The fiercest number

Some actual bona fide good news last week - Alan Johnston, kidnapped journalist, freed after 114 days. I think this should be marked in some way. How often do you get actual good news in the true sense? Usually it's sporting victories, which aren't really news, or things about calves born with extra legs, which aren't really good.

Meanwhile, one of the new brooms says the terror fight could take 15 years. I would like to see how he's worked this out. Maybe people are just demanding specifics; they're easier to deal with than vague hand-flaps of uncertainty when lives are at stake. I suppose the people responsible for the impossible job of sorting out terrorism can't just hold up pieces of string at press conferences and shout "HOW FUCKING LONG IS THIS? A? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?"

Still, I'm finding it hard to stifle my sense of absurdity when it comes to the recent non-attacks. (I'm sure there are better links than these to cite but dammit, if you are here it means you are an intelligent bean with ability to use internet, and there are many more splendidly comprehensive bloggers in my blogroll to whom you may refer on such matters of import. So!) It's not that these things shouldn't be taken seriously (ish) because it shows that the intent is still there, even if the ability isn't (and there were doctors behind these things? I fear for the quality of our healthcare all the more. Perhaps years of listening to people complain about their knees drives one to jihad. My GPs are thoroughly sociopathic fucks in any case. So!). And terrorists are just as able as anyone else to learn from their own and each others' mistakes, especially if the media helpfully point those out.

But the fact is that this - two non-bombs in central London and one semi-bomb in Glasgow complete with flaming terrorist determined to at least take out one person even if it was only his silly, on-fire self - was a giant laughable arse-up all the way. I was very pleased by the sensible reaction of Brown's lot (since I last wrote he has finally ascended - I did ask him to wait till I was ready, but he was busting), a far cry from what would have been another set of ominous showboating pronouncements from that flouncing ringmaster of a Blair swine - but! the media have overwhelmingly taken the line that we were only saved from being bombed to molecules by "a combination of luck and public vigilance". Not that the Scottish bloke doesn't deserve much kudos and his internet celebrity - in fact that just makes me grin a lot, really. He did good. But in both London and Glasgow, the attacks were thoroughly buggered up before they even didn't happen, and it was less to do with luck and vigilance than the kind of blithering incompetence rarely seen outside of rubbish 70s sitcoms whose plots revolve solely around thin men being unable to operate bicycles.

So the rhetoric baffles and bothers me somewhat. Of course any number of other, more efficient attacks might have been ready to go, so I understand the raise in threat level etc etc etc (what a whimsical notion that is - I like to find out the weather, the travel and how scared I need to be of a morning) bUT I wish these attacks had been put in better perspective by the Feral Beasts. Considering the failure of a non-viable bomb to go off an 'attack' is like considering a foetus a toddler. Saying "if these bombs had gone off thousands would have been killed", when the bombs couldn't have gone off (they were missing a vital component, apparently - that one is a good link, btw), is taking the fine art of rabid speculation to glorious new levels. If all the news were treated in the same manner, we'd have so much hysteria-based fun.

Supermarket knife rampage man thwarted

...The weapon was later found to be a small plastic spork. "If it had been a large machete, the carnage would have been unimaginable," said Inspector Dollop...

Yars.

Meanwhile I've had an interesting week at the Website. I've been doing holiday cover there for a year, and now the job's come up. I have concluded, for a variety of reasons, that I would step over my own mother to get it. I would also step over an acquaintance who is also apparently applying. Only, the first time I tried to step over her, I would deliberately miss.

Yeah, s'like that, homes.

It was a week unusually full of interesting men, which is always a good week. I don't know where the interesting women are, but - oh, it might have something to do with the fact that I've always worked in ever so slightly gender-wonky situations. These were men I worked with or have worked with, or men I met backstage at Reading and ended up living with who I haven't seen in four years and who look so completely different with their weight loss and tattoos and coloured contact lenses and lack of facial hair that it was rather a surreal experience. Media-ish and/or music-related men, to a man. These are the circles I've always moved in. I've probably absorbed an unhealthy amount of testosterone over the years, and get mistaken for a man all the time without realising it.

