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.

Loud + clear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.