When we heard, months ago, that Sheffield’s dilapidated ‘Roxy Disco’ building had been purchased by the AMG group – operators of the ‘Carling Academy’ music venues – with a view to it becoming the ‘Sheffield Carling Academy’ we were quite excited. As time moved on, and we found out that the venue’s opening act would be Grenoside’s own ‘Reverend & The Makers’, well, let’s just say that the clickthru to seetickets.com was more-or-less instantaneous.

As it turns out, it was quite lucky we bought our tickets when we did, because the gig sold out only a day or two later – pretty impressive for an act that’s only troubled the top 20 twice.

We arranged for my mum to pop over and babysit Aimee, and we toddled off to the bus stop for the bus to town – a little later than we’d planned, but we weren’t really bothered too much as we figured the first support act, ‘Toddla T’ (no, really) would be toss anyhow. If we’d could catch some ‘Smokers Die Younger’, the other support act, that’d be great. However, due to First South Yorkshire’s dire bus service (our ‘every 15 minutes’ service arrived after standing at the bus stop for nearly 50 minutes) and our mixed up assumption of the running order, we arrived at the Academy mid-way through ‘Toddla T’s set. Joy.

AMG claim to have spent £3 million in refurbing the ‘Roxy’ – and we were quite apprehensive as to what was awaiting us – having been past the building a few times in the week and seeing it look very much like a building site. However, once inside we were greeted with a fairly open auditorium, with balcony above. The stage is suitably impressive – I can’t help thinking that it is a little too big for the room, though.

I’m not sure what ‘Toddla T’ are up to. Is it a comedy act or serious musical venture? There’s a rapper/MC guy ostensibly rapping away whilst a DJ fuses some bleep/synth with dancehall drum and bass. Pretty ordinary pop-jungly-bollocks, really – apart from the guy robot-dancing with a cardboard box on his head, oh, and the two white girls done-up like a pair of Ali G’s ‘biatches’ (replete with bling and ridiculous sunglasses) just… being there. Very, very odd.

It being a ‘Carling’ venue, there is some focus on selling as much lager as possible – and, indeed, the four-person deep queues at all three of the bars I found inside indicated that there were plenty of thirsty people – just a pity that there were nowhere near enough bar staff, and their ‘time saving’ barcode scanning tills seemed to be having some teething problems. All in all, it took us a good 30 minutes to get a drink whilst putting up with the mighty ‘T’s jibber-jabber drum and bass. Not a great start.

However, it isn’t long before the Reverend & co are on-stage – curiously launching into it with a new song followed by their biggest hit, Heavyweight Champion of the World. They blitz through the setlist with a mixture of album tracks, and quite a few ‘new’ numbers – one in particular was introduced by Jon (the ‘Reverend’) McClure lighting up a ciggie on-stage and proclaiming that “Gordon Brown can’t tell me when I can have a fag!” before giving us a taste of a cynical, political track – telling us to “think for yourselves” and that the government can’t tell you what to do. All very hackneyed ‘indie’ concepts, but delivered in such a frantic, euphoric way, you’d almost start believing him.

If there’s one band the Makers are the polar opposites of, it’s Manc giants, Oasis. When going to an Oasis gig, you may as well just put some cardboard cutouts on the stage and stick a copy of “Definitely Maybe” on the PA – not so for these guys. They fling themselves round the stage with such haphazard abandon that their careless demeanor becomes infectious, and the happy vibes pass through the crowd. It’s not just the tracks, either – Jon unleashes spontaneous bursts of poetry between his interplay with the audience (“That fag’s just cost me 2 grand”) – sure, some of it is indie-rock-band-101, but the wheat outweighs the chaff. If there’s a dictionary definition of “Party Band”, this is it.

By the time the final number is on – “He Said He Loved Me”, the crowd are so hyped that after the track finishes, McClure takes the mic and explains that “we’re all going outside” and grabs a parka and is seen rushing off the stage. Cue; 2500 people all heading for the exit at once. It’s one way of avoiding an encore, anyhow! There’s quite a crush getting out, and we’re literally carried along by the weight of the sheer number of bodies and are deposited on the street along with everyone else – hanging around waiting for an impromptu appearance of the band. However, it doesn’t happen, and eventually everyone decamps and disappears into the city.

An excellent gig, and – once they get their staffing and logistics act together – a great venue.

…are, mercifully, unfounded!

I am a very busy bee, you see.

