Skip's Acorn Treasury

In The Bleak Midwinter

2012-01-27T11:00:00.001Z

At the start of this month, I was sat in a log cabin by a loch. The rest of England was jamming twitter, remarking that it was so windy they'd seen their car drift by the patio. I was snug.

It was my boyfriend's idea. He quite fancied going up to Fort William - and it turned out to be a lovely thing to do. The sleeper train leaves at 9pm and gets in at 9am which means you can actually enjoy getting drunk in the buffet car, rather than crawling into a rattling bed at 2am, and staggering hatefully out of it a 7am cursing your head and the civet cat's piss coffee. Instead, come 8am we were sat eating croissants and chugging through snowy mountains.

Using the internet, I'd arranged for a taxi to take us to that castle by Loch Ness you see in the postcards. It seemed like "A Thing To Do". It was all dour fun, in its own bleak way, but you can probably imagine what four hours in a cab were like when the driver's opening gambit was "No, don't get me started on politics..."

It was like a primer on Scottish Political Theory, mixed in with some caustic remarks about how hard it was to find employment in the area if you've done "a wee bit of youthful GBH", and a couple of laden remarks about how nice it was when English people paid a tip. There was also a very long silence after he asked "Are you two... brothers?".

Anyway, two days sat in a log cabin, walking along the shores of a loch until you could chew the rain, and then back home for soup. I think that's what's nice about being old and happy.

Soul Food

2012-01-23T18:28:00.001Z

My boyfriend is a statistic. You see on the news about graduates applying for hundreds and hundreds of jobs without getting an interview... well, he's that statistic, plugging hopelessly away at a job market where suddenly even a trainee junior assitant intern (unpaid) must have an MBA and fluent Mandarin.

His first job vanished while he was on holiday. He came back to find the office literally gone. For a while he washed dishes at the local pub. And now, finally, he's got a job saving the world in... Manchester.

Now, I love Manchester. It's a wonderful city. And Salford Quays, like any shiny sky palace by the water, has a certain bleak grandeur. But my boyfriend's flat is in Salford – the bit in-between.

When we went up to view it, it seemed nice enough. Horrible street, but the flat itself had been the victim of a gay decorator with more money than sense – an explosion of halogen, chrome, wood and granite, beams exposed, surfaces angled and a Juliet rail dangling over Salford's only tree. It was, in other words, lovely – and the flatmate very laid-back. Mind you, when there's a remote control for your curtains, why wouldn't you be laid-back?

The snag came when I visited for the weekend. It turned out that last time, the laidback flatmate had done “rental tidying” - whipping up a cupboard jumble of ashtrays and magazines that now spilled over everything. It was filthy. Not in a bohemian way but in a “I'm not sure I'd even piss in that toilet” way.

Stuff dangled from the ceilings – some of the wires had held up a fish tank. Others had held up a sling. One of the mirrors in the bathroom was apparently “two-way”, but was luckily so filthy that it no longer worked.

So we spent the weekend tidying and bleaching until it reeked of swimming pool. It's made me cheerier about the cat-hair squalor I live in. Much cheerier. I may take the next year off cleaning.

Salford does have some charms. We've found a Polish Shop that sells 12 flavours of Vodka. But that's about it, really. We sat outside a drag casino waiting for a bus for 20 minutes in rain so fierce even the old ladies tutted, their knuckles tightening on their shopping trolleys.

Mostly, we walked around the Arndale Centre, buying cleaning products and talking brightly about how we were going “to make this work”. And by last thing on Sunday night, we'd kind of done it. It still looked like a brightly sparkling recycling bin, but you could at least touch things without feeling like you were in one of those adverts for “the hidden germs that lurk in your home”.

Come Monday morning I woke up and it felt nice. I even managed to walk back from the shower without my bare feet crunching on a domestic gravel of breadcrumbs, dust and cigarette ash.

Back in the bedroom, my boyfriend was waiting for me. “I've made us coffee,” he said. “We've got five minutes. We can sit in bed and drink it.”

My boyfriend is brilliant. He can salvage any situation. This was, I thought, as I picked up my coffee and sat down on the bed, going to work after all.

Which is when the bed collapsed.

Countryside

2012-01-20T10:34:00.000Z

My parents now live an odd, yet beautiful place. There's a cafe on the seafront, there are regular steamtrains, and the cat loves sitting in the garden staring with lazy, curious hunger at nothing in particular.

All these things are good... but, after a few days, it gets to you a bit. My mother has started behaving oddly. Always a bit "old-fashioned" in her views (describing the local pharmacist as "a lovely little brown fellow, as chocolate as you like. What? They're always laughing those people..."), she's started saying some things which... well, are actually racist. We were watching Countryfile (I know!) the other day and, when a Polish expert on canal-side microbiology was interviewed, she announced loudly, "Disgusting! Why couldn't that job have gone to someone local? Eh? Eh?"

It's not excusable, but it is at last explicable. I discovered the fire bucket was full of pamphlets from those weird political parties you hear about but don't-quite-believe-in. With names like "Campaign for a cleaner britain". One of the leaflets was about "Overcrowded UK". You don't get things like this in the city - but in the countryside (which is bloody empty) these parties are everywhere. My mother doesn't actually read them (her glaucoma is so advanced she no longer reads), but, as she's lighting the fire with the damn things, she glances at the headlines and it confirms Her Worst Suspicions about the world.

While it's rather wonderful here, it's odd like that. There's a sign on the local charity shop which says "YOUR HOSPICE - YOU'LL BE SURPRISED" which sums it up, really. After a week here, I've started doing the "country laugh" where you'll finish a sentence ("It's warm today, isn't it?") with a little jovial chuckle. This lovely little town is full of people greeting each other with the country laugh ("Musn't grumble - hee hee hee") and pottering about like Second Victims on an ITV3 show. I'm watching a lot of ITV3. That and property shows.

I do rather love it here. But I'd also quite like... yes, I'd very much like to go home soon. Still, mustn't grumble, eh? ha ha.

How oddly marvellous

2012-01-12T16:12:00.000Z

Two books of mine have been nominated for the BFSA Award. Which is... lovely. Coo.

How the Vampires ruined Easter

2011-12-23T14:35:00.001Z

The story about Tim Minchin having a song about Jesus cut from an ITV show reminds me of a time, long ago, when I was launching a BBC website about Vampires one Easter.

It had been live 15 minutes before I got bollocked. I got bollocked for everything, but this bollocking was from someone very high up in iBBC.co.uk who'd been on a management training course I can only imagine was called the "Deep fried chocolate shit sandwich". The phone call went like this:

iBOSS: "Hey! Love the design of your vampires site.... but I need you to take it down immediately."

ME: "What?"

iBOSS: "It's a lovely design and great content, but it just seems inappropriate and culturally insensitive. We can't have content about Vampires going out at this time of year."

ME: "Sorry?"

iBOSS: "It's great to see such innovation, but I'm afraid Easter is the wrong time for the subject matter of Vampires. In fact, if it was done by someone else, I could call them deliberately offensive to Christians."

ME: "What? Wait. Jesus wasn't a vampire!"

iBOSS: "You're a very clever person, but I must say that you are now twisting my words. But yes, we just cannot cause any offence through the association between Jesus and Vampires."

ME: "What association?"

iBOSS: "Your association. It's very clear. The BBC just cannot broadcast anything to do with Vampires at Easter. It's a rule."

ME: "Is it?"

iBOSS: "Well of course it is, obviously."

ME: *thumbing through the Radio Times* "Then why is BBC Two showing a season of Hammer films over the Bank Holiday weekend?" I list the titles of the films, ending with "...and Taste the Blood of Dracula on Easter Monday."

iBOSS: "oh. Well, perhaps I was mistaken. But anyway, just thought I should call and say what a lovely design it was. Well done."

*click*"

Tinsel

2011-12-23T10:33:00.000Z

Last night we went to David Hoyle's thing at the RVT - which was kind of amazing, ish. He ranted about the arms race while dressed as a christmas tree. Then a fat drag queen stapled tinsel to her arm.

"Don't look," said the boyfriend. "There's so much blood." I didn't look.

There was to be a special performance by an ex-porn star. The ex-porn star has now got fat, which probably means he's happy. He's relaunching himself as an actor. He stood around doing appalling mime for ten minutes, ate some cold baked beans, and then rammed some fairy lights up his bum.

"It's no way into the National Youth Theatre" sighed the boyfriend.

A drunk man put his coat on to go home. But didn't. He just stood for an hour, slightly to the right of the stage, staring at us, frozen. It was like the sign language interpreter got stage fright. Odd.

Ridiculous Development Projects #1: Blake's 7 2000

2011-12-13T14:40:00.001Z

I've been involved in a lot of things in my time - but since the department I worked for, then the department after that, then the whole building has now been shut down, perhaps I can do occasional filler on "Projects I worked on that never happened."

(At the moment, I'm too busy to leave the house - unless it's Tesco).

So, a long time ago, a department I worked in was doing a lot of development work. By which I mean "not making anything". (They actually managed to make one television pilot - it was a CGI game show with punters bombing cities in planes. Sadly, they handed in the first show the week of September 11th and little more was heard from it...).

Anyway, at the time, this department was full of telly people (who didn't make any television) and online people (who made an awful lot of websites). You can guess the pecking order. Every now and then online people were summoned by the telly people to discuss "future projects". As I was running a science fiction website at the time, I got the summons fairly regularly.

I sat down at this meeting.

BOSS #1: "So. We're going to do Blake's 7!"

ME: "Uh, but..." (I was never any good at brainstorming. Never say "but-"). "You don't own the rights."

BOSS #1: "We'll get them. Where's Jason?" (Jason was Boss#2 - whose name has been changed.)

JASON arrived late (Company tactic - always arrive late to a meeting. You prove you're most important if you then ask for a summary of what you've missed.)

JASON: "So kids, what've I missed?"

BOSS #1: "We're going to remake Blake's 7."

JASON: "Amazing. I'm just off to the loo."

JASON is gone a while. There is a reason for this. JASON had a massive drugs habit. Everyone knew about it. I later found out who his dealer was - he was one of those people in the department of who you thought "well, what do you do?".

JASON comes back five minutes later, glassy eyed and sniffing and sits down.

BOSS #1 launches into a passionate pitch for why he wants to do Blake's 7.

JASON nods for a bit, then...

JASON: "Yeah yeah yeah. But I'm thinking.... what it's missing is Gambling! and Lesbians!"

BOSS #1 fears JASON. We all do. I often vomit before meetings with him. We both nod nervously.

JASON: "Come on, yeah! Let's mix it up! Blake's 7! Gambling! Lesbians! But let's make it Century 21 and 360!"

BOSS #1 falls silent. His dreams aren't yet shattered, but they've tipped off the tabletop of ambition and are heading towards the hard flooring of despair.

JASON then glares at me. His nostils flare - revealing bushels of flecked white nasal hair. He is clearly giving me ten more seconds before the shouting begins.

So I come up with my big idea. My big "oh fuck it, he's so off his tits, he won't remember this meeting."

As a matter of fact, I'm wrong. S-Club Blake's 7 is in development for several months. Then they realise they don't own the rights.

From The Red Carpet

2011-11-15T00:18:00.000Z

Okay. I'll admit it, I'm fascinated:

I've been wondering for over a year now what the deal is with From The Red Carpet. What is it... doing? I understand the Orange ads (especially now the Rio one's gone forever) - but I can't see the point of From The Red Carpet. Nice lady in a frock yells pleasantries at celebs from a distance cut together with bits of the trailer.

In the early days, it was just Kim Taylor Bennett and us -

In many ways, those were the golden days, when Kim would ask Gerald Butler if he'd like to take her down, and he'd blush, while everyone else in the cinema would wonder how much longer their popcorn would last.

But those golden days are no more. Episode 21 was when it all changed. When From The Red Carpet sold out. All of a sudden, they were sponsored by M&Ms. Kim was relegated to sidekick with all the grace of a kidnap victim putting on a brave face for the hostage video while two CGI chocolates banter at her.

The two elements are grafted together with all the subtlety of the American version of Battle Of The Planets - in the latest episode, Kim is left sat alone in a sidecar, mugging emptily away while her M&M masters work out what to say to her. She doesn't even have a name any more. She's now just "Woman In Frock Who Jamie Bell Can't Wait To Get Away From".

No. I just can't work it out.

Electricity in my teeth

2011-11-10T12:07:00.003Z

Man In seaside cafe: "There's something in my house. They've been using my electricity, I think it's the Police at nights. It's the television. It gives me ailments. If you use the national health dentist they put pellets in your teeth which the satellites pick up. I am suing the government for two billion pounds. I've been reckoning it up."

Woman behind counter: "Yes, well, you won't mind paying £2.85 for that tea, then."

How to miss a train

2011-11-07T11:36:00.001Z

I used to be very angry. It's probably because I had a very stressful job and let it get to me. These days, I'm not really angry, unless I've got a deadline or I've discovered a mug from the dishwasher has been unloaded incorrectly.

And then... on Saturday, I made myself miss a train. I left my flat to get to Paddington. I had an hour before my train. You can walk it in that time.

I had several opportunities to catch that train. When I got onto the underground and realised they were running that special Saturday service where they switch off most of the lines - I could have turned around and walked away. Got a cab. Walked. Hired a rickshaw.

Instead I tried to get to Paddington using the Metropolitan Line. Not since Sherlock Holmes found the Bruce Partington Plans has anyone used the Metroplitan Line to get anywhere. But I had a go. Sitting next to me on the train was a woman rocking and crying "I'm going to miss it, fuckit fuckit fuckit". She was actually sobbing. I nearly comforted her, but she glared at me.

Oddly the time I'd reached Baker Street, I was in almost the same state. Like I'd caught it off her. I still had half an hour. I could still walk to Paddington in half an hour. But no. I decided, against advice from a nice man on the platform... I decided to catch a bus.

You know those people... on buses... who the driver makes an announcement about "We're not moving until the man with the ikea bag gets off"... I was that person. Suddenly, my Oyster card had expired, or something. And I was just stood there, like an angry mad thing, saying "Honestly!" and rolling my eyes. At an empty bus stop. As though I expected London to care. London doesn't care. That's its charm.

So I tried to catch a tube to Paddington again. And I missed my train by a minute.

The lesson here is that, next time it all gets a bit much, I'll either get a cab, or actually just try, rather than simply start shaking like a washing machine full of stress and socks.

The other thing that puts it into perspective - slow train journey, changing at Bristol Parkway and all, is that I was trying to get to Taunton. Which - the night before - had just had a horrific traffic pile up.

"Sorry I'm late," I said to my Dad on the phone. "It's been a nightmare."

"No, no it hasn't," said my Dad, and got on with banging nails into his new shed.

Happy Anniversary

2011-10-29T13:35:00.001Z

My boyfriend and I don't know exactly when we first met. This fact is puzzling. I still find typing "My boyfriend and I" really, really weird. It still feels strange, and also it's an oddly formal phrase, as though we open supermarkets and christen cruise liners together.

Anyway, he arrived in my life one mystery day last October. We do know when our second date was - we bumped into each other at the Trafalgar Square Hate Crimes Vigil. Because what romance really needs is to be surrounded by a lot of gay men trying to look solemn, not check grindr, and not set their hair on fire while wondering if it's rude to slope off before the inevitable Brian Paddick.

So, in the spirit of it being a year and all, we went along to the Trafalgar Square Hate Crimes thing again last night. Now, forgive me if my tone's all wrong. I think hate crime is ridiculous - I can't imagine disliking someone so much that I'd fairly casually murder them. Not even chuggers. And yet, for some peculiar reason, it seems to keep happening to gays. It happens to a lot of other people, but I think it's okay to have one night a year when we feel cross that it's happening to us. Although, frankly, every year the stories get worse. What with a barman being set on fire and America having cornered the market in humiliating students to death... FUN!

Anyway, we went to the vigil. There was the inevitable Long-Speech-By-The-Relative-Of-Harvey-Milk about how we should hate hate and love love and banish dark vibrations with light energy; a wonderful (short) speech by Elly Barnes about how she was actually doing something about it every bloody day; and some dreadful anti-hate-crime rap by what appeared to be a white geography teacher doing the end-of-term party. What began a couple of years ago as a nearly spontaneous outpouring of rage has become as dull as a trip to an airport. Perhaps this is how we show that we're solemn - if we're prepared to stand in the rain for an hour listening to Harvey Milk's interminable nephew then we can't be the careless flibberty-gibbets you think we are. Mind you, if next year we could just have Elly Barnes, that would be very nice, thank you.

We stood and hugged and set our candle holders on fire. Whether it was because I had a terrible cold or I was quietly moved, I appeared to be crying a little. Then, when they announced Brian Paddick, we got the bus home.

"Happy anniversary," said my boyfriend as he put on clown make-up and went out to a Hallowe'en rave. I stayed at home and watched Larry Sanders until I fell asleep, very happy.

The True Cost Of A Castle

2011-09-23T17:52:00.001Z

This post is about being given things and getting rid of them... and, at the bottom, how much unread books cost you...

A while ago, I muttered on here about trying to buy a new bike. Well, a reader on here gave me one. Yes, the lovely Hugh gave me an old mountain bike and I've been flying around town on it ever since. Which is just marvellous of them.

In a similar spirit, we had a party the other weekend where people brought along old books and DVDs and swapped them with other things. Less bring-and-buy, more give-and-take. Any books left over goes to charity. It was almost successful. Well, it was a lot of fun (we got drunk and ate cake), but taught me some interesting things about possessions.

Here goes:

PEOPLE LOVE BOOKS
They just do. A pile of spare Agatha Christies went in seconds. In fact, most of the crime fiction vanished. The literary fiction got tutted over - especially the more recent stuff (How The Beach and Brick Lane have gone out of fashion). The science fiction was either carried away instantly or sneered at loudly and longly (it is, actually, rather awkward trying to explain, at a distance of 20 years, exactly why I loved Greg Bear so much. As far as I can tell all his books ended with the world going explode).

But anyway - a book is a thing beloved and shared and tutted and picked over. They're not dead yet.

