On Tuesday night after work, I headed up to Camden with Lea and Dean to see Birds of Tokyo play at Barfly (for only £6.50 a ticket!). We grabbed a few Red Stripes (or cider in Lea’s case) before heading upstairs to see the second warm-up band – Mujeres de Barcelona. They were an absolutely crazy Japanese three piece, with the tiniest female bass player that I’ve ever seen (as opposed to the gigantic female bassists in most of the other bands I see?). She can’t have been more than 5 foot high, and the bass guitar looked massive in her hands!

(Apologies for the photo quality; I only had my phone camera with me, and it doesn’t do a great job in low light.)

Credit where credit’s due; she was great, lead guitarist/vocalist was freaking amazing – though I had no idea if he was “singing” in English or Japanese. It was such a weird experience.

Birds came on around 10 PM (!!), which unfortunately meant they only played for an hour and a bit. They didn’t play my favourite song (The Baker’s Son), but their overall setlists was quite solid, and included at least four tracks from their forthcoming album. It sounds like it’s going to be their best album to date; I’ll be buying it as soon as I can get hold of it! Unsurprisingly, most of the crowd were Australians, and most people seemed quite chuffed with the band’s performance.

Barfly was a great venue too – it was a little bit too loud for such a tiny room, but there can’t have been more than two metres between me and the main stage, then Andrew Goddard walked straight past us after coming off stage! Cool!

Dean, Lea, and Kylie had never been to the Cotswolds for a clotted cream tea! And since Dean and Lea are making their way back to Australia (taking the very, very scenic route!) we had to remedy this situation yesterday. We had an absolutely gorgeous day of sunshine, so it was a perfect day to be out in the country!

We started at Bourton on the Water – “The Venice of The Cotswolds” as they say, simply because it has a stream. Creative. We made the others take the Dragonfly Hedge Maze challenge, and they came through victorious.

Next, we hit up Stow on the Wold for some lunch. Having been there before and remembering the abundance of shops that were there, I thought we’d be loaded for choices of places to eat. But after walking around most of the town, we didn’t find anything that jumped out, and we eventually settled on a hotel who served us a fairly ordinary meal (or at least I thought so). This was certainly not the highlight of the day! We made a few obligatory purchases in the local chocolate shop before trundling off to Chipping Campden for the main event – Clotted Cream and Scones.

Oh man, they were so good – and so big! Usually two scones is the order of the day, but each of us could barely get through one!

It’s a bit of a hike to get there, but The Cotswolds always makes a lovely destination for a day trip. And now, I want some more clotted cream…