There's many a snoop twixt cock and hoop

It's...

I've decided pub quizzes are the new knitting - a dreary fusty old pastime inexplicably revived by sexy young things in all the best places. It's gonna catch on. Really. I've done one two weeks on the trot now and it's utterly satisfying. Not to win overall - we've come 6th or joint 8th or something feeble - but to feel the giddy zing of the individual correct answers. The renewed fondness you feel for your plucky little brain when it squeezes out answers you forgot it had or never knew it knew. Who knew I knew the hydra had nine necks? Not I.

What's all this then?


The Good

Foxen attempting an avant-garde outdoor production of 'Turandot' at night. They're really going for it. Just as the beast sometimes resembles a horse, or a panther, or a bear, the foxen can be reminiscent of crows, or cats, or sexually-frustrated apes. Really you should hear 'em.

Really wonderful albums by Roisin Murphy, Winehouse (it doesn't get old), Adele and yes yes Britney played a blinder the poor LA urchin. (The pathos of her life makes me want to find and punch quite a lot of people, but selfishly I am just glad she managed to lift her head out of the gutter long enough to record 'Get Naked (I Got A Plan)' - but actually really I hope she manages to stick some semblance of a life together. Ain't right.)

Insanely beautiful spring weather - OK, it's cold, but the sun the sun of it is just gobsmacking.

Charlie, Eli and Shreve.

The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. Went twice. Blundering around a vast building in a mask, happening upon wrong things in semi-darkness, and marvelling at the fact that such a health'n'safety black hole is possible in This Day + Age. I went through a wardrobe and came out in a fireplace, and my inner five-year-old exploded.


The Bad

Office move imminent. Noooo, they be stealin ma view of Senate House! Remember, all change is bad. (We don't know where we're going yet. We have to be out by the end of the month. Haw!)

No but really, why don't they just have us all donate DNA like we donate blood and have done with it? At least we'd get a cup of tea out of it.

There is nothing on television. NOTHING. EVER.

Unfit and listless and helpless in the face of triple chocolate shortbread, chunky and almost burned and fulfilling as something you made in Home Ec class and rescued just in time.

Camden town went on fire. It is going to cost a lot to fix. Much loss of livelihood. Rotten.


The Fugly

(I could make a better delineation here but, pffft.)

A man grabbed my arse in the street a couple of weeks ago. When I politely suggested that this was not decorous behaviour for a 21st-century male, he did it again. When I walked past a couple of incredibly conveniently-placed police officers a minute later, I hesitated, then carried on. Dammit.

I may give up on the idea of trying to buy a flat. Live fast, rent house, leave a beautiful... windowbox. Peh.

There are other things I'm teetering on giving up on, but I'm probably just being a knob. Knob that I am.

Yes, and how do we mark the occasion of someone we sort of probably quite love (a bit) slipping away? We don't. Nor do we have a gothic fit about it although that seems kind of appropriate (hell, and fun). We just go about our business feeling surreal and shruggy and occasionally a little bit teetery.

(I had to perform an unfriending on the Social Utility. It was like having a small online creature put down. Oh, which reminds me... this is sort of beautiful. And I have no idea why.)


I'm going to attempt to follow the example of the remarkably loquacious Louche and blog thrice daily. Ahem. I am telling you now it won't work.

Disloyalty cards

I must repair the posterlet that I swallowed my pride to stick under the passed-around pen of the band. (The pride went down fine actually, more like a morsel of seafood than a giant cod liver oil pill.) I kept that bit of semi-shiny promo-paper immaculate for six years, through countless house-moves, 300 miles north and back, and then when I get it signed and bung it back up on my wall for the first time in years, the oaf who comes to fix my PC leans against the wall and makes a little rip in it. And doesn't even have the decency to be a bit horrified. (He didn't fix my PC properly either, the steaming berk and clot.) It infuriates me to look at it. A pox on him and his big ape hands. Well, OK, just a minor pox as it is just a bit of paper of some sentimental and now doubtless some eBay value BUT STILL.

