Good evening, I am from Essex.

Ha. Ha! Yeah, I know. I KNOW. Perhaps, in time, this will change. And then maybe other things, like so many oversized dominos, all through The Power of Regular Blogging.

The truth - the truth - is that I haven't sat down for quite a few weeks. Well, I have sat down, and I have been sitting down, and I have had several really good and fulfilling actual sits down (an important distinction). But, I don't know, what's that thing about the bad girls not having time to keep diaries? Ugh. It's not very nice, forget I mentioned it. I have been neither bad nor good, nothing so binary, I have merely done behaviour according to a complex combination of factors ranging from indelible instinct to momentary whim. Most of it has pleased me, and none of it has resulted in me being in the free crapsheets looking like hell, so I am likely to continue.

So, to recap. What did I in September? I went to to two weddings. One was an hour late because of the bride's hair which had some kind of follicular panic, and there was extra food and empty seats at the single-dregs table I was on because of an almighty falling out of my mutual friends. We ate their profiteroles.

Then there was start of job, of course, which now feels like it's been my life for ooh, at least eight months or something. Writing about one's job on the internet is not done of course but the salient points include but are not limited to:

1) I can wear what I like and prat about online to my heart's content.
2) The people are in the main terribly charismatic and personable.
3) I eat lunch at my desk like someone who is actually busy.
4) Although once I ate it in the famous Japanese restaurant which occupies the ground floor of the building, and omigod the tofu you simply wouldn't believe it it was like steak.
5) There is a lot of swearing, and griping aloud is permitted. All good.
6) And just as well because it is kind of shambolic in places.
7) It is mostly quiet, however, because everyone witters to each other on IM. Handy. Especially for complaining, and gossip. The water cooler is dead, man.
8) Lots of people comment on the website and we have to deal with the little data-nubs they scatter as they please. In some kind of never-ending avalanche of banality, irrelevance and casual sexism. It is a bit like mucking out the internet.
9) But it's OK.
10) And they pay me quite a decent amount of money, like, every month, without me having to email them five times and call them twelve times and send them letters and hesitate for a bit then take them to small claims court when all other options have been exhausted (including the one with the very big men without discernible necks) and then find that doesn't work either and try not to calculate how much I've spent trying to just get fucking paid.

Revelatory!

11) And they do not seem, even after three months, to think I am especially odd. This is probably because they are quite odd. Excellent. Whew.

I've been to lots of things and missed even more, obviously, but the actual managing to go to things is, y'know, good. I went to a roller disco. I was terrified. I went home. I saw a musical. I died a bit inside. I went home. I saw some wonderful bands. They were wonderful. (Look at this site, though. Cor!) Oh and Amy Winehouse too, which just made me laugh for all the people who are opting out of cherishing her as the most important and greatest music star of our generation, refraining from basking in the kind of real awe you can rarely feel in life, and are frittering away their precious glittering and harshly-rationed moments peering up her nose. (Journalists referring to what is quite clearly and manifestly cocaine as "a mystery white powder" is a bit like Jenna Jameson unzipping you and going, "Oh my gah, what's that?" That is cocaine - that is a figurative penis - shut up.)

I experienced genuine irony in that I was undone for an entire weekend by the healthy health supplements taken to offset the side effects of incredibly unhealthy and bad, but oh so smashing ingestibles. That was amusing. Er, and I have settled into some kind of routine of being buffetted by squashy clouds of coincidence, I mean, it is getting ridiculous, y'know, but it's always quite nice even when it is A Bit Scary.

Oh and in the last week I've seen two people, one really rather significant, who I didn't think I'd ever see again a couple of months ago. Both meetings were more pleasant and satisfying than they had any right to be, considering these are people from quite a few versions of my life ago. I also reclaimed another friend from the jaws of nostalgic/bitter friend-oblivion and am very indeed dead chuffed. Naturally I owe most of this to the Social Utility (pecan-studded biscuits be upon it). I can't even really rue it for bringing me the odd bit of sad or grim or nnng or titsup or fucksakes or sigh, even though it has, because these things pale before the frankly disgusting opulence of the peopley luxuries it's bestowed. I've long since given up feeling qualms about how much of my existence seems to involve it in some way, because, y'know, whatsitooyer?

Yes, this is about the level of eloquence we're talking here.

I'm utterly and laughably unprepared for Christmas, but at least the beast has his accommodation booked and he shall have his turkey. He is getting love handles, middle-aged as he is now, only they're kind of around his shoulders, which makes his waspish waist look even more absurd. He now has a nanny in the form of the Wife, who tends to him in my absence and also sometimes makes me porridge of a cold morning, and seriously my tea consumption has gone up by about 900% since she moved in. We are utterly co-dependent, which is extremely silly but great for those slumpy moments when things are sucky. (80% of these occur either at 7pm, or 12.30am. The dank armpits of the evening.)

