The record shop in question was Pure Groove in Farringdon. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what a record shop was like; Pure Groove is not like that at all. It consists of an shop-sized open space (they put a few cafe tables in it during the day) with a stage at one end, some comfy chairs, magazines and so on, and a counter down one side behind which is a small selection of interesting rarities, vinyl, signed CDs, t-shirts and so on, a coffee machine and some beer. It reminded me strongly of I Knit London, though the space in the middle is optomised for listening to live music rather than for knitting. They have a in-store gig every evening (and many lunchtimes), they sell nice bottled beer and some snacks, and they're clearly a fantastic place to just chill.

I couldn't get to the Scala because I was off seeing the Greek Theatre Players, slightly displaced this year from the Greek Theatre. This was The Comedy of Errors, marvellously played. My heart sank when I saw that nobody else had brought kids; but Marianne enjoyed it all and even Jonathan enjoyed the second half, once we'd said "Right. There are *two* sets of twins." If you're taking kids, even teenagers, to The Comedy of Errors I would recommend explaining Egeon's initial speech to them in advance because it's long and hard for kids to follow and without the set up the entire play is incomprehensible. Once again I benefitted from my appalling ignorance of Shakespeare; most of the ending is telegraphed long in advance, but I got to enjoy one delightful reveal. Another benefit of advancing years is that Shakespeare's language, which I remember struggling with in school, seems to me pellucid now. You can catch The Comedy of Errors tonight or tomorrow at the Holy Family College in Church Hill Road, Walthamstow, or on Sunday at the Capel Manor Gardens.

Finally, I must mention Graze, who send little boxes of tasty treats to your home or workplace. Each box has three things to graze on, a mixture of fresh and dried fruit, nuts, seeds, little yoghurt coated things, and so on. There's loads of different possibilities, you can rate items to get them more or less often or not at all, and the presentation is lovely. The boxes are £2.99 each, which is pretty comparable to what the same sort of thing would cost you from, say, Marks and Sparks or Pret. I'm in two minds about Graze. On the one hand this is fantastic stuff to get you through the work day, far better than crisps and choccy bars, and I love getting the boxes through the door. On the other hand this is a lot more expensive than, say, peeling and chopping fresh pineapple yourself, so if you're committed to the cult of Cheap then it's clearly not for you. I have a code -- 3GH2D5JE -- if you enter that on the website you can get a first box free to try, and a second box half-price.

I was intrigued by the reviews so I got a copy, despite a longstanding hate of both driving games and crime simulations (I'm very law-abiding). It is fantastic fun and well worth a tenner. It is possibly a bit immoral; you certainly find yourself gunning down people with abandon, and although the drug-dealing sub-game is 'optional', you will quickly find yourself unarmed and penniless if you don't join in. There's a good range of missions and some of the plotting is genuinely funny. GTA is famed for its sandboxes and there are lots of fun things you can do in this game that have nothing to do with the main plot. For example, all the service vehicles can be stolen and then used, so you can drive a cab and pick up fares, drive a police car and respond to crimes, drive a fire engine and put out fires, and so on. And the pacing is fantastic for a DS game; you can pick it up and have fun in just a few minutes. The graphics beat anything I've previously seen on the DS by some margin too; Liberty City is huge, and it's all distinctive, and I don't know how they have done it.

GTA: Chinatown Wars is an adult game that says 'here, come and play at doing things you'd never dream of doing in real life, in a ludicrous fantasy world where you are much tougher than a pack of hardened goons, your car automatically drives in a straight line and nobody fires straight.' One of the reasons that people criticise GTA is that it 'glamorises' crime but I think it is just doing the same thing as any simulation game; making a hard thing (making crime pay) seem much easier, just like Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis.

In other adult gaming news, I'm playing the new Mac version of Braid, the thinky, philosophical puzzle game disguised as a platformer. The premise is that of Super Mario; Tim (I do not know whether Tim is a plumber by trade) has lost his princess and is searching for her. He has to collect jigsaw pieces which are cashed in for the ending, and like in Prince of Persia, he can rewind time to avoid getting killed by monsters. That description misses out three key things. The first is that rewinding time is not merely a death-avoidance gimmick. In practice you have to rewind time, in many and variously tricky ways, to solve the puzzles, nearly all of which are fiendish. The second is that this game is exceptionally beautiful, and I am a sucker for pretty games. And the third, of course, is that Tim is not an uncomplicated little plumber. The game is framed with his ruminations on time, loss, princesses, and the general weight of living. The game has an ending, which I have been somewhat spoilt for by randomly wambling round the internet; so you will want to be careful about that.