So the other day I was on my way to some fuckforsaken region of western London where I never usually go ever, where the tube comes out and gasps for air above ground, and was listening to a song that went "Through southern snow to Heathrow", and just as that line came on the Heathrow express went past saying heathrow heathrow heathrow. I like this sort of coincidence. It's suggestive to me of a tiny signpost telling you that you're still going the right way. Of course this is a lot of old arse but it's a nice thought.

Is it time for mergers and acquisitions yet? And am I going to format it correctly this time?

Gots

- Weekend's worth of work (well, more of it) delivered by courier with terrible fear of dogs. I opened the door and there was no one there. The beast had spoken, the man had run away. Dear dear.
- Some bits and pieces from helpful individuals that may save me from hiding under the bed from a deadline, and if you saw my bed you would know how bad that is.
- Cough. The kind that doesn't affect you all that much but kind of makes your throat taste of something that does not belong.
- Lockets (2 packets)
- Invitation to gig (at venue I will always remember fondly for one particular sweaty night when we poured water over each other's heads like the kind of idiots you try to ignore at gigs).
- Some lurid green earbuds, I suppose, by default since they've been left there. They are too big to fit in my ears and look like they are made of the stuff they make jelly shoes out of.


Losts

- Potentially, in the next week the Social Utility. Ah, said the fox, I shall cry. But really, I will be so bereaved and so bereft. Like a Bowery bum, when he finally understands the bottle's empty and there's nuthin left. Yes.
- Website job. Only I didn't lose it, it lost me. More fool it. I'm there till the end of next month, at least, and I shall be gathering free shit like a nut in May, so I shall.
- Shedfox. He's gone. He is an ex-fox. Although I hope he's just found a better shed to sleep on.

Recovereds

- Degree of laughable chutzpah, apparently. Have forward-put myself initially for two projects - one already started by someone who needs another person, one only existing in my tiny mind - neither of which I'm quite capable of pulling off but y'know, it's nice to.... oh, I don't know.
- Lipbalm, thought lost and replaced, proving both how disorganised I am and how frivolous with money. Terrible. Terrible.

I wasn't kidding, you know.

Emails are incredibly easy. I fire them off with great joy and glee and aplomb and things of that sort. It's having something that you have to do that is the bugger. Proper bloggers blog like I email. I blog like... like someone who doesn't do it very much. I am creaky with it. It does not sit well.

But y'know, I'll get over it.

Frenzy of must-get-work today, partly precipitated by the mother and father and assorted stunted siblings of all gas bills. How absurd when it is so warm out. But then I did only turn my heating off completely about a week ago. Ground floor, see. Gloomy. Unwarm. Although for a ground floor flat it's not gruesomely dingy. Well, The Corridor is. But that is the wont and the nature of The Corridor.

So I thought I'd better attempt to find some more crumbs of gainful employment, and began by bothering someone on the online social utility du jour. Strictly speaking he put himself in the line of bother by adding me in the first place. He doesn't know me, but he knows of me. I forget that's possible. I'm used to seeing my name on things here and there but not in any distinguished way, especially not among people who do the same thing I do. But then I was doing it before this bloke was, so I might have been a formative influence. Blimey.

Yes, so this means I may soon be attempting to think like a 17-year-old, which I don't think I was especially good at when I was 17, so that should be interesting.

I've also been whoring my CV about the place to little avail. I'm not very good at whoring DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD.

It occurs to me that I could tot up my gains and losses for the day or the week or something in a way that is in no sense Jonesian or even Fieldingian. (That reminds me, I hope they remembered to take my accidental 'brobdingnagian' out of the book. I was demented with the need to fill up another page.) Why? I don't know, isn't that the kind of thing you put on a blog? And isn't 'why' the last question when it comes to blogging? Blogs crumble to dust when they come into contact with it. So.

Gains (the week thus far)

- Lovely flying swallow necklace for pence that is my new favourite thing
- New friend. And lunch
- A new favourite insult i.e. 'feetfucker' thanks to this
- Pending work commission
- Clean, fluffy dog

Losses

- Sense of calm due to upstairs fridge's rumblings of discontent
- Time
- More time
- But this we are used to
- Percentage of hope due to the yawning chasm where my finances should be

Wow, those are some big existential losses, dude. I may have to wash the dog again. And film it and put it on the internet, for that is where everything happens.