DVDs ARE THE VHS OF TODAY
When did DVDs stop being shiny things that we all loved massively? I was shocked when a friend announced he'd archived his entire collection onto a harddrive and was throwing them all out. Shocked and appalled... until I started going through my collection and ended up with a massive pile of things (CSI? Even for the tasty crime twink with nice hair? No). But what stunned me was that no-one wanted any of my DVDs (apart from a spare copy of Firefly). So, we took them to Cash Converters. Armfuls of them. Hundreds of pounds worth of shiny shiny discs... and got £18 for them. Sad, but then, unless it's rare, it's hardly even worth ebaying them. Isn't that odd? It's like they're obsolete. It's a good way of stopping me spend money buying more of the buggers. It's like my inner "50 quid at HMV" man died there and then.

I AM FICKLE
The nicest thing was admitting defeat. It actually felt liberating accepting that I will only ever like two Woody Allen films, that I will never finish a book by Angela Carter, or re-read London Fields. It's nice to look at things on shelves and think "crikey, when they released the X-Files on DVD the first time, they really got it right", or "Those reproduction Agatha Christie first editions look a lot nicer now that there's no Robert Bloody Browning near them". That said, there are still things on the shelf that I'm keeping as a badge of honour (I've suffered through Jude The Obscure. I want people to know this) or as a threat to my leisure time (Throwing away Ulysses is a step too far). It's also lovely having empty shelves... and knowing I'll fill them again.

AND FINALLY... I AM MEAN

Talking of cash, there's got to be a value to throwing things away.

Let's assume my flat is 300 cubic meters.

And let's take the average rental value of a flat in London to be £2k a month.
Some maths tells me that that's 24 grand a year for 300 Cubic meters. I get a bit confused here, and go "hrr, hrrr, hrrr", but I think that's £80 a cubic meter a year.

Let's take James Ellroy's The Dudley Smith trio (20 cms x 13 x 5), which clocks in at 0.0013 m3... 80 x 0.0013 tells me that that book costs 10 pence in rent a year. Every year it just sits on the shelf. And, as I've read 2/3rds of it, that 3p just hanging out there.

Taking this to extremes, a lego Castle takes up 0.036 m3 - which costs a whopping £2.88 a year.

And the cat, surprisingly, has a volume half that of a Lego castle. So she only need pay £1.50 a year.

I am now wondering about whether to introduce a levy on my boyfriend for being so damn tall.

Loving the Travelodge

2011-09-22T08:38:00.000Z

Good morning. I've just wasted £80, and I'm actually quite happy about it.

A few weeks ago I needed to book a hotel room next week for work. And, after about five goes at the Travelodge website finally managed it. I've never quite worked out what it is about their site, but at busy times I get the feeling their server throws bookings up in the air and then sees which ones stick. Anyway, on my second day and my third computer I finally managed to book a room for next week.

This morning, Travelodge emailed me to ask if I'd enjoyed my stay and my heart stopped. Of course, obviously, as some point during the booking-seven-times-stress-tastrophe I'd booked a room for the wrong night. Which is a terrible thing to find out and a waste of £80. But... better to find out now than next Monday. When it would be awful.

I like to think that, in a parallel world, there's another me who had a brilliant time in a Travelodge last night. Perhaps I met someone - ooh, in a bar, or something, and said "Would you like to come back to my hotel?". Which, even when it's the Travelodge, sounds classy. Although, what would you seduce them with - there's no minibar. There's not even a shortbread finger to break in two.

It's not the first time I've done this with Travelodge - during one of their £10 deals I accidentally booked my parents a room in Canaray Wharf. In fact, I bet there are thousands of ghost rooms spread across the City, every night patiently waiting for people who will never come....

Twitter

2011-09-19T11:24:00.000Z

Twitter's a funny old thing, really. Obviously, it's killed off the blog and replaced it with the chance to watch famous people RT charity walks and missing hamsters.

But it's also that odd thing that in no time at all the people I follow are mostly topless men and Caitlin Moran.

Gaylita (or the Masque of the Deadly Twink)

2011-09-14T21:26:00.002Z

Where have all the messed-up gay teenagers gone? I'm sure they're still all out there somewhere, queueing for the Glee Concert Movie, but the public face of Gay Youth is very different.

Picture the scene - a birthday party of gays with beards, all of us drifting happily through our thirties... but someone had brought along their work experience student. Who was 17.

Now, this would have been fine. Really, utterly fine if he'd done what 17 year olds should do - which is stand around, mumbling and not making eye contact. But at some point there's clearly been an upgrade. And none of us coped with it well.

I watched him scythe his way through the party like a twinkling version of the Masque of the Red Death. I vowed that I would not fall. I would not become one of his giggling victims. And then he was standing in front of me. Smiling.

"What is that cologne you're wearing?" he said to me. "It suits you."

I blinked, mumbled and looked at my boots.

"Where did you get those boots from?" he asked.

I muttered something again and shifted nervously. A tiny bit of my brain went "Oh. Pay people compliments. It clearly works, but damn it's obvious. Learn to do this when you grow up." The rest of my brain just fizzed.

When I opened my eyes he was still there. Smiling. "So, ah," I began, just about not adding "My boy". I knew he was from Oxford. That seemed safe. "What college are you at?" Phew.

A tiny laugh. "I'm not. I'm still at school." The same smile.

I ran away to the bar. When I returned he was smiling at someone else and I felt both relieved and jealous.

But he came back. To tell me stories of how he'd been travelling the Pigalle, performing stand-up in French and having sex with businessmen in cars. All said with a dreadful, confident shrug.

Someone staggered to our table - in any other circumstances he'd have been the belle of the ball, but no-one noticed him. Not really. Desperate for attention, he'd have set himself on fire if he could, but instead covered himself with birthday cake while roaring about how drunk he was. Then he slunk away, unmourned.

We didn't have eyes for him. Just for Gaylita. We had eyes for each other, ust about, but hooded cautious looks that said "Are you? You're not, are you?"

And then he left, off to catch a bus home, and the spell was broken.

One of us sat there, almost in tears. "He made to kiss me, and I said no. But I could have... I could have... why didn't I? Oh, he said I was special. I was special to him, wasn't I? Would it have been so very wrong?"

We consoled him with the concerned air of Colonels dealing with a fellow making a spectacle of himself in the club over a Chee Chee girl. But we all knew... there but for the grace of god.

I patted the old boy on the shoulder. But I knew. Before Gaylita had left, he'd leaned over to me, pecked me on the cheek and whispered "You're so hot." And then he'd gone. But I knew. I knew I was special.

To the drugs dealers outside

2011-09-07T16:31:00.000Z

Dear Drugs Dealers outside -

You know what I really hate about you? Yes, you bring the area down, you piss on the stairs, you deal drugs in front of a playground full of toddlers, you beat up your clients at 1am, you talk late into the night about how you hate fags and the pussy that you are banging, you set fire to the flower beds, you prey on the recovering addicts at the local hostel, you still insist on saying "ohmydays", you have nicer phones than me, and the police seem completely powerless to stop you, whether it's dealing bicarb or setting fire to the swings... but what I hate the most about you is that you are smoking Marlboro and it smells like HEAVEN.

Yrs, an ex smoker with a loss of perspective.

Losing the War

2011-08-22T09:15:00.004Z

If you're a rolling news channel, you're only as good as your last war, and BBC News has had some pretty dreadful ones lately. Turning to Sky News for coverage of vital events is like relying on a slightly dodgy friend for all your gossip - you know you shouldn't, but it's just so entertaining. And recently BBC News has been anything but.

Hot on the heels of BBC News's abysmal coverage of the London riots comes their coverage of The Liberation of Libya. On Sky News you could see nighttime crowds in Green Square, celebrating and firing guns. On the BBC it was still daytime as they made do with a loop of library footage from earlier in the day. At 2am they were still claiming that this was a report from "The Front Line". But the broad daylight suggested that the fighting, and the story, had long since moved on.

The picture quality on Sky and Al Jazeera was never going to win an award - but it was there, fresh and live, and a bit like chat rouelette with guns. Sky News even had a fabulous lady in a tin hat - Alex Crawford, standing right there, in the middle of Green Square, with the plucky look of someone who just knows they're going to get played by someone fabulous in the movie of all this.

Meanwhile, the BBC's man on the spot was trapped in his hotel... 5kms away. His twitter account went from initial frustration:

to an increasingly Evelyn-Waugh's-Scoop desperation, including a plea for Sky News's correspondent to come and liberate him.

His on-air appearances had a similarly hapless air, the poor man looking like a freshly-bollocked fish. It must have been terrible for him - trapped in his hotel by the government, in an increasingly dangerous situation, surrounded by minders with guns... but it made for dreadful, dreadful television. And having to carry on reporting gamely on the view from his window (er, silent night) while his rivals had jubilant crowds, gunfire, and the thrilling tearing down of flags.

After a while (out of frustration or pity), BBC News cut away from the poor man and settled for showing still pictures from the internet (like the liberation version of Tony Hart's gallery) and then a studio interview with a dull man in a beard until we gave up and went to bed.

BBC News gamely ignored the stunning coverage by its rivals, except to make the occasional petty corrections ("@SkyNews reports that looters are moving into #Rixos hotel... not really. A few."). This morning they've put on a bolder face (in an article which could only be more bathetic if called "My room service hell as Tripoli fell..."), and are pointing out at every opportunity, with wounded pride, how dangerous Libya still is. But, as the fighting continues...

...the war for news has been won. For the last few weeks, Sky have made us forget the Corpse Copter, Kay Burley and even that shouty man... and instead have proved the one thing that no-one wanted to see... that the BBC's rolling News service just isn't worth watching.

Reclaim the streets

2011-08-09T17:53:00.000Z

Last night social media came into its own and rolling news ended up looking silly.

At about 1am, as the London riots reached Camden, I got chatting to my neighbour Kim. "BBC News is rubbish," she said, "What's going on?"

I told her we were getting our news off Twitter. "Oh," she said, "How do I do that? I only use it for the celebrities."

Not that Twitter was entirely reliable. You know how in an office there's normally one PA who can't resist sending round emails saying "Just passing this on, but a friend of a friend overheard a foreign man with a beard saying to steer clear of town tonight..."? Well, Twitter is a breeding ground for these trouble-stirring fucktards. The one mercy is that at least they can't tweet in Comic Sans.

These rumours went hand in hand with stupidly thoughtless photoshop forgeries (London Eye in flames, anyone?) - and with exactly the same bleating caveat as you used to get with those shit-stewing emails of "Don't shoot the messenger!!! Just want people to stay safe." No, no you don't - you just want people to live in fear.

The nice thing was the way that Twitter self-policed these things very efficiently, and soon proved a great way of serving up news, comment, and even the odd bit of brilliant gallows humour . That said, if you're easily offended, Twitter ain't the place for you. Or maybe it is. As London got progressively sadder (and drunker) there was a noticeable increase in people loudly taking offence, forgetting that humour is frequently as valid a defence mechanism as leaping on a high horse.

While Twitter triumphed, the BBC News Channel had a peculiarly glum evening - as though everyone had gone home and was hoping we'd all go to bed, rather than staying awake, desperate to know our homes were safe. Instead we were treated to increasingly out of date footage... and then, madly, BBC News went over to Singapore. For an hour and a fucking half. While warehouses burst into flames and the violence spread across the country, BBC News pressed on gamely with their planned Singapore coverage, flapping around like a flaccid cock at an orgy.

We turned over to Sky who had thought to send out reporters to try and cover the catastrophe. A man called Mark (with good hair in a crisis) stood on the streets of Clapham asking rioters if they were happy with what they'd done. Back over on the BBC the rioters and looters were still being called "protestors", which seemed a bit hopeful. But, as someone said on Twitter, "BBC News so out of date they've just reported a fire on Pudding Lane".

Again, I keep mentioning Twitter. At about 2am people started talking of a clean-up of the streets. We staggered to bed, vowing to go along to the one in Camden.

As it turned out, the worst of the damage in Camden had been blitzed by street cleaners used to the weekend market. So we were sent to Clapham...

What followed was both wonderful and the dullest flashmob of our times, as over a thousand people gathered with brooms and bin bags ready to clean the shattered High Street. We waited... and we waited.... and we waited...

We were all VERY middle class, politely queuing to tidy up the chaos. We were so middle class that when Sainsbury's handed out free croissants, we applauded.

But... as the hours ticked by... it became more curious. We were, for example, penned in. It was very politely, discretely done, but penned in we were. We were there for the cameras to take pictures of - nice, jolly, lovely people trying to do their Ealing Comedy bit with brooms and brio. As an example of a community reclaiming the streets of a vibrantly diverse area we were all a bit white and middle class. Which was possibly a bit disappointing for the media who got consequently over-excited when a passing rasta Mum started shouting. She may have been screaming mad, but at least she didn't look as though she was a freelance web designer.

There was an upside to all of this... the totty. There was, after a while, nothing better to do than gawp at the sheer quantity and quality of the hot men of London who'd turned up with brooms and troubled expressions.

They were supplemented by the nearby branch of Fitness First who disgorged their trainers and resident muscle marys who joined the crowd, milling, pecking away at their iphones with pudgy fingers and furrowed brows. It was more crammed with hot men than gay pride. It also felt a bit wrong... which made it all the better.

In the end... Boris turned up. Like the crowd were a nice little backdrop for a photo op. Shortly after that the crowd were allowed to finally start cleaning up. Funny that.

But overall... it was a good thing. The right thing to do. And there's a nice feeling to being able to recognise my broom on the picture that went round the world.

RIP TJ Hughes

2011-08-01T11:43:00.000Z

I am very sad that TJ Hughes has gone into administration. I discovered a branch in Glasgow last year and I've been more times than to the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. Or the Polo Lounge.

I think I loved it because it's a battered relic of the 70s ("As are you" the Affection Unit muttered as I dragged him on a farewell tour of their lavender hand creams). The shop was orange and formica, resolutely unmodernised, but also weird. Sometimes the lobby display would be vacuum cleaners, sometimes trampolines. The rest of the ground floor was taken up by celebrity perfumes by non-celebrities (Helloooo Samanda! the twins from Big Brother.

The "fashion" department was the creepiest. At the top of the stairs you'd be met by a picture of two children. A yellowed and creased picture of two children. Who by now must be approaching pensionable age. The only customers would be old ladies whose leopard print skirts swished against their crutches.

The basement was where TJ Hughes swept everything that didn't even belong in TJ Hughes - electric fires with fake logs, teapots and industrial concrete steamers. I loved going down there, mostly because the escalator squeaked in exactly the same tune as the incidental music to Doctor Who: The Greatest Show In The Galaxy.

On our farewell tour, the Affection Unit and I went up to the top floor where pleated curtains hid. We were met at the top of the stair by a Scottish Ginger Prince. "Are you twose looking for duvets? We're down to singles and kings and it's a miracle if you'll find a valance." He wandered away, leaving us surrounded by mercilessly floral scatter cushions.

"I think we've pulled," muttered the Affection Unit, pointing to where the Ginger Prince lurked among sprays of fake dried flowers. I nodded, not really listening. I'd spotted a sale on tea towels. Everything must go.

The art of negotiation

2011-07-27T15:52:00.002Z

ME: "Let's not have this row now. Not when I'm drunk and covered in biscuit crumbs."

BOYFRIEND: "When are you not?"

Why is digital radio so crap?

2011-07-19T07:49:00.000Z

The BBC has launched a project to crowdsource mobile coverage across the UK. I think they should launch a similar investigation into Digital Radio.

We're constantly assured that DAB covers over 90% of the country with transparent wonder. But I'm sat here in Central London listening to the familiar sound of robots squabbling and I'm thinking "really?".

Little Furry Friends

2011-07-07T08:35:00.000Z

I'm in the Glasgow flat with the Affection Unit and the cat (this is a while back, but I'm catching up - but hey, I'm so settled I now go on holiday with my cat and my boyfriend, which is either what normal people or what Dr Dolittle would do).

And the problem is... I wake up. At first I think it's because he's snoring. Okay, I figure, I can deal with that. Only his snoring is... odd. Extreme. Weird. Worse than that guy who said "I grind my teeth together" and then sentenced me to a sleepless night in Crouch End sharing a single bed with either a cement mixer or a pile driver (and neither of those are euphemisms for balling till dawn). No, this noise is worse. Then I realise.

It's not snoring at all. It's scuttling. There is a mouse under the bed.

I am horrified. I have literally no idea what to do. Which is when I remember I have a boyfriend. And suddenly, I realise blissfully why I have one.

"Wake up," I say, "There is a mouse under the bed. Do something."

He stares at me. He says "wuhhhh?" a bit. He blinks. But he is awake. It is now his responsibility. Forget long country walks and evenings out and evenings in. Dealing with vermin - this is the real reason for being in a relationship. Should Ryan Reynolds and I ever get married, it's going in the vows.

We lie there for a bit. Working through the various levels of "are you sure?" and "what do we do?". To be frank, we're not actually making a great success of Dealing With Vermin, but at least we are in this together. Which is something. Even if our current solution appears to be clinging to each other like Laurel and Hardy waiting for the piano to drop.

It is at this point that the cat wakes up at the foot of the bed. She yawns with the careful luxury of a cat who has been rather enjoying the wonders of a memory foam mattress and then she stretches out a paw in our direction. "Ladies," she says, "Let me deal with this," and vanishes under the bed.

Seconds later the cat takes something to the living room. There is a lot of noise. Then an eerie silence. A few seconds later the cat returns to the bedroom alone, jumps back on the bed, and goes to sleep.

Horrified, we leave the bedroom and search the living room. Lying on an Ikea lamp like Aslan on the altar is a mostly dead mouse. The cat, fetched from her slumbers, gives it no more attention than an old catnip toy, and cleans herself.

My boyfriend is, it should be said at this point, so vegetarian even his shoes are made of lentils. But, while I stand there, crying a little, he calmly fetches the dustpan and flings the mouse out of the window. Followed by the dustpan.

"I hope the mouse didn't suffer," he says, sadly.
"Its last thoughts were that it could fly." I say.

We go back to bed. I am convinced I can hear hundreds of mice in the skirtingboard ready to pour out into the living room. So he holds me until I fall asleep. I am never going on holiday without a cat or a boyfriend again.