I downloaded the demo and was hooked; it does not feel to me particularly pricey at $14.99 but perhaps I am an easy target. I understand it crashes on many Macs; fortunately not on mine. Most of the puzzles (but not all) are self-contained and lend themself to prolongued thought; this is a game where setting it down, going away for a while and returning often renders an impossible scene straightforward. There is a puzzle early in Braid which is widely decried as unfair; I solved it without help and was enchanted when I did it. I think I've collected about half the puzzle pieces now. These puzzles are difficult, and the learning curve is quite brutal. The designer, rather arrogantly, has released a 'walkthrough' that says, roughly, all the puzzles are fair, figure it out and don't use a walkthrough.

Braid then, is an adult game about the nature of gaming, and about life. It is saying 'games can tell us about our life' and a deliberately artificial situation can nevertheless teach us profound lessons that are similar to those acquired from a movie or book. I do not doubt that this is true of games in general; I am not yet sure it is true of Braid.

And finally, the gameplay trailer for The Beatles: RockBand is jolly great and I'm sure the game will be fine. But the opening cinematic is just extraordinary. I'm only a moderate fan of the Beatles and I'm seriously excited.

Meanwhile, I learn that Birdsong Radio has gone off the air. Since getting a radio that could have multiple alarms tuned to different stations, we used this as our weekend 'alarm'; instead of being woken suddenly by music we were woken gently by birdsong. Apparently some radios do it themselves now, and this radio can use music on an SD card as an alarm. But still.

But my main haul from Talking Elephant was various Morris stuff. Now, they've been repackaging some of the Morris material, and so some of the stuff on Sweeps, a compilation for Rochester Sweeps, includes things by the Albion Band, the Morris On Band and others. But tucked in there is a Tickled Pink track I don't have, and several tracks plucked from 'Cobbled Together', an album Simon Care did with the Moulton Morris and others. From the Moulton Morris Men more directly comes Where The Pavement Ends. This was recorded by Simon Nicol and Dave Pegg, possibly some time ago -- but has been released in time for May Day and is full of wonder and delight.

Simon Care, one of the leading lights of Moulton Morris, has released a second anthology album, Oh What a Caper,
showcasing all the fantastic work he does with other people. Tracks here from Whapweasel, various incarnations of Albions, Edward II, Tickled Pink and so on; mostly demonstrating how Care, as well as being a thoroughly nice bloke, is the undisputed master of the driving melodeon beat.

No relation to Talking Elephant is acid croft live favourites Elephant Talk I discovered that they have a newish album out, Natty Loon, that I didn't know about, so I bought it. But really, their brand of somewhat-celtic trance is best experienced late at night at a festival.

My 'back catalogue special' this month was John Renbourn's Sir John Alot. This was obviously filling a gap. Amazon says "Recommended for people who can't stand John Renbourn's voice", because it's entirely instrumental.

Giles Lewin is a fiddler and piper with the Carnival Band, and for a while with Bellowhead, and one of Maddy Prior's band (no, not that band). The Armchair Orienteer is a brand new solo outing, and the title refers to music's ability to transport you to all manner of places. Most of the tracks on the album, although they play with a wide variety of international musical styles, were penned by Lewin "on location in my shed". The English ones, however, draw on themes from Playford. The playing is extraordinarily accomplished and it's fantastic fun to listen to Lewin producing tunes from so many different musical styles. My one concern is that the arrangements are very precise; the styles that Lewin reflects are typically gutsy, driving folk music, but this album makes me think of the drawing room rather than the campfire. Several times I thought 'ah, this is a pause, the next bit will be where he takes the tune and really lets rip' only to find it was the end of the track. But these are great tunes and the album's well worth listening to.