Actually, I did get mistaken for a man rather a bit when I wrote for the satire sheet that is no more. We had credits, not bylines, and everyone else there had a Y chromosome which was plain to see in their names. So it wasn't surprising that people would write in about something I'd written and refer to me in the register of bloke. It was curiously gratifying, though, especially as it meant I never had to take any criticism, because it all went to this male alter-ego the readership inadvertently created. I named him Ted.

The week's menfolk were mostly curmudgeonly and cynical, in a mostly pleasant way, although one was properly wise and one maintained the same infectious enthusiasm for things that I remember appreciating before. One of them gave me a new drug experience, although he didn't necessarily mean to - but I have discovered the secret of joy, and her name is CODEINE. How it is legal, even if it requires a degree of cajoling and fibbing, is beyond me. I spent the last hour of work stoned out of my gourd, then ran home from Baker Street to Walthamstow on winged feet, wrote a 300-page high-concept novel and showed it to God. God gave me this wicked quote to use on the cover of the paperback.

(I'm pretty sure I also saw some E scattered on the steps at King's Cross, but if you think I picked any of them up to check, you're sorely mistaken. I simply bent down to lick one. It was inconclusive. Thinking about it, I should have gathered them up and sold them outside regardless. Curses.)

Yesterday I did a stint as a steward for an art event in a pretty wood in a place I thought for years was made up by the BBC so Mark from EastEnders could get his first break. I wasn't too impressed with the fluro-jacket, but was thrilled with the walkie-talkie. There's nothing like strolling past some innocent event-goers with your hip occasionally bursting into a snatch of semi-comprehensible monologue. I was bitten by something on the neck, but it didn't matter because it was the first July-like day of July and I would gladly have given a vein's worth to the starving insects of Essex for that.

Oh, and Shedvixen has apparently given over the shed to Shedfox. I saw them together, looking like a single fox with four ears, but since it's just been himself. Neither today, though. Keine foxen. I no longer appear able to get decent pictures, which is an ass. But if I got this Website job, I may be able to borrow some gobsmackingly brilliant camera that digitally compensates for all lack of talent and wobbly arms, and run away with it.




Two new additions to the 'loll - Piqued and Evidence of a Struggle. You will laugh, you will curl your lip, you will vomit uncontrollably but not notice until you wake up three hours hence.

Been caught napping

So! The film done pretty good on its first weekend. It's had mostly rave reviews and the odd bad one, and even its own fisticuffs on the increasingly batshit Comment is Free. (It's like civil war in there, all the damn time - the writers' views seem to align so seldom with those of the commenters, I wonder why they don't... I dunno, start their own paper. Poor nomadic Guardian readers without a home to call their own.) I hauled a bunch to see it on Friday and liked it even more than I did at the cast and crew screening (where I had a very brief and loud conversation with Walter Wolfgang). The bunch also enjoyed it. I was pleased to be a part of it.

Later, there was drinking. Also there was pink vomit on the nightbus, but thankfully none of it mine.

The other good news of course is that Rachel's unwanted company is in custody. It's nothing to get too happy about - the woman needs help - but it needed to happen, and now it has.

So I was thinking - it may just be more procrastination, but I reckon I might try and write something every day for a couple of weeks, or something. I'll have to fight off the guilt that proper political bloggers thought nicely of me for a couple of days when in fact I am not one of them - clever, incisive, thought-provoking, regular-updating them - merely another of a hundred thousand gits who witter on about their washing. Then I can witter about my washing as I please. And perhaps, intermittently, about Tony Blair. If he does anything good like insist that he doesn't want to have a pop at the press, and then describes it as "a feral beast".

Otherwise - TWU is being wonderfully nice, dog is mellow, bed is empty, mattress is inexcusable, work is lame and scant, money is scanter, skin is gothic. Sun is out, though, and so is the asparagus.

I really need to go on holiday, if only to flaunt these two dresses I got from H&M for a tenner apiece and about which I should probably feel very, very guilty.

hA!

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.

Tricycle

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.

Defying SOCPA means never having to freeze your tush off. Oh wait.

