Norman Ralph

After several weeks offline due to holiday, work, festivals and moving house (well room….) I am finally back online, although only temporarily at the moment. I am currently using a makeshift internet connection until our house network is up and running, so I cannot vouch for the regularity of my posts for the foreseeable future. I will do my best to ensure that I try to keep you all up to date on the comings and goings currently making my life about as hectic as it has been in several years!

Firslty, I am currently working ten to eleven hour days for a framing company selling certificate frames to graduates at Leeds University. Good money but hard work! I had to pass up on the last two festivals I was supposed to be working due to a) a better offer and b) the feeling that the work I was doing was going very unappreciated to say the least!

Basically, my life is good. I have a fantastic girlfriend, amazing housemates, quality friends and a bank balance in the black! Not a lot else for me to say at the moment. I am sure that my future posts will include some of the details I have skipped over, but then again they might not. Requests on a postcard please.

Liz and I headed across to the BBQ and party hosted by Matt, Kat, Kieran, Heather and her housemates on Saturday afternoon. A few getting ready problems had caused us to runa little late, we didn’t leave my house until gone 3.30pm. We were some of the first to arrive, even though it started at three. With chairs and tables set out, Kieran’s front garden is actually a really nice place to hold a party, it is roomier than it looks and with the front fence, encolsed enough to feel like a garden party rather than a park party.

Kieran had taken the liberty of ordering a keg of ale from Elland Brewery, a genius idea! Over the night we sank over 60 pints from it! Along with the copious wine, the BBQ food and the cheese there was much revelry and fun. The musical choices were excellent and the party ran really well. It started to die out in the early hours, but a few harcore party animals lasted until gone 3am! I stumbled home with Claire about 3.30am after polishing off my third bottle of wine, which had been preceded by a good bash at the ale (about ten pints if my memory serves me correctly) so I was rather drunk.

Unfortunately, the night was not a total high point. I had had to drop Liz off at the station so she could get to work. It was the worst goodbye we have ever had to say. I am not going to say much more about it as it was a very personal experience. In case you are reading Liz, I miss you and I hate not being with you!

Thanks Kieran et al for a quality party, it really was a great evening for the most part. Hope we can have a repeat in the future.

I thought it would be best if I let everyone know what I was up to this summer as blog posts are going to be a bit thin on the ground. I am going to be working a number of the smaller festivals this summer with Sarann. We are working at five and paying guests at another. This all means that we will be away for the best part of seven weeks including all the travelling time. I will keep you updated on our progress as best I can.

Sunrise – 31/05 to 03/06, Somerset

Farmyard – 15/06 to 17/06, North Yorkshire

Workhouse – 29/06 to 01/07, North Wales

Buddhafield – 11/07 to 15/07, Somerset

??? – 20/07 to 22/07, ???

Solfest – 24/08 to 26/08, Cumbria

As you can see a massively varied group of festivals, in terms of music, venue and location. I am really looking forward to getting to as much of each of the festivals as possible. I am working for a guy named Rakesh in his catering van. I am doing two four hour shifts everyday of the festivals, so it all depends on timing.

The only diasdavantage of the whole thing is that I don’t get to see Liz all that much, it just happens that the weekends I’m not away are the weekends she is down to work – which sucks!

Saturday was the raison d’etre for me heading home for Easter. With Jon back from the Falklands and Dom and Beki up from London it was the ideal opportunity to relive some our youth.

Lunchtime saw us shake off our hangovers from the night before and fire up the barbeque for some lunch. The four of us were joined by Izzy and Nikki for some light refreshments and a few sausages and burgers. It was a glorious afternoon, good food and drink coupled with some lively company. We tend to get together a few times a year, but these BBQ’s tend to be well worth the effort. As the afternoon rolled on we headed our separate ways to get changed etc ready for our big night out.

I used the chance to go into Preston and pick up a new car stereo, one with a CD player and RDS – review to follow. Ended up at Izzy’s getting some CDs burned and came up with a plan to head over to Chester Zoo on Monday. Having got changed and ready I drove back over to Dom’s for the pre-party.

Joining Jon, Dom, Bekki and myself for this night of fun were Ash (Dom’s brother) and his girlfriend Jemma, Anja and Kirsty. We started off at Dom’s with a few drinks. The few drinks turned into many drinks and by 9pm we were getting ready to go into Blackpool. We have not been out in Blackpool as a crowd since we were at sixth form so we were all up for this night.

The taxi dropped us off at Schofield’s and we set off with the night. Drinks have definitely gone up since last I was in Blackpool – £20 for a round of 6 drinks! The tequilas were cheap though, so I got a round of them in! Walked up to Syndicate at about 11ish and after paying the princely sum of £10 to get in, we set about partying.

The rest of the night was somewhat of a blur, Jon and I were on the quadruple vodka and redbull’s! The music was funky house and the lights flashed a lot. It was a really good night, clubbing the likes of which I have not experienced for a good 5 years! Leeds has some good clubs but it just cannot compete with the size and atmospehere of the Syndicate. It may have been one of those nights that the fact I was with excellent company mean more than that quality of the environment, but still an excellent night.

