Palace Crystals

The Palace Crystals at the Palace beer festival 2011, originally uploaded by Kong_.

Here are some young girls semi-clad in blue and red. Here are some shamed older boys, one needing an urgent refill. Here is a stand inside Selhurst Park that had just borne witness to a seedy bunch of blokes cheering on the young girls as they cavorted. Here is a pie and chips for lunch, with chips and pie for dinner.

Sometimes I find my life impossibly glamorous. Malcolm Allison would have approved.

Three Deutsche Marks

Mark lives in a little bit of paradise.

Zurich, and Switzerland as a whole, is so bloody marvellous. A great standard of living, friendly folk, wonderful natural beauty - it's a little bit of paradise. If we weren't already moving to New Zealand (which at least has the friendly folk and the nature) it'd be hugely tempting. Mind you, I've only been during the summer.

I visited Mark to say hello but also to crash at his pad whilst we hit the 20th Anniversary Streetparade. It did NOT disappoint. In fact this was probably the best of the three Streetparades I've been to, being as it wasn't characterised by too much booze (2007 - and a 4AM finish) or too little booze coupled with familial responsibility, when Rach and G came with me in 2008 (and we had to leave quite early to visit Mark's fantastic parents.). Banging and sunny and a bit drunk and great. The four partners in crime were me and three people called Mark: Mark himself, Marco Stadli and Marco Vara - hence the title of this post.

The easiest way to sum up the fun is by posting this:

this:

and this:

Highlights for the non-hedonists:

A 2-hour hike round the lake at Pfaffikon on Sunday, including a trip to the Irgenhausen Castrum, a bratwurst, beer, sunbathe, swim and lovely Appenzeller wheatbeer at the Jucker Farm; a trip to Andrien and his missus' place, where we spied on their sweetly snoozing 10-month-old daughter and walked away with a fresh tub of bolognese sauce; a trip to the zoo and its Masoala Rainforest; baseball on the TV; and showing Mark how to make some beats using FL Studio - he has a cinematic ear I think, a Vangelis-a-like. Watch out for his first composition 'Molc'.

Five years ain't so much when you're 37, and so this is the deadline for our next meet - 2016, or the 25th Anniversary party....salud Kleibi, see you again soon bro.

Space invaders

This tickled me.

Post-it invaders

Reverberation, Swiss style.

This is one from a few years back actually. Note both the owl sounds made by Georgia, and the respectful distances left for the motorists.