I should possibly be worried about the things I have presently that I would be a bit lost without, but I suppose you've got to have a few of those, and I'm not adding any more for a bit if I can help it. You don't want too many. No no.

Oh, and I did some actual fucking writing the other night, goddamn. Preliminary stuff, true, but it was something involving typing that wasn't an email or one of these bits, so. So! And it felt like writingy writing in the sense that it wasn't really like me doing it. Or rather, it wasn't like I was generating material, it was all there and I was just transcribing, doing the donkey work with the occasional thoughtful bit of original input to complement the whole. It's positively secretarial.

I suppose I avoid doing it even though it's so clearly what I should be doing, as much of the time as I can. It is somehow risky. Obviously there's the thing where you do stuff and you look at it later and oh the rampant shittitude of it is overwhelming and boring, but the risky element is more to do with poncy ideas of like, Truth. Even though it's fiction. Stuff has to ring true, at least. Have its own truth and stick to it. And it's totally dead easy, it is absolutely la la laaaaa while I'm doing it, and so I trust it to be correct, more or less, because how could it not be - but you've got to interfere a bit and nudge it in directions, because it doesn't know what it's doing, and so how do you know you're acting as stabilisers to the little wobbly bike of your runaway prose and not, like, I dunno, growing a big field of GM crops on the natural earthy canvas of your... y'know?

Bleh. Nonsense. It's only stuff that I'm going to use later to do other stuff with, it is a tool (heh, yes, I know how it feels, etc) and so doesn't need to be Good. But it does need to be Right. There are people involved here. People with surprisingly ghastly childhoods, in fact, but they couldn't be such loveable dysfunctionals without those.

I mean, I'm only making them up so I can eventually throw them off a bus shelter and kill them, without even letting them have sex beforehand, but that's not the point.

If you've read to here, you may have a biscuit.

Oh and the foxen are abroad at night, having decamped across the road. I see them all the time. Usually they also see me. It never fails.

Next time in our non-solipsism special:

Morrissey - why doesn't he just put on a white sheet and pointy hat and be done with it? (Because he's not a racist. He is a curmudgeon. There is a difference.)

Maddy - Kate... police... Murat... sleeping pills... oh, look, a couple have done a massive audacious but totally rubbish life insurance fraud, something to do with a canoe, thank God, clasp it to your newsbosom! And it's great because like no one's died or anything, and look at the symmetry with a person turning up rather than going missing, they've closed a circle for us, and as a nation we can finally know tabloid peace. News lives!

Evel Knievel - oh, I thought he was dead already.

Suicide by drum solo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To paraphrase some red-nosed bloke, a band ruined music, music journalism and probably several other things for me and I never even had the common courtesy to thank them.

I'm too completely shagged out to do the quality of waffling I ought, but the whole point is that while they inspire me to all sorts of flights of fancyness, they also make me realise that there's not really any need for it. It's enough to experience these things. And I kind of want to keep it to myself, anyway, because... I'm still not sure why, being a writer and all. But it's like... I could make some money writing about sex, but I sort of can't. Not because I'm a prude about it, but I can't translate my thoughts about it into writing, somehow. And don't want to. Really don't want to. Want to keep it for myself. Even writing about it in generic terms, drawing on the most general experience - just Do Not Want. It's too private. It is.

I feel almost the same way about this band. It's a private pash. A warm-glow, hazy-shared-bubble, separate-dimension-in-which-everything-is-good-and-pure sort of thing. Not that I'm not pleased to find other people who love them, it's just... I'm not into being a fan in that way. It's not really like that. It's not a drooling obsession. I just know that I'm somehow plugged into them and at home with them in a way I've never quite been with any other band, or thing. And it's all very safe - there's none of that sickly lurching feeling of wanting what you can't have about it, the kind of thing that makes girls cry in huge gaggles at airports as boys in sunglasses are hustled away by a hundred suited brickshithouses. Good things can be oddly painful in ways that almost make them worth avoiding. But not this one. I suppose there was some nagging twinge of unfinishedness before I'd interviewed them - interviewed being the operative word, as opposed to just met, that wasn't it - but that's gone now. There's nothing left to do but enjoy it.