Subject matters

What pretty day. I really ought to go out in it, but it's Saturday which is my day for total indolence. I'll have to give it up at some point. I mean, I really enjoy Doing Stuff, it's just that there is something magnificent about the Doing of No Stuff.

TWU has retreated and retracted and all that. Thank frick. She did this by proxy of the managing agent, having by the sound of it had a bit of a talking to by my actual proper bona fido neighbour. Typically, I felt a bit rotten and was going to go round and make nice, but while I believe in the sorting-out-of-things and the making of the nice very deeply, I've also learned that with some people it isn't worth it. Not that I'm going to be hostile. Just as neutral as an inoffensive colour on a rental flat wall.

I was going to paint these walls, in fact (my literal actual walls - keep up), if only because it's great to be allowed to do it by a landlady. When I also asked if I could knock a few nails in the walls to hang pretty things thereon, she agreed without a moment's calculating hesitation. Yep. Go nuts. Fill your boots. And your rented walls. With pretty. This is wondrous in a world that frowns on tenants' use of Blu-Tac and knocks the little smudges off their deposit to the tune of hundreds. Even though they should damn well give a place a lick of paint before new tenants move in anyway.

So, yes.

Oliver James has a new book out called 'Affluenza', about how capitalism makes us miserable. I've had a sneaking suspicion for yeeeeeeears. Sometimes I want things that I don't even want. It's nasty. Someone now needs to do a book about how the media make you miserable. You can't escape it - even mostly avoiding the papers, as I'm having another phase of doing (and it really is very relaxing), makes you feel terribly Guilty. Surely the price you pay for your complacent fatness and frivolity and relative comfort is being made and kept aware of the misery of others. But then a lot of the time you can do nothing about it. So what kind of an obligation is it? Are we just supposed to bear witness to it? I think to an extent we should. And yet and yet.

Still, the papers unsettle me in a hundred different ways aside from their actual content. I hate reading good writers because it makes me feel like a worm. I hate reading bad writers because I want to know why they are getting work at all, and then start to fret about the dumbening of everything and all. I hate the sensationalism and the pandering and the wankiness and posturing, and how there isn't a single paper I really feel I can align myself with at the moment (I mean, you expect it with political parties, but come on, how many papers are there?) I can't bear my own tiny attention span, and skipping down pages and skating across paragraphs makes me feel queasy. The stuff I can focus on often makes me flappingly incensed, and then I have to find someone to rant at, and they have to put up an umbrella, and no one benefits.

I suppose it all comes back to capitalism and the whole too-much-choice-is-no-choice-at-all thing. This probably goes for people as well. Just too many. No one has enough time to adequately maintain all the friendships and acquaintances they'd like to. I'm constanly guilt-ridden or perhaps guilt-stricken or guilt-nibbled by my neglectfulness. If I get in touch with people I haven't heard from in ages, and send them a lot of breezy wiffle, I make them feel guilty. It is horrendous!

Sigh. The only solution is the boringly predictable one of mild hedonism and indulging the lower instincts. Which I will be doing in the usual polite and legal Saturday-approved fash as soon as I've done the washing up and something about my hair.

The Book is in mock-up form. I am sort of thrilled and sort of not, as usual. There are going to be several things I am going to have to Let Go, I can tell. Writers are always going to be tiny scrabbling worker ants, and ultimately we just have to feel grateful that we haven't been fried to an ant-crisp by the cruel magnifying glass of the universe.

Explain to me how this works

(Gratuitous dog shot, but he is miming my current feelings, so it's allowed.)

Anna Nicole Smith, the Wal-Mart Marilyn, is dead. Ian Richardson the actor is also dead. Mark E Smith has made another album with The Fall. Oh well.

Draining afternoon, being reminded of a) the proliferation of casual skulduggery in the media b) the honesty and goodness of some of the people in it who don't conform to said gruesomeness and c) what a thorough and sneakily perennial pain in the psychic arse some issues are. I mean, come on, enough. I have been good. I'd like my Joy now please.

