It's a jazz day

Colindale, London, England // 4.22 pm // Mostly sunny 11ºc / 52ºf

I don't quite know how many of my blog posts have been named after a lyric of the song I'm listening to at the time, but I know it's many. And it's happened again here, thanks to Robin Blamires' special jazzy show as part of Smoke Radio's marathon broadcast last week. Robin, if you're reading this, I did intend to wake up to listen to the show. My alarm even woke me up at 4.55am, but I just couldn't pull myself out of bed. So thank you for the link!

Been a few weeks since the last blog. Something that I have been doing every week is going to the radio station in East London to do some more rehearsals for my forthcoming radio show, the resurrection of Grooveline. I've not been giving specific details about the show or station until it is concrete, but we are almost there. At the moment it looks like the show will be launching, available online, on Tuesday 31st March at 7pm till 8pm, and will be so weekly. I've been really pleased with the rehearsals so far. It's sounding more like a real radio show that it has in the past, at least production wise. Features return to the show. And I'm really enjoying the challenge of cramming it all into a neat 60-minute package. There will also be a great show webpage to support the show, featuring the facility to listen to the previous 4 weeks of shows on-demand. I'm really excited about it all, and hope to confirm the details sometime next week.

Everything has been going well at work, but it has all been going an hour earlier. Because I work for an American company, and to American time, and the fact they went into "summer time" 3 weeks earlier than the rest of the world, I've had to wake up at 3am instead of 4am. It's amazing the difference it makes. Getting the car into work in the morning usually, shops are loading up with stock, news-stands are open and milk trucks are out. It feels like early morning. But at the moment going to work, at 3am, news-stands are shut, kebab shops are full of pissheads, girls with their arses hanging out of their skirts are trying to flag down taxis with their ridiculously tiny handbags waving in the air. It feels like late at night!

It's also meant going to bed closer to 9pm, which is even more difficult. Roll on BST!

The last two weekends have been busy, and spent in the West Midlands. Two weekends ago Elle and I went to a reunion-of-sorts in what was my home for three years, Stafford. Elle and I met up with a group of old friends and spent the afternoon and evening going round our old drinking holes, and some of the new venues that have sprung up. Besides those though, not a lot has changed. But it's always nice to go out of London and be able to buy a pint for considerably less than £3!

Also that weekend I watched the Scottish Cup 6th Round match between Celtic and St Mirren. We had beat them 7-0 the previous week. But surprise surprise, St Mirren managed to dump us out of the cup. And pretty comprehensively. Still, we made up for it the following weekend by beating Rangers 2-0 in the League Cup final! I watched the game in a fairly scary Celtic Supporters Club in Wolverhampton.

Which was last weekend, and started with a night out in a pub in Hammersmith with Elle and some of her workmates. On Saturday we drove up to Walsall ready for a night out in celebration of Elle's 26th birthday which was on Monday. We went out in Birmingham on Saturday night after a few drinks at Elle's mums. The plan was to end up at the club Gatecrasher on Broad Street, but we had a few drinks elsewhere first.

Finally, we were queuing up to get into the club, and the queue was moving fairly fast. Our group got to the front of the queue, the door attendant took one look at me, shook her head and said "Nah, he's not going to get in". For a second or so I thought she was joking, but it was soon apparent that she really wasn't. We were asking her why but didn't really give us a straight answer, although something suggested it was what I was wearing (a dressy shirt, smart jeans and black shoes - all well within their dress code for the night). Meanwhile, chavs wearing pretty much tracksuits, and girls with their tits virtually hanging out were all streaming inside the club. For being part of a party of about 7 respectable people, and a night out for Elle's birthday, I was pretty upset.

The door person told us to go to someone else further down, in the hi-vis jacket, and ask *her* why we weren't getting in. So we did. To be fair, I remember looking a bit like a lost sad puppy at this point, but I just couldn't understand in the slightest what the problem was. As it seemed, either did this other women who, on being asked why I wasn't being allowed in, umm'd and ahh'd for a good while as she looked me up and down, trying to find a reason. She couldn't, but she followed that by "Well it must be the shirt. It's just the wrong type of shirt". The wrong t.... the... WHAT THE F*CK?! The wrong type of shirt?! I don't remember seeing *that* in the dress code! By this point, I felt rage bubbling up. This wasn't the first time this had happened to me in Birmingham. And the other time it happened it was for similarly baffling reasons, and *again* on Elle's birthday night out. At that point I decided that I was never going to part with any cash on anything to do with Gatecrasher again, and decided after the night had ended I was going to boycott Birmingham and never have a night out there again.

We ended up going somewhere else where there was no problem. It seems everyone had a good night anyway, but it really did spoil my night. I don't really know why I took it so personally, but I just hate being responsible for spoiling what had been planned for weeks, maybe months.

When it comes down to it, if that is going to be their criteria for the door then I don't want to be in a place like that anyway. And I hope they let in record numbers of drug dealers, people with knifes and those who intend to spike girls drinks in, just because they were wearing the right kind of shirt. The quicker they get shut down, the better. And then with hindsight they may think maybe they should have rethought their entry policy.