Moosie Doosie and other critters - one

I’m no Kate Moss.

For one thing, I’m dating a bassist. Not a lead singer. The bassist in Bandit, doncha know. Not the highly strung, former Libertine and current frontman of Babyshambles. My bassist is not a crack head neither, although he likes his vodka.

I’m not dressed like her neither. No thigh high boots topped by a pair of slinky shorts for this girl, although I’ve had my fashion moments. I’m wearing jeans and a fleece top, to ward off the evening fog creeping in from the Bay of Fundy.

I’m not chopping high grade cocaine into lines on top of an amp, long brown hair hiding my face.

I’m not hanging with Pete and his mates in a recording studio somewhere in trendiest London. I am in Freeport, Long Island, Nova Scotia. With Himself and his band mates, who are tuning up and drinking beer and doing all the noisy, pointless things that men do when they’re getting ready to play.

We are sitting in Bandit’s band shed. And it is Saturday night, just as it is all over the world.

We all find our own level of glamour. This is mine currently.

No rock stars in my firmament. Just real ones. Peeking through the fog swirling around Freeport.

Moosie Doosie is staring at me from underneath his fez. At least, I think he is. I can’t see behind his enormous yellow Elton John sunglasses. When I asked the guys, they said Himself had gotten him in Cape Breton and brought him home. He’s their mascot. He being the head of a four hundred pound bull moose, mounted onto a mahogany panel for display purposes. I found out later that Moosie Doosie used to hang on the living room wall in Himself’s house, where he convinced his young nieces and nephews that Moosie ran down the hill so fast he burst through one day and got stuck.

Looking at Moosie, I thought nice buy, dude, despite the fez and the sunglasses. Well spotted. He has a great eye for the eclectic, my man. A nip into some grubby ‘antiques’ store in Cape Breton must have resulted in this find.

Then I’m told Himself found Moosie Doosie standing in a swamp in Cape Breton, tracked him, circled him, shot him in the heart, then shot him six more times to stop Moosie’s death charge towards them in its tracks, tagged him, bled him, then winched him onto a truck and drove him home.

Of course.

Silly me.

Anyways, he’s retired from the house onto the wall of the band shed, alongside a poster of Elvira looking very 1985, pouting down from where she is draped over the bonnet of a classic car.

This is not the first band shed I have hung out in during a long life of trying to score the coolest guy in the room, but it is by far the coolest. And I’ve scored the coolest guy in the room.

Band sheds. As women have houses and living rooms and kitchens beauty parlours and shopping malls to bond in, men have band sheds.

Being a doyenne of these things, I understand the privilege of my position – a girl in the band shed. So I sit and drink my beer and stay quiet.

Across from my perch on the sofa (or cot as they say on long island), the wall is lined by an enormous baby blue cooler, lifted from a Dairy Queen years ago. Its got wonderful fifties curved lines. A relic of the days when things were made by people who had jobs in factories and mortgages and cars, not life sentences for sedition and a cot in a labour camp.

Down at the far end is a wood stove and a dart board.

Male heaven. Aren’t I the privileged little Queenie. Being allowed into the bandshed.

I am sitting on a green sofa, which is surprisingly clean and comfortable for a band shed sofa. I have a twelve pack of Schooner and three of the Bandits are tuning up while the drummer, who’s had quite a bit to drink today apparently, tries to crawl to the drum kit.

It’s proving pretty difficult for him to manoeuvre his way through the cables and amps and mike stands arranged around the practice area, even on all fours. In happy acknowledgement of his master’s quadrapedic behaviour, his Mamaluke is wandering around knocking things over with his tail.

Hell that’s a big dog. He can eyeball me when I’m sitting down. An Alaskan canine version of Boxer (Animal Farm), bred to pull extraordinarily heavy weights over short distances on ice. Because of that breeding, his shoulders are huge and his haunches are over-developed, but because of his thick fur you can’t see the muscle, and so he looks like an obese huskie without their cold cold eyes. After he knocks over my beer twice in vain attempts to lick me with his loofah of a tongue, I get his owner to put him outside.

This proves more traumatic for the owner than for the Mamaluke, as outside can only be reached by a steep staircase that plunges into the darkness of the hall. I forgot to mention that, didn’t I. The band shed isn’t a shed, it’s an old house the guys have done over to hang out in.

Of course.

What do you do when you’re in your thirties and you can’t play guitar at home anymore because you’ll wake the kids? You buy an old house in Freeport, near the Legion of course, and turn it into your dream hangout.