The snow's given way to boring old cold, but I'm still waiting to get sick of 'Lovelight' which may actually be the greatest pop song of all time.

Glee

(Taken through a hole in the bubblewrap what is stretched across one of my picturesque yet completely rubbish 1930s sash windows which would make Al Gore cry. The bubblewrap doesn't do a lot to stop the cold breeze from wafting onto my dainty hands as I type, but what do you expect me to do? A? What?

It kind of looks like a bullet hole though doesn't it. Ooh.)

It have snowed! Country is in chaos, naturally, and news is all of a fuffle about it, but I am quite happy as I don't have to go out. The dog went out in the morning and galumphed hither and thither flinging snow everywhere with his nose, which is in fact the most amusing sight in the world. I threw snowballs for him and when they vanished into the rest of the snow, as snowballs tend to, the look of utter bewilderment on his solemn face was priceless. He was Adrift in a Senseless Universe. But then dogs are used to that, living as they do with us and trying so hard to grasp what the fuck we are on about all the time. No wonder they sleep so much.

Other than that I am still footling about post-book, toying with ideas, and being a greedy oaf with people's valuable time and lips. Also doing some drinking, which is in fact a wonderful traditional pastime and I think it should be revived.





The sleek and efficient hunter in his wintery domain, having just performed the time-honoured act of making yellow snow. Although it's somewhat wasted on him.

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.

Ding dong mmkay

Because it is my first time being tagged, and because it's Rachel, I'll do it now before I realise it's a rotten old racket that should be slain (by Chicken Yoghurt).

Rabbit Strike's Best Seven Stuff Of 2006 Things

1) Having a proper actual foreeen holiday for the first time in years and years.

2) That counts twice cos it was also a dead fantastic holiday.

3) Getting a nice magaziney gig and a radio gig to make up for two lost.

4) Getting finagled into doing some of a book. (It will be a good thing once I finish fretting about it.)

5) Staying actual proper friends with an ex.

6) Smashing birthday with lots of drinking and silliness.

7) Um... people, who are great. And dog.

That was actually a bit of a struggle, shamefully. I want to make a list of 14 horrible or crapulent or generally a bit lame things about this year now (why isn't Torchwood better? Why? It deserves a list of its own - and I'm afraid I shall watch the much-puffed finale but that's only because I am a glutton for punishment, and for John Barrowman) but! that's not the spirit. I am looking forward to the new year. Without too much of that glutinous optimism that never bears fruit, or if it does it's kind of bashed leaky fruit that you wouldn't really want unless you were making jam.

Yes! I should say something about the lovely warm response to my witterings here which were catapulted into some sort of blogospheric attention when I used them for good and not for annoying self-centredness, but that might be annoyingly self-centred. Oh well. Call that number 8) just to bugger things up.

Now I suppose I'm obliged to inflict this on seven others, but I'll buck the trend by only bothering Paul, Abby, Salvadore and JonnyB.

Perhaps it's easier to make a list of Seven Things That Were Good By Default.

1) Not having an actual flea infestation after all. Just a few fleas. Which have fled.

2) Not despising short hair too much and managing to disguise badness of pre-short hair with sexy hat.

3) Boiler not breaking touch wood touch wood and then thermostat also.

4) Not getting arrested in Parliament Square or anywhere else for that matter.

5) Only having to file one small claim.

6) Being ill or germy only very infrequently and not for long.

7) Only getting one Christmas present that I already had and being able to go "Gah! I already have this" and for present-giver to go "Gah! I knew that would happen" and all to roll eyes and giggle and so none of that awkwardness when you get something you've already got.

That's better.

It's lovely to look at your blog after Christmas and find what people have been typing into search engines to happen upon you. I've had 'over 50 nude women', 'pot sexy russian woman', and my personal favourite to date, 'picture of a one spot fox faced rabbit fish'.

If I'd thought about it I could have written up The Poo Bag Saga, which might have been the new Bathmatwatch, but that is for another day when I haven't got mad post-Christmas crazywork to do. Alas.

Kissy.