Off to a Reverend and the Makers gig tonight, will report tomorrow.

I know, I know, I know. I’m as disappointed in myself as you all must be. What a bastard, not updating the blog for a whole week.

Well, that’s well and truly broken the New Year’s resolution. Damnit.

As it happens, the last week has been very busy, and has had some ups as well as downs. There was a ‘shock’ announcement at work, David came to visit us, and Aimee learned how to point to the various parts of ones body in the “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” song! Such a busy life!

Anyhow, David came to visit and stay for the weekend, which was great. We’re doing some preliminary investigations into how feasible it might be for us to ‘tank’ out our cellar, and make it a livable room. Presently, the floor is laid with bricks – David dug some up and discovered that there’s just bare soil underneath – so it might be possible for us to rip the bricks out and get a proper floor laid.

In other news – last week, my employers decided to announce the closure of the office I work from, and relocate all staff to their head office some 45 miles away. This is somewhat surprising and certainly disappointing news, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t totally unexpected.

Many years ago, in my first job, I let work-related things affect me so much that it messed my head up totally. Bad management, stupid decisions and downright unfair working conditions affected me so much that my usual cheery disposition was slowly erased and replaced with a panic-stricken wreck. Things got so bad that I registered the domain you’re reading this on!

After all this passed, and I got my head right again, I became determined to never allow work to get in the way of my well-being. So, I took this bad news by the scruff of the neck and dealt with it positively – not just cattily whinging about the situation. Time to go back to freelancing.

I’ve no intentions of commuting to our head office everyday, certainly not long-term. So, ‘strike while the iron is hot’ is my mantra at the moment – and, thus far, things are going well.

One benefit of a more ‘flexible’ working arrangement will be that I can spend much more time at home with Aimee. Nothing disappoints me more than having a day when I get up and out of the house before she wakes (no, really, she’s a heavy sleeper!) and return just after she’s gone to bed. It only takes two or three days of this and it’s a significant time without ever seeing her.

A change is as good as a rest, as they say…

All the online April Fools’ jokes were poor this year. The whole point of them is that they’re supposed to be vaguely plausible – so you’d read/look at them and think that it’s real.

Who’s ever going to believe that Google and Virgin would open a Martian colony? Or that kernel.org.uk, the home of the Linux kernel, was switching to FreeBSD?

Then there’s the jokes that are just designed to get a laugh – like Youtube’s redirection of videos to the Rick Astley classic, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

Maybe the days have gone where we’d be fooled into thinking spaghetti grew on trees, and we’re all far more ‘informed’, due to the wonderous interweb…

I stumbled across a most interesting website today – Telebid. At first glance, you might dismiss it as the usual eBay-clone fodder, but – there’s quite a bit more to it than that. See the low prices of items sold? Got your attention? Thought so.

However, there’s a catch – there’s always a catch – and the catch in this case is pure fucking genius by the site owners.

You don’t bid ‘on the item’ in the traditional sense, you’re bidding essentially for the right to purchase the item for the current highest price… And the current highest price is inflated by 7 pence every time someone makes a bid… and it costs you 50 pence to make that bid… aaaand if you’re a last-minute sniper, you’re out of luck because they extend the auction end time in the event of last-second bids. Is your interwebby ‘scam’ spidey-sense tingling now? I know mine was.

Only this isn’t a scam – it’s not particularly nice, and it leaves a lot of (foolish) people out of pocket – but people do walk away with £30 PS3′s and £50 LCD TV’s. It’s just that Telebid walk away with much, much, much more.

Let’s take an example:

Telebid are selling a Sony 17″ Laptop. It has a RRP of £799. It starts at zero, like all of their auctions, and the clock begins counting down. Anytime a user places a bid on the item, the price rises by 7 pence, and – if it’s close to the end of the auction – some time is added to the clock. This means that even though an auction might be ‘ending in 10 seconds’, it is very likely indeed to run for considerably longer, as people wait for the counter to run down to 1 second and frantically click the ‘bid’ button – thus adding extra time to the auction end.

When the auction does eventually end, the ending price is £166.39. What a bargain! What a deal! The winning bidder spent £40 in bid tokens placing 80 50p bids on the item, and has only to pay the £166.39 and a small postage charge, and he’s the owner of a shiny new Sony VAIO, and it only cost him £206.39 – a fraction of the full RRP. Well done him.

