Rumours of My Demise....

....Are greatly exaggerated.

Seeing as how it's been a week since I last spouted some nonsense on these hallowed pages, I guess an update is well overdue.

Thanks to all those who thought to check I was still alive (well, Erica did anyway). It's been a pretty hectic week, all in all.

The festival was as good as I expected it to be, although a tad quieter than both myself and the organisers had anticipated. The highlight of the weekend for me were Primal Scream, who rattled through a furious greatest hits set.

Seth Lakeman played a great hoe-down set in front of a receptive audience doing a drunken Strip The Willow in the mud, the Super Furry Animals managed to include Power Rangers helmets and crisp eating into their repertoire, and Teenage Fanclub showed everyone why they should have been the biggest band in the world.

Bjork's set wavered between out-of-key Icelandic yelping backed by a fluorescent horn section to a spectacular laser light show during the majestic bass-driven splendour of Venus As A Boy. And The Go! Team were the best surprise act of the weekend, bringing the opening Friday night to a moshpit-bouncing close.

Seeing as how the festival site was knee-deep in mud by the end of the first day, it was a good feeling to be staying in a caravan with a shower, cooker and real beds. I must be getting old, but the prospect of standing in the pishing rain all day before walking through a dark Scottish version of the Somme to get to a tent that has collapsed and flooded just doesn't appeal any more....

Anyway, a three-day pear cider bender isn't the ideal preparation for a week-long oil industry conference and exhibition. Offshore Europe is essentially just an excuse for a bunch of very rich companies to get together and give away lots of tat. The Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre this week is awash with free pens, sweets, stress balls and key rings. Hats off to Edda Accommodation for giving away leather attache cases containing USB pen drives and calculators and to Eni for CD wallets - at least their free shite is almost worth keeping.

So, I'm a tad exhausted, which is the reason for the complete lack of postage over the past week. If I'd had any foresight, I'd have handed the keys to the blog to someone else for a week to keep y'all amused - but I don't, so I didn't.

Oh, and Tuesday marked the first anniversary of this far-flung outpost of the worldwide interweb. I'm still surprised that anyone bothers to stop here at all, but for those who do - thank you. Please come again. (And have a nice day.)