After four and a half years I don't think I've got much more to add to Pyramid Blog.

It's time to close this chapter so I can start anew somewhere else.

Favourites from 2006:

5) FutureSex/LoveSounds (Justin Timberlake)
4) The Back Room (Editors)
3) Live From Dakota (Stereophonics)
2) Black Holes & Revelations (Muse)
1) Show Your Bones (Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

And for more inspiration, check out Pitchfork's Top 100 Singles From 2006.

If I had to propose a list of things that consistently tie my guts up in knots, either burning me up with happiness or bringing me as close to teary eyed as an acceptable masculine gender role will allow, it would look approximately like this:

Top Ten Things That Make Me Feel Something*

10. Looking at the world from several thousand feet in the air.
9. Sunny days.
8. Death of a pet: The prospect, the process, and the subsequent absence.
7. Rejection of supra-national democracy and the pursuit of global hegemony.
6. More than a few Radiohead or Crowded House songs (although each for unrelated reasons).
5. Coffee.
4. Literary themes of love and loss (e.g. Lolita, Great Expectations, The Ground Beneath Her Feet).
3. Surmounting a challenge I really cared about.
2. Reflecting on how much my parents love me, despite my appalling insufficiencies as a doting son.
1. Coming home.



* By 'feel something', I pointedly exclude the primary male emotions 'hungry', 'tired' and 'horny', so as not to offend sensibilities of the delicate reader.

I headed up to Edinburgh in August to see Radiohead perform, having not managed to secure tickets for the London gigs.

I bought two tickets way back in March, expecting that I would find someone in London who would also want to see them. By the time that August came round, it was clear to me that while a few people I know would want to go, no-one in my contact list is nuts enough to queue for hours and hours to see them. So I gave the unclaimed ticket to a company I saw perform the most entertaining Shakespeare I've ever seen as part of the Fringe Festival (The Pantaloons - they're brilliant, check them out if the chance ever comes up).

Last time I saw Radiohead was November 2003, and this time I was committed to again securing a spot in the front row, albeit without the ensuing camera disappearance and train ejection.

Having flown up to Edinburgh for the express purpose of seeing Radiohead, I determined to leave as little to chance as possible. This involved casing Meadowbank Stadium the day before, talking to security staff there, and estimating when I needed to be there to get a good shot at the front row.

If you've never experienced life at the front of a queue to get into a rock concert then you're missing out on something strange and wonderful. Typically there'll be multiple doors/gates that will open, and these are coveted spots where people cluster around. Initially there'll only be a few fans who arrived ridiculously early to secure the best positions.

This particular concert opened it's doors at 4pm, and the first group of fans arrived to take up the strategically best positions by 5.30am. These people are generally referred to (often with a trace of genuine reverence) as 'the hard core'.

Early on, the keener fans that arrive hours and hours early find a degree of camraderie in their mutual passion. As more and more arrive, people become more territorial. What was camraderie is gradually replaced with suspicion and paranoia.

I was at the front of one queue with one American and a pair of Englishwomen, all of whom came up/over specifically for the concert. It was great to have some banter during the long tedious wait, but no-one confuses this with real relationship building. One Englishwoman says to her friend that 'if you fall over on the way (to the stage), I'm not stopping for you.' She's smiling when she says it, but no-one is naive enough to think she is joking.

The final 30 minutes before the doors open is a tense time, where miniscule doubts about trivia like door functionality or distance to stage become questions of life and death. A key and much debated issue is the speed with which one will pass through the security check and ticket rip. More than a few of the less experienced diehard fans are to be found wide-eyed and backpack open, sweating over what they should dispose of in order to secure a quicker passage in the mandatory bag check.

Being at the front, I've pre-cleared my possessions with the security person in order to proceed straight through to the ticket ripper. I've also made a point of bringing capacious cargo pants rather than a backpack. My concert survival pack of chewing gum, eye drops, muesli bars and a packet of Wet Ones earns me a few odd looks from my neighbours in the queue. As the minutes tick by, the ground staff look increasingly nervous. The crowd is still relatively small and quiet but the buzz at the front is deafening.

Basic Darwinism applies here, in that some tribal cooperation makes the long wait better for everyone, but the moment those doors open it's every person for his/herself. The slow and weak will be trampled mercilessly in the race to the front.


It reminds me a lot of setting up on the blocks for the 100m sprint. The door opening is a 'To your marks', the security clearance is a 'Get set', and the sound of that ticket being torn is the gunshot that signals the start of the only thing that every mattered to you and the several thousand others beside you.

Torn ticket in hand I sprang into the Stadium, setting a course for the upward steps directly ahead of me where some daylight could tantalisingly only just be made out. The Englishwoman was just ahead of me, and inexplicably there were several others flying onto the stairs from the left and right, suggesting the neighbouring doors had a few seconds head start on ours. Panic would have set in if there was any room for it in my adrenalised brain, but instead I was hurtling up the steps desperate to find how these would connect me to the pitch. Everyone ahead of me on the stairs was reaching the top and heading right, so I took a chance and broke left. There was no time to stop and look, I only had a sense that this was there was some path on the right down to a gate onto the pitch and some people were already on it. Where I was on the left had no such gate, but desperation didn't need any such thing, so in a few strides I had somehow jumped the fence surrounding the pitch and hit the ground running.

