Muse at Ashton Gate Stadium, Bristol

I finally left my house after 3 months.

Ever since the pandemic escalated, I have been living the Box Life. I sleep in a big box and wake up to my colleagues in a 13″ box. My food is left in a box by my doorstep and my friends are in a 5″ box. This is partly due to vulnerable habitants in my box and partly due to my tendency to live in my head.

When the time came for me to fulfil my civic duty of voting, I stepped out into the wild wild world… or is it a planet-sized box, running on an operating system that has been invaded by the COVID-19 virus? I wouldn’t be surprised at this, having spent my childhood watching The Matrix, my teens reading books like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and my university days earning a Philosophy degree (first lesson: Descartes).

This short trip out of my house reminded me that a wider world exists, and it includes this website! I thought it was high time to write something and what would be more apt than this situation’s exact opposite? The last time I was in a proper crowd, it was a stadium concert where people stood shoulder to shoulder, row after row. Impossible! It must be fantasy, for everything that happened before 2020 seems to be a distant half-remembered dream.

Last summer, I saw my favourite band for the 6th time, and I fear it could be the last. The pandemic ebbs and flows, showing no signs of relenting. In this photo, you can see my watch tanline, fresh from Cornwall. With hiking as a hobby and a beach near me, my watch tanline was a constant. But after 3 months of Box Life, this tanline is no more and I also lost a stone (~6kg/14lbs). Essentially, I look like Gollum now HAHAHA

I once again made it to the front row, where you have both an unobstructed view and first dibs when the stewards start handing out water near the end. Wait, why am I extolling the benefits of queueing early? There is nothing left to queue for anymore. Even if there was, the practice of sharing water with strangers—or anyone at all—is not coming back.

A selfie with the gathering crowd

(Normally I don’t wear makeup, to the point where different people at different times asked me the same question, ‘Have you ever worn makeup in your life?’ I would always reply, ‘I wear eye makeup to rock concerts.’ It is my only makeup skill, unless you count applying lipbalm during winter haha. I spent two hours on this and of course, I absent-mindedly rubbed my eyes after this photo. If you used liquid eyeliner before, you know what that means…)

They brought the brass in for ‘Pressure’, which made this ex-trumpet player here very happy!

One of the best things about long summer days is this—gigs with epic sunsets! Matt was playing the solo in ‘The Dark Side’ here, how ironic.

Clip of ‘Thought Contagion’

Murph the Robot appeared with the opening riff of ‘Stockholm Syndrome’. Its massive mechanical jaw and arm moved up and down through the metal medley, as if it would catch and gobble the band members up anytime. Yes, Muse can get very theatrical (they threw a guitar into the sea at Cannes). When I saw them at the O2 during the Drones tour, an inflatable airship fell into the crowd. Madness!

Confetti during ‘Mercy’! I got a lot of these on my hair, but that was nothing compared to the walking Christmas tree. Yeah on the way out of the stadium, this chap picked up all the confetti and completely covered himself with that, lol.

At the end of the gig, a crew member passed me this setlist, with the duct tape intact. Nice! :D I know some fans complain that their setlists are basically the greatest hits these days, which is quite inevitable when a band is long-lived. While I can’t argue against that (when I first saw them in 2007, they played ‘Bliss’ and ‘Soldier’s Poem’), I still enjoyed every show of theirs. After all, they won a dozen Best Live Act awards with virtuosity and showmanship that are increasingly rare with touring musicians. Most of all, there is nothing like the camaraderie with thousands of fellow fans, all the more precious in these isolated times.

Hang on… did I just say ‘precious’? #becomingGollum

Newark Castle

Thanks to the peculiarity of the train operator, I had to disembark in Newark and walk across town in order to catch the connecting train at the other station, despite my destination being well-connected by rail.

But on the bright side, I could pop by the castle, where I saw this:

What a contrast between the ruins and the tree,
blooming with the sovereignty of nature!

Books and bookshops

Ah, authors like Camus justify the time spent on verb conjugation. I had to trudge uphill to Keith Fawkes, walk in only to walk out (curse aisles that fit only one each), walk in again and climb up a ladder just to retrieve this book while this teddy bear slept in my coat pocket. How unjust!

It was such a lasting labour that whoever minded the till fell asleep. Upon waking up, he toppled a champagne flute (expectedly empty) and wrapped the book in a purple candy stripe bag. I received it, left £2 on the cluttered table and stumbled out into the dull world.

Hamlet, A Study in Scarlet and The Wind in the Willows — books
that took so many trains, their gilding are now faded and their spines frayed.

Old books sometimes come with surprises like equally old
photographs (to mark pages) or as pictured, old letters.

Spot the differences!
L: Five-year-old mock-vintage book on the youth of the author
R: Fifty-year-old decaying book on the decline of an old world. How apt!

Brown is so tiny he sleeps in a room made of Penguin books.

“My light and my salvation” — Psalms 27 illuminated by the
Mediterranean light. How I miss reading the bible on paper.

Shakespeare and Company has been housing so many books and people that it seems curiously natural to find a chessboard and piano there. I apologise to those who were distressed by my poor playing.

Notice the typewriter layout? QWERTZ keyboards have this uncanny ability of making QWERTY users like me curl up in a ball and weep. Now, I understand the plight of left-handers; what sort of hope do they have in this unreasonably right-handed world?