The world from my window

This weekend I changed my Blogger profile picture: (I'll explain later).   Now if I'd been wearing it at last night's Mr Scruff gig, no-one would have batted an eyelid. Girls in bear hats, boys in crocheted hats, pork pie hats and baseball caps, an old man in shades with a wispy Salvador Dail-style moustache and goatee, Mr Grigg in a Wobble Control tee-shirt and a white bearded steward who looked like he could quite easily have done the James Robertson Justice voiceover in the surreal track, Fish . Trout are freshwater fish and have underwater weapons  Trout are very valuable and immensely powerful  Keep away from the trout Mr Scruff himself, with headphones atop his smooth head like a Roman emperor wearing a crown of laurel leaves. His adoring public whooped and hollered to pulsating beats and Latin rhythms. And still the Electric Palace clock said five past nine. My blog characters, all bar Pelly and Anakin Sheepwash, decided to give...

  My ears are still ringing. The gig of the year, my Weymouth friend says. I wouldn't argue with that. 'Not a bit poptastic, then?' asks Pelly 'I-grew-up-with-prog-rock' Sheepwash this morning. 'No, slaptastic,' I say, beaming. I went back twenty-odd years last night to see Level 42 and, do you know? They're better now than they were then. Mind you, I was only a few months away from giving birth to Number One Son and spent all night standing on a cold, concrete floor in the Showering Pavilion at Shepton Mallet. Now that I'm nearly fifty, the comfy seats of Weymouth Pavilion came in handy. But the pounding bass of Mark King and those lovely harmonising vocals of keyboard player Mike Lindup got me out of my seat. Music to my ageing ears. No wonder I've got tinnitus. A misspent youth of disco music, punk rock, jazz funk and chillout. And a bit of folk interspersed. And what's more, even Mr Grigg enjoyed the gig, despite thinking...

This day is becoming quirkier by the minute. At breakfast, Mr Grigg tells me as an afterthought: 'You know that Census thingy? Well, I put you down as a Jedi.' And then this afternoon, Mr Scruff leaves a comment on my Oldest Swingers in (Camden) Town blogpost. How cool is that? That's about it. Love Maddie x

So here we are, walking through Camden at 11 o’clock at night, in a surreal kind of haze, rubbing shoulders with the bohos and the young. We’re in a London bubble, away for the weekend and mouths agape at the ever-changing tableau before us. Mr Grigg comes over all poetic: ‘As I walk along the street every person that I meet no-one is older than me.’ Everyone is under twenty five, apart from two drunks in a broken-up phone box. We wander down to Mornington Crescent tube station, which for years we thought really only existed in the Radio 4 panel game I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue . We’re heading for Club Koko , a majestic-looking former theatre and now a music venue for the hip and trendy. The music hits us, boom, boom, boom, as we make our way through the young throng and head for the tea house downstairs for a nice cuppa. This, you see, is a sell-out gig by Mr Scruff, a DJ-extraordinaire whose music Wikipedia describes as downtempo, trip-hop and nu-jazz. He is also a huge tea fan. I o...