Ahem. I have been absent from the blog of late; happily we’ve been very busy here at Blackbridge Inc. and while I’ve been up to all kinds of stuff from going to my first boxing match to seeing an awesome jazz gig to eating lobster in East London to watching Arsenal thoroughly not win the league, I have been not really writing about it.

But anyway, we are where we are. And I went to the National Portrait Gallery on Sunday. My co-visitor was mainly keen on taking photos of the ears of marble busts and examining any paintings of lace; that said,we both paid attention to a great exhibition they have of portraits from the first part of the 20th century - everybody from Kingsley Amis to General Montgomery, Walter Sickert to TS Elliot. I also saw a bust of Sir Noel Coward, taken from a face mask - he was a tiny man. Tiny.

Talking of ‘the Master’, I read over the weekend that the 19th of April is “record shop day”. Sad that it has come to that really; they’re dropping like flies. The best record shop I ever visited - or rather the shop with the best owner I ever met - was in Fargo, North Dakota, as in the Coen Brothers film. Previously, this guy had a shop in Minneapolis where I was living and a friend of mine knew him; he’d left the Twin Cities record community under a bit of a cloud in a dispute over the ownership of a Beatles Butcher cover. I was going up that way to see my then girlfriend’s parents and managed to persuade her that a two hour diversion followed by a similar amount of time looking through a room of dusty records was perfectly acceptable. What can I say? ‘4 Weddings and a Funeral’ had just come out in America and my stock has never been higher.

My friend had called ahead to say we were coming and in my girlfriend’s Honda Civic we headed north. A bit too slowly as it happened; we must have left late and were still miles away when my hard-fought diversion was cancelled despite my very best Hugh Grant-esq pleading. I called my friend when we got to Crookston (home of the world-famous Sugar Beet Museum) and he promised to ring Jim and say we’d come back on Sunday for definite. Sure enough, a couple of days later we left early and got to the place in a little strip mall in Fargo and sure enough Jim was there. A friendly fellow, grizzled hippy-type. “I’ve just got here myself, Keith said you were coming today so I went and got a twelve pack” - a twelve pack! - “while I waited for you”. I was glad he had; I went through his records while drinking his kindly offered bottles of Miller and found some brilliant stuff: Shamek Farrah’s ‘First Impressions’ on Strata East, a psych-rock Loading Zone album (that Youtube clip is WELL weird), a great Jackie and Roy album, lots of soul - hell, he even threw in three Dean Martin records for my girlfriend as “today is his birthday so they’re free”; it probably wasn’t his birthday.

What I also picked up and probably paid a couple of dollars for were some records as unlikely to end up in a North Dakota record shop in the midday sun as I was, two albums by the aforementioned Noël Coward, both of which - by coincidence - I had listened to while lounging on Saturday afternoon.

The Live in Las Vegas one is superior; it’s absolutely hilarious. And surprisingly risque for the time, I can’t recommend it enough. Best of all is his update of Cole Porter’s ‘Let’s Do It’ - I read a great biography of Porter while on holiday in Spain a few years ago and it listed quite a few of the wonderfully salacious unpublished lyrics from his more intimate live performances. I’ll perhaps not mention them all here.

Right. That’s it for now, more next week. Honest.