July is the cruellest month

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.

Fave new world

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.

Fists with your toes

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.

The things we did and didn't blog

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.

Plaintive mechanical squeaking

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."