Would not normally be having a race with Pav on a Tuesday morning. I would normally be pestering him to put the latest episode of Heroes onto his FTP site ready for me to download. This morning however, I decided to leave him alone and downloaded the avi file myself. Although it took me a while to find a genuine copy available. We used the same torrent, and even though he started forty-five minutes after me, his download finished over thirty minutes before. I had an average transfer rate of 60kbit/s, where has he has 300k. Bubble alerts in XP can be very annoying, but this bubble from uTorrent confirms the torrent file download is complete. Just a shame I had to wait some forty minutes later for my bubble!

When I got home from work that evening, around 6.30pm, I had an e-mail in my Hotmail (correction, MSN Live Mail). This was strange, an e-mail from Pav, with the subject “One for da blog”. There was an attachment, two in fact. The body of the e-mail was short. Three simple words. These arrived today. If I ever thought I was not going on holiday next month, that illusion was shattered with the delivery of these tickets. In fact in exactly one month’s time, I will be at a birthday party at Island Bar in Caversham, before then at the end of the night, getting ready to drive down to Gatwick for the flight to Innsbruck Airport, while of course I wish we were landing at Salzburg Airport which is named after the city’s number one son, Mozart.

That links us to the topic of music. On my drive back from Guildford this afternoon, I was pondering what to listen to. As I pulled out of York Road car park, the traffic was quite heavy, so I had time, while sitting there to choose my album for the stereo. For some reason I decided I was in the mood for some garage. I had last really spoken about garage music on the phone to Dave. It was making a come back of sorts but under the re-branding of UKG (please, who thought that one up?). I bought the Pure Garage Platinum album back in April 2003 from HMV in Slough if my memory serves me correctly. I converted the three disc album into a single MP3 CD and gave the box set to my sister, Samantha. Listening to the songs and aided by a scrap of paper (which lists my favourite track from each directory (effectively disc) it brought back some fond memories of 2000. My first year at University. My favourite song is Imagine by Shola Ama, but I also found a new song Something by Amar featuring MC Rankin. Also it was a great opportunity to test out the power of the new sound system. Amar performed at the BBC Electronic Proms two months ago and is featured on Timbaland’s album Shockvalue.

My route home, was relatively cross country up to Bracknell. Here I joined the A329(M) before heading onto the M4 towards London (westbound). As I took the exit to get onto the M4, I noticed the heavy traffic at a standstill underneath me, but it was too late to change lane. I had to bite the bullet. It was not too bad. We were stationary for a few minutes, then made steady progress for a mile before stopping again. Then a few minutes later we started moving again. There was no evidence of an accident, so I just assume it was ‘sheer’ wait of traffic as we constantly hear on the radio. (Apart from Teg because he cannot get any reception on any band!) While on the motorway, I switched to one of my drive time CDs. I have been burning music albums for myself for the past eight years, but to date, I have only ever created one complete album. This album I call, “Drivetime” and spans two disc. The idea behind this album was two fold, firstly predominately music to listen to in the car, secondly (and here is the clever bit) to have a song from three decades. I stuck with 80s, 90s and 00s. This worked perfectly and enables for a track listing that just works and does not conflict. One of the tracks on this album, was Walking Away by Craig David. The perfect song for the way I felt and memories of the music video, as David walks out of his 4×4 and walks through the traffic on a busy road in London. (Readers Stateside might be a bit lost as they had a completely different version!) However, the song was right for the moment, not for right now. So this time around my posting ends with lyrics from another song, which I listened to at least four times this evening. Imagine If I Told You That I Want You Imagine If It All Came True Tell Me What You Would Do With Me Would You Tell Me That You Feel The Same Imagine If I Told You That I Need You Would You Say Baby I Need You Too No Matter What You Do I Know You Should Be In Love With Me