By Hannah

Unfortunately, Mike Randle will not be able to type today’s diary due to the fact that he is jetlagged, has only slept a few hours and still can’t make up his mind if he is hungover or not. Therefore, he has asked me to address the Diary in this particular manner. He is very excited about the Borderline show on Thursday, but says that he will jump out of my second floor flat window if he gets one more text regarding the football game going late. He says ‘let’s all hope for the best’.

Oh, by the way, this is his girlfriend Hannah. So I’ll try to do my best ‘Mike Diary’ sans the bad spelling. Now, for those of you who are curious, Mike had ten pints of Stella last night, which explains why I’m typing this. But see, I’m translating while he lies in bed watching Italy vs. Bulgaria. It’s 1-1 at the 64 min mark. Now, once he arrived from LA we met up with Love fan Jackie Barnes for drinks at the hotel. This went on till about 10pm, then after Jackie left we walked around and got a curry, brought it back and watched Big Brother Live. We listened to Beach Boys and Randy Newman and the new Morrisey.

Next morning, we had an English breakfast and tea, which Mike inevitably consumes too fast, and watched Jenny Jones. We concluded that Jenny is in fact rather stupid as she couldn’t seem to keep up with the fast paced topic of ‘who out of these 18 men is the father of my baby?’. It was even better when we realised it wasn’t any of them. Mike slept as I did ‘a bunch of girly stuff’ and failed to believe me that the time was 5pm when he eventually woke up. We walked to the corner shop and purchased 10 cans of the aforementioned premium lager, to which I asked him to explain the difference between premium and nonpremium lager. The answer was b******t so I gave up.

We then followed our stomachs to McDonalds to sample the new ‘healthy menu’ but just as the golden arches were within sight, Richard Meehan saved the day with a call from the hotel lobby, where he was purchasing pints. We met up with him and Mike decided to drop the beer luggage in the room, but when he returned he found only half a pint left, for it was being consumed by LOVE Manager Glenn Povey. Richard was kind enough to buy Mike another pint (as we were both well skint) and we were soon joined by Daddyo, Rusty and Chapple. Oh, and Richard also explained the premium lager thing a whole lot better than Mike and his attempt. Glenn announced that he was driving home just as it started to piss down hammers and nails and the rest of the band went upstairs to watch the football game while Mike, Richard and I ordered a curry and had it delivered to our hotel room. We ate curry and drank stellas whilst watching England win 4-2 then Richard decided to head off home.

Around that time we recapped on Big Brother while Mike got his toenails painted very dark brown. True to form, he continued to consume vast amounts of stella while we watched a thought provoking (for lack of a better word) TV show on Channel 4 about people who ‘fall in love’ with their pets and pursue sexual relations. Really. Honestly. Seriously. The psychologists refer to this condition as ‘Zooaphilia’. We thought it was just plain weird. Mike fell out laughing and immediately called Rusty and told him to flick to Channel 4 and asked him if it reminded him of a person whom they knew back in LA who they suspected engaged in such activities. We drank beers till the early hours and enjoyed tea and my mini birthday cake.

The next thing we knew it was 9am and room service were knocking on the door with breakfast. We checked out the hotel at noon and jumped on the tube and Piccadily Lined it all the way to Caledonian Road to see John Etherington, where he was listening to the new Brian Wilson CD. I loaned him my copy of Barstool Blues. We then headed to Piccadily Circus for cheese burgers and a pitcher of Kronenberg. We were rather overwhelmed by the loudest tequilla drinking contest in the history of London (perhaps) as this is the last thing you want to experience on a damp, quasai-hungover day. To say we wanted to kick their heads in was an understatement, but Mike discovered ‘possibly the best salad he’s ever had in England before’ and this seemed to consume us (oh, and the beer) for a good few hours. Oh yeah, before this we stopped by Borders and picked up the new issue of Whiskey Magazine, which Mike liked but felt a bit dissapointed in a misquote re. Bryan McLean’s contributions to LOVE. Oh, and there’s a nice picture of Baby Lemonade too. After that, we came back to mine just in time for the ‘duff duff’ drum bit ending of Eastenders. Bugger. Then I was ordered to write this. So, for the last 15 minutes I’ve been acting secretary. Let it be known, this is my first AND last day on the job.

Mike Randle