Steve Knightley has re-recorded his 1999 solo album "Track of Words" to produce Track of Words: Retraced. I suspect he felt that the 'radio-friendly' original wasn't showing off his songwriting to the best degree possible, and rather than re-release that, he's chosen to re-record it in a more acoustic way. I don't find these tunes as compelling as his work with Show of Hands, though that isn't really a criticism given how fabulous "Witness" is. His other solo album, "Cruel River", has grown on me over time, too.

The Handsome Family have a new album out, Honey Moon. As a celebration of their twentieth wedding anniversary, this is an entire album of love songs. You wouldn't expect the sentiments to be trite here, and indeed they're not. It did remind me rather of the Magnetic Fields though, but as my main complaint about 69 Love Songs was that there weren't 169 love songs, that's not really a problem.

Walthamstow Folk Club continues to inspire my listening. I saw the fine interpreter of ballads Chris Foster there, and picked up his new album Outsiders. I was feeling a bit strapped for cash that night, or I'd have bought everything he had with him. There are several streaming tracks on his MySpace; highly recommended.

I totally failed to buy any CDs by Bill Caddick when I saw him at the Cellar Upstairs; he didn't have any for sale. Not on his website either; I do think this is an almighty mistake for a singer/songwriter. We did spend the entire evening going 'gosh, did he write that one', though, so you'll know his songs.

Another great friend of the folk club is Anne Lister. I won her most recent album in the folk club raffle, and set about picking up the rest. So this month I have got Singing On The Wind and Root, Seed, Thorn and Flower. Quirky, unusual songs, beautifully sung.

Finally, the nice people at Proper sent me a copy of the 2009 Folk Awards compilation album so I could review it on Amazon. I did, and commend it; thirty tracks from established and new folk bands, including several of the 'song of the year' winners and nominees, all for £9. Can't go wrong really.

Examples of many of the musicians and songwriters mentioned in this post are included in my May Music Spotify playlist.

The lovely thing about Spotify is that it finally delivers a workable modern form of mixtapes. I can tell you how wonderful a band I'm listening to is, and link to a Spotify playlist that includes their music. You can listen to all the tracks I've chosen in full, and then use Spotify to explore further. I am not sure what its reach is yet (in particular, I'm not sure it reaches the US). Even better, there are collaborative playlists that several people can edit.

As an example of this, I've complied a short list of tunes and songs in five time -- A Bunch of Fives. You'll need to have Spotify to play it of course. Do add the tracks I've missed (though not 'other weird time signatures' please, just fives). For the benefit of people who can't get Spotify, this currently includes Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", Mawkin Causley's "Ye Mariners All", the second movement of Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony ("Pathetique"), Shirley and Dolly Collins' "Searching for Lambs", "When Your Mind's Made Up" from the film Once, Jethro Tull's "Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow", "Everything's Alright" from Jesus Christ Superstar, the Mission:Impossible theme (Lalo Schrfrin), "River Man" by Nick Drake, and "Mars: the Bringer of War" from Holst's Planet Suite.

Here's a second collaborative playlist -- at present with no tracks in it. Recommend music for me here.

One of the most exciting things going on in my music collection at the moment is Navigator Records. You may remember that their launch lineup of artists was notable because I had seen every single one of them live; that's no longer quite true, but still. Of 17 albums on eMusic on the label, I own 14 of them. I keep hearing that bands I like are signing to Navigator or that Navigator is releasing an album that was previously self-pressed. Fantastic label. Highlights include the various projects of Jon Boden and his mates, the various projects of Kris Drever and his mates, and the new Mawkin:Causley album.

I've bought a couple of songs specifically to learn to sing: a field recording (by Alan Lomax) of William Rew singing "The New Mown Hay", and Ian Dury's "England's Glory", specially for St George's Day.

A request for French music in the melodeon forum (not by me) resulted in a recommendation of La Chavanée, which contains Frederic Paris and several of the other musicians who contributed to Mel Stevens' fantastic collections of tunes from the Massif Central. I grabbed one album from eMusic, but I want more.

On eMusic, I'm filling in my collections of Ashley Hutchings, particularly Albion Band and Morris On, and John Kirkpatrick.

