Flatmates

I walked into the kitchen of my flat the other week to observe that the plates were on the march again; columns of greasy crocks winding across the hinterlands of the worktop toward the cooker like Hannibal's elephants traversing the alps, daubed in a Pollock-esque crust of dried pasta sauce.

I sighed, the first nascent stirrings of a headache throbbing at my temples.

It's not the big things that annoy you when you live with people, I find. Alright it is, but it's also more persistently the little domestic foibles and quirks that drive me to distraction. I'm fairly tolerant, and can co-exist contentedly with any amount of opinion, vice and idiosyncratic behaviour, but so help me god, if someone leaves the tv on standby again I'm going to get on some Michael Douglas in 'Falling Down' type shit.

I think I'm getting a little irritable in my old age, and ideally, would really like to get a place of my own. While I think all my housemates are wonderful people, co-habiting is a process of acquiescence and tacit agreement that sometimes seems more like an unspoken war of attrition, with shifting alliances forged along lines of opinion, over all too familiar flashpoints.

Cleaning is one example. I don't see why anyone is too busy to spend ten seconds washing a plate, but then, most of my housemates at some time or another seem to disagree with this, and would rather deal with it 'some other time'. Of course everyone denies doing this, and ostentatiously huff and puff when the plates stack up, yet nonetheless think nothing of dashing spent crocks into the sink to lurk for days like crocodiles beneath the greasy water.

Heating is another common bone of contention. Now it's getting colder the heating is constantly on, and our flat sometimes feels the engine room of The Bismarck, so stifling is the temperature. I sometimes come home and fling open windows just to get the air moving, which is a sure sign I think, in November, that it's getting hot in herre (thanks, Nelly). Then again, I'm the kind of person who'd rather wear a sweater than turn up the heat, wheras some people are only content if they can walk round their home in a t-shirt in January.

Maybe I should look at the bigger picture, and consider all this as terraforming on a macrocosmic scale; a contribution to global warming that will, in the long game, engineer a warmer world for us all. Hell, by 2050 London will probably resemble some Ballardesque dystopia, where Iguanas compete for space alongside the pigeons on the South Bank.

The biggest source of my grumpiness these days however is the guy who has the room next to mine; part of whose ritual of going to bed is to switch on his tv immediately prior to sleep, (and he generally drops off within twenty minutes) leaving the set to quack away to itself like the teacher in Charlie Brown.

Part pf my problem here is that I do suffer from degrees of insomnia these days, and it takes very little to stop me dropping off. I freely admit this is slightly neurotic as London is hardly an oasis of calm, yet whilst I can somehow tolerate the distant external sounds of traffic, sirens, gunshots and shouts and screams that Camberwell generates, any incessent persistent sound, no matter how quiet, is the aural equivalent of the Chinese water torture to me, which I just fixate upon to distraction.

Selfishly enough, I don't even mind up to about one o'clock when I do go to bed, but after that, I really wish people would pull the plug on all local forms of media. I simply don't want to lie awake guessing whether that tinny sound I'm hearing through the wall is the soud of someone not watching golf, or someone not watching some crappy game-show.

Quite a few times I've actually crept into his room to switch it off (which is weird). The sight of my partially clothed housemate snoring like a beached porpoise snared in the folds of his duvet is a sight I could willingly forfeit at the best of times, never mind at half two on a Thursday morning.

A couple of times he's woken up/been awake, and I've asked him if he'll turn it down/off which he willingly does, and this happened last night. He was a bit funny with me this morning though (didn't acknowledge me on the landing) and I think he thinks I'm being unreasonable ("it's not loud etc").

I am hence, going to have to talk to him about it, and him being a reasonable guy, I'm sure he'll understand. I don't really want to though, and would much prefer it if he'd just take the fucking hint and turn it off.

In this respect living alone sounds immensely attractive as you can dispense with this kind of banal diplomacy, and don't have to convene meetings about trivia such as who's buying the toilet roll with anyone except yourself. At the minute flatsharing is getting to be as tedious as an Eastenders storyline, only unfortunately not relegated to four half hour slots weekly (and the omnibus on Sundays of course). Basically I want to go and live in a cave (and no, not The Hermit's Cave on this ocassion).