Dinner With The Folks

2011-06-30T10:40:00.000Z

I get back from Glasgow and we go out for a meal at my parents' favourite Turkish restaurant. We go there about once a year and it's a treat my parents talk about every time they discuss a London visit. "Ooh, the bread!" my mother will often gasp fondly. They used to dream about going back to Turkey. Now they're so old they simply dream about a Turkish restaurant in Mornington Crescent.

Well, they're never going back there again.

The nice thing, the lovely thing, about them being so old is that, after a lifetime of not making a fuss, they've finally started complaining. We were halfway through our starters when waiters descending, snatching their plates away mid forkful. Dad and I looked stunned. My mum turned around, bless her, and yelled, "Bring that back and then just piss off."

She will clearly be a terror in the care home.

The manager arrives a few minutes later and offers by way of justification, "But so many of our customers are in a hurry to get to Koko...."

To which I yell at him, "My parents are over 70, do you really think they're going clubbing?"

He shrugs. On the walk home my mother says "I have never been clubbing. Do you think I should enjoy it?"

Parents in the City

2011-06-26T13:40:00.000Z

My parents are staying in my London flat while I'm away. They've kind of moved house but are camping in their motor home before they can move into their new place (apparently they will live somewhere near a shop, which will be novel for all concerned).

Besides doing what my parents normally do when they're in residence - scouring the place from top to bottom and rearranging things which shouldn't be touched, they're having a bit of local trouble. The last week or so we've had a new, rather nasty group of drugs dealers who hang around beneath the window. I've told my parents to call the police if there are any problems as they're just tiresome.

Last night the drugs dealers beat up a client outside. My parents did not call the police as they did not want to cause a fuss. They are shaken by it as "his screams just went on and on till your Dad turned off his hearing aid". I am quite cross with them.

Bad Taste Boyfriend

2011-06-10T14:13:00.000Z

My thoughts turned to Tom Daley, as they do frequently (His growing up is the gay version of Emma Watson Syndrome).

AFFECTION UNIT: *tuts* You know his Dad's just died.

ME: Oh :(

AFFECTION UNIT: Still, this means he'll be looking for a father figure....

When Bad Things Happen To Good Daleks

2011-06-02T09:50:00.001Z

Many years ago, when I looked after the Doctor Who website for the BBC, we had a Dalek. First of all, it was a battered original prop that the lovely BBC Visual Effects man Mike Tucker found for us, but then one day a department called BBC Heritage asked to borrow it for an exhibition and then refused to give it back. Eventually, they offered to return it if we paid for 18 months of storage fees. We said no. They probably melted it down.

In 2005, we moved offices and it was decided it would be nice if we had another Dalek. Luckily, Mike had just finished building a Dalek for the new series and had various bits of the original props that had been used left around:

So, we paid for him to assemble them into a beautiful original Dalek. It turned up and was very much adored. Our department was supposed to provide a perspex case for it. Or a plinth... or... well, discussions rumbled on and a plinth never arrived.

Then I moved to Wales and would occasionally visit the Dalek. One morning the finance department were trying to fit their fattest member into the Dalek (To chants of "You can do it Mehmet!") Sadly he couldn't, and the Dalek never quite recovered. I mentioned a plinth again. Partly out of concern for poor Zeg and partly because it's quite funny saying "Dalek Plinth". Try it.

I felt sorry for the poor thing. It was, after all, a real Dalek prop. And lovely. But now looked a bit sad.

I left the BBC, and the department itself vanished soon after, but the Dalek remained. In a corner of a kitchen. Sadly. Probably the only original prop still in the BBC's hands.

And, er, how is it being cared for? There are, naturally, lovely corners of the internet devoted to guessing the fate of the BBC's Dalek props. They are assembled using care and concern and detective work.

I just used Facebook:

Lidl

2011-05-31T11:30:00.000Z

A woman is dragging her bloke around Lidl.

"You are bang out of order. BANG out of order. BANG!" she yells, slapping packets of sliced meat into her basket.

She's got a great body, but a face that somehow screams "less drugs more moisturiser". Her bloke just looks hangdog.

She gets to the counter and starts screaming at the till assistant. "You know what this fucker's done? Do you?"

The man at the counter demurs.

"I only just got home to find him in the fucking bathroom wanking with his best mate. Didn't I, you stupid pig?" She jabbed her boyfriend in the elbow. He looked more miserable. She shouted some more, forgot her pin number, then left Lidl, kicking her boyfriend ahead of her.

The staff behind the counter then performed a perfect Mexican wave of eye rolling.

PS: Sorry, it's been a bit quiet. I have asked the Affection Unit if I can sleep around to provide the blog with stories of silliness. "Of course you can, sweetheart," he says. "Joking."

Strangers on a Train

2011-04-26T08:36:00.000Z

So, the Affection Unit and I are on the train back from Glasgow. And it's a horrible train.

Eight people are arguing over two seats. All of them have tickets for the same seats. Unfortunately a woman and her luggage are occupying them. "I don't have a reservation, no," she says, "But my son MUST sit with his back to the engine."

That kind of train.

We slump down somewhere. We're not having a row. But then again, we may only be speaking to each other via that cat. You know how it goes.

There's an announcement - upgrade to first class for 15 quid. We look around the carriage. A jolly lady is on the phone, "Och, Mary! They're saying it's terrible full, but I'm not moving my case up. It's so big and heavy and I'm sure it'll be fine! Have you seen Laura's ankles?".

We upgrade.

We find a free table. There's a posh-looking lady. We smile. We sit down. We quietly place the cat on the edge of the table. We nod politely.

And then it begins. Please note - travelling with a cat is a great way of making new friends. On the journey to Scotland we'd ended up with an impromptu petting zoo. Now, on the way back, we were sat with a woman called Elaine whose husband was something big in the International Monetary Fund in Washington. She spoke with a refained English voice that dropped like a stone as soon as she talked about her mother in Ayr.

At some point we were joined by a nice lady called Charlotte who had the air of an escaped nun. We were talking about maths and Charlotte suddenly announced, "I'm sorry, they lost me with Calculus. Silly of me, I know, but Calculus did it for me. I ran away to India and smoked a lot of dope." Turned out she ran a pension fund and lived in Islington, so it had clearly worked out well for her.

Shortly after Preston we had a picnic. Charlotte presented quiche, we provided some dips, and Elaine produced a bottle of wine. We started to laugh a lot.

The cat kept shooting "please adopt me" glances at Elaine. We freed the cat from her basket and she looked about to jump onto my lap - but instead bolted under a seats. I went to rescue her and discovered that, even in first class, people are shits.

"That was the worst thing you could have done!" someone informed me.

"I hope you know I have cat allergies," said a woman.

The cat had curled up under a seat, and required a tiny bit of fetching out. Frankly, compared to the horror inflicted on trains by your average toddler, fairly minor. But interesting to see how people reacted.

Elaine loudly shouted "take no notice!" and informed us that when Kennedy was shot she was on stage with Sooty and dressed as a diddy-girl.

Unleash the Zombies!

2011-03-31T14:02:00.001Z

Well, UKCMRI (aka The Kings Cross Death Camp) have written to us all to smugly announce that they really have got planning permission to spend the next 4 years building their one-size fits all solution to The End Of Civilisation As We Know It. Next door to my flat. And the Eurostar.

Quite how they've achieved this on land that was supposed to be used for building affordable homes for key workers is still a little bit of a mystery, but their leaflet is very pleased with itself.

Oddly, now they've got the go-ahead, the artist's impression has got a little bolder. Here's how they used to publicise it:

And here it is now:

Gone are those lovely friendly trees that helped to hide how big it really was. Gone is the suggestion that the roof is a shimmering waft of gossamer glass. Instead, it's a massive "fuck you" of a building. This isn't any ordinary Scary Bio Lab. This is a Shiny One.

Also, you can now clearly see the chimneys. Which when quizzed at a meeting turned out to be mostly for the incineration of corpses. Coo.

In return, we get three community support police officers for three years. Who I'm sure will do a great job in dealing with the understandably alarmed protesters.

It's not all doom and gloom. As part of the coup de grace to the community, they're closing down the allotments that have stood on the site and have launched an exhibition to show the rich architectural heritage of the area that they're now gloatingly destroying.

I look forward to the next edition, which will probably have the headline "Say goodbye sunlight, hello smallpox".

Why I hate Halfords

2011-03-16T12:08:00.000Z

Sometimes a firm has an utter disconnect between a great online presence and the grim reality of their stores.

I tried buying a bike from Halfords. Yes, I know, but their site offered a brilliant "reserve and collect" service - you reserve it, and they'll assemble it for you to collect when they open the next day. No sooner had I placed my order than they texted me with the order code. Fantastic online service!

The next day I turned up at the Halfords store in Mile End. It was empty apart from two people behind the bike desk, both playing with their mobiles.

I handed over my reservation code. The guy made that "kiss my teeth" noise so valued in Customer Service. "I've not built any of today's bikes yet. So...."

"But," I protested, "Your website...."

KMT again. This time with a shrug. After prompting, he tears off a till receipt, scribbles down the phone number of Customer Services and then gets back to talking with his colleague about sneaking off for the afternoon. As he wore a badge labelled "Duty Manager" I hardly think this was the perfect crime.

I rang customer services and explained that there's a difference between their amazing website and their awful shop. The response was an audible shrug. It would have been better if she'd said "Well, we're Halfords. What did you expect?" What's most puzzling is that someone at Halfords has clearly put so much money into trying to rehabilitate their brand online, but they're still wearing the concrete boots of their shitty shitty stores.

To cap it all, when I get home empty-handed their amazing website had emailed me with tips to help me enjoy my new bike. Way to twist the knife.

Sadly, I probably will end up having to buy a bike from Halfords. But I'll be thinking "Fuck you" every step of the way. Because I know that's what they're thinking about me too.

The Avengers: In Colour

2011-03-15T14:25:00.001Z

Well, you've probably heard about The Midsomer Murders race row (where the producer announced that there was no place for ethnic minorities in his show).

My friend Lee reminded me that this isn't the first show to play the "last bastion of Englishness" card. He was talking about The Avengers - a show which had a "no blood or blacks" policy written into its writers guide ("NO COLOUREDS" got block caps, just to make sure). Just like Midsomer, kinky sex was fine, but not mutliculturalism.

What makes the Midsomer debacle all the worse is that The Avengers tried this policy in the 1960s. It was a silly policy then, designed to preserve The Avengers' picture postcard never-never England which made it such a scrummy international sale (it's the only English show ever to air on US network television, and was so popular in South Africa they made their own radio version. Go fig).

However, as a policy, it was also a failure. Quite a few black people ended up in The Avengers. They all appeared to have gone to Eton, but then so did everyone in The Avengers, even the gals. The show just couldn't tell interesting stories without them

So it's interesting that what The Avengers couldn't manage in the 60s some crackers bloke's managed to do in the 21st Century. Well, I say interesting. I probably mean repellant.

Mind you, racism is one of those bafflingly old-fashioned things. Like pressing flowers or shitting in the street. I still remember staying late at work to read the inbox after the first episode of new Doctor Who went out. It was an amazing evening. Reading through over a thousand emails, people who'd just got in touch to say what an amazing time they'd had, proud Dads sending in photos of their happily terrorised children... and one man who'd emailed to say "The best bit was when she dumped the c**n."

Yeah. Still makes me feel queasy.

Out of the closet

2011-03-13T11:26:00.001Z

As I write this, the boyfriend is eating cornflakes at the exact time the cat is using her litter tray. It's a singularly awful collision of sound.

Anyway, the point is, many years ago, when I first moved to London, I had all my Doctor Who books on a shelf in my bedroom. I say all, I mean about 20. Which is probably more than enough for some people. I was, at the time, trying desperately hard to date a man called Christian Fletcher (you would, just for the name, wouldn't you?). He was over one time when he spotted the books, lurking at the bottom of the shelf. "Oh," he said. "Are those DVDs? My flat mate loves Doctor Who DVDs." He then realised they were books and his startlingly pretty face fell.

Things cooled shortly afterwards. Mind you, it may also have been me not realising that mobile phones record each missed call and me trying to get hold of him six times in one evening when I was at a play round the corner from him... "Did you call?" he texted. "Many many times?"

In a bid to seem more sane, I took to calling boys less and also decided to hide Doctor Who from my life. After all, this was the Space Year 2001 when Doctor Who was not cool and if I wanted to impress people to get laid I'd tell people I worked on the Fame Academy website. What a difference a decade makes.

When I moved into my own flat, my room had two wardrobes. As most of my clothes were novelty t-shirts with kittens on, I didn't need to hang much up, so I turned one wardrobe into the Cupboard Of Sad. This was because a week after I moved in, my parents sent a van along with ALL of my stuff. Crates and Crates of books. Including... hmmmm.... treasured relics of my fishbowl-lensed-mouth-breathing childhood.

So, into the Cupboard of Sad went hundreds of Doctor Who books. Novelisations, Novels, The Doctor Who Knitting Book, Junior Doctor Who And The Brain Of Morbius (being a bowlderised version of a particularly gruesome adventure. In hindsight, as wise a move as Junior Hannibal Lecter And The Silence Of The Lambs. Junior Doctor Who also tackled And The Giant Robot and then fell silent). The Doctor Who Cookery Book, the first volume of an illustrated encyclopedia (notable for pastel drawings of monsters and for missing out the letter 'K'), a book in which two baffled American lesbians toured the space quarries of England, and even a hardback alarmingly called "25 Glorious Years". Basically, all of my parents' wearisome love and pocket money slapped into a cupboard. Along with books that were still coming out. That were all read, adored, and then quickly hidden away.

Oh, that glorious decade of luring people back without them even realising that a few yards away lurked my shameucopia, hidden behind two MDF doors. It looked like an ordinary cupboard, but it was much sadder on the inside.

Things have changed. Maybe it's growing up. Or getting a boyfriend who doesn't care about my obsessions so long as they don't get in the way of following the Swedish heats of the Eurovision Song Contest. Perhaps it's that Doctor Who is very cool now. Or just that I need somewhere to hang my shirts (I still have one t-shirt with a kitten on. I wear it down the gym and you can fuck off if you think you're taking it away).

But I've now stuck all my Doctor Who books on shelves. Well, nearly all of them. There's still a couple of hundred to find space for somewhere. The urge to re-read them all is almost overwhelming. The cat likes them too. She's eaten quite a bit of The William Hartnell Handbook. I think he'd approve.

Of Tunbridge Wells

2011-02-19T12:04:00.000Z

The Affection Unit takes me on a date to a public toilet in Tunbridge Wells. It's now a tiny club, which is hosting a set by Florrie, the new Xenomania act (hint: boyfriend is music journalist. According to me the members of Xenomania are Betty Boo, Betty Boo and Betty Boo. This is what gets me A Sharp Look).

But it's very exciting being in Tunbridge Wells. We are surrounded by tiny children dressed like they're the Mini Pops auditioning for Skins (Vintage cardigans: still so in if teemed with tights and nothing else).

It turns out there's a support act. The support act are White Boi Rappers who bound around yelling "Brap" and "Skank". "Are you going to die?" asks Affection Unit. I later look up the word "Brap". Urban Dictionary tells me: "A sound uttered when a heavy tune comes on usually heard in garage raves. Combine with gunfingers for best results." Which explains the strange hand gestures they kept making. AU points out that they're so young, they probably have never heard of Ali G, which kind of makes it all right. Their mums are standing right behind us. They are doing wedding dancing. With gunfingers.

The rapping young tories are accompanied by a girl. She's got an amazing voice and looks magnificently bored. At the end of the set she sulks away into the night, while the rest of the band stand around looking very pleased with themselves. "We're FS! We're FS! Look us up!" they keep saying. They don't appear to realise that FS is the name of a gay educational magazine about STDs. (AU checks twitter - apparently they are also called FSteam so may be aware of the confusion).

They are followed by another support act. It's a female singer who does really nice twirly folk, surrounded by men in tweed playing guitars. FS's mothers shake their heads sadly. I think it's rather nice.

Then nothing happens for an hour. During this time, the girls-wearing-cardigans-as-dresses are gradually joined by a lot of men who are tall and rather rugged with exciting facial hair and very large arms. There is still no sign of Florrie, but the view is very nice.

At this point, I have to leave to get the last train home. I never get to see Florrie. But I do get a text to tell me that she is amazing and that the bearded men have all taken their tops off and are dancing in their vests. I have left my boyfriend in Tunbridge Wells surrounded by hot bears. And that is my Friday night. Hmmmn.

The Free Man

2011-02-12T09:50:00.001Z

Spent a lovely week in Portmeirion.

I was fascinated by Clough Williams-Ellis, the village's creator. He comes across as carefully eccentric - everything about the place was invented, even the name (it was originally called something like Chilly Mouth, but Clough picked something a bit grander, but couldn't quite decide on a pronunciation).

Clough built it on a patch of land near an Uncle's estate, and made the most out of the microclimate, creating England's first purpose-built holiday village. Royalty came, Noel Coward wrote Blithe Spirit there, everyone was charmed by the basket-weaving hermit in the woods. It was a nice little folly that Clough picked away at in between proper work.

Then the bombshell dropped. The resort was actually making a lot of money. Wife and daughter tactfully realised that, as it was a business, it should behave like one. The dour cheese-pairing hotel manageress was replaced with a flamboyant man with a parrot called Agatha who worked the guests with charm.

Portmeirion already had a shop, but the takings tended to disappear - this was probably related to the discovery that the charming Moroccan barman slept there at nights. Instead, private garages in the villas were done away with, replaced with shops. But what were the shops to sell? Clough's daughter had a brainwave and invented Portmeirion Pottery, which soon became an internationally famous Welsh pottery brand. Curious, as she had it all shipped in from Stoke-on-Trent.

Clough was a great proponent of proper town design. Stalin offered him the role of his chief town planner, but Clough was disturbed by how much he liked the great dictator and instead contented himself with creating Stevenage. He did more than anyone else to create laws for listed buildings and planning permission - but at the same time made sure he was able to work without them at Portmeirion. Similarly, he established the Snowdownia National Park to preserve the Welsh countryside... but ensured that its borders skirted around Portmeirion.

