It seems that through a combination of problems I shall not be returning to the Isle of Wight, instead I shall be on a break until January when I will rejoin the programme. Although unanticipated, this break has set me up nicely for the joys of Christmas retail temping. Tis the season to be…moaning, queuing, spending. I firmly refuse to be on the queing side of the counter this year and instead have planned to craft all my gifts by hand (so please ensure all stockings are stong enough for painted beach pebbles!).

It has been an eventful week. I have completed my first week of full time block experience working in schools. The journey to get there is getting no easier, especially the ferry crossing bit. I’m sure whenever Neptune hears I’m about to cross the Solent he ensures there is a good amount of stomach churning swell!
The good thing is that the experience seems to be going fairly quickly – Mainland placement roll on please.
Well I better go. Folks around for lunch so I better tend to the market bought, efficiently killed (i hope) chicken.

News: The editor of The Sun, Rebecca Wade has been arrested for assaulting Ross Kemp (Grant in Eastenders) who is her husband.

Rarely have I been so pleased by a news story. May she rot.

Hahaha, that’s hilarious!

Excert from a recent John Cale interview:

LP – Finally, there’s a popular story about you cutting the head off a chicken onstage with a meat cleaver…

JC – It was a really nice meat cleaver. I bought it in Berlin. So beautifully balanced. It didn’t take very much. There was no sawing, you just lowered your arm and the weight of the cleaver carried it.

LP – There’s been no explanation why you had a chicken and a meat cleaver onstage together in the first place. Presumably it was premeditated?

JC – Yeah. My band left over it. It turned out they were vegetarians. We got the chicken from a farm outside of Oxford. I told my tour manager to put it in a box and just come out with it. Of course, he had to grandstand it. He came out holding the bird, right up high, and that was it. We were screwed.

The bird was on the floor of the van all the way to London. The band had all this time to ruminate over what was going to happen. They were like ‘What are you going to do with the bird?’ Nothing. ‘Are you going to hurt it?’ Of course not.

Around that time everyone was gobbing on musicians. Tom Verlaine came over to play the Marquee, and he couldn’t believe that people would drink beer and spit it at you as a form of adulation. So I took it a step further. I threw both the head and body out into the crowd. Everyone was kicking it away from them like it was contaminated. After the show, the band came up to me and said, You lied to us. You said you weren’t going to hurt it. I said I didn’t hurt it. It didn’t feel a thing.

Oh dear!