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.

Suicide by drum solo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Duracell Minus

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Ninja Grapes

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.

Everybody in the house of love

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.