See (at this point you may wish to go and make a cup of tea, and drink it, and then go and do some shopping or something) the thing is I am so deeply fond of them that even if things are rotten and rubbish - and we've got to say, folks, we are pretty much up to our eyebrows in landfill at present - they will not only cheer me up but actually make me happy. Really goofy-grin, tears-in-eyes, lump-in-throat, tingle-in-ribs happy. I'd flogged my spare ticket (being on my own, a very bad start) to a tout for a fraction of what it cost, nearly laid out a security git for telling me to 'smile' and nearly burst into tears at another one for telling me to say 'please' (I'd said "excuse me" but I don't think he heard, and I'm such a big believer in politeness too). I'm stricken with a nasty emotional common cold (the one I never thought I'd get, but these things mutate, and this one might be bedding in), mourning the loss of the small but real dream of the website job that died suddenly of budgetosis yesterday, and wondering if there is such a thing as a perfect balance between fluttering anxiety and despairing fuck-all-this-ness. (I'm sure the tension between those two forces works great, like when they find out Monty Burns has every illness ever discovered but they all keep each other from snuffing him.)

And then this band plays, right, and I am not stricken or mourning or bemoaning at all but just gazing and smiling. There was a lovely bit of a breeze (this was Somerset House, so kind of like being the filling of a stately stone wedding cake) and the sky was stubbornly dark blue for hours. They were soppy and said nice things (and tried to get us to sing 'Happy Birthday' to the drummer, ferchrissakes, the soft bastards), and played great, and looked great, and were just great. I try to be objective, but why would I want to do a thing like that? Why would anyone?

I'm quite blissfully aware that I've lost all objectivity with them - I do occasionally try an experimental switch to distant analyser mode, and it just physically doesn't work, like trying to flip a lightswitch with your chin sometimes doesn't. It makes me giddy that I can't see over or around this band - I totally understand why people don't like them, and I'll never try and win anyone round if they're not immediately into it, but all that's irrelevant when I see them. Criticism just doesn't exist. It's real escapism. The only other things that ever give me that complete respite from all the shite (does that rhyme? well, it ought) are the beast, some of the time, and sleeping with someone. (Or sleeping on my own, in fact, but that's rubbish, because no one worries in their sleep, it's cheating.)

OK, there are other small things that successfully disengage me from the toxic gloop, but it's a hard thing to pull off for more than a minute.

The singer was standing around watching the support band (who blew, sadly), straggle-haired man of the people that he is. He more or less remembered me from the half-hour I spent listening to his Steven Wright drawl and tommy-gun laugh. I was pleased to see him and he wasn't displeased to see me, so I didn't feel funny shouting a couple of friendly things in his ear. They are different, I realised that ages ago - they've sort of got the approved organic rock star stamp on them. They're not putting it on - that's who they are. It's got nothing to do with posturing, that's not in their vocabulary. They might not have fallen out of the sky but they could have been pulled up from the earth (I think their clothes were, at least). However, the thing is that I can never tell them what they mean to me - I have a bit of a desire to in a way, but not much. I couldn't articulate it anyway, but that's not the point - there is no one you can really address it to, just yourself. They said themselves that whatever they write isn't really theirs, and it's true - the whole thing is greater than sum of parts and so they're only partly responsible. And they're not supernatural, they are just blokes. The people aren't really the thing, they're just what starts it. The string of the lovely balloon.

I had a better way of putting that, but pfffft.

I don't credit them with making me quit, I realised it was necessary on my own. I think they did a bit of precipitating and a bit of easing of transition and a bit of inspiring. It's not like you can really make a living at music journalism now unless you've been established for years on end - someone today tried to justify his writing for free because "everyone's a critic now, and who's to say my opinion's more important than this guy's in his bedroom?" and I had to flush his head in the toilet five times before the sound of "it's the democratisation of content" finally gurgled into silence. I didn't down tools the minute I heard the twangy rumblings of the first song on the first album. That was in ruddy 2001, so I kept at it for a while, and they were just my favourite band in a way no band had ever been my favourite, but it wasn't any sort of deal-breaker.

Still, whatever else I lost when I threw in that particular stinking soul-destroying towel, I didn't lose them. I was sure a while ago that there had been some natural evaporation, and they'd become a bit more ordinary and banal to me, and they sort of did, but miraculously it takes no time at all to tap back into the way I always felt about them. Which is, just so all-consumingly fucking fond.

My love for this stuff is pure, there is nothing clagging it or compromising it. It's my joy, even if it's momentarily punctured by drunken oaf morons of the kind that go to gigs and run the risk of me punching them to the ground - but never mind them, look at this wondrous lovely beauty of a splendid rock'n'roll nonsense and then blow your hair about by the end window of the tube on the way home. All else is rather a bit balls, frankly.

