Thursday 5th August

Having forgotten to check 'My eBay' last night, it's the morning before I remember to check the status of the item I put up for sale last week. Feeling in need of scaring up some extra funds to put in the wedding savings account, plus feeling guilty for happily splurging on a new laptop at the weekend, I decided to list my old Korg Electribe sampler - starting at £50 but hoping for a bit more.

I bought it in 2004, during my first year at Royal Holloway (off eBay, in fact) for well over £200 - at a time when I was so bored during the day that I happily spent hours putting together clicky drumbeats and ominous synth chords. Over and over again. Now, though, I haven't touched the thing for at least two years and haven't even thought about making music for at least a year. I suppose I'm less bored and miserable than I was then - I wonder if that's a prerequisite for a lot of people to make music?

On checking my email this morning I'm pleased to see that the sampler has gone for over £100; not bad when I had been warned to expect the worst in these days of software solutions and the overall cheap cost of more advanced rival machines. Maybe the guy who bought it likes the retro appeal. Either way, I'm a bit annoyed to find that he lives up north somewhere, meaning that he won't be able to come and collect it and that I'll either have to queue up for an hour in Wood Green's horrendous post office (not bloody likely) or sweet-talk the folks in the warehouse at work into posting out for me (much more likely). I stick the box in a sturdy carrier bag with a picture of an elephant on the front - and promptly forget to take it into work at all. Bugger. In order to stall for time, I email Mr. Winning Bidder and ask to confirm his delivery address. Hopefully he won't give me negative feedback (The 17 stars I have accumulated over something like six years of sporadic buying and selling on eBay mean an awful lot to me, after all) if the thing arrives a day late.

After work K and I enjoy a nice dinner of the remaining frozen kievs, new potatoes and brocolli, before deciding to watch Training Day - one of the films Ant copied onto my hard drive on Tuesday. It's one of those films I've heard a lot of good things about, but have never found myself in a position where a box with 'Denzel Washington' and 'Ethan Hawke' on the front was going to appeal to me. I've got nothing against the pair of actors - I just don't tend to go for the kind of films they, but particularly Washington, are in. Training Day, however, is a lot of fun from the start and confounds a lot of expectations about this kind of film and the kind of storytelling you'd expect to find in it. I like the way that Washington's character's story is the most complete and possibly the most relevant to the narrative, yet we have to see his story through the confused, naive eyes of Hawke's. There's some good humour in there too and I'm a sucker for any film where rappers turn up in amusingly self-serious cameos. Snoop Dogg is OK, Dr. Dre is woeful.

One interesting thing about the film, however - which is the same impression that I took away from films like Crash, Heat and Collateral - is that LA looks like the ugliest, drabbest and most boring place in the world, to the extent that I'm amazed films are made there. It offers simply no backdrop (other than the people who live there and endless rows of cars, I suppose) and its 'skyline', while glimpsed briefly, is completely without landmarks. It could be any cluster of skyscrapers in the world and I defy anyone (who doesn't live there) to identify it as LA over, say, Detroit or Houston. Is this why they need to use the Hollywood sign to signify the place in films and TV shows? It seems odd to me - as does the fact that the place is still considered to be a glamorous destination. My little brother went there a couple of years ago, as the first stop on a round-the-world gap year trip, and suggested that it was pretty horrifying. The highlight, he said, was being offered raw meat on the bus by a little old lady. Delightful.