Did I really say I was hoping to update this site more often? That was back last March and since then I haven't lifted a finger except to put in the tour dates for last May. I can't imagine where the time went. Which is another way of saying I haven't got any excuse.
But yes I have - I've got loads of them: I changed computers because the old one was clapped-out. Changing computers is fast replacing starting a new address book as the major post-modern trauma - I don't know that post-modern is neccesarilly right but I just fancied using it. I couldn't update the site because I couldn't work the software on the new computer. So that makes it the fault of Windows Vista. Vista is disgusting but that's progress - we'll get used to it, just as we're all beginning to get used to TV sets where the cars are wider than in real life, and people are short and stocky with very wide legs and fat faces.
I got married - never said a word about it here so you can imagine that I didn't care, but I knew everyone was reading about it on Amy's blog which is how I keep abreast of what's going on in my life myself.
Amy's diary is great. I used to write about everything that happened until I started to feel worn down and pressurised about it and then I stopped, but Amy's diary is vastly entertaining and quite inspirational. She makes me feel like writing again. Here's the link:

http://www.amyrigby.blogspot.com

That's that then - I've lost all my readers. As if I still had any! Anyway, back to the wedding - I managed to look like a complete twat in all the photos. I was thrilled to bits so I didn't look cool or whatever. I looked great the next day sitting amongst hungover daughters with the adoring wife at my side in a tea shop in a French town called Brantome. The photos on the day were almost enough to make me want to banish wedding photography all together (that's me speaking with my dictators hat on by the way). We got our own back on weddings on June 21st, la fete de la musique here in France. The Fete de la Musique used to be a mad, chaotic affair. My first experience of it was in 1989 in Paris. The crowds literally stopped the traffic and the whole city went crazy for twenty four hours. There were musicians playing everywhere - brass bands, rock 'n' roll bands, folk troubadours, tenor saxophonists, young men throwing off their clothes and dancing naked in the street (yes, that really happened), and not a moving vehicle to be seen from the Place de la Concorde to the Bastille. It was anarchy.
It's nothing like that now. Everything is planned months ahead down to the tiniest detail. The most tedious musical ensembles get to play on specially erected stages in prime town centre locations and nothing starts until a respectable six pm.
Someone once told me that on June 21st musicians in France are actually under a legal obligation to play but I think that's an old bylaw that's been conveniently forgotten. The Fete de la Musique is no longer a celebration, it's just an excuse to sell beer. And as a side effect France gets to wallow in the most banal, semi-talented, mundane, half-baked, middle-of-the-road pap that it can throw at itself.
So, without wanting to align ourselves with any of the above, Amy and I decided to take to the streets. I wanted to recapture the spirit of anarchy, the chaos, the fun I had here in the late eighties and through the nineties, before Nicholas Sarkozy got his nasty little hands on the place.
(The other night while we were doing a gig in a local bar I put forward the idea, in French, that Sarkozy is actually Margaret Thatcher's penis. Nicholas Sarcoidosis is, as you probably already know, only two feet high, a modern miracle modeled on Napoleon himself, a portable president - you can stick the little fucker in your pocket and take him away. Whatever will they think of next?!!?
An English voice said 'Now steady on there.' And Amy asked quite innocently 'Qu'est ce que c'est une bite?')

I think that'll do for the moment - I wouldn't want to get carried away on my first day back. I'll carry on tomorrow. Unless there's a catastrophe. And before I go I want to say thanks to my friends Karen Hibberd and Tony Judge for helping me to get the software working. Thank you!!