Once on the pitch the gargantuan stage was clear and waiting for us directly on the other side of the field. I took off at a good pace, laughing madly at the bizarre spectacle we must have cut as I swept past the Englishwoman (who seemed to be running the fastest 200m of her life).

If things had been strange up until now, here they took a turn for the bizarre. Myself and the dozen other people I could vaguely sense arriving onto the pitch on either side of me were now confronted with about eight security staff in a widely spaced line halfway between us and the stage. Our mindsets being one part confusion and three parts desperation, we slowed a little in the breakneck sprinting, at which point the guards started waving their arms and yelling things like 'Don't run!', 'Slow down!', and even 'Walk!'. I think one person running toward them stopped and looked around desperately. What he would have seen was the other (by now) hundred or so people wildy running smooth arcs around and in some cases between the helpless security staff. The immediate and apparent impression to this madness was that Meadowbank Stadium was the scene of massive regression to school yard gaming, where someone had just called 'BULLRUSH'. By not following the rest I was in a pretty good position to clear the line on the left, at which point an almost empty front row loomed into sight. The final 50 metres was an ecstatic one, and I was still making rapturous noises of thanks as I threw myself onto the front row fence up against the shoulder of one of the 8 people who beat me there. I clung to that fence as if my life depended on it, and saw that I was positioned approximately three metres to the left of the state centre. The shock of success hadn't even set in when a fast moving object crashed into my left. The Englishwoman must have saved a bit of gas for the home straight because she was now grinning maniacally at me or her victory (probably the latter). Between us we managed to save enough space for the slightly slower English friend, ensuring that all three of us would enjoy the concert from our prime positions.

And the concert? It was great, just as good as they were last time I saw them. The experience was marred a little by the worst pushing I've been caught in. The pressure of bodies behind you into the (notably unpadded) fence was just insane. Although if I was to look on the bright side, I might be happy to discover that not all the organs I brought with me turned out to be life sustaining ones.


But Thom and Radiohead were brilliant, and the memories were absolutely priceless (including Beck running around dressed as a bear).

When they next tour I'll be back there queueing again, you can be sure of it. If you're a keen disciple of Radiohead too you're welcome to join me on the pilgrimage to the front. You don't need to be a nut to get there, but I suspect it probably helps.

The first week in a new job is a traumatising thing. Even though this is effectively my fifth job out of university, I still get butterflies that remind me a lot of starting a new school.

Will I like my new classmates? Will I like my new teacher? Will either my classmates or my teacher like me?

Will I be too smart or too stupid to fit in? Will the older boys steal my lunch or call me names?

Will I be able to find my desk again after lunch?

Looking back over the various jobs I started, there were certainly some challenging moments.

I can still vividly remember my second day at the recruitment company. I had just moved to Prague and was spending every night out partying with visiting friends. The resulting exhaustion was second only to the aftermath of my best AIESEC conference (record being 14 hours sleep in 6 nights). Several times that afternoon I dozed off and snapped back awake as my head was about to hit the desk. Five years later and I can still see it so clearly. I guess terror has a way of imprinting such scenes into your memory.

The sleep lesson was learnt for my subsequent job at the mobile operator, but that didn't prevent me from forgetting to log off my PC before leaving for the weekend. Upon my return on Monday, lo, I found a PC infested with porn spyware, toolbars, popup generators, the works. After reviewing the browser history, it was evident that someone had been surfing the seedier side of the information highway in the early early hours of Saturday morning. Most probably a cleaner had noticed the unlocked PC, and decided to catch up on a bit of email and porn, and in the process thoroughly infected my windows profile with not entirely unwelcome smut. This was, unfortunately, nothing I could resolve myself. Instead, I was forced to have a conversation with my new manager something along the lines of "Well, this is going to sound bad, but it seems that someone has been surfing a lot of porn on my computer..."

And if you want to consider temp jobs I've had, then I would also give honourable mention to my stint as admin assistant to the Marketing department at my university during summer. First or second week, I had the job of setting up a mailing list for staff of the larger business faculty (100 or so academics?). Setup went fine, but an immediate problem was revealed in that responding to someone's list message would effectively respond to the entire list. A friend of mine didn't catch this subtle point, and in responding to a proferred classified advert, managed to reply to the other 98 or so unrelated academics. I gallantly sought to bring her attention to this oversight so that she might not embarrass herself again. Hey Sarah, did you know that if you reply to a list email then everyone on the list will get it? I wasn't sure if you realised, so just thought I should check... all you need to do is check the TO: line... you know how people really hate getting that sort of mail :] dave. And here, of course, I forget to check the TO: line, and sent that email out to 97 or so unrelated (and now slightly more agitated) academics.

And how's the new job then? Nothing so bad has happened to me yet. The people have been really nice and I haven't done anything too embarassing so far. The worst thing on the radar is likely to be some sadistic initiation ritual known as The Krispy Kreme Challenge. If this is the last Pyramid Blog post you ever read, you can probably assume that I recently/tragically discovered that I was a diabetic.