So after all that fannying about, I sallied forth to the demonstration in Parliament Square this evening. I spent the day labouring under the misapprehension I was still going to be less than legal, because I hadn't had my special Willy Wonka golden ticket yes-you-may letter from the police in the post. When I discovered from Rachel that a) it's sort of like a driving licence in that you don't have to actually physically have it on you, kind of thing and b) the police, when she phoned to ask after the progress of our permission things, were outraged by our insane interminable loiter last week, I was gratefully disabused. And a bit disappointed, obviously. Robbed of my amusing coda.

The plan was to hold a mass lone demo (as has happened every month since August), completely and humbly legally, from 6 till 7pm, then move a few yards over and have a rip-roaringly non-legal and naughty carol service. And that's what transpired. I hate to say a good time was had by all, but I think it was. It was a good thing to do so although you're supposed to be selfless, I think you're allowed to feel a bit pleased. I have limited experience of demonstrating, and so am irksomely analytical about it, but one of the distinctive things about a demonstration like this is how blooming jolly it is. Jolly and very British - peaceful but not po-faced, a bit daffy without ever losing the sense of enormous importance. This sort of humble gaggle milling about under the looming, gorgeous, other-gold-looks-like-Ferrero-Rocher-wrappers-next-to-this opulence of Parliament. Parliament is an absolutely intimidating place, representing power in one of the most effective, criticism-rebuffing ways you can imagine. You feel very small next to it, and obvious as it is to say, your voice and presence as a defiant citizen in the face of such an impassive and significance-fraught structure feel infinitesimal.

But everyone deals with that overwhelmingness and gets on with it. I love the absurdist convention of these demos - the bonkers notion that you could be arrested, if you didn't have permission, for waving a placard saying 'No more smelly cheese', and of course the silly things themselves perfectly satirising the silliness of the relevant sections of the Serious Organised Annoying Little People Who Probably All Live On Quorn And Are Malnourished And Wrong In The Brain Act. I went for the double-pronged assault of 'ASBOs for apostrophe abuse' (two people asked me if 'ASBOs' shouldn't have an apostrophe; I smote them) and 'Better grammar for placards' (at least no one questioned the spelling of 'grammar'). This was an agonising decision which meant that my favoured campaign, 'Hide Daniel Craig's clothes', had to be sacrificed. Next time, however, as it is a matter of grave import that we strive to bring about a state of perma-nude Bond.

Gathered there all giggly and shivering, we held our placards (and in one spectacular case a pink Christmas tree, decorated grotesquely with laminated images of the casualties of illegal war), circulated and chatted, unwisely went in the road, waved at passing honking cars and mopeds, and were cold. There must be laws and constants about public demonstration, many of them things you kind of don't want to admit to yourself because you're supposed to be being totally selfless and above this sort of thing, like, say

Trundle's Law: Adversity of weather conditions is directly proportional to sneaky sense of righteousness.

Beanamble's Constant: If you demonstrate and no one gets arrested or questioned or stopped or otherwise interfered with, you feel if not a sense of actual failure then certainly a sense of anti-climax.

Fossingberd's Wotnot: Beanamble's Constant is inevitably followed by a sense of horrified guilt over sense of anti-climax. Etc.

I don't know, perhaps that's just me being a git. It sounds pretty beastly when you put it like that - you don't want any martyrs in this, and I know how dedicated people are and how little they let anything like that interfere - but I suppose it's because it's just mind-boggling to break a law or breach it or circumvent it or however you put it, in front of the seat of government, and to have nothing happen at all. When you're actually doing it, it's quietly surreal, and the lack of consequence is equally surreal given everything you ever learnt about right/wrong and legal/illegal. Plus, the whole issue we were protesting was the right to freedom of speech (by extrapolation), and although that only really means the right to be heard, dammit, you want to be listened to. Even if the representatives whose attention you attract are not receptive, you want to be acknowledged, just as you are implictly when you go and vote. Seeing that you're not being acknowledged makes you feel - not personally, but really as an average example of people of your country - neglected. Which in turn makes you angry. I suppose if you protest regularly you get over that, but for a novice like me it makes for an unpleasant aftertaste.


