Dan Govan

January is often regarded as a lean and boring month where people reflect on the highlights of the past holiday season and mope about the weather. I decided not to go with the mainstream opinion. Not including various drinks/lunch/dinner with various people, my January went a bit like this:

• NYE: Popstarz Quick visit to Darren's sumptuous soiree before high-tailing it to Popz. Was really fun to see NYE in a club atmosphere and the "Snow storm" and "backstage" were very cool, but between my not knowing many people out, and hitting the free alchy a leeetle too hard and crashing out at 2ish, it doesn't rate as one of the best NYEs ever ;-) Got to bed about 6, woke up about 4, ugh.
• 5th January: West 5 + randomness Put silly blonde bits in my hair. Stylist talked me into it. With that and the long black coat it's all very retro-me. Later went to Will's for impromptu cheese and wine followed by West 5 which was actually a lot nicer than expected. Rather than being cheesy and naff the Piano-side Karaoke was actually fun to watch. Am I getting old? Anyways it began to all go horribly wrong when after West 5 finished when we decided to continue the party at Will's with a random posse and too much alcohol. Hrm. I was on the roof at some point but I only know that because I took a picture of it.
• 9th January: I am Legend You're not Legend, you're a very naughty boy. This film seemed to deliberately miss the point of the book, replacing it with some weak-ass god-bothering. Meh. A let down.
• 11th: Ricardo's Birthday thing I had decided not to go out that night but in a spate of random a party came to me. Woot! They rolled in from the pub and commenced drunken cooking and Portuguese liquors, before rolling out to the club a few hours later. Sweet.
• 12th: dUCKiE Billed as a 30+ club night at the Vauxhall tavern. Noted by a friend of a friend as "the place where indie boys go to die". Good crowd, great cabaret, music extremely random and massively hit and miss. The place was rammed to the rafters and smelled of toilet, only worse. Great night in the face of adversity, topped off with a 3am visit to MacDonald's. Classy.
• 16th: St. Trinians Billed as a crap film, pleasingly it was actually very good. Many laugh-out-loud moments, and more than a couple of "Oh, Mr. Darcy!" moments too. Heartily recommended.
• 19th: Trash Palace > Ghetto Luke's Birthday thing. A few old Warwicky faces, a few I never knew at the time, excellent "Jager Bomb" things and a bit of a boogy. Good night, if cut a little short. Spent longer negotiating night buses than anything else :-)
• 21st: Pub Quiz Regular version of last month's music pub quiz, again with the sitting and the watching other people get points. Celeb spots: Julian Barratt from The Mighty Boosh and some dude from Hot Chip. Le shrug.
• 23rd: Gayer Nacht Few peeps round for wine and films, namely Broken Hearts Club (which was actually fairly terrible, in spite of featuring Superman and Whatsisname from Scrubs) and Another Gay Movie (which is brilliant if you can bear to watch it). Must do this again! *poke* Maybe with less psuedo-porn though.
• 26th: Unskinny Bop Due to a change of management at the venue the future of Unskinny Bop is in dire peril! They negotiated 2 more nights to prove themselves to the people in charge, of which this was the first. Considering we kinda didn't move from the same spot all night (it's a small place) it was excellent. Just plain old dancing throughout, old-school. Lots of pics here. It was all back to Darren's post-club for more drinking and a good few hours of talking shit.
• 30th: Charlie Wilson's War Heard there was rather a lot of singing in Sweeney Todd so saw this instead. Hmm. It was alright, but kind of ended on a bum note. *poot*
• 31st: BUG Adam Buxton does it again at the NFT. Sweet bunch of videos and way more directors than last time, including the ones who did the Hoosiers latest stuff. Nice.

Another Resolution was to go out more, to Do More Random Stuff. "Nothing ventured..." and all that. It's been a reasonable attempt really; with a few friends, a bit of money and a smidgen of effort it's not difficult to find things to do in London. Since my last "Wot I did" catchup post there's been a unbroken chain of Stuff that finally and unfortunately ended last weekend, when a bad case of man-flu caused me to bail on Saturday entirely and spend the next three days in bed watching back-to-back US QAF. Ugh. I'm still coughing like an idiot. Grr it. So anyways it's time for another catch-up! In other words I'm going to blatantly raid gCal for most of the crap I've been up to over the past couple of months. December first. January next time.

