Skidding into illicit activities | Music

The new year! A year so far filled with broken resolutions [see here for cake], night shifts, and the icy grip of winter hitting Glasgow with a vengeance.

Even leaving my flat has become fraught with tension, as I try to combine balancing my surprisingly heavy work bag [filled with ever-disappearing black pens and posh pot noodles] with lowering my centre of gravity and doing a kind of crouch-shuffle across the ice to get to a patch of tarmac. An old woman striding past with spikes on her boots looked at me pityingly as I got stranded in a particularly bad patch, and actually offered to help me out, like an urban mountain rescue. Only slightly less embarrassing than when an old man offered me some of his spare weights in an ill-advised body pump class.

Apart from forming a very intimate relationship with my hot water bottle, I've been relatively busy so far this January. Making sushi with my family [my mother being genuinely surprised that it was made from raw fish], playing with papier mâché after work [I knew all those amazon delivery boxes would come in useful..] and going gin tasting after night-shift.

Yes, you read correctly, after night-shift. Now kids, don't try this at home. I grabbed a couple of hours sleep after over-hollandaising myself at breakfast, woke up, and got thrown straight into drinking neat, room-temperature gin.

Now, I like gin much more than the next person, but that completely threw me. "This is very refined gin, so it shouldn't hit the back of the throat." I am obviously not refined enough for the very refined gin, because it very definitely hit me in the back of the throat. And in the head. Cut to 2 hours and 3 gin cocktails later, and I'm trying for over 10 minutes to fit my keys into my front door lock. I try one key, another key, I take a break and think about locksmiths. I'm trying the first key again when all of a sudden, out of my supposedly empty flat, I hear a voice call out 'Hello?'. This is not my flat.

Here I stand, a prime example of the direct correlation between alcohol and criminal activity. I nearly committed B&E [with a locksmith accomplice] because of gin. And worryingly, that wasn't the first time.

And now I've got to dash, because I'm currently putting together a three-tiered birthday cake for my sister, and these ganaches aren't going to whip themselves, ok? 

You may have noticed that the blog has had a bit of a makeover, courtesy of several hours me trying to learn code, and then giving up and buying a template to fiddle with. I'm planning to move into different types of posts, and hopefully this will mean that I can post a bit more often. If there's anything you want more of, or less of, let me know and I'll see what I can do [within reason].

And now, acoustic-y music to tramp through snow to:

Bear's Den - Elysium [acoustic]

Tor Miller - Headlights

Winterbourne - Cold

Radical Face - The Mute