Summer's Here Kids

This will be the last blog I post from Loring Hall. Tomorrow afternoon I sign a contract for a house on Lucas Street in Deptford and leave South East London for the summer. Which will be exciting. We've got a loft conversion and everything. And a garden big enough for a two man kickabout.

This summer, like life, is full of possibilities (yeah, I just made a bad Dntel reference. I don't even like Dntel, apart from the Superpitcher remix of (This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan, which you should check out ASAP. It's a beaut). Who knows what I'll do. Perhaps I'll travel to various cities in Europe for hedonistic weekends fuelled by cheap alcohol, fist pumping and pounding, monotonous, rigid techno played in sweatboxes filled with leather clad Germans. I might actually do some writing over the summer. This would be a good idea as, for a creative writing student, I do very little writing in my free time. I started this blog primarily as a way of forcing myself to write, but it hasn't worked very well. I'm too worried about being earnest or whatever so I just post rubbish about records I like. I end up sounding like a tossed off in 5 minutes Vice article. But yeah, what else could I do? I could work. I really do need to work. If I'm lucky I might get to sweat my face off in a Pizza Hut in Norwich for 35hrs a week. Still, it's got to be better than working in a toy shop like I did for the whole of last summer.

No, in reality I will probably spend my summer sat in my room, listening to techno, house, disco and twee indie pop whilst I read short stories by American writers. I will moan about being bored but be unwilling to change things. I will be bored on the beaches and bored in the woods, and when I am bored in London next year I will miss being bored on beaches and in woods.

I'll leave you with an mp3 of a song by a band I've become obsessed with in the last week. John Darnielle is the man behind The Mountain Goats. Now, usually I hate most singer/songwriter stuff (Jens Lekman aside) but this guy is something else. His lyrics are better than most authors prose. So yeah, here's my favourite song of his, from the 2006 album Get Lonely. Totally reminds me of the writer Lorrie Moore, whose Collected Stories is one of the best books I've ever read. There's bound to be some of her stories online, so give her a go. She's like a slightly more flowery Raymond Carver.

The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely