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.

Head meet pish

So the daily showing here didn't come off. What of it? It just means I'll have to catch myself unawares and do it without thinking. I'm convinced this is the secret to me ever getting anything done, in fact. Ambush.

Acquisitions

Polish green amber (who knew about this?) pendant, charming surprise
New will-write-words-for-pence website
A couple of morsels of payment
New specs prescription (only moderately blinder, apparently) and blagged contact lenses


Losses

The usual.


The only thing more depressing than hula-hooping short-skirted spontaneous-picnic-having hot weather in summer is relentless grouchy northern-grade grimness. It is actually cold. And it is actually wet, and grey and horrible, horrible. And I am actually staying out of it, thank you. I only had the barest twinge of a pang at missing Glastonbury, and similar for missing this thing at Knebworth tonight (Underworld are playing, and there I was thinking they'd died or something). I've cossetted myself to the point that I need a really good reason to rouse myself from my sultry nest.

Mind you I was hauled out last night by the Bradford bird (no one from school or anything - I'm continuing to successfully evade and avoid my gruesome Yorkshire-based past, thank you. Oh, except that I did have to do a little amateur psychologising to help the one schoolfriend whose company I still enjoy, because her mate had suddenly gone all funny about being accused of being gay and said he never wanted to speak to her again, and I said it was probably him not being able to deal with them growing apart after all this time and needing to find something to get mad about as a way out, like, and I really thought about it and spent time trying to give good advice as requested and everything but she hasn't replied, so maybe she's decided she never wants to speak to me again in a sort of pass-it-along scenario. Ho hum. Where does the full stop go? It still goes after. Correct punctuation in and around parentheses is rapidly going the way of the apostrophe. Bloody idiots everybloodywhere).

(Best to start a new paragraph I think.)

An insane but sort of charismatic pub in Dalston (adjacent to or part of Hackney, therefore sort of 'gritty' and sort of tiresomely full of trendy fucks), all knackered wood and fag-stained walls and high wartime ceilings and the odd picturesque lovable old alkie amongst the kind of young snoots who don't take their hats off indoors. Although in fact it all added up to quite a pleasant riot. Got chatted up by a woman who'd just come back from Mexico, only it wasn't my perfume, it was someone else's. By about 11pm it was like the bottom of a ship, all seething and rowdy and pissed, with drinking and ironic conversation instead of rowing.

Lots of stimulating company crammed round on those poky stools you get, going on about crap in lofty fashion, and apparently knocking back Coronas too quickly. I've never quite got my head around my tolerance to alcohol - with a brief university blip (I used to drink pints - pints!) it's always seemed to be embarrassingly low. But it seems to vary. A million factors must be involved. The experiment could go on forever.

The things I need to be grateful for are

a) If I'm going to sick with the booze, it invariably holds off until I get home. My body must be finely attuned to my sense that nothing, not even being [insert nasty violent action] in the [insert body part] with a [etc], is worse than public humiliation, and adjusts itself accordingly. It's extraordinary, really. No forcing all the other inhabitants of top deck of nightbus to open all the windows for this correspondent. And none of that ending up on the news as part of a montage of head-shaking examples of what happens when girls binge-drink. But then I don't quite qualify as a 'girl' any more, and also the last time I wore a tiny skirt of the kind that looks so great when you're lying half in the road with your arse aloft was in 1997. And that was only for ten minutes before I decided to put something more androgynous on instead.

b) If sickness of the booze is my evening's destiny, my body (which must be keenly aware of the nastiness and potential deadliness of having beer-problems in sleep or at least in bed) has this beautifully-timed routine it goes into so as to avoid any Hendrixian issues.

Approx. ten minutes in advance of ill: Body gently rouses hostess from bricklike slumber, and tactfully introduces idea that getting up will be a good idea just now, because, well, ahem, madam. Allows time for idea in all its unpleasantness to sink in.

Approx. five mins to ill: Puts arms and legs to work at gentle pace, heaving corpse from bed and transporting to bathroom.

Approx. 60 secs to ill: Settles into position to ensure imminent horror is kept to minimum and requires no more clean-up than a flush.

