodbye to Barnaby before she goes to Leeds with her hi-fi (actually her mum's hi-fi).

Money is getting back to being grindingly awful, but I have been in the studio here and in Paris, managed to do one more gig (6th Sept) which was great despite my losing my patience with certain (financial) aspects of it, I returned to Leeds after 26 years and Jam Langdon-D phoned me up whilst I was in the Merrion Centre (spooky), serious bell-ringing has recommenced at the church, I got rid of our old piano to a pub this morning via a horsebox and some wacky ladies, a rat ran across my path as I was walking back down the road afterwards, The Shrimp came to see me yesterday and we went to The Half Moon pub and they were playing an old live tape of Johnny Winter no less... Arab friends have come and gone, I've got a new old car, and I've got to do my accounts but I can't stop reading The Furry Freak Brothers' Compendium.

Either life is strange or I am. And now Barnaby has gone to Leeds and her room is empty, posters gazing down at her cat on her bed.

And the autumn leaves are falling.

It's a strange feeling - the weather is closing in with clouds and cold winds, and tomorrow I am going to Leeds with my daughter to check the place out as she is going to Uni there. I haven't been there since 1982/3, when I left with my wife and infant son. Going back will be strange, and hopefully I will be able to meet up with an old friend that I left behind there - Pat, the original drummer of the Skinbat Scramble, a band which started in Leeds in 1981 and is still going today (we have a gig on Sunday at The Forum in Tun Wells). It's really beginning to dawn on me that the kids are nearly all grown up and will soon be gone. A strange, strange feeling, and at the same time all these memories and places from the past are calling me back. On Saturday I failed to turn up for a drink with another old friend from those days - Nikki Eton-Rifles. I think that the emotional aspects are just occasionally dragging me under, maybe there is some baggage left over from those days? I dealt with it all fairly abruptly in those days, and then just left behind various emotional wastelands that are still there. So many people from the past have reappeared that I am drowning in memories, half-forgotten, hardly remembered. And the kids are almost flown away.

But this is how life is supposed to be, and tonight - soon, I have another band rehearsal to grind through in preparation for Sunday, and the discipline required seems to become more of an effort each time. Malcolm, a friend of ours will be playing with us, and he jammed with Hendrix in Germany once. Strange, strange connections, time is playing its tricks with us again. So much has been done and so many memories created by these gigs, and conections ,made and sometimes broken (especially amongst the younger members) that it is almost sad. Yet, this is that time of year where all these implications and resonances become unavoidable, one is so busy battling through the everyday humdrum reality that you don't notice these greater significances, and they are quite humbling.

So, its Leeds after all these years and then the gig, and whatever happens next...

I really am. I've run out of money and I am seemingly out of sanity as well. Last night I looked out of the window and it looked like the Taliban had taken over the street - three 4 X 4 Pick-ups outside in our parking spaces with the resident white van in it's usual sacred space. It was the neighbour and his builders' mates. What makes it irritating is that if you or your friends park where he likes to park or his wife, then he's running up and down the road mouthing off at you to move your car. So, yesterday, when my wife couldn't get her tools out of her car because of this hypocrite and his mates I looked out of the window. I must have had a little episode because the next thing I know I am shouting at them all, and really about to jump out of the window and take them all on. It was insane. I was frothing at the mouth according to my son who wrestled me to the floor.

I think I am truly losing the plot.

Yesterday afternoon, after spending 5 annoying hours on fixing my websites, I went down to the woods in order to get some air and sun and to put a deer fence around one of my prized Xmas Trees. This one is in a little wooded strip next top the fields where we used to have our horses, and also unfortunately next to a busy road and opposite its layby, where nosey tradesmen sit in their white vans taking your car registration for some reason.

After I'd cut the stakes (really badly) and hammered them in I put the wire fencing around them. This took some time as there were four different pieces of wire that I had to loop together. As I was kneeling down tying this stuff into one piece around the tree stakes I heard a rustle of the leaves behind me. I thought "That sounds like an animal - or a very light person..." The obvious candidate was a pheasant, who are "a-stepping" at this time of year. I looked round ever so slightly so that I could see out off the cormner of my eye - I seemed to see a birdlike shape. I carried on tying the wire so as not to frighten whatever it was away, and sure enough I heard the rustle of the leaves continue towards me.

