Good evening, I am from Essex.

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.

The fiercest number

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.

Find and kill and find and SMASH

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.