It's incredible how it works, every time. None of that panicky, unseemly, carpet-endangering dashing. And I was glad of it in the early hours of this morning as, for some reason, it was one of the worst instances of beer revenge I've experienced in some time. I have no idea why. There was no indication of anything on the slightly silly journey home (after I nearly got stranded at the end of a route, they let me ride back to relative civilisation in a bus with all its lights off, which was Dead Exciting in a moody sort of way) - just the proto-hangover headache I tend to get.

Basically, I am rubbish at drinking. Rubbish. I never drink during the day; I am scrupulous about what I mix and don't mix (last night was one part cider to four parts weedy lager); and still the wrath is brung, seemingly arbitrarily. Still, it was just about worth it, being an entertaining and stimulating sort of evening that I probably needed. The fact is that although I toy with the idea, I'll never be able to entirely give up drinking. Fortunately my tolerance levels mean that it only takes me a literal couple of drinks of almost any kind to get to the level of confidence and silliness I like. But yes, if I'm in a group of people I don't know especially well then I'm a useless wide-eyed bundle of awkward until those first few sips have taken effect, and I am no one's useless wide-eyed bundle of awkward, not even my liver's.

Ah well, it could be coke, let's not get our panties in a bunch.

In any case drinking is only sensible given the bewildering wrongness of the weather (floods everywhere, skinny teenagers being swept away and twentysomethings dying of hypothermia in storm drains), which is really rather unhappy-making. Oh, and poor Gordon Brown who ascended this week has inherited a world of mess, although you've got to laugh at the serial ineptitude of terrorists who can't blow up a nightclub and terrorists who set themselves on fire. (And not in the self-immolating Tibetan-monk fashion either, more in the couldn't-bring-down-democracy-with-a-democracy-bringing-down-machine fashion.)

The dog, at least, is still the dog. You have to find your things you can rely on. There's also a young vixen who has taken to snoozing on a nearby shed roof when it's not pissing down. I go out and look at her, and she looks back in that louche vulpine way before closing her eyes again. It pleases me.

Some Witnesses came to bother me when I was still very wobbly in the mid-morning. They made me take a thing about 'The Source of Evil', which obviously I was sure was Magners at that moment. (Look, they drink cider with ice in it in 'Withnail & I', remember, so it cannot be wrong.) I'm sure I've read it before, it has these great Marvel-grade illustrations of the Harlot and the Big Sex Beast or whatever it is that I'd scan in and post up and invite y'all to smirk at if only I had a scanner. I don't think they've really thought this through. They'll be sending young impressionables into the arms of Satan by the dozen with their salacious pics of scantily-clad crumpet.

Why I have to be polite I don't know. I wish I could just say "No, I am an atheist and it's taken me years to get to this point of personal enlightenment, what you have to say is of no interest to me and I think you've got a damn cheek preaching to me or anyone else. Good morning." They must have thought I was some manner of moral derelict anyway, all bleary-eyed and t-shirted and stinking of other people's fags. But what gives them the right to come and judge me on my own rented doorstep, I don't know. I may prepare some material to send them away with for next time.

*

ATHEISM - if you don't want to join us, that's just fine, we're not organised in that sense in any case, like, we don't have any festivals or holidays or anything although actually maybe that's not a bad idea... Joan? Joan... what do you think of this? I'll write a letter.

1. You don't have to do anything, really
2. We don't have a book unless you count 'The God Delusion' but Dawkins wouldn't approve of that usage, oh, but it'd be amusing to have a go at 'The Satanic Verses' or even 'A Brief History Of Time'.
3. All are welcome!
4. You just need a brain.
5. We have women. Really clever and emancipated women, mostly.
6. We're only giving you this because you're attempting to indoctrinate us, which we find rude. We will never come round your gaff and start telling you there is no God. We're content enough to know it - OK, to believe it because you cannot prove the non-existence of God any more than the opposite - yeah, but that doesn't mean we have a 'belief system' as such - but that DOESN'T MAKE US BAD PEOPLE.
7. In fact, if you think about it, it may make us authentically good people if we are trying to be good, because strictly speaking living a good life because you think it's the right thing to do is more laudable than living a good life because you don't want to be impaled on a pitchfork and toasted for eternity by imaginary imps.
8. But, y'know, totally up to you.