Then, these two peacocks came strutting past me about two feet away, and stopped and looked at me. I said "Hello", they looked at me, and carried on walking, up to the fence by the road, then round to my old hedgecuttings heap and the grave of our old cat, Lutard. Fascinating they were. They disappeared off into the tangled wood further up the strip and then eventually came back, walked past me again and off round the small pond that forms there at this time of year. Fascinating. What a pleasant encounter next to Paranoia Layby Hell.

I am planting trees. I am not very good at it but I am better than some people (who put logs underneath the tree to get it to the right height, which of course prevents the roots from going downwards and so kills the tree). The deer have been incredibly vandalistic - must be the rutting time again.

A gig approaches this Sunday for the Skinbat Scramble... then one on 12th April which looks like it'll be The Ghost Lilacs again, maybe The Old Dolphin Brigade...

...I had a meeting at a record company office (which I think got our point across), drank a lot of beer, had the moon and Pole Star (if that's what it was) pointed out to me by my son as being in a spookily Islamic reminiscent formation (I once had a ring lent to me featuring that same configuration by a beautiful woman in Sevenoaks in 1979 - she took it back...), watched a rugby match (what's happening to me, watching sport?) and discovered that a local record shop had sold 3 of my CDs, which means I can just about pay the credit card bill this month.

And I/we listened to The White Album - all the way through... they were pretty good those Beatley People weren't they?

I have left this profile largely unattended recently due to Xmas and New Year and the fact that this time of year is a real drag for me as there is no money/work/respite and so I have little to pass on that isn't just economic woes and that's a real drag. But besides loving Xmas anyway I have managed to drag myself through a rather strange month of January. Whilst occasionally I see photos of Goth Models having a wild time posted up on the profile I have been ploughing on (in December at least) with doing a few gigs and going to other gigs. One thing I did plan to do was get our lyricist Norrie Thornton (from across the road from us) out on Xmas Eve to witness our The Forum's Xmas Acoustic Night performance (where I hoped to perform one of his songs he wrote for us), but what with his poor health, being unsteady on his feet and the icy weather making the paths around The Forum into ice traps I decided not to bother him and wait for another day. He was also a bit like a badger in that you would only see him in the street at odd times and the rest of the time he wouldn't answer his door. So, Xmas Eve arrived and we did the gig (The Ghost Lilacs) and it finished early as it started early, and off to The Ragged Trousers we all went and had a nice time before seeing Dave Salisbury off at the train station. I later went to Midnight Mass (my second gig of the day!) to ring the bells before the service and as I had a rather forlorn friend with me who wanted to attend the Mass I stayed. When I got home at 1am, there in front of our front door with a note and a piece of green tinsel around it was a fine bottle of Merlot, left by Norrie sometime around midnight (as it wasn't there when I left at 11.45pm). Next day I left his Xmas Cake in a biscuit tin outside his door. Then Xmas came and went, and apparently Norrie was seen in the street by my wife and also by the old lady next door, but I reckon it was his ghost. I went down to the woods and planted our Xmas Tree (later attacked by a rabbit) near to Daisy's grave and the weird cycle of the year in the wood started to grind round again very slowly. Things got incredibly cold around about the 9th January and some weird animal woke us up on an eerie moonlit frosty night of Christina Rosetti's evocativeness, with almost human cries. It came and went over the next few nights and seemed to be retreating into his immensely overgrown garden each time.

And then the new album by my band the Skinbat Scramble (curiously enough, titled "Remains") came to its final stage and all the discrepancies that creep into projects of this kind simply because people have such intense feelings about what they are doing distracted me.

