Excuse me, I believe you're sitting on my snarge

There's many a snoop twixt cock and hoop

2008-02-13T21:48:00.007Z

It's...

I've decided pub quizzes are the new knitting - a dreary fusty old pastime inexplicably revived by sexy young things in all the best places. It's gonna catch on. Really. I've done one two weeks on the trot now and it's utterly satisfying. Not to win overall - we've come 6th or joint 8th or something feeble - but to feel the giddy zing of the individual correct answers. The renewed fondness you feel for your plucky little brain when it squeezes out answers you forgot it had or never knew it knew. Who knew I knew the hydra had nine necks? Not I.

What's all this then?

The Good

Foxen attempting an avant-garde outdoor production of 'Turandot' at night. They're really going for it. Just as the beast sometimes resembles a horse, or a panther, or a bear, the foxen can be reminiscent of crows, or cats, or sexually-frustrated apes. Really you should hear 'em.

Really wonderful albums by Roisin Murphy, Winehouse (it doesn't get old), Adele and yes yes Britney played a blinder the poor LA urchin. (The pathos of her life makes me want to find and punch quite a lot of people, but selfishly I am just glad she managed to lift her head out of the gutter long enough to record 'Get Naked (I Got A Plan)' - but actually really I hope she manages to stick some semblance of a life together. Ain't right.)

Insanely beautiful spring weather - OK, it's cold, but the sun the sun of it is just gobsmacking.

Charlie, Eli and Shreve.

The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. Went twice. Blundering around a vast building in a mask, happening upon wrong things in semi-darkness, and marvelling at the fact that such a health'n'safety black hole is possible in This Day + Age. I went through a wardrobe and came out in a fireplace, and my inner five-year-old exploded.

The Bad

Office move imminent. Noooo, they be stealin ma view of Senate House! Remember, all change is bad. (We don't know where we're going yet. We have to be out by the end of the month. Haw!)

No but really, why don't they just have us all donate DNA like we donate blood and have done with it? At least we'd get a cup of tea out of it.

There is nothing on television. NOTHING. EVER.

Unfit and listless and helpless in the face of triple chocolate shortbread, chunky and almost burned and fulfilling as something you made in Home Ec class and rescued just in time.

Camden town went on fire. It is going to cost a lot to fix. Much loss of livelihood. Rotten.

The Fugly

(I could make a better delineation here but, pffft.)

A man grabbed my arse in the street a couple of weeks ago. When I politely suggested that this was not decorous behaviour for a 21st-century male, he did it again. When I walked past a couple of incredibly conveniently-placed police officers a minute later, I hesitated, then carried on. Dammit.

I may give up on the idea of trying to buy a flat. Live fast, rent house, leave a beautiful... windowbox. Peh.

There are other things I'm teetering on giving up on, but I'm probably just being a knob. Knob that I am.

Yes, and how do we mark the occasion of someone we sort of probably quite love (a bit) slipping away? We don't. Nor do we have a gothic fit about it although that seems kind of appropriate (hell, and fun). We just go about our business feeling surreal and shruggy and occasionally a little bit teetery.

(I had to perform an unfriending on the Social Utility. It was like having a small online creature put down. Oh, which reminds me... this is sort of beautiful. And I have no idea why.)

I'm going to attempt to follow the example of the remarkably loquacious Louche and blog thrice daily. Ahem. I am telling you now it won't work.

Good evening, I am from Essex.

2007-12-12T23:58:00.000Z

Ha. Ha! Yeah, I know. I KNOW. Perhaps, in time, this will change. And then maybe other things, like so many oversized dominos, all through The Power of Regular Blogging.

The truth - the truth - is that I haven't sat down for quite a few weeks. Well, I have sat down, and I have been sitting down, and I have had several really good and fulfilling actual sits down (an important distinction). But, I don't know, what's that thing about the bad girls not having time to keep diaries? Ugh. It's not very nice, forget I mentioned it. I have been neither bad nor good, nothing so binary, I have merely done behaviour according to a complex combination of factors ranging from indelible instinct to momentary whim. Most of it has pleased me, and none of it has resulted in me being in the free crapsheets looking like hell, so I am likely to continue.

So, to recap. What did I in September? I went to to two weddings. One was an hour late because of the bride's hair which had some kind of follicular panic, and there was extra food and empty seats at the single-dregs table I was on because of an almighty falling out of my mutual friends. We ate their profiteroles.

Then there was start of job, of course, which now feels like it's been my life for ooh, at least eight months or something. Writing about one's job on the internet is not done of course but the salient points include but are not limited to:

1) I can wear what I like and prat about online to my heart's content.
2) The people are in the main terribly charismatic and personable.
3) I eat lunch at my desk like someone who is actually busy.
4) Although once I ate it in the famous Japanese restaurant which occupies the ground floor of the building, and omigod the tofu you simply wouldn't believe it it was like steak.
5) There is a lot of swearing, and griping aloud is permitted. All good.
6) And just as well because it is kind of shambolic in places.
7) It is mostly quiet, however, because everyone witters to each other on IM. Handy. Especially for complaining, and gossip. The water cooler is dead, man.
8) Lots of people comment on the website and we have to deal with the little data-nubs they scatter as they please. In some kind of never-ending avalanche of banality, irrelevance and casual sexism. It is a bit like mucking out the internet.
9) But it's OK.
10) And they pay me quite a decent amount of money, like, every month, without me having to email them five times and call them twelve times and send them letters and hesitate for a bit then take them to small claims court when all other options have been exhausted (including the one with the very big men without discernible necks) and then find that doesn't work either and try not to calculate how much I've spent trying to just get fucking paid.

Revelatory!

11) And they do not seem, even after three months, to think I am especially odd. This is probably because they are quite odd. Excellent. Whew.

I've been to lots of things and missed even more, obviously, but the actual managing to go to things is, y'know, good. I went to a roller disco. I was terrified. I went home. I saw a musical. I died a bit inside. I went home. I saw some wonderful bands. They were wonderful. (Look at this site, though. Cor!) Oh and Amy Winehouse too, which just made me laugh for all the people who are opting out of cherishing her as the most important and greatest music star of our generation, refraining from basking in the kind of real awe you can rarely feel in life, and are frittering away their precious glittering and harshly-rationed moments peering up her nose. (Journalists referring to what is quite clearly and manifestly cocaine as "a mystery white powder" is a bit like Jenna Jameson unzipping you and going, "Oh my gah, what's that?" That is cocaine - that is a figurative penis - shut up.)

I experienced genuine irony in that I was undone for an entire weekend by the healthy health supplements taken to offset the side effects of incredibly unhealthy and bad, but oh so smashing ingestibles. That was amusing. Er, and I have settled into some kind of routine of being buffetted by squashy clouds of coincidence, I mean, it is getting ridiculous, y'know, but it's always quite nice even when it is A Bit Scary.

Oh and in the last week I've seen two people, one really rather significant, who I didn't think I'd ever see again a couple of months ago. Both meetings were more pleasant and satisfying than they had any right to be, considering these are people from quite a few versions of my life ago. I also reclaimed another friend from the jaws of nostalgic/bitter friend-oblivion and am very indeed dead chuffed. Naturally I owe most of this to the Social Utility (pecan-studded biscuits be upon it). I can't even really rue it for bringing me the odd bit of sad or grim or nnng or titsup or fucksakes or sigh, even though it has, because these things pale before the frankly disgusting opulence of the peopley luxuries it's bestowed. I've long since given up feeling qualms about how much of my existence seems to involve it in some way, because, y'know, whatsitooyer?

Yes, this is about the level of eloquence we're talking here.

I'm utterly and laughably unprepared for Christmas, but at least the beast has his accommodation booked and he shall have his turkey. He is getting love handles, middle-aged as he is now, only they're kind of around his shoulders, which makes his waspish waist look even more absurd. He now has a nanny in the form of the Wife, who tends to him in my absence and also sometimes makes me porridge of a cold morning, and seriously my tea consumption has gone up by about 900% since she moved in. We are utterly co-dependent, which is extremely silly but great for those slumpy moments when things are sucky. (80% of these occur either at 7pm, or 12.30am. The dank armpits of the evening.)

I should possibly be worried about the things I have presently that I would be a bit lost without, but I suppose you've got to have a few of those, and I'm not adding any more for a bit if I can help it. You don't want too many. No no.

Oh, and I did some actual fucking writing the other night, goddamn. Preliminary stuff, true, but it was something involving typing that wasn't an email or one of these bits, so. So! And it felt like writingy writing in the sense that it wasn't really like me doing it. Or rather, it wasn't like I was generating material, it was all there and I was just transcribing, doing the donkey work with the occasional thoughtful bit of original input to complement the whole. It's positively secretarial.

I suppose I avoid doing it even though it's so clearly what I should be doing, as much of the time as I can. It is somehow risky. Obviously there's the thing where you do stuff and you look at it later and oh the rampant shittitude of it is overwhelming and boring, but the risky element is more to do with poncy ideas of like, Truth. Even though it's fiction. Stuff has to ring true, at least. Have its own truth and stick to it. And it's totally dead easy, it is absolutely la la laaaaa while I'm doing it, and so I trust it to be correct, more or less, because how could it not be - but you've got to interfere a bit and nudge it in directions, because it doesn't know what it's doing, and so how do you know you're acting as stabilisers to the little wobbly bike of your runaway prose and not, like, I dunno, growing a big field of GM crops on the natural earthy canvas of your... y'know?

Bleh. Nonsense. It's only stuff that I'm going to use later to do other stuff with, it is a tool (heh, yes, I know how it feels, etc) and so doesn't need to be Good. But it does need to be Right. There are people involved here. People with surprisingly ghastly childhoods, in fact, but they couldn't be such loveable dysfunctionals without those.

I mean, I'm only making them up so I can eventually throw them off a bus shelter and kill them, without even letting them have sex beforehand, but that's not the point.

If you've read to here, you may have a biscuit.

Oh and the foxen are abroad at night, having decamped across the road. I see them all the time. Usually they also see me. It never fails.

Next time in our non-solipsism special:

Morrissey - why doesn't he just put on a white sheet and pointy hat and be done with it? (Because he's not a racist. He is a curmudgeon. There is a difference.)

Maddy - Kate... police... Murat... sleeping pills... oh, look, a couple have done a massive audacious but totally rubbish life insurance fraud, something to do with a canoe, thank God, clasp it to your newsbosom! And it's great because like no one's died or anything, and look at the symmetry with a person turning up rather than going missing, they've closed a circle for us, and as a nation we can finally know tabloid peace. News lives!

Evel Knievel - oh, I thought he was dead already.

Climbing obstacles like old people fuck

2007-08-30T22:32:00.000Z

Yes yes it's been a month, what of it? So much has happened, but then that's months for you, they have stuff in them, generally.

I have been anointed with an actual job, starting shortly, picking the bits off other people's writing like some kind of baboon. Excellent. I am still staggered at this evidence of my employability. Now I just need something similar to convince me that I'm a writer, ish, and not just an indolent hack who hasn't even been that great at hacking. Oh is she never satisfied? No, but here is a list of things that have satisfied her in the last four calendar weeks:

Green & Black's (currently, butterscotch)

Antony Gormley (wonderful)

Prince (joyous and impish and excessively freaky)

Shedfoxen

Fat moths

Family Guy

Pastry-bestowing boss

Wi-fi Skype handset

Red t-shirt with guitars on

SLEEP.

Yes, those. Also moments of synchronicity of which there seem to be more at the moment. Am I just noticing them, or is this, like, a Sign that something good is going to happen and the Utah Saints are gonna play? Pfft. Fun though and deserving of a new section thingy methink.

Synchroliciouses

Music: Pet Shop Boys 'Being Boring' - "all the people I was kissing, some are here and some are missing in the 1990s..."

Visuals: Poster for book, 'The Missing', seen by totally unneccessary spontaneous crane of neck.

And the rest, well y'know.

Gains

Oh so much free crap including:

Some socks with silver in them
Some face goo smelling faintly of fake strawberries
Two copies of Prince's new album which isn't that great but y'know, it's Prince
Box of insane and fascinating Oriental confectionery, none of which is edible, and some of those little paper bangers that you throw at people's feet and do not think we didn't
Two battery-powered massagers (ha ha, 'silent' ones), one with light-up feet
An iPod case, which is very pretty but I cannot use it, having no iPod except that Shuffle which is still in its case
3959879 sundry USB flash drives
A fetching pink phone, although I have to give it back, but it shows birds in the day and shooting stars at night and it pleases me, even if it has no damn credit on it dammit
Bottle Pimm's
Dog grooming vac attachment (yes)

And

Some gloves, because they are selling them, and they will soon be necessary
Hat, ditto
Some money, finally

And

A cousin, by marriage
Some new friends and acquaintances (I'm getting good at acquiring those, it's just finding places to put them, y'know?)
Shortly, a flatmate, and very welcome she am

Losses

One of the best days of the non-summer, at a festival with terrible sound and 20 toilets for five or perhaps even ten thousand people (I'm not getting into all that again but suffice to say, grrr)

Some nice sunglasses, sat on by someone (anguish)

Wants

Oh we're not going there.

I also went to a wedding in the Lakes and had this insane insect bite that made my leg swell up for a week hobble hobble, and saw what turned out to be the world premiere of a brilliant film, and most recently went down the canal, fed swans and gazed upon the glory of shabby old marvellous peaceful London, soon to be shafted by the fucking cursed Olympics.

(Yes and here the font changes, but it is significant of nothing more than my sneaky cutting and pasting and my inability to be Bothered.)

Meanwhile, the straight to hell moment of the week (so it's not this week, so who's counting? What am I, a schmuck on wheels? etc).

I get the bus to the tube, past some flats. Monday there are police outside. Tuesday there’s police tape, forensic suits and witnesses. Wednesday there are flowers tied to the railings. Thursday I get out a stop early to look.

The local papers had the story reassuringly splashed on the front page. It’s when it gets to a note on page six that you start to worry about the area. Although actually anything that brings property prices down at this point is fine by me; yes I am so desperate to property-own that I would live in a place where I had to take a bath in full riot gear. Anyway, it was a stabbing, 34-year-old dead from single wound to the thigh (often happens apparently, hits the atery and you’re fucked). Grim.

The card with one bunch of flowers had a little rhyming message. It did give me pause. It went:

We didn’t always see eye to eye

But you didn’t deserve to die

Now your up in the sky

Hmm. That first line immediately rings alarm bells for me. The bloke was an MC. MCs have beefs with other MCs on occasion. And when an MC dies violently, you do not want to pay tribute with heavy implication of beef. Muy suspicious. It (I thought to myself) really might as well have said

We didn’t always see eye to eye

Which is why

I had to stab you in the thigh

Goodbye.

In any case, they’ve got the bloke, or at least a bloke, and he’s going to the Old Bailey. His name is amazing. It combines a classical Greek reference with one of the elements on the periodic table. Amazing.

Suicide by drum solo

2007-07-22T23:57:00.001Z

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.

Disloyalty cards

2007-07-19T23:51:00.000Z

I must repair the posterlet that I swallowed my pride to stick under the passed-around pen of the band. (The pride went down fine actually, more like a morsel of seafood than a giant cod liver oil pill.) I kept that bit of semi-shiny promo-paper immaculate for six years, through countless house-moves, 300 miles north and back, and then when I get it signed and bung it back up on my wall for the first time in years, the oaf who comes to fix my PC leans against the wall and makes a little rip in it. And doesn't even have the decency to be a bit horrified. (He didn't fix my PC properly either, the steaming berk and clot.) It infuriates me to look at it. A pox on him and his big ape hands. Well, OK, just a minor pox as it is just a bit of paper of some sentimental and now doubtless some eBay value BUT STILL.

So the other day I was on my way to some fuckforsaken region of western London where I never usually go ever, where the tube comes out and gasps for air above ground, and was listening to a song that went "Through southern snow to Heathrow", and just as that line came on the Heathrow express went past saying heathrow heathrow heathrow. I like this sort of coincidence. It's suggestive to me of a tiny signpost telling you that you're still going the right way. Of course this is a lot of old arse but it's a nice thought.

Is it time for mergers and acquisitions yet? And am I going to format it correctly this time?

Gots

- Weekend's worth of work (well, more of it) delivered by courier with terrible fear of dogs. I opened the door and there was no one there. The beast had spoken, the man had run away. Dear dear.
- Some bits and pieces from helpful individuals that may save me from hiding under the bed from a deadline, and if you saw my bed you would know how bad that is.
- Cough. The kind that doesn't affect you all that much but kind of makes your throat taste of something that does not belong.
- Lockets (2 packets)
- Invitation to gig (at venue I will always remember fondly for one particular sweaty night when we poured water over each other's heads like the kind of idiots you try to ignore at gigs).
- Some lurid green earbuds, I suppose, by default since they've been left there. They are too big to fit in my ears and look like they are made of the stuff they make jelly shoes out of.

Losts

- Potentially, in the next week the Social Utility. Ah, said the fox, I shall cry. But really, I will be so bereaved and so bereft. Like a Bowery bum, when he finally understands the bottle's empty and there's nuthin left. Yes.
- Website job. Only I didn't lose it, it lost me. More fool it. I'm there till the end of next month, at least, and I shall be gathering free shit like a nut in May, so I shall.
- Shedfox. He's gone. He is an ex-fox. Although I hope he's just found a better shed to sleep on.

Recovereds

- Degree of laughable chutzpah, apparently. Have forward-put myself initially for two projects - one already started by someone who needs another person, one only existing in my tiny mind - neither of which I'm quite capable of pulling off but y'know, it's nice to.... oh, I don't know.
- Lipbalm, thought lost and replaced, proving both how disorganised I am and how frivolous with money. Terrible. Terrible.

Oooo, ooooo, ooooo: Look what you've started

2007-07-18T23:55:00.000Z

To paraphrase some red-nosed bloke, a band ruined music, music journalism and probably several other things for me and I never even had the common courtesy to thank them.

I'm too completely shagged out to do the quality of waffling I ought, but the whole point is that while they inspire me to all sorts of flights of fancyness, they also make me realise that there's not really any need for it. It's enough to experience these things. And I kind of want to keep it to myself, anyway, because... I'm still not sure why, being a writer and all. But it's like... I could make some money writing about sex, but I sort of can't. Not because I'm a prude about it, but I can't translate my thoughts about it into writing, somehow. And don't want to. Really don't want to. Want to keep it for myself. Even writing about it in generic terms, drawing on the most general experience - just Do Not Want. It's too private. It is.

I feel almost the same way about this band. It's a private pash. A warm-glow, hazy-shared-bubble, separate-dimension-in-which-everything-is-good-and-pure sort of thing. Not that I'm not pleased to find other people who love them, it's just... I'm not into being a fan in that way. It's not really like that. It's not a drooling obsession. I just know that I'm somehow plugged into them and at home with them in a way I've never quite been with any other band, or thing. And it's all very safe - there's none of that sickly lurching feeling of wanting what you can't have about it, the kind of thing that makes girls cry in huge gaggles at airports as boys in sunglasses are hustled away by a hundred suited brickshithouses. Good things can be oddly painful in ways that almost make them worth avoiding. But not this one. I suppose there was some nagging twinge of unfinishedness before I'd interviewed them - interviewed being the operative word, as opposed to just met, that wasn't it - but that's gone now. There's nothing left to do but enjoy it.

See (at this point you may wish to go and make a cup of tea, and drink it, and then go and do some shopping or something) the thing is I am so deeply fond of them that even if things are rotten and rubbish - and we've got to say, folks, we are pretty much up to our eyebrows in landfill at present - they will not only cheer me up but actually make me happy. Really goofy-grin, tears-in-eyes, lump-in-throat, tingle-in-ribs happy. I'd flogged my spare ticket (being on my own, a very bad start) to a tout for a fraction of what it cost, nearly laid out a security git for telling me to 'smile' and nearly burst into tears at another one for telling me to say 'please' (I'd said "excuse me" but I don't think he heard, and I'm such a big believer in politeness too). I'm stricken with a nasty emotional common cold (the one I never thought I'd get, but these things mutate, and this one might be bedding in), mourning the loss of the small but real dream of the website job that died suddenly of budgetosis yesterday, and wondering if there is such a thing as a perfect balance between fluttering anxiety and despairing fuck-all-this-ness. (I'm sure the tension between those two forces works great, like when they find out Monty Burns has every illness ever discovered but they all keep each other from snuffing him.)

And then this band plays, right, and I am not stricken or mourning or bemoaning at all but just gazing and smiling. There was a lovely bit of a breeze (this was Somerset House, so kind of like being the filling of a stately stone wedding cake) and the sky was stubbornly dark blue for hours. They were soppy and said nice things (and tried to get us to sing 'Happy Birthday' to the drummer, ferchrissakes, the soft bastards), and played great, and looked great, and were just great. I try to be objective, but why would I want to do a thing like that? Why would anyone?

I'm quite blissfully aware that I've lost all objectivity with them - I do occasionally try an experimental switch to distant analyser mode, and it just physically doesn't work, like trying to flip a lightswitch with your chin sometimes doesn't. It makes me giddy that I can't see over or around this band - I totally understand why people don't like them, and I'll never try and win anyone round if they're not immediately into it, but all that's irrelevant when I see them. Criticism just doesn't exist. It's real escapism. The only other things that ever give me that complete respite from all the shite (does that rhyme? well, it ought) are the beast, some of the time, and sleeping with someone. (Or sleeping on my own, in fact, but that's rubbish, because no one worries in their sleep, it's cheating.)

