Certain dates hold a lot of significance for us all. We know that December 25th is the day Jesus was born, and we know that he was raised from the dead on one of the Sundays in March or April (we keep on changing our minds on that one!). February the 14th sees us celebrate St. Valentine's Day (my favourite day of the year), Diabetes Day is November the 14th and on July the 1st we dust off our Maple Leafs (leaves?) for Canada Day. But now there is one more date, perhaps more momentous than Diabetes Day and Canada Day combined and multiplied by ten or twenty… Monday, November the 27th sees Panda Kopanda release only our second EP ever. It's taken some time, but finally the CDs are in front of us and we're raring to go.

Hello and welcome to the third of my blogs. If only I could earn enough money to pay my rent from this, like one of the less ridiculous storylines of Neighbours. The following events happened quite a few weeks ago, but since then the Panda Computer slipped into a virus-induced coma from which it has only recently recovered, and so this story is as of-the-moment as technology (and partly my own laziness) could allow.

Last month we took the high road to Inverness, the capital of the Highlands and world-renowned epicentre for the manufacture of diabetes diagnostic kits. I'll save you the bother of reading another ream of nonsense because nothing of interest really happened. You see, we had a 'Yoko' with us on this trip, which basically means you can't get up to much mischief because you're too busy minding your language and desperately holding in your farts. It's a well-known fact that girls have a bad effect on musicians. Take John Lennon, the writer of many of the best songs of the last century, he then meets Yoko, starts singing about all this hippy bullshit, stays in bed for a while and then gets shot. Compare that with the completely asexual Cliff Richard, who has had five decades at the top, consistently pushing the boundaries of modern music as we know it. The facts speak for themselves, women are a destructive and often deadly influence.

OK, again I'm not being entirely serious (before Rachel runs round to my house and stabs me - ironically adding further proof to my theory), and it wouldn't be Panda Kopanda without a bit of mischief.

So, once again we boarded 'Deep Purple'/ 'The Ocean'/ 'Billy Ocean' (or whatever we have decided to call the slightly newer band Volvo and successor to 'Big Red'), took her aboard the ferry and made the crossing to Stranraer. The weather always seems to be on our side when we go to Scotland, and the drive from Glasgow towards the north of the country is pretty spectacular. Anyone who says the landscapes of Ireland are spectacular is, quite frankly, talking through their hairy hole because the two just don't really compare. The only drawback to the Scottish countryside is the amount of midgies, which the front windscreen of the Volvo can testify for. Ray Mears would have had a field day licking the insect guts off the glass and saying "mmmmm, absolutely delicious!", it would have kept the fat bastard happy for weeks! The five hours or so of driving was quite a pleasant journey, and we even managed to make the most of an hour-long traffic jam by beeping our horn when golfers at the nearby course began their swing, delighting as they ballsed up their drives. PANDAS: ONE - GOLF: NIL!

Having arrived at Inverness we made our way to our hotel, apparently booked under the name 'Panda Kopanda' - cue confused look from the receptionist as she tries to make sense of these random sounds being wung at her face. Eventually we discovered that the rooms were actually booked under the names of two of the organisers but our Spinal Tap re-enactment wasn't quite over (where's that cricket bat?!). We couldn't get the keys to the rooms until the receptionist received faxed proof of the credit card booking. This makes her seem like she was somewhat competent and thorough in her job; she was, in fact, an idiot and kept on repeating the phrases "But ye don't understand, that's mah preuf!" and "Ah need mah preuf!" over and over (put on a Glaswegian accent, then imagine that your dad is probably your uncle too, repeat the phrase ad nauseam and you've got the picture). Thankfully, she was assured that proof would be forthcoming at some point, and we got our keys. Yahoooo! Let's get up to the rooms and make some tea! There's only three tea bags, what sort of hotel is this?

Walking through Inverness we found a city with much going on. There were washing lines in the city centre with lots of I 'heart' Inverness knickers on them, a big hut made of heather which seemed to have some muck in it, and various street theatre things (it all seemed a bit like bollocks, but high-art, conceptual bollocks at that, which makes it good). And with the city looking so culturally up for it we thought this could be a successful night for us.

