Best Birthday EVER!

Just wanted to say a thankyou to everyone (especially Anders) who made my birthday really great. I had LOADS of fun all weekend and am still in a good mood now!

Friday was just a night for hanging out, watching Big Brother, icing cakes, pottering in the garden and generally relaxing.

Saturday was the launch of We Show Up On RadaR's new single on Hello Thor. What a brilliant gig that was. Nick had hatched an elaborate plan to hold the launch in the central library in Nottingham. Seemed like a great idea until Saturday dawned and people stared at us as we made more noise than you should, setting up and sound-checking as quietly as is humanly possible. Still, we made paper chains, set up a stall to sell the afore-mentioned cakes, got the filming all prepped and we were ready to go. And suddenly it didn't seem so weird, in fact it seemed like the most fun ever. Midsr played first while we discovered that cake & wine are a very popular combination and frantically dished out as much of both as we could. Alloy Ark followed and were wonderful - a great voice, songs which sound fresh and yet you feel like you already know each one, really lovely. Finally Andy came on and totally charmed the room. It was so great to see him somewhere where the focus was on listening to the music, rather than chatting or going to the bar and his songs really stood out for it. There were high emotions, laughter and even a very small amount of impromptu singing along. Brilliant. Thanks everyone!



From the top, Anders & Nick, Andy & Blake (a.k.a. We Show Up On RadaR) and Alloy Ark playing to a full room. (Hope you can see in this last pic there was a real mix of people, including some people who seemed to come for the reading and then ended up staying for the music!)


After the gig, we packed away as quickly as possible and me and Anders headed home to transform our mud-patch back garden into this:


Now obviously it looks a little crazy in broad daylight, but in the dusk, with candles and bunting all around, music playing, mojitos BBQ and cuban cigars on the go it felt pretty special to me! Anyway, the party was really fun. It must've been a good night when you're whirling round the kitchen to "Danke Shoen" (from Ferris Bueller) at 4am.

Sunday was my actual birthday and involved a bit of a hangover, pancakes for breakfast, playing on my new DS and a trip to the park with Anders, Jim & Abi. We did all the fun you can do in a park, except for going on the swings... the very reason we went! Still, in about 45 minutes we managed to: eat ice-creams from an ice-cream van, have a race, play 'helicopters' with sycamore seeds, climb a tree, go on a roundabout til we were nearly sick, play football, look at flowers, have piggybacks, do some competitive jumping, make a robot noise with my shoes, stroke a white dog, sing in the bandstand, do cartwheels and handstands, almost attempt a roly poly and more stuff I can't remember. Two thumbs up for Woodthorpe Park!

Anyway, thanks again to Anders and everyone, I had a lovely weekend.

Bex
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