OK, there are other small things that successfully disengage me from the toxic gloop, but it's a hard thing to pull off for more than a minute.

The singer was standing around watching the support band (who blew, sadly), straggle-haired man of the people that he is. He more or less remembered me from the half-hour I spent listening to his Steven Wright drawl and tommy-gun laugh. I was pleased to see him and he wasn't displeased to see me, so I didn't feel funny shouting a couple of friendly things in his ear. They are different, I realised that ages ago - they've sort of got the approved organic rock star stamp on them. They're not putting it on - that's who they are. It's got nothing to do with posturing, that's not in their vocabulary. They might not have fallen out of the sky but they could have been pulled up from the earth (I think their clothes were, at least). However, the thing is that I can never tell them what they mean to me - I have a bit of a desire to in a way, but not much. I couldn't articulate it anyway, but that's not the point - there is no one you can really address it to, just yourself. They said themselves that whatever they write isn't really theirs, and it's true - the whole thing is greater than sum of parts and so they're only partly responsible. And they're not supernatural, they are just blokes. The people aren't really the thing, they're just what starts it. The string of the lovely balloon.

I had a better way of putting that, but pfffft.

I don't credit them with making me quit, I realised it was necessary on my own. I think they did a bit of precipitating and a bit of easing of transition and a bit of inspiring. It's not like you can really make a living at music journalism now unless you've been established for years on end - someone today tried to justify his writing for free because "everyone's a critic now, and who's to say my opinion's more important than this guy's in his bedroom?" and I had to flush his head in the toilet five times before the sound of "it's the democratisation of content" finally gurgled into silence. I didn't down tools the minute I heard the twangy rumblings of the first song on the first album. That was in ruddy 2001, so I kept at it for a while, and they were just my favourite band in a way no band had ever been my favourite, but it wasn't any sort of deal-breaker.

Still, whatever else I lost when I threw in that particular stinking soul-destroying towel, I didn't lose them. I was sure a while ago that there had been some natural evaporation, and they'd become a bit more ordinary and banal to me, and they sort of did, but miraculously it takes no time at all to tap back into the way I always felt about them. Which is, just so all-consumingly fucking fond.

My love for this stuff is pure, there is nothing clagging it or compromising it. It's my joy, even if it's momentarily punctured by drunken oaf morons of the kind that go to gigs and run the risk of me punching them to the ground - but never mind them, look at this wondrous lovely beauty of a splendid rock'n'roll nonsense and then blow your hair about by the end window of the tube on the way home. All else is rather a bit balls, frankly.

July is the cruellest month

2007-07-15T21:14:00.000Z

The weather is still ass - well, there was some sun and actual warmth and everything this weekend but consistency is the thing oh and sunny proper sun, the kind that makes me complain because I'm usually wearing specs but I'd rather be complaining about that than this. And give me an album full of upbeat uptempo poperiffic choons and I will go straight for the slump-shouldered moody track, and sit there staring out of the window at Shedfox, or the roofy space where Shedfox was until he went off about his foxy business, WITHOUT ME.

Yes.

Acquisitions

Like omigod these amazing boots that I want to, I dunno, put on and walk around in?
Invitation to see one of favourite bands in October
Some really amazing blisters from the shoes that didn't give me any grief at all on my birthday
Box files (4) (like that's anything like enough)
Supposedly, a copy of The Dirt for research purposes but is it here? It is NOT
Details of several nice properties that I will not be moving into soon
Special edition of Airplane! (leading to loss of shit - it really is the greatest. "Joey? Dgy'ever... hang around the gymnasium?")
Times for job interviews (2)

Losses

Goodie bag from networking event I didn't get to because I couldn't find the damn place goddammit
Optician appointment (hungover) (but I did summon the wherewithal to ring and cancel)
So much time, to the Social Utility, but it is the bringer of joy
A drift of paper, some of it crap and some of it sad and soggy with meaning, but it all had to go and we're not done yet either
Decorum (modicum thereof)
Composure (unmeasurable)

Retentions

Most of dignity at Roman-grade drinking occasion, remarkably
Glut of misplaced sentimentality, unprepossessing propensities... inability to use short words where five long stupid ones no one ever uses will do
Funds from stewarding (£20) (although that's not true, it just looks like it because the note is here on my desk; I could not guess how many of its comrades have fallen this week in the immoral financial war that is my life)
Loads of crap that is ripe for the banishing

I can't quite pinpoint what I've done this week, actually. It turns out to be a week off between stints of website cover, although I'm now graduating to between-perma-people cover from holiday cover. The people it is between is the person who has just left and me, hopefully. There is going to be some wretchedness around here otherwise, oho sirree. Well, more wretchedness. The wretchedness levels are pretty healthy at the moment. But the boots help. And will do until I am forced to stop wearing them because the pain, the pain is too much, probably. I should be allowed to wear comedy tigerfeet slippers all the livelong day because my feet hate everything.

If I end up in actual gainful employment - which I could do with because freelancing at present is like being one of those fish sort of half-immersed in wet mud between the spokes of an old bicycle wheel in a drained riverbed going bloop GASP bloop GASP you get the general idea - then I'll have to be careful what I say here, won't I? I wouldn't like to get dooced. (Oh google it, I can't be bozzed as we used to say at school. But the blog of the woman who was the original dooce victim is brilliant and I'm totally ripping her off with the CAPITAL STUFF. I hate caps for emphasis but if I do it in a slightly arch way I can get away with it to myself. FOR NOW.)

Thought: does anyone get dooced for writing nice things about their boss on company time?

Other thought: how do people with proper jobs ever manage to do stuff? Work takes up all their day. It is inhuman. Oh, but I want it.

Lastly: Go Rachel.

Correckshin

2007-07-09T20:49:00.000Z

I had done a thing since Gordon Brown got in. Tsk. Poor brane.

Fox is back. And so is rotten weather. Hail! Hail the size of cantaloupes. Or at least, the size of pence. American pence. Or old French pence.

More good news! Tiny girl taken from back of car is returned to family, covered in mosquito bites.

It's awfully quiet working at home again without people with whom to exchange piffle.

The fiercest number

2007-07-08T18:34:00.000Z

Some actual bona fide good news last week - Alan Johnston, kidnapped journalist, freed after 114 days. I think this should be marked in some way. How often do you get actual good news in the true sense? Usually it's sporting victories, which aren't really news, or things about calves born with extra legs, which aren't really good.

Meanwhile, one of the new brooms says the terror fight could take 15 years. I would like to see how he's worked this out. Maybe people are just demanding specifics; they're easier to deal with than vague hand-flaps of uncertainty when lives are at stake. I suppose the people responsible for the impossible job of sorting out terrorism can't just hold up pieces of string at press conferences and shout "HOW FUCKING LONG IS THIS? A? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?"

Still, I'm finding it hard to stifle my sense of absurdity when it comes to the recent non-attacks. (I'm sure there are better links than these to cite but dammit, if you are here it means you are an intelligent bean with ability to use internet, and there are many more splendidly comprehensive bloggers in my blogroll to whom you may refer on such matters of import. So!) It's not that these things shouldn't be taken seriously (ish) because it shows that the intent is still there, even if the ability isn't (and there were doctors behind these things? I fear for the quality of our healthcare all the more. Perhaps years of listening to people complain about their knees drives one to jihad. My GPs are thoroughly sociopathic fucks in any case. So!). And terrorists are just as able as anyone else to learn from their own and each others' mistakes, especially if the media helpfully point those out.

But the fact is that this - two non-bombs in central London and one semi-bomb in Glasgow complete with flaming terrorist determined to at least take out one person even if it was only his silly, on-fire self - was a giant laughable arse-up all the way. I was very pleased by the sensible reaction of Brown's lot (since I last wrote he has finally ascended - I did ask him to wait till I was ready, but he was busting), a far cry from what would have been another set of ominous showboating pronouncements from that flouncing ringmaster of a Blair swine - but! the media have overwhelmingly taken the line that we were only saved from being bombed to molecules by "a combination of luck and public vigilance". Not that the Scottish bloke doesn't deserve much kudos and his internet celebrity - in fact that just makes me grin a lot, really. He did good. But in both London and Glasgow, the attacks were thoroughly buggered up before they even didn't happen, and it was less to do with luck and vigilance than the kind of blithering incompetence rarely seen outside of rubbish 70s sitcoms whose plots revolve solely around thin men being unable to operate bicycles.

So the rhetoric baffles and bothers me somewhat. Of course any number of other, more efficient attacks might have been ready to go, so I understand the raise in threat level etc etc etc (what a whimsical notion that is - I like to find out the weather, the travel and how scared I need to be of a morning) bUT I wish these attacks had been put in better perspective by the Feral Beasts. Considering the failure of a non-viable bomb to go off an 'attack' is like considering a foetus a toddler. Saying "if these bombs had gone off thousands would have been killed", when the bombs couldn't have gone off (they were missing a vital component, apparently - that one is a good link, btw), is taking the fine art of rabid speculation to glorious new levels. If all the news were treated in the same manner, we'd have so much hysteria-based fun.

Supermarket knife rampage man thwarted

...The weapon was later found to be a small plastic spork. "If it had been a large machete, the carnage would have been unimaginable," said Inspector Dollop...

Yars.

Meanwhile I've had an interesting week at the Website. I've been doing holiday cover there for a year, and now the job's come up. I have concluded, for a variety of reasons, that I would step over my own mother to get it. I would also step over an acquaintance who is also apparently applying. Only, the first time I tried to step over her, I would deliberately miss.

Yeah, s'like that, homes.

It was a week unusually full of interesting men, which is always a good week. I don't know where the interesting women are, but - oh, it might have something to do with the fact that I've always worked in ever so slightly gender-wonky situations. These were men I worked with or have worked with, or men I met backstage at Reading and ended up living with who I haven't seen in four years and who look so completely different with their weight loss and tattoos and coloured contact lenses and lack of facial hair that it was rather a surreal experience. Media-ish and/or music-related men, to a man. These are the circles I've always moved in. I've probably absorbed an unhealthy amount of testosterone over the years, and get mistaken for a man all the time without realising it.

Actually, I did get mistaken for a man rather a bit when I wrote for the satire sheet that is no more. We had credits, not bylines, and everyone else there had a Y chromosome which was plain to see in their names. So it wasn't surprising that people would write in about something I'd written and refer to me in the register of bloke. It was curiously gratifying, though, especially as it meant I never had to take any criticism, because it all went to this male alter-ego the readership inadvertently created. I named him Ted.

The week's menfolk were mostly curmudgeonly and cynical, in a mostly pleasant way, although one was properly wise and one maintained the same infectious enthusiasm for things that I remember appreciating before. One of them gave me a new drug experience, although he didn't necessarily mean to - but I have discovered the secret of joy, and her name is CODEINE. How it is legal, even if it requires a degree of cajoling and fibbing, is beyond me. I spent the last hour of work stoned out of my gourd, then ran home from Baker Street to Walthamstow on winged feet, wrote a 300-page high-concept novel and showed it to God. God gave me this wicked quote to use on the cover of the paperback.

(I'm pretty sure I also saw some E scattered on the steps at King's Cross, but if you think I picked any of them up to check, you're sorely mistaken. I simply bent down to lick one. It was inconclusive. Thinking about it, I should have gathered them up and sold them outside regardless. Curses.)

Yesterday I did a stint as a steward for an art event in a pretty wood in a place I thought for years was made up by the BBC so Mark from EastEnders could get his first break. I wasn't too impressed with the fluro-jacket, but was thrilled with the walkie-talkie. There's nothing like strolling past some innocent event-goers with your hip occasionally bursting into a snatch of semi-comprehensible monologue. I was bitten by something on the neck, but it didn't matter because it was the first July-like day of July and I would gladly have given a vein's worth to the starving insects of Essex for that.

Oh, and Shedvixen has apparently given over the shed to Shedfox. I saw them together, looking like a single fox with four ears, but since it's just been himself. Neither today, though. Keine foxen. I no longer appear able to get decent pictures, which is an ass. But if I got this Website job, I may be able to borrow some gobsmackingly brilliant camera that digitally compensates for all lack of talent and wobbly arms, and run away with it.

Two new additions to the 'loll - Piqued and Evidence of a Struggle. You will laugh, you will curl your lip, you will vomit uncontrollably but not notice until you wake up three hours hence.

Head meet pish

2007-06-30T18:04:00.000Z

So the daily showing here didn't come off. What of it? It just means I'll have to catch myself unawares and do it without thinking. I'm convinced this is the secret to me ever getting anything done, in fact. Ambush.

Acquisitions

Polish green amber (who knew about this?) pendant, charming surprise
New will-write-words-for-pence website
A couple of morsels of payment
New specs prescription (only moderately blinder, apparently) and blagged contact lenses

Losses

The usual.

The only thing more depressing than hula-hooping short-skirted spontaneous-picnic-having hot weather in summer is relentless grouchy northern-grade grimness. It is actually cold. And it is actually wet, and grey and horrible, horrible. And I am actually staying out of it, thank you. I only had the barest twinge of a pang at missing Glastonbury, and similar for missing this thing at Knebworth tonight (Underworld are playing, and there I was thinking they'd died or something). I've cossetted myself to the point that I need a really good reason to rouse myself from my sultry nest.

Mind you I was hauled out last night by the Bradford bird (no one from school or anything - I'm continuing to successfully evade and avoid my gruesome Yorkshire-based past, thank you. Oh, except that I did have to do a little amateur psychologising to help the one schoolfriend whose company I still enjoy, because her mate had suddenly gone all funny about being accused of being gay and said he never wanted to speak to her again, and I said it was probably him not being able to deal with them growing apart after all this time and needing to find something to get mad about as a way out, like, and I really thought about it and spent time trying to give good advice as requested and everything but she hasn't replied, so maybe she's decided she never wants to speak to me again in a sort of pass-it-along scenario. Ho hum. Where does the full stop go? It still goes after. Correct punctuation in and around parentheses is rapidly going the way of the apostrophe. Bloody idiots everybloodywhere).

(Best to start a new paragraph I think.)

An insane but sort of charismatic pub in Dalston (adjacent to or part of Hackney, therefore sort of 'gritty' and sort of tiresomely full of trendy fucks), all knackered wood and fag-stained walls and high wartime ceilings and the odd picturesque lovable old alkie amongst the kind of young snoots who don't take their hats off indoors. Although in fact it all added up to quite a pleasant riot. Got chatted up by a woman who'd just come back from Mexico, only it wasn't my perfume, it was someone else's. By about 11pm it was like the bottom of a ship, all seething and rowdy and pissed, with drinking and ironic conversation instead of rowing.

Lots of stimulating company crammed round on those poky stools you get, going on about crap in lofty fashion, and apparently knocking back Coronas too quickly. I've never quite got my head around my tolerance to alcohol - with a brief university blip (I used to drink pints - pints!) it's always seemed to be embarrassingly low. But it seems to vary. A million factors must be involved. The experiment could go on forever.

The things I need to be grateful for are

a) If I'm going to sick with the booze, it invariably holds off until I get home. My body must be finely attuned to my sense that nothing, not even being [insert nasty violent action] in the [insert body part] with a [etc], is worse than public humiliation, and adjusts itself accordingly. It's extraordinary, really. No forcing all the other inhabitants of top deck of nightbus to open all the windows for this correspondent. And none of that ending up on the news as part of a montage of head-shaking examples of what happens when girls binge-drink. But then I don't quite qualify as a 'girl' any more, and also the last time I wore a tiny skirt of the kind that looks so great when you're lying half in the road with your arse aloft was in 1997. And that was only for ten minutes before I decided to put something more androgynous on instead.

b) If sickness of the booze is my evening's destiny, my body (which must be keenly aware of the nastiness and potential deadliness of having beer-problems in sleep or at least in bed) has this beautifully-timed routine it goes into so as to avoid any Hendrixian issues.

Approx. ten minutes in advance of ill: Body gently rouses hostess from bricklike slumber, and tactfully introduces idea that getting up will be a good idea just now, because, well, ahem, madam. Allows time for idea in all its unpleasantness to sink in.

Approx. five mins to ill: Puts arms and legs to work at gentle pace, heaving corpse from bed and transporting to bathroom.

Approx. 60 secs to ill: Settles into position to ensure imminent horror is kept to minimum and requires no more clean-up than a flush.

It's incredible how it works, every time. None of that panicky, unseemly, carpet-endangering dashing. And I was glad of it in the early hours of this morning as, for some reason, it was one of the worst instances of beer revenge I've experienced in some time. I have no idea why. There was no indication of anything on the slightly silly journey home (after I nearly got stranded at the end of a route, they let me ride back to relative civilisation in a bus with all its lights off, which was Dead Exciting in a moody sort of way) - just the proto-hangover headache I tend to get.

Basically, I am rubbish at drinking. Rubbish. I never drink during the day; I am scrupulous about what I mix and don't mix (last night was one part cider to four parts weedy lager); and still the wrath is brung, seemingly arbitrarily. Still, it was just about worth it, being an entertaining and stimulating sort of evening that I probably needed. The fact is that although I toy with the idea, I'll never be able to entirely give up drinking. Fortunately my tolerance levels mean that it only takes me a literal couple of drinks of almost any kind to get to the level of confidence and silliness I like. But yes, if I'm in a group of people I don't know especially well then I'm a useless wide-eyed bundle of awkward until those first few sips have taken effect, and I am no one's useless wide-eyed bundle of awkward, not even my liver's.

Ah well, it could be coke, let's not get our panties in a bunch.

In any case drinking is only sensible given the bewildering wrongness of the weather (floods everywhere, skinny teenagers being swept away and twentysomethings dying of hypothermia in storm drains), which is really rather unhappy-making. Oh, and poor Gordon Brown who ascended this week has inherited a world of mess, although you've got to laugh at the serial ineptitude of terrorists who can't blow up a nightclub and terrorists who set themselves on fire. (And not in the self-immolating Tibetan-monk fashion either, more in the couldn't-bring-down-democracy-with-a-democracy-bringing-down-machine fashion.)

The dog, at least, is still the dog. You have to find your things you can rely on. There's also a young vixen who has taken to snoozing on a nearby shed roof when it's not pissing down. I go out and look at her, and she looks back in that louche vulpine way before closing her eyes again. It pleases me.

Some Witnesses came to bother me when I was still very wobbly in the mid-morning. They made me take a thing about 'The Source of Evil', which obviously I was sure was Magners at that moment. (Look, they drink cider with ice in it in 'Withnail & I', remember, so it cannot be wrong.) I'm sure I've read it before, it has these great Marvel-grade illustrations of the Harlot and the Big Sex Beast or whatever it is that I'd scan in and post up and invite y'all to smirk at if only I had a scanner. I don't think they've really thought this through. They'll be sending young impressionables into the arms of Satan by the dozen with their salacious pics of scantily-clad crumpet.

Why I have to be polite I don't know. I wish I could just say "No, I am an atheist and it's taken me years to get to this point of personal enlightenment, what you have to say is of no interest to me and I think you've got a damn cheek preaching to me or anyone else. Good morning." They must have thought I was some manner of moral derelict anyway, all bleary-eyed and t-shirted and stinking of other people's fags. But what gives them the right to come and judge me on my own rented doorstep, I don't know. I may prepare some material to send them away with for next time.

*

ATHEISM - if you don't want to join us, that's just fine, we're not organised in that sense in any case, like, we don't have any festivals or holidays or anything although actually maybe that's not a bad idea... Joan? Joan... what do you think of this? I'll write a letter.

1. You don't have to do anything, really
2. We don't have a book unless you count 'The God Delusion' but Dawkins wouldn't approve of that usage, oh, but it'd be amusing to have a go at 'The Satanic Verses' or even 'A Brief History Of Time'.
3. All are welcome!
4. You just need a brain.
5. We have women. Really clever and emancipated women, mostly.
6. We're only giving you this because you're attempting to indoctrinate us, which we find rude. We will never come round your gaff and start telling you there is no God. We're content enough to know it - OK, to believe it because you cannot prove the non-existence of God any more than the opposite - yeah, but that doesn't mean we have a 'belief system' as such - but that DOESN'T MAKE US BAD PEOPLE.
7. In fact, if you think about it, it may make us authentically good people if we are trying to be good, because strictly speaking living a good life because you think it's the right thing to do is more laudable than living a good life because you don't want to be impaled on a pitchfork and toasted for eternity by imaginary imps.
8. But, y'know, totally up to you.

*

I think this is the future of peaceful resistance to the people who bother us in such ways. Gather copies of the London Lite and hand them to the vendors for recycling. Loudly sing 'My Old Man's A Dustman' when some horrible tinny Xzibit starts up from the back of the bus. Offer charity muggers... oh, I don't know what can be done about them. I told one I was late the other day, which was perfectly true, and she wheedled "ohhhh it'll only take a minute" and I said "I'M! LATE!" and scored her pious face with my claws. She fell back into the path of a hateful bendy bus, and I hurried on to the optician.

God, it's cold, I'm putting the heating on.

I wasn't kidding, you know.