I wasn't kidding, you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gains (the week thus far)

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

Losses

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

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

Duracell Minus

This week I has

* talked late

* sat up late

* curtain-twitched

* made hamstrings complain

* not done enough

* learned the child sign language for 'pig', 'tiger', 'sheep' and 'biscuit'

* signed up for a screenwriting seminar

* gone "aaargh" with regards above

* partly because of the £

* interviewed one of favourite bands in a sort of shock last-minute who'd-a-thunk-it scenario

* gone "wheeeeee" with regards above

I can witter about that one now (and don't think I won't) but I'm planning to write it up on here properly and interminably, in a way that no sensible editor would print. Which will be sort of emancipating. They've done that for me before anyway, making me break free from the shackles of supposed creative endeavour that's actually like a prison of the mind, man. When I used to go and see them and jump about and shout and smile, all the other nonsense I was embroiled in that had to do with seeing bands and writing about them and trying to talk to them when they just wanted to go back to bed seemed utterly superfluous.

I suppose I wish I'd had the balls to interview them when I had the chance for one of the mags I used to write for - which I might have linked but there is no trace online of its brief life except mentions of its demise. I might have been able to write about them in the way I wanted to, but then again it would probably have turned out bad. I almost don't want to write about them at all. It spoils it somewhat. I have to start justifying myself - which is hard in this case as they're almost a guilty pleasure - and it's just a lot of bollocks. But yes.

But yes! It's not often you feel like you get the chance to tie up a very long sort of shoelace-thin but trailing loose end like this. I probably couldn't have done it a few years ago. My problem with interviews - well, one of the many - is that I can't bear to come out of them thinking I came across as a knob. It's a pretty sterile environment, these days, and I'm uncomfortable and awkward. The whole 'never meet your heroes' thing implies 'because they'll be crushingly disappointing and boringly human and not like they fell out of the sky at all', but it's so much more likely that you will disappoint them... and they have no expectation of you to start with. You can feel utterly negated by a dismissive glance from someone you admire. I know, I'm too susceptible to the whole myth of it all, but then I always wanted to be. Like a stupithead.

Fortunately, I came out with most of my dignity intact; and as immature as it may be, with the hint of a sense that they could actually have fallen out of the sky still in place too. It wasn't a very good interview, I don't think, but things were said into dictaphone, and although they

* got up and wandered about the room occasionally

* sniggered

* sighed deeply

...somehow it didn't seem personal.

Almost anything you build up to be a big deal is stunningly prosaic when it happens, but I never find that disappointing - it fascinates me how that works, as if your brain dumps a load of calmative chemicals to enable you to deal with it. This thing had spent years deflating in any case, but it was still kind of special. I never thought it'd ever happen, and that always gives you a bit of a celebratory feeling, giving rise to noisy TWU-bothering singing upon getting home. The staggeringly normal feeling of the moments you think will be otherworldly is actually sort of lovely. It's uniquely pleasant after the anxiety that precedes it. I think it's the element of surreality that you get with it. I don't know. But I did sit there and smile like a fool. Part of my pleasedness must have come from the fact that I do care a tiny bit less now if people think I am a fool. A tiny tiny bit. They aren't as important to me as they were, but they were important enough that they'll always have that resonance for me. So... yeah. It was daunting, but they were fine, and I was so relieved I was nearly giddy.

I got them to sign something - I've only ever got one other autograph for myself, because he was such a thoroughly amiable bloke. This - I don't know, I'm strangely unmoved by the thing that's now stuck on the wall by my desk with three absolutely illegible signatures on it, even as it pleases me to look at it. Oh - no I'm not, I am a bit moved. I just thought about what it means, and what it would have meant if I'd had it four years ago. I suppose it is a belated sign-off on a part of my life. A really good part. In parts. A sign of happy times.

They're playing on my birthday, in a venue I've seen them in twice, which is soon going to be turned into offices torn down. Good God. I will need wheeling home.

Once I've transcribed the thing and finished kicking myself for how terrible I sound and the questions I didn't ask, I'll write it up here. I suppose I should try and use it as some sort of line, marking the end of me writing sentences like the previous one, but those sorts of lines tend to be a load of unrealistic arse, like some genetically-modified monster of an ultra-new year resolution. Maybe you're just supposed to come to terms with your own imperfections. Man.

Ugh. What a thought.

Paedo's out (I have been waiting all my life for a pun such as this)

Whoops. I just got a bit carried away with the labels. I have so many as to render them quite useless. Still, an inability to file is a sign of a creative mind. It is.