As expected, there were no police - no journalists to speak of either. There was a Liberal MEP, though, which was very something. The only police visible were the ones usually propping up the Parliament gates, looking cold and bored in their fluorescent jackets. Brian Haw had a little passive-aggressive pop through his megaphone at one point, and people laughed nervously, but no one came over and demanded to see papers or anything. It's another layer of surreality - before SOCPA people would protest all the time there and be ignored by politicians, but now we have to apply for permission to be ignored. It's like being not there at all, being negated on some official level. (I went to the rally in Hyde Park in early 2003, remember the excited hollers of a million on the streets and felt so roused, and then so furious and impotent when those million marchers were eaten up in a soundbite and swallowed away like a bad taste. It sticks.) Like hanging around a police station, shouting "ooooo-ooooo" at distant officers who register nothing of your presence. Anyone who's ever given or received the silent treatment from a lover, or opted not to respond to criticism, knows the immensity of the power of silence, and now I suppose the government have figured it out too.

Rachel gave a properly rousing speech, reminded us that "it is the duty of all citizens who give a stuff" to be here, to acknowledge what's going on and challenge it. I watched the cars going past (Parliament Square is a very daunting and almost inaccessible island, you feel like a rabbit dashing across the lanes to get there, and it's another thing that gives you this sense of 'you are not supposed to be here', but I digress), observed the gawping or mildly interested or blank or smiling faces of passing drivers, and wondered how many of them actually know about SOCPA. The form of a small demonstration is pretty standard, and in London people can easily tune it out like they tune out a hundred other elements a day - it seems far enough removed from usual life, aberrant and irrelevant enough to not pay attention to. But this is the sort of issue that attracts people who do give a stuff, but don't often feel the need to actively go and stand in the cold about something - like me. This is something that really affects everyone, however much it may seem to affect only a small pocket of placardy people. So I stood there and hoped that some of the people going past were thinking about what was going on.

At 7 some of us shuffled to the corner for the illicit carol service. It's such a perfect concept - it was held last year and will probably be on next year, and the police are never going to interfere because imagine the front covers if they went in and arrested the bejesus out of a lot of rosy-cheeked warblers in the middle of 'Silent Night'. They dismiss it for this reason, and I had to pause for a moment to get my head around the idea that it was breaking the law, but it is. It's an organised demonstration. I went last year and wrote about it in typically one-foot-out fashion (I know, I annoy myself) - this year it was a smaller gathering, and colder, and altogether less political. There was a gallant, slightly wobbly saxophonist in lieu of missing solo trumpeter, and there was giggling and competitive caterwauling during 'The Ten Days Of Christmas', and swigs of hip flasks and mulled wine (did I mention it was really very bastard cold indeed because if I didn't that would be a grievous error and would imply that we did not suffer for our noble cause). We didn't do 'Little Drummer Boy' because that was a terrible heap of bewildered pa-rum-pum-pums last time. We learn. And we missed out all the juicy Satan stuff from 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen'.

We held a minute's silence as the traffic rushed by oblivious. Nothing does the same thing as silence, as I said - maybe next time we should stand in silence for an hour in the square. One protestor covered her mouth


and there's not really any substitute for that either if you want to declare your outrage that your right to say things is being curtailed. People tune out milling, chatting, politely whooping protestors. If we're being silenced, and being met with silence, maybe silence is the way to strike back. It would certainly signal disgust. (There's always mooning for that, of course, but let's put that on the back burner, or the back of a bus full of drunk rugby players.)

Brian Haw said some brief, typically passionate words, but he was more subdued than I've seen him. He tends to be a human foghorn, but not this evening. Last year we made much out of the fact that we were defying the law - this year Brian did an amusing little "I'm breaking the law right now, la la la" into the megaphone, and Tim gave us a round of applause and we all joined in, but we were quieter about it. The positive spin on this is that we all knew why we were there, in the effing cold and friz, and we simply defied rather than banging on about our defiance - it's no big deal, we could do this every day, and maybe we should. The negative is more along the lines of - we are tired and weary and helpless and we do not know if this is doing any good at all.