2007-06-13T22:06:00.000Z

Emails are incredibly easy. I fire them off with great joy and glee and aplomb and things of that sort. It's having something that you have to do that is the bugger. Proper bloggers blog like I email. I blog like... like someone who doesn't do it very much. I am creaky with it. It does not sit well.

But y'know, I'll get over it.

Frenzy of must-get-work today, partly precipitated by the mother and father and assorted stunted siblings of all gas bills. How absurd when it is so warm out. But then I did only turn my heating off completely about a week ago. Ground floor, see. Gloomy. Unwarm. Although for a ground floor flat it's not gruesomely dingy. Well, The Corridor is. But that is the wont and the nature of The Corridor.

So I thought I'd better attempt to find some more crumbs of gainful employment, and began by bothering someone on the online social utility du jour. Strictly speaking he put himself in the line of bother by adding me in the first place. He doesn't know me, but he knows of me. I forget that's possible. I'm used to seeing my name on things here and there but not in any distinguished way, especially not among people who do the same thing I do. But then I was doing it before this bloke was, so I might have been a formative influence. Blimey.

Yes, so this means I may soon be attempting to think like a 17-year-old, which I don't think I was especially good at when I was 17, so that should be interesting.

I've also been whoring my CV about the place to little avail. I'm not very good at whoring DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD.

It occurs to me that I could tot up my gains and losses for the day or the week or something in a way that is in no sense Jonesian or even Fieldingian. (That reminds me, I hope they remembered to take my accidental 'brobdingnagian' out of the book. I was demented with the need to fill up another page.) Why? I don't know, isn't that the kind of thing you put on a blog? And isn't 'why' the last question when it comes to blogging? Blogs crumble to dust when they come into contact with it. So.

Gains (the week thus far)

- Lovely flying swallow necklace for pence that is my new favourite thing
- New friend. And lunch
- A new favourite insult i.e. 'feetfucker' thanks to this
- Pending work commission
- Clean, fluffy dog

Losses

- Sense of calm due to upstairs fridge's rumblings of discontent
- Time
- More time
- But this we are used to
- Percentage of hope due to the yawning chasm where my finances should be

Wow, those are some big existential losses, dude. I may have to wash the dog again. And film it and put it on the internet, for that is where everything happens.

Been caught napping

2007-06-12T22:57:00.001Z

So! The film done pretty good on its first weekend. It's had mostly rave reviews and the odd bad one, and even its own fisticuffs on the increasingly batshit Comment is Free. (It's like civil war in there, all the damn time - the writers' views seem to align so seldom with those of the commenters, I wonder why they don't... I dunno, start their own paper. Poor nomadic Guardian readers without a home to call their own.) I hauled a bunch to see it on Friday and liked it even more than I did at the cast and crew screening (where I had a very brief and loud conversation with Walter Wolfgang). The bunch also enjoyed it. I was pleased to be a part of it.

Later, there was drinking. Also there was pink vomit on the nightbus, but thankfully none of it mine.

The other good news of course is that Rachel's unwanted company is in custody. It's nothing to get too happy about - the woman needs help - but it needed to happen, and now it has.

So I was thinking - it may just be more procrastination, but I reckon I might try and write something every day for a couple of weeks, or something. I'll have to fight off the guilt that proper political bloggers thought nicely of me for a couple of days when in fact I am not one of them - clever, incisive, thought-provoking, regular-updating them - merely another of a hundred thousand gits who witter on about their washing. Then I can witter about my washing as I please. And perhaps, intermittently, about Tony Blair. If he does anything good like insist that he doesn't want to have a pop at the press, and then describes it as "a feral beast".

Otherwise - TWU is being wonderfully nice, dog is mellow, bed is empty, mattress is inexcusable, work is lame and scant, money is scanter, skin is gothic. Sun is out, though, and so is the asparagus.

I really need to go on holiday, if only to flaunt these two dresses I got from H&M for a tenner apiece and about which I should probably feel very, very guilty.

Taking Liberties: a righteous plug

2007-05-23T16:52:00.000Z

OK, so here's the thing - Taking Liberties is a documentary about the state of civil liberties as we come to the end of Blair's tenure. I saw it last night (along with Rachel who's in it), and while I can't be totally objective as I did contribute to the accompanying book, it's dead good. I expect many red-faced Sweeney-grade-shouty arguments to spring from its viewing.

It's released in 12 cinemas, mostly on June 8th. If you fancy seeing it, try and make it to the opening weekend - that way it's more likely they'll get wider distribution, and you will have the unconditional love of a load of dedicated and knackered filmmakers.

You can get the book ere and at Waterstones and all that, but I really recommend going to see the film itself. (And yes, Boris Johnson is in it, but don't let that skew your perspective.)

Find and kill and find and SMASH

2007-04-25T23:09:00.000Z

So, given to bouts of anxiety as I am, I thought I'd drag my tensed-up carcass to a meditation class tonight. Since I came across the leaflet last week, advertising the start of the course with plenty of time, in the chip shop I rarely visit - I figured it was ser-en-dip-it-tuss and that. Only as it transpired, fate did not want me to attend after all. For fate intervened in the form of a football, erratically kicked by a small boy, straight through my flimsy lounge window.

The dog had been peacefully snoozing on the chair and barrelled into the hall with the end of his tail so far between his legs it almost outran his head. Judging by the unholiness of the atmosphere in the room now, I can only conclude he had a small accident along the way. (Oh it's in the spaces between the old wooden slats I shall have to move immediately.) The noise was like someone dropping a crate of empty wine bottles down a short flight of stairs, SMASH bump SMASHASH tinkle tinkle tinkle. The image was so fixed in my mind that as I ran down the Corridor to see, I was actually thinking "Did I leave a large collection of empty wine bottles somewhere?" Ah, l'idee fixe or whatever.

So, yeah, glass everyfuckingwhere ranging from flakes resembling proper posh sea salt sprinkled on the sofa to big ugly semi-rectangular guillotines scattered all the way across the floor and propped on the radiator. It's just as well I hadn't settled in to watch The Simpsons on the sofa with my left cheek about six inches from the window. Brrr. I am genuinely interested to see how my skin ages, thank you.

A nice man who was passing stopped to say he'd seen a boy run next door. The child of my nice neighbour. Turns out the little bugger just sat down to tea and not a word said not a peep the little swine. Within half an hour (after phoning for a proper cockney, who came round all bald and took out the giant daggers of glass from the frame with his bare hands) she'd marched him round to apologise. Apparently it hadn't really sunk in until Nice Neighbour explained to him that the lovely Beast could have got glass in his paws. It was all sort of charming, really, in spite of the ruined evening and the meticulous sweeping and traumatised dog and all. Quite sort of 1950s. High jinks. Boys playing in the street and scurrying away when they break windows. A quaint domestic mishap. Beats violent burglary.

It was all very 21st C. on Friday, though, as it was my birthday and there was polite end-of-evening naughty debauchery at 3am. All a very welcome surprise. Previous to that there was a long and pleasant evening on some leathery sofas and fighting over jukebox and the like. I don't know why I'm so surprised when an evening goes well and everyone is happy and all is full of love (and substances), but it keeps it fresh, I suppose.

I had lots of things to write about on here (I will not use that cursed new verb!) but of course not being a proper blogger, I haven't. They included

- Something unforgivably glib and superfluous (probably) about the Virginia Tech massacre and America's bone-deep gun culture. Guns do seem to foster this forgetfulness, absent-mindedness or sense of unreality, about human life - because it must be so easy to just shoot someone. It takes very little physical energy and you can do it from a distance. It must be not quite like actual killing. There's no point even discussing gun control because that's not going to be the issue, the gun lobby's too powerful and guns are right up there with free speech in the US in any case, and people will still say that if he really wanted to he would have set bombs to kill just as many people, etc, etc.

You just have to hope that if something has to give, it's neither the race issue, nor the mental health one. Ostracising anyone for any reason is only going to lead to more of the same, and sectioning anyone who writes bad plays isn't going to help either and is just going to pile misery upon misery and ignorance upon ignorance upon fear upon bullshit - but then, this is always going to happen, especially in America, and so... given the options, they should probably do nothing but brief their police better, and encourage people to be a bit nicer to the weird kids. Perhaps have actual background checks for gun purchasers, rather than making it easier than getting a credit card. Try that. That wouldn't infringe on anyone's God-given right to own an instrument of death, would it?

His last eBay purchase was 37 rubber duckies. It's not funny, not sad, just... nothingy. Which is sad, I suppose.

- Something about the BRMC gig. But then I still have to write up that other stuff on them if I'm going to bother, and so I should incorporate it in there or something. I smoked a cigarette. It seemed only right and natural. I did enjoy it. Maybe I could start smoking and then quit on July 1st when the ban comes in, and do a crappy psuedo-journalistic programme about my nicotiney adventure for BBC Three. It'd be less dangerous than those awful rampantly unethical things where women try to get to size zero by eating their own earwax for a fortnight.

Anyway, they were just as they always were and I was quite beside myself.

- Something about this Cutting Edge doc (don't read that, it's shit, and they can't spell 'eke' and should be fired) about foxes in Stoke Newington, just like me old mucker done did. (He done the VT thing as well. Oh he is better than me. Tsk.) Some sentimental old middle-clarse fools put food out for the foxies and gave them unimaginative names. Still, at least they put chicken livers out, and not Swiss rolls like some asshats did. Some younger and louder middle-clarse fools kept chickens in a coop made of string and fairy leg hairs in their vast Islington-lite back garden, and were infuriated when foxes kept getting in and killing their birds. This was fucking up their shit, and apparently the shit of the world at large, because as they constantly said, they were "trying to be green". How awful - think of the acceleration in the melting of the ice caps every time Foxy crunched down on a chicken neck. The family were all haughty grumpy exasperated about all the sentimental idiots in the area putting food out for them and treating them like ickle flufflies, but even more pissed at the foxes themselves.

The thing is, as was explained to the family, it ain't no good snuffing the pests because as long as the food supply remains, others will come. Others will come. It's like Field of Dreams, except with a rubbish chicken coop instead of a nice baseball park. Regardless! the man of the house hired a fucking marksman to come and shoot the beasts. They had to lure them by leaving meat out in the garden for several nights. A pregnant vixen was dropped first - they really did drop, then stretch a bit, it was horrible, but you can't deny it was quick - then her mate, who'd heard the shot, and screamed, and came to find her. Eerie little bastards, they are. No wonder people anthropomorphosise them. They do people stuff. (Elephants have 'funerals', you know. But anyway.)

So that was that. Except for the fact that it wasn't because as had been patiently explained to them, others came. It was a beautiful illustration of hypocrisy; knowing that shooting the foxes was futile, they went ahead anyway, which makes it an act of revenge, which means they were attributing human qualities and drives and motives to animals... which makes them every bit as noxiously sentimental as the dickheads they derided who think foxes really like cake.

Actually, it was hardly about foxes at all. It was about how awful and poisonous that fat hostile self-righteous posturing and thoroughly ignorant streak of the middle-clarse is. I love Stoke Newington - oh the pretty restaurants and sexy houses and the wondrous cemetery that's in the new Amy Winehouse vid - but it may be some kind of Bermuda Triangle for human decency. It may!

Other than that, I am reading A Round-Heeled Woman. It is not very good. Sorry. It's not. Shame because she is great and it's a good story. It's a month till The Book is out. Erk. I am listening to LCD Soundsystem (yes but I can't be arsed to find a link, it's true). It is very good. I saw John Carpenter's The Thing at the weekend. It was excellent. I am tricking myself into writing something. It will either be brilliant or shit. That's how it goes.

Oh, and this is the best headline... ever. They must have had some kind of moment of perfect shiny enlightenment and inner peace as soon as they thought of it, before screaming and running through Wapping naked. Even if they weren't in Wapping.

I Want Cheesecake

2007-04-02T21:51:00.000Z

Fortunately I have some in my fridge. So that's alright, then. Instant gratification. Reward for doing the work I should have done at the weekend. It would be more appropriate if it was a day out of date, of course, but I'm sure I'll find some way to balance that out.

I seem to be interviewing people again, suddenly. I hate the loathsome charade of the sorry nonsense (and I know it's more my fault than that of my interviewees, and more the fault of the nasty big PR machine than mine, etc) but it's money. In this case the freelance rates have actually gone up, which is approximate to inflation going down i.e. fookin unlikely. I will get £36 more for what I just did than for my dalliance with That Rock Band. Which works out at... 16p more per word, if I know my maths, and I really absolutely don't and never have done. Anyway, it's more, and I'll enjoy it until the next budget meeting which concludes that all the staff must work 23 hour days for the same money, and all freelancers must be banished to the wilds of Tibet.

I'm on the point of losing a gig that replaced another lost gig, and I have never been more with the sunshine and the hay thing, at least in theory. Something that should be applied to all areas of life. While one is young. Sigh.

On a fairly not unrelated note, The Friday Thing is dead, gently smothered by time and can-no-longer-be-arsedness. You can't afford to get sentimental about these things, of course, but then I'm not sure you can afford not to. A bit. Just as a buffer.

I really need to do some more blagging. No, blAgging. Blogging Can Wait.

I went to a Motown/Northern Soul club in Walthamstow on Saturday night. People clapped after some of the songs. It was lovely. I am going to enjoy getting old, to the point at which I rather wish I'd hurry up and do it, because wasting my youth in the non-approved non-rebellious fashion is making me a bit uncomfortable.

Actually that's crap, I'm not doing a bad job. I just need to be doing it in shorter skirts. Skirts of any sort would be a start. But why do women wear them? They're like really rubbish trousers, that's what they are.

Frisk

2007-03-15T16:41:00.000Z

I had the most extraordinary crop of bad post this morning.

1) Confirmation that my payment's gone through for this seminar wotnot, which would be good news were it not for

2) Perplexing, grumpy, unsigned letter insisting I owe more tax

3) Quite straightforward letterette explaining that bailiffs can't serve warrant on those who owe me because it's only a registered address, and after four attempts they finally figured out that there was no one actually physically there. A shrewd lot, those bailiffs, you want to watch them.

4) New council tax bill, probably with pence added for the Olympics since it's already hilariously yet disgustingly spiralled out of controoooooool.

How Very Depressing. Still, with regards 2) I've managed to find another address, so I can apply to reissue the warrant. Which I shall. Only another £25. Bargain!

If and when I get any or all of the escalating amount back, I am going to put on a dress and go somewhere for a cosmopolitan. Perhaps in these. Unless anyone would like to buy them for me first, in recognition of my heroic struggle which is not just for me but for all freelance worms who have ever not been paid by a person. But then I'd probably have a heroic struggle trying to get them on, and they would win, and I would cry and stomp, but the stomp would be less than impressive what with the bare feet and all.

Fuck the bootmakers. Some of us have calves.

Garden is now not so neatly but more pedantically bisected, straight down the middle of the path, which means neither of us can use it any more. Next time it rains I won't be able to slop out there in my slippers. It is mildly infuriating. Since the weather has gone all beautiful TWU has been out there every daylight hour, looking for things to destroy. She's put some green bristly doormats on her side, like stepping stones, at jaunty angles. There are bamboo arches and metal filigree frames and shit all over the place. Woman needs a bumper selection of jigsaws.

Oh, and they're knocking down the Hammersmith Palais. They are cunts.

Bah.

Size 6, by the way. And I also fancy myself in this. Even if it has something to do with Sienna 'Pfft' Miller and would look ridiculous in a 14.

"Just a young man who was good to his mother"

2007-03-10T00:33:00.000Z

Almost forgot. John Inman, the Grace Brothers Marilyn, is dead.

Duracell Minus

2007-03-09T23:31:00.000Z

This week I has

* talked late

* sat up late

* curtain-twitched

* made hamstrings complain

* not done enough

* learned the child sign language for 'pig', 'tiger', 'sheep' and 'biscuit'

* signed up for a screenwriting seminar

* gone "aaargh" with regards above

* partly because of the £

* interviewed one of favourite bands in a sort of shock last-minute who'd-a-thunk-it scenario

* gone "wheeeeee" with regards above

I can witter about that one now (and don't think I won't) but I'm planning to write it up on here properly and interminably, in a way that no sensible editor would print. Which will be sort of emancipating. They've done that for me before anyway, making me break free from the shackles of supposed creative endeavour that's actually like a prison of the mind, man. When I used to go and see them and jump about and shout and smile, all the other nonsense I was embroiled in that had to do with seeing bands and writing about them and trying to talk to them when they just wanted to go back to bed seemed utterly superfluous.

I suppose I wish I'd had the balls to interview them when I had the chance for one of the mags I used to write for - which I might have linked but there is no trace online of its brief life except mentions of its demise. I might have been able to write about them in the way I wanted to, but then again it would probably have turned out bad. I almost don't want to write about them at all. It spoils it somewhat. I have to start justifying myself - which is hard in this case as they're almost a guilty pleasure - and it's just a lot of bollocks. But yes.

But yes! It's not often you feel like you get the chance to tie up a very long sort of shoelace-thin but trailing loose end like this. I probably couldn't have done it a few years ago. My problem with interviews - well, one of the many - is that I can't bear to come out of them thinking I came across as a knob. It's a pretty sterile environment, these days, and I'm uncomfortable and awkward. The whole 'never meet your heroes' thing implies 'because they'll be crushingly disappointing and boringly human and not like they fell out of the sky at all', but it's so much more likely that you will disappoint them... and they have no expectation of you to start with. You can feel utterly negated by a dismissive glance from someone you admire. I know, I'm too susceptible to the whole myth of it all, but then I always wanted to be. Like a stupithead.

Fortunately, I came out with most of my dignity intact; and as immature as it may be, with the hint of a sense that they could actually have fallen out of the sky still in place too. It wasn't a very good interview, I don't think, but things were said into dictaphone, and although they

* got up and wandered about the room occasionally

* sniggered

* sighed deeply

...somehow it didn't seem personal.

Almost anything you build up to be a big deal is stunningly prosaic when it happens, but I never find that disappointing - it fascinates me how that works, as if your brain dumps a load of calmative chemicals to enable you to deal with it. This thing had spent years deflating in any case, but it was still kind of special. I never thought it'd ever happen, and that always gives you a bit of a celebratory feeling, giving rise to noisy TWU-bothering singing upon getting home. The staggeringly normal feeling of the moments you think will be otherworldly is actually sort of lovely. It's uniquely pleasant after the anxiety that precedes it. I think it's the element of surreality that you get with it. I don't know. But I did sit there and smile like a fool. Part of my pleasedness must have come from the fact that I do care a tiny bit less now if people think I am a fool. A tiny tiny bit. They aren't as important to me as they were, but they were important enough that they'll always have that resonance for me. So... yeah. It was daunting, but they were fine, and I was so relieved I was nearly giddy.

I got them to sign something - I've only ever got one other autograph for myself, because he was such a thoroughly amiable bloke. This - I don't know, I'm strangely unmoved by the thing that's now stuck on the wall by my desk with three absolutely illegible signatures on it, even as it pleases me to look at it. Oh - no I'm not, I am a bit moved. I just thought about what it means, and what it would have meant if I'd had it four years ago. I suppose it is a belated sign-off on a part of my life. A really good part. In parts. A sign of happy times.

They're playing on my birthday, in a venue I've seen them in twice, which is soon going to be ~~turned into offices~~ torn down. Good God. I will need wheeling home.

Once I've transcribed the thing and finished kicking myself for how terrible I sound and the questions I didn't ask, I'll write it up here. I suppose I should try and use it as some sort of line, marking the end of me writing sentences like the previous one, but those sorts of lines tend to be a load of unrealistic arse, like some genetically-modified monster of an ultra-new year resolution. Maybe you're just supposed to come to terms with your own imperfections. Man.

Ugh. What a thought.

Passive-aggressives anonymous

2007-03-03T18:00:00.000Z

TWU has just been out in the garden scattering blue crystals along the boundary of 'her' fence. Several of these have found their way, due to her erratic scattering technique, onto what would still be my half of the path even if she had divided that straight down the middle also. Pettiness is totally infectious.

I assume they are some sort of internet-bought dog repellent, and not dog poison. He took no notice, in any case, and snoffled about his business on 'my' side as usual when I let him out. Like a good neighbour who doesn't want to give bad neighbour a fucking inch, I had snatched up said business almost before it plopped softly onto the grass.

Now, this I just find rude. True, the dog has nicely ploughed the garden on 'my' side with his giant paws, but it's not as if her side is pristine. It presently contains

* some junk of the plastic sheeting/large box variety, dumped on what was a nice brick-built compost heap

* a single long thin piece of something rubbery, meant to 'protect' the grass it is surely suffocating

* with an old watering can on top of it, containing some bits of plant matter

* some pots

* some broken bits of tile

I mean, he did figure out how to get in there, and has had a little recce twice. The first time I got him out through the 'gate', and the clatter of the rusty pipe and my soft but navy-grade sibilant cursing may have alerted her. But the other time, it was daylight, and I successfully got him to leap the fence (that's good leapin') and no harm was done. Nor was any Business. How does she know? And why does she care so much? And what, exactly, fresh happy horseshit is this?

Next, I predict some sort of forensic marquee will be erected.