Amazon launched its mp3 store with a huge range of cheap albums, and I picked up a wide variety of stuff for amazingly little, including the fantastic Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band retrospective, Cornology. The entire recorded output of the band, for less than a tenner. A lot of regular albums were on special offer for £3 or £4 (many still are), which is a psychologically important price point for me, and I picked up a lot of the sort of albums that people talk about in magazines. Fleet Foxes, Elbow, The Killers, that sort of thing. I don't like any of them as much as John Kirkpatrick, but there you go. And I filled in several dozen gaps in my record collection at £3 each.

Finally, I took advantage of iTunes' 'upgrade your iTunes purchases to de-DRM them' offer. In my case this cost me the staggering sum of £2.79. I have been very, very, careful not to buy that stuff; all but one of those tracks were bought with a free gift certificate I got once.

There's going to be an Utterly Fantastic Free Folk Concert in Trafalgar Square tomorrow, celebrating St George's Day. I'm multiply booked and can't go, but it's got a fantastic lineup including Seth Lakeman, Eliza Carthy, Jim Moray, Kathryn Tickell and the Demon Barbers. Free. Wow.

I can't go because we'll be holed up here planning the next plokta.con, happening at the end of May. Do all please come!

This would, I'm sure, be fun under any circumstances. But once you combine it with the iPhone, it's unstoppable. You click a button to get a list of caches near you, pick one, and start driving/biking/walking towards it. Health Warning: that can lead you to walk off the edge of a cliff. Not, however, in Suffolk. 2/3 of the band LAU come from lumpy places; their word for the trauma induced by the flat open spaces of East Anglia is 'horizontigo'. If you were in the Lake District, you'd probably want to have decent maps with you. If you're going after 'easy' caches in a flat, dry, industrial park on the outskirts of Ipswich, the main hazard is the local traffic. And dog poo.

How many caches are there? Well, here in London, there are at least a dozen within two miles of here. Out in rural Suffolk, there were still plenty around. Worldwide, there are 3/4 of a million. Which is, well, quite a lot.

Our first cache was noted as 'tricky'; after a little while of fruitless hunting, we became discouraged, and went after a nearby 'easy' cache. We found it and were very jolly. We quite failed to be stealthy because we were too busy whooping about. We set out after another, but the iPhone ran out of charge. So now we have a plan for future geocaching; take an iPhone charger with us. I think we will also take our 'better' GPS, the Garmin 305 bike computer.

We also have a small puppy; a trackable object called Tosca the Travel Puppy. Tosca is trying to get to Windsor Castle, and as we're a lot closer than Ipswich, we're helping him on his way. Unfortunately, our weekends are in the wrong order; last weekend we were in Sunningdale Park, which is within spitting distance of Windsor Castle.

Later we went searching for a cache by the side of the Lee Navigation, but once again couldn't find it. Perhaps we will stick to easy ones. Meanwhile, the kids have walked for miles and miles, and are now sleeping soundly. Don't let them in on the secret.

The Groundspeak Geocaching Logo is a registered trademark of Groundspeak, Inc. Used with permission.

There's always a contingent worrying that developers who sign up for MacHeist don't get a lot of cash in return for giving away tens of thousands of licenses. I observe that they're consenting adults; and besides, the iPhone has shown that selling your app very very cheap can be a terrifically successful business model.

So, what's in the bundle this year?

• iSale, an eBay helper app (I use GarageSale)
  
• Picturesque, a photo improving program (I use PhotoShop)
  
• SousChef, a recipe storage app (I use YummySoup)
  
• World of Goo, an award winning game (ooh yummy I can't wait)
  
• PhoneView, an access-your-iPhone utility program (sounds jolly useful)
  
• Little Snapper, a screen capture program (I use Skitch mostly, and Snaps Pro X when I need heavy lifting)
  
• Acorn, a not-so-bloaty image editing program (I use PhotoShop)
  
• KineMac, a 'realtime 3d animation program' (I have absolutely no idea what I might use this for)
  
• WireTap Studio, an audio grabbing and editing program (I use Audio Hijack Pro/Fission).
  