Setting ourselves nicely up for a fall we quickly realised it wouldn't be the best of nights when we arrived at the venue to be told there wouldn't be a bass amp, nor a seperate monitor mix to put the bass through, and all our allocated soundcheck time was spent watching the soundman trying to re-wire a broken monitor. The house DJ (obviously a graduate of the Tony Blackburn school of DJ-ing) repeatedly lowered the volume during the music to say in mid-Atlantic tones "Alright, we've got a great band coming up! All the way from Belfast! Give a big Inverness welcome to Panda Kopanda!". When it came time to play the pretty ned-ish crowd largely got on with their drinking, acting out those WKD adverts and talking to each other about that idiot from Afghanistan who had to chop off his own knackers. That said, a sizeable amount of people walked in to the venue just to see us, clapped and cheered enthusiastically and left as soon as we had stopped (after the odd CD transaction). So not an entirely wasted journey and we had still managed to have some fun onstage, in spite of the 'challenging' sound.

With the gig behind us and our heads spinning somewhat, we headed back to the hotel for some rock 'n' roll mayhem. We kind of lost our bearings and found ourselves driving down random streets drunkenly shouting "AH NEED MAH PREUF!", "WHERE'S MAH PREUF!", "YEU CAN'T HANDLE THE PREUF!" and various other proof-based phrases at the local hoodlums before realising we were driving down a cul de sac and we'd have to discreetly do a U-turn and drive past them again to avoid getting bricked. In the end we found the hotel, polished off a carry-out (eeyooo!) and set about wreaking some havoc. The windows of the hotel only opened to a gap of around three inches so the old 'throwing the TV out the window' trick was kind of out of the question. The only thing that would fit was the remote control so we tipped that out of our first floor window and I think one of the batteries fell out when it hit the ground. PANDAS: ONE - TRAVELODGE: NIL!

The following afternoon we headed back to Stranraer to catch the ferry home. An oil leak in the engine meant we had to stop every now and again to ensure we wouldn't be going up in a ball of flames. Gavin and Yoko ...ahem, I mean Rachel persuaded themselves that they had to go to IKEA in Glasgow to buy a desk (apparently nowhere in Belfast does desks). Not only were IKEA all sold out of suitable desks but we had also ventured off the motorway at 4:45 right in to the Ibrox area of Glasgow, with fifty thousand 'Gers fans exitting the stadium, bringing the whole of that area of the city to a standstill for over an hour. Rachel helpfully informed us that if we missed the ferry then it was all football's fault. Let me assure you all that football was nothing more than an innocent bystander for the senseless murder of rational decision-making.

The trip from Stranraer to Glasgow on the way up had taken us two and a half hours. This time, thanks to our unsuccessful trip to buy a desk (a fucking desk!), we had only one hour and twenty minutes to make the same journey back before check-in for the ferry closed. Gavin's driving was like a road-based version of Speed 2, never going below 85 land knots, even on the twisty roads. We passed about a dozen speed cameras but we knew the fines would be less hassle than missing the boat and having to fork out another couple of hundred snoop for a later ticket home. Gav had his foot on the accelerator the whole time, John was pressing the horn and the rest of us stuck our heads out the window and tried to imitate the sound of an ambulance hoping people might get out of our way. We tail-gated any slow drivers, one of which was an old-woman who spent ten minutes scratching her head so we shunted her in the back and got her to swerve and crash in to a tree. I hear they're making a new series of World's Wildest Police Videos, so there might be some helicopter footage of us in it with Sheriff John Bunnell saying something like: "Where this band are headed, the only song they'll be playing is Jailhouse Rock."

With one and a half minutes to spare, we caught our ferry and thankfully didn't have to sleep on the streets of Stranraer til the next boat home. Never before have I been so glad to see a thousand of Norn Iron's returning Rangers fans adorned with red, white and blue, dodgy jewellery and mispelt tattoos, although after a while that happy feeling dissipated somewhat. The docks of Belfast neared, we were home again, safe and sound and without any near fatal incidents to report, apart from our fairly dangerous driving. Obviously the Grim Reaper had realised that we were harder to kill than most and has since moved on to easier targets, such as Tonga's King Taufa'ahau Tupou the Fourth, a death, which I'm sure you'll agree, has saddened us all.

Now, as the heir apparent to Aesop I do feel a certain obligation to give a moral lesson with these stories, although I'm not quite sure what the overriding moral is. So... Wheel of morality turn, turn, turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn. And today's moral is.... Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy but socially dead.

(The real moral of the story is: Try not to place too much importance on the crappiness of closing sentences and comfort yourself with the thought that the rest of the story was quite interesting... in a way)

-David