Ex-Tabula Rasa

Today’s themesong: Who Do You Love?

Mogwai - R U Still In 2 it?

Ah, that awful moment when it’s no longer clear. When you have to ask, ‘Who do you love?’ When you know something has changed, and you’re not sure what it is, or why, but you know that by having to ask the question, you’re not going to like the answer.

Embraces are shorter. Nights spent watching TV together are more about the TV and less about the ‘together’. Furtive glances betray true feelings. You travel all the way to Hull on a cold November weekend so you can be together after more than a month apart and she spends all her time with her friends - friends that she gets to see every bloody day if she wanted to - and not you, who had to spend six hours on a coach that stunk of piss, with a two-hour stop in Birmingham coach station (which stinks of piss even more), just to get there, only to find yourself sitting on the periphery of the group with a drink in your hand and nobody to talk to because everybody else is discussing some French Literature lecturer that you don’t know because you’re at a university on the other side of the country, let alone on the same bloody course.

“Are you still into it,” asks Aidan Moffat, of Arab Strap, “‘cause I’m still into it,” while Mogwai’s guitars swoon away in a listless, barren manner. Then he adds quite possibly the most heart-breakingly plaintive evidence for a waning romance: “We haven’t had sore bits for about a fortnight.”

A fortnight without sore bits. Who do you love, indeed?