Search for a hero inside Will Self

2007-03-03T13:40:00.000Z

The truth about pit bull dogs

disembowel a rabbit

waiting all my life for this moment

paragraph about optimism

Search racism's secret bonding

you and your ipod are just rude

i have been waiting i have been waiting for this moment all my life

ITS THEIR FAULT I'M RACIST

this ain't a scene, it's an arms race should be taken off the radio

i have been waiting all of my life for you to make

Subject matters

2007-03-03T13:06:00.000Z

What pretty day. I really ought to go out in it, but it's Saturday which is my day for total indolence. I'll have to give it up at some point. I mean, I really enjoy Doing Stuff, it's just that there is something magnificent about the Doing of No Stuff.

TWU has retreated and retracted and all that. Thank frick. She did this by proxy of the managing agent, having by the sound of it had a bit of a talking to by my actual proper bona fido neighbour. Typically, I felt a bit rotten and was going to go round and make nice, but while I believe in the sorting-out-of-things and the making of the nice very deeply, I've also learned that with some people it isn't worth it. Not that I'm going to be hostile. Just as neutral as an inoffensive colour on a rental flat wall.

I was going to paint these walls, in fact (my literal actual walls - keep up), if only because it's great to be allowed to do it by a landlady. When I also asked if I could knock a few nails in the walls to hang pretty things thereon, she agreed without a moment's calculating hesitation. Yep. Go nuts. Fill your boots. And your rented walls. With pretty. This is wondrous in a world that frowns on tenants' use of Blu-Tac and knocks the little smudges off their deposit to the tune of hundreds. Even though they should damn well give a place a lick of paint before new tenants move in anyway.

So, yes.

Oliver James has a new book out called 'Affluenza', about how capitalism makes us miserable. I've had a sneaking suspicion for yeeeeeeears. Sometimes I want things that I don't even want. It's nasty. Someone now needs to do a book about how the media make you miserable. You can't escape it - even mostly avoiding the papers, as I'm having another phase of doing (and it really is very relaxing), makes you feel terribly Guilty. Surely the price you pay for your complacent fatness and frivolity and relative comfort is being made and kept aware of the misery of others. But then a lot of the time you can do nothing about it. So what kind of an obligation is it? Are we just supposed to bear witness to it? I think to an extent we should. And yet and yet.

Still, the papers unsettle me in a hundred different ways aside from their actual content. I hate reading good writers because it makes me feel like a worm. I hate reading bad writers because I want to know why they are getting work at all, and then start to fret about the dumbening of everything and all. I hate the sensationalism and the pandering and the wankiness and posturing, and how there isn't a single paper I really feel I can align myself with at the moment (I mean, you expect it with political parties, but come on, how many papers are there?) I can't bear my own tiny attention span, and skipping down pages and skating across paragraphs makes me feel queasy. The stuff I can focus on often makes me flappingly incensed, and then I have to find someone to rant at, and they have to put up an umbrella, and no one benefits.

I suppose it all comes back to capitalism and the whole too-much-choice-is-no-choice-at-all thing. This probably goes for people as well. Just too many. No one has enough time to adequately maintain all the friendships and acquaintances they'd like to. I'm constanly guilt-ridden or perhaps guilt-stricken or guilt-nibbled by my neglectfulness. If I get in touch with people I haven't heard from in ages, and send them a lot of breezy wiffle, I make them feel guilty. It is horrendous!

Sigh. The only solution is the boringly predictable one of mild hedonism and indulging the lower instincts. Which I will be doing in the usual polite and legal Saturday-approved fash as soon as I've done the washing up and something about my hair.

The Book is in mock-up form. I am sort of thrilled and sort of not, as usual. There are going to be several things I am going to have to Let Go, I can tell. Writers are always going to be tiny scrabbling worker ants, and ultimately we just have to feel grateful that we haven't been fried to an ant-crisp by the cruel magnifying glass of the universe.

And the mome raths decided to have an effing beer

2007-02-28T01:03:00.000Z

Alright, alright, I'm going to have a moment. Because needs must.

Figured out the other day that the junk is actually a cunning makeshift fence to protect the other fence from the dog. Interesting. Dog got stuck in the little corral made by the larger makeshift fence shortly after this revelation, and calls for him to come in were met with soft whines of caged bewilderment. Finally I made out his flapjack-coloured legs in the dark and had to go out in really unsuitable post-bath attire and free him.

Today the individual I shall politely refer to as That Woman Upstairs (hereafter 'TWU', which is kind of nice in that auto-fill-in-the-gaps-with-your-brain way) made a complaint about me, or at least the beast, to the managing agents. Which I appreciated so much more than a simple knock on the door or a note as a prelude to the kind of neighbourly discussion we've enjoyed before. Nothing has that personal touch like a call from the people who collect your rent, while you're trying to finagle a magazine page into a shape it is strenuously resisting. I mean, short of receiving a bunch of slithery rotting stems at my desk, I don't think I could have been any more moved.

The other element of the day that stuck it in and broke it off, removing a slim buffer that might have cushioned the blow of neighbour-betrayal, was the sudden and likely fatal indisposition of the Non-Pod. Alas and afuckinglack. I know it's a crutch. But people need their crutches to get about. This is why there are crutches. Especially when the tube is stuffed with people who make horrid noises with their noses.

On the way home - oh the silence and the shufflings and throat-clearings and inane witterings and tinny headphone seepage of it* - a man attached himself to the single tube door of my carriage as the train moved off from one stop. He didn't look concerned, but I thought he must have his jacket caught, for a long surreal moment of pre-panic. The train picked up speed. Mental images of screams and splattered glass. Then he smirked, and dropped onto the platform, jogging. Idiot.

Yesterday on the tube I saw a man reading The Economist. He was moving his lips as he read. I thought this was brilliant. If I got the tube every day I'd keep some manner of terribly popular blog of ink Polaroids of tube tableaux or some such piffle.

They're small things but they can't half make you feel defeated and crumpled. It was at least cheering to get an email with the rudest subject line I have ever seen in all my born days.

I am currently mainlining or speedballing or meatpasting (n shit) the below. Yeah, I know, but it's so pretty, and Cameron 'Mr Neneh Cherry' McVey produced it so it reminds me of goodness and truth and shamelessly big production that has no place in decent modern society. It's like Goldfrapp and Kate Bush and something else that's probably Natalie Imbruglia. And in the middle, she does a cartwheel, and it kind of makes me want to burst into something like tears.

*See, I have swanky in-ear things that don't leak anything at all, so no 'possible hypocrisy' tag here. Although it is always possible.

Loud + clear

2007-02-19T12:03:00.000Z

Findy-term of the day - you are an idiot dancing rabbit. Surprising number of people arriving here with variations on 'I have waited for you all my life'. I bet they're disappointed.

Weekend of pleasant and unpleasant surprises, which still weren't quite proper surprises in that I could have figured them out or extrapolated, projected, or wotnot. Sad stuff and happy stuff in dizzying proximity. Terribly melancholy Saturday rescued in its final hours, followed by pretty fucking good Sunday which lasted about three days - although it didn't involve Chinese New Year, because evidently I'm destined never to experience it. I think it has been Written that I shall be trampled by an over-enthusiastic dragon or something, so the universe is trying to keep me from it, at least until 'my' book comes out.

The sad stuff is a rotten deal out of which I have got lightly, which always makes for Guilt. But it can't be helped. Being a control freak, of course, I resent this enormously. At least it was preceded by nice things, even if there aren't going to be more of them. Shows the very serious and pressing need to appreciate people and situations and all while you are fortunate enough to have 'em in yer orbit. And a bit of Coleridgey melancholy never hurt anyone. Much. As long as it doesn't descend into Keats, obviously.

Woman From Upstairs is continuing to be a bit batshit. I've got on OK with her previously, although she is a cantankerous, kvetching, self-centred sort of an annoying neighbour. But she will complain about me and the dog with relation to the garden to neighbours outside within my earshot (alright, so I had to stop eating my cereal so the crunching didn't obscure the poisonous gossip, but that still qualifies as earshot). And then she will proceed to dump some junk at the bottom of the garden, which is arguably worse in petty terms than a stray bit of poop. She has pedantically divided our shared garden into two halves, with a flimsy fence ensuring the dog gets 50% less gambolling/mooching space - part of the fence is fine netting, in which a squirrel nearly met a harrowing dolphinesque end the other day. (I would have presented its contorted corpse to her and made her think, as they say in the north, on.) But the junk - bits of old bed and wood and stuff - are in 'my' half. Which begs the question - why doesn't she just fuck off?

I can't grumble though really - it's a lot less bad when it's someone you know and have spoken to and can get on with who's being obnoxious. I've generally been lucky with my neighbours, and just as I don't think WFU has any real reason to complain about me considering how awful and selfish and abusive and evil neighbours can be, I don't have much reason to whine about her. She occasionally crashes about upstairs swearing and being industrious, but then I crash about downstairs getting the dog to leap over my legs (fun and good exercise) and getting annoyed about the lack of hot water or telling the dog to stop savaging his toys when the post comes. (In fact most of my crashing about is by proxy, or at least assisted.) So we're probably even. And my other neighbours I know by name and they are proper, good neighbours, the kind everybody needs but usually has to suck up not having. Their benign presence makes me very happy, because I know how rotten it is to have nasty tensions or just massive indifference from people you hear, if not see, every day. It's sad. I want to start some sort of Scheme. Cakes and tea and little considerate notes and trust and engendering of the sort of minor fondness that is unique to neighbours, who will never see each other again once one moves.

Oh! I will never see Lovely Woman Next Door and her boy again when I split, and there will be no one to be the keeper of my spare keys. I must try and appreciate them while I have them, and I do try. With whatever new ones I have it will be charm offensive ago-go, which is the minimum necessary when you have a giant lumbering creature with the canine equivalent of the 'TOXIC' symbol on his head in your care.

Two - count 'em - instances of inverted-comma-ownership in this post. And also the neighbours aren't really mine, and nor are the spare keys, or the main ones either. Alas! Nothing is quite mine. I just lent out a book, one of my favourites, which I half-inched from my first London flatmate, so it's never really been mine. If I ever see it again, it means karma has not been correctly installed in this supposedly improved but actually quite rubbish version of the cosmos. But this all prepares me for the bizarre concept of house 'ownership', which still seems like a hilarious misnoma. Latest figures show that only five people in the UK actually own their property, and are blissfully mortgage-free, and are so posh that you need a translator. I find the whole thing quite daft, but as long as things don't start to own me, I suppose it's not a big deal.

I have a new project to start on, which isn't mine either. Once you start to think of things in these terms, you realise that the only thing you can actually lay full and permanent claim to is a small pot sheep with one chipped ear. It's quite liberating, although I suspect all that clutter that doesn't quite belong to me is still going to require sorting out soon. Bah!

Incidentally, did anyone else immediately think of this when this was shown everywhere? Oh, and whatever she's done and however much of a fuck-up she may be, headlines like 'Grab a front-row seat for Britney breakdown' are not cool, asshole.

hA!

2007-02-14T12:42:00.000Z

Seek and you shall reveal yourself to be a bit odd

2007-02-14T12:32:00.000Z

One of the most stupid fun things about having a blog is nosing through the search terms that brought the bewildered and pervy to your little corner of the net. Like sex tourists blundering onto your porch. Or fools. Fools without pants.

Hello! And welcome!

a dog breed that's half dog and half rabbit

would we care if shilpa looked like the back end of a bus

freaky things do to dead people

Pretty internet

2007-02-14T12:19:00.000Z

It's a wonder I ever get anything done. Oh wait.

WRINKLE IN THE EYES FROM STRESS!

*

"What is undervalued in the sale pitch of this item (and it's overall sense of delight while you sun-bathe on the car-port covered in at least six of these freshly delivered delights) is the wonderful "SPAK" sound it makes when you throw it to the linoleum."

*

"That's right. Instead of the London Astoria, we get a hole in the ground. A building site. Fuck all, basically."

*

"I tried to laugh off the fact that I was going to eat a chocolate sandwich - embarrassing, when he was living on miso paste and seaweed. He gave me two-fifths of a smile and started rummaging around in the silverware drawer."

*

"While Vickie danced, J. Howard tried to grab her breasts. Thus began J. Howard's aggressive pursuit of Vickie's affection."

*

Up your hoohaa, America!

*

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language. Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.

Explain to me how this works

2007-02-09T23:45:00.000Z

(Gratuitous dog shot, but he is miming my current feelings, so it's allowed.)

Anna Nicole Smith, the Wal-Mart Marilyn, is dead. Ian Richardson the actor is also dead. Mark E Smith has made another album with The Fall. Oh well.

Draining afternoon, being reminded of a) the proliferation of casual skulduggery in the media b) the honesty and goodness of some of the people in it who don't conform to said gruesomeness and c) what a thorough and sneakily perennial pain in the psychic arse some issues are. I mean, come on, enough. I have been good. I'd like my Joy now please.

The snow's given way to boring old cold, but I'm still waiting to get sick of 'Lovelight' which may actually be the greatest pop song of all time.

Tricycle

2007-02-08T20:11:00.000Z

This I have been waiting for

2007-02-08T15:34:00.000Z

I've got this fake nasty finger jobby I've been waiting to use for ages. It's just not the kind of accessory that goes with most things.

Glee

2007-02-08T12:51:00.000Z

(Taken through a hole in the bubblewrap what is stretched across one of my picturesque yet completely rubbish 1930s sash windows which would make Al Gore cry. The bubblewrap doesn't do a lot to stop the cold breeze from wafting onto my dainty hands as I type, but what do you expect me to do? A? What?

It kind of looks like a bullet hole though doesn't it. Ooh.)

It have snowed! Country is in chaos, naturally, and news is all of a fuffle about it, but I am quite happy as I don't have to go out. The dog went out in the morning and galumphed hither and thither flinging snow everywhere with his nose, which is in fact the most amusing sight in the world. I threw snowballs for him and when they vanished into the rest of the snow, as snowballs tend to, the look of utter bewilderment on his solemn face was priceless. He was Adrift in a Senseless Universe. But then dogs are used to that, living as they do with us and trying so hard to grasp what the fuck we are on about all the time. No wonder they sleep so much.

Other than that I am still footling about post-book, toying with ideas, and being a greedy oaf with people's valuable time and lips. Also doing some drinking, which is in fact a wonderful traditional pastime and I think it should be revived.

The sleek and efficient hunter in his wintery domain, having just performed the time-honoured act of making yellow snow. Although it's somewhat wasted on him.

If you set your iPod to shuffle in the woods, does it play 'Pet Sounds'?

2007-02-04T00:07:00.000Z

A beautiful faux-spring day. I spent some of it sitting in a churchyard talking about books and sundry related issues with the ice-cap-melting sun in my eyes. I saw a heron and two dancing tortoiseshell butterflies. (There was actually someone else there as well. I wasn't crouching over an ancestor's grave telling them about the mixed feelings of giddiness and shrugginess I'm alternating between over this here book, about which I'm thrilled and not really much bovvered at once.) It was bliss, frankly, even if it made me fret about stuff as the world is really meant to be doing more. (That first link's really good, by the way.)

Previously, at about 1am, I was on Oxford Street when a large sleek heart-coloured American automobile slouched by. I admired it - I like a bit of car occasionally. I did ogle a VX220 earlier - you almost never see them as they never caught on, but apparently they're brilliant. They are properly sexy cars, because they have a certain wackiness and humility about them. People just didn't want them cos although they're basically modified Lotus Elises, they still said 'Vauxhall' on them. People are shallow. At least the ones who buy sports cars, it seems. So someone with one of those I might infer could look past the superficial and I would be immediately Interested, whereas a knob with a Porsche could take his pretentions elsewhere. Most cars that are meant to be sexy leave me cold. But yes.

I was trying to figure out what it was (something wide and American, in any case) when I noticed it said 'WESTWOOD' in big silvery letters across the top of the windscreen. So in fact more like

WESTWOOD

And lo, as it slunk by I clocked that still really not entirely unyouthful face in profile. Despite having met quite a few quite famous people and all but witnessing that they go to the toilet just like the rest of us, I am filled with a certain helpless unapologetic childish glee upon sighting a Famous. On this occasion the glee was somewhat enhanced because well, it was 1am, work it out for yourself. So I did shout, or rather holler, "WESTWOOD!" Or indeed

"WESTWOOD!"

If I'd had my wits about me I would have gone

"WESTWOOD GOODLOOKINGOUTTHERE MYMAINMAN UPINTHEBUILDING BABY BOY HOLLA BACK!"

But y'know, I think I made my point clearly and concisely. Then I made to my companion the neither concise nor clear point that Westwood is actually brilliant, because while many many claim to, like, Not Give A Fuck what people think, he is one of about three living individuals who actually Don't. He must be one of the most ridiculed public figures ever, but he continues to be ridiculous without a blink. It is hard not to believe he's not putting it on, but I think if he was then the enormous number of hip hop artists who give him mad props would have nothing to do with him, and would probably go out of their way to insist that he's a laughable assbag who insults their culture every time he loosens his chiselled white jaw. And, y'know, surely the fact that he was popped in a drive-by shooting in 1999 gives him credibility in his field. Unless someone just thought he was a laughable assbag, of course, in which case the rotten bastard should have put their gun away and just posted something rude on the Radio 1 website like any normal idiot.

I'd just come to London for the first time to live (excepting when I was born, because I was born in London and am a proper actual Londoner and deserve some sort of prize dammit) and was staying in Kennington when said incident went down. (Ooh look, and that's the hospital where I was born that they took him to as well. In London.) I was aghast. The guy doesn't even allow swearing on his late night show and dubs noises over all the fucks in the stuff he plays, which means some tracks just consist of a smattering of phat beats and loads of birdsong like they have on Big Brother when someone says "Adidas". He's just a nice bloke. Bonkers, obviously, but nothing warranting a cap in the ass or even in the arm.

(Heh: "police think he may have been followed". Oh, really?)

So I am down with Westwood, due to his setting of a beautiful example of how to be yourself even when white middle-class tossers who would probably love to be a bit more like you like Toby Young and Marcus Brigstocke smugly deride you as a fraud, and everyone else thinks you're a bit of a silly embarrassing twat. I salute his indefatigability.

Go hard, brother number one. N junk.

A bit of a week of new excitingness, really, aside from celebrity hollering (I also saw Neil Tennant in Soho last week, although I didn't holla at him, it would have been inappropriate.) This year is looking at least some shade of fine. 'Fine' in the urban sense, I mean.

Could someone tell me why they silence out the 'god' in 'this ain't a scene/it's a goddam arms race' in the Fall Out Boy song of the same name when the video is on the telly, but not on the radio? I suppose Nietzsche would listen to emo.

Paedo's out (I have been waiting all my life for a pun such as this)

2007-01-28T01:59:00.000Z

Whoops. I just got a bit carried away with the labels. I have so many as to render them quite useless. Still, an inability to file is a sign of a creative mind. It is.

I did write a thing about the present prisony fiasco with regards that big old paedo, but I don't want to immediately alienate everyone, even if I'm going to alienate some by not writing about it. I might just find someone I agree with and link to them. Oh bugger it, I'll fillet some bits out.

1) Actually it's not actually illegal to just be a paedophile because it's not illegal to fancy children, only to act upon it, which makes you a paedophile who is a sex offender. I wish the media would stop being so lazy on that point. Actually. It's important.

2) Mumble mumble are people who watch nasty child pron actually dangerous in the most literal sense so if we're talking about only the most dangerous criminals that bloke doesn't necessarily qualify does he mumble murfle I think I left a thing over there and have to go now.

3) If they're worried about what nasty crime will be committed next necessitating the lock-up of people for whom there is no room at the inn, I would bet dosh that it's going to be some manner of severe damage to said blokey, who was clever enough to go on all the telly with his face and say that the judge was just doing his job. Get the police guard off Jade's house post haste, they're lining up with leftover fireworks. (I can't watch BB anymore although I suppose I'll watch Shilpa win tomorrow. It's all too ghastly. Whatever those unpleasant women did, their lives are now going to be ruined, and it's rather disproportionate considering they weren't being any more idiotic than most of the idiots you find who aren't on telly.)

Much as I can barely bear the Indie at the moment (it won't stop until we are all hanging our heads in shame so hard we get whiplash), I had to make a knowing face and say 'uh huh' at its front page today. Scroll down for list of people who've been banged up recently, including the naked rambler and people who've refused to pay taxes or fines for political reasons.

Oh and I was also interested to read this, or attempt to read it. I got through a paragraph and a half and then my entire head started to spontaneously warm and sweat reservoired in my ears. For the love of all that is holy, what is that woman taking? I mean, I thought my prose was a bit florid and hectic and such, but compared to her I am Emily goddam Dickinson.

Fave new world

2007-01-27T22:57:00.000Z

Blast. I seem to have been gently forced to upgrade. I don't care if it's better, change blows. But really, couldn't they just let me use their old machinery for as long as I liked? It's not like there are health and safety issues. Grump.

The trivialities of the day!

- Dog stole my remaining pain au chocolat from where it nestled on the kitchen worktop, wrapped snugly in plasticy stuff. That beast. He is becoming roly. He is sleek enough to look at, and that narrow collie waist looks almost worrying next to the booming Nottweiler ribs, but when he sits down you can see all his fur sort of ruck up like a carpet. If you had the strength, you could probably lift him by grasping a handful of dogflesh almost anywhere on him. His actual surface area must be vast. Still, it's just a bit of not-unhealthy flab. He has an extraordinarily boring and frugal dry diet, which is why he puts his head in the bin and steals patisserie fare when he can. Ah well. As long as he's not anywhere near Rusty standard (how did those ruminants ever get him back? They will only feed him pies! Stupid country).