Table number 666

My attention span shrinks ever further like a wet slug under a salt shaker. Today I've failed to get to the end of two especially interesting and well-written New Yorker articles. There's no hope for me. Especially after I nearly threw something at the telly when an Orange advert presented itself with breathtakingly bad grammar. That sentence, and this one, is probably also equally executed as poorly but, fuck it.

Oh dear, and now I've just failed to read an article about gourmet dog food. But then I have been sitting here twotting about for some hours, and besides there are few things pointlesser than gourmet dog food. BK greets every dry dish of complete food - which I admit I do try and vary the flavour of from giant bag to giant bag - with such unadulterated joy that I can't imagine him being happier with dripping steak. When he's chewing his first mouthful, he turns his head to look at me, and wags his tail as he chomps, then gets back to it. Then when he's finished he comes to find me and thank me with more waggings and smiling. Aw.

Oh dear, and now I've become the thing I hate the most, one of those people who drivel on about their pets. Although actually a) BK is not a pet, he is a tame dependent wolf beast and friendly oaf and b) there are lots of things I hate so much more and so much more vehemently, including people who put gold jewellery on babies, and the Chinese government. (More coming soon.)

Presently I'm harbouring germs. I tend to sort of foster passing germs for a few days, feel pathetically incapable, and then turf them out again. These ones are at least vaguely trippy, which is courteous of them. I must have a decent immune system, which goes nicely with my decent metabolism and muscle tone, all of which I've sorely tested with years of indolence and eclairs and going out without a coat on. I get all cross when germs stop me from doing things, despite the fact that if I had no germs at all I'd blatantly go straight to the sofa for seven straight hours of blissful sloth. Ho hum.

There is never anything worth watching on TV unless it's on More4 which Sky won't give me. Does this mean I'm getting old?

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.

Hot turkey

It's finally got warm and, as ever, I'm not sure how to deal with it. Warm weather means worrying about flab and pallor, which in turn makes me disgusted with myself for succumbing to such boringly oppressive ideals. It also means being peppered with insect bites. I usually get one healthy bout of them around this time of year, a liberal sprinkling whose marks then linger for the whole summer. Curses. I just spent half an hour trying to clap one small black flying thing to death, and when I succeeded I didn't even realise it. Finally saw one wing and ink spot on finger indicating battle had been won. I've recently developed the ability to catch flies with one hand and then release them, but this one wasn't going to get the opportunity to feast on my soft white flesh.

There's another one. You'll get yours, chum.

The warm weather also brings a certain reflectiveness. This year I've found myself having to face up to some hard facts, having been sitting resolutely on them as if on a treacherous sofa concealing a gang of renegade springs. Some of them are so dreadful that I cannot yet look them in the eye. Some are just about tame enough for me to approach and, hopefully, overcome. If others can tackle such Herculean tasks, then so can I.

The truth is that I have a problem. An issue, if you will, with excess. Booze, drugs, sex. The usual suspects. For some time now I've been denying that I'm on a slippery, slidey slope. It's a swine and a bastard, but this month is where I finally stand up to it, see it for what it is and find it in myself to change, if only for four weeks. Because if I'm honest, brutally honest with my weak self, I'm not getting nearly enough of any of them.

I seldom don't opt not to drink alone. I just can't accept that fourth beer; the fifth and sixth and seventh all fly by into someone else's mouth. Wine goes down like it's general anaesthetic laced with Toilet Duck. Rare is the night when I crack open a bottle and suddenly I'm waking up at lunchtime with a French pig shitting in my head. I pop pills and snort lines and smoke like there's a tomorrow and I have to get up especially early for it. I get wild and crazy almost every two years. It affects my mood; I'm often agreeable, chatty, sensible, starting conversations in the street. It's reached a point where my life is becoming intolerable - the tedium is out of control, and it's past time I dealt with it.

Thus I'm embarking on a filth-encrusted fucking vomit-flecked steaming flailing bugger of a bender for the entire month. I will storm every pub I pass until its derelict cellar reverberates with pleas for mercy. I will light each virgin Marlboro with the fizzling embers of its predecessor. I will eat cannabis sandwiches and take three spoons of coke in my mushroom tea. I will cultivate some sort of sordid mutually-beneficial arrangement with Camden Town's dealers. It's going to be a motherfucker, but with God's help I'll conquer this terrible affliction.