There is a convenient fiction that it was originally established as an artisan's community, but it was always a holiday resort, and one that daytrippers flocked to. The entry price fluctuated according to demand, with a sign outside saying "In order to discourage visitors, the entry price today is __. If you wish to avoid this impost, kindly turn around".

The idea for a holiday resort was ripped off by Billy Butlin, who established a cheap-n-cheery version at Pwllheli. This was requisitioned from him during the war, and afterwards the Pwllheli town council used Clough's planning laws in order to block its reopening. They'd never cared for Butlins, and invited Clough along to the subsequent enquiry - Butlin had nicked his idea and built a tawdry resort, surely he'd be against it? Instead, Clough announced pointed out that Butlins' customers had been through a horrible war and surely they deserved a holiday? To each according to his need, and all that...

Mind you, when Clough discovered the trustees of his Uncle's estate was planning on turning the castle bordering Portmeirion into a home for wayward youth, the businessman in him swiftly decided it would be much better as another hotel.

Clough was a Welsh noble of a certain era that never actually spoke the language. Nowadays the resort is proudly Welsh and staffed by the nicest, most crisply-efficient people you could wish to meet. It's also baking hot in February. Which is surely impossible, but also beautiful.

BBC Cult saved

2011-02-10T15:19:00.000Z

You've probably seen this link already. If you'd like your very own copy of the BBC Cult site, you can download it from there.

From an intellectual copyright point of view... No, I have no idea whether this is infringement, piracy, or the bravest piece of online archive rescue ever pulled off. But it's made me happy.

Interestingly, I quietly enquired at the BBC whether it was possible to have a copy of my site before it was gone and was told it would be too tricky. Or, er, not.

Glasgow Again

2011-01-28T14:03:00.002Z

People are nicer in Glasgow. Not all of them, obviously, as otherwise Taggart would be about bunnies and cupcakes, but by and large.

I was up visiting the flat there to do a couple of odd jobs. I painted a door badly, shake-n-vac'd the hallway and weeded the window boxes. I then remembered that one of the windows was stuck, and set out looking for a handyman.

This turned out to be really easy. I found him through my local hardware store (actually, there are quite a lot of hardware stores in the East End of Glasgow. I go to the one that looks the least like a serial killer's cash-n-carry). The man behind the counter (he's called Jim. We're on first name terms now) said "Sounds like you need Cory. You'll find him in the pub."

Information: I have never before set out to deliberately find a handyman in a pub. I have stumbled across a few, but those were happy accidents. And anyway this wasn't one of *those* pubs - this was a bunker built out of concrete and fruit machines nestling in the shadow of an electricity sub-station. But still, it was thrilling to walk up to a bar and said "Oh hello! I'm looking for Cory."

The barmaid blinked and pointed to a corner. "Thanks awfully," I said. As I trotted away I could hear her eyes rolling. You see, there's a problem with my diction in Glasgow. I go from being a bit 1940s Newsreader to full on Fauntleroy. It's like I've bumbled in from the Drones club, policeman's helmet tucked proudly under one arm.

Cory turned out to be a tiny man anywhere between 30 and 90. I explained my problem. "I may be round later on this afternoon," he said. Then he looked at his pint, considering it carefully. "Actually, make that tomorrow morning."

"Really?" I said. "That would be utterly lovely."

I figured he wouldn't turn up. But he did and he spent a merry morning teaching me how to repair double glazed windows. At the end of which he charged me a tenner. Do you hear that, London plumber who has been charging me hundreds of pounds not to mend my boiler for five months? Do you? Ten pounds. I gave him twenty out of shock.

To celebrate, I went out to buy bacon. A thing I can't get over is that one bacon roll is £1.20 and two are £1.40. This appeals to both my parsimony and my gluttony. I managed to get most of the way through my order without a problem, but then we reached the following exchange:

Ed (for it is his cafe): Sauce?
Me: Ooh, tomato ketchup please!
Ed: Where are you from?
Me: Er, London. (puts on you-got-me face) How could you tell?
Ed: I couldn't. I just knew you weren't from around here.

Ed hands me the bacon rolls and, as I turn to go, he says "Look after yourself." It's as though the next scene will feature Blythe Duff staring down at my headless corpse.

Instead, Fawkes takes me out for quid-a-drink night with friends (Even the pubs here are pound shops). The conversation briefly touches on whether they've seen more dead bodies than seals in the Clyde.

At the bar, a Very Weird transvestite is talking to a politely bored barlady. The transvestite is very small, with a very deep voice that has all the vibrancy of an automated train annuncement. "I'm planning on doing some more stand-up," he intones. "I don't know what quite yet but it's bound to be crazy. For instance, I was thinking about things that two men would never say to each other at a bus-stop...." He tails off. "I mean, you could have that, couldn't you?"

Downstairs in the gents, two lesbians are kissing while using the hand-dryer. Glasgow lesbians are like this - they're everywhere and they are very happy. So happy that they can't even stop kissing while surrounded by drunk men urinating optimistically towards the urinals. Above them is a poster advertising an upcoming PA by Adam Rickett. It is apparently a great way to celebrate Valentine's Weekend, and it is free to get in, with amazing drink offers. I don't know why I mention this, but I'm oddly fixated by the juxtaposition of two people expressing their sexuality with careless pride and Adam Rickett.

Upstairs I sip at a shooter of black zambucca to hoots of derision. One of the people I'm drinking with gets a message on Grindr. It begins: "ASL?". We hoot at this - who says that any more? The next message he gets is "Cool. Blow job? You look hot."

Baffled, he shows us his Grindr profile pic. It is of the squinty bridge in the docks. He shrugs.

Yet more proof that Glasgow people are friendlier.

BBC Cult to close.... again!

2011-01-25T09:37:00.001Z

Yesterday the BBC website announced vast and sweeping cutbacks. Sadly, a lot of wonderful people are losing their jobs (happily, maybe a few less wonderful people will also go).

The BBC also announced it was closing 200 websites. Crikey. That's a lot. Or is it? A friend sent me the list... pointing out that the BBC Cult website is being shut down.... again.

I produced the Cult site years ago. It was axed the last time the BBC announced an online restructuring.

And now, in order to save money it is being axed again.... at a saving to the licence fee payer of £0.00. What's the point?

Last time the site was allowed to stay online because... well, the licence fee payer had paid for the content to be made, and there was quite an outcry. In order to allay this, People In Suits announced that the content would stay there - and it's still very popular. It seems silly not to keep this resource freely available.

Mind you, Cult was axed because the BBC saw no future in programmes about vampires, dragons or Daleks. Ah well....

Anyway, why not go and visit the BBC Cult website? While you still can...

Prepare for the Zombie Apocalypse

2011-01-22T11:17:00.000Z

Zombies are dull, but they are dullest when they are your neighbours. In news that's attracted a whisper of press coverage, the Kings Cross Apocalypse Factory has been approved.

UKCRMI is, depending on how you see it, either the UK's biggest biomedical research lab or the UK's biggest Zombie Farm. And I live next door to it. I can't help but feel that an imminent outbreak of ravenous ghouls is going to push down property prices.

How do I know that the worst is going to happen? How do I know that the streets will be filled with brain-hungry research scientists? How do I know that UKCMRI is really the vanguard of the zombie apocaylpse? Because Boris Johnson thinks it is a good idea.

Run. Save yourselves. Run.

The song of the naked cowboy

2011-01-20T14:49:00.000Z

The Naked Cowboy is in town. The New York street entertainer has been hired to promote a range of bagels by singing about them. Clearly
- He's not naked
- With a body like that, he probably doesn't eat carbs
- It's January
- What?

But these things are all entertaining and it beats slumping around the flat tidying away the last of the Christmas lego. The Naked Cowboy, I have discovered, is a TM and a franchise. His website includes a link so that you can apply to be a licensed Naked Cowby. But no, not until my post Christmas lard has shifted.

January's an odd month, though, isn't it? Nothing really happens, everyone's either dieting or not drinking, or saving or whatever, so maybe it's nice that there's the occasional Naked Cowboy as a distraction from the Month Of Feeling Mildly Dissatisfied With Your Lot.

As my friend Lee points out, life is not a competition. That said, I wouldn't mind being Jake Shears for an evening. I know it's wrong, but I'd just like to try it.

You don't have to be mad to dance here...

2011-01-08T18:31:00.000Z

There is a lady who occasionally stands outside the Euston Hilton dancing. She sometimes has an old tape walkman, but mostly she's just grooving to her own tune, a 33rpm steady, circular raunch that can go on for hours.

She normally wears pink spanx, a cheery top and scrunchies. Given the chilly weather she's currently dressed in sensible winter beige layers. I waved. She waved back. These things are good.

The gym in January

2011-01-06T13:57:00.001Z

Well, it's grim. At the moment there appear to be two kinds of people down the gym.

The Impossibly Hot
I have no idea where they've all come from, but nearly every time I go down there, someone utterly stunning is strutting around, yoinking the heaviest dumbbells around on their pinky finger while jogging merrily away. Please, some of us still have mince pies at home. It's maddening of you to be so perfect. Also, annoyingly, they split into "Straight" and "Gay, but puh-lease, way out of your league, honey". So it's just me in the corner with Radio Four.

The New People
Welcome. We know you won't be around in February, but you do make the next four weeks that extra bit awful. Yes, the gym has free towels - but you're not supposed to take them home with you. And, if you must, please not an entire armful.

Also, why are you so demanding? Yesterday I was busy struggling away (the weights have got heavier over the Christmas break, too) and realised a woman was staring at me. She looked impatient. She was waving her arms at me. She wanted my attention, clearly. Realising she had it, she put her hands on her hips and started to talk to me.

I held up my hand - truth to tell, I had just got to a bit in Northanger Abbey where Catherine Morland was having a most interesting turn around the room, so had to press pause. While I fumbled with my ipod, the woman actually rolled her eyes.

"Hello," I said, "How can I help?"
"I've just joined. Can you show me how to work the treadmill?"
We go over to the treadmill. The woman glares at me accusingly. "It's different from the ones I am used to."
"Okay."
"I mean, how does it start?"
I press the large button labelled "Start".
"Fine. [huffy noise] How do I control the speed?"
I press the Up arrow. The treadmill goes faster. She watches the empty belt go round and round, critically. "That's a bit fast for me, wouldn't you say? I prefer a walking pace and 7.5 kilometers is not my walking pace."
Wondering vaguely how Catherine Morland would deal with this, I slow it down for her.
She nods. "But how do I stop it?"
I point to the large red switch labelled "Quick Stop."
"Oh," she says. She then turns around and marches into the changing room.

Curiously, there wasn't an ounce of fat on her. On balance, I think Catherine Morland would have jumped up and down on her twigletty neck until it snapped and then danced Sir Roger de Coverley on her twitching corpse. But that's just a guess.

PS: Relationship still going. Boyfriend wailing that he is now totally obese. In practice this means that half of his twelve-pack has vanished for a week. Disaster.

You're not still, are you?

2010-12-24T10:51:00.004Z

My relationship has survived its biggest test. He took me on a date to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. *sigh*

Next please!

2010-12-23T10:51:00.000Z

Interesting time of the year for watching how other people shop. That's a euphemism for standing around tutting and rolling my eyes.

We all know about Flustered Shopper - the person who gets to the counter, watches all their things go through then wakes out of a trance to realise that these need to go in their bag-for-life and that they must then voyage through their pocket Narnia for their purse/wallet, try and find exact change or some helpful approximation of it, get distracted by a baby picture on the inside of the wallet, sigh a little and then start gathering their purchases and bags together as though they are faithful Sherpa Tensing about to trek to the roof of the world.

We are all Angry Self Checkout Shopper. Nothing more needs to be said about this, although one day I pray the NHS Suicide Booths use this voice. Oh, and M&S have got rid of them juts as Tesco have decided that they are the way forward. I wonder their staff don't have riot gear.

Finally, this year I saw Rude Fashion Shopper. She was dressed like she worked for Sgt Pepper and was clearly on her way somewhere fabulous, just stopping off for 10 menthol at the corner shop. She plucked an immaculate fiver from inside her cape and then CRUMPLED it before dropping it into the hand of the assistant like a used hankie. What?

G-fail

2010-12-21T19:04:00.002Z

Gmail is obsessed that I try "Sydney's largest cruising restaurant". Oh honey, we've all known that kind of waiter.

In praise of Pound shops

2010-12-03T09:36:00.000Z

First there was the Richard Dennen's gay column in the Evening Standard, now my friend Ashley has found A weekend eating Poundland food. The article's joy sings from word to word, but you will go BANG at "my daughter, Dory... if she saw the pink label Heinz Barbie pasta in tomato sauce she would never eat broccoli or quinoa again!"

As Ashley points out, the Standard champions itself as the paper of the dispossessed - then runs a sneering article about Poundland food. As someone comments on the article "You don't do your weekly grocery shopping in Poundland any more than you do in WH Smiths."

Earlier this year, my friend Gary did a play called Mrs Reynolds And The Ruffian. It was about many things, including an old lady brightening up her estate by planting flowers in the abandoned plots. Through it she forms an unlikely friendship with a wayward youth. LIFETIME AMBITION.

Ever since, I have been doing this on my estate - with shrubs and bulbs almost entirely from pound shops. You get a fucking hardy rose bush from Poundland - if it can sit for three months on a shelf tied up in elastic bands, it can survive the nuclear winter that is Somerstown.

It's a brilliantly satisfying thing to do - and an utterly unaffordable bit of whimsy without pound shops (I am mean and selfish - this is as good as I get). The other day while I was working on a bed, a woman rapped me on the shoulder and asked me what I was doing. So I told her.

"Good," she said, "Council says we don't deserve flowers."

Yes, the frost has dented the primroses, but my quid bulbs are still ticking away, along with roses, redcurrants, and lord knows what else but it-looked-nice-on-the-box. All from a pound shop. Take that, yummy mummy.

Let it snow

2010-12-02T15:44:00.001Z

The cold weather brings out the best and the worst in people. At the moment, you probably can't move for Facebook updates about heroic journeys into work or valiant battles with the central heating. We all deal with these things in different ways.

The cat, for example, wakes me at four every morning to inform me that it is still cold. Considering that Cat has stolen entire duvet, this seems a bit rich. Especially as Cat then sticks its head out of the cat flap, drains all the heat from the flat, and then posts itself back under the duvet. As I said, we all deal with these things differently.

It does seem to be an excuse to go and stand at train stations screaming at staff. At Kings Cross this morning I overheard a woman railing "But I have to go to my cousin's funeral. It's so inconsiderate of you". I mean, seriously, what? Apart from anything else, it's plain common sense that shouting at ticketing staff isn't really going to make four foot of snow go away. A couple stood at a window, pounding on the glass and swearing. I mean, really, why? It would perhaps be excusable if staff weren't going out of the their way to be helpful, working the queues, and generally being as friendly as slightly-too-polite Aunt Sally at a wedding.

I am currently working anywhere other than the flat. Yesterday I swapped the British Library for Camden Library, which was a mistake. The building sweated desperation and failure, miserable staff being constantly berated by weird people, all holding more-than-three Sainsbury's bags stuffed with bits of paper that they'd painstakingly unfurl at any moment. When I was a kid I wanted to be a librarian (lots of arranging books in the right order - how brilliant). Not any more.

Today I tried a coffee shop (yeah, way to rock the cliche - writing on a laptop in Costa). Oddly, a coffee shop is where the worst of humanity gathers in a smug. The staff all the have same panicked look that Lee from Steps wore throughout his time with the group, as though they're trapped in a nightmare working as baristas even though they've never made a cup of coffee before in their lives. The customers are worse. Putting me to one side there was....

1) Haughty lady who had brought her own sandwiches and was eating them under the table as though it was The Perfect Crime.

2) Two students planning a trip using a university travel grant. "Oh yeah, and what we'll do is we'll get Prakash to do the final proposal for us as he is very creative and will do whatever I ask him to. Now I think we should say here that we're walking the whole route, but in fact we'll just sit on that beach, yeah?"

3) Sensitive Girl. You know her - rainbow-jumper, lots of dolphin jewelry, skin paler than rice pudding, bag made of velvet. "Hi, I just wanted to check - I've a nut allergy, so will the caramel syrup be okay?" Pause. "Cos caramel's a nut, isn't it?"

Finally there are the loos in coffee shops. Getting in requires all the agility of a text-based adventure game from the 80s ("Get RECEIPT from CAROL. Go NORTH to BASEMENT. Use CODE on DOOR. Do not TOUCH any surfaces"). Once you're there it is a little bit like breaking in to Fort Knox to discover all the gold has gone. And there's just a puddle of wee and a really horrible smell.

Discovery

2010-12-01T13:39:00.000Z

The local Catholic school was founded by refugees from the French Revolution. I am interested in this. No-one else is.

While the rest of the country has proper snow, Camden has clearly cut back to just A Lot Of Cold. It's so so cold I've given up trying to heat the flat and am just wandering around in ski thermals. The cat has shut down completely. It may have died. Although something is still eating the cat biscuits.

Unexpected Item In The Bagging Area

2010-11-29T15:10:00.000Z

So, boyfriend. Which is why I've been quiet for a few weeks. Partly cos I didn't want to say anything to jinx it, and partly cos... well, the number of opportunities for truly disastrous temporary cupboard husbands decreases rapidly when you're dating the same man.

Don't worry, though. Given my track record I'll find some truly appalling way to torpedo it by Tuesday. I bloody hope not, however.

Worrying fact: The cat likes him. This means they're probably conspiring together already.

Anyway, back tomorrow with more silly stories.

Things continue

2010-11-21T14:02:00.000Z

Overall "Rather Marvellous Really". There's a couple of things I could do without at the moment (mind you have discovered that filleting your gmail may not solve a problem, but does hide it like an unopened bank statement). That's more than balanced by there being a lot of lovely things going on. Which sounds both cryptic and inane. 's'mylife.

