I’m back from Vienna. More on that later, hopefully. I’ve actually been back since Saturday afternoon, but there were 1097 unread posts in my RSS reader, so I have barely had time to eat until now. Or something like that.

But there’s always time to spend five minutes and join the bandwagon about this new, irresistible Tullycraft single The Punks Are Writing Love Songs. The song is as Tullycraft as Tullycraft can be, and which can be downloaded, for instance, on the blog of Magic Marker Records, who will release the band’s new album next month.

The Lucksmiths have a new album out, too. It is called Spring A Leak and contains 45 (!) songs that have been released before, but weren’t easily available. One of them is a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ Deep Sea Diving Suit, which is as brilliant as a song, as it seems like in theory. (It was a B-side of the T-Shirt Weather CD-single. You can listen to it here.)

And Professor Pez have a new album out, too. The Big Man Above is very kind this autumn to us who like good music.

I know you hadn’t forgotten about it. But just in case: It’s Exeter Goes Pop! again. Tonight. At the Phoenix. From 8 pm, and you won’t be charged for getting in.

I won’t be there though, for the very same reasons that made me miss every second club night so far. Too busy with work, which is too far away from home. Actually, I’m getting really busy, suddenly, because the highlight of this company’s year will take place next week: a big conference in Vienna. I have been to international conferences before, back in the days when the Dutch government paid me to think about some obscure maths theorems, but I never stayed in the Hilton. So even though I bet it’ll be hard work –we are organising the thing, after all– I am really looking forward to it.

Perhaps they should play some good Austrian pop tonight. If such a thing exists. It probably doesn’t. So they should just play A Smile And A Ribbon’s The Boy I Wish I’d Never Met. Because it’s such a brilliant life-defining heart string-pulling pop song.

‘Nobody [...] really noticed the predominance of brown, or if they did, thought it worth remarking upon. These were brown times.’

They never tell you, when you move to England, that Jonathan Coe’s books are perhaps the best introduction into the history of England of the past few decades. They should.

(The Rotters’ Club, which I just finished, is a brilliant book about growing up in 1970s England. The chapter in which Benjamin takes his sister for a walk might the best thing I’ve ever read. Why I never read any of the man’s until very recently, I don’t know. But guess who will be at the local library on Monday morning, waiting for it to open and to provide him with another book?)

Chances are that you weren’t in Lima, Peru last weekend, so you might not have seen Scattered Songs proudly lying in the local record shops. It is the debut album of The Occasional Flickers, which is Greek turned Scotsman George, a friend of ours, now residing in Edinburgh, who recorded the record on his own. I had heard the album before –George is a nice friend– and was listening to it again on the train to Oxfordshire yesterday morning. Now one is supposed to like their friends’ bands anyway, which might sometimes blur the actual opinion a bit, but I realised (again) that this boy does actually write some pretty decent pop songs. (That’s a euphemism.) It put me in a much-needed good mood for most of the afternoon.

Here is a video of A medal won in 84, my favourite song of the album, performed live in Edinburgh. Another song, Visions of Christine, is available through the website of Plastilina Records, who are those kind Peruvian people that will make sure your favourite record shop or mail order will have the album available for you.

I hated the world for not letting me join the fun and I hated the world as much for wanting me to join the fun. No, that doesn’t make sense to me either. But it happened, like it has happened so many times in the past. And there was no good reason for it: we had had a lovely day, celebrating a year of living in the UK, with good weather, good friends, good food and good music. It was, up to a certain point, one of the best days of the past year. And then I suppose that things got a bit overwhelming for me. Which is all right, I can just take a break. And well, I did, kind of, but the break lasted a couple of days and was characterised by dark thunder clouds in my head and annoying replies to anyone who didn’t just accept the plastic smile on my face, which was supposed to hide a deep-rooted and passionate hate. Which, of course, meant that poor Dimitra had to suffer me and my terrible mood-changes once again.

Sometimes I do hate myself.