- Did I mention that my non-Pod has niftily merged Bjork's 'Greatest' with Take That's 'Greatest'? Well, it has, and it is still amusing.

- What, oh what is the use of Bloc Party? Their music is ugly.

- Why do Bowling For Soup still have a career? Their music is uglier, but at least it knows and sort of acknowledges it's ugly, whereas Bloc Party's music thinks it is beautiful. This, as superbly explained by Stephen Fry, is the worst kind of ugly.

- I was going to put in a link to Fry's brilliantly brilliant 'Room 101' performance featuring the above explanation, but ten minutes of searching through a MOUNTAIN of SHITE on YouTube has yielded nothing. Why do they not make YouTube search better? Why must I wade through a thousand bits of cobbled-together, crappy-stills-set-to-cringey-music-to-no-end-whatsoever bilge before still not finding what I want? Warum?

I would put YouTube into Room 101. I don't care if it enables me to see hilarious things. (I'm not putting links to any hilarious things either. Grump grump grump.)

- Isn't it sort of nice that Big Brovaz have another (not terrible) song out when everyone had chalked them up as an example of how evil record companies build up young naive types and then destroy them?

- I have been watching too much of the music television.

- But I am allowed! since I did write 47,121 words. 6,000 or so of them went in a second in a meeting the other day, and I didn't bat an eyelid. That is how mature I am. Naturally I put laxatives in everyone's coffee because the ruthless purge of those innocent words needed to be marked in some way, and it seemed as good a way as any.

All that's left now is some tinkering and filling-in and stuff. I kind of want to do it again. It's sort of hard to let go of. There is still so much to say. And it all needs to be said by me.

- Word of the day is 'jejune'. It's almost onomatopaeic, in that when you say it sounds like a sneer, and thus beautifully true to its meaning in its sound.

- After months of languishing in the kind of hip hoppily baggy jeans I would previously have hesitated to wear while decorating, I have today at last purchased some tight items for my legs which make me feel sort of human again. And they were nine pounds and look like I paid ooh at least 15.99 for them. Yes! And some grey trousery things which look lovely from the rear but like they're crying out for the subtle bulk of male genitalia at the front. But that's what you get on the high street. Obviously they haven't heard about all the oestrogen in the water. Etc.

- I can't go into all the reasons 'Creep' is terrible right now, but I will do at some point, because it needs to be said. It is so very poor. I hate it when people make bad horror films because the genre gets enough grief as it is. And it makes me squirm when I get the feeling that the makers of a bad horror film have made it thinking "yeah, put this and this in and have this happen, that'll be scary", when in fact scaring an audience is an awesomely subtle and meaningful psychological undertaking which requires love and care and intelligence and so shut up with your awful heap of crap that should have got laughed out of the office where they decide what horror films should be allowed to be made.

Note: there are seven films called 'Creep' on IMDB. Not that you can infer anything from that.

- Oh look, now I have to put labels on. I feel vaguely uncomfortable. It seems rather a vain thing to do. (Like blogging isn't. Oh yes, I'll take this family-sized package of vanity, but woah! easy on the tiny toddler dish of vanity there, slick.) I mean, is anyone really going to come here and feverishly look up everything my dog has ever done? I suppose the nice people who come here when I actually write something relatively serious deserve the chance to filter out the rest of the tripe. Guys, this is for you.

Idiots in idiocy shock

2007-01-18T11:54:00.000Z

But first: 28,004. Rock! Only another 10,000 or so to go I reckon. Tra la la. And some interminable tinkering obviously.

So I stopped watching Big Brother because my telly broke, although I would probably have stopped anyway as it was becoming painful. I don't find people being horrible and humiliating each other or themselves entertaining even when it's fiction, let alone reality. Now telly has been cleverly reset in a way only someone who's not a techno-arse can manage (thank you), and I'm going to be drawn back to it just to see, just to seeee if those awful women are as bad as the massive furore suggests. It's hopeless.

It's difficult to pin down whether or not the fairly obvious bullying of Shilpa Shetty is specifically racist or not, but oh the issues, the issues it raises. 21 MPs have signed a Commons motion condemning it, and Channel 4 have refused to make any proper comment beyond a generic one. The former probably haven't seen the programme, and the latter are going to milk the controversy beyond the point at which it's acceptable for a show which is always going to seek controversy. Both stink. You do have to jump on racism very hard as soon as it raises its head, but you've got to establish that it is racism first, otherwise you are making matters worse in much the same way as women who cry rape do. Channel 4 are going the other way, and getting very close to being irresponsible.

Part of my problem is that all the howling about racism rather excuses the fact that she's been called a cunt by that nothing-boy Jade Goody is porking - so sexism's OK - and undermines the fact of the bullying itself, which isn't acceptable behaviour either (although it might be inevitable in the BB house; they did do it to that poor fucked-up bloke last year... oh... and he was Pakistani. But that's probably a coincidence. He was dreadful. But still).

So I agree with maybe 20% of Germaine's argument - the rest of it is the usual naive crap that gives people credit for the kind of Machievellian plotability that only a sociopath could sustain. I really don't believe she's at all manipulative - she's got no need to get the British public on her side to further her career, she doesn't care if she wins or loses, and she didn't know anything about the show before she went on it. I've rarely seen anyone appear to be so genuine on there, celebrity or otherwise. Thus, Germaine, I need to say my love is eternal but do shut up, you intermittently horrendously erroneous windbag.

I think the racism's there, but it's the fat end of the wedge. It's just oozed out of the general nasty garbage bag (yes, I hate Americanisms too, but 'rubbish' just doesn't convey the kind of rancid goo I need here) of hatred that the other idiots have for the woman. If you're a moron and you find someone objectionable for something specific and fleeting, then you find larger, permanent, personal things about them to hang your objections on - a pair of specs, a big arse, a funny accent. It's because you can't quite articulate your objections in and of themselves - they have to be attached to something. Specific objections are subtle and fiddly and require a bit of analysis - vulnerable personal attributes are like big child-sized building blocks you can grab onto and throw about. Plus, morons think hate is fun. It's like bingo. This is why they don't do it alone. It's a communal, bonding activity, and a bind against the dark suspicion somewhere in the echoing cellar of their brain that the world might find them pointless.

Shilpa is very un-pointless - she seems to be a great example of humanity. She's immensely successful, poised and cultured and well-mannered and beautiful and a lot nicer than you'd expect. The others have had varying degrees of success on the basis on not much talent or beauty and must know how limited it is. They might have some subconscious sense of how 'totally and utterly ordinary' they are by comparison, and how beastly and base they are. Maybe they suspect Shilpa knows it, and so they're just childishly going all out to prove how very horrid they are to her, in that sheep-as-a-lamb sort of way. Or they might just be galloping gormless oafs with no idea of how to treat people.

I don't think they can justify their behaviour on the basis of Shilpa's behaviour, as I think they are doing to themselves, even if Shilpa has been annoying. They're reverting to the lowest possible insults in the face of someone who outclasses them so comprehensively that they can't digest it. But I had to laugh when I saw a clip in which Danielle Lloyd, a dead-eyed Scouse twit who never puts a 'T' on the end of anything when a simple Gordon Brown-esque unhinging of the chin after a vowel will suffice, slobbered "She carn even speak English proplee!"

I suppose I should feel sorry for her, as her flimsy career will be in ruins and she'll probably need to pay for her own protection, which she will need because a lot of other ignorant bastards will want to beat her up. A most mature response, especially when most of them will be the kind who regularly spout much worse in the pub. But for the time being, I'm just finding her a nasty little girl.

The trouble is that the wilfully ignorant often seem to claim a sort of psuedo-racial immunity from criticism. When Jackiey Goody had that scrap with Shilpa over mispronouncing her name, she bellowed "If I can't pronounce your name it's not my fault". Why isn't it? Because no one should ever expect you to make a tiny bit of effort to get someone's name right, so you can show them that most basic level of respect? Well, not if they're foreign and have a silly name. It's their fault for having a silly name, and you don't need to apologise for not being able to get your flapping gob around it. Or it's just the fault of the universe in general. The universe in general cops for a lot of shit from the stupid.

Nothing is ever an idiot's fault. It's just this automatic failsafe against criticism and means nothing, beyond "you are not allowed to criticise me because I am a poor bear of very little brain". This can be augmented by insistences of shit childhoods, drug problems, other problems, other nasty people, etc, but it usually stands up on its own as this impenetrable wall of ignorance. But you can always make an effort, however intellectually challenged you are - you can always try. That elevates you, that you're aware of your shortcomings and refuse to offload them onto others - if you can't pronounce a name, you are contrite about it, not hostile. Why would you be hostile? How can you justify it? You don't need to - it's not your fault, so fuck them. It's just always easier to be permanently on the edge of defensive hostility, and to absolve yourself of responsibility for that and everything else, with the get-out-of-jail-free card of your idiocy.

I can't wait to hear the justification Jade and Danielle and Jo will have for this. I suspect Jo will be horrified and will repent enormously in an ohmigod-what-have-I-become sort of way - she'll wring her hands over ever going into the house in the first place and apologise profusely, having realised she does still want to be famous and liked after all. Danielle will just dig herself in deeper with more twittery, and try and justify it, and flutter her lashes, and then Teddy Sheringham will dump her, or defend her, or defend her and then dump her. Jade will just shout that her dad was black, and then go into hiding, then make a kind of mockery of a Kate Moss-style comeback, possibly by being photographed snorting coke. Shilpa will just go back to her great life in India where she is adored and venerated by all, and hypocritical self-loathing newspapers will call us all cunts.

Then stupid people will continue to be rewarded by society for staying stupid, remaining infants, and causing any amount of damage for which we don't hold them to account. Maybe this is a good start on that score. I try to believe in freedom for everyone to be what they want to be, but I find it so hard not to be militant about idiots. I think they're the biggest problem in the world, and idiocy knows no boundaries of race or nationality. It's only lucky for us that they're too stupid to unite, otherwise we'd be fucked. It's bad enough as it is. (It would be totally inappropriate of me to mention for example suicide bombers at this point, and to speculate that the most significant thing about them is not their race or nationality or religion but their rampant and self-justifying and dangerously energising and self-perpetuating and contagious idiocy. So I won't.)

I might write a book. And then go into hiding.

Links! that I am too rubbish to work into the post properly (I'm not very good at this blogging lark - I should make an effort and elevate myself, or something)

Uniquely British 'not-quite-racism'

Good point, really

Ha ha. Yahoo news is no better than Jackiey "Shoopa... Shuffpa" Goody

It's only words and

2007-01-11T12:34:00.000Z

words are all I need to give you a really nasty glutinous earworm for the day. Buahahaha.

It is raining maliciously, a great day to get an email saying 'Greetings from sunny Goa'. It did contain some useful friendly advice about how to get one's money out of some bastards who are ignoring one's requests to pay one. I small claimed their collective ass in November, slapped warrant on yesterday. So far it has cost me £135 and I've heard nothing. Obviously they are all dead. Or if not now, then soon. Soon.

So, I'm embroiled in writing half a book (the lower half). It's only two chapters, but one of those is such an enormous beast that it takes up that much more of the word count, and is likely to be broken up and scattered throughout the finished book so no one has to sit through all of it in one go. I'm not really thinking too much about the word count - waffly as I am, there will certainly be more than enough of the little blighters, although whether any of them will be the right ones is another matter. Deadline is roughly analagous to Paul's, but unlike him I am so far doing it clean. No caffeine or nothing. Just sheer low-level mania and dog cuddles.

Mr Carr lovingly blogged about his every day, a feat which makes me blink, because, well, it's like writing even more on top of the huge amount of writing you're doing. I just don't have the stomach for it myself, or to put it another way, I am in no way sufficiently organised to fit in blogging as well as sleeping and occasionally eating. Or to put it yet another way, I can't think of anything to say other than 'It'll get done and probably won't be complete arse'.

I was until the day before yesterday happily breaking up the evening with The Simpsons at 6 and Big Brother at 9, oh it pains me to say it, but I think the low viewing figures for this series vindicate me. Then yesterday the telly died, or rather the Sky box did. Me telly faltered before Christmas, so I swopped it with the one my mate left behind months ago, and then that was even worse, and so I got a new one with a DVD player in it which is awfully cute and space-savey so that's fine but now the Sky box has died which is exactly what happened to another bloody Sky box about three months ago and I'm really quite fucked off about it especially as you can't get More4 or E4 for free on Sky despite the fact that they are FREE FUCKING CHANNELS, MURDOCH.

Isn't blogging great? You might never have known that.

I suppose it's a good thing I am telly-less, but you need to take breaks and switch off, and I hate not being able to get the depressing news about imminent dog amnesty in which hundreds of perfectly healthy and non-aggressive dogs are going to get snuffed. I'm probably too full of telly, though, need to learn how to (shudder) entertain myself. If I can't get it sorted by next week though I'll be forced to go round someone's house to watch 'The Trial of Tony Blair'. It'll be like the olden days, when people went round each other's houses.

Where the book is concerned, I think it's something like 7,000 words so far scattered like a load of bollocks over about five different documents. Part of the problem is that all of it wants to be first. It's like being a primary school teacher on a class trip. I'm relying on cheap gags and even cheaper figuratives to get me through. I've got a week today.

I hate, by the way, that the 'This Life' special had Egg the slightly unconvincing best-selling novelist come out with the quote "Asking a writer about the progress of his novel is like asking a man with cancer about the progress of his disease". It annoyed me. Partly because lovely as the quote is I've heard it a gazillion times. It's a shame how some quotes just succumb to becoming hackneyed without much pressure.

What I love though is Wikipedia vandalism. I happened upon some at about 2 this morning in the course of looking up something obscure which wasn't going to help me get to the end of the paragraph but optimism is always good, and it's still there this afternoon. I'm preserving it here because some dope with nought better to do is bound to excise it sooner or later. And it deserves to be seen.

John Prescott

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

John Leslie Prescott MP (born May 31, 1938) is a British Labour Party politician, Deputy Prime Minister, First Secretary of State and Member of Parliament for the constituency of Hull East in the north east of England.

Environment

The UK played a major role in the successful negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and Prescott led for the country during the discussions.^[4]^[5].

However due to his enormous appetite for baked beans, his own personal contribution to green house gases (his farts) and thus global warming means that this fat man, whatever agreements are made at Kyote, will destroy the world in 32 years.

Trivia

His favourite food item is a sugar and chocolate coated doughnut served with french fries with a side order of pig. He would sell his own mother for a doughnut.

Hellen: a handcart

2007-01-08T00:12:00.000Z

I'm late with this too but, y'know, illness and all. (Now I think I'm getting another bug on top of the first one, oh ferchrissakes it's not like I actually do dangerous things like going out and mingling with people, give me a break.) The objective has been achieved, but every little helps as those megalomaniacal product-peddlers keep telling us.

I'm happy to do my bit (even if it's only symbolic now... ill, ill...) in helping Girl with a one-track mind propel Nicholas Hellen of the Sunday Times to the top of Google for all the wrong reasons. As she explains, he was one of the disgraces to the profession who tried to bully her into falling in line when she was outed by them last year. The email he sent threatened in the lowest way to expose her - dangling her family in front of her, inferring that if she didn't cooperate they wouldn't pull any punches (after all, she is the kind of infamous whore slut painted strumpet who should consider herself lucky she isn't paraded through town in stocks on the back of a donkey cart of smelly sin). And all in a tone of... what is that a tone of? It's not unctuous. It's not exactly faux-polite. Whatever it is, it is calculating and nasty.

"Dear Miss [my name],

We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend's paper, revealing your identity as the author of the book, Girl With a One Track Mind.

We have matched up the dates of films you have worked on - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Batman Begins and Lara Croft Tomb Raider - and it is clear that they correlate to your blog. We have obtained your birth certificate, and details about where you went to school and college.

We propose to publish the fact that you are 33 and live in [my address] -London, and that your mother, [her name], is a [her address] -based [her profession]. The article includes extracts from your book and blog, relevant to your career in the film industry. We also have a picture of you, taken outside your flat.

Unfortunately, the picture is not particularly flattering and might undermine the image that has been built up around your persona as Abby Lee. I think it would be helpful to both sides if you agreed to a photo shoot today so that we can publish a more attractive image.

We are proposing to assign you our senior portrait photographer, Francesco Guidicini, and would arrange everything to your convenience, including a car to pick you up. We would expect you to provide your own clothes and make up. As the story will be on a colour page, we would prefer the outfit to be one of colourful eveningwear.

We did put this proposal to you yesterday, but heard nothing back. Clearly this is now a matter of urgency, and I would appreciate you contacting me as soon as possible. To avoid any doubt we will, of course, publish the story as it is if we do not hear from you.

Yours sincerely,
Nicholas Hellen

Acting News Editor
Sunday Times"

This sort of hypocrisy and gruesome treatment of ordinary people may be widespread in the media, but there's no reason why everyone should be tagged with it. There are plenty of staunchly ethical and thoroughly decent journalists, some of whom I've been chuffed to call my mates, and much as they'd like to flag up grubby little swine like him and disassociate him from themselves and their profession, they usually can't. So I hereby linky for them as well as for Ms Lee, who's dealt with the whole nightmare brilliantly and turned it around for herself. Booyah.

Incidentally I think Andre at A Beautiful Revolution put it much more succinctly (and politely) at the time than I ever could have done.

Nu happy woo!

2007-01-07T17:56:00.000Z

Yes oh yes. Happily I had the original wizard jolly time at Rachel's, came home all skippy mid-morning on the 1st to find the dog (who does not usually get left all night by any means, I hasten to add) had done a cat-like guilt trip by removing a banana skin and teabag from the bin and putting them in the hall to indicate his hysterical desperation for food. Sorry K. Also happily I strolled like a jammy bugger right past the hangover. Unhappily I was then suddenly strucken with some evil winter lurg on the evening of the 2nd, ensuring that my long-anticipated viewing of the 'This Life' special was punctuated by stumbled dashes to the loo down The Corridor. (The Corridor is the defining feature of my flat, which was built by a philanthropist in the 30s like most flats in Walthamstow, and it is so very long that it's not nice when you're ill.)

'This Life +10' was so fist-chewingly insultingly bad that I might have had cause to go a-vomming regardless. I bloody love the original series, it's up there with 'Six Feet Under' for me in terms of wit and nuance and emotional Truth, and of course Anna was a formative influence etc etc no but really, it was great. So it was grotesque to see these sort of reanimated character corpses mouthing lines they would never actually say, in this nasty smug artificial clunky set-up, and although it hasn't ruined it for me I rather wish I'd avoided it. It was such a Comment, or it thought it was - a fly-on-the-wall documentary within a film, and all the look-now-it's-the-noughties-people-have-iPods stuff - and I hate that.

So two fingers to Amy Jenkins even if it was her concoction in the first place and we should be grudgingly grateful. But more importantly a whole set of offensive digits to whatever this malaise is. It's not dissimilar to the bout of whatever it was I had a year ago, which may or may not have been food poisoning. This was too late both for the new year oysters (how did the affluent and properous ever get into those as a stylish sexy thing? They are so messy you need a whole council cleaning squad on standby pointing their high-power hoses at your top) and the subsequent prawns, so it's obviously just the continued wrath of the God in whom I don't believe. This one's evidently pissed off that not everyone thinks He exists, although any decent God wouldn't give a rat's ass because He would have the confidence in Himself, innit. But as Woody Allen once quoth, "How can there be a God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

Food is once again my enemy, and me and food usually get on pretty well. Constant nausea, wobbly head, old-lady gait. Bugger. And of course the world hasn't realised that the law is, there shall be no bad news for the whole of January. Most of the bad news, as usual, seems to be stupid news. Naturally my gears are especially ground by the re-emergence of the tabloid anti-darling, the Devil Dog. The mauling to death of a small girl is unquestionably horrific and tragic, just as the mauling to death of a small baby was last year, but they seem to be events that just suck the common sense out of the press and police and public alike, spit it out and run around making Eddie Izzard noises. ("Hello, can I come in? I've got a pig in me trousers. Can my friend come in too? He's got jam for brains.")

I have far too much ire on various angles of this for my poor head to deal with at present, but by way of pretending I'm not sickly let's have a nice LIST (with nowhere near sufficient links but, well, I'm new at this really, and I'm ILL, etc):

1) Did I tumble in surprise from my chair when it was reported that they'd seized £15,000 of cash and (at least according to The Sun) some quantity of heroin and coke from the house where the kid died, the stuff belonging to the dog's owner and kid's uncle 23-year-old Kiel Simpson, a tracksuited skinhead with a stupid face? Niet! I must report that in fact my arse stayed exactly where it was m and barely registered a twitch at this unexpected twist. I was Jack's entire family's complete lack of surprise and that of all his dodgy, responsibility-bypass, tracksuited, scally bastard neighbours.

If she'd accidentally swallowed a load of chinawhite and died that way, the press would at least have rounded unequivocally on the feckless little bastard, but because the dog was the deus ex jobby in this case, they somehow can't bring themselves to really point and shout at the crim scum whose fault the situation was entirely. Well, a couple of people have a bit, but one of them was Simon Heffer, and who listens to that old gasbag? It is not a dog issue, besides the fact that the dog was illegal (under a rather moronic and arbitrary law which doesn't work). It is a crim scum issue.