I did write a thing about the present prisony fiasco with regards that big old paedo, but I don't want to immediately alienate everyone, even if I'm going to alienate some by not writing about it. I might just find someone I agree with and link to them. Oh bugger it, I'll fillet some bits out.

1) Actually it's not actually illegal to just be a paedophile because it's not illegal to fancy children, only to act upon it, which makes you a paedophile who is a sex offender. I wish the media would stop being so lazy on that point. Actually. It's important.

2) Mumble mumble are people who watch nasty child pron actually dangerous in the most literal sense so if we're talking about only the most dangerous criminals that bloke doesn't necessarily qualify does he mumble murfle I think I left a thing over there and have to go now.

3) If they're worried about what nasty crime will be committed next necessitating the lock-up of people for whom there is no room at the inn, I would bet dosh that it's going to be some manner of severe damage to said blokey, who was clever enough to go on all the telly with his face and say that the judge was just doing his job. Get the police guard off Jade's house post haste, they're lining up with leftover fireworks. (I can't watch BB anymore although I suppose I'll watch Shilpa win tomorrow. It's all too ghastly. Whatever those unpleasant women did, their lives are now going to be ruined, and it's rather disproportionate considering they weren't being any more idiotic than most of the idiots you find who aren't on telly.)

Much as I can barely bear the Indie at the moment (it won't stop until we are all hanging our heads in shame so hard we get whiplash), I had to make a knowing face and say 'uh huh' at its front page today. Scroll down for list of people who've been banged up recently, including the naked rambler and people who've refused to pay taxes or fines for political reasons.

Oh and I was also interested to read this, or attempt to read it. I got through a paragraph and a half and then my entire head started to spontaneously warm and sweat reservoired in my ears. For the love of all that is holy, what is that woman taking? I mean, I thought my prose was a bit florid and hectic and such, but compared to her I am Emily goddam Dickinson.

Fave new world

Blast. I seem to have been gently forced to upgrade. I don't care if it's better, change blows. But really, couldn't they just let me use their old machinery for as long as I liked? It's not like there are health and safety issues. Grump.

The trivialities of the day!

- Dog stole my remaining pain au chocolat from where it nestled on the kitchen worktop, wrapped snugly in plasticy stuff. That beast. He is becoming roly. He is sleek enough to look at, and that narrow collie waist looks almost worrying next to the booming Nottweiler ribs, but when he sits down you can see all his fur sort of ruck up like a carpet. If you had the strength, you could probably lift him by grasping a handful of dogflesh almost anywhere on him. His actual surface area must be vast. Still, it's just a bit of not-unhealthy flab. He has an extraordinarily boring and frugal dry diet, which is why he puts his head in the bin and steals patisserie fare when he can. Ah well. As long as he's not anywhere near Rusty standard (how did those ruminants ever get him back? They will only feed him pies! Stupid country).

- Did I mention that my non-Pod has niftily merged Bjork's 'Greatest' with Take That's 'Greatest'? Well, it has, and it is still amusing.

- What, oh what is the use of Bloc Party? Their music is ugly.

- Why do Bowling For Soup still have a career? Their music is uglier, but at least it knows and sort of acknowledges it's ugly, whereas Bloc Party's music thinks it is beautiful. This, as superbly explained by Stephen Fry, is the worst kind of ugly.

- I was going to put in a link to Fry's brilliantly brilliant 'Room 101' performance featuring the above explanation, but ten minutes of searching through a MOUNTAIN of SHITE on YouTube has yielded nothing. Why do they not make YouTube search better? Why must I wade through a thousand bits of cobbled-together, crappy-stills-set-to-cringey-music-to-no-end-whatsoever bilge before still not finding what I want? Warum?

I would put YouTube into Room 101. I don't care if it enables me to see hilarious things. (I'm not putting links to any hilarious things either. Grump grump grump.)

- Isn't it sort of nice that Big Brovaz have another (not terrible) song out when everyone had chalked them up as an example of how evil record companies build up young naive types and then destroy them?

- I have been watching too much of the music television.

- But I am allowed! since I did write 47,121 words. 6,000 or so of them went in a second in a meeting the other day, and I didn't bat an eyelid. That is how mature I am. Naturally I put laxatives in everyone's coffee because the ruthless purge of those innocent words needed to be marked in some way, and it seemed as good a way as any.

All that's left now is some tinkering and filling-in and stuff. I kind of want to do it again. It's sort of hard to let go of. There is still so much to say. And it all needs to be said by me.

- Word of the day is 'jejune'. It's almost onomatopaeic, in that when you say it sounds like a sneer, and thus beautifully true to its meaning in its sound.

