It's raining. I swear that if you went outside and looked up, you'd drown within minutes. There's more rain out there than gaps.

The road - which I've never seen close to being flooded - is an inch deep in water.

We have no sandbags.

We do, however, have twenty cardboard boxes filled with my wife's clothes and shoes.

Our house looks like the Trotters' flat.

We move on 12th October. The house we're buying has an extension. It's one of the reasons we fell in love with it: an extra bedroom and a utility room.

Thing is, the extension was built in breach of a covenant on the house that stretches back to 1938, forbidding the building of extensions or outbuildings. We could be sued, or someone could come around and knock the extension down.

The solicitor, trying to pacify me, said, "it's only a very slight possibility," which - as you can imagine - was about as reassuring as a surgeon with the DT's leaning over you, rusty scalpel in hand, just as the general anaesthetic is kicking in.

We'll still buy the house, I imagine. We might just have to camouflage the extension.

The Loving Cup were very good on Friday night. They sounded a lot less like a tribute band, more like the real thing. The singer's not drawling as much. They went down really well.

I DJ'd okay. Played lots of stuff I've not played before without trotting out the usual cliches.

It was a curiously unsatisfying experience, though. I'm sure that the punters in Telfords used to be a lot more broadminded in the olden days. I have distinct memories of playing Can 'after the band' ['after the band' is always more restrictive because I want to keep people dancing] and the likes of Black Sabbath, Gang of Four and NWA... these days, if you don't drop the fucking Scissor Sisters within ten minutes of starting, there's a huddle of 'people' at the DJ booth, frowning and complaining.

Clearly they should have brought their iPods with them and danced a long to their own soundtracks.

Still, there's a challenge in there, somewhere, isn't there?

I was much more friendly on Friday night, though. The only person who go the rough side of my tongue was the 'persistent wanker' who kept coming up to me saying,

"You said you'd play the Stone Roses!"

There's a sweet, stabbing irony in the fact that the band who pushed me onto the jittery, stuttering go kart that has led me here, are the absolute bane of my existence every Friday night.

There's more to music than the Stone Roses.

Fool's Gold, indeed.

Jo's away Monday - Wednesday. I've got Neil Innes on Monday night and the Galatasaray game on Wednesday... but, for now, I'm going for a swim. Back to the top of the page...