Suicide by drum solo

I should stop doing the surrealistic post titles. It's too much like The Hard Work. And yet, and yet.

The Website, being set up with blog software, gets comments. As with other blogs, many of these are spam, many are shite and some are just worthy of note for their... amazingness. Just saw this in an idle glance:

i did not like girls aloud to go
i was very sad when they went down in lift
i did went girls aloud to go off stage
and i do not like when they are going down
on a glittery lift i was very sad when girls aloud after when they went down lift
i did miss all of girls aloud and i do miss my favourite in girls aloud is cheryl
tweedy when cheryl tweedy sang on stage
i was sad when girls aloud went down on a
sparkly lift i was upset when girls aloud
after go i was so sad when girls aloud went i was going to cry i missed girls aloud so much where are you going to be touring again?what is your next tour called? what will you be wearing on the next girls aloud tour what is the name of your next tour going to be?

Lord. The conversations people have with thin air on there. Asking things of the subject of the posts as if they could respond. It's a bit sad. But that is the internet.

(I had a big barney with someone last year about whether or not 'internet' takes a capital 'I'. I eventually grudgingly conceded it probably does, but I'm more or less reverting to my previous position i.e. only pompous nerds call it the Internet. I may be pompous, and I may be a nerd, but... well, I have my limits. Every day I find a new one.)

Shedfox isn't gone. He was there today. But there is a certain tension of course. How long will he hang around? And what's happened to Shedvixen, anyway?

I should be writing an actual feature at this moment, but having cobbled together some sort of exoskeleton to be filed into shape and slapped with hi-gloss goo tomorrow, I am having some Green & Black's hot chocolate and taking to my bed.

I was complaining as usual to - what's a good blogonym - my friend Walthamguy (that'll have to do) about what a lousy excuse for a journalist I am. I'm a decent enough writer which is why I get away with it, and I have proper principles about use of quotes and employment of grammar out the wazoo, but all the nuts and bolts of interviewing and researching and winkling out I am hopeless at. One of these days I'll do a course and actually learn all the stuff I've been bluffing I can do for years. Yeah, of course, the greater part of it is bluff, fake it till you make it, and all that. I was astonished when I did some proper corporate writing - I basically pastiched what I thought corporate writing reads like, and it turns out that's what corporate writing is. I do have a slobbering bloodhound nose for house style, it's uncanny.

But yes, I'm sorely in need of an arse-kick to that end. Also, to the end of getting to bed on time. Bed is about my favourite place in the world (even with the stale slice of Mother's Pride augmented with chickenwire and coathangers that is my current wretched excuse for a previous tenant cast-off of a pitiful mattress), but I suppose the pull of the PC is hard to resist.

London fell to bits on Friday, with torrential rain knocking out loads of the tube. (There were signal failures and security alerts too, but those we're used to.) The sky was so dark around midday it was like a goddam total eclipse yes it was. Went in a pub at lunchtime and the flagged basement was sloshing with grey water. And! People were still sitting there drinking and chatting like their shoes were dry. Ah, Britain. Britain, Britain, Britain.

There was a humiliating attempt to see another Somerset House gig, thwarted by the uselessness of record companies who can't get guest lists right. We had aftershow passes, ironically and more or less uselessly enough (for anyone who's never been to one and imagines they are amazing, allow me to disabuse you - they are people drinking in rooms and can be lovely or utterly depressing like any other occasion of that nature), so we doused our dolefulness in free booze, and nearly got covered in red wine by a twat in a suit who tipped a glass over and left a lake of the stuff to fester on table-top and floor while he chatted to his stupid friends. I wouldn't be surprised if it was his fault we didn't get in.

The remainder of the weekend has been spent half-arsedly attempting feature and more full-arsedly apostrophe-wrangling - on a print-out, for a pleasant change, so I could sit and make authoritative scribbles with an actual physical red pen. Turfed the dog off the chair and sat under the light with the stereo on. Big black hulking proper boys' thing it is, having been salvaged - legitimately, boringly - from the offices of defunct music mag in 2001. It doesn't see as much use as it should. Put on a Spiritualized thing I finally found after a lengthy hunt (I can't count my CDs, especially not the flimsy packety ones) and did smiles. I've had worse Saturday nights. I have.

Earlier I'd found, after similar scrabble through drawers and shelves, the one CD recording I have of myself warbling. It was made sometime mid-university with a bloke from home I had been in a band with when I was 17 - he was doing some tinkering with some new joybox of some sort so I helped. Astonished to find that not every muscle in my body spasmed with embarrassment at the sound of it. The cringe factor was far lower than all the pollsters predicted. Even the flat notes had that attractive "yeah, I meant to do it like that" thing about them, like... I can't think who but people get away with it all the time. Morrissey? Morrissey.

I should have learnt by now that a great deal of the time, not bad is more than good enough.