We almost managed to blow up an EasyJet flight to London. We had a very cunning plan, which involved using two (plastic) jars of hazelnut paste, but security at Amsterdam Airport were more clever than we had thought them to be. They removed both jars from our hand luggage and all we could do was get on the plane, which safely landed on Gatwick Airport.

So we have been to the Netherlands. It was strange to be back again, mostly because everything was so familiar. Like it had been a month, rather than almost a year, since I had last been there. At the same time, it was such a relief to realise that, when I had last walked through these streets, we still had to move to England, and find a house, a job and a new life, and that everything had worked out so well in the end. Especially since I realised how this, rationally seen, had seemed such an unwise thing to do. But then, if I had only made rational decisions in my life, I’d still be lying in the pram.

Speaking of that, unlike everyone else, our nephew Tijs had changed. Quite a lot, actually. Well, that’s what babies do. He is more than a year old now, and slowly but decisively crawling his was through his little world.

I was quite surprised to realise how many people actually knew I work in Abingdon. To all those people: it’s dry again. In fact, work, although no more than a few hundred yards from the Thames, had never been flooded. (The clever people made sure that it was built 60cm higher than the previous flood record. Well, what would you expect form a company that claims to protect your computer?) So, yes, I’m back at work now, with a load of things to do, and a lot of emails I still have to answer. Let me just use the fact that my head is having a prolonged holiday as an excuse. It’s a cheap one, I know.

We find ourselves abroad right now. In the Netherlands, which isn’t really abroad of course, but they drive on the ‘wrong’ side of the road nevertheless. Which also means that I’m not at work this week. Work, which is in Abingdon-on-Sea, a couple of yards from the Thames, so I’m not sure if I’d be able to go there anyway. I did spend 11 hours on trains last Friday though, but that was only partly caused by the floods – and for a much bigger part by First Great Western’s incapability of dealing with stressful situations. We also feel for the people who go to IndieTracks this weekend, but then not too much as we’ve got more important things to do. Eating cake, for example.

There used to be lots of reviews and blog posts lying around here on this domain, back from the old Think Small: pre-WordPress and mostly written in Dutch. They had disappeared a while ago, after I had been playing with some settings and I had never been bothered enough to look into it. But now that I finally did, I realised it wasn’t me who broke them, it was just that the provider had denied access to some essential file. One email later –no, they have no idea why they ever did that– everyhing works again.

So there you go: 850 reviews, all in Dutch and at least 700 of them written by me. From the over-pretentious ‘magazine’ that wanted to make a difference to Dutch music scene to writing about three new Swedish bands a week. Or, from the bloke with too much time on his hands to the bloke whose life was suddenly going way too fast to keep up with. If you happen to be that bloke, and you’re kind of in pace with own your life again, it’s quite nice to read some of it back though. It wasn’t all that badly written.

What I had never realised though, is that it started with a review of The Best Friends Group and ended with one of The Lucksmiths and that both bands feature the same Mark Monnone. (Spelling has never been something Think Small excelled in. Well, I did get more than half of the letters in his name right.) And not that long after I had stopped writing reviews, I found myself standing in the yard of a small Athenian venue, with that same Mark Monnone and a couple of others, trying to recall the lyrics of The Cat’s Miaow’s Make A Wish. But that’s another story.

In any case, if you’re interested: here’s the old blog, here are some interviews and, since both are in Dutch, here is the old English blog. And here’s what I still consider to be my favourite review of that time.

• The Lovelies hailed from Portsmouth and they were, erm, really lovely. Nancy posted three songs the other day and I really like them. But then… didn’t I have a Lovelies CD? Looked though my files. Indeed. Sold it. Never even gave it a proper listen, probably. That’s what one gets from buying too many CDs. Hah.
• Jens Lekman has a new single. It’s really good. I would have forgotten to post about it, if it weren’t for this totally unrelated article in the Independent.
• Even if I didn’t know the band’s music –come to think of it, I still know only one song…– seeing these photos, I would know I’d love Liechtenstein.
• The Bartlebees are on MySpace. Which would be a useless piece of information, if it weren’t for the songs you could listen to. All four of them are covers, but the Bartlebees might have been the best cover band ever. Also, it includes And Then Suddenly which originally was a very obscure Dan Treacy-song.
• I linked to Pitchfork’s Forkcast twice above. Might keep an eye on that then.

And then there’s also this Ph.D. thesis. Always there in the background, usually sitting in a quiet corner of the room, managing to hide very well, to the point where it almost gets unnoticed, only then to suddenly jump up and draw all attention to itself by jumping through the room.

I feel guilty. Towards myself, towards people who said I was such a talented mathematician, but mostly towards my supervisor. He has always been great to me, and very helpful too. Gave me a lot of time and space when I needed it, to sort my life out. It wasn’t enough though, it would never have been probably, not to finish the thesis on time anyway. I will finish, I know, and I keep telling this to myself, but I’ve lost almost all of my motivation to finish. But then, I was never really excited about it in the first place. Always thought the excitement would come back one day, as it had gone so suddenly a few months before I started the job. But it never did.

It doesn’t really help either that’s it’s something form the past. A past that I don’t really want to forget, but that I definitely want to get done with.

So I spent most of today working on the damn thing. I had to. Though it was mostly trying to work on it, as I found myself staring at the computer screen a lot, trying to make sense of things that I know I used to understand quite well. And I didn’t make much progress. Again. So I ended up feeling frustrated and rather unhappy with myself. Again. But if I’ll just keep trying, it should work one day. It should.