God I sound like an irritable bastard don't I? And there's the rub. I'm no domestic god. I'm sure I'm a pain in the arse to live with, and sometimes in the end living with other people just seems to hold a mirror up to your own petty madness and general crankiness, which my personal vanity would much rather avoid. I'd like to pretend I can get on with everybody, all of the time, but it just isn't true.

Satre said: "Hell is other people" (or something similar). My maxim might be: "I love people, I just couldn't eat them all".

Casino Royale

I went and saw the new Bond film on Friday at the Ritzy in Brixton, as everywhere in the centre of town was sold out. And despite my reservations about the franchise as a whole it was pretty entertaining.

I'm glad to say they've reigned in the cheesier excesses of the recent Bond output in favour of a grittier, pared down tone. So gone are invisible cars, Ice palaces, genetically enhanced villains, Bond doing a spot of impromptu tidal-wave windsurfing after an orbital satellite slices of a section of a glacier with a laser, and in is ushered a craggy faced Daniel Craig striding purposefully around Montenegro with an intensity worthy of the T1000.

One of the best things about it is the decision to eschew grandiose visual effects in favour of more traditional stunts, which gives it a tremendous sense of kinesis in parts. An early chase scene which sees Bond pursue a terrorist (played by champion freerunner Sebastian Foucan) across a buiding site in Madagascar, has a high impact choreography reminiscent of Jackie Chan.

Also dispensed with are the far fetched gadgets which wouldn't look out of place on Adam West's batbelt. This bond gets a gun and a car, and in one scene it's a Ford Mondeo at that. MI6 must also provide free gym membership as 007 looks impressively buff, emerging shimmering from the sea in an inverted reprisal of Ursual Andress's iconic cheesecake moment in Dr No.

Muscles aside, Craig's is the first convincingly hard Bond since Connery's, and you probably wouldn't spill his Martini if you met him down the pub. Moreover he manages to project the right air of moral ambiguity appropriate to a government sponsored killer, his piercing glinty death-camp eyes somehow just adding to the overall effect.

The main villain—La Chieffre—comes acoss as a proportionately psychotic foe, who, while in full posession of a trademark disfigurement (he weeps tears of blood) is less cat-holdingly camp than previous incarnations of the bond baddy (though he does whip James Bond's balls in one scene). The fact that his name sounds a bit like 'The Chief' is pretty top too.

Of course, before we all start reaching for our genitalia, it's still a Bond film and not the Godfather part II, so any accrued gravitas is somewhat undermined by the hackneyed trappings native to the franchise (the audience were pissing themselves laughing when the first Bond girl made her entrance jiggling down the beach on the back of a horse) yet overall the familiar institutional motifs (crashingly insipid one-liners for example) are underplayed, and mitigated by the Craig reinvigoration effect(tm).

So if you're going to 'catch a flick' with Brian Sewell and Germaine Greer, you might want to look elsewhere, but otherwise go see it. It's a fun way to waste a couple of hours, and has a very nice graphic title sequence (the main tune's a bit crap though).

Go on take a gamble (arf arf).

Just for the record..

If and when I make it into Second Life, this is what I want my avatar to look like.

For some more check Wayne Barlow's website. His stuff's incredible, a bit like Heironymus Bosch with Corel Paint.

National Express

My trip to Manchester this weekend gone was moderately successful. I managed to see most of my friends, in spite of them inhabiting different areas, and having pretty different social commitments; arriving on Friday evening and departing on Sunday afternoon gives you a pretty slender window of opportunity to timetable everything in, though I did my best.

Caught up with Vic and Paul on Friday, and went to a bar called Common in the Nortern Quarter, which has lots of illustration on the walls, before getting a lift off Kenny back to Heaton Moor in his latest Japanese second hand motor (a Honda this time). Ended up sitting up round at Vic and Paul's flat well into the wee hours, listening to Northern Soul and other delights on this amazing old school DJing unit which Paul's dad lent him – all it's missing is the telephone handset to cue tracks up on and it could be the seventies again. I think we got a bit carried away as the landlord rang up the next day to say there'd been two complaints about the volume. Oops.

