I've been hunting everywhere for a copy of the Frightened Rabbit album 'Midnight Organ Fight'. By 'everywhere' I mean I've looked in HMV in Winchester and two different HMV's and Zavvi's in Portsmouth and Gunwharf Keys respectively. I hate it when you're looking in record shops for one CD and nobody has it, because you become a little too familiar with the CDs that are either side of the one you want. I remember when I was trying to find a copy of Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River, I got absolutely sick to the back teeth of that OK Go album with the flowers and the car on the sleeve. Not as sick, I imagine, as OK Go are of seeing people rip off their running machine video and the fact that nobody can remember how the song goes. Then, when I tried to get hold of Mapmaker by Parts and Labor, and I became fed up looking at Dolly Parton albums, especially now that people don't just put her in Country, they put her in Rock and Pop as well. I eventually ended up not buying Black Sheep Boy until I found a second hand copy in London a year and a half later, and I had to import the Parts and Labor album from Sweden, even though the band are from Brooklyn. I'm not even sure if that album even made it into this country. However, Frightened Rabbit are Scottish, and fuel crisis or no fuel crisis, there's no excuse for an album created on the same island, not reaching the south. I really don't want to resort to buying it on the internet. I'll try in Southampton tomorrow, but really, I wish there was still a Fopp somewhere, because Midnight Organ Fight, is precisely the sort of album you could guarantee finding in Fopp, what with it being mawkish Highland indie shit and all. It's a truly great album though, if you ignore the three minute-long tracks of filler, you basically have 11 songs of heartbreaking and angry songs almost exclusively written by jilted romantic males, for jilted romantic males, about dealing with break-ups, wanting to injure ex girlfriends new loves, and coming to terms with having the start again. The lyric sheet should come with the best lines already underlined, it's the sort of album that people discuss their favourite lines from. I declared myself housebound when I woke up this morning because my feet were absolutely killing me, and I found it incredible difficult to stagger from one side of the living room to the other, without clutching onto the back of the sofa or adopting a preposterous bandy-legged pirate stance across the kitchen. Absolute idiocy. But I got so fed up of this that I did eventually go for a short walk today, almost deliberately as an excuse to listen to Frightened Rabbit without being distracted by television or George Lamb's greying hair. It's been a while since I loved an album so much that I needed an excuse to walk around the park even though I have malfunctioning feet. The whole album deals with heartbreak in such an accurate and romantically sad way, it almost made me want to get into another doomed relationship and fuck everything up, just to add extra resonance to the lyrics. Almost.
My walk was supposed to go straight to the post box around the corner and home again, but for reasons I can't comprehend, my feet didn't feel quite so much like amputation was the best solution when I was wearing the shoes that caused the problem, so I carried on to the leisure centre in Winchester is located at the end of my road, and isn't very exciting. It used to be simply known as The Recreation Centre, and was a faceless generic ugly building. Then it burnt down, and I remember that night really clearly, because it's just about the only major fire that Winchester's ever had, and there was lots of hilarious over-exaggerated fears that our house was in the direct line if it spread, which it was never going to do, but we were all kept inside anyway. The renovation of the centre meant it had a big ugly glass roof put on it, they rebuilt the swimming pool and chucked flume in with it, and added a few odds and sods on the ground floor to justify having this warped Sydney Opera House blue glass thing sticking out the top. This is the only version of what's now known as River Park Leisure Centre that I can remember. Although, it's not quite the same now. To be honest, I've got absolutely no fucking use in a leisure centre whatsoever, but I had a wander around to see if anything had changed. Firstly, the flume has gone, but the exit pool was still there, it just didn't have any water in it, and I'm not surprised they're loathing to remove it because it's got a really pretty blue mosaic pattern on it in the shape of a whale. Nothing else appeared to be different; the centre has recently gone under new management, and I guess the flume had to go, but the pools were the same. I didn't want to hang around because I was the only person there who wasn't the mother of a 5 year old child learning to swim, and could tell everyone was looking at me. I watched some people who were, again, uncomfortably young doing some incredible trampolining in the main hall, but got self concious, especially because the window balcony thing I was standing on was at precisely the same height as the peak of each jump. If there's one way to be put off your flip, it's the sight of a sunburn goth gawping at you. I went downstairs again and picked up a program to see what else was new and in a restricted area, like in the gym. I asked at reception if they had a swimming timetable, and was pretty much told that I was a total idiot, because the leaflet I had on me contained the swimming timetable and I should have looked closer. In mild anger, I left and walked around the park. Everything looked exactly the same. I walked up Nun's Road, because someone from Nun's Road recently got arrested for spreading graffiti everywhere, but I didn't see any evidence of it anywhere, on Nun's Road or anywhere else in town. I won't pretend I wasn't disappointed not to find any, graffiti makes a good photo opportunity. I didn't do a full circuit of the park, instead I walked on further past what used to be the athletics track. I think Winchester does keep up with modern trends and fashions, but is always lagging behind. Only getting a Starbucks and Subway in the past year is one indicator, the other is that now the running track, which used to be on the perimeter of the football pitch, has been overtaken by the football pitch, and now this area of Winchester is known as the football club. They've even put a pathetic little attempts at a stand at one end, which has, from what I could see, three rows going back and four across, so twelve people could sit down. Everyone else just has to stand around like an animal. There was no match on a Wednesday afternoon clearly, so I continued on my way. I thought about going to look at the allotment, but I'm not 100% sure that we still have one, certainly my dad hasn't mentioned anything about it recently on the phone, so maybe we don't. It's not best practice to walk onto someone else's allotment and start poking around with the shed or anything else there, so I didn't. Instead I made my way home a strange route up through Abbot's Barton, a residential area away from the city centre that isn't that exciting, but it reminded me of the week-long period I had a paper round, which I categorically despised, and should I ever have children, I will ban them from having one.
Leave the rest at arms length / I'm not ready to see you this happy.
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