*

I think this is the future of peaceful resistance to the people who bother us in such ways. Gather copies of the London Lite and hand them to the vendors for recycling. Loudly sing 'My Old Man's A Dustman' when some horrible tinny Xzibit starts up from the back of the bus. Offer charity muggers... oh, I don't know what can be done about them. I told one I was late the other day, which was perfectly true, and she wheedled "ohhhh it'll only take a minute" and I said "I'M! LATE!" and scored her pious face with my claws. She fell back into the path of a hateful bendy bus, and I hurried on to the optician.

God, it's cold, I'm putting the heating on.

And the mome raths decided to have an effing beer

Alright, alright, I'm going to have a moment. Because needs must.

Figured out the other day that the junk is actually a cunning makeshift fence to protect the other fence from the dog. Interesting. Dog got stuck in the little corral made by the larger makeshift fence shortly after this revelation, and calls for him to come in were met with soft whines of caged bewilderment. Finally I made out his flapjack-coloured legs in the dark and had to go out in really unsuitable post-bath attire and free him.

Today the individual I shall politely refer to as That Woman Upstairs (hereafter 'TWU', which is kind of nice in that auto-fill-in-the-gaps-with-your-brain way) made a complaint about me, or at least the beast, to the managing agents. Which I appreciated so much more than a simple knock on the door or a note as a prelude to the kind of neighbourly discussion we've enjoyed before. Nothing has that personal touch like a call from the people who collect your rent, while you're trying to finagle a magazine page into a shape it is strenuously resisting. I mean, short of receiving a bunch of slithery rotting stems at my desk, I don't think I could have been any more moved.

The other element of the day that stuck it in and broke it off, removing a slim buffer that might have cushioned the blow of neighbour-betrayal, was the sudden and likely fatal indisposition of the Non-Pod. Alas and afuckinglack. I know it's a crutch. But people need their crutches to get about. This is why there are crutches. Especially when the tube is stuffed with people who make horrid noises with their noses.

On the way home - oh the silence and the shufflings and throat-clearings and inane witterings and tinny headphone seepage of it* - a man attached himself to the single tube door of my carriage as the train moved off from one stop. He didn't look concerned, but I thought he must have his jacket caught, for a long surreal moment of pre-panic. The train picked up speed. Mental images of screams and splattered glass. Then he smirked, and dropped onto the platform, jogging. Idiot.

Yesterday on the tube I saw a man reading The Economist. He was moving his lips as he read. I thought this was brilliant. If I got the tube every day I'd keep some manner of terribly popular blog of ink Polaroids of tube tableaux or some such piffle.

They're small things but they can't half make you feel defeated and crumpled. It was at least cheering to get an email with the rudest subject line I have ever seen in all my born days.

I am currently mainlining or speedballing or meatpasting (n shit) the below. Yeah, I know, but it's so pretty, and Cameron 'Mr Neneh Cherry' McVey produced it so it reminds me of goodness and truth and shamelessly big production that has no place in decent modern society. It's like Goldfrapp and Kate Bush and something else that's probably Natalie Imbruglia. And in the middle, she does a cartwheel, and it kind of makes me want to burst into something like tears.

*See, I have swanky in-ear things that don't leak anything at all, so no 'possible hypocrisy' tag here. Although it is always possible.

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.

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.

Nu happy woo!

Yes oh yes. Happily I had the original wizard jolly time at Rachel's, came home all skippy mid-morning on the 1st to find the dog (who does not usually get left all night by any means, I hasten to add) had done a cat-like guilt trip by removing a banana skin and teabag from the bin and putting them in the hall to indicate his hysterical desperation for food. Sorry K. Also happily I strolled like a jammy bugger right past the hangover. Unhappily I was then suddenly strucken with some evil winter lurg on the evening of the 2nd, ensuring that my long-anticipated viewing of the 'This Life' special was punctuated by stumbled dashes to the loo down The Corridor. (The Corridor is the defining feature of my flat, which was built by a philanthropist in the 30s like most flats in Walthamstow, and it is so very long that it's not nice when you're ill.)

