someday, maybe.

Six days ago, there was a gig in London. Eric Burdon, no less – a complete legend. A lot of people from our generation don’t know who he is, so I’ll fill you in quickly – he was in a band called The Animals and wrote the timeless House of the Rising Sun, of which you can currently hear countless crap versions on cheap Casio keyboards across the country. If you want to pigeonhole his music as a genre, call it RnB – in the original sense of the phrase, none of this shite Craig David interpretation bleating about how horny he is. Proper wah keyboards and everything.

My dad had bought 4 tickets, so before the gig me, him, and two ladies from his office (Jo, my dad’s age, and Cath, somewhat younger) went out to an old favourite Italian place for dinner. We’d left it a little late, so we ended up gobbling dinner down and quaffing the plentiful supply of wine. Hurriedly, we paid and left, and youthfulness took over. Me and Cath bounded down the train station steps. The train was going to leave and the two old guys were nowhere in sight, so I held the doors open.

Sitting on the train, gliding through the darkness, it seemed an eternity before Kings Cross arrived. We were all pleasantly good from the wine though, and animated conversations about blow up dolls and the like soon ensued.

The good humour stayed into the gig. Plenty more drink was ordered, and I wound up dancing with Cath. We were giggling like school kids and having a great time. Some stupid deaf cow standing behind us snapped at me to “shut up, she couldn’t hear a bloody word.” Considering you could’ve heard the music four blocks away, I find that hard to believe.

In general, I found the night a troubling experience. On the one hand, this was great fun: good food, good music, good crowd, good times. But being around Cath – who’s taken, naturally – for so close and so long set a few mental balls rolling around my head. Dances don’t mean a thing when you’re pissed; everyone dances with everyone. She probably wouldn’t be like this if it weren’t for the drink. And I hadn’t even begun to think about what Phil would think. This wasn’t in my nature at all. A somewhat more plausible explanation: having spent 7 years at a guys-only high school has caused me intense guilt over any remotely romantic or sexual feelings.

Sometimes it occurs to me that I have the classic split personality thing. Like any youth, I want to be free - have fun, live it up. Do whatever. Good so far, right? Wrong. I seem to have been blessed (cursed?) with more morals than 30 other men combined. So the moral side of my brain forces its way back in and levels things out. Net result: nothing interesting ever really happens to me. This is not to say that I was hoping something would happen, far from it – I respect her hugely as a person.

In the end, she drank rather too much and we ended up carting her home between the three of us. Jo called Phil and we arranged for him to pick her up and see she got home ok. Jo came home with us for a bit, saw my drum kit and straightaway wanted to have a bash – even though it was one something in the morning. She sat down on the stool but comically slipped off and crashed onto the floor. I guess that’s another one who had a bit too much to drink, lol.

As for me, I felt a certain sense of liberation and guilt at how the night had gone. I went to bed troubled, and with my head spinning, in all senses of the word.