He's a sexy and elusive motherfucker

Unless you've been asleep under a rock for the last few weeks, then you'll know that wee man Prince has been acting all silly buggers over here in the UK.

Indeed the elderly scamp has been using the element of surprise to its full advantage by playing a series of 'guerilla gigs' across London and in Manchester. The idea behind his Hit and Run tour is that his group, Third Eye Girl, reveal the whereabouts of the show a few hours before it takes place on Twitter. It's a right clever strategy cos the venues are much smaller than the arenas he's accustomed to packing. Because of this smaller scale, everyone goes fucking bat shit at the notion of seeing the wee man race through his hits in a locale where, if he wasn't wearing shades, you'd be able to see the whites of his eyes. It means many folk have spent hours waiting outside various venues around London for hours and hours and hours to see the Purple one rock through hours of hits. Not us however (boo hoo). When he's dropped a bollock of news on the internet, we've always been a little too late on the uptake or in totally the wrong place to warrant a trip to the venue queue. We're still waiting now for something to happen.

The closest I've been to Prince is standing outside Ronnie Scott's 10 hours before he was due on stage watching a queue of 200 people shuffle about and look very pleased with themselves.

Motherfuckers! 

To the top of the Shard and back again

Nothing I says I love you more than a Valentine's Day gift which involves confronting a deep and irrational fear, which is so glued to your very soul that your guts melt and become all sticky at the very thought of it.

No matter what I do, I'm deeply terrified of heights. It may not be the height itself but the fear of falling which keeps my pants moist and my hands shaky. I even come over all funny on escalators. Yeah. What a milksop. But this year on Valentine's Day it was the experience of going up the Shard near London Bridge which was the vibe. It's 72 floors up to the top of this monument. So it's high fo' sure. And the sights are immense. On a clear, sunny day (which was luckily for us, the background to our visit) you can see for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. Even when, like me, you couldn't go too close to the edge... 

Woaaaaaaaah

Aliens beckoned us

Edgey

London - in all its smelly glory

Crazies going close to the edge. Stop it you loons

Waaaah

These people looked like ants and they weren't even that far away

I like CDs and I want (some) of them to stay

Like most folk in their early thirties, CDs have been a thing for more than half my humble existence. And because they were once the best way to consume sound (and I'm unable to chuck anything without some serious heart-wringing), there are stacks and stacks of them lying around our gaff - fucking hundreds of the wee shiny little bastards.

I've lugged them from one rented place to the next for yonks, playing increasingly small amounts of them in lieu of listening to albums I really wanna check on Spotify via the tinny, shitty laptop speakers. Why am I so pathetically loathe to get rid of them? Each one has some sort of memory, shitty or otherwise attached. Whether it was the first splurge of discovering Fopp and their three quid bargain bins or going without lunch for a week in a bid to save enough coin for a CD single by a no-mark indie band I was infatuated with at the time, there's something behind each one. Anything else? Well laptops sound like a pair of tins being bashed together by a chimp who's sticking sugar up its arse. CDs also used to be fucking expensive back when writing a song could make you any money so it feels like you're lobbing pound coins into the fire by getting rid of the bastards.

I've been wrestling with the dilemma of binning them, the main obstacle being that I'm too disorganised to back anything digital up so keep losing everything every time my computer dies. However, as part of a controlled experiment, I'm flogging some CDs to raise dosh for this marathon (zzzzz) attempt all via our work intranet. There's a mixed bag of shit going up for sale but I've shifted some 70 quids worth. Which ones have shifted you (don't) cry? Anything to do with Zappa, Led Zepp, Bowie, The Smiths and bands of yore while the DJ Semtex grime mix has gone untouched. The buyers are almost all blokes aged 25 and above which (possibly) proves something about how old habits die hard/I'm not alone in being a CD keeping weirdo/blokes love CDs or something else entirely. But if you're looking for tangible facts (and being a lover of physical product this is exactly what I'm after) the only real thing to happen is that (some) of these CDs are here to stay. Certain dinosaurs may have been eventually wiped out but the ones round here are still breathing...