About a week later I noticed on my way back from getting some hens' eggs in the woods that Norrie's Xmas Cake was still outside his door. I took it back home and opened the tin - it was in perfect condition, what with being sealed in a tin and the incredibly cold weather. I got suspicious and soon ascertained from the neighbours that no-one had a firm sighting of him for at least 10 days, and I had noticed that his recycling bin that was full of empty bottles had not been put out (ie. it was still by his front door). I went round the back of his jungle of brambles garden calling him and got no reply. I then called the Social Services and got an answerphone (it was a Sunday) but then just phoned the Police. For once they didn't mess around. They broke his door down as soon as the Ambulance was there, but he was dead inside the house. Been there for days in the outside temperatures he had in his house due to the broken window where the Blackbird used to come in to visit him. They took him away. I gave his Xmas Cake away.

We heard nothing until I saw some people coming out of his driveway about 10 days later - his house had been sealed up by the Police. One of them was a lady from the Bank who are dealing with his affairs (this was last Thursday). She said that his funeral was the next day, at 9am, 30 miles away! None of us who had looked out for him for these past 20 years could attend as a result of the distance and short notice. Curiously, on last Friday he came into my thoughts for about 20 mins while I was sanding down windows, and I realised afterwards that it was around the time of his funeral. I then had to drive miles to get my daughter to Eastbourne (coincidence) for her driving theory test at 5.45pm. It was bitterly cold and as I drove along looking for the place the test was at we went past the Pier in the sunset's dying light and my daughter remarked at the starlings flocking patterns flying around it. I dropped her off and parked and killed the hour waiting for her by wandering up to the Pier. It was soooo cold. I walked round to the end of the Pier and there I could hear birds' tweeting coming up through the floorboards - that is obviously where the flock of starlings had gone - to roost under the Pier on the girders.

I went back into the arcade on the Pier and put 10p into one of those 'piles of coins about to tumble' machines and watched it start promisingly and then get assimilated by the clustering banks of coins without even a shimmy or a tremor from the ones at the edge. There seemed to be something significant about life in that short sequence. That was the only 10p they got out of me that evening. I went itno a Polish shop and was unable to buy any of their beer as I was skint, I then walked past a Lap-Dancing Club and went into a cycle shop with security cables strung across the shop at head height. My daughter passed her test. We went home.

I dreamt a couple of nights later that I was in a garden with Norrie chasing Guinea Pigs about that were escaping from a hopelssly constructed cage. He was protesting that he had to drive to Sidhoop or somehwere, which I thought was odd as he'd not used his car for 20 years and it sits even at this moment in his drive completely overgrown by brambles. There was a massive thunderstorm overhead with no rain falling. I woke up, thinking that the dream must have been his spirit moving on. That weird animal has not been heard of again. His house is still overgrown, sealed up. We were going to play The Forum's January Acoustic Night on the 25th but it was cancelled, so we are now doing the February one instead. We will be playing some of Norrie's songs that we recorded for him.

The Goth Models are still crazy. Brad is coming over soon for a Sons of Quag rehearsal for a future Paris gig, and I have had my first very productive rehearsal with a couple of guys I know who are helping me out to finish my unfinished tracks that I have been writing. I am moving on but it's been a strange, strange Xmas and New Year. I wish Daisy was still here.

It's a very strange life.

Yes folks, that's my bank, and that's us. The bank is stealing my money wholly unaware (I believe) that if they push me over the edge they won't just get the £200 they've stolen off of me this past few weeks BUT that they will also lose about £25,000. Let them find out the hard way I say if they ae going to behave like that.

So, moanings aside, last night was the last night of the year of the Nifty Nights... and it was one of the best (see the Nifty Eagu & The Glo-Pilots blog entry "Nifty Gigs and Associated Wanderings"). Heat From A Dead Star returned, Chop Chop Bear Touch appeared for the first time, and Split Record played too (they are all about 14 years old). The Skinbat Scramble played one of their bet sets to date. A member of the awesome Windows Clack from 1978/1980 was in the audience. It was a beautiful, cold, crisp day and the night was even colder - very Chrismassy indeed. Somehow we didn't freeze in the venue. We're off to The Forum again on Friday to see Nifty Night stalwarts Rachel's Got A Flamethrower support the amazing Rolo Tomassii. I really can't think of much to say as I am bit worn out from the weekend and I've still got an amp to move to the storage depot this morning. The famous Skinbat Scramble parachute is still hanging from The Forum's ceiling.