Episode 1404: Trip To The Other Side Of Coventry...

Only finished reading Sea Of Trees tonight because Emma and Toby came to my kitchen for drinks at 1 am. At least that bottle of Malibu from last year is now finally gone, even if I ended up drinking more of it last night than I preferred. The novella, by the way, is beautifully wrought and well worth checking out. Robert James Russell's definitely one writer to keep an eye on. I spent the afternoon helping out with some children's games in Stoke Heath (incidentally, a part of Coventry that I've never been to), which I have to say was quite uncharacteristic of me. I don't regret it though. Got a bit of sunshine, and the kids looked like they really had fun. I mean, it definitely beat sleeping till noon and then frittering away the rest of the afternoon procrastinating. So now it's night, and I'm checking out new music online instead of writing. There's a new Delerium track coming out called 'Monarch', and I'm glad that the sound is more in the vein of the Nuages Du Monde album than the 'Dust In Gravity' single. Not that I hated that single or anything. I actually found Kreesha Turner's vocals on that interesting, and Poem and Chimera were pretty poppy albums. It's just that Nuages Du Monde is probably my favourite album, so if the rest of Music Box Opera sounds like 'Monarch', I'll be really happy. On a related note, thanks to the magic of YouTube, I've discovered the folk-pop sounds of Joshua Hyslop, a labelmate of Delerium's. It's completely the wrong time of year for it, but I really like his version of 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas', which is one of my favourite Christmas songs. His new album might make for good dissertation-writing music tomorrow...