Let’s look at everyone else who was involved in the auction: In order to reach the ending price of £166.39, there must have been 2,377 bids (16639p / 7 = 2,377). Each one of those bids cost the bidder 50p. This means Telebid made in bids alone £1,188.50. That’s £389.50 more than the RRP of the laptop! Not to mention the fact they’ll get £166.39+P&P on top of that from the winning bidder – that’s a whopping £555.89 of profit on that one item. Alone!

The average IT/Electronics retailer will be doing well to make an 6-7% margin on a laptop like that – Telebid are making a gigantic 69%!

Consider that they sell 100′s of items a day, and you can soon appreciate the figures involved must be gigantic. So gigantic that they offer some items on a ‘Fixed Price’ basis – where they’ll place high-value items for auction which will sell at a fixed (exceptionally low) price (say £19 for an 80GB iPod) no matter what the auction end price – or ’100% off’ basis, where the winner only pays for the number of bids he’s placed, no matter what the auction end price is. It is entirely possible for someone to win one of these auctions with a single 50p bid – just like it is for me to win the lottery on Wednesday with a single £1 ticket. It doesn’t matter if they lose £400 on an auction lot like this, because they’ll make it up in spades on the other lots.

I’m sure it won’t take long before people work it out – but in the meantime, I’m quite sure that Telebid will be making hay while the sun shines and will be laughing all the way to the bank with bidders money. Legitimate? Sure, I guess. Ethical? Probably not. A bargain? Sure, but only if you’re really, really lucky.

Took Aimee to see the “Baaa-baa’s” and “Moo-moo’s” at Heeley City Farm today. I’d never been before, and the south of the city is largely a big grey area in the road atlas in my head, so we relied on a Navigo to get us there – and it did, which was nice.

The farm is certainly what it says on the tin – a city farm. It’s literally right in the middle of some rows of pre-war workers terraces. It almost looks like the land the farm is sited on previously contained housing, which has been demolished to make way for the farm. Certainly, it’s quite odd to see 3 residential streets bisect the farm itself.

Once you step off the streets, and into the farm, it’s like being on a real farm – complete with the sights and smells(!). I think it’s great – some city kids won’t get to see a farm, and having this on their doorstep is excellent.

All of the staff are volunteers, and I must make a special mention to the young girl who showed us round the ‘small animals’ section, who described the animals in intimate detail and even encouraged Aimee to stroke and touch the animals themselves. Really, really encouraging to see this lass, who must’ve been about 12-13 really taking an interest in the welfare of the animals and not hanging around outside the local shops.

It is, unfortunately, a little run-down. The feeling is that the farm survives and ‘makes do’ as best it can – but some of the structures are looking pretty old and weathered. Probably nothing that a lick of paint wouldn’t fix, I guess. Presently there is no admission charge at all, and visitors are free to wander around the farm as they wish – which is exceptionally trusting in this day and age.

Of course – none of this matters a jot to Aimee, who is solely interested in the animals, who keep her entertained and awed. She’s so very curious – always wanting to see the next ‘thing’ and learn from it. Anyhow, if you’ve a young child, I recommend it.

Unaccustomed as I am to BBC3′s programming, I happened upon the aforementioned programme quite by accident tonight. Why haven’t I watched this before? It’s ‘lush’, it is.

Some of the acting is as wooden as the props, but the writing is, at times, hilarious. The little scene last night involving the overweight couple falling into a lusty romp over Kentucky Fried Chicken had me in stitches! Never before has a KFC corn-cob been used as a sexual metaphor on television!

It’s excellent romantic comedy with a witty twist – give it a go. I’ll have to track down the first series now and give up some more of my Sunday night to a TV show!

Up nice and early to get to work on time to meet the engineer I’m assisting on-site. Gotta love working on Saturdays.

It’s dull work, but it’s stuff that needs doing and it’s the kind of thing that can only really be done when you haven’t got 300 users sitting on the network you’re in the midst of tearing apart.

Get things done and dusted for about 1pm, and head back home. Catriona is visiting for the day and when I arrive back Aimee is entertaining her new visitor.

After Aimee’s bedtime we crack out the Xbox and Wii. Not played on the Wii for ages, really. We have a bash at the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics game, and it’s great fun with the three of us playing – exhausting too! The gameplay harks back to the days of joystick waggling on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon and Summer Games on the Commodore 64!

British Summer Time steals an hour of my sleep tonight, and I won’t get it back til October. Bah.

Today has been just as dull as Thursday. Really. Nothing to report here.