'This Life +10' was so fist-chewingly insultingly bad that I might have had cause to go a-vomming regardless. I bloody love the original series, it's up there with 'Six Feet Under' for me in terms of wit and nuance and emotional Truth, and of course Anna was a formative influence etc etc no but really, it was great. So it was grotesque to see these sort of reanimated character corpses mouthing lines they would never actually say, in this nasty smug artificial clunky set-up, and although it hasn't ruined it for me I rather wish I'd avoided it. It was such a Comment, or it thought it was - a fly-on-the-wall documentary within a film, and all the look-now-it's-the-noughties-people-have-iPods stuff - and I hate that.

So two fingers to Amy Jenkins even if it was her concoction in the first place and we should be grudgingly grateful. But more importantly a whole set of offensive digits to whatever this malaise is. It's not dissimilar to the bout of whatever it was I had a year ago, which may or may not have been food poisoning. This was too late both for the new year oysters (how did the affluent and properous ever get into those as a stylish sexy thing? They are so messy you need a whole council cleaning squad on standby pointing their high-power hoses at your top) and the subsequent prawns, so it's obviously just the continued wrath of the God in whom I don't believe. This one's evidently pissed off that not everyone thinks He exists, although any decent God wouldn't give a rat's ass because He would have the confidence in Himself, innit. But as Woody Allen once quoth, "How can there be a God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?"

Food is once again my enemy, and me and food usually get on pretty well. Constant nausea, wobbly head, old-lady gait. Bugger. And of course the world hasn't realised that the law is, there shall be no bad news for the whole of January. Most of the bad news, as usual, seems to be stupid news. Naturally my gears are especially ground by the re-emergence of the tabloid anti-darling, the Devil Dog. The mauling to death of a small girl is unquestionably horrific and tragic, just as the mauling to death of a small baby was last year, but they seem to be events that just suck the common sense out of the press and police and public alike, spit it out and run around making Eddie Izzard noises. ("Hello, can I come in? I've got a pig in me trousers. Can my friend come in too? He's got jam for brains.")

I have far too much ire on various angles of this for my poor head to deal with at present, but by way of pretending I'm not sickly let's have a nice LIST (with nowhere near sufficient links but, well, I'm new at this really, and I'm ILL, etc):

1) Did I tumble in surprise from my chair when it was reported that they'd seized £15,000 of cash and (at least according to The Sun) some quantity of heroin and coke from the house where the kid died, the stuff belonging to the dog's owner and kid's uncle 23-year-old Kiel Simpson, a tracksuited skinhead with a stupid face? Niet! I must report that in fact my arse stayed exactly where it was m and barely registered a twitch at this unexpected twist. I was Jack's entire family's complete lack of surprise and that of all his dodgy, responsibility-bypass, tracksuited, scally bastard neighbours.

If she'd accidentally swallowed a load of chinawhite and died that way, the press would at least have rounded unequivocally on the feckless little bastard, but because the dog was the deus ex jobby in this case, they somehow can't bring themselves to really point and shout at the crim scum whose fault the situation was entirely. Well, a couple of people have a bit, but one of them was Simon Heffer, and who listens to that old gasbag? It is not a dog issue, besides the fact that the dog was illegal (under a rather moronic and arbitrary law which doesn't work). It is a crim scum issue.

1b) As for ascribing human moral values to dogs, that's just the other side of the noxious sentimentality that propels people to feed their pets ice cream cones. Totally consistent. It's not just the tabs that do it either - so many people, who should know better, automatically think of dogs as knowing what they're doing in the way we do, having motives in the way we do. They do not. I don't get angry at that sort of idiocy because it gives dogs a bad name - dogs don't care - but because the bad name gets dogs and people killed.

Dogs do not have responsibility. Nothing is their fault. They are done to, acted upon, and everything else is instinct. They don't have morals. If loud fireworks bang make jump, as has been suggested was the case here, maybe go bite. If squeal heard, more bite until no more squeal. That's how they work. High-pitched sounds stimulate dogs to bite. It's nothing to do with any desire to kill people. That's why they love squeaky toys - they mimic the distressed cries of prey animals. K's squeaking of his squeaky is fantastically funny and awfully cute, but it still often occurs to me precisely why he enjoys it.

This dog was a year old. It was a puppy. And already fucked up enough to attack, kept outside and isolated, and given the opportunity to act on its most dangerous instincts by fools. (It's now emerged that the family were discussing getting rid of the dog after it bit one of them a few days before - can't find the link but I'll add it later.)

