January, don't be cold, don't be angry to me

This weekend saw me doing something I actually very rarely do - being vaguely sociable and chatting to people. Friday night was the Apocalyptica gig to which practically everyone in Oxford seemed to be going, and we managed to precede it with noodles and follow it with ice cream. Why is it that I never think to go to G&Ds [Oxford café which is open late, serving ice cream, hot drinks and snacky bits]? Particularly since the new(ish) one down St Aldates really isn't that far away from my house. I like the place, I should go more often.

I'd like to claim that Saturday was active, dynamic and revolutionary, but actually it involved davefish, keris, ChrisC and I turning into complete vegetables in front of the Kerrang! music channel. Which gave us time to chat, and some little moving pictures to stare at when tiredness took over. Keris turns out to be a bewildering mine of pop trivia. I am sadly not down with the cool kids, and had to have it explained to me who half of these popular beat combos are.

Sunday I actually was active and dynamic, if not quite revolutionary, and took on Hampstead Heath with spindlemere.

( She's speeding her way through Hampstead Heath  )

( Sucking on a toxic icicle )

So don't become some background noise

I've had the radio on a lot in the car recently. Car radios are always doomed, in my opinion - I hate an off-station radio more than I hate an off radio-station , and driving in and out of signal ranges means a life time of tuning and re-tuning. At the moment I've settled on my old school-days standby of Virgin 1215, currently tuned to three different presets - one that works in Oxford, one in Reading, and one for in between. Suggestions for resilient stations welcome.

( And everything I had to know, I heard it on my radio )

[*] I don't know what track it is - I've just bought the new Lemon Jelly single on 7", and the sleeve/centre bits are way too artily designed to have anything so mundane as track names on them. They're very pretty, but not very informative. The stickery thing on the outer cellophane suggests I'm listening to either Battle Baby Scratch or The Shouty Track, but despite the latter descriptive name it's not immediately obvious which is which (to me, anyway).

What do you call the round papery bits in the middle of a record, anyway ? Centreplates ? Roundels ?