- After months of languishing in the kind of hip hoppily baggy jeans I would previously have hesitated to wear while decorating, I have today at last purchased some tight items for my legs which make me feel sort of human again. And they were nine pounds and look like I paid ooh at least 15.99 for them. Yes! And some grey trousery things which look lovely from the rear but like they're crying out for the subtle bulk of male genitalia at the front. But that's what you get on the high street. Obviously they haven't heard about all the oestrogen in the water. Etc.

- I can't go into all the reasons 'Creep' is terrible right now, but I will do at some point, because it needs to be said. It is so very poor. I hate it when people make bad horror films because the genre gets enough grief as it is. And it makes me squirm when I get the feeling that the makers of a bad horror film have made it thinking "yeah, put this and this in and have this happen, that'll be scary", when in fact scaring an audience is an awesomely subtle and meaningful psychological undertaking which requires love and care and intelligence and so shut up with your awful heap of crap that should have got laughed out of the office where they decide what horror films should be allowed to be made.

Note: there are seven films called 'Creep' on IMDB. Not that you can infer anything from that.

- Oh look, now I have to put labels on. I feel vaguely uncomfortable. It seems rather a vain thing to do. (Like blogging isn't. Oh yes, I'll take this family-sized package of vanity, but woah! easy on the tiny toddler dish of vanity there, slick.) I mean, is anyone really going to come here and feverishly look up everything my dog has ever done? I suppose the nice people who come here when I actually write something relatively serious deserve the chance to filter out the rest of the tripe. Guys, this is for you.

Idiots in idiocy shock

But first: 28,004. Rock! Only another 10,000 or so to go I reckon. Tra la la. And some interminable tinkering obviously.

So I stopped watching Big Brother because my telly broke, although I would probably have stopped anyway as it was becoming painful. I don't find people being horrible and humiliating each other or themselves entertaining even when it's fiction, let alone reality. Now telly has been cleverly reset in a way only someone who's not a techno-arse can manage (thank you), and I'm going to be drawn back to it just to see, just to seeee if those awful women are as bad as the massive furore suggests. It's hopeless.

It's difficult to pin down whether or not the fairly obvious bullying of Shilpa Shetty is specifically racist or not, but oh the issues, the issues it raises. 21 MPs have signed a Commons motion condemning it, and Channel 4 have refused to make any proper comment beyond a generic one. The former probably haven't seen the programme, and the latter are going to milk the controversy beyond the point at which it's acceptable for a show which is always going to seek controversy. Both stink. You do have to jump on racism very hard as soon as it raises its head, but you've got to establish that it is racism first, otherwise you are making matters worse in much the same way as women who cry rape do. Channel 4 are going the other way, and getting very close to being irresponsible.

Part of my problem is that all the howling about racism rather excuses the fact that she's been called a cunt by that nothing-boy Jade Goody is porking - so sexism's OK - and undermines the fact of the bullying itself, which isn't acceptable behaviour either (although it might be inevitable in the BB house; they did do it to that poor fucked-up bloke last year... oh... and he was Pakistani. But that's probably a coincidence. He was dreadful. But still).

So I agree with maybe 20% of Germaine's argument - the rest of it is the usual naive crap that gives people credit for the kind of Machievellian plotability that only a sociopath could sustain. I really don't believe she's at all manipulative - she's got no need to get the British public on her side to further her career, she doesn't care if she wins or loses, and she didn't know anything about the show before she went on it. I've rarely seen anyone appear to be so genuine on there, celebrity or otherwise. Thus, Germaine, I need to say my love is eternal but do shut up, you intermittently horrendously erroneous windbag.

I think the racism's there, but it's the fat end of the wedge. It's just oozed out of the general nasty garbage bag (yes, I hate Americanisms too, but 'rubbish' just doesn't convey the kind of rancid goo I need here) of hatred that the other idiots have for the woman. If you're a moron and you find someone objectionable for something specific and fleeting, then you find larger, permanent, personal things about them to hang your objections on - a pair of specs, a big arse, a funny accent. It's because you can't quite articulate your objections in and of themselves - they have to be attached to something. Specific objections are subtle and fiddly and require a bit of analysis - vulnerable personal attributes are like big child-sized building blocks you can grab onto and throw about. Plus, morons think hate is fun. It's like bingo. This is why they don't do it alone. It's a communal, bonding activity, and a bind against the dark suspicion somewhere in the echoing cellar of their brain that the world might find them pointless.