Last night featured Unexpected Clubbing. Really we just ended up in the Black Cap. Apparently, it is becoming the new Joiner's Arms. This is probably a great surprise to everyone, not least the Black Cap. It's like a gay bar stuck in the 90s, which is probably the appeal for the Hoxmosexuals, but really.... it's like they're re-running the same club nights over and over again. Even the acts are the same, note for note, from when I last saw them in 2002. It's a bit sad, really. I remember the Black Cap as being a brilliantly unpretentious giggle. Now it's a slightly shabby mess. Will the arrival of a lot of men with interesting glasses and expensive gingham revitalise it? Really?

The security staff are still brilliant. One sidled up to the world's most obvious dealer last night. "Do you really want to stand there, mate? It's just you're in full view of the CCTV. Why not nip to the loo, eh?".

Staggering home through Camden at late o'clock was an obstacle course of swearing, flying bottles, vomit and girls pulling each other's hair. We picked a mock-fight with each other. As Ben said, "it's like when they try and escape by covering themselves with rotting meat in The Walking Dead..."

Late last night

2010-11-14T10:09:00.000Z

I dropped round to see the students next door, who appeared to have moved their flat. I needed to talk to them about fireworks and trifle.

"Oh, it's you!" they said. "Come in, come in! We keep meaning to say how much we like your work. No, really we do. Excuse the mess, we're off out clubbing, which is why we're all ironing topless..."

And then I woke up.

Curious

2010-11-11T10:44:00.000Z

Couple of weeks. Not in a bad way. I'm busy, but in the same way that I tidy the flat, in that I'll find myself in the kitchen thinking "now what was I doing?" and just make myself a cup-a-soup instead.

Things I've discovered about being a freelancer - you can never have enough teaspoons.

In other news, it's a month since I gave up smoking. My friend Joe was my last smoking friend and he gave up in June, which left me feeling like that nice lady at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (there is a lovely Garrison Keillor story about the last smoker in America called End of the Trail. That). There are good sides to it all. The suddenly needed a lot less sleep is one. The feeling better in the mornings. The looking younger (and, for complicated reasons, I desperately need to look as young as possible at the moment). But...

Oh, it's not fun. According to my nice little card, it's supposed to get better right now. Well, about a week ago. In fact, no, not so much.

I went to see Joe's hypnotist. Which worked really well. There have been only two problems. One is that if I feel a craving I am supposed to look at the colour red. My worst craving came at 7am one morning jogging round Loch Lomond. This was Loch Lomond. There was no red. Just a variety of lovely greys. It took a mile before I found a post box and hugged it. This is not good behaviour.

Then there was my one lapse. Hypnolady banned me from watching television as that's where I did most of my smoking. Instead, I've spent the last month curled up in bed with cheap wine and a bad book. Oh, and a block of cheese (one of the benefits of being mildly lactose intolerant is that helps me go to sleep. Or pass out. Or whatever. Who cares so long as I get through another day without smoking?).

There was of course, one exception. One night when I thought "fuck it, let's watch telly". Ten cigarettes later I went to bed miserable, and the next day had one of Those Hangovers. You remember those teenage hangovers about which you say "and to this day I have NEVER drunk Taboo or Mirage again"? One of those hangovers.

So that's it really. Lots of work. Lots of sleep. Lots of cheese.

Caprica Cancelled

2010-10-29T15:25:00.000Z

So, Caprica is cancelled. The quasi-mystical-virtual-reality-worrying-and-beards follow-up to Galactica is being replaced with something a bit more gutsy. Caprica was only really liked by people who spent their evenings ironing Team Jacob pillowcases while genuinely meaning to get beyond Chapter 1 of their copy Nietszche for Dummies. Blood and Chrome sounds a bit more.. you know... blood and chrome-y.

According to EW, Blood and Chrome was commissioned at a meeting at Comic-Con between an exec from SyFy and Caprica guru David Eick (no relation to the lizard guy). The conversation may have gone a bit like this:

EICK: "So, anyway, things are going great on Caprica..."

EXEC: "Uh-huh."

EICK: "Yeah, we've got a whole spiritual arc plotted out, a real journey of the mind..."

EXEC: "Right."

EICK: "Honestly, we are staring into the Frakking Abyss."

EXEC: "Sure you are."

EICK: "Mind you, the writing room has this idea for a show all about exploding spaceships and Cylons."

EXEC: "uh-hu... What?"

EICK: "Oh yeah, crazy isn't it? It's all zoom! zoom! pew! pew! pew! robots go smashy-smashy! kablooey! and I keep saying to them, guys, if you can really nail the true nature of the virutal soul by year three, then maybe, just maybe we'll do it as a web series."

There is a pause.

EICK: "Seriously, Caprica is a metaphysical allegory! It's Obama!"

EXEC: (mournful, quiet) "pew... pew... pew..."

Filling in

2010-10-28T08:04:00.002Z

Last week's filling fell out. It was put in by dashingly handsome euro dentist. I go back and am seen by a different dentist - he isn't dashing. He's not handsome. But he has a great sense of humour, is painless, and an amazing dentist.

There is a life lesson here.

The Kings Cross Death Camp

2010-10-26T08:04:00.001Z

In this world there are tough sells. Telling people that their new home is built on an Indian Burial Ground is one. Building a viral research centre in the middle of Kings Cross is another.

For some mad reason it's proposed to erect a viral monolith next to our estate. In between Somerstown and the sunlight will be 13 stories packed full of the deadiest germs known to man. Right next to the Eurostar. We've seen 28 Days Later. We've seen Survivors. What could possibly go wrong?

The people of Somerstown are normally fairly laid-back, but we're managing to protest the nightmare fairly well. We had a hilarious community meeting about it the other week. One woman pointed out it'd attract terrorists like flies to shit. Someone else pointed out that UKCMRI, the people behind it, already have quite a nice research establishment in a non-residential area.

Brilliantly, UKCMRI had sent along someone to talk to us. Clearly, tough crowd, but he was marvellous. He turrned up late, saying he'd had a problem organising childcare. "Would you be happy if someone built this next door to your children?" someone asked. The man went pale. "Um, yes," he quavered.

Someone else asked, "How many of the seven chimneys will be used for burning animal corpses?", to which the guy responsed, "Um, well, not all of them, obviously." There was a ghastly silence. "I mean, most of the animal corpses will be driven away in special lorries...". A hand shoots up, "So you're saying that there'll be lorries going up and down our road full of dead animals carrying plagues? The roads our kids play on?" The crowd tuts.

The man looks like he'd like to go home now. Instead he tries to explain the animal experiments. "You see, we use a lot of ferrets, especially when we're looking at the common cold. What's great about ferrets is that they get the sniffles." The crowd make a noise. It's the noise of people suddenly deciding that ferrets are the cutest things ever, and then imagining heaps of cute ferret corpses being burned. It's an odd noise. Children wail. Mothers clutch babies protectively.

It actually gets worse. The man haplessly tries to explain that many of the diseases they're trying to cure are "you know, things that people in this area, deprived areas, suffer from..." This goes down like a cup of cold sick. "Are you saying people like us deserve to have this next to us?" an irate woman demands.

It may be Nimbyism, but there's a point to it. No-one would dream of building the UK's largest virology centre in Knightsbridge. As it is, slapping it on a bit of empty ground near the ignorant poor seems a safer bet. Only, it turns out, we're not actually the ignorant poor. I realise the people who are going to turn up to a public meeting aren't necessarily a representative sample, but they seemed sensible, informed, and above all scared. And, frankly, if someone told you they were planning on building the biological equivalent of an Indian Burial Ground next door, so would you be.

Hate +1

2010-10-24T08:00:00.002Z

Yesterday I left the flat to discover the RMT had organised an anti-cuts rally under the surprising slogan "We're all in this together". I'll remember that next time there's a tube strike cos your drivers are demanding free unicorns, Bob.

It is a hazard living on the same street as the RMT. Periodically you'll find the road blocked with TV vans, or, as yesterday, socialist workers with duffle coats pouncing on Saturday shoppers nipping into Costcutter.

Around the corner, the local fire station were also protesting the cuts. Their approach was to fill the road with firemen. Frankly I'd have taken a leaflet off them if it had said "Death to Kittens".

I got back to the flat and tried to work while hearing people blarting "Comrades..." at each other through megaphones. I rolled my eyes. Political protest sucks.

Then my friend Joe tells me that it's been a year since there was a Gay Hate Crimes Vigil in Trafalgar Square and they're doing another one. So, I go to that. Hypocrisy goes well with candles.

It's a nice thing, if you can call an event to protest gay people being kicked to death nice. Some of the speeches are really moving. The problem is that various protest groups view it less as a protest and more as a giant marketing pen. So, you'll be stood there trying to listen to Harvey Milk's nephew and someone will flyer you, get you to do a survey, take a newspaper or... frankly, fuck off. Couldn't you all just stand at the entrance to Trafalgar Square and do us as we leave, eh?

The event itself is fine, if padded. Two hours of speeches is a bit much, and soon people are running out of variations on "Hate hate, love love, please don't kick the gays". We kind of get that, otherwise we wouldn't be stood here with candle wax dripping down our hands. Some of us have even turned off Grindr during the two minute silence. Of course, it's all put into perspective by an Aussie friend of a friend who has been dragged along. "What's the point of this?" he sulks a bit loudly, "I mean, that kind of thing doesn't happen here, does it? This is England." Um, yes, yes it does. Quite a lot, actually. And that's why we're here.

It's the morning after, and I'm still finding those damn fliers in the back of my jeans. Apparently there's a "March and Carnival" against racism, fascism and Islamophobia coming up. What is this, Amazon's "People who like Gay Hate Crime also like..."?

And here's a leaflet suggesting that I hold my same sex partner's hand in public. For one thing, I should be so lucky. For another, it's got a picture of two lesbians in wheelchairs holding hands as they go over a bridge. What's interesting is the reactions of the people in the background. They're not going "ooh, lesbo touching" or "eurgh, disableds" but "I'm sorry, but you are blocking the bloody bridge, ladies". Even their dog is edging out of the way. The leaflet is printed on lovely lovely card. Lovely glossy card. Lovely glossy expensive card. Lovely glossy expensive "does David Cameron know who your printer is?" card.

I vow now, if I should miraculously get a same-sex partner, I will of course hold their hand in public. Out of pride and also to make sure they can't escape.

The Whole Tooth

2010-10-21T08:05:00.001Z

A disadvantage of modern dental hygeine is that I keep flossing out fillings. Well, I've done it twice this year. It's an awful feeling - the triumph of thinking you've finally dislodged that nagging bit of lettuce followed by the heartrending "ping" of enamel hitting basin and the sinking thought "Clumsy and Expensive! So you".

The good thing about my dentist is that he's hot. I can see no way of translating this into an actual dating opportunity as he's made me whimper simply by muttering "root canal, it's not so bad". He's very Eastern European preppy - wearing neatly ironed stripy shirts tucked into chinos in a way that just makes me want to hug him. A friend acidly comments, "Why not make the first move by reminding him that dental anaesthetic suppresses your gag reflex?"

That turns out not to be true. Halfway through surprise replacement filling yesterday there was a sudden "oh" from Hot Euro Dentist followed by frantic vacuuming of my throat, and not in the hoped-for way. Turns out new filling had immediately fallen out and vanished. It's not pleasant swallowing a tooth. It's even less pleasant having to bring it up again, especially when encouraged by cries of "Don't swallow it! Don't swallow it!" and "Oh god!".

Yesterday included googling "How poisonous are fillings?" with a face like a bloater fish. I'm increasingly jealous of my dad, whose visits to the dentist involve dropping his teeth off at reception while he nips out to the shops.

Loch

2010-10-18T17:51:00.000Z

The really amazing thing about Loch Lomond is that it's under an hour from Glasgow. Compare this to my flat in London - with a bit of luck I'd be in Penge or East Croydon.

Just to point out, Loch Lomond looks like this, only prettier:

Other than that, there's not really much to say about the last few days. They've been lovely. And just occasionally, very very cold.

Hopefully, my next trip up here should include: The steam train to Fort William, the GlasGay Festival, and a foam party at the Polo Lounge. Followed by hypothermia on the walk home.

Differently Abled

2010-10-16T09:40:00.000Z

I'm in the Polo Lounge in Glasgow. I've finally met Fawkes. My friend Tim and I are having a lovely time, when... a man shuffles over and introduces himself speaking slowly and clearly.

"Hey guys. Are you two deaf?"

We blink.

"It's just I saw all the waving and...."

We realise. We're not deaf. We're just camp.

The End Of Time

2010-09-27T08:36:00.000Z

It's not every day you can say your lover is leaving you to join an apocalyptic cult. But I can.

The Brazilian is back. He's had a lovely time in Wiltshire. He went to work in a cafe and ended up running guided tours of crop circles ("For some they are shit, but hey, they may be real."). Now he's back in London for a very few days, and then going back to Brazil... to rejoin the weird cult that he left.

They've phoned him. Apparently, the end of days is near, so they need him back. They've even offered him a slight payrise. With winter coming on in London, he's figured, what the hell. Also, the great thing about belonging to a cult is the lack of long-term planning. "They think it all ends in 2012. If it doesn't all go to shit, then yeah, maybe I'll need to think of what to do next." This is probably how Boris Johnson greets every morning.

The tiny downside is that it's in the middle of nowhere. With no booze. No cigarettes. No boys. No coffee. I look at the Brazilian in horror. He shrugs. "It's not so bad. It's peaceful." I admire him. But selfishly, I'm thinking "Typical. I've turned one man straight, now another would rather live in a monastery."

He has, at no point, suggested I join his cult. I don't know whether to be relieved or insulted.

There's a story behind this

2010-09-21T18:06:00.001Z

Upstairs, Downstairs

2010-09-13T11:54:00.000Z

The gays upstairs had a splendid fight yesterday. You could tell it was gays - they'd been lobbing things through the window and amidst the shattered pains of glass, the courtyard was littered with tealights, potted plants, and DVDs with titles like "Raw Beef" and "Skaterboy".

Today one of them moved out. While he was loading the van the other one was throwing wine glasses from above, cooing "whoopsie". I suspect it had something to do with him taking their small dog with him.

So there we go. On the one hand, a sad end of a chapter. On the other hand there's a vulnerable, freshly-single gay upstairs. And he's clearly nuts.

*grabs a bottle of cava and best cardigan*

In other news, fiddled with the comments and spam-filtering, trying to make it a bit easier for people to comment. The result was an inbox clogged with emails about using pivot tables in excel. What? Now I'm 36 do I no longer count as a target for pen1s enlargement? I also discovered that stats button, which is quite striking. Apparently the single most popular post on here ever is "Russell Howard Topless". Humph. I dunno, over seven years of rubbish dates and that's the best I can manage. Russell, if you're still reading this blog, can we hook up? It's not for me, it's for the traffic. Honest.

Where the nuts come from

2010-09-10T10:35:00.000Z

I meet the Brazilian in a bar. I've gone out for a drink and as I sit down, I realise two things:
1) I'm surrounded by transvestites
2) They've announced those fateful words "Two minutes till Sandra comes on stage".

The trannies aren't proper glamorous trannies. These look like mildly frumpy people who get their fashion tips from Les Dawson. They are almost all of them clutching the handbags you find at jumble sales.

Sandra is, if you've not seen her, well... it's just one of those awful moments when you think "Have I really seen that same act for ten years? Oh lord."

There's a bar downstairs. "Oh, the ladies are just finishing." I'm told. I see a sign up that says something like "Shirley Valentine's". There's clearly some kind of transvestite gathering. I'm oddly reminded of The Witches convention in Roald Dahl.

But actually, inside it's okay. A large man in a small frock rushes past me into the night, and I'm at the bar. And it's empty. Well, almost empty.

When I was a kid I used to imagine the world was made for me. You know - that only my house was real, that all the others were fakes, that people were as real as the newsreader on television (that episode of Willo The Wisp has a lot to answer for). I wonder at what point you stop realising that the world revolves around you and you revolve around the world? Thinking back to some of my exes.... Anyway, the point is that sometimes, the people in a bar just appear to have been hired in for the evening by a casting agency. They just can't have a real existence elsewhere, can they?

I'm not talking about the large man in the corner, sipping a pint and looking miserable. I'm sure he's got a home, a dog, and may even be called Barry. Only he rarely goes home, hardly sees the dog, and never uses his name. He just sits in the corner of that pub, of every pub.

Nor am I talking about the incredibly athletic black guy who, even though it's been a damp summer has come out in short shorts. They're red and covered in glitter but hey - he's probably just nipped in for a quick drink on his way home from choreographing the 1970s.

But... but I am talking about the guy who is wearing a doublet and hose. Actual, proper, secondary school Romeo costume. He's drinking a J20, so he must, actually, be real. But and yet.... he can't be. He just stands there in a corner, watching one of those insane PubTV flat screens (why are you advertising your bar in a bar? I mean, we're standing in it). He looks insoucient - he is eyeing up everyone shamelessly. It's not so much cruisy as predatory. As though he's waiting to be challenged to a dual.

And that's when I realise I'm not the only person trying not to laugh. For there's a handsome man, and we're both pointedly not laughing at the last of the capulets.

So we go outside for a cigarette. His name's Phillip and he's from Brazil. "Not Phillipe?" I ask. He glowers at me. We walk back to the station and he arranges to come round at the weekend.

Amazingly, he does. He teaches English, he's moved to England on a whim. Well, he says a whim, but...

His story is complicated. He's a vegetarian, which isn't so easy in Brazil. So he moved out of the city, and taught in a vegetarian community. I ask what this is and he winces. It's complicated, but the stews were nice and eventually... they got a little mad. So he moved to England.

How mad? I find out when he asks me what I do. I try and explain. He looks suddenly nervous as though a secret society has caught up with him, plied him with cheap cava, Camel lights and sexual intercourse to try and win him back.

"You work with.... Aliens?" he asks. I nod.

And then it all comes out. The community he went to work for got increasingly less about vegetarianism and ecology and more about the aliens. Specifically The Old Ones who lived before mankind, an ancient and wise race who slept in their underground cities and were awaiting the signal of return, a signal which had never come. However, the community had worked out how to bring about this signal by reuniting 13 discs of power. When he'd been there there'd just been the 12, but then someone had apparently unearthed the 13th and he'd hotfooted it on the next plane out.