I began in earnest yesterday by gradually consuming all the alcohol, bleach and psychoactive material in the house. This afternoon I drank my weight in Malibu. I like Malibu. It tastes like Keith Richards falling out of a tree.

Now I can't catch that fly. Ah! I'll breathe on it.

That's quite enough of that

In the words of Richard E. Grant, "Balls." But, like, in a good way.

Flatmate is soon come, and with him half the rent, thank Jebus. More significantly, though, with him comes good company and regular washing-up, no but really, he is very good people as we re-established during his recent visit. We used to sit in a boring job wondering why we'd been blessed with all this brain we weren't using, emailing each other silly crap to stay afloat. One day we emailed entirely in haiku. Heh. He is even more apologetic for his very existence than I am, so I've decided we should have a Sorry Box. At 50p per expression of contrition, I reckon we'll raise enough every week to get shitfaced every Friday.

Not that it takes me much, admittedly.

Other recent badness-cancelling things of late have included my birthday, which involved lots of laughter and love and a gratifying number of bottles for the recycling man. And a cake, even. Blueberry chocolatey cake and candles. I blew them all out in one go. I am big.

Also, this town is great. I know three of my neighbours which is practically worth a documentary. The town itself has got amazing heritage, and here and there some staggering examples of fearsome Art Deco architecture. There's a certain brash confidence and angular arrogance and fearlessness and gorgeousness about things from the 1920s that I love. No sense of how much worse things were going to be - they thought the very absolute worst was behind them. The town hall is this vast breathtaking stern white Russian thing, and the assembly hall next to it is about as amazing with its roof-height glass doors and the shouty motto

FELLOWSHIP IS LIFE - LACK OF FELLOWSHIP IS DEATH

That's me told.

There is also one duck, called Gerald, that sits by the fountain and looks imperious. Good old Gerald.

The downside of all this gloriousness is that the cinema - boarded up for the last two years or so, which is bad enough because me likee films on doorstep - turns out to be a Grade II listed example of Art Deco sexiness also. If it had just been the shitty 60s joint I thought it was it wouldn't be such a travesty that it's lying neglected. It's just covered in nasty white tiles with one of those concretey outcrops over the door and a grotty white vertical cinema sign, and smells of what the Scottish call 'pish'. But the other night I went over the road to look up at the building properly, and it has these long slender elegant windows and is sad and beautiful. Bugger.

Window still isn't fixed. But dog is healthy, blue flowers are sprouting in big clusters in the garden, and I'm grateful for wot I got.

Oh, and that there is a red-arsed bumblebee. It got into my bedroom and the dog nearly ate it. I got it in a glass. It was waving its front legs in the way bees do when they're asking the bee god to come and lift them up. I gave it a blob of Lyle's Golden Syrup. It continued the bee dance of death for a while until it discovered the sticky medicine, then fell to sucking at it with immense and solemn concentration. When it had finished after half an hour or so in a syrup trance, I put it on a flowery plant in the garden. It fell off. I scooped it up again. It sat for a second and then took off, flying off at tree-height.

Ah small things, and small things with furry legs that need sugar.

Mare of London

Out last night. Out tonight. Still chased by The Fug. More bank fuck-ups, more fear. These are not especially good times, as times go. But there is always the 'but' and I'll take it, thank you.

I must ring my mum. And the bank. Bastard swine from bloody hell. Thereafter I might attempt to get my sense of humour back. Perhaps some light brow-clutching will do it.

In fact the Pieces only amounted to 467,519

If I were any sort of person I'd be posting about the James Frey/Oprah thing - man makes lots of money with drugs and crime memoir, endorsed by Oprah who defends him against accusations of fraud, turns out to be a fraud, has botty spanked by Oprah on TV, may change the way publishers check non-fiction books. But I'm not. Not right now.

But I will say that my man with a book resurfaced. I did think he was dead.

