An interesting day

Went round to my Dad's today. Joined him and his wife Jean for a coffee in a Victorian style cafe in Deganwy, which is very bijou. It's nice, but you're not allowed to use mobile phones in there. They do however have very, very nice scones.

Jean is after a new car and is bored of Mercedes, so we took a trip down to the local Jaguar dealer to take a look at the X-types they have there. They may be a Mondeo underneath, but they're pretty nice. I took the opportunity to sit in a beautiful XJ6 that was in the showroom. It had 10 miles on the clock and was absolutely stunning in metallic grey paint and a cream interior. It had the highest trim level (Sovereign) but had a diesel V6 under the bonnet, meaning it was only £205 to tax for a year, not bad for a car like that. The price of the XJ6 was £58,000 - a few years ago you could have said 'You could buy a house for that!' but now that sadly isn't true...

While in Colwyn Bay I popped into a music shop that I hadn't been to for a long time. It was really cramped, you literally had to make your way through narrow aisles between stacks of amps. But at the back of the shop was something that really tested my limits. It was a Music Man StingRay bass, in metallic teal and a pearloid scratchplate. It had a 2 band EQ and was absolutely beautiful. The price was £650, which isn't bad at all. I tried out both a fretted and fretless StingRay back in January in the US, and they were absolutely superb. The fretless one was the first fretless I managed to play in tune without having to really concentrate on it.

As well as that, they had a nice Trace Elliot bass amp, which along with the StingRay were being sold for a customer. The amp was £450 but he said I could have them both for a grand. Both of these items have been on my bass wishlist pretty much since I started playing, so that was slightly annoying.

After that, went into Llandudno to pick up a set of new headphones after my faithful Panasonic folding ones broke. I bought them in Manchester airport enroute to New York in 2005 after I broke the ones I took with me. I ended up with a pair of Sennheiser HD-215s, a little pricey, but they are absolutely awesome. Really really good sound quality. Also they came in a very nice sensible box that opens up nicely to reveal the headphones and a case, none of this sealed plastic nonsense which you have to attack with scissors, knives and chainsaws.

Trying to find In Extremo stuff in this country is hard. A couple of the albums are available, but the live DVD is proving hard to track down. They aren't quite as extreme as Rammstein live, but do perform in kilt like outfits and things.

This is a great site - it lets you download YouTube videos and save them in FLV format. This can then be played in the VLC media player.