Last night, I had the strangest dream.. A GRATE BIG corridor, lined with evil shoes and chocolate cake. I am being chased by Dimitra Daisy, Stephen Hewitt, and Archel Holland. I run until my feet turn to leg-warmers, and eventually I reach a marmalade fountain, and I know I can run no further. They wave at me, one by one, screaming: "say something INDIE, ian!" and they cackle, like whelks do when nobody is looking. I know they won't be impressed by anything I can say. Perhaps I can fool them with Barry White... no, Dimitra has an extensive knowledge of music, and an effigy of Barry White in her cupboard, where she thinks nobody can see it.. Only one thing springs to mind.."err...love is like a bottle of Pimms, but a bowl of chips is not Mike Love" It is at this point that I realise I'm not wearing any clothes, and we're standing on a bridge two thousand.. - Oh okay, that's all utter bollocks. I thought it might be nice to come back with some sort of half-arsed story and gimmick. It was nice, once upon a time, to have a gimmick here. I don't know why I needed one so badly, whether it was some reluctance to ask you to accept me, or whether it was some attempt to stand out, in a place where one of the best things was that I didn't stand out, that I felt there were people around me, albeit in a strange computery and occasional picnicky way, who just accepted me. My that's a long paragraph. Remember when it was the done thing to write in really really long paragraphs that just went on and on and talked about peas, and ditches, and scratching one's arse. I scratched my arse this morning. My fingers still smell.. no, stop it RIGHT THERE. I am actually very clean. Well, reasonably clean, anyway. Perhaps it was knowing there were 890890483908430983 people out there getting the email, and even if 8908439084390843908 of them pressed "delete", that still left someone I'd never met in Nova Scotia, and a group of shepherds in Milton Keynes, who I had only known that one, brief time.. See, Ian, you're at it again. Just get to the point, and fuck off. Well, I miss you lot - and even if life got kind of JIOJAIORJEIOJFAEIOJFEIOJEFIO, as it does, I still wondered what a lot of you were doing. The weird thing about meeting internet chums is that you've already offered so much of yourself before you get to "know" them in a conventional way. That either means the barriers come straight up, or, if you're lucky, you can have less of that crap that we do when we first meet people, and we can just, vaguely, attempt to be honest. Through the power of cheap alcohol, junk-food and dancing, of course. Maybe that's why you can feel so attached to people you've only met a few times, and you don't have to see them that often to feel that you have very real and important friendships. So, erm... that 10th birthday picnic sounds great. This wasn't quite what I meant to write. I wanted to write something clever about people going off and having sex and not posting on Sinister, which seems to be the current theory. It would be nice if it were true. Perhaps it has something to do with...whisper it...Belle and Sebastian being less important to people's lives - not only because NU-B&S don't seem to sound like anything other than nice, clever pop whereas once they sounded like someone that I knew, but also because, at some point, we accept a band isn't going to change our lives. Not without a bit of our own input, at least. I still read the posts quite a lot, and I wonder about things like Butcher Boy - whether I should be happy, or even care, that they got a good review or not. I even thought about entering Ken's karaoke competition (is it still going, ken?) - but its not the same as being here, is it? Can we just come back and not talk about Belle and Sebastian? Thinking back, did we ever actually talk about Belle and Sebastian? Hey, someone post about something completely random, and we can have one of those conversation thingies. Hey, why shouldn't it be YOU???? Finally, I met two very Famous Sinister List Lovelies at a BIRMINGHAM PICNIC the other day. Sort of a picnic. In that there were more than two people, and we ate and drank. So that's a picnic, innit? I wanted to take them somewhere very exciting, and more bangin than a box of squirrels on drugs, but couldn't think of anywhere. We did sit in a place that served strange cocktails (they burn the skin of the orange a little bit, then float it on your cocktail... I've never seen that before - is there any point to it?) and played CLIFF RICHARD videos. Also, it was in gayville, and the gays are always exotic, aren't they? Like papayas. Strange, dancing, papayas. Oh, such juicy goodness. I guess that's reporting back, of sorts, haven't done that in a while...don't even know if Starry and Lixi are reading, but if you are, it was nice to see you, dears. We should do more Sinister things, and post, and stuff, because, like, it was sort of fun, wasn't it? yeah yeah YEAH TYEHATETAH! So, no more making up crap about dreams. Not even that dream where I'm being chased up a totally different corridor by Ally Cook and Robin Stout, and they're holding... no, not that dream. come back to sinister, lovely children. Let's celebrate each other. Celebrate yourself while you read. Did you know it was the FEAST OF DIONYSIUS today? So that involves goodness, at least. Have some nice goodness. Take may good care. I love you all. I kiss you. Twice. Structure is over-rated. xx Ianjamesanscombe And is it too late to ask how one gets to play at Tigerwanking? I miss that musical masturbation. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+