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Gardening Leave: A last minute trip to Berlin

- Michael 10 Comments

Tube strikes. They’re the bane of many people’s lives (whether you support them or not they are disruptive) and when the last one was announced it fell across my last couple of days in my old job. This chucked up the issue of “working from home” which, let’s be honest, wouldn’t have happened. So my old job put me on gardening leave for the last couple of days and I suddenly had a whole week off between jobs. I jokingly tweeted about taking the chance to sleep on twitter and my friend Rae of Love From Berlin intervened:

I quickly checked some flight costs and made sure she wasn’t actually joking and booked a last minute flight to Berlin to hang out with Rae her cats, eat loads of food and explore a city I’ve heard a million good things about. So that’s how I found myself on a coach at 4am on a Sunday morning on my way to Stansted airport (I can get the coach from basically outside my front door, that’s dangerous for me to know) and an adventure in Germany.

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A weekend in June: Hotbox, Dinerama & Dinosaurs

- Michael 2 Comments

Well, June has been hectic. In fact, wait a minute, it’s JUNE? And it’s July IN TWO DAYS? When did this happen? I have no idea where my time has been going lately. It seems to be slipping away faster and faster (along with my money). Just this Friday I’m moving (again) to Bow Road, so if any of you are East Londoners, mine is a Gin & Tonic (no cucumber, god help you if I find cucumber in my gin).

Secret Cinema - Force Choke

Force choke – Photo by Arthy

But why has June been so busy I hear you ask? Well I’ll give you a snapshot of just one weekend to really hit it home. It started with a gig on the Thursday, the Movielife to be exact, at the Electric Ballroom. A whole heap of my friends were down from Leeds as well as a bunch of people from London. The Movielife are one of those bands that helped shape half the people I knows music taste. They got big in the early 00’s before breaking up and continuing with various endeavours (Vinnie, most notably in I Am The Avalanche). This meant that while it was a Thursday, a rather large amount of booze was consumed, and by the end of the set I had no voice left.

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