Taxi and a kebab at 3am and we were back to Dom’s for some post-party drinks. Next thing I remember was waking up in Dom’s spare room. We fired the BBQ back up and had ourselves some BBQ bacon butties!

We have now had a few days on sunshine and relative warmth, can we suggest that Summer is coming? I hope so. It has struck me the last few days that without the massive pressures of coursework deadlines, the wind and rain and the general apathy that grows when you are poor and tired that the group of friends I spend time with are infinitely more relaxed, more outgoing and generally better to spend time with.

I have really anjoyed spending time with people that last week or so. I have written on here about really starting to get to know Kat, then visiting Sarann up in Cumbria, now I think I have found some more common ground with Matt. Sarann is being her usual lovely self and Michelle and I are getting on better than ever. The more time I spend with George the more I like the guy too.

I think that the whole depression/end-of-term-itis of the past few months waas necessary, or at least I am glad it happened. I think eveyone now realised, consciously or not, that we need to make the most of our time when we are feeling up and it.

Roll on the rest of the holidays.

As some of you will know and the rest of you are about to find out, I have spent the last few days visiting Sarann at her home in Wigton, Cumbria. I had a really great time and enjoyed the fact that I didn’t go near a computer and barely touched my mobile apart from the odd occasion.

I received a text from Sarann at the weekend just gone asking if I wanted to pop over to Wigton for a few days to visit and then drive her back to Leeds afterwards. After some shuffling and a few telephone calls me and Kat decided we would go up on Tuesday and stay over until Thursday so that we could get some stuff in and be back in time for me to get to Barenaked Ladies .

After picking Kat up on Tuesday lunchtime, we headed over the moors to Cumbria to see Sarann. The thought of free homecooked food keeping us from getting too bored on the three hour trip! Wigton is a fairly small town in Cumbria, about 20 miles from Penrith and the same from the coast. There didn’t seem much there to be honest and the off licence even ID’d Kat for wine! Bear in mind that Kat is 22 going on 23 and doesn’t look like a 15 year old!

We spent the afternoon at the beach, playing in the sand, skimming stones and generally larking about. We also had homemade ice cream from a little local shop, it was delcious! We then stopped by Sarann’s dad’s house to feed the cat and get some ideas for stuff to do on the Wednesday. For dinner that night we had the most amazing Cumberland sausage casserole, one of my all time favourite dishes. A few glasses of wine and a few rounds of Marry, Date or Dump and a failed attempt to watch Moulin Rouge rounded off a very enjoyable day.

Wednesday was spent being touristy in The Lake District. We drove down to Thirlmere, parked up and wandered the 4 or so miles to Grasmere. It was a lovely little walk, if a little tricky in places and the weather managed to stay nice for us until we got to a pub for some lunch. After a ridiculously expensive round of drinks we completed our walk into Grasmere, had a look round some great little shops – including Croft’s Bakery, which sells the finest flapjack I have ever tasted. We then caught the bus back up the car then drove home via Dove Cottage, the home of William Wordsworth.

After a dinner of pizza and pasta and a long philosophical debate we finally got drunk! Which took some doing – eight bottle of wine to be honest. The night (or rather morning) ended with us heading to bed following some more in depth conversations on topics as diverse as abortion, rape, sperm banks and contraception!

Thursday was a lie in, we headed back to Leeds about 3pm and I dropped the girls off and headed home to get ready for my gig.

Thanks to Sarann and her Mum for looking after us and making us feel so welcome!

I am currently sat at my computer at 4am listening to music. This is likely to be a recurring theme in my blog posts. I am an insomniac. I just don’t seem to sleep. Sometimes I can go for days with only an hour or two of sleep each night. My average bedtime for the last seven or eight days has been about 6am, with me getting up by 8 or 9am.

What is bizarre, though, is that I was exhausted at about 10pm this evening. I was sat at Kat’s with tea and chocolate hobnobs waiting for George to come round so we could watch a film and I could barely keep my eyes open. By the end of Terminator, I was wide awake again. I don’t think the twenty minute walk home through the cold air of Leeds helped with either.

I have been spending increasing amounts of time with Kat recently, I must have been seen her about five times in the last week alone. This does not sound a lot, but I have never really been that close to her, we just have never really gotten to know each other. I am really glad that we have started to remedy that though, she is a really cool person. Very opinionated, but then I like someone who has their own thoughts. More importantly, she is prepared to fight for those ideas! Kat also makes one of the meanest cups of tea around. In fact, it is now almost impossible to decide on who makes the best tea – Kat or Sarann! I will have to put them to the test this week when Kat and I head over to The Lakes to visit Sarann.

The first week of the Easter break is now over and as George mentioned to me earlier it has both flown by and dragged. It seems over so quickly because I have not really achieved anything, but it has also dragged as it feels a life time ago that we were all in the pub celebrating St Patrick’s Day and Wendy House!

Here is to a more productive three weeks coming up. I am not holding my breath though as I am off to Cumbria on Tuesday, going to see Barenaked Ladies on Thursday and then Jon gets back from the Falklands in 10 days! So much to do, no time or money to do it!