I would go with the positive, though, with only the usual little niggly doubts and cynicism around the edges. There will be at the least a steady trickle of people prepared to defy SOCPA in this way for as long as it's in place, and although it's hard to cling onto the belief that it will do good, it's of symbolic importance to keep doing it, to counterbalance what is an insidious, craven and terrible symbolic gesture on the part of the government.

I suppose this now means I'm obliged to go and get frostbite again sometime soon. Thank you, Tony, because of you I will have to buy stupid thermals. Ooh, I could get a onesie, like the ones in old Westerns where the sheriff is rousted out of bed at night by the posse and he comes out in his hat and boots and a onesie with buttons up the middle and his gun. That'll do nicely.

Fucketh ye not

This guy owed him upwards of 50k. He gave him every chance, but in the end... man. And you know what he did, he left his squeaky right there as a warning. I swear the cops shit where they stood.

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.

We're gonna net us some work

A shocking week that I'm not going to discuss. Mingled with the men who own the world on Tuesday and came away feeling like a worm. The bank have assigned me an entire new identity - that of a whorehouse madam in an old Western, as far as I can tell - and don't know how they've managed it. Most impressive. And the dog gave himself another foxshit facial so I had to hose him down last night. Actually though that was quite amusing. He now smells faintly of coconut.

I don't usually fall upon the neck of weekends and bless them, but this one I welcome like a new year. And it's only February. The armpit of the year. Come friendly April, even if that means another faltering step towards 30 and the grave beyond.

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.)

Resident Weevil

And I wonder why mothers gather up their wee ones and hold them tightly.

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.

Leyton Schmeyton

No, I totally meant for it to come out like that. Sh.

And the greatest of these is pie

The alleyway light has gone. I haven't been out there at night for some weeks because the back door is buggered, but it's quite a sight from the window. Or a lack of sight. Rather calming, the pure black offset by angular reflections from inside and a grey outline of the college wall, other outlines depending on how much of a moon there is - although I'm sure it has the opposite effect if you're actually out there.

The flat I had was withdrawn due to issues with dog. Curses. But I found a better one, little further along from the tube but very close to a park, and displaying many of the endearing qualities of this house. This perturbs me slightly, as it's a bit like recognising the characteristics of old boyfriend in new one, but what the hell, I demand grace and charm and fireplaces. Fireplaces, dammit! These were installed by the gracious and charming landlady, who lived there herself for 15 years. I felt quite emotional. I do wish living spaces didn't have such an effect on me. I blame 67 Clifton Common with the stairs you had to abseil down.

The estate agent was a lanky blonde South African who was also charming, although charm seemed to be something he had rather than something he did. Hard to tell with estate agents. The one I had before was French and used to complain about how rude Parisians were. This one was at least an improvement on the artful git who assured me the first flat was in the bag. I asked him to ask the landlord of the other place I'd seen (pokey, dingy, other words which maybe should have an 'e' or maybe not) if he'd take the dog. When I went back later to tell him that I'd found somewhere else, he looked at me in some degree of shock and dismay and said he'd just spent ages persuading the landlord to let me and my beast live in his hovel. I wasn't there for more than a couple of minutes, collecting my forms, but he sulked for an eternity. Boo fucking hoo, you berk.

(I did express my gratitude, by the way, I didn't pull a face or anything. I just thought he was outrageous in his unprofessional guilt-tripping.)

Having met the landlady of the other place and bade tree-boy goodbye I wafted down Walthamstow high street all pleased. It was Saturday and something was going on in the open space near the top of its long pedestrianised beginner-slope. They were turning on the Christmas lights. There was hip hop dancing, and I cannot remember whether or not that's supposed to have a hyphen - I think not, actually. Then there was a town cryer who looked especially ridiculous and particularly Caucasian in the big unruly gaggle of light-plunger-pusher-downers on the stage. I was even more pleased. Flow of mild endorphins through system. It's the sort of feeling that you have to acknowledge because you know it to be unusual and precious, like an English summer day that succeeds in being summery throughout.

Pretty lights, too, obviously.

This is apparently one of the oldest pie and mash shops in London. I'm afraid I was overcome with sepia. Humble apologies.

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.