Shilpa is very un-pointless - she seems to be a great example of humanity. She's immensely successful, poised and cultured and well-mannered and beautiful and a lot nicer than you'd expect. The others have had varying degrees of success on the basis on not much talent or beauty and must know how limited it is. They might have some subconscious sense of how 'totally and utterly ordinary' they are by comparison, and how beastly and base they are. Maybe they suspect Shilpa knows it, and so they're just childishly going all out to prove how very horrid they are to her, in that sheep-as-a-lamb sort of way. Or they might just be galloping gormless oafs with no idea of how to treat people.

I don't think they can justify their behaviour on the basis of Shilpa's behaviour, as I think they are doing to themselves, even if Shilpa has been annoying. They're reverting to the lowest possible insults in the face of someone who outclasses them so comprehensively that they can't digest it. But I had to laugh when I saw a clip in which Danielle Lloyd, a dead-eyed Scouse twit who never puts a 'T' on the end of anything when a simple Gordon Brown-esque unhinging of the chin after a vowel will suffice, slobbered "She carn even speak English proplee!"

I suppose I should feel sorry for her, as her flimsy career will be in ruins and she'll probably need to pay for her own protection, which she will need because a lot of other ignorant bastards will want to beat her up. A most mature response, especially when most of them will be the kind who regularly spout much worse in the pub. But for the time being, I'm just finding her a nasty little girl.

The trouble is that the wilfully ignorant often seem to claim a sort of psuedo-racial immunity from criticism. When Jackiey Goody had that scrap with Shilpa over mispronouncing her name, she bellowed "If I can't pronounce your name it's not my fault". Why isn't it? Because no one should ever expect you to make a tiny bit of effort to get someone's name right, so you can show them that most basic level of respect? Well, not if they're foreign and have a silly name. It's their fault for having a silly name, and you don't need to apologise for not being able to get your flapping gob around it. Or it's just the fault of the universe in general. The universe in general cops for a lot of shit from the stupid.

Nothing is ever an idiot's fault. It's just this automatic failsafe against criticism and means nothing, beyond "you are not allowed to criticise me because I am a poor bear of very little brain". This can be augmented by insistences of shit childhoods, drug problems, other problems, other nasty people, etc, but it usually stands up on its own as this impenetrable wall of ignorance. But you can always make an effort, however intellectually challenged you are - you can always try. That elevates you, that you're aware of your shortcomings and refuse to offload them onto others - if you can't pronounce a name, you are contrite about it, not hostile. Why would you be hostile? How can you justify it? You don't need to - it's not your fault, so fuck them. It's just always easier to be permanently on the edge of defensive hostility, and to absolve yourself of responsibility for that and everything else, with the get-out-of-jail-free card of your idiocy.

I can't wait to hear the justification Jade and Danielle and Jo will have for this. I suspect Jo will be horrified and will repent enormously in an ohmigod-what-have-I-become sort of way - she'll wring her hands over ever going into the house in the first place and apologise profusely, having realised she does still want to be famous and liked after all. Danielle will just dig herself in deeper with more twittery, and try and justify it, and flutter her lashes, and then Teddy Sheringham will dump her, or defend her, or defend her and then dump her. Jade will just shout that her dad was black, and then go into hiding, then make a kind of mockery of a Kate Moss-style comeback, possibly by being photographed snorting coke. Shilpa will just go back to her great life in India where she is adored and venerated by all, and hypocritical self-loathing newspapers will call us all cunts.

Then stupid people will continue to be rewarded by society for staying stupid, remaining infants, and causing any amount of damage for which we don't hold them to account. Maybe this is a good start on that score. I try to believe in freedom for everyone to be what they want to be, but I find it so hard not to be militant about idiots. I think they're the biggest problem in the world, and idiocy knows no boundaries of race or nationality. It's only lucky for us that they're too stupid to unite, otherwise we'd be fucked. It's bad enough as it is. (It would be totally inappropriate of me to mention for example suicide bombers at this point, and to speculate that the most significant thing about them is not their race or nationality or religion but their rampant and self-justifying and dangerously energising and self-perpetuating and contagious idiocy. So I won't.)

I might write a book. And then go into hiding.

Links! that I am too rubbish to work into the post properly (I'm not very good at this blogging lark - I should make an effort and elevate myself, or something)

Uniquely British 'not-quite-racism'

Good point, really

Ha ha. Yahoo news is no better than Jackiey "Shoopa... Shuffpa" Goody

Everybody in the house of love

A month in the new place and the dog has already broken a window trying to eat cats in the garden. The windows are original sash ones, which is great except for the fact that the frames would make a good cheesecake base. This offsets the guilt considerably.

I'm writing about spas and culture and politics and how no one ever needs to listen to Shania Twain. Music reviews for a frilly website for overgrown girlies = a most satisfying doss. Where once I poured my soul into music criticism for monkey nuts, now I hack with glorious 3-star indifference for decent money. It's like victory over the false promises of glory that keep you down. Yessir.