"Goodness," I say, "That alien race sounds just like the..." And then, seeing the haunted look in his eyes, I shut up.

He is trying to escape an imminent alien apocalypse by working in a cafe in Kentish Town. He's probably not the first.

The next day he texts to say he's moved to Wiltshire. Or does he?

Tales of the UnExPected: Fancy seeing you here

2010-09-03T11:36:00.000Z

"It's been a while," he says.
"Yeah."
"How've you been?" he says.
"Good thanks. You?"
"Fine thanks."
"You've put on weight."
"Thanks. At least I'm wearing clothes." I say.
It's one of those bars where the dress code occasionally varies. Madly, this means I don't see him for two years and then suddenly bump into him at the bar and he's wearing a pair of pants. I'm not sure if this gives me the advantage or not. I am conscious that, were I in his position, I would be the only person in the bar wearing Bugs Bunny not Aussie Bums.
There's a pause.

"Why did we split up?" he says.
"I dunno. We kept missing dates." It was one of those odd... nearly clicking, not quite clicking, nearly clicking things. But here we are. Face to face. A couple of silver spoons. Where is that from?
Anyway, here we are. Two years on. It's odd. I nearly typed "it's all a bit mad", but don't you just hate people who say that?

So he gives me his number and I have no idea what to do with it. Do I call him? Do I not call him? So I leave it in the back of my jeans and pop them in the washing machine. My fate is in the hands of Daz. If the number's still legible afterwards, then maybe I'll give him a call.

The Pandorica Opens

2010-09-02T10:36:00.000Z

Camden Lidl not yet open. But soon.... soon... soon my precious, soon...

funny familiar forgotten

2010-08-31T11:52:00.001Z

You know when someone does something really stupid online and then follows it up with one of those semi-apologies that includes the bleat "Look, it's just been a really tough few days and there's been a lot of stuff going on in my personal life" and you think "fine, but if that's the case how come you found the time to check Facebook, send that mad email or post fifty three times to a message board in block caps?"

Well... yeah. Last night contained a tiny, awful little event. A really small ugly bit of homophobia. Stupid really the sheer tininess of it - I've had friends who've been properly gay-bashed and they're brilliant about it. But this... oh lawks, I'm worked up into a right old state by it. And the terrible thing is, it was so tiny and casual, just a single remark that the guy probably forgot about it between one sip of his drink and the next. I haven't. It's so small and it's gnawing away.

*fumes*

So I'll be treading carefully online for a couple of days. Just to avoid having to say "Look, it's just been a really..."

tap tap tap

2010-08-28T11:42:00.000Z

It happened at one of those luncheon parties for gays. Everyone around me had tapped open their iPhones to see if the waiter was on Grindr, and then someone stared at me.
"Where's yours?"
"I don't have an iPhone."
"oh" A tiny pause.
I produce my battered Nokia.
"How... retro. Look! How 2000s." There is cooing. And clucking.

Not having an iPhone has become... well, it's become like some kind of deliberate anti-fashion statement. Or, in my case, because I belong to T-Mobile.

"Why don't you change network?" one of my exquisitely-haired friends tuts.
"Because I've got the most amazing deal." Seriously, there is a special T-Mobile Discount for "I've shagged the manager of a call centre on his water bed" and I'm not letting go of it.

But it does mean that "T-Mobile iphone" is one of my periodic hopeful google searches. Along with "Avengers blu-ray", "cancer-free cigarette" and the name of a particularly vile ex-colleague with "RIP" after it.

The other day, I hit pay-dirt on one of these. No, not the chance to do the Numa Numa dance on a grave, but T-Mobile now stock the i-phone. Well, kind of. You wouldn't expect them to rush headlong into the 2010s, now, would you?

If you click the existing customer button at the bottom of the page, it asks you to log in and then offers you a google android thingy. "What iphone?" it shrugs.

It has to be an iphone. I'd like to join Grindr before all the gays have moved on to dating via wireless hair-product. Already an A-gay friend of mine's informed me that "Grindr is ovah". But then he's now dating a sushi chef, so it could just mean the sudden rush of carbohydrates has driven him mad. I'm still recovering from the dinner party where the friends I'd invited over casually arranged their own dessert on the way out. This left me mildly stunned (there are other gays in my apartment building? is it the guy with the really tiny dog? or the guy who appears to live on Waitrose pierce-n-ping?).

Anyway. I'd like an iphone. So I make the mistake of ringing T-mobile customer service. This is like hell, if hell had voicemail. It's broken, and constantly spins you around in a loop while sending you helpful automated texts ("Why not log into our website?"). Eventually, after two minutes of stabbing the star key and yelling with a pent-up rage I haven't felt since my days of lower-middle-midle-lower management, they put me through to someone in a call center in a galaxy far far away.

This does not go well. The line is so faint and her accent is so strong and I'm so cross that neither of us can understand the other. At another time, if I hadn't just spent five minutes pressing 1 to hear those options again, I might, just might have found the fact that she pronounced it "pissword" funny. But not today. Today I'm like a freshly-microwaved Daily Mail of hate.

Finally I am transferred to a nice Valleys Girl called Kate. She's no-nonsense and will have none of it. "We do have the iphone" she admits, and we can transfer you to it. Hosanna. But it is quite pricey... hang on. She's checked my account. Actually, with the discount you've got... there's awe in her tone (I suddenly wonder if he took pictures). So, I'm left wondering... should I do it?

I email a couple of friends. One of them has just become the marketing manager of a major phone network. He promises me an even bigger discount. And this time it doesn't involve horizontal trampolining.

"Cool," I say. "How much?"
"Ah," there's a pause of about a day. "I don't know. Let me check the figures and get back to you."
"Hang on, you're the marketing manager of [blank] and you don't know?"
"No."
"That's rubbish."
"I know your phone number. Just you wait."
"Was that a threat?"
*click*

So. I'd like an iphone. But I still don't have one. And the nearest I'm getting to meeting temporary afternoon husbands is a sudden stream of texts from people called things like Tiffany explaining that they're bored and appear to have lost all their money and their clothes.

A Familiar Face

2010-08-25T10:39:00.000Z

Many years ago I went to take my second driving test. It was the same examiner.
"Oh don't worry," she said, "I do ten of these things a day. I can't remember anyone. Well, only the really awful ones."

On my fifth test she greeted me with a weary sigh. "Hello James".

I still can't drive.

***

A few years ago I took my bike in for repair as it just wasn't pedalling. The guys at the bike shop clustered round the gears, staring in horror. One of them eventually, staring at the floor, managed to address me.

"So... what did you oil that with?"
"Oil."
"What kind of oil?" (sniggering from the back of the shop)
"Olive oil."
"Olive oil?"
"Extra virgin!"
"oh my god."

Someone called Barry collected some money from someone called Ted. There'd been a bet on.

***

You remember I washed my netbook to death a couple of weeks ago? I took it back to the repair shop to get the melted keyboard replaced. As I walked in, the guy who runs it greeted me like an old friend. I noticed his Polish helper glance up from some soldering. The two shared a glance.

"Just a new keyboard, yeah?" he asked.
"Yep."
"So... Not... done anything else?"
"No. I haven't touched it."
"Still... it's....?"
"Fine, apparently."
"Okay."

He looked vaguely disappointed. He took the netbook from me. His gently sniggering air transformed to that of a protective father. I suddenly realised what it's like to be at the vet's when you're That Crazy Old Lady Who Has Been Feeding The Cat On Kit-Kat Chunkies.

The Dying Swan

2010-08-19T16:45:00.000Z

I've been dating a ballet dancer recently. It kind of petered out, as things with ballet dancers are bound to do, but he was rather lovely in a vaguely flaky way.

We managed one meal out. He ordered a burger, fries, the cheeseboard and ice cream. I had a bowl of soup.

He was very good looking, but, as he admitted, his flatmate was stunning. In a "he's about to take over the part of Rocky in Rocky Horror". Dancer sighed "We no longer go out to bars together as I'm fucked off with getting shoved out of the way," he said. His flatmate was also utterly disorganised, helium-squeaky, and almost completely pointless.

Plus he had an extremely high body image. Dancer used to have business meetings in his flat, but gave up after Ben kept wandering through wearing a thong while eating cereal and scratching himself.

The Dancer did tell me one lovely story, though. He and Ben the Beautiful went out one night. And there on the dance floor was a very handsome man.

Ben clocked him, squealed "honey, it's showtime!" tore off his shirt and went to dance at the handsome man. This was a mistake, as for a professional dancer, Ben is actually not very good on a dancefloor. If he's following a routine he's immaculate, but confront him with the Pussycat Dolls and he's like a sack of fighting coathangers.

Handsome man ignores the display of flailing. Ben, spurned for the only time in his life, storms back to Dancer. "Hey babydoll, this place is ova!" he announces and swishes out.

Dancer stands there at the bar and sighs. He's about to follow when an arm lands on his. It is the handsome man. "I hope that's not your boyfriend because this is my number," he says.

Dancer leaves the club, floating on point. Ben is standing fuming on the pavement. "Hey gurl, what kept you?" he yells. The Dancer tries evading the question, but eventually answers. Ben screams and refuses to speak to him for a fortnight.

There's a moral here. I think. Possibly.

How I became a hooligan

2010-08-18T12:45:00.000Z

We were drinking in a theatre bar before a show. We were having a lovely time, place to ourselves. Then it filled up with the interval crowd from the previous show. Who jostled and tutted us.

In the corner someone started to play the piano, quite loudly. It was annoying, but we just raised our voices and pressed on. We'd just got to a juicy bit of somebody else's sex life and weren't going to be distracted. Then the singing started. This wasn't a light bit of Cole Porter in the Palm Court but I'm-filling-an-aircraft-hanger.

The worst thing was the way the interval crowd loved it. They wheeled out the smug laughter. If you've been to the RSC you'll have encountered the Coxcomb Laugh employed by people to show "I know what that word means. Hahahaha." It was that kind of self-satisfied chuckling.

What with the singing and the piano and the mirthless laughter it was getting very loud. We could hardly hear ourselves shouting about a friend's taste in twinks. People started looking at us. An old man slumped down at our table, got out a tesco sandwich and dentured his way through it while glaring at us. We got cross. The music got even louder. We were practically having to bellow at each other...

Then an usher came over and explained that the previous show was a pop-up opera and they'd decided to do act 2 down in the bar and we were interrupting it. We had gatecrashed a pensioner flashmob.

I'd like to say "mortified, we sat quietly through the rest of the opera". Yes, that would have been the polite, nice thing to do. But no. Faced with having to sulk through the rest of an act of an opera getting "that's you told" looks from the egg mayonnaise brigade, we left. Quite loudly.

Misheard

2010-08-12T11:38:00.000Z

Brilliantly, unexpectedly went to a gig last night - the amazing Our Lady J

See? I can do going out. And you should too - not only is she incredible, but the choir are amazing In Every Way.

Anyway, afterwards, am talking to one of the choir and I make a tit of myself in at least two ways. One is to suddenly realise that he's going out with a friend of mine and announce this in a tone of startled surprise.

The second awful thing is that we're discussing another stunningly beautiful member of the choir.

"Oh, he's sweet and an idiot." I am told by the singer.

My jaw hangs open excitedly and my head fills with a plan involving tin foil and a string. "He's an idiot!" I bellow gleefully, "How brilliant that he's stupid!"

The singer glares at me. "I didn't say he was an idiot."

"Yes you did."

"No, I said He Was Canadian."

Awkward.

Pleasingly, though, I get home and find there's a trampoline in my flat.

Biking for Boris

2010-08-11T09:24:00.001Z

If you're a Londoner, you'll have seen these things:

Normally pedalled by people looking Very Pleased With Themselves. They're the iPad of bicycles. If iPads were heavy and cumbersome with all the grace of an iron-clad spinster.

A couple of weeks in and I've decided I Like Them. The system is actually really simple to set up - £2 for the electronic key and £1 for each day you decide to use one. Dead handy if you're thinking "well I'll cycle into town but I shall be too pissed to make the return journey".

The bikes are... well, the Evening Standard is valiantly insisting on calling them "chic" but they look like they've been designed by the NHS... but they're okay. They're a bit top-heavy so anyone over six foot will fall off immediately, but if you're Sandi Toksvig you're laughing. Once you get used to them they're very practical, even if pedalling them is a bit like stirring rapidly-setting wallpaper paste.

The only problems really are the docking stations - getting a bike out requires a kind of upwards-heave that's a bit of a trick, and finding one to park the bike is a bit challenging (Soho Square has a cluster of Boris Bikes circling hopefully in parking orbit). Apparently there's a very nice iphone app, and Boris does send you a map when you sign up for the scheme, but I don't have an iphone and I keep forgetting the map.

Worse is the fact that as soon as you get to a docking station, someone will immediately talk to you. It's usually tourists demanding to know how it works or wanting help unlocking a bike with their oyster card (no, it doesn't work, yes, that's sad, but I'm not the mayor of London).

Last night it was a club bouncer who had rescued a set of keys from a docking station and wondered if they were mine. Well, I say wondered. He was Very Determined that they were my keys. It was one of those odd social situations - he'd clearly spotted someone had left their keys behind and was determined to do an act of charity and had decided there was only one cyclist in London (either that, or we all know each other). He kept shoving this bunch of someone else's keys towards me. I kept politely declining. It ended up with me waving my own keys in his face while he said (in Bouncer Voice): "People should be More Careful with their keys."

So there we are: Today's lesson - when undocking a bike, don't leave your keys in the docking station. Which, now it's been brought to my attention, I now realise is a cripplingly easy thing to do. And will probably do it next time.

Thing is though, if I do, the customer service from the scheme will be amazing. I had a bit of trouble first time I hired a bike. Five minutes later they rang me to check everything was okay. "I see from our computer that you've just hired your first bike. Are you cycling right now? " Yes. I am wobbling through traffic as we speak. Your computer is telling you this. Can we wait till I've not crashed?

Vote! Vote! Vote!

2010-08-08T11:09:00.000Z

A thing I did is shortlisted as one of the Top 20 Audiobooks of the Year. I am keeping a carefully neutral tone about this. But just so you know, the cat has been eating Tuna Chunks rather than Tuna Flakes all week.

Anyway, you can vote here. There - see, I am running a social networking marketing campaign. Take that Ginny Woolf, I'll get you for this, etc.

Question of the day

2010-08-05T10:43:00.000Z

Who the hell goes cruising wearing a doublet and hose?

Getting Saturday Wrong

2010-08-04T14:14:00.001Z

It started with a tooth falling out. It's done this three times so far this year. Same tooth. Which is always annoying as dental anaesthetic makes me twitchy and grumpy, as a result of which I do stupid things.

I stump along to emergency dentist in Camden. Who turns out to be an emergency Private dentist. This means Classic FM rather than Heart 106. It also means a £400 bill rather than £16.90.

I stumble home. Along the way, I pass a little street by Euston Square station. Pleasingly, I realise it certainly is "Baker Street" in the new series of Sherlock. Then the anaesthetic really kicks in and I go home and lie down, twitching and muttering.

After a bit I decide to get my netbook ready to lend to Lee. He's going on holiday and I love new netbook. I tidy it up. I understand for most people lending out a netbook means removing porn, but as I've never really "got" porn, I instead spend half an hour trying to find some to put on (from here - mostly SFW).

And there we are. Job nearly done. I notice a slight mark on the screen. I'll just spruce that up, I think with a quick squirt of kitchen cleaner and some polish and...

Turns out, I've put the bang into Cillit Bang. The netbook immediately dies. Actually melts. As I am pressing the spray I am thinking "Is this really a good idea?"... but as I said earlier, I do stupid things on dental anaesthetic.

Suddenly today is a £600 day. And I can't even do a nice thing for a friend. And then someone I'd been vaguely dating the other week texts to say "Hi, how are you? Just to say I'm not really in the mood to meet again xx".

Hum, I think. Bad day. So I go and see Lee. And he takes me to the best Chinese Buffet in the world. Somehow I manage to eat unlimited duck pancakes using only the right hand side of the mouth. Later we go to the White Swan and have a horrible time, but I don't care.

On Monday I take netbook to the local laptop hospital. They stare at it.
"You put this in the washing machine, right?" they say eventually.
I shake my head.
"Sure," they say, unconvinced.

The guys who run the store are really nice and manage not to start laughing until I've left. I can hear them sniggering as I walk away. In binary.

The Taming of the Shrew

2010-07-26T13:46:00.000Z

In the country. Cat brings in a shrew. Mum and I coo, impressed. Cat kills shrew a bit. Shrew hides in a cushion. Cat pats cushion. Cushion squeaks. Cat grows tired of homemade muppetphone and slinks back out through cat flap.

Mum and I are left alone with potentially dead vermin in a corner. We prod it with a stick. It is alive.

"You've got to kill it," urges Mum, a bit Lady Macbeth.

Suddenly, horribly, armed with a mallet and a dustpan, I realise I've not killed anything bigger than a bug. The next minute isn't pleasant. It's probably easier to put something out of its misery if your eyes are open. Instead I make some dents in the skirtingboard.

I used to be okay at this - when I lived by the river, it was a daily chore to get rid of dead rats from the kitchen. It wasn't pleasant but I could do it. But this thing was alive. And quite squishy.

Eventually the tiny corpse is scooped up and thrown out into the night. The cat watches all of this from the garden. Curious and pitying.

"I hate that cat," announces my mother and goes to bed. I go and find the gin.

Saltash and the Devil

2010-07-23T08:26:00.005Z

There's a curious story about a disqualified beauty queen - she claimed to be 22 and from Plymouth. She's actually 27 and from Saltash.

I'm trying to get my parents to move to Saltash. Since they may both lose their driving licences I figure they should live somewhere with shops. Rather than in Wuthering Heights.

Saltash is brilliant - it's on the other side of the Plymouth suspension bridge, so has all of the advantages of Plymouth without the disadvantage of being Plymouth. From my parents' point of view it's got views and charity shops. From my point of view, it's full of dim men as pale and lumpy as school custard who lurk meaningfully up and down the high street with tattoos so cheap they either do them at £stretcher or it's an evening class option alongside flower arranging.