So I took the bicycle this morning and went to Oxford. It wasn’t that I desperately felt the need to go to Oxford on this very day but, like most things in life (well, in my life), it was just a convenient way of fulfilling two wishes at once: to visit Oxford properly, now that I’ve been working so close to it for half a year, and to do something on a lonely Saturday.

Oxford is a nice city, as that thousands of tourists, enough to make the streets in the city centre very crowded, can’t be wrong. They can take away the need to spend hours on the streets and watch the, admittedly quite pretty, buildings though. But Oxford has museums too, all free, and I had made my main purpose of this day to visit the Museum of the History of Science.

I had read it is the oldest purpose-built museum in the world, which had sounded promising. It wasn’t built for the right purpose though. It has all that gives museums a bad name: just rooms filled with things. This is how they measured the distance between planets in the 17th century and that is what 19th century looked like. No story to link the things. Just small notes, giving a very concise description of the items numbered 1 to 12 in every display. (The best museum I have ever been to is the Independence Museum in Latvia, Riga, which has only black and white photos –I’m slightly exaggerating here– but they’re linked by such an interesting and well-written story that I’d love to go back there one day, to see it all again.) I spent half an hour or so reading the occasional display, mostly because I felt like I had to, and then went to the first of a series of lectures about the number seven –it’s 07/07/07 today, after all– but that wasn’t half as nice as the idea had sounded either. Something about magic around the number seven in the 16th century and how that was supposed to be linked to the seven days of the week. It didn’t make much sense to me.

Luckily, Oxford has a large number of bookshops too. Always nice to spend some time strolling around and to put some extra titles on the list of things I want to read. One day. But then, with a book-case full of interesting books at home, most of which still unread (by me), there wasn’t much point in even thinking about buying something.

So in the end, I bought the few things that I needed to buy, found a nice quiet park and spent a few hours sitting under a tree, reading Rachel Seiffert’s new novel Afterwards and enjoying the first summery day in months. And that was nice.

Song of the day: Next Time Passions – Not Here Anymore

Dimitra is in Thessaloniki right now. I’m not. She has family living there and a number of friends too. I only have some in-laws and some friends-through-Dimitra living there. Who I’d love to have seen though, so it’s not like I didn’t want to go, but one can’t have everything. So I’m spending some lonely weeks here in England, mostly in Oxfordshire, as there’s no point in going back to Devon for the weekend.

It’s not as bad as it sounds (although weather that resembles ‘summer’ a bit more would be nice). For example, I get to sleep in the same bed for more than six consecutive nights, something which I haven’t done since December. I hadn’t realised this so much, but I’ve been ‘about to leave’ for months now. It’s this what’s the worst part of working-away-from-home, not the missing Dimitra, and not even the long train journeys. So I’m quite happy that, for a change, I won’t have to do any travelling in the weekend. I might go and visit Oxford, which I still haven’t done. It seems to have a couple of nice museums. And I can read books, something for which I never have (or take) time to otherwise.

But I do miss Thessaloniki. And not just because they have proper summer right now.

(Not Here Anymore is the best Greek song ever, if you’d ask me, which you kind of do by reading this blog. It’s from a compilation called Try A Little Sunshine on Greek label Pop Art. Like almost all Greek bands, they were from Athens. Thessaloniki deserves a couple good bands.)

“I feel it will neeeee-ver stop; I feel like I’m listening to Swedish pop”

There’s a new song for download by The Electric Pop Group and, no surprise, it’s really good. They played in England London last weekend, but I sadly didn’t get to see them. Tom did though and he only made me a little bit jealous.
Fellow Swedish pop stars Bedroom Eyes have a new EP out and since they’re such nice people, they’ve put the full EP, including a printable cover, on their site for us to download. For reasons not even clear to myself I only downloaded two of them, but I keep finding myself putting them on repeat on the mp3 player. Not that I will ever get tired of sweet, melodic pop songs from Northern countries (both songs sound quite Scottish to me), but even if I would, I’d still keep listening to Bedroom Eyes. Oh, it’s called Valentine Vacancy and it’s pictured left. [thanks to half of the blog-o-sphere for putting the new single to my attention]
And there’s The Garlands, who are Swedish too and who do a very nice cover of Wham!’s Freedom, of which I didn’t even know I knew the original. They share members with Free Loan Investments, Nixon and Cloetta Paris, one someone is involved in Fabulous Friends Records too. Which is just a complicated way of saying that Roger Gunnarsson is the male half of the band. [via The Rain Fell Down]

Chris has called it day with his 32nd and final The Rain Fell Down podcast. Now one could get all sad about how much his shows will be missed –and they will be– but just like with Tangents the other day, it’s so much better to stop when people will still be sad and miss you, than to keep something going just for the sake of keeping it going. Still, let me use this post to praise the shows one final time and, if you haven’t done that yet, urge you to download the full 32 hours of great music: indiepop and what-would-become-indiepop, old and new and obscure and relatively-well-known.

In the real world, rain didn’t stop falling down. Not at all. I suppose it was the ideal context to The Lodger’s Grown-Ups that I was listening to this morning –the band hails from Leeds, after all– but if that’s all it takes for summer to start, I wouldn’t mind playing my Holiday, Vacaciones and Another Sunny Day records. Not at all.