Today I had tea in proper cups and ate homebaked cake, and bitched about literature, which was gratifying. We swopped books. It was curiously pleasing to watch mine go off to new and interested parties, at least the one in particular that I had liked but that left me feeling somewhat hollow. I acquired nine new ones which I want to read all of all at once. I seemed to end up with an armful of misery, drugs and filth. Excellent.

What is also gratifying:

1) I edited a book this month which will be published and everything. A decent book. Which I edited at a creative level instead of just giving it a technical Brazilian. This was very pleasing indeed.

2) The new Goldfrapp album, which is just as Goldfrappy as the other two only slightly more so. There's this one delicate muffled piano pounding bit that's half-buried in the midst of one second verse that I would just like to loop in my head indefinitely, just behind my eyebrows.

3) One of the books that happened to be there today for the picking was raved about to me the other day by a 19-year-old phone services salesboy, who came to anoint me with free weekend calls and stayed for two cups of tea. So I picked it. I had to really. It was such a satisfying coincidence. He said it changed his life. If that's the case then God knows what he was before he was knocking on strangers' doors in the snow, but let's not be too cynical. He was a nice, bright boy. I could almost have threatened his career with my body.

4) Dog. Dog always gratifying, especially when making hard gangster types pale on the bus.

5) As karmic Jiffy-bag reward for putting up with pain-in-arse PRs bothering me to review 'The Best of Our Tune with Simon Bates' (in all fucking honesty), I am being sent gifts. An Arctic Monkeys pin badge for one, but for better than that, a fat block of Belle & Sebastian Post-Its. I couldn't give a rat's ass for Belle & Sebastian, but each Post-It says

Step Into My Office, Baby
_____________________
_____________________
_____________________

on it which is enough for me.

What is not gratifying:

1) The first spa treatment I reviewed was an extraordinary Austrian detox treatment, which involved being poached gently for a while in hot fragrant water and then being tilted from side to side to stimulate metabolism. It was a marvellous experience only marred by the fact that it flushed the Evil Abdomen Ague of Yore from its foetid cave in, I don't know, the abdomen of my subconscious or wherever, and now I can hardly eat pizza without doubling over and groaning theatrically. Banishing the Evil Abdomen Ague of Yore took time, patience and money before, and I'm determined to use none of these now that it's come galumphing back. Just peppermint tea and hilariously unrealistic screaming-grin optimism.

2) Either the central heating is going through some sort of midwinter crisis (who knew it was possible to live better than in a charming neglected terraced house with shitty gas heaters alone? I'm not missing it and nor are my pre-arthritic joints), or it's so fucking cold that the cold is just eating up all the heat. Or both.

3) I'm going to have to get a permanent flatmate when my temporary one, my old mate the accountant, leaves after a month here. Can't I get some kind of special rent-discount for being a fickle hermitous misanthrope who vacuums seldom and yet can't stand it when the knives are the wrong way up in the drainer? (Blades down, people. Everything else up so you can tell what it is. And put the fucking teaspoons in the smaller bit at the front that practically says 'teaspoons go here', or so help me, I will disembowel you with this very spatula.)

4) Having enjoyed sex with people who love me or at least want to have sex with me, several times a week for the last three years, I'm suddenly celibate as a pet lizard. Actually there have been several non-sex spells in that time, but for some reason this one is especially bitey. It's all the socialising. There's no other explanation for it. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop that is willing to do disgusting things to me for an evening. At least not without complication. Alas. I've just had the most adult and healthy and satisfying complication for 18 months, and now in order to maintain the delicate balance of the universe I require something otherly. I suppose I'll just have to channel it into my work. How bastard dull.

5) I've got to find out where the tax office is so I can deliver whatever laughably passes for my tax return by hand on Tuesday. Dig it.

Tomorrow A-ha are doing an instore gig at HMV on Oxford Street. (Yes, it's very gratifying to be back here in the land where the interesting event roams free.) Morten Harket still looks exactly as he did in 1986 only a bit more rugged. He has aged like a good pair of jeans. A remarkably beautiful man who I should probably not be gazing upon in my present state of graceless bodice-ripping tension. I'm expecting to see Cliff Richard lurking in the crowd, primed to abduct the Nordic Adonis in order to bathe in his blood and gain ETERNAL LIFE.

Then I'm going speed-networking, probably with business cards printed at that shopping centre. I'm an urchin at their lustrous marble table.

Putting mouth where face is

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

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

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

"There's a hooker on the bed!"

"Hello!"

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

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

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

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