• 5th Dec: Caroline's Soireé Very strange event in that it was all very posh, the average age was a couple of decades north of what I was used to and the amount of wine put away was astonishing. Very interesting. The older I get the more of my convictions are challenged revealed as subjective rubbish, but talking to these olds I assume there'll be some sort of turning point somewhere down the line I'll start becoming very opinionated about some utter tosh.
• 6th Dec: Darren's Birthday thingy Eagle Bar Diner - Milkshake cocktails: still very good. Crocodile/chicken burger: Not really very good at all.
• 8th Dec: Dansistor Uber-random disco/dance night in some sort of mini-warehouse type establishment. Seems disco is great because you don't have to know it to dance to it. Who knew? Also where I realised that what you like to dance to doesn't have to be what you like to listen to. I hear it's closed down now though. This was the night I walked home from Piccadilly Circus at five in the morning, headphones on, pacing along. Actually fun.
• 12th Dec: Work Christmas thing This was a bit dire to be honest, the cocktails looked very nice but were mostly water with flavouring and the "food" was an assortment of inadequate canapés. The vodka luge ice statue was kinda fun though. The masses of free drinks proved to be a little too much, and after leaving the venue for another Soho place that I don't remember much of, I decided to walk home in completely the wrong direction. I eventually hailed a taxi in Battersea. The best part about it was all the picturesque scenes I captured with my rubbish cameraphone as I wandered off, all the lovely landmarks that should have screamed "wrong way" and, "head back". Muppetous.
• 15th Dec: Mary's Mulled Wine Evening There was wine. It was mulled. There was also Glögg. It was soooo good. I could so do with that right now, to soothe my throat you see. Purely medicinal purposes. Lovely evening swapping gifts and catching up. Cut a bit short as we also had to go to:
• 15th Dec: JCW's Christmas do "Too much is not enough", cue random flashbacks to a similar party with the same theme in Leamington about 5 years ago. Brilliant to see JCW again, strange to see his peeps in their fabulousness. It's astounding these people that have so much money they can spend their entire lives just being beautiful and doing interesting things. I've also never seen so much champagne in one place, and I'm including retail establishments.
• 17th Dec: Christmas Pub quiz Old School pub quiz had a Christmas edition that mostly involved more prizes than usual and some free food. Apparently it was notorious in it's time but then it moved venue and now it's mainly a place for the team from the NME to feel superior by winning every week. Definitely a laugh though. Saw a couple of the Magic Numbers too, which was funny.
• 21st Dec: Giles' Christmas Party G lives in a lovely place in what feels like the middle of nowhere but assuredly isn't. Kinda "architectural" and odd. There was "a wonderful life" projected onto a wall and an old engine sitting around. The party was ace, starting with more gift-swapping, excellent nibbles and good company, then moving on to a bus to Ghetto which was excellent. Don't think I'd ever been on a Friday
• 30th Dec: BDD at Turnmills I've never been to a "proper" club (Wait, does Heaven count?) for fear that the music would be shit or the clientele twats (check and check for Heaven), so having the peeps from Button Down Disco take over Turnmills for a "Fuck New Year" party was a treat. The scale and variety of the decor was dazzling, the music was good, the crowd was decent. It's just a pity the drinks were so dear.

There were meant to be illustrations but I can't work out how to blog flickr pics. Which is annoying as I did it for the last post. Bah. Anyways January later. In other news, the RSS feed works now.

About a month ago I was going to write the usual prosaic end-of-year stuff about what I was going to try and do better in the coming year, but the very thought of it bored me so much that I wanted to chew off my own hands to spare the world and myself such uninspired rubbish. You’ve heard it all before, I’ve said it all before. But I felt this time was a little different, so instead of a generic statement of purpose I thought I’d wait a bit and give a statement of progress. Or several, rather. One for each of the “resolutions”.

I’ll start with a quick one; Photography.

Problem: I found I had stopped taking photos entirely, due to combination of apathy and crapness of camera. I thought this sucked. Solution? Get new camera. Take lots of pics. Huzzah!

Progress: Camera got: Panasonic Lumix. Wide angle for a digicam and small enough to fit in my pocket all the time, even when out at night. It also has the fabled anti-shake thing and can take a string of photos in a row. Me likey. It’s taken a while to get used to having a camera on my person again though, so photos have been a little sporadic, but a few are on flickr now, including what might be my best/favorite picture ever, shown below. (Larger resolutions here.)

Still to do: RTFM! As good as automatic mode is on this camera I still need to read the manual to work out how to do things… well… manually.

Early this morning I was having a pirate dream. A pirate captain was threatening me with a weighty cutlass while his crew looked on jeering. At some point I must have gotten bored of this scenario because the me-character grabbed the cutlass and starting slicing the captain up. He was most upset. Then I apparantly thought that the bloodyness was getting a bit grim and so I switched to banged him over the head with the flat of the blade in a slapstick manner. Then I woke up. As I flailed at my phone-come-alarm-clock I hit the wrong button and it switched into mp3 mode, half way through the song “I Need A Holiday” by Scouting For Girls, the part where it repeats the line “I wish it could be sunday when I wake up every day” over and over.

So true.

So here I am at dangovan.com and here I shall stay! For ever more if all goes well. I haven't had a chance to sort out what the place looks like yet so it's still pretty ropey. I just took the out-of-the-box template that was closest to what I wanted it to look like and started ripping it apart, but I badly underestimated how much ripping would be needed. Finding such dodgy work put forward as a professional piece makes me feel both smugness and despair, but at least it saves me from having to start with an empty page, which I hate. I think it's going to be pretty good when it's done, which is really great because it's been a long time coming.

Unfortunately the massive amount of work that needs doing here means the actual writing of blogs is still on hiatus: I've got a small pile of would-be blog entries that I haven't yet written, and most of them probably never will. In the mean time I might write about progress here, or about how the inevitable new year's resolutions are going, or a random rant about the weather. It doesn't really matter because nothing's ready for "launch". As soon as that fateful day comes I'll up the witty and turn the insightful to 11 (For about a week.) but I'm in no particular hurry to get there.