There are also three not-yet-unlocked apps, BoinxTV, 'a live-editing tool for video podcasters' (I think this is a very cool program but I'm not sure what I'll use it for; but honestly, anything that's a product of Boinx and the Coding Monkeys is likely to be fantastic), The Hit List, a task manager (I use Remember the Milk, and I've tried a huge range of programs in this space; I would struggle with anything that didn't have both a strong cloud presence and a separate iPhone app at this point), and Espresso, a web development tool (I don't do much, and when I do I handcode, and perhaps Coda or similar is in my future? Who knows). There was some considerable discussion last year about why unlocks always happen (so much so that bundles with locks that are selling weakly always end up releasing their locks early to push sales).

Finally, although the bundle is great, for me the real joy of MacHeist is the build-up, with ingenious puzzles, loads of free software (including some super programs like Fresh and Scribbles) and a great web experience. Worth the bundle cost for that alone and I recommend that people jump on board earlier next year. Anyway, you have two weeks to get the bundle. If you want.

The last time I visited the Luminaire, I castigated it for being totally cut off from civilisation. I think that must have been a special TFL train-free night, because this time we had no trouble either getting to Kilburn, or getting home. In all other respects the Luminaire is a venue of utter stonkingness; small, with great sound, and with splendid signs on the wall saying things like "This is a live venue, not a pub. If you want to chat to your mates, you're in the wrong place. Please leave." I have rarely wanted to hug a wall so much.

Jon Boden has brought a band with him, the Remnant Kings; I googled it and so should you. On the album he plays all the instruments himself; tonight he has teen multi-instrumentalist Sam Sweeney, this time mostly on drums, ace concertina player Rob Harbron on concertina, Dave "not the chap who takes the photos" Angel on guitar, and Matt Grime on double bass. Boden plays guitar, concertina, melodeon, and, yes, fiddle a bit. But this is nothing like Bellowhead. The live sound is not quite like the album; less brooding, with little dribbles of folk melodies slipping in here and there. The livelier tunes are rocked up considerably in the live set; the album is very restrained by comparison.

Songs From The Floodplain is a linked set of folksongs from the future. They're all set in a world with no oil; or rather, there's a very little petrol, which we are led to believe is hoarded by the Government for unspecified purposes. Instead we have village life, and the necessary foreshortening of outlook caused by restrictions on travel. There's a new religion, the making of music, a new set of folk traditions. The little remaining plastic becomes the precious jewellery of a new age. The songs on the album do not form a coherent narrative; instead they are snapshots sung by the characters living in the world, at different times. We see people gradually coming to terms with the new world in which they live, and hear their tales of doing the ordinary things that people do, but in a different environment.

SF fans will recognise the world we are inhabiting. This is a peculiarly English vision of the future; Boden is a sublime interpreter of English folk song, and this infuses his future England. "Songs from the Floodplain" sits firmly in that favourite English subgenre of science fiction known as the "cosy catastrophe". Disaster has befallen us, but our essential Englishness survives. This is one of those worlds described by John Wyndham, or, especially, Richard Cowper. They're not so commonly written these days; SF readers are suspicious of post-apocolyptic futures where people live simply but comfortably.

Musically, it all succeeds terribly well. It's compelling, thoughtful but not bleak or sombre. I think it will be claimed for filk, though I am unsure whether Boden has any awareness that there's a whole genre of science fiction music out there. It is, without question, far better than most filk music. The underlying material is very well thought through, and it's performed by one of our finest folk singers at the peak of his game. The world-building is relentless, the incluing subtle, and nothing is extraneous. Boden does not join all the dots for you; he drops you in the world and leaves you to make sense of it. I just wish that there was tons of filk out there as good as this.

Back at the Luminaire, the evening was filled out with songs from Painted Lady, Jon Boden's first, very low key, solo release. Oddly, these songs felt less polished than the new ones. It was still lovely to hear favourites like "Blue Dress". Support came from Lauren McCormick with James Delarre and Roz Gladstone; a varied and assured set that ranged from Edward Lear to Marie Lloyd by way of some of the bloodiest ballads of all.

I bought the album from Jon Boden at the concert, but was far too tongue-tied to ask for a photo, or query whether he had ever heard of filk music. Luckily, heading back to Walthamstow, we made the happy discovery that Tim Chipping has the identical post-apocalyptic coat to the one that Boden wears on the album. How cool is that? Must be some special case of wearing the band t-shirt to the gig.