I even find my parents a house. It is ridiculously cheap. My mother takes against it at once. "No views" she says. For a woman in imminent danger of losing her sight, this is ironic at best.

Nevertheless, we arrange to go round it with Laura from the estate agents. Her blonde hair has been straightened in a trouser press. My mother takes against the house and Laura with a hiss like an angry swan.

We walk through the door. The house is utterly amazing. Imagine a mini-stately home that's been shoddily converted - they've not even bothered ripping out the original features, simply covered them over with clapboard.

"You're in for a late 18th Century treat" says Laura, peeling back some plywood to show a hand-carved staircase. My mother looks at her with something like respect. "You're not stupid like an estate agent should be," says my mother. This for her, is high praise. Interestingly, Laura does not punch my mother to the ground. I'd love to know what training course she's been on.

We've spent much of the last ten days going round stately homes. This house is like that, but with an added air of treasure hunt. All the original features are intact. Ish. Oak floorboards hidden under orange nylon carpet, fireplaces nestling under artex. There is even a view. From the upstairs kitchen. It would be the best view of Plymouth Ho possible, were it not for a big tree next door. "Imagine if that tree died from poison," murmured my father wistfully (he used to work in pesticides in the 80s. The shed is full of bottles with names like "Stomp" and "Wipeout" which are now illegal even in Nigeria. His garden has never had slugs or birdsong).

Finally, Laura the Estate Agent does a little dance in the hall. Her high heels echo on the floorboards. "No one's checked, but sounds like a cellar" she says. We stand there, impressed. Secretly, all of us have wanted a cellar. I'd put Lego in it. Dad would fill it with useful bits of wood. Mum would clean it.

Afterwards, we sat glumly in the carpark watching trains chug over the suspension bridge. "Oh dear, that is the one," my mum sighed with quiet despair. The house is a bargain. But that's still £130k none of us have spare, and it's not like my parents can sell their house immediately. It's at moments like this I wish I'd gone into the City when I'd had the chance (it was either that or the BBC). You know, just for a couple of years.

At school we had a history teacher who'd done banking for five years. He'd made a mint and was now clearly teaching just for a laugh. It made him a brilliant teacher. How I remember the lesson where we reproduced John Wilkes's attempt to raise the devil in the school grounds by traipsing round the Rotondo reciting the Lord's Prayer Backwards. "But sir - do we walk backwards, recite the prayer backwards, or both?". "Let's work through the three options Gemma Pudsey and when you burst into flames, well, then we'll know, poppet."

See? He was brilliant. And also minted. It's at rare times like this, sat in a carpark in the rain, that I wish I was more like him. I'd be able to buy my parents a house on a whim. And I could raise the devil at dinner parties.

Views of the Country

2010-07-21T09:21:00.001Z

So, I've been in the country for ten days. Basically, rehab with pasties.

There's something about the fresh country air (or maybe it's the boredom) that puts you early to bed with barely half a bottle of Lidl plonk inside you.

I've hardly missed smoking - except when watching Poirot with the parents, which is such an orgy of chainsmoking that the effect on me is like the brainwashing scene in Clockwork Orange ("must... not... rape... Eleanor... Bron...").

My reasons for country living are many. For a start, I miss the folks. Then there's a couple of projects to finish off, plus the bonus that being at home for two weeks costs nothing, meaning that I can finally cross "economy drive" off my to-do list (No wonder rural dwellers are addicted to drugs and online poker - there is nothing else to spend it on apart from houses. More of which later).

Finally, of course, my parents REALLY miss the cat. I'm now incidental to their plans. "Oh, are you staying?" my mothers asks as I get through the door. The cat eyes me, smugly, allowing my mother to scoop it up while cooing "Who's mummy's best love? Youare-youare-youare!"

My parents are fascinated about every aspect of the cat in a way that makes me pray it wasn't like this when I was a toddler. They'll comb through her litter tray like it's an episode of Time Team ("ooh, a solid. Isn't she a good girl?").

It's endearingly crackers... only, it turns out my parents are busy being very ill. Naturally, they don't really tell me (as a family, we just don't speak of these things), but their decision to bide out their twilight years on a hill in the middle of nowhere is now threatened by Dad's cataracts and Mum's glaucoma. Legally, neither of them is supposed to be driving.

It's at times like this that I realise what a disappointment I am to them. I'm sure somewhere my Dad has a list (he likes lists) that goes:
- can't play cricket
- didn't join the scouts
- not a lawyer
- not a mason
- gay
- failed five driving tests

The fact that I can't drive and they aren't allowed to hasn't stopped us from embarking on a merciless regime of Mr Magoo-style day trips "while we still can". In the last fortnight I've had my fill of stately homes, gardens, and small market towns. My mother's ecstatic "ooh look at that view" now seems oddly poignant, which doesn't help.

We'll get back home with a final crunch of gears and last scrape of car against fence in the late afternoon. Hardly has the rear wheel bumped to a halt against the garage wall than my mother will rush indoors. Just as I have a list of failures, my mother has a list of successes. For the cat. It goes:
- it poos
- it sleeps
- it eats
- it purrs
- it snores

Clearly, after me, she set the bar very low indeed.

HDN-Hell

2010-07-11T09:03:00.001Z

I accidentally ordered something from Amazon without checking whether or not it would be sent out by HDNL. Bad! Wrong! Never again!

As soon as you realise you're under HDNL house arrest it's like a glimpse into a Machine Stops future where all of humanity spends its entire time sealed into pods waiting for deliveries.

Sudden thought: It's a mercy that Gentlemen's Ordering Services don't use HDNL isn't it? Can you imagine stumbling home to find a note saying "We tried to deliver ChickenLols84 but you were out"? Or worse, finding it fuming sullenly in next door's kitchen?

The Comedian

2010-07-09T09:50:00.000Z

The Comedian turns up on my doorstep just as my cold is finally going.
"Hello," he says.
"It's been a year," I say.
"There's never been anyone else," he says.
We both laugh.

The Comedian is fun. He's from the north, but studying theatre in Brighton. He's a stand-up comic, is about eight foot tall, and just seems to potter around amiably. His Dad lives somewhere in London, so every now and then he drops by.

He has a student flatshare in Brighton which has an internal stalker. "It was creepy originally, but now it's kind of reassuring. You know - if I ever fall over in the bath, I know there'll be someone on the other side of the door to call the ambulance. And, if I ever forget my keys, I know he'll be sat in the kichen in the dark, just waiting."

I once dated someone at uni who had a stalker. It was his ex, Piers (it was Oxford, so everyone had an ex called Piers). I remember after a house party. Mark had taken a lot of drugs, so we cleaned the flat until 5am, and then crawled into bed.

"Can you... smell cigar smoke?" I asked.

"Oh," said Mark.

Sat in a chair at the end of the bed was Mark's ex. Watching us. While smoking a cigar. "Please, don't mind me boys," said Piers, "Just carry on." PUFF.

It's creepy realising that stuff like this feels like it was just the other summer, but actually happened two decades ago. Almost before the Comedian was born. That's not funny.

Heigl

2010-07-05T08:49:00.001Z

Sometimes you find yourself in a dark room doing something really regrettable and feeling ashamed. Yesterday, I went to see the new Katherine Heigl film.

I was bored and hadn't left the house for a week and through all the snot and confusion the impulsive desire to see Killers struck me. "Well, how bad can it be? And is Katherine Heigl really that awful an actress? I mean, she was fun in Roswell..."

Killers is a terrible film. It's not all Katherine Heigl's fault, but it's quite hard to see past her. She plays a "kooky" darling who accidentally marries a retired hitman. "Hilarity" ensues. One day, all their friends are trying to kill them and they must run for their lives. Only....

Heigl's character drops a momentous hissy fit. Before she runs for her life she demands an explanation, and then that they go shopping. All earlier pretence of being kooky and adorable has gone and she spends the rest of the film shrieking and squawking and whining.

The worst thing about this is that Heigl is frighteningly good at angry. You watch her being angry on screen and suddenly all those stories about her on-set behaviour on Grey's Anatomy go bing! My god, you think, that must have been what it was really like. When Heigl does angry acting, it's like she lets her guard down and her true self out, and you get to see what her agent, stylist, PA and dog-walker have to put up with. It's truly frightening.

The only other person like her for chillingly convincing angry-acting is Anna Torv who plays Special Agent Pramface in Fringe.

There's a famous description of the original Take That as four boys dancing round a polar bear, and Fringe is essentially three actors treading carefully round a block of ice. Torv is a nuclear winter of an actress. Like Heigl the only emotion Anna Torv can convey convincingly is fury. The difference between the two of them, though, is that Anna Torv doesn't even attempt the others. There's a brilliant scene in the latest series where they stick her on a roller coaster and her hair moves... but nothing else.

Anyway, back to Killers and Katherine Heigl. It's not entirely her fault. The film is fairly atrociously written. People keep saying unconvincingly smutty things like "Have you been downloading those internet pornos again?" in a way that makes you wonder if someone went "Let's give it a crude Seth Rogen kind of style" and everyone nodded but no-one had a clue what it meant. Then there's the stunning reveal that they've been living surrounded by professional assassins for three years because... because... well, these things just happen in movies.

I am not blaming Ashton Kutcher for any of this mess. Even though the film was his idea. My reason for excusing him is that he very priddy. Tom Selleck is also in this film. He wears a moustache.

ill

2010-07-03T10:52:00.000Z

That was a waste of a sunny week. Thanks cold.

On the other hand it is true - if you don't eat for four days you do lose weight. Who knew? Also, since when is hiccuping for 18 hours part of a cold? I mean, really?

And now, why does everything taste of salad cream? Even tea?

In other news this week, I found an ex on Facebook. A devastastingly handsome ex. Who's now gone... bald and speccy in a very "Grim Up North London" way. Sad week :(

Quis?

2010-06-27T09:32:00.002Z

I catch up with a friend who is a teacher. He tells me about having to look after his team at a cricket match.

"The visiting teacher was such a ravenous closet case," he sighs, poking away at a flapjack. "I wish he'd just come out and said 'Fancy a shag?', then I could have turned him down and got on with the afternoon. Instead he practically chased me round the pavillion. He sweating in the unusual places where only fat people sweat and he was all red in the face. It was repulsive. But he wouldn't actually get to the point. He'd just waffle on about liking a tight pair of shorts if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink. It was awful."

It's weird how suddenly you're back at school remembering EXACTLY that teacher.

(update: lawks, how many typos? i have massive cold)

Meanwhile in Europe

2010-06-23T15:00:00.000Z

Bizarre story on You and Yours (yeah I know) about how UK people who've emigrated to Southern France have found it cheaper to get groceries delivered from Tesco in England than to use their local shop.

PRESENTER: "How do you imagine your local shop feels about it?"

WOMAN: "Well, perhaps they should be more flexible about their prices."

PRESENTER: "Surely they can't help the strength of the pound against the euro?"

WOMAN: "Hmmm."

This is going to fascinate me all day. You move to France to "get away from it all". And then you can't. Not even a tiny bit.

Lessons I should have learned by now

2010-06-22T16:09:00.000Z

HIM: "You won't be all weird in the morning, will you? "

ME: "No. Wasn't planning on it."

HIM: "Good. I hate it when people go all weird in the morning."

In the morning, he goes all weird.

Pink Mince

2010-06-21T10:05:00.000Z

There's stuff by me in the new issue of Pink Mince which appears to be a lifestyle magazine for men with lumberjack shirts and artfully-shaped facial hair. It's jolly good - there's even an article in which a man with sexy tattoos shows you round his palatial barge home. I'm fascinated by this article:

I would like a barge. It sounds brilliant.
The article doesn't mention if he belongs to any Gentleman's Ordering Websites. How would you describe your location without it sounding like a "meet your serial killer" advert? "Camden Lock Towpath, near the burnt out shopping trolley". See?
Mind you, he does have very very nice tattoos. I bet he doesn't use those websites.

In other news, after months of being quietly busy, suddenly very little work for the next fortnight at least. Now, I've checked my online banking, done my sums, and I really shouldn't panic, not for months. But I am. Oh dear lord I am. What am I supposed to do? So far, I've been very lucky in that work's turned up like some kind of cosmic ordering system, but now... I dunno... I guess this means actually admitting that I am a freelance and somehow... you know... doing whatever it is that freelancers do to solicit work. Or getting a part time job to stave off the horror of sitting around the flat, reading The Arabian Nights and getting on the cat's nerves.

Hande hoch!

2010-06-18T12:16:00.000Z

Last week, I went on a date with a visiting German. This is why I will be avoiding the inter-fiddles for a while. I'd forgotten that temporary cyber-husbands are weird.

For a start, he'd said he was athletic. By which he meant he needed a sports bra for his moobs. They were so low-slung I wondered if they were simply high-rise testicles.

We sat having a drink, making small talk, and sharing a bowl of cashews. He tells me what he's into. Turns out, he's into rubber and fisting. I decide I've had enough cashews.

I ask him why he's in England. He explains he's a scientist doing research into bacteria. "It is the bacteria in shit," he says, which just seems like turning your hobby into your day job.

So, I'm having a drink with a tubby rubber fisting fetishist scat scientist. Awkward. I've never been brilliant at making my excuses and leaving. So instead I talk about the cat. A lot. I chat about her incessantly. I even find some fluff on my shirt and show it to him. I offer to find him the pictures on my phone. I keep on and on about the cat until he checks his watch and says "ah, oh dear, I have an early start at 10 tomorrow. Must get some sleep."

And then he is gone. I go to pay the tab and discover it's only four quid. There's a minimum of a tenner if you're paying by card. The wonderful French barman shrugs gallicly. I smile, suddenly very happy. "Can I have six pounds worth of crisps please?" I ask.

I walk into the flat, arms full of crisps.

The cat eyes me, dryly. "Date not go well?" it asks.

Quornucopia

2010-06-16T16:59:00.000Z

Brilliantly, Quorn have brought out loads and loads of new things, including Quorn Fish Fingers, Fake Stake, burgers, scotch eggs, sausage rolls, and even Bramley Apple Bangers

Being more than a little artificial I'm addicted to it all. The only problem is... well, I feel like a sheep that's been eating clover. It's brilliant - it's kind of like an anti-diet. It's kind of "Eat Yourself Straight". After dinner, I swell up to the size of a bouncy castle and spend the evening farting copiously while stumbling around in a vast black t-shirt and belching.

In other news, I've just discovered instant miso soup and pot noodles. Pot noodles are brilliant (kebab flavour! pork rib flavour!). The other day I was sitting eating a pot noodle while reading an article about White House Banquets in Vanity Fair. It might, just might, be classy. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, I am trying to mend a broken heart with a lot of ballet. Well, a ballet dancer.

Eurovison Prong Contest

2010-06-14T12:08:00.001Z

"So," I say to Lee, "Have I told you about the Brazilian Lawyer?"

Lee rolls his eyes. "You realise there's a formula, don't you?"

What do you mean?

"Nationality + Profession, then some random detail and giddy clapping."

I go very quiet.

"Honestly, go check the shag rolodex that is your blog and you'll see."

Hum. Brazilian Lawyer, Czechoslovakian Punk Baker, Portugese Programmer, Romanian Rentboy. I'm really not sure what this means. Maybe I should try and learn a few more names, or just not ask what they do for a living. Or settle down. Or write about the cat more.

I go home. Some time later I sleep with a Polish Barista.

The War On Lego

2010-06-09T13:14:00.001Z

A while ago I found some War On Terror fego in Asda, but the range you could buy was quite limited. Not any more thanks to The Kids Arms Shop.

Before perving at their Lego options, let's just check out the name of the store again, shall we?

Everyone still feeling good about themselves? Great.

Question is, what do I buy? Do I go for the Panzer Tank Set (suitable for ages 5+)?

Or do I blow it all out on the World Peacekeeper's Gift Set?

It does have a lot of guns.

So many choices.

And we're back

2010-06-06T09:30:00.001Z

Well, apparently things got a little hacky last night. While I was out and about in Glasgow, someone was fiddling with my gmail. Tsk.

So, if you tuned in and got a big advert for a sex bride or really white teeth, then I'm sorry. And, if I've sent you an email promising similar services, or even just announcing that I'm bored and would be happy to pleasure you by premium-rate phone number, then I'm equally sorry. Although I have got a six-hour train journey today and no special plans, so....

Two things.Firstly - Gmail's way of proving I'm real is, roughly...

1) Morning! Your gmail may have been hacked.
2) Send us your mobile number and we'll reactivate your account.
3) Don't forget to pick a new password!

Can you see the flaw there? I'm not Chloe from CTU but I can.

Anyway, Glasgow has been its usual lovely self. One highlight was staggering out of the Polo Lounge at "Too Old For This" o'clock and sitting down for a last cigarette by a police box. I think this is cool. Taxis think this is In The Way.

Two very pretty lesbians wander over. They are on their way home but one of them wants to make sure I'm okay. This is Glasgow. People do this.

"What's his name, sweetheart? Did he break your heart?"

No, I say. I am just sat here smoking before going back to the hotel. I am wary and from London. Why are they being nice to me? Do they want a free cigarette or some money or to sell me some of the drugs?

Pretty lesbian just shrugs. "Do you listen to Chris Moyles?" she asks. And then explains that he's shit. At quite some length. Then she and her girlfriend start yelling "Save 6music" a lot. I think I join in.

These are clearly my new best friends and wonderful people. Until one of them leans forward and says, "And I'm gay, but I would do that George Lamb in a heartbeat."

I go home.

Foreign

2010-06-04T13:33:00.000Z

So, yes, I've been abroad. It was nice, although clearly these days I don't fly well. It was nowhere near last year's spiking horrors of having to spend 24 hours flying back from Australia, but flying to Turkey not pleasant.

It didn't help that we had two security alerts. One was due to a false passport and a lot of suspicious luggage. I find this reassuring. Nothing says "we're not taking off until we're absolutely sure there isn't a bomb on the plane" more than being told to collect all your luggage and assemble on the tarmac while they empty out the hold.