1b) As for ascribing human moral values to dogs, that's just the other side of the noxious sentimentality that propels people to feed their pets ice cream cones. Totally consistent. It's not just the tabs that do it either - so many people, who should know better, automatically think of dogs as knowing what they're doing in the way we do, having motives in the way we do. They do not. I don't get angry at that sort of idiocy because it gives dogs a bad name - dogs don't care - but because the bad name gets dogs and people killed.

Dogs do not have responsibility. Nothing is their fault. They are done to, acted upon, and everything else is instinct. They don't have morals. If loud fireworks bang make jump, as has been suggested was the case here, maybe go bite. If squeal heard, more bite until no more squeal. That's how they work. High-pitched sounds stimulate dogs to bite. It's nothing to do with any desire to kill people. That's why they love squeaky toys - they mimic the distressed cries of prey animals. K's squeaking of his squeaky is fantastically funny and awfully cute, but it still often occurs to me precisely why he enjoys it.

This dog was a year old. It was a puppy. And already fucked up enough to attack, kept outside and isolated, and given the opportunity to act on its most dangerous instincts by fools. (It's now emerged that the family were discussing getting rid of the dog after it bit one of them a few days before - can't find the link but I'll add it later.)

2) It's amazing how little the media seemed to be arsed to find out about the (actually not very long or taxing) Dangerous Dogs Act. They were content to say that only pure-bred pit bulls were banned, when in fact it clearly says 'pit bull type dogs', which covers a multitude of cross-bred, brick-headed, long-legged, muscle-bound penis-extension canine sins. The morons on the internet were calling for pit bulls to be banned when they already are, you morons, but they're the morons on the internet.

What worries me is that the media are starting to figure there's almost no point in getting the facts completely straight about such an emotive issue, because, well, it's a bit pedantic when children are dying and morons are baying for blood. Oh, and also, faced with the choice of a thousand dog experts champing at the bit to go on telly and explain that it's a more complex issue than it appears and it's not as simple as 'pit bulls bad', or of any number of traumatised victims of dog attacks, who do all the outlets pick? Even the BBC take the juicy option and parade the poor sods on the show. Does anyone do sensible news any more? And what's this thing of handing influence over to people who are (totally understandably) hysterical and usually know nothing about the broader issue? They are not in any position to influence opinion, and they don't even realise the media are exploiting them in their pain. If anyone starts talking about 'Ellie's Law' then I am off.

3) What was 3)? Oh yes. The raids. Well, great, they're busting a dog-fighting ring - needed doing. Except that to begin with, they should have done it a long time ago, and for the sake of the dogs, not because of some binary connection with an attack on a person. This means the dogs are now being treated as dangerous objects to be removed from society, rather than the subjects of abuse that they are.

But more importantly, like the DDA itself, the raids aren't going to make any children any safer whatsoever. This is for a very simple reason that I haven't seen anyone else bring up yet, either because they don't know or because it'd be too unpopular and iffy a point to make. If you're a big old crim and you breed dogs for fighting, then you probably know what you're doing as much as a big old crim with a crack lab. The dogs are used in a sport (legality aside) and in gambling and so they are an investment, just like greyhounds. Of course many of them are mistreated, but the serious people are going to spend money and time building and maintaining athletes - champions. (The ones seized from Merseyside so far were from a couple of lock-ups, both at buildings owned by a local bloke who also owns a gym. Yeah? Minted crim scum.) People have to handle the dogs, take them to and from fights. So they don't want the dogs to be people-aggressive, only dog-aggressive. Dog aggression and people aggression in dogs are not the same thing - there's an overlap, yes, but one does not indicate the presence or even propensity of the other. Any dog-aggressive dog should be watched around people, but, well, it's just not a direct equation at all.

So, pit dogs are bred and trained (as far as you can stretch the definition) to want to fight other dogs. If they show signs of wanting to fight people, they are no good. In that context, they are Bad Dogs. They're frowned upon. They're no more suitable as champion fighters than a greyhound with a gammy leg. What worries me is that these are maybe the dogs that the serious dog-fighters offload onto molluscs like Simpson. Although of course his dog Reuben was only a year old, so Simpson probably bought him as a too-small puppy for £400 from one of his dodgy crim mates. Or a bloke at the side of a road. Whatever.

The point is, the likelihood of these lock-up raids bringing in any actual potential child-killing dogs is pretty negligible. (Obviously any dog larger than a baby is a potential child-killer, a point that I wish more people were making till blue in face and cliche-sick, but statistically... it's just not likely.) They need to worry about individual dogs, pit bull or otherwise, owned by individual idiots. Same as before. Same as in 1991 when the DDA was hurried through the House like an illicit lover out of a window. That's not going to change, but as is usual with difficult problems the solution is too tricksy and long-term to be seriously contemplated by a government that wants to stay popular. The public want results, and now they're getting them, even though they're the results of something else entirely.

An amnesty isn't going to help either - all it'll do is shut a few people up until the next attack (I'm betting it'll be, ooh, maybe a Neapolitan mastiff, to shake things up a bit). In the meantime, slightly more well-meaning but still moronic morons are beseiging animal shelters and such with desperate enquiries about their perfectly docile, amiable bull breed slobberer that they now believe is a ticking time bomb, while others are just abandoning them in a panic. (This happened with Rottweilers last year too, only it wasn't reported. The media's angle this time is slightly, fascinatingly different - all because of the legal issue with the dogs, which gives a certain sense of calm and your-government-is-in-control to it. There's room for a mote of sympathetic stuff about the dogs and responsible-ish owners. With the Rotts, it was just scary anarchy time, and the abandonment issue just wasn't relevant somehow. Hmm.)

Oh, and others are having themselves what would appear to be slight little overreactions. The rotten bastards.

The ignorance! I can hardly stand it. (Ha! And now Posh is setting a great example. Sigh.)

Speaking of which, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly hooked on Celebrity Big Brother this time. I know, I know, but it's so succulent for the amateur psychologist. But crucially, it is full of what seem to be genuinely nice people. I really, really like nice people.

I think celebrities in general get a fucking hard time, and of course some of them deserve it because they're horrid or stupid people who were always going to be horrid or stupid one way or another. In Big Brother terms, though, the celebrities are always going to be better value than the nobodies. This is partly because they are used to being watched and analysed, which makes it less of a morally-suspect exercise, and partly because many celebrities become famous due to their natural charisma, personality and yes, intelligence, or the effects thereof.

And, and, if people deal with the pressure of fame for years on end, they either become partially destroyed by it or they achieve this sort of aura of placid contentment and Knowledge. They know themselves. They might not have anything left to prove. That's certainly the defining mark of most of the lot this time. They are lovely. The disgraced former Miss Great Britain and sort-of WAG is an irritating little empty-headed twit, and the two ex-popstars are boring, and Leo Sayer is a needy blabbergob, but the others are just lovely. Especially the lovely Shilpa, who I expected to be rather precious as a massive Bollywood star, but is actually totally humble and sweet and just lovely lovely lovely and trying ever so hard.

The Goody family on the other hand are a repugnant shower of deeply unlikeable sub-humans. Jade is just a genuine idiot who's learnt to flaunt her ignorance for a lot of money, her boyfriend is some sort of half-smiling, vacant-eyed shadow, but the mother... Put me in a house with that woman, that aggressive, childish, beastly, bellowing, thick-as-two-short-pigshits woman, and it'd be like that episode of 'The Shield' where Vic puts two rappers in one of those shipping crates and tells them to sort it out and then in the morning only one of them walks out and says he wants breakfast. I am telling you.

Black holes, not revelations

2006-12-31T02:14:00.000Z

I was just about to email someone I vaguely know to point out that there's an amusing typo on a relatively important bit of his website. But then I thought - no one cares. I've thought this before but have usually swatted it aside as heresy or at least something unhelpful. Of course this being two hours into New Year's Eve, my sense of acceptance of the essential pointlessness of what I mostly do for a living may be false. You always look for things that point to stuff being Different in The Future at this pestilent time of year. There's probably a gene for it. A gene with a timer.

Anyway - I don't know, perhaps I should just crack down on my tendency to point out people's oopsies to them thinking they'll be grateful, and then work on the flinch I get whenever I see the twitching corpse of what could, in the right hands, have been a sentence. Especially since I am very far from perfect on that score myself. In any case, it's just not sexy. Maybe good English just needs its own Nigella, but I'd need a few years, some hair dye, some elocution lessons, bigger hips, and to sleep with several BBC Four commissioners (the ones that could still manage or appreciate it).

So there's a late night revelation. Other recent ones include:

1) It is physically impossible to tire of that Scott Matthews song with the video with all the beds.

2) 'Stranger in Moscow' is the last good song Michael Jackson will ever record, but it is still better than ooh, so much other stuff.

3) It's very handy to have Film 4+1 as well as Film 4 and a remote control handset, but it tends to result in watching the same film in an absolutely batshit order.

4) 'Spirited Away' is really very amazing but the ending is rubbish.

5) Cheese shops and delicatessens and the like have yet to reach this end of the tube line. Nearest thing is a posh sausage shop but that only sells posh sausage. However, this is bound to change. This place is going to be the new Stoke effing Newington and I'm going to be outclassed and outpriced before too long.

6) It's wonderful to really feel committed to a belief that you've wavered on and picked to bits for years before settling on one side. Even if it's ultimately depressing to hold the belief. This I realised today when I heard with some shock about Saddam's execution. No personal sympathy for the guy well obviously well of course, but you can't just have some new category of Eeeeevil that justifies officially offing someone. It's not the mark of a good democracy. At least that's one thing we no longer do here. Though you might not think so from Margaret Beckett's mealy-mouthing about him being brought to account, but er cough we still don't really kind of support that sort of thing, but then it is Iraqis' business and we don't want to interfere with their fragile emergent democracy, even if... yes. Cough.

I think justice is like freedom or perfection or any other absolute ideal - something you can and should strive for but can never completely achieve. And are a bit batshit if you genuinely believe it's possible. People tend to get very hoity-toity about justice having been done in the event of an execution - the absoluteness of it seems to appeal to that desperate need for closure that we can probably blame Oprah for creating in all of us, or possibly 'Friends'. But the equation just doesn't make sense to me. Above all, lofty as it sounds to me, I don't think it is our place to mete out death as a punishment. Ever. I don't think there is any higher power whose place it is to do it, except perhaps the ghost of Darwin. Who is a bit like Jacob Marley but maybe with, like, little bones hanging off his jacket or something. The Darwinator. That guy. But just because there isn't a higher power doesn't mean we should act in lieu of one.

Obviously many people who do believe in a higher power condone the death penalty, which is odd because you'd think they'd let God kill 'em all and let er, God sort it out. But He seems to be good at delegating when it comes to that sort of thing.

Incidentally - when the Iraqi Prime Minister said that Saddam faced his death "like all tyrants", did he mean that as some kind of backhanded compliment? Bloke went to the gallows if not defiantly, then at least with a certain obstinate demeanour from what I've seen. I suppose most tyrants don't go to their deaths blubbing for mama and begging forgiveness, but then to many people that sort of stubborn scowling thing would be taken as admirable dignity. As befits, y'know, a martyr. So... that's not really what you want from your tyrant's death, is it?

It'll be interesting to see how many people are actually sacrificed to the dead tyrant, and if it'll really be recognised as such, and how many people will insist that it's got nothing to do with Saddam's execution - or if it has any connection, well, it was worth it, because the fucker had to die. As if he actually had to. As if he hadn't already been neutralised, but like the mad Russian blond guy said in Die Hard, "I don't wan neutral, I wan dead." (He's dead too, that bloke. Ho hum.) And as if he didn't have so much more to be held to account for.

I think they just couldn't bear the thought of another eight trials for other atrocities. There may not have been enough lawyers in Iraq to get through it. Buggers were getting assassinated as fast as they could glean the salient details of the case.

7) Power cuts like the one our street experienced earlier this evening really need to last longer than ten minutes for that full childish glee effect to descend. But I did meet my new neighbour after we both stuck our heads out of sundry apertures in our respective dwellings, waving torches around.

8) It's a uniquely awkward situation when one estranged member of your family (presumably) gives another your mobile number. Erk.

9) I know Steve Irwin did remarkable and genuine and lasting good things for animals overall, but I still can't watch footage of him poking snakes in the eye and bellowing "COR HE'S REALLY ANGRY" without throwing things at the telly. Sorry.

Ding dong mmkay

2006-12-28T10:03:00.000Z

Because it is my first time being tagged, and because it's Rachel, I'll do it now before I realise it's a rotten old racket that should be slain (by Chicken Yoghurt).

Rabbit Strike's Best Seven Stuff Of 2006 Things

1) Having a proper actual foreeen holiday for the first time in years and years.

2) That counts twice cos it was also a dead fantastic holiday.

3) Getting a nice magaziney gig and a radio gig to make up for two lost.

4) Getting finagled into doing some of a book. (It will be a good thing once I finish fretting about it.)

5) Staying actual proper friends with an ex.

6) Smashing birthday with lots of drinking and silliness.

7) Um... people, who are great. And dog.

That was actually a bit of a struggle, shamefully. I want to make a list of 14 horrible or crapulent or generally a bit lame things about this year now (why isn't Torchwood better? Why? It deserves a list of its own - and I'm afraid I shall watch the much-puffed finale but that's only because I am a glutton for punishment, and for John Barrowman) but! that's not the spirit. I am looking forward to the new year. Without too much of that glutinous optimism that never bears fruit, or if it does it's kind of bashed leaky fruit that you wouldn't really want unless you were making jam.

Yes! I should say something about the lovely warm response to my witterings here which were catapulted into some sort of blogospheric attention when I used them for good and not for annoying self-centredness, but that might be annoyingly self-centred. Oh well. Call that number 8) just to bugger things up.

Now I suppose I'm obliged to inflict this on seven others, but I'll buck the trend by only bothering Paul, Abby, Salvadore and JonnyB.

Perhaps it's easier to make a list of Seven Things That Were Good By Default.

1) Not having an actual flea infestation after all. Just a few fleas. Which have fled.

2) Not despising short hair too much and managing to disguise badness of pre-short hair with sexy hat.

3) Boiler not breaking touch wood touch wood and then thermostat also.

4) Not getting arrested in Parliament Square or anywhere else for that matter.

5) Only having to file one small claim.

6) Being ill or germy only very infrequently and not for long.

7) Only getting one Christmas present that I already had and being able to go "Gah! I already have this" and for present-giver to go "Gah! I knew that would happen" and all to roll eyes and giggle and so none of that awkwardness when you get something you've already got.

That's better.

It's lovely to look at your blog after Christmas and find what people have been typing into search engines to happen upon you. I've had 'over 50 nude women', 'pot sexy russian woman', and my personal favourite to date, 'picture of a one spot fox faced rabbit fish'.

If I'd thought about it I could have written up The Poo Bag Saga, which might have been the new Bathmatwatch, but that is for another day when I haven't got mad post-Christmas crazywork to do. Alas.

Kissy.

Defying SOCPA means never having to freeze your tush off. Oh wait.

2006-12-20T21:22:00.000Z

So after all that fannying about, I sallied forth to the demonstration in Parliament Square this evening. I spent the day labouring under the misapprehension I was still going to be less than legal, because I hadn't had my special Willy Wonka golden ticket yes-you-may letter from the police in the post. When I discovered from Rachel that a) it's sort of like a driving licence in that you don't have to actually physically have it on you, kind of thing and b) the police, when she phoned to ask after the progress of our permission things, were outraged by our insane interminable loiter last week, I was gratefully disabused. And a bit disappointed, obviously. Robbed of my amusing coda.

The plan was to hold a mass lone demo (as has happened every month since August), completely and humbly legally, from 6 till 7pm, then move a few yards over and have a rip-roaringly non-legal and naughty carol service. And that's what transpired. I hate to say a good time was had by all, but I think it was. It was a good thing to do so although you're supposed to be selfless, I think you're allowed to feel a bit pleased. I have limited experience of demonstrating, and so am irksomely analytical about it, but one of the distinctive things about a demonstration like this is how blooming jolly it is. Jolly and very British - peaceful but not po-faced, a bit daffy without ever losing the sense of enormous importance. This sort of humble gaggle milling about under the looming, gorgeous, other-gold-looks-like-Ferrero-Rocher-wrappers-next-to-this opulence of Parliament. Parliament is an absolutely intimidating place, representing power in one of the most effective, criticism-rebuffing ways you can imagine. You feel very small next to it, and obvious as it is to say, your voice and presence as a defiant citizen in the face of such an impassive and significance-fraught structure feel infinitesimal.

But everyone deals with that overwhelmingness and gets on with it. I love the absurdist convention of these demos - the bonkers notion that you could be arrested, if you didn't have permission, for waving a placard saying 'No more smelly cheese', and of course the silly things themselves perfectly satirising the silliness of the relevant sections of the Serious Organised Annoying Little People Who Probably All Live On Quorn And Are Malnourished And Wrong In The Brain Act. I went for the double-pronged assault of 'ASBOs for apostrophe abuse' (two people asked me if 'ASBOs' shouldn't have an apostrophe; I smote them) and 'Better grammar for placards' (at least no one questioned the spelling of 'grammar'). This was an agonising decision which meant that my favoured campaign, 'Hide Daniel Craig's clothes', had to be sacrificed. Next time, however, as it is a matter of grave import that we strive to bring about a state of perma-nude Bond.

Gathered there all giggly and shivering, we held our placards (and in one spectacular case a pink Christmas tree, decorated grotesquely with laminated images of the casualties of illegal war), circulated and chatted, unwisely went in the road, waved at passing honking cars and mopeds, and were cold. There must be laws and constants about public demonstration, many of them things you kind of don't want to admit to yourself because you're supposed to be being totally selfless and above this sort of thing, like, say

Trundle's Law: Adversity of weather conditions is directly proportional to sneaky sense of righteousness.

Beanamble's Constant: If you demonstrate and no one gets arrested or questioned or stopped or otherwise interfered with, you feel if not a sense of actual failure then certainly a sense of anti-climax.

Fossingberd's Wotnot: Beanamble's Constant is inevitably followed by a sense of horrified guilt over sense of anti-climax. Etc.

I don't know, perhaps that's just me being a git. It sounds pretty beastly when you put it like that - you don't want any martyrs in this, and I know how dedicated people are and how little they let anything like that interfere - but I suppose it's because it's just mind-boggling to break a law or breach it or circumvent it or however you put it, in front of the seat of government, and to have nothing happen at all. When you're actually doing it, it's quietly surreal, and the lack of consequence is equally surreal given everything you ever learnt about right/wrong and legal/illegal. Plus, the whole issue we were protesting was the right to freedom of speech (by extrapolation), and although that only really means the right to be heard, dammit, you want to be listened to. Even if the representatives whose attention you attract are not receptive, you want to be acknowledged, just as you are implictly when you go and vote. Seeing that you're not being acknowledged makes you feel - not personally, but really as an average example of people of your country - neglected. Which in turn makes you angry. I suppose if you protest regularly you get over that, but for a novice like me it makes for an unpleasant aftertaste.

As expected, there were no police - no journalists to speak of either. There was a Liberal MEP, though, which was very something. The only police visible were the ones usually propping up the Parliament gates, looking cold and bored in their fluorescent jackets. Brian Haw had a little passive-aggressive pop through his megaphone at one point, and people laughed nervously, but no one came over and demanded to see papers or anything. It's another layer of surreality - before SOCPA people would protest all the time there and be ignored by politicians, but now we have to apply for permission to be ignored. It's like being not there at all, being negated on some official level. (I went to the rally in Hyde Park in early 2003, remember the excited hollers of a million on the streets and felt so roused, and then so furious and impotent when those million marchers were eaten up in a soundbite and swallowed away like a bad taste. It sticks.) Like hanging around a police station, shouting "ooooo-ooooo" at distant officers who register nothing of your presence. Anyone who's ever given or received the silent treatment from a lover, or opted not to respond to criticism, knows the immensity of the power of silence, and now I suppose the government have figured it out too.

Rachel gave a properly rousing speech, reminded us that "it is the duty of all citizens who give a stuff" to be here, to acknowledge what's going on and challenge it. I watched the cars going past (Parliament Square is a very daunting and almost inaccessible island, you feel like a rabbit dashing across the lanes to get there, and it's another thing that gives you this sense of 'you are not supposed to be here', but I digress), observed the gawping or mildly interested or blank or smiling faces of passing drivers, and wondered how many of them actually know about SOCPA. The form of a small demonstration is pretty standard, and in London people can easily tune it out like they tune out a hundred other elements a day - it seems far enough removed from usual life, aberrant and irrelevant enough to not pay attention to. But this is the sort of issue that attracts people who do give a stuff, but don't often feel the need to actively go and stand in the cold about something - like me. This is something that really affects everyone, however much it may seem to affect only a small pocket of placardy people. So I stood there and hoped that some of the people going past were thinking about what was going on.