So I did that detox for work and it fucked me. Then I had delicious duck and gorgeous creme brulee (you can fill the accents in yourself, you've got italics, what more do you want?) by way of a work thing on Monday, and one or other of those has fucked me. Is this God's way of telling me to be more idle, or just to eat greasy kebabs and belch and never attempt to do healthy things or eat nice food?

Yes, I'm poisoned, woe, woe. For the last two days I've either been asleep or chained to the loo, one way or another. Total food intake as of five minutes ago is one red apple, four slices of bread and Marmite and about half a box of Ritz crackers which I fell upon Tuesday evening and rent asunder. My stomach has taken complete leave of its senses and is going to have to be persuaded that all food is not evil. I am all feeble and rubbish, and bad-tempered, and afraid, and bilious and sad. What's that Japanese proverb that goes something like

Dance and sing - an inch from us is black night

OK so this ain't black night, it's just a bastard bout of food poisoning, but it's amazing how things can look shiny-dupa one week and then look thoroughly grim the next, with not a great deal of actual change. Bleh.

I might start on one of my new books, about a crack addict. That'll rally me. Even if some of it is fibs. Dirty, filthy, crack-addled fibs.

Have some pictures entirely unrelated to the above in a pleasantly whimsical sort of fashion.

(At present I'd rather be where that one was taken.)

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.

Putting mouth where face is

It's relaxing to have some patina of anonymity. I just disabled my old blog as it's being linked to by a genuine madman, and I'd rather not have that mild worry of his grasping digits fumbling through it looking for ammo. He's got some sort of vendetta with someone I know, and has taken the time and psychosis to set up a blog pretending to be him. I remain convinced there are only 17 intelligent-sensitive-witty-charismatic-beautiful individuals now living, but I'm now wondering what the stats are for actual grown-ups.

Come to think of it, I should disable a link or two here also for now. I'm not about to sucked into anyone else's personal hell, thank you.

At present no one knows I'm here, to my knowledge. In the giddiness of liberation I could proceed to pour out my gnarly heart and eager spleen about everyone I know. I could empty the box of my burdensome brain in a huge puff of thinky-dust. But it's not actually that tempting, I find. No. It's not. Some of it I've done, and discovered there's a limit where I thought you could just dodder on forever; some of it I've just got no desire to do. Some things there are no escaping - others are surprisingly easy to outwit.

"There's a hooker on the bed!"

"Hello!"

"Don't move. Their vision is based on movement."

"...Hey, where'd you go?"

Work is agreeable. Looking at a dissertation about drug use, which is actually well-written and frustratingly readable for 155,000 words of something which needs to be shipshape by tomorrow afternoon. At least in this case I know I'm making genuine, if tiny, improvements, like brushing the lint from a tailored coat; as opposed to putting a sprig of parsley on a ruined dinner which would have been inedible even if cooked properly, which is what I'm used to doing.
Then something exciting and internal for one of the high street banks - my own, in fact. I hope they'll remember me, although not too clearly, obviously. Most of a book to get through next week. Another fine mess. Not only is it in one long long long sentence mostly unfettered by punctuation, with capital letters Sprinkled at random, it's incoherent babble. Incoherent fundamentalist Christian babble, thus barely cogent to begin with.

And then it's socialising interspersed with flat-hunting, or vice versa. Here, it's been raining, and fireworks have been going off in the mid-afternoon, and drunken students have been stumbling into next door's garden talking loudly in the early hours. This place is not right in the head.

Multi-word bile-up: many dead

There was much to make the brain cry bitter tears about this interminable, incomprehensible PhD I had to tackle today, but it was perhaps this which finally did it:

The urgent need to transfer information from one computer to another has arise heavily after information is generated in large volumes and started to bile up all over the place in mangers' desks.

There was more - oh, there was so much more - but for now I'm just glad it's all behind me.

The aim, by the way, is to get back to London by the end of the year, which is lumbering ever closer like a big old zombie with a tambourine. Once ensconced, we'll figure out the rest. It will involve writing. It will involve debt. It will involve driving even if it kills me and/or innocent bystanders. And it will involve the healthy, considered and ruthless sitting-on of persistent irks of the mind like a big old zombie trying to close an obstinate suitcase. And succeeding. With a tambourine.