The other security alert was on an internal flight. It was caused by a little old lady trying to smuggle five tightly wrapped packs of goats cheese in her hand luggage. Clearly, she'd never heard of semtex. Once the security staff had stopped shouting and ringing bells, they started laughing and taking photos of the x-ray on the phones. Bless.

So how was Turkey? Much the same, really. My Turkish is the same as ever (good in restaurants, hopeless elsewhere, and if you're hoping for a verb in a sentence then you'll be waiting a long time). But hey - it's an unusual skill to have, so I'm very proud of it. Even if I'm not very good at it. It's like making a mediocre creme brulee.

Not much happened really. Istanbul was its dumpy rude self. Cappadocia is still the most beautiful place on the planet:

Odd to think I've been going there for nearly 20 years. Every time they say "oh, tourism's ruining it..." and yet, it's still there, as magical as ever. Although this time we found a whole new underground city and a monastery, which made up for them putting really overweight-American-friendly superwide steps in the more popular cave churches.

Two lovely new things. One was trying out a night train from Istanbul. The guidebooks are all sneery about the trains, but the amazing seat61.com assured me it was possible. And it was cheap and lovely.

The other nice thing was going to Safranbolu. It's an old Ottman town that they never really got around to knocking down in favour of something in peach concrete. It's charming and friendly, but the best thing of all was that they've turned a 14th Century caravanserai into a luxury hotel:

It was like staying in a museum. Amazing, but you'd occasionally find tourists in your bedroom. There was also the day when I stuck my trainers to dry on the roof and the Turkish government had hired the hotel to launch some kind of policy initiative. We hid in some caves while important looking people stood on our balcony chain-smoking and doing a deal.

We also went to the Black Sea Coast, which turned out to be very hot and not much else. A nice old man took us out in his boat so we could look at jelly fish and dolphins and watch him smack the brains out of several small fish with his shoe.

There were a lot of cats in Turkey, all trotting around with the quiet certainty that they run the place. It's like a benevolent dictatorship - they control the vermin and charm the tourists, and they also tell you how propserous a place is. Safranbolu and Cappadocia had plump sleek cats. Istanbul had bedraggled street mogs. We watched one eating bread. I was not allowed to pack any in my luggage.

Old boy

2010-06-03T13:23:00.000Z

Somehow, my old school has my email address. This surprises me, but means that occasionally I receive utterly random missives like the below:

Speech Day welcomed a good number of Old Stoics this year, despite the rain, and included a remarkable display of Old Stoics’ Classic Cars on the North Front

We have further great events over the summer, at which we would be delighted to see you:

12th June
Do take part in the Old Stoic Open Golf Tournament for the Bill Edgerley Memorial Cup.

13th June
Foden’s Brass Band returns to Stowe with master classes in the morning and a lively concert in Chapel in the afternoon.

2nd July
The Summer of Love with Donovan & John Illsley of Dire Straits – tickets still available.

Perfect. If I played golf, owned a vintage car, and liked nothing more than tootling Money For Nothing on the tuba.

I am not the crossbow killer

2010-05-31T10:32:00.001Z

I'm on holiday at the moment (more later, but it's lovely thanks) when I receive a spate of texts about The Crossbow Cannibal, a case being presided over by my more useful namesake.

Curious to find out more (and with a broken laptop), I rush out to buy an English language paper and end up with The Times International Edition. It features a curious article which is, at best, insensitively subbed (and strangely missing from the Times Online site). In it the reporter wanders the streets of Bradford talking to friends of the three victims, sex-workers who appear to have been chopped into tiny pieces and dumped.

Here are a few quotes which illustrate what might have gone a bit wrong with the article:

"I've been taking my punters there ever Friday, right where they found the body. I've been doing punters right under my friend's nose."

"Sue was soft. She was an angel but soft as shit. She'd do punters for £10."

"My friends always used to have a laugh with her and she'd give her right arm to anybody."

Another draft?

The best of times

2010-05-17T18:21:00.002Z

I have been going to the gym for quite a lot of years now and in all that time, neither of the following things has happened:

1) I've never developed arms like squirrels in a sack
2) I've never had sex

Apparently there's a lot of nookie in gyms, but maybe I go to the wrong ones. I did once go to the notorious YMCA gym on Tottenham Court Road which looked like an secret underground base for a gay Bond villain. The changing rooms had quite a number of very naked men displaying their obvious excitement - but they also contained several young children getting changed. Frankly, there's a time and a place, fellas.

I have twice *nearly8 pulled at the gym. The first was at the BBC gym at Television Centre. It was all a bit embarrassing. I was being obviously cruised but was at a really funny bit of The News Quiz and perhaps my best look is not laughing on a Swiss Ball. Undeterred, he followed me into the changing rooms and then lost interest when he I changed into my beloved Marvin The Martian boxers (quite why novelty pants with a "surrender you strange life-form, you" slogan are a turn off I dunno). The next week we bumped into each other at the Filling Station salad bar. Turns out there's no etiquette for "Hi! I haven't seen you since you hated my comedy knickers". I never saw him again - I like to think he left.

The second time I nearly pulled at the gym was very embarassing. I was chatting to a friendly and very good looking man. We got on like a house on fire. We walked out of the changing rooms together and he went to the water fountain. Now, here's where social skills would have helped. I could either follow him to the water fountain (which would have looked stalky as I clearly had no reason to be there), or I could leave. So I left, so as not to seem rude.

At which point the good-looking man gave me a look of disappointed disgust and said "Oh, so it's like that, is it? Bye then." If only Nancy Mitford had addressed this topic we'd be celebrating our civil partnership this weekend.

Instead of which on Sunday I did what I normally do. I went to the gym, tiny bit hungover and wearing my pyjamas (old t-shirt and trousers so baggy you can call them pantaloons). Merrily, I plonked myself down on the rowing machine.

Which is when HE turned up. You know what they're like - people who are so muscly gravity bends around them. He strolled in, lifted some very heavy weights with a fingernail and then dangled from the pull-up bar without a care in the world.

I tried not to watch him and instead rowed (a trifle unsteadily) through to the end of The Archers Omnibus (oh, Lillian...). Then I went and showered.

While I was showering, Mr Muscle wandered into the changing room and glowered at me angrily. It was a look which said "I know your sort. Yes, these are the biggest arms you'll ever see in your life, but the gun show is over. Now fuck off." This seemed perfectly fair, frankly. To minimise contamination I stayed in the cubicle until he'd gone into another of the showers, and then slunk into the sauna.

At which point he came into the sauna. How utterly, hideously embarrassing. It's not a big gym and the sauna is the size of a microwave oven. There was barely enough space for one of his biceps and oh dear me, just look at those thighs. How was I going to try and comfortably share warm oxygen with an alpha male? Paging UN goodwill ambassador Geri Halliwell.

I was just contemplating making some weak small talk along the lines of "oh dear, the light bulb's gone in here again" when... it all went a bit porn.

The next few minutes were among the happiest and yet least satisfying I've ever had. Sadly for my univesity education, I discovered that men with very large arms can do pretty much what they like. Annoyingly, I'd like to say all I could think was "You've made me feel like a princess" but instead my brain just went:
- Why me?
- Never ever leave me
- Do watch out for those hot coals

He kept on muttering "Gotta go. Really gotta go" which made it all the more urgent, but also all the more transient. Clearly, men with big arms have busy lives opening fetes and saving the world, but all I could think was "Must you? This is possibly the most exciting thing to happen to me this year. If not ever."

Afterwards we got changed. It was awkward. We still hadn't actually had a conversation. Neither of us was looking at the other - he seemed suddenly shy (which was a bit like Optimus Prime playing peekaboo). And yet again, Nancy Mitford remains tight-lipped on what is the right thing to say to an anonymous stranger you've just had sex with.

In the end, I settled for a grisly attempt at a matey pat on the shoulder. "Thanks," I said.

And he made that half-grunt half-laugh sound that men make which means "Yeah, that was a laugh", "You too,", "Don't mention it", and "Don't Mention It".

The Odd Couple

2010-05-16T19:02:00.002Z

So, I'm at a party. And there's a married gay couple. I keep talking to them as they're near the food.

The thing about them is that... they're ALL about the sex. I talk incessantly about my cat, but pretty much their only topic of conversation was their sex lives.

This was a fairly nice, ordinary, mingly house party. There were straight men, straight women, a few gays... But (let's call them) Eric and Ernie filtered everything through cock-tinted spectacles.

Eg 1:

NICE LADY: "So how do you know our host?"
ERIC AND ERNIE: "Oh we spit-roasted him years ago."
NICE LADY: "Are these bruschetta?"

Eg 2:

"Any plans for the weekend?"
"Yeah. We're sling-fucking a Norwegian."

Yes. Eric and Ernie own a sling. This naturally required some explanation. Apparently they'd turned the spare room into an office-slash-dungeon. With a sling. Apparently it was self-assembly and was operational in minutes. I have a ceiling-mounted laundry hanger. This is excitement enough for me.

Ikea don't make a sex sling (although if they did, it'd be called Shünt), so Eric and Ernie got theirs mail order (I am trying to imagine the "we tried to deliver" note from the Post Office right now). Not so their cage. "No, we had that custom-built and fitted."

I don't have a cage for several reasons. These include:

I would lose the keys
It would take up valuable space which could be used for shelving, lego and cat-toys
I met one of my boyfriends in a cage. It would bring back unhappy memories. I avoid Nandos for a similar reason.
My flat is already cluttered with unwise impulse buys which are now gathering dust. There's a rice cooker, a USB vacuum cleaner and 10 metres of gold-plated S-Video cable. I'm wary of adding a cast-iron cube to the list. I'm not that much of a Star Trek fan.

Naturally, Eric and Ernie also have an extensive range of sex toys. They couldn't tell us in enough detail about their electro-shock butt plugs.

"Where did you get those?" I asked, stirring celery in the guacamole. "I mean, is there a catalogue?"
"Oh yeah. We got them from ErosTek."

It turns out that ErosTek are real. They've got a blog. Here's a sample post:
"When plugged into the AC adapter, the battery level displayed is higher since it sees the charging voltage being delivered to the battery via the charging circuit.... Don’t forget about the ET312 for 6 months and then expect the battery to have any life left in it."

I have *exactly* the same problem with my mobile phone. See? It always pays to read the manual. Mind you, I salute ErosTek. I'm sure many companies will have done the following equation:

Electricity + Bottoms = Very Bad Idea

but clearly they've pressed on regardless. And the best thing? It turns out the electro-bummer is remote
controlled. This is supposed to lead to a uniquely tangled web of pleasure-pain-domination-control around the house at all hours of the day and night, but all I'm thinking is "What happens if the neighbours get a clicker for their garage?".

My new plan? I'm buying a universal remote.

So wrong and yet far right

2010-05-09T10:34:00.002Z

"Who is that?" It was the middle of election night. We were watching Ed Balls keep his seat. And there, on the screen behind him appeared...

Yes, it helped that he was sharing the screen with Ed Balls and a fat-suited David Tennant. But... who was that vision of utter beauty? It looked like David Beckham, only... (and this may have been that it was 5am) BETTER. Look at those cheekbones, the hard jaw-line, the stubble, the hair, the dead-eyed gaze...

Oh lord, please don't let me be fancying the BNP candidate.

Sometimes, fate plays cruel tricks. The head knows not where the heart may fall, etc etc. Sadly, it turns out that this political pornstar is none other than Chris Beverley, and yes, he really is a member of the BNP.

Umm.

But maybe, you know, he's not all bad... Maybe he's a cuddly fascist? Although, let's face it, we'd want to skip the cuddling.

Let's find out more about Chris. Thankfully, he has a twitter feed, from which we learn that he likes 24 but not immigration. Also, TitansMarch has helpfully uploaded a video to YouTube where he says that TB is caused by foreigners and Labour and that we should... um, I actually had a bit of trouble following after that, maybe it was his slightly discursive argumentative style or the thought "he's lost weight recently. Wonder if there's a special 'only eat British food' zone diet?".

See, I'm a rubbish gay. I'm trying ever so hard to vigorously enter into mass debate with Chris but am just thinking "I wonder if he's done a charity calendar?". I mean, what pictures are there out there, oh internet?

January sees cheeky Chris taking a firm hold of his weapon, his cold, dead eyes making love to the camera while preparing to bury it to the hilt.

February shows him donning a sexy suit to pose with the French Nationanl Front and the Austrian Freedom Party. Woof, I hope there's Lebensraum in those Union Jack boxers, Chris.

March sees him saying "I don't hate Hitler" to Richard Bacon. I hope those two continued their sparring once the cameras stopped rolling. Phwoar.

April... the suit is working for you but I'm starting to wonder about the hair. Seriously, Chris, cross the floor to our side and we'd do something about that... pro-hawk?

May gifts us a Tom of Finland piece of fan art which it would be nice to see on a mug, teatowel, or jizz mop.

And that's just the year so far. I'm hoping that June sees him posing naked in front of unicorns and a waterfall, his manhood peeping cheekily from behind one of his Amazon picks, perhaps a tome about Jihad, sustainable indigenous culture, or just by Tolkien.

I know, I know, this is all wrong. I mean, it's not as bad as a gay I know who went to Milton Keynes to get beaten up by someone in Nazi costume and then complained about the trains home. But still...

I have decided, however, that this is post-modern. After all, this has been the gay refuge for liking everything terrible from Dynasty to Supermarket Sweep. Perhaps, just perhaps... After all, if Chris found out that he had a large - nay, swelling - gay following wouldn't he be slightly annoyed? I'm wondering about starting a carefully-worded Facebook group. We could follow him around, with t-shirts and flags. Maybe even a banner. I dunno what we'd call it... "Benders for Beverley"?

Not, sadly, that Chris will be out in an official capacity any more. At the election he lost his slender grasp on his seat. But the gays? Oh Chris, we'd have a firm grasp on your seat.

One final fact about Chris which came out after he attended a European National Front conference... he's fluent in German. Oh Chris, you had me at "Heil".

In media res

2010-05-06T11:55:00.002Z

People are in employment who've never not known the Internet. I remember ten years ago taking on a work experience student who spent the entire day on IM telling her friends how bored she was. And I thought then "tch. kids today".

But it's worse now. Or better. But genuinely... everything's changing and changing so fast it's like the theme tune to Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads.

For instance, roughly speaking...

In the 1950s, telly was in black and white, 4x3 and had 405 lines.
In the late 1960s, telly was in B&W, 4x3 and had 625 lines (hi def!)
In the 1970s telly was in colour (I remember a snotty kid called Dominic pointing at the Red Green and Blue dots on the formica front of ours and sniffing "Huh, yours only has three colours. Ours has all of them").
In the 1980s, telly got Nicam Stereo and by the end of the decade, we all got video recorders so that we didn't have to miss shows... if we could programme the sodding things.
In the 1990s, we got widescreen
In the 2000s we got... digital, freeview, PVRs, the IPlayer, bittorrent, HD, DVDs then Blu-Ray...

Yes, there's a bit of a fudge in the last bit, but you'll agree it's all a bit of a rush. And now Sky is launching 3D telly, already making whatever you bought last year obsolete.

When I was a child, my parents got me a Boots B&W portable telly. It weighed so much it held down a tent in a storm, and you tuned it with a dial. I finally said goodbye to it in late 2001. Apart from anything else, my DVD player just had no idea how to talk to it. But I was sad to see it go.

Now TVs are things that we shrug off like frayed socks. The lovely Ros who is staying in my Glasgow flat at the mo emails to say that she can't work the telly. It's not broken, she just can't get the hang of it "but don't worry, I picked up a new one on the way home." That's where we are.

I've a trunk in the flat of obsolescence. It contains two laptops, the record player, the minidisc, the VHS and, of all things, the DVD-Recorder (which is soooo five years ago). I got the last two out yesterday to copy over some old tapes for my parents, and got a few minutes in and thought... "there must be an easier way". The answer is, madly, that it was easier to download the shows from YouTube and burn them to DVD on my laptop (with a menu feauturing pictures of my cat, natch).

Of course, the brilliant thing about YouTube is that, if the source is an old VHS tape, you get strange little bits of old wonder that remind you how brilliant telly was in those days. Or not. Please, for your own joy and wonder, watch the first 30 seconds of the following clip:

Daft Punk

2010-04-30T09:06:00.004Z

The odd thing about the Czech Punk is that he looks so normal. I mean, utter pocket gay you could take as hand luggage on RyanAir without raising an eyebrow, but normal.

For a start, he works at an organic bakery in Chelsea. That's hardly spit and bin bags. He's wearing Abercrombie. But he keeps mentioning how he's a punk, and I just assume that he's picked the word up.

Later, I find out that tattooed across his back in the Sex Pistols font is the phrase "Punk is not dead" so I guess he must be.

Odd things in South Camden #317

2010-04-29T08:08:00.002Z

A posh-looking woman is walking her dog by St Pancras.

It shits on the ground.

She carefully bags the turd.

Then throws it into the road.

A car rolls over it.

The bag explodes.

I'm staring at the woman.

"Fuck off" she says. And walks away.

Dawn chorus

2010-04-23T16:19:00.002Z

So, early this week I was up. I'd gone to bed late, woken up at half two, and spent the night finishing "Murder, Maestro Please" - turned out to be quite a decent read, actually.

I was about to fall asleep when my second brain (my stomach) remembered that McDonalds opens at 5am for breakfast. What would that be like, I thought. So I went.

Trust me, there's no glamour. Although they do do a great cup of coffee. Possibly pressed from the souls of infants, but it's lovely.

The 5am staff were extraordinary - all posh leggy women with blonde hair and lovely manners. It was curiously like a MaccyD's run by Debs. The customers were mostly mumbly men. Not as many hot Polish builders as you'd hope. The odd thing was realising that there were two good old fashioned prostitutes still working outside the door.

Kings Cross has changed a lot. For years it's been lacking that "you want business?" feel that had the police searching our bins annually for diced hooker. Clearly, it's still there, they've just shifted the hours around a bit.

Anyway, I felt truly alive. I'd bought a muffin and a nice cup of coffee from a trainee yummy mummy and been propositioned for sex. And it wasn't even 6am.