2) It's amazing how little the media seemed to be arsed to find out about the (actually not very long or taxing) Dangerous Dogs Act. They were content to say that only pure-bred pit bulls were banned, when in fact it clearly says 'pit bull type dogs', which covers a multitude of cross-bred, brick-headed, long-legged, muscle-bound penis-extension canine sins. The morons on the internet were calling for pit bulls to be banned when they already are, you morons, but they're the morons on the internet.

What worries me is that the media are starting to figure there's almost no point in getting the facts completely straight about such an emotive issue, because, well, it's a bit pedantic when children are dying and morons are baying for blood. Oh, and also, faced with the choice of a thousand dog experts champing at the bit to go on telly and explain that it's a more complex issue than it appears and it's not as simple as 'pit bulls bad', or of any number of traumatised victims of dog attacks, who do all the outlets pick? Even the BBC take the juicy option and parade the poor sods on the show. Does anyone do sensible news any more? And what's this thing of handing influence over to people who are (totally understandably) hysterical and usually know nothing about the broader issue? They are not in any position to influence opinion, and they don't even realise the media are exploiting them in their pain. If anyone starts talking about 'Ellie's Law' then I am off.

3) What was 3)? Oh yes. The raids. Well, great, they're busting a dog-fighting ring - needed doing. Except that to begin with, they should have done it a long time ago, and for the sake of the dogs, not because of some binary connection with an attack on a person. This means the dogs are now being treated as dangerous objects to be removed from society, rather than the subjects of abuse that they are.

But more importantly, like the DDA itself, the raids aren't going to make any children any safer whatsoever. This is for a very simple reason that I haven't seen anyone else bring up yet, either because they don't know or because it'd be too unpopular and iffy a point to make. If you're a big old crim and you breed dogs for fighting, then you probably know what you're doing as much as a big old crim with a crack lab. The dogs are used in a sport (legality aside) and in gambling and so they are an investment, just like greyhounds. Of course many of them are mistreated, but the serious people are going to spend money and time building and maintaining athletes - champions. (The ones seized from Merseyside so far were from a couple of lock-ups, both at buildings owned by a local bloke who also owns a gym. Yeah? Minted crim scum.) People have to handle the dogs, take them to and from fights. So they don't want the dogs to be people-aggressive, only dog-aggressive. Dog aggression and people aggression in dogs are not the same thing - there's an overlap, yes, but one does not indicate the presence or even propensity of the other. Any dog-aggressive dog should be watched around people, but, well, it's just not a direct equation at all.

So, pit dogs are bred and trained (as far as you can stretch the definition) to want to fight other dogs. If they show signs of wanting to fight people, they are no good. In that context, they are Bad Dogs. They're frowned upon. They're no more suitable as champion fighters than a greyhound with a gammy leg. What worries me is that these are maybe the dogs that the serious dog-fighters offload onto molluscs like Simpson. Although of course his dog Reuben was only a year old, so Simpson probably bought him as a too-small puppy for £400 from one of his dodgy crim mates. Or a bloke at the side of a road. Whatever.

The point is, the likelihood of these lock-up raids bringing in any actual potential child-killing dogs is pretty negligible. (Obviously any dog larger than a baby is a potential child-killer, a point that I wish more people were making till blue in face and cliche-sick, but statistically... it's just not likely.) They need to worry about individual dogs, pit bull or otherwise, owned by individual idiots. Same as before. Same as in 1991 when the DDA was hurried through the House like an illicit lover out of a window. That's not going to change, but as is usual with difficult problems the solution is too tricksy and long-term to be seriously contemplated by a government that wants to stay popular. The public want results, and now they're getting them, even though they're the results of something else entirely.

An amnesty isn't going to help either - all it'll do is shut a few people up until the next attack (I'm betting it'll be, ooh, maybe a Neapolitan mastiff, to shake things up a bit). In the meantime, slightly more well-meaning but still moronic morons are beseiging animal shelters and such with desperate enquiries about their perfectly docile, amiable bull breed slobberer that they now believe is a ticking time bomb, while others are just abandoning them in a panic. (This happened with Rottweilers last year too, only it wasn't reported. The media's angle this time is slightly, fascinatingly different - all because of the legal issue with the dogs, which gives a certain sense of calm and your-government-is-in-control to it. There's room for a mote of sympathetic stuff about the dogs and responsible-ish owners. With the Rotts, it was just scary anarchy time, and the abandonment issue just wasn't relevant somehow. Hmm.)

