Tuesday. Meadowbank Stadium. Radiohead. Wonderful.

Truly fantastic set… as always during the pre-match analysis you have to ask, “what song will they start with?”. Well, we got it completely wrong since they started with Airbag, which was absolute magic. The crowd was full of idiots (I don’t know what it is about Radiohead gigs, but there’s a history of unfortunate injuries at their shows that would surprise you) and Thom Yorke even stopped mid-way through Morning Bell to have a good shout at the people in the front row who had obviously bought tickets for Slipknot and wandered in on the wrong day.

The stage backdrop had several large, irregularly shaped video screens which were used to project fancy graphics and stuff. During You And Whose Army? a disturbing fish-eye video stream of Thom Yorke’s face was distorted and split among these screens, rather like looking in one of those bathroom mirrors in the shape of several splashes of water (like this). He obviously thought this was a real hoot as he tried to suppress his grins and lean back to stare at the crowd. It was all really weird looking.

Support was from Beck and (I think) Deerhoof but I missed the latter because I was still at work. The doors opened at 4pm and even getting out at 5pm there was no chance of getting through the Festival crowds without a flying DeLorean or Ford Anglia.

Really oddly we met a whole bunch of people we know as we went through the throng at the exit gates: a good friend from university, his two flatmates and one of his friends from his PhD course. They invited us for drinks but we had to set off on the forty minute drive home. It sucks to not live in Edinburgh, and sucks twice as much during the festival.

Yesterday was a pretty full day of interesting delights. At one o’clock h2_the_foodie, not_a_mouse and queenspanky and I met for lunch at Monster Mash. I had never met Queenspanky before and marvelled at her tea-consuming abilities. (I don’t like tea, but I didn’t let this slip at the time as I might have been disembowelled for uttering blasphemies.)

I then went with h2_the_foodie to the Glasgow Print Studio’s little exhibit on George Street to see if we could pick up a John Byrne on her parents’ behalf. Alas the one they wanted was of a very limited run and was long since gone. We also discovered that her parents had already been in to the gallery and bought something else anyway.

The streets were completely mobbed with folk being summery and festive, so I joined in by eating ice cream. We then saw The Penny Dreadfuls’ Victorian sketch show Aeneas Faversham — it was as excellent as the rave reviews would lead you to believe. I talked to Bookdrunk on the way out but I’m pretty sure I was unrecognised and confused poor BD mightily. But such is life.

Got home and watched some more of the first series of Battlestar Galactica. The writing’s improved much more from the first two episodes but the somewhat corny “no atheists in foxholes” ending to the last episode I watched was rather disappointing.