Since I got back from France, time has been slipping by oddly, though this may simply have a lot to do with having fallen off the not smoking jazz cigarettes wagon. I don't know. What I do know is that I really don't know how much longer I can cope with living at my grandmother's, but I also really can't see myself being able to move any time soon either.

I'd really wanted to make it to LHusi drinks this Friday, what with all the people I've not met coming down as well as the usual suspects etc, but had that Fast Freddie gig at the Fiddlers to do instead, so that was that. Given that I had no less than three gigs to play on Saturday, owing to some kind of music festival in Stratford in East London, it was probably no bad thing that I gave this particular drinks a miss, as I was only just able to get through it all as it was. Gigs, it would seem, are like women, policemen and buses, etc.

The afternoon gig was fun; just me accompanying $TrumpetPlayer on piano, sitting in the bar of the Theatre Royal Stratford from 11am to 4pm. We normally play from 1pm to 4pm, but they'd decided to extend our set forwards by two hours in honour of the festival.

What they hadn't done was told the guys behind the bar anything about whether we were allowed more than one free soft drink each this time. So there we are, playing a five hour gig starting at 11am in the morning and... Ah fuck it. It's stupid beyond credence. In the end I think the people behind the bar caved in, mainly through sheer embarrassment at the ultimate fuckwittedness of their bosses, and generously allowed us two free soft drinks each over the five hour period.

Towards the end, $TrumpetPlayer's mate $OtherPianist turned up and I switched to bass. We'd been playing a strange mix of straight jazz standards and weird beatsy things that $TrumpetPlayer had programmed, and I have no idea what it can have sounded like, but it was fun to play.

That gig finished, I had to run across the road, with bass and amp, to get to the next gig, standing in on bass for my friend D.'s band, who were playing two sets, one late afternoon, and one late evening, at the Railway Tavern there.

Unlike the theatre, they'd really organised themselves well for the festival there, and were putting on 12 acts between 12pm and 12am; six acoustic and six electric, on two stages. All in an otherwise normal medium-sized pub. The sound was excellent, and some of the bands and musicians were superb, especially a young slide guitarist called Jay Gipson and a blues band of older guys called Bill Hurley and The Enforcers.

Watching the latter play was like a music lesson - they had everything right, from how tight they were as a unit to how entertaining they were as performers, and for all that they didn't play a single tune that everyone hadn't heard a million times before, it didn't matter somehow, because they played each one in such a way as to make it clear why that tune was one everyone wanted to play. You couldn't help but grin the whole time they were playing.

Sitting in with the band I was playing with proved a little trickier, as D. was playing upbeat funk with quite a lot of unexpected changes, and the basslines were... not unimportant. He'd not managed to provide any recording or written chart, and we hadn't had time to meet up in the two days since he'd asked me to do it, so I was having to wing my way through it completely by ear, which I think I more or less got away with - we had people dancing and applauding and so forth. $TrumpetPlayer had come down to the gig and sat in with us, so we were guitar, bass, drums, percussion, sax and trumpet - always a fun combination.

Sadly, D's drummer turned out to be a complete twat and walked out after the first set, on the basis that we weren't playing exactly what he'd rehearsed (well duh) and he didn't like it. Alas, D. then rang $WorldsWorstDrummer, a mutual friend of ours from Camden, who I have already left one band in order to avoid (nice guy, can't play, sorry), so the less said about the second set the better.

The evening continued to spiral into disarray and disaster when, our second set over, I went to collect my car from where I'd parked it twelve hours before.

It wasn't there.

No matter how hard I looked, no matter how much further down the road I went than the spot where I knew damn well I'd parked it, it was not there.

My evening ended on the phone to the police, going through the reporting your car as stolen rigamarole, and having to crash at $Singer's place, which is fortunately only round the corner.

The amazing thing, to me, is that it's not as if my car is/was anything worth nicking. What kind of moron would nick an F-reg Nissan Micra half-eaten away by rust with nothing left inside it, no stereo system, and a coat hanger stuck in where the aerial used to be? It's done me sterling service for several years, and in the past I've been able to leave it anywhere without any problems.

I guess I'd reckoned without the enterprising young car thieves of Stratford, who clearly take a more broad and measured view of these things than the average car thief.

So. Stratford. A nice place, but don't park your car there for more than four or five hours or someone will have away with it.