Oh, and others are having themselves what would appear to be slight little overreactions. The rotten bastards.

The ignorance! I can hardly stand it. (Ha! And now Posh is setting a great example. Sigh.)

Speaking of which, I'm afraid I'm hopelessly hooked on Celebrity Big Brother this time. I know, I know, but it's so succulent for the amateur psychologist. But crucially, it is full of what seem to be genuinely nice people. I really, really like nice people.

I think celebrities in general get a fucking hard time, and of course some of them deserve it because they're horrid or stupid people who were always going to be horrid or stupid one way or another. In Big Brother terms, though, the celebrities are always going to be better value than the nobodies. This is partly because they are used to being watched and analysed, which makes it less of a morally-suspect exercise, and partly because many celebrities become famous due to their natural charisma, personality and yes, intelligence, or the effects thereof.

And, and, if people deal with the pressure of fame for years on end, they either become partially destroyed by it or they achieve this sort of aura of placid contentment and Knowledge. They know themselves. They might not have anything left to prove. That's certainly the defining mark of most of the lot this time. They are lovely. The disgraced former Miss Great Britain and sort-of WAG is an irritating little empty-headed twit, and the two ex-popstars are boring, and Leo Sayer is a needy blabbergob, but the others are just lovely. Especially the lovely Shilpa, who I expected to be rather precious as a massive Bollywood star, but is actually totally humble and sweet and just lovely lovely lovely and trying ever so hard.

The Goody family on the other hand are a repugnant shower of deeply unlikeable sub-humans. Jade is just a genuine idiot who's learnt to flaunt her ignorance for a lot of money, her boyfriend is some sort of half-smiling, vacant-eyed shadow, but the mother... Put me in a house with that woman, that aggressive, childish, beastly, bellowing, thick-as-two-short-pigshits woman, and it'd be like that episode of 'The Shield' where Vic puts two rappers in one of those shipping crates and tells them to sort it out and then in the morning only one of them walks out and says he wants breakfast. I am telling you.

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?

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.)

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.

Plaintive mechanical squeaking

I've been in London for what seems like about a month. This is a good thing, by the way, exhausting as it is. Set off from ye north at 4.20 on Friday, and embarked on an epic journey full of disappointment, anguish and the shocking waste of a perfectly good sausage roll (I sacrificed it to my wrath on a cold hard Manchester platform). I arrived at Euston just before midnight. Not bad going. Still, limp and drained as I was from hours of bother and boredom, I still felt that wintery zing shoot through my system when I trudged out of the station. It's no wonder I got tired after four years here. It's just like crack, only not quite as healthy.

I managed to leave my gloves, which had always had a doomed 'our alliance shall be fleeting' air about them, in the cab. They join my star-shaped silver watch on the honours list of fondly-remembered lost objects which were sacrificed to a noble cause. (The watch fell out of my pocket when I was rolling in the grass at Homelands, just outside the tent where The Orb were playing at 4am. I wasn't wearing it as I was allergic to it. Tsk. The Orb were good though. Or were they? Didn't matter.) The gloves were black leather and suede, a tiny bit too big, too thin and delicate to do any real hand-warming. They were obviously some deceased individual's 'for best' and hadn't been worn since their purchase maybe 40 years prior to my snaffling them from a charity shop in Kentish Town. A stamp on the inside of one proclaimed they had been finely crafted by Marshal & Snelgrove. I'll use those in writing one day when I need some 'fine gentlemen'.

Yesterday, having bought some replacement gloves, I managed to somehow bugger the zip on my bag and had to get a replacement for that, as I didn't want to walk around the centre of London with an open bag. It's been a bad week for accessories.

More significantly, I may have an East End flat, which I will be installed in within a month if everything comes up rosy. Currently waiting to find out if my forms and references indicate I'm some sort of criminal who doesn't deserve to work like a dog to pay rent in anywhere nice. In this instance I may have to sacrifice a Greggsful of savoury pastries to the pointlessly vengeful gods of unfocused rage.

"These are the grapes, and this is the wrath."

"Ooh, that's good wrath."