August, again.

It's old news now, but the above headline I spotted outside a newsagents on Camberwell church street the other week is either evidence of Wasps having read my last post and venting their collective wrath, or the standard of journalism at the London Evening Standard. Maybe they were killer celebrity wasps. Still haven't seen many myself.

I haven't blogged in quite a while because, quite frankly I haven't felt up to the task. Which doesn't mean I haven't tried. On numerous ocassions over the last few weeks I've sat down with the intention of writing something interesting, and promptly given up out of sheer apathy. And I couldn't think of anything interesting (frankly I was hard pressed to think anything other than "it's hot"). Indeed my blog dashboard is currently littered with half written blog posts, discarded like watermelon rinds beneath a rusting tractor.

Only the other night I began writing about a moth the size of a sparrow that was ricochetting off my bedroom lightbulb, tracking it's movements to a bottom left position on my 'Octopus, squid & cuttlefish' poster, before I came to from my reverie and went to bed.

All this low bloggage is a shame as it would appear some people actually read this thing, including, it would seem, the good folk at my local, The Hermits Cave, who somehow worked out who I was. This has in turn prompted me to put on ice my review of The Castle, in case the owner reads it and sends his ghostly dog after me. Watch this space though.

Apropos nothing, Big Brother has really started to wind me up, and actually stresses me out to watch it now. If stroking a cat lowers the blood pressure, watching grown men and women screeching at each other over trivia is the equivalent of watching a bag of kittens being thrown into the Thames and shot at by idiots. I wish they'd bring in Paul Verhoven as guest producer for a week and liven things up with some 'climbing for dollars' style games. I'd buy that for a dollar.

Also, Lily Allen has seemingly become as omnipresent as fried chicken joints in South London, thanks in no small part to the Guardian being on her (purely metaphorical) dick. I've got no real beef, as she actually seems likeable enough, though you know the nation's in thrall to someone when she gets her fashion tips from Pat Butcher and no-one seems to notice. Have you seen those earrings? You could pilot a digger through those no problem. If this seems unfair, remember the girl herself seems to have a fine line in invective, unleashing darts at celebs such as Pete Doherty ("I do think he should be exterminated") Madonna ("The most over-rated person in pop history") and James Blunt ("Rhymes with his surname"). That last one especially is fine by me.

I actually spent a good half hour or so looking for pictures of both Lily and Pat, with the aim of doing a 'separated at birth' type feature, but it didn't work out as they actually look totally dissimilar apart from the loud garments and out of scale jewellery. See what you think.



similarly, I intended to do a a profile on the similarities between the facial hair of Ja Rule and Blakey from 'On The Buses' last year, but sacked it off because no-one cares who Ja Rule is. I'll post it here so you can check it out, though looking at it again, it does seem more like wishful thinking.



In other news I'm working in a flat in Putney at the minute. Not sure what I think about Putney, though it's not somewhere I think I'd gravitate towards instinctively. The corner I'm in is in a suburban bit just off the Richmond High street, and it reminds me superficially of Didsbury in Manchester, only with less gentrified shops. I did spot a pub that doubled as a Thai restaraunt though, so it definately is in London.

Having worked in more urbane locations, one thing I find genuinely bothersome about places like Putney is finding a decent lunch (where's the sushi? The jerk chicken?). The nearest sandwich shop I found had offerings of the order of tuna and sweetcorn, where the readymixed ingredients glower at you from beneath fronds of tired lettuce, under crenellated peaks of some stiffening union of fish and mayonnaise.

Stifling a facial tic I headed next door to the local news agents who predictably dispensed gloomy looking prefabricated sandwiches in plastic containers. A quick scan of the list of the compedious list of ingredients revealed more E's than the Castlemoreton rave. Unbelievably I opted for a Ginsters pasty: a pocket of sick which had the texture of a freshly dead frog with none of the taste. I'm sure this all sounds very bourgeois, but once you've got dined at Il Panino in Soho, any other sandwich just seems vastly sub-standard.

This weekend has been alright. Went to It's Bigger Than last night which was good, though hot. It took two hours to get home too. The weather is generally a lot cooler now, and Summer already seems to be in the act of riding off into the er, sunset. I can't believe the unnerving speed with which this year has whipped past. I'm orking for some of this week, then I'm going to try and savour the last dregs of this heat, whilst getting some other stuff done.