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.

Been caught napping

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

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.)

Black holes, not revelations

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.

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.