Even better than the pig in a bun was the discovery that I can now buy raw milk on the market, from Grove Farm in Hollesley Bay. They don't even have a website. The black and white labels on the bottles have a little newsletter about the cows and what they're up to. We couldn't take a photo of the milk because we were too busy drinking it, but Syrup and Tang reviewed their milk a little while ago, including photos of the milk and labels. People remark on the colour of this milk, but I'd say it's exactly the same colour as pasteurised Jersey milk, full of cream. It's the taste we're after. There's apparently a prison connection here too; the farm used to be a prison farm, and the owners employ ex-offenders from the prison nearby.

I'd read lots of vibe for Nina Paley's animated retelling of the Ramayana, Sita Sings the Blues. Although Paley had done well-regarded short animations previously, this is her full-length feature, and it has been stuck in Copyright Hell because there is no system for mechanical royalties for the use of music in movies. I'd seen several rave reviews of this, but somehow had still tagged the movie mentally with a 'worthy' tag. The movie draws a parallel between Paley's own failed marriage, and the role of the virtuous and devoted wife Sita. It uses a variety of animation styles, including one in which Sita is rendered as a sort of Indian Betty Boop lip-synching the torch songs of Annette Henshaw.

So when I discovered that it's now available for online streaming, ahead of a full downloadable release next week, I started to watch, intending to watch for a bit and then move on (ooh, the flittery nature of modern life). Except that I swtiched the video to fullscreen after a minute or so, completely charmed by the peacock phonograph in this still, and then Marianne started to watch. And a few minutes later, curious as to the howls of laughter coming from the study, Jonathan joined us. We were all completely delighted.

Is it suitable for children? Well, they both had a far better understanding of the Ramayana than I did, thanks to their thoroughly multicultural school curriculum. So the subject matter was straightforward enough for them to understand. The entire film has its own embedded commentary, and at one point there's some frank discussion of the sexual politics involved in the saga; not enough to trouble them I think. I think, really, it's a film for people. Watch it.

That was tonight's Family Activity. Last night we put some geodes inside an old sock and smashed them with a hammer. That gave both Marianne and Jonathan practice in using a hammer in a controlled fashion, and Steven practice in not getting too worried about his children waving hammers around. We now have a lot of smashed bits of geode. Some of them have crystals in. None of them are anything like as fancy as the obviously dyed ones that people tried to hawk us in Morocco. We also have an unusable sock.

Of course, this weekend I had no trouble hitting the target at the glorious Warwick Folk Festival. We went to this festival two years ago; it's on a tricky weekend that normally clashes with either Trowbridge or Cambridge. It's a perfectly-formed delight; big enough to book big bands and have plenty going on, but small enough to be easy to get around and see everything you really want to.

My aerobic exercise came from Oysterband on Friday and Bellowhead on Saturday, in addition to a certain amount of ceilidh, swimming twice, and plenty of tent-pitching and general walking around. Memo to other festivals; here is how you set up for a band that people are going to want to dance to at a festival where the main marquee is seated. You set the stage high off the ground (nearly as high as me), you leave a big space at the front, and then you put the seats behind that. Result; everyone gets to see, those who want to stand can do so, and those who want to sit have an unimpeded view. Warwick was just about perfect in this regard.

An additional feature was a big screen, complete with local ads, screen lag, and cute camera angles. I am not sure the main stage at Warwick is big enough to warrant it, but some people clearly appreciated it.

Discovery of the festival for us was the loud and rather silly metalcore ceilidh band Glorystrokes, playing the Saturday night ceilidh. Great fun to listen to and pretty good to dance to. We also particularly enjoyed hearing Bella Hardy, fresh from the Proms, veteran folkie Tony Benn, appearing here with elder statesman Roy Bailey; and the suddenly Mercury-nominated Unthanks, with all new backing musicians.

We also found time for traditional crafts, including more corn dollies (I made a Welsh fan! And I had a picture, except that AirMe appears to have neither saved nor uploaded it). Marianne bought a knitting board, which is essentially French knitting on steroids. She's currently generating large amounts of square knitting; I have a plan to acquire stripy cotton yarn and channel her creativity into homemade dishcloths.