At 7 some of us shuffled to the corner for the illicit carol service. It's such a perfect concept - it was held last year and will probably be on next year, and the police are never going to interfere because imagine the front covers if they went in and arrested the bejesus out of a lot of rosy-cheeked warblers in the middle of 'Silent Night'. They dismiss it for this reason, and I had to pause for a moment to get my head around the idea that it was breaking the law, but it is. It's an organised demonstration. I went last year and wrote about it in typically one-foot-out fashion (I know, I annoy myself) - this year it was a smaller gathering, and colder, and altogether less political. There was a gallant, slightly wobbly saxophonist in lieu of missing solo trumpeter, and there was giggling and competitive caterwauling during 'The Ten Days Of Christmas', and swigs of hip flasks and mulled wine (did I mention it was really very bastard cold indeed because if I didn't that would be a grievous error and would imply that we did not suffer for our noble cause). We didn't do 'Little Drummer Boy' because that was a terrible heap of bewildered pa-rum-pum-pums last time. We learn. And we missed out all the juicy Satan stuff from 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'.

We held a minute's silence as the traffic rushed by oblivious. Nothing does the same thing as silence, as I said - maybe next time we should stand in silence for an hour in the square. One protestor covered her mouth

and there's not really any substitute for that either if you want to declare your outrage that your right to say things is being curtailed. People tune out milling, chatting, politely whooping protestors. If we're being silenced, and being met with silence, maybe silence is the way to strike back. It would certainly signal disgust. (There's always mooning for that, of course, but let's put that on the back burner, or the back of a bus full of drunk rugby players.)

Brian Haw said some brief, typically passionate words, but he was more subdued than I've seen him. He tends to be a human foghorn, but not this evening. Last year we made much out of the fact that we were defying the law - this year Brian did an amusing little "I'm breaking the law right now, la la la" into the megaphone, and Tim gave us a round of applause and we all joined in, but we were quieter about it. The positive spin on this is that we all knew why we were there, in the effing cold and friz, and we simply defied rather than banging on about our defiance - it's no big deal, we could do this every day, and maybe we should. The negative is more along the lines of - we are tired and weary and helpless and we do not know if this is doing any good at all.

I would go with the positive, though, with only the usual little niggly doubts and cynicism around the edges. There will be at the least a steady trickle of people prepared to defy SOCPA in this way for as long as it's in place, and although it's hard to cling onto the belief that it will do good, it's of symbolic importance to keep doing it, to counterbalance what is an insidious, craven and terrible symbolic gesture on the part of the government.

I suppose this now means I'm obliged to go and get frostbite again sometime soon. Thank you, Tony, because of you I will have to buy stupid thermals. Ooh, I could get a onesie, like the ones in old Westerns where the sheriff is rousted out of bed at night by the posse and he comes out in his hat and boots and a onesie with buttons up the middle and his gun. That'll do nicely.

And now, some politics

2006-12-16T16:57:00.000Z

This was work.

HANGING AROUND I N T E R M I N A B L Y FOR DEMOCRACY

Thursday 14^th December, 2006

16.20
Meet companion for coffee to fill in SOCPA forms. The Application for Demonstration forms (3175A, retention period 7 years), will enable us to demonstrate outside Parliament in celebration of democracy, provided we hand them into a police station six days in advance of the demonstration. Our intention is to join a 'mass lone demo' on the 20th December in which many people obtain individual permission to protest simultaneously. Faffing about with bits of paper as is now required for us to carry out this most basic civil right is something we’re happy to do, in order to essentially give the entire oppressive rigmarole two fingers in public. Swig drink, feel warm glow of righteousness.

16.50
Arrive at police station in north London. Find young trendily-dressed couple, a single woman and a bloke or two waiting. Plonk down on fixed metal seats. Have a bit of a natter. Check forms correctly filled in. Observe bleakness of waiting room, out-of-order phone and scribbled-on walls.

17.00
Become aware of friction between couple queueing. She seems to be trying to reassure her fraught boyfriend – he is irritated and harsh. “Just back off, Gisella. Don’t touch me again. You’ve wasted four hours of my day.” Female officer is dealing with a bloke at the window. Gisella slinks away in her heels, then wanders back. One or two more people come in and ask if this is the queue. It is. They shrug and sit down.

17.05
A gaggle of teenage boys in hoodies slouch in and occupy some of the remaining seats. One of them slips off his pristine Fila hi-tops. The others complain loudly about the “cheese”.

17.11
Gisella continues to stroke her boyfriend’s leather-jacketed arm, cuddle up to his back and put her arms around his waist. “You touch me again and you’ll see what’ll happen. I will hit you in the face.” Exchange worried glances with companion. Gisella murmurs something sullen in unidentifiable European accent and hovers near boyfriend’s elbow. Boyfriend sets jaw and glares about him. We seethe quietly at his beastliness.

17.16
Read graffiti. ‘Bacon sarnie die’. ‘Jihad’. Someone’s MySpace URL in fetching blue felt tip under the hood for the knackered phone. The single girl gets out a laptop. Samuel Beckett is mentioned.

17.19
Gisella draws near boyfriend, puts fingers on his sleeve. He flinches violently to shake her off, throwing his arms up and out and turning away. Heart drops at the movement. More worried glances. Is he really going to start beating the crap out of his woman in a police station? Officer has disappeared from behind window. Gisella traipses off again. After making a call on her mobile and having a fag outside she circles back around. Begin to question her state of mind. Shortly, there is a revelation.

17.21
“Look, Gisella – this has got to stop. You come to my building, the porter puts you out, you come back in again. You have been following me around all day. You need to stop. There is no ‘us’. You need to get in a cab, now, and go home. Just… delete me from your memory. And everything will be okay.”

17.24
Wish for television, and perhaps a hot chocolate. Gripe softly about absurdity of bureaucracy intended to prevent people criticising the government. Consider going out for a paper. Think about horrendousness of the news and mendacity of Tony Blair. Reconsider. Shuffle feet about. Teenage AsBoy fires up 50 Cent on his mobile and slumps down in seat.

17.26
Man we now understand to be harrassment victim occupies a seat, leaning forward to prop chin in hands. Gisella hunkers down to look into his face, unmindful of the fact that she is hunkering almost between the previously unfettered knees of companion. Companion scrunches up in seat. Frowns exchanged, and some of those stifle-it-or-there-will-be-bad-things sort of nervous smirks.

17.32
Gisella and her man get to the window. Fiddy is in full effect and drowns most other things out, but the man is evidently explaining to the officer that this woman will not leave him alone. She strokes his arm reassuringly. AsBoy flicks through to find The Game. “I slept with her a few times last year,” says the man. Imposing Irishman comes in, asks where the queue starts, shrugs, sits down and opens a paper.

17.37
Officer takes man away to take a statement. Gisella leans, like a forlorn cat out in the cold, against the door to the inner station where her beloved is telling the police about her. She paws at the door. Then, in hypnotic state, wanders out for a fag. Get a glimpse of her face and see her glazed eyes.

17.38
That bit from ‘8-Mile’ where Rabbit finally trounces everyone in the battle on the mobile. AsBoys rap along with considerable skill, but also with touchingly-deferential hushedness. Blair’s noble ‘Respect’ project can wind up in the knowledge it has done what it set out to do, and more.

17.50
Want drink.

17.52
No one at the desk. Decide to stand up and get in the queue proper.

18.00
No one at the desk. Single girl quietly tapping on laptop. AsBoys getting fractious. Lead AsBoy, in tall woolly hat, presents himself at the desk and spies officers of the law photocopying in back room. “Scuse me,” he enquires. “Ooo-oooo.” Rest of gang sniggers. AsBoy whistles as if to errant Staffy. Photocopier continues important photocopying. AsBoy swaggers back to seat. Speculate as to the possibility that we’ve been run over by a bus, and are in hell. Note there is no clock. No clocks in hell.

18.05
Low-level grumbling swells, like a growing storm of pissed-off people who want to be in the pub.

18.06
Really want drink.

18.07
A man and a woman with a clipboard appear. “Is this the queue?” “Yes.” “Sigh.” He approaches the still-bare, lonely window. A woman materialises on the other side, her back to the desk, doing something with some paper. “Excuse me,” says the man. Her back shows no recognition. “Scuse me.” Nothing. “Excuse me.” She turns with a blank face. “I need to somethingsomething.” “I don’t work here.” She vanishes. Man retreats in defeat. Man and clipboard-woman loiter beside queue. Gisella circles restlessly, silently.

18.10
A woman and two men come in and go straight to the window. We watch them warily. This is Britain. A nation of dignity and honour, where people queue. We are renowned worldwide for the orderly and humble nature of our queues. Some of our queues can be seen from space. This is how things are done. Commence muttering about having proper system and avoiding fights. In the distance, past the glass, Gisella’s man is still giving his statement, his leather jacket hung on the back of his chair. More people come in, see the queue, look a bit aghast. No one at the window. Photocopying.

18.12
Bit of Justin Timberlake. Excellent.

18.18
Companion gets on phone and calls the police station we are standing in to enquire brusquely as to why there is no one on the desk. People smile. Talk to Irishman and other man behind in queue. “I’ve never waited so long to sign my name,” says Other Man. We say we’re just here to hand in some forms. Explain SOCPA. Ponder the subtle genius of the red tape involved. It’s almost as if they want people to get put off demonstrating.

18.20
Companion goes out for a fag. Officer comes out to talk to Gisella. “Look, he doesn’t want to see you, he doesn’t like you. I know it’s hard, but you just have to accept it.” Gisella says nothing. Young man talks to mate on his mobile. “I been here an hour. Got hunger for the desk, bro.” Check as requested companion’s head for fresh grey hairs.

18.21
Another officer comes to window and sees the woman and two men. Companion points out not unreasonably that we have been queueing for an hour and a half. Woman blasts with authority that she is there to pick up the belongings of someone who’s been found dead. “My brother,” says one of the men. Companion is silenced. Atmosphere balloons and subsides like fitfully-snoozing sea-creature. Officer emerges from a side door and is almost rushed by loitering man and clipboard-woman. They are accepted and vanish into the belly of the station.

18.24
Group leave with dead man’s effects. AsBoys rock up to the desk again and recommence Operation Copper-Attention-Get. Operetta of moans and gripes is now into its thrilling second act. AsBoy tilts head to the gap at the bottom of the window and is gallantly insistent. “Hey. Hey! There’s some ladies here that need to hand in some forms!” Resist urge to pat him on his woolly-hatted, uncertain-futured head.

18.30
Gisella hangs around the automatic doors, gazing out into the night. The doors stay expectantly open. There is a draught. Want to slap Gisella.

18.35
Officer comes out and asks Gisella to go with her. Gisella accompanies her eagerly to inner door, then seems to finally gather that perhaps she should get in a cab and go home. She takes a faltering step back. The officer takes her by the elbow and gently but firmly moves her inside. The door closes on “I am arresting you for -” and they are swallowed up. AsBoys erupt in cackles.

18.37
Companion gets call back from the station we are standing in with bollocks explanation of why there is no one on the desk, despite the fact that any normal office would make sure reception was covered at all times. Muse on the possibility of the police, like the Post Office, being opened up to competition from other companies. Dream of lovely Duluxed waiting rooms with fish tanks and water coolers, and a better world for all.

18.40
AsBoy, who more closely resembles the Artful Dodger (the 60s film version) by the minute, hangs around the inner door. “If you kick it, they will come out,” he explains to us in matter-of-fact voice of experience. “But they *will* arrest you.” Start to weigh up pros and cons of this option.

18.43
AsBoys finally succeed in attracting attention and hunch over in deep discussion of forms. They are jumping ahead of the single girl but she is unperturbed. And it is only supposed to take them a minute, after all. But we are on police-minutes.

18.50
Single girl has got to window and is attempting to get back her missing handbag. Two other women come in and stand at the other window. We tense and glower, having by now returned almost entirely to the wild. Officer disappears with reference numbers.

19.02
Officer apparently despatched into wardrobe and currently negotiating with Narnia officials to obtain location of handbag. Other Man is now into his stride and starts complaining bitterly about how long it can possibly take to find it. Go up and ask single girl what’s going on. “They’re not going to find it,” she shrugs. “I’m going to lose it twice.” Someone emerges and takes the two women inside. Irishman and Other Man go through initial phases of bonding process. Hover behind single girl waiting to pounce before officer can flee. Irishman insists the yellow line must be stood behind. We all smirk at each other.

19.04
Photocopying.

19.15
Officer returns empty-handed. Single girl takes her reference numbers and departs. We lunge forward like jaguars and push our limp forms through the gap. Officer apologises for wait.

19.16
Companion finishes explaining to officer what to do with the forms. Officer duly takes forms to cursed photocopier.

19.17
Tumble through automatic doors into street clutching validated photocopies of silly forms. Cheer lustily. Skip down road full of glee. Decide to just quickly check second page of form marked ‘Police use only’, crucial to validate our presence at the station today and protect us from possible detention under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act of 2005. Find it blank.

19.20
Back in queue. Irishman and Other Man and two others very understanding.

19.21
Point out error of officer’s ways. Officer stamps forms upside-down.

19.24
Drink.

Fists with your toes

2006-12-16T16:32:00.000Z

A new year approaches, and it may or may not see me making something of this wretched thing. There will probably be some brow-creasing over what should be excised according to who might be looking. I will never learn. Never ever. Also, I hate people who blog about blogging even more than I hate people who say "I blogged this" or "I blogged about this" all the damn time. So I'll try and cut that out. Along with biscuits. Oh biscuits.

So, yes, this is the score, as succinctly as you like.

* This is a work of procrastination, since I have an actual book to actually write, for an actual deadline. The deadline is very silly. It makes me laugh. In the meantime I have to hand in some of it the day after tomorrow. This makes me laugh also.

* A fox just strolled through the garden. I love foxes.

* I have Skype now. It is the shizzay, except when it doesn't work and freaks people out because they think someone has phoned them and is just listening.

* I did an awful lot of karaoke the other night at a work Christmas party which was satisfyingly non-glam without being a skanky depressing mess. 'Fairytale of New York', performed with another writer (too many teeth but a fair MacGowan impression), was most successful. The rest I don't want to talk about.

* I don't have enough hair and too much of it is going grey.

* I did all my Christmas shopping in an hour in Camden and was disgustingly pleased with myself. Of course now I dare not look in the bags in case all I bought was crap.

* The other day I went to hand in a form in order to demonstrate in Parliament Square, and found myself involved in an episode of 'Shameless' scripted by Samuel Beckett. This deserves its own post.

Fucketh ye not

2006-08-21T01:31:00.000Z

This guy owed him upwards of 50k. He gave him every chance, but in the end... man. And you know what he did, he left his squeaky right there as a warning. I swear the cops shit where they stood.

Table number 666

2006-08-04T22:40:00.000Z

My attention span shrinks ever further like a wet slug under a salt shaker. Today I've failed to get to the end of two especially interesting and well-written New Yorker articles. There's no hope for me. Especially after I nearly threw something at the telly when an Orange advert presented itself with breathtakingly bad grammar. That sentence, and this one, is probably also equally executed as poorly but, fuck it.

Oh dear, and now I've just failed to read an article about gourmet dog food. But then I have been sitting here twotting about for some hours, and besides there are few things pointlesser than gourmet dog food. BK greets every dry dish of complete food - which I admit I do try and vary the flavour of from giant bag to giant bag - with such unadulterated joy that I can't imagine him being happier with dripping steak. When he's chewing his first mouthful, he turns his head to look at me, and wags his tail as he chomps, then gets back to it. Then when he's finished he comes to find me and thank me with more waggings and smiling. Aw.

Oh dear, and now I've become the thing I hate the most, one of those people who drivel on about their pets. Although actually a) BK is not a pet, he is a tame dependent wolf beast and friendly oaf and b) there are lots of things I hate so much more and so much more vehemently, including people who put gold jewellery on babies, and the Chinese government. (More coming soon.)

Presently I'm harbouring germs. I tend to sort of foster passing germs for a few days, feel pathetically incapable, and then turf them out again. These ones are at least vaguely trippy, which is courteous of them. I must have a decent immune system, which goes nicely with my decent metabolism and muscle tone, all of which I've sorely tested with years of indolence and eclairs and going out without a coat on. I get all cross when germs stop me from doing things, despite the fact that if I had no germs at all I'd blatantly go straight to the sofa for seven straight hours of blissful sloth. Ho hum.

There is never anything worth watching on TV unless it's on More4 which Sky won't give me. Does this mean I'm getting old?

The things we did and didn't blog

2006-07-25T23:03:00.000Z

The worst thing about this heat is that it forces you to talk about the weather. It's not enough for it to turn your brain into soft curdled mush, it has to make absolutely sure your conversation goes to pot. And your writing. Look at that now.

I haven't taken any pictures for ages. I could have taken a picture of a lovely TVR Tuscan at the British Motor Show at the weekend but neither of us had camera facilities. It was blue and looked very much like a proper Batmobile. Maybe Batgirl would drive it if she could cope with the treacherous rear-wheel drive and its allegedly extreme likelihood of spinning the occupant to a grisly end. We sat in it and admired the preposterous gorgeousness of its design - the hand-stitched blue leather, the opulent curvature of the dashboard echoing the voluptuousness of the body work.

'It's so beautiful because it's going to be the last thing you see, y'see.'

'Is this all the boot space?'

'You don't need to take any luggage with you, because you're going to die.'

'Oh yes. How do you unlock the doors? I can't see the locks. But it doesn't matter because once you get into the car, you never need to get out again.'

'Perfect.'

I seem to miss more stuff than I attend these days, but considering it's summer I'm not doing too badly in terms of Diet Coke Ad Terror (DCAT). That usually strikes sometime in June and continues until late September, when I figure it's actually OK to wear rubbish clothes, be untoned and untanned, and not have a big group of sexy friends who swing by every day in their Chrysler (it seats about 20) to take me to the beach for BEACHY FUN AND SEXFULNESS.

I'm too grown-up for that to really bother me these days. I accept I'm not going to be at the Reading festival this year, but I also understand that my hankering to go there has everything to do with misplaced nostalgia and little to do with the reality. Although last time I did enjoy being a snotty VIP git, loafing about in the blessedly (relatively) civilised press bit with the PVC chairs and tables. I saw about five bands and the rest of the time hid from the hordes of 16-year-old wankers whose ancestors threw their shoes at Daphne & Celeste.

What did I miss?

- Dog becoming Japanese catalogue model

- Attending naked nightclub. Er... yes.

- Being employed worryingly regularly on the basis of my ability to bullshit (but only because I bullshat them so effectively, I think)

- Seeing Graham Coxon faffing about, twice, and being a bit sad at the multiple chins of the middle-aged Buzzcocks

- Wondering why no one has managed to remake The Lost Boys, and concluding that yea, only I have what it takes to tackle such an awesome task, and plotting to rain foulness upon the idiots who are making some sub-Buffy slarge (working title 'The Lost Girls', probably) and show them the error of their boring, bollocks ways. (It was a slow day around here.)

- Bumping into two ex-nemeses who are alright really and even admitted without prompting to having been primo tosspots before

- Attending about three events in a week calling themselves 'Christmas in July' - the imagination of these people knows no bounds

- Seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers in stinking Earls Court, realising how low my tolerance is for OTHER PEOPLE in their NEARBY THOUSANDS with their BAGS and ELBOWS and THROWING OF BEER. (They were good although Kiedis kept his top on. I paid MONEY for that gig, how dare he?)

- Spending upwards of three hours being savaged by a student of Vidal Sassoon. My hair now resembles... oh, Christ, what is that? It's sort of a routed out of bed at 4am with Tazer guns and trained badgers over hot coals by an 8-year-old ADD sufferer with pinking shears look. It looks quite nice.

Hot turkey

2006-05-03T23:45:00.000Z

It's finally got warm and, as ever, I'm not sure how to deal with it. Warm weather means worrying about flab and pallor, which in turn makes me disgusted with myself for succumbing to such boringly oppressive ideals. It also means being peppered with insect bites. I usually get one healthy bout of them around this time of year, a liberal sprinkling whose marks then linger for the whole summer. Curses. I just spent half an hour trying to clap one small black flying thing to death, and when I succeeded I didn't even realise it. Finally saw one wing and ink spot on finger indicating battle had been won. I've recently developed the ability to catch flies with one hand and then release them, but this one wasn't going to get the opportunity to feast on my soft white flesh.

There's another one. You'll get yours, chum.

The warm weather also brings a certain reflectiveness. This year I've found myself having to face up to some hard facts, having been sitting resolutely on them as if on a treacherous sofa concealing a gang of renegade springs. Some of them are so dreadful that I cannot yet look them in the eye. Some are just about tame enough for me to approach and, hopefully, overcome. If others can tackle such Herculean tasks, then so can I.

The truth is that I have a problem. An issue, if you will, with excess. Booze, drugs, sex. The usual suspects. For some time now I've been denying that I'm on a slippery, slidey slope. It's a swine and a bastard, but this month is where I finally stand up to it, see it for what it is and find it in myself to change, if only for four weeks. Because if I'm honest, brutally honest with my weak self, I'm not getting nearly enough of any of them.

I seldom don't opt not to drink alone. I just can't accept that fourth beer; the fifth and sixth and seventh all fly by into someone else's mouth. Wine goes down like it's general anaesthetic laced with Toilet Duck. Rare is the night when I crack open a bottle and suddenly I'm waking up at lunchtime with a French pig shitting in my head. I pop pills and snort lines and smoke like there's a tomorrow and I have to get up especially early for it. I get wild and crazy almost every two years. It affects my mood; I'm often agreeable, chatty, sensible, starting conversations in the street. It's reached a point where my life is becoming intolerable - the tedium is out of control, and it's past time I dealt with it.

