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Showing posts from January, 2010

Albums of 2009

It strikes me that magazines and websites announcing their best albums of the year is occuring earlier and earlier as they seek to outdo each other. A bit like shops bringing out their Christmas stuff in September. With that in mind, fashionably late, here are my favourite albums from 2009. 1. Manic Street Preachers - Journal For Plague Lovers 2. The Horrors - Primary Colours 3. Crystal Stilts - Alright Of Night 4. Future Of The Left - Travels With Myself And Another 5. Peaches - I Feel Cream 6. The XX - The XX 7. 80Kidz - This Is My Shit 8. Carina Round - Things You Should Know EP 9. The Yeah Yeah Yeah's - It's Blitz 10. Miss Kittin - Two 11. White Lies - To Lose My Life 12. Wooden Shjips - Dos 13. La Roux - La Roux 14. The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love 15. Fuck Buttons - Tarot Sport 16. The Antlers - Hospice 17. Julian Plenti - Is... Skyscraper 18. Grammatics - Grammatics 19. Flight Of The Conchords - I Told You I was Freaky 20. PJ Harvey & John Parish - A Man A Woma

Airport man

I've grown to dislike airports very much. They seem to have become a cross between shopping centres and prisons. Malaga Airport smells of disinfectant and tastes of overpriced timeshares and package tourism. Passport control is self service. At Palma De Mallorca Airport, a bus driver who is so relaxed that he is almost a parody of a Spanish stereotype dumps us smack in the middle of the runway between two planes, so we have no idea which we have to get on. After a few minutes a very angry management type comes screeching up in his golf buggy, directs us to our plane and then tries to start a fist fight with the bus driver. The driver will not get involved and instead just shrugs his shoulders as if to say, 'I did my best here. What do you want me to do, drive people to their actual plane? Are you LOCO?!?' At Gibraltar Airport a road runs through the middle of the runway. When a plane comes in to land traffic is stopped by a level crossing. At the Gibraltar/Spain border we a