On Friday night I played Mah Jong with Joh, Ed and the hive mind of Stevonne: an orgy of tiles, cat biscuits, tequila and Kahlua, but a good orgy. Until the "stomach punching" revelations, that is. <shiver>

Saturday saw a slow recovery, then Sophie and I drove off to the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. On the way there we happened across Middle Farm, and having had many discussions of said farm the previous night I requested a stop-off. I thought I'd not been there before, but everything seemed frighteningly familiar; I must have popped in at some point over the last few years.

 

As well as being a working (and open) farm which you can wander around, they have a vast collection of ciders, meads and wines for sale - with some particularly unusual varieties. I escaped with some Orange wine, 2 pints of rather sweet cider, some ginger mead, sweet honey mead, and traditional mead. Mead was one of our traditional fares when clambering around Wales, and holds many pleasant memories for me - most of them not suitable for publication here.

After that we continued on our journey to magical Bexhill, to see an exhibition of work by Jeremy Deller and then a performance of Acid Brass, the project he collaborated on with the William Fairey Brass Band. It's basically a brass band performing a selection of Acid House classics.

The exhibition was great; I wish we'd gotten there earlier to see all of The Battle of Orgreave, the film he produced about a clash during the 1984-5 Miners Strike... but the bits I saw looked good. I also particularly enjoyed his selection of calling cards designed to provoke conversation (e.g. "Please help me - I went to a single sex public school", "There is only one Minogue").

 

We took a quick break to shove some Italian food down our throats in town, then wandered back for Acid Brass. I knew what to expect here, having bought the album when it was first released, but it was great to see it done live; and surreal as it was to see a brass band playing this stuff, it was even more surreal to see members of the audience in their 40s or 50s clearly reliving halcyon days with their toddlers...