Thus I'm embarking on a filth-encrusted fucking vomit-flecked steaming flailing bugger of a bender for the entire month. I will storm every pub I pass until its derelict cellar reverberates with pleas for mercy. I will light each virgin Marlboro with the fizzling embers of its predecessor. I will eat cannabis sandwiches and take three spoons of coke in my mushroom tea. I will cultivate some sort of sordid mutually-beneficial arrangement with Camden Town's dealers. It's going to be a motherfucker, but with God's help I'll conquer this terrible affliction.

I began in earnest yesterday by gradually consuming all the alcohol, bleach and psychoactive material in the house. This afternoon I drank my weight in Malibu. I like Malibu. It tastes like Keith Richards falling out of a tree.

Now I can't catch that fly. Ah! I'll breathe on it.

That's quite enough of that

2006-04-28T02:19:00.000Z

In the words of Richard E. Grant, "Balls." But, like, in a good way.

Flatmate is soon come, and with him half the rent, thank Jebus. More significantly, though, with him comes good company and regular washing-up, no but really, he is very good people as we re-established during his recent visit. We used to sit in a boring job wondering why we'd been blessed with all this brain we weren't using, emailing each other silly crap to stay afloat. One day we emailed entirely in haiku. Heh. He is even more apologetic for his very existence than I am, so I've decided we should have a Sorry Box. At 50p per expression of contrition, I reckon we'll raise enough every week to get shitfaced every Friday.

Not that it takes me much, admittedly.

Other recent badness-cancelling things of late have included my birthday, which involved lots of laughter and love and a gratifying number of bottles for the recycling man. And a cake, even. Blueberry chocolatey cake and candles. I blew them all out in one go. I am big.

Also, this town is great. I know three of my neighbours which is practically worth a documentary. The town itself has got amazing heritage, and here and there some staggering examples of fearsome Art Deco architecture. There's a certain brash confidence and angular arrogance and fearlessness and gorgeousness about things from the 1920s that I love. No sense of how much worse things were going to be - they thought the very absolute worst was behind them. The town hall is this vast breathtaking stern white Russian thing, and the assembly hall next to it is about as amazing with its roof-height glass doors and the shouty motto

FELLOWSHIP IS LIFE - LACK OF FELLOWSHIP IS DEATH

That's me told.

There is also one duck, called Gerald, that sits by the fountain and looks imperious. Good old Gerald.

The downside of all this gloriousness is that the cinema - boarded up for the last two years or so, which is bad enough because me likee films on doorstep - turns out to be a Grade II listed example of Art Deco sexiness also. If it had just been the shitty 60s joint I thought it was it wouldn't be such a travesty that it's lying neglected. It's just covered in nasty white tiles with one of those concretey outcrops over the door and a grotty white vertical cinema sign, and smells of what the Scottish call 'pish'. But the other night I went over the road to look up at the building properly, and it has these long slender elegant windows and is sad and beautiful. Bugger.

Window still isn't fixed. But dog is healthy, blue flowers are sprouting in big clusters in the garden, and I'm grateful for wot I got.

Oh, and that there is a red-arsed bumblebee. It got into my bedroom and the dog nearly ate it. I got it in a glass. It was waving its front legs in the way bees do when they're asking the bee god to come and lift them up. I gave it a blob of Lyle's Golden Syrup. It continued the bee dance of death for a while until it discovered the sticky medicine, then fell to sucking at it with immense and solemn concentration. When it had finished after half an hour or so in a syrup trance, I put it on a flowery plant in the garden. It fell off. I scooped it up again. It sat for a second and then took off, flying off at tree-height.

Ah small things, and small things with furry legs that need sugar.

Mare of London

2006-02-11T15:35:00.000Z

Out last night. Out tonight. Still chased by The Fug. More bank fuck-ups, more fear. These are not especially good times, as times go. But there is always the 'but' and I'll take it, thank you.

I must ring my mum. And the bank. Bastard swine from bloody hell. Thereafter I might attempt to get my sense of humour back. Perhaps some light brow-clutching will do it.

We're gonna net us some work

2006-02-10T12:49:00.000Z

A shocking week that I'm not going to discuss. Mingled with the men who own the world on Tuesday and came away feeling like a worm. The bank have assigned me an entire new identity - that of a whorehouse madam in an old Western, as far as I can tell - and don't know how they've managed it. Most impressive. And the dog gave himself another foxshit facial so I had to hose him down last night. Actually though that was quite amusing. He now smells faintly of coconut.

I don't usually fall upon the neck of weekends and bless them, but this one I welcome like a new year. And it's only February. The armpit of the year. Come friendly April, even if that means another faltering step towards 30 and the grave beyond.

In fact the Pieces only amounted to 467,519

2006-02-01T23:37:00.000Z

If I were any sort of person I'd be posting about the James Frey/Oprah thing - man makes lots of money with drugs and crime memoir, endorsed by Oprah who defends him against accusations of fraud, turns out to be a fraud, has botty spanked by Oprah on TV, may change the way publishers check non-fiction books. But I'm not. Not right now.

But I will say that my man with a book resurfaced. I did think he was dead.

So I did that detox for work and it fucked me. Then I had delicious duck and gorgeous creme brulee (you can fill the accents in yourself, you've got italics, what more do you want?) by way of a work thing on Monday, and one or other of those has fucked me. Is this God's way of telling me to be more idle, or just to eat greasy kebabs and belch and never attempt to do healthy things or eat nice food?

Yes, I'm poisoned, woe, woe. For the last two days I've either been asleep or chained to the loo, one way or another. Total food intake as of five minutes ago is one red apple, four slices of bread and Marmite and about half a box of Ritz crackers which I fell upon Tuesday evening and rent asunder. My stomach has taken complete leave of its senses and is going to have to be persuaded that all food is not evil. I am all feeble and rubbish, and bad-tempered, and afraid, and bilious and sad. What's that Japanese proverb that goes something like

Dance and sing - an inch from us is black night

OK so this ain't black night, it's just a bastard bout of food poisoning, but it's amazing how things can look shiny-dupa one week and then look thoroughly grim the next, with not a great deal of actual change. Bleh.

I might start on one of my new books, about a crack addict. That'll rally me. Even if some of it is fibs. Dirty, filthy, crack-addled fibs.

Have some pictures entirely unrelated to the above in a pleasantly whimsical sort of fashion.

(At present I'd rather be where that one was taken.)

Ninja Grapes

2006-01-31T01:56:00.000Z

Ha! That was diverting. Maybe 50 people in a sort of bijou Strand vault, circulating and talking to one person every three minutes, business cards flying everywhere (alas, not mine - I should get some lovely card and scrawl my own, that would make me look terribly creatif). You had to raise your voice to be heard above all the other enthused bellowing. It was like some mad entrepreneurial aviary.

Three minutes is a mighty long time if the other person is very dull and/or very quiet. This I have learned.

I finally got to eat something, all spent after seven times round, and managed just about to avoid an argument about foxhunting with a girl who was so Barbour it was arresting. She practially had "My family have hunted these lands since the 1700s" graven across her forehead so it wasn't even an assumption when I asked if she had. (Admittedly the whole "Foxes are VERMIN" rant rather gave her away.) But we were too darned civilised and pleasant to tussle over that. I just put a non-expression on my face and tucked into my duck which had been seared on the white-hot metal edge of hypocrisy, why yes. Then some gonk with a website set fire to a napkin with a candle. The flapping-it-about dance didn't really help.

I need a haircut. Moreover I need to do something grubby and honest before I lose touch. But the last time I did that I nearly killed many people for being utter, posing, smoking, credulous, approval-honking fucksticks. I suppose most people are a bit awful, and especially most people who coagulate into social groups of their own accord; maybe that creates its own unsavoury chemical reaction. No one like groups, they're ugly things. Only individuals are precious and lovely. And the relief when you find and clutch them, your hands all soiled with the grot of the rest.

Oh yes, and I did get to see A-ha for four songs. Including that one and that other one. He didn't shrink from the high notes and going by the breathtaking cheekbones and the very moving angles of his amazing face, somewhere in an attic in Oslo there is a really hideous gnarled portrait with snaggleteeth and red eyes. He has a receipt from the devil's own desktop. He'd be exhausting to look at for too long. He's 46 or something and, y'know, hot damn. Apparently in 2000 he beat Bill Withers' record for the longest note held on a record - Bill's was 18 (that one in 'Lovely Day'), Morten's was 20 and a bit. In a song that no one living actually has except me. It's not bad.

I had two glasses of wine and I feel dreadful. I think the two varieties are having some kind of international incident. In my innards. Whither my valiant ninja doctor who cured me of everything last time? He's in Lytham St Annes. Curses.

Resident Weevil

2006-01-30T03:04:00.000Z

And I wonder why mothers gather up their wee ones and hold them tightly.

Everybody in the house of love

2006-01-30T02:00:00.000Z

A month in the new place and the dog has already broken a window trying to eat cats in the garden. The windows are original sash ones, which is great except for the fact that the frames would make a good cheesecake base. This offsets the guilt considerably.

I'm writing about spas and culture and politics and how no one ever needs to listen to Shania Twain. Music reviews for a frilly website for overgrown girlies = a most satisfying doss. Where once I poured my soul into music criticism for monkey nuts, now I hack with glorious 3-star indifference for decent money. It's like victory over the false promises of glory that keep you down. Yessir.

Today I had tea in proper cups and ate homebaked cake, and bitched about literature, which was gratifying. We swopped books. It was curiously pleasing to watch mine go off to new and interested parties, at least the one in particular that I had liked but that left me feeling somewhat hollow. I acquired nine new ones which I want to read all of all at once. I seemed to end up with an armful of misery, drugs and filth. Excellent.

What is also gratifying:

1) I edited a book this month which will be published and everything. A decent book. Which I edited at a creative level instead of just giving it a technical Brazilian. This was very pleasing indeed.

2) The new Goldfrapp album, which is just as Goldfrappy as the other two only slightly more so. There's this one delicate muffled piano pounding bit that's half-buried in the midst of one second verse that I would just like to loop in my head indefinitely, just behind my eyebrows.

3) One of the books that happened to be there today for the picking was raved about to me the other day by a 19-year-old phone services salesboy, who came to anoint me with free weekend calls and stayed for two cups of tea. So I picked it. I had to really. It was such a satisfying coincidence. He said it changed his life. If that's the case then God knows what he was before he was knocking on strangers' doors in the snow, but let's not be too cynical. He was a nice, bright boy. I could almost have threatened his career with my body.

4) Dog. Dog always gratifying, especially when making hard gangster types pale on the bus.

5) As karmic Jiffy-bag reward for putting up with pain-in-arse PRs bothering me to review 'The Best of Our Tune with Simon Bates' (in all fucking honesty), I am being sent gifts. An Arctic Monkeys pin badge for one, but for better than that, a fat block of Belle & Sebastian Post-Its. I couldn't give a rat's ass for Belle & Sebastian, but each Post-It says

Step Into My Office, Baby
_____________________
_____________________
_____________________

on it which is enough for me.

What is not gratifying:

1) The first spa treatment I reviewed was an extraordinary Austrian detox treatment, which involved being poached gently for a while in hot fragrant water and then being tilted from side to side to stimulate metabolism. It was a marvellous experience only marred by the fact that it flushed the Evil Abdomen Ague of Yore from its foetid cave in, I don't know, the abdomen of my subconscious or wherever, and now I can hardly eat pizza without doubling over and groaning theatrically. Banishing the Evil Abdomen Ague of Yore took time, patience and money before, and I'm determined to use none of these now that it's come galumphing back. Just peppermint tea and hilariously unrealistic screaming-grin optimism.

2) Either the central heating is going through some sort of midwinter crisis (who knew it was possible to live better than in a charming neglected terraced house with shitty gas heaters alone? I'm not missing it and nor are my pre-arthritic joints), or it's so fucking cold that the cold is just eating up all the heat. Or both.

3) I'm going to have to get a permanent flatmate when my temporary one, my old mate the accountant, leaves after a month here. Can't I get some kind of special rent-discount for being a fickle hermitous misanthrope who vacuums seldom and yet can't stand it when the knives are the wrong way up in the drainer? (Blades down, people. Everything else up so you can tell what it is. And put the fucking teaspoons in the smaller bit at the front that practically says 'teaspoons go here', or so help me, I will disembowel you with this very spatula.)

4) Having enjoyed sex with people who love me or at least want to have sex with me, several times a week for the last three years, I'm suddenly celibate as a pet lizard. Actually there have been several non-sex spells in that time, but for some reason this one is especially bitey. It's all the socialising. There's no other explanation for it. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop that is willing to do disgusting things to me for an evening. At least not without complication. Alas. I've just had the most adult and healthy and satisfying complication for 18 months, and now in order to maintain the delicate balance of the universe I require something otherly. I suppose I'll just have to channel it into my work. How bastard dull.

5) I've got to find out where the tax office is so I can deliver whatever laughably passes for my tax return by hand on Tuesday. Dig it.

Tomorrow A-ha are doing an instore gig at HMV on Oxford Street. (Yes, it's very gratifying to be back here in the land where the interesting event roams free.) Morten Harket still looks exactly as he did in 1986 only a bit more rugged. He has aged like a good pair of jeans. A remarkably beautiful man who I should probably not be gazing upon in my present state of graceless bodice-ripping tension. I'm expecting to see Cliff Richard lurking in the crowd, primed to abduct the Nordic Adonis in order to bathe in his blood and gain ETERNAL LIFE.

Then I'm going speed-networking, probably with business cards printed at that shopping centre. I'm an urchin at their lustrous marble table.

Leyton Schmeyton

2005-11-20T23:56:00.001Z

No, I totally meant for it to come out like that. Sh.

And the greatest of these is pie

2005-11-20T23:56:00.000Z

The alleyway light has gone. I haven't been out there at night for some weeks because the back door is buggered, but it's quite a sight from the window. Or a lack of sight. Rather calming, the pure black offset by angular reflections from inside and a grey outline of the college wall, other outlines depending on how much of a moon there is - although I'm sure it has the opposite effect if you're actually out there.

The flat I had was withdrawn due to issues with dog. Curses. But I found a better one, little further along from the tube but very close to a park, and displaying many of the endearing qualities of this house. This perturbs me slightly, as it's a bit like recognising the characteristics of old boyfriend in new one, but what the hell, I demand grace and charm and fireplaces. Fireplaces, dammit! These were installed by the gracious and charming landlady, who lived there herself for 15 years. I felt quite emotional. I do wish living spaces didn't have such an effect on me. I blame 67 Clifton Common with the stairs you had to abseil down.

The estate agent was a lanky blonde South African who was also charming, although charm seemed to be something he had rather than something he did. Hard to tell with estate agents. The one I had before was French and used to complain about how rude Parisians were. This one was at least an improvement on the artful git who assured me the first flat was in the bag. I asked him to ask the landlord of the other place I'd seen (pokey, dingy, other words which maybe should have an 'e' or maybe not) if he'd take the dog. When I went back later to tell him that I'd found somewhere else, he looked at me in some degree of shock and dismay and said he'd just spent ages persuading the landlord to let me and my beast live in his hovel. I wasn't there for more than a couple of minutes, collecting my forms, but he sulked for an eternity. Boo fucking hoo, you berk.

(I did express my gratitude, by the way, I didn't pull a face or anything. I just thought he was outrageous in his unprofessional guilt-tripping.)

Having met the landlady of the other place and bade tree-boy goodbye I wafted down Walthamstow high street all pleased. It was Saturday and something was going on in the open space near the top of its long pedestrianised beginner-slope. They were turning on the Christmas lights. There was hip hop dancing, and I cannot remember whether or not that's supposed to have a hyphen - I think not, actually. Then there was a town cryer who looked especially ridiculous and particularly Caucasian in the big unruly gaggle of light-plunger-pusher-downers on the stage. I was even more pleased. Flow of mild endorphins through system. It's the sort of feeling that you have to acknowledge because you know it to be unusual and precious, like an English summer day that succeeds in being summery throughout.

Pretty lights, too, obviously.

This is apparently one of the oldest pie and mash shops in London. I'm afraid I was overcome with sepia. Humble apologies.

Plaintive mechanical squeaking

2005-11-10T10:33:00.000Z

I've been in London for what seems like about a month. This is a good thing, by the way, exhausting as it is. Set off from ye north at 4.20 on Friday, and embarked on an epic journey full of disappointment, anguish and the shocking waste of a perfectly good sausage roll (I sacrificed it to my wrath on a cold hard Manchester platform). I arrived at Euston just before midnight. Not bad going. Still, limp and drained as I was from hours of bother and boredom, I still felt that wintery zing shoot through my system when I trudged out of the station. It's no wonder I got tired after four years here. It's just like crack, only not quite as healthy.

I managed to leave my gloves, which had always had a doomed 'our alliance shall be fleeting' air about them, in the cab. They join my star-shaped silver watch on the honours list of fondly-remembered lost objects which were sacrificed to a noble cause. (The watch fell out of my pocket when I was rolling in the grass at Homelands, just outside the tent where The Orb were playing at 4am. I wasn't wearing it as I was allergic to it. Tsk. The Orb were good though. Or were they? Didn't matter.) The gloves were black leather and suede, a tiny bit too big, too thin and delicate to do any real hand-warming. They were obviously some deceased individual's 'for best' and hadn't been worn since their purchase maybe 40 years prior to my snaffling them from a charity shop in Kentish Town. A stamp on the inside of one proclaimed they had been finely crafted by Marshal & Snelgrove. I'll use those in writing one day when I need some 'fine gentlemen'.

Yesterday, having bought some replacement gloves, I managed to somehow bugger the zip on my bag and had to get a replacement for that, as I didn't want to walk around the centre of London with an open bag. It's been a bad week for accessories.

More significantly, I may have an East End flat, which I will be installed in within a month if everything comes up rosy. Currently waiting to find out if my forms and references indicate I'm some sort of criminal who doesn't deserve to work like a dog to pay rent in anywhere nice. In this instance I may have to sacrifice a Greggsful of savoury pastries to the pointlessly vengeful gods of unfocused rage.

"These are the grapes, and this is the wrath."

"Ooh, that's good wrath."

Putting mouth where face is

2005-10-29T17:51:00.000Z

It's relaxing to have some patina of anonymity. I just disabled my old blog as it's being linked to by a genuine madman, and I'd rather not have that mild worry of his grasping digits fumbling through it looking for ammo. He's got some sort of vendetta with someone I know, and has taken the time and psychosis to set up a blog pretending to be him. I remain convinced there are only 17 intelligent-sensitive-witty-charismatic-beautiful individuals now living, but I'm now wondering what the stats are for actual grown-ups.

Come to think of it, I should disable a link or two here also for now. I'm not about to sucked into anyone else's personal hell, thank you.

At present no one knows I'm here, to my knowledge. In the giddiness of liberation I could proceed to pour out my gnarly heart and eager spleen about everyone I know. I could empty the box of my burdensome brain in a huge puff of thinky-dust. But it's not actually that tempting, I find. No. It's not. Some of it I've done, and discovered there's a limit where I thought you could just dodder on forever; some of it I've just got no desire to do. Some things there are no escaping - others are surprisingly easy to outwit.

"There's a hooker on the bed!"

"Hello!"

"Don't move. Their vision is based on movement."

"...Hey, where'd you go?"

Work is agreeable. Looking at a dissertation about drug use, which is actually well-written and frustratingly readable for 155,000 words of something which needs to be shipshape by tomorrow afternoon. At least in this case I know I'm making genuine, if tiny, improvements, like brushing the lint from a tailored coat; as opposed to putting a sprig of parsley on a ruined dinner which would have been inedible even if cooked properly, which is what I'm used to doing.
Then something exciting and internal for one of the high street banks - my own, in fact. I hope they'll remember me, although not too clearly, obviously. Most of a book to get through next week. Another fine mess. Not only is it in one long long long sentence mostly unfettered by punctuation, with capital letters Sprinkled at random, it's incoherent babble. Incoherent fundamentalist Christian babble, thus barely cogent to begin with.

And then it's socialising interspersed with flat-hunting, or vice versa. Here, it's been raining, and fireworks have been going off in the mid-afternoon, and drunken students have been stumbling into next door's garden talking loudly in the early hours. This place is not right in the head.

Multi-word bile-up: many dead

2005-10-14T23:12:00.000Z

There was much to make the brain cry bitter tears about this interminable, incomprehensible PhD I had to tackle today, but it was perhaps this which finally did it:

The urgent need to transfer information from one computer to another has arise heavily after information is generated in large volumes and started to bile up all over the place in mangers' desks.

There was more - oh, there was so much more - but for now I'm just glad it's all behind me.

The aim, by the way, is to get back to London by the end of the year, which is lumbering ever closer like a big old zombie with a tambourine. Once ensconced, we'll figure out the rest. It will involve writing. It will involve debt. It will involve driving even if it kills me and/or innocent bystanders. And it will involve the healthy, considered and ruthless sitting-on of persistent irks of the mind like a big old zombie trying to close an obstinate suitcase. And succeeding. With a tambourine.