Most eventful item of the day: Neither of us fancied cooking dinner, so I was dispatched to the kebab house. When I returned, I discovered that the kebab geezer had given me ‘the wrong kebab’ – and my lamb donner was in fact a chicken shish. Oh well.

Back in the office today. A very dull day indeed.

It’s today that I’m reminded that I’ll need to work on Saturday too, which makes this already very busy week even worse. Gah.

A day spent in the drizzly, cold Docklands. Installed the kit I was in town to sort out and then popped over to Harbour Exchange for my delayed meeting.

The meeting goes well and fairly quickly, and I’m left with three hours to kill before my late train back. I’d much rather get open returns, but one must always count the pennies when dealing with expense claims!

I figure that it wouldn’t be too much of a wait if I made my way over to St Pancras, and sip a couple of quiet ones at the Baby Betjeman, where I could use the wireless and get on with some stuff. So, I make my way back across town and just miss the 5pm mad-dash – which was nice.

However, disaster strikes. The Baby Betjeman is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it lies in peace. Well. It’s closed, anyhow. All that’s left is the giant parasol and a chalk noticeboard saying that they’ve closed up because the ‘proper’ Betjeman pub is nearing completion – at the end of April! Bollocks.

The only other option is the on-platform ‘Champagne Bar’, which is entirely as pretentious as it sounds. I find a seat by the bar and order a cup of tea, in true British stiff-upper-lip style. However, tea doesn’t last 2 hours and curiosity gets the better of me, and after supping my (rather bland) tea I take a look at the drinks menu.

This place sure does sell a lot of plonk. For obvious reasons, though, they only sell a few varieties by the glass – meaning that if you want to sample an 1990 Krug, you’ll be stumping up a few hundred quid for a bottle. There is nothing non-Champagne-related on the menu, apart from a couple of sparkling wines.

Madness and boredom takes me, and I order a ten-quid glass of Bollinger. The cheapest Champagne on the menu – something I’ve never heard of, and likely to taste of cat’s piss – is £7.50 a glass. I figure if I go with a ‘name’ I’ve heard of, it’ll at least taste good while I’m struggling to get over the cost. It is, actually, very nice – but worth £10 for a single glass? I think not.

It’s only after I order and drink my Bolly (darling!) that I notice that some other people at the bar appear to be drinking lager. At least, they’re drinking something that looks like lager out of large goblets. I double-check the menu, and no – there’s no lager or beer on there anywhere.

When the barman (or, more probably a ‘Champagne Waiter’) asks me if I would like another drink, I ask for a lager. He replies, somewhat nonchalantly that they do not have any lager. I gesture over to two guys clearly drinking lager and express my disbelief in his assertion. “Oh, zaht is zee beer, made from zee Champagne”.

WHAT THE FUCK?

Beer? From Champagne? You what? I tell him I’ll have one, even if just to see what the hell it really is. It turns out to be Kasteel Cru, a lager brewed with ‘Champagne Yeast’. “Made from Champagne” is stretching it quite a bit – but, it’s only £3.75 and for fizzy (naturally!) lager it’s not too bad.

Speaking of stretching the truth – I noticed that the Champagne bar at St. Pancras claims to be – with no hint of irony whatsoever – “the longest Champagne bar in Europe”. This is fine, except for one thing.

The bar, itself, is a small square – there are four seats at each side. It is, by no definition of the term – ‘long’. Evidently, I’m not the only person to notice this and a fellow Kasteel Cru drinker pipes up and asks a waiter. The response is that it’s the length of the seating area – which runs down a fair length of one of the platforms which makes it the longest. There’s tenuous links and there’s tenuous links… really!

On the train back I watch the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-laden new movie – “No Country For Old Men”. It is everything I hoped that “There Will Be Blood” would be – full of suspense, mystery and damned fine acting.

Tommy Lee Jones is excellent as the pathos-driven local Sheriff, and – who-da-thunk-it – Josh Brolin can act, playing the hunted ‘man in the wrong place at the wrong time’ – but the show is totally, and utterly stolen by Javier Bardem’s psychotic hitman, Anton Chigurh.

If there’s a list of top movie psychopaths, then Anton is right up there with Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci, Goodfellas), Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper, Blue Velvet) and Hannibal Lecter. Woody Harrelson and Trainspotting debutee Kelly MacDonald provide excellent supporting parts. The only let down is the ending, which is disappointingly inconclusive.