Saturday went for a trawl round Heaton Moor's charity shops, though didn't find a thing worth having. Wandered past my old place down into Burnage were I bought a few CDs at Sifters, before catching the number 50 bus into town.

Here I had my first encounter in years with a couple of good old Manchester scallies, who you almost forget about in London, but are instantly recognisable by their uniform grade one haircuts, and the fact that they tuck their trousers into their socks (I can't believe they think that's a good idea). The exchange was unremarkable. They called me some names, I wanted to bang their rodent-like skulls together but decided it really wasn't worth it. The end.

Got to Manchester and caught up with my brother Dan briefly, before heading over to Chorlton where I met up with Fran, and later Crenan, who'd just got back from Jersey. We sat in the horse and Jockey talking and it was generally a bit like old times.

After that I caught the 22 bus toward Stockport, and after quite a bit of walking eventually made it to my friend Stu's party in Reddish. Everyone but me was in Fancy dress, so I guess, in a sense, contextually speaking, I was the most outlandishly dressed of them all. My one concession was to fix a comedy moustache to my upper lip for a duration not exceeding twenty minutes. We partied until around six, before I caught a taxi to my brother's place in Heaton Norris and crashed in his front room.

And then it was Sunday and time to go home.

The worst thing about the weekend unfortunately, was getting there and back, as I'd opted (foolishly in retrospect) to take the National Express coach. Bad move, and as of yesterday I have made a solemn pact with myself to under no circumstances ever take the coach again of my own volition. Ever. Life is simply far too short.

It was bad enough on the way up when we ended up diverting through Alderly Edge, but the trip back down was the coaching equivalent of dropping brown acid, and ended up taking over six hours. It would have been more bearable, but the last person to get on the coach was a really fat lady who decided she wanted to sit next to me. I don't have a problem with fat people necessarily, unless they're sitting on my seat while I'm in it, and this lady's backside was threatening to annexe mine.

I sat, cramped up, feeling hung over and miserable, alternately reading a book about the Manson killings and watching the 'toilet engaged' light at the front of the coach slyly wink on and off at me.

"Please god, make this stop"

I thought. It didn't (draw your own conclusions here).

The worst bit was in Luton where the traffic was forced into one lane to pass a flatbed truck putting out traffic cones. It took an hour and a half to pull abreast of it, wherupon I noticed they'd just put out the last one.

I eventually got into Victoria and battled my way home, but by then it was getting on for ten o'clock. Nearly seven hours since I'd caught the coach. I could've flown to New York in that time. I hadn't.

Up North Trip

Right. I'm off to Manchester for the weekend. The iPod is strapped down with life affirming soul joints, and I've got a bag of limes to ward off scurvy mid coach journey. Yes it takes that long.

'Washing Up Bowls'

It was my turn on the flat cleaning rota the other night, which, if nothing else, gave me turn to meditate on a feature of many kitchens, which I think is utterly superfluous, but still persists to linger on, like a kitchen based appendix (the wasted, vestigal stomach in the human body, rather than the bit at the back of that textbook you never read).

I'm talking about washing up bowls, and I'd like to invite each and every one of you to explain what practical purpose they serve. Feel free to use simple, childlike terms and intonation, diagrams, pictionary style sketches, or, if you peep me on the real (I can often be found in the Hermit's Cave holding forth about such trivia) maybe you'd prefer to communicate through the medium of mime, charades style.

Be as patronising as you wish, only please, can someone explain, 'cause I just don't get it.

Ok first and foremost I realise you can wash things up in them, but then you could also wash things up in the sink they're placed inside. To use an analogy it seems like placing a slightly smaller bath within an existing bath when bathing. Or building a house only to live in a shed inside it.

The restricted space the bowl allows basically means that you have less room to manipulate the crocks, less elbow room to grease the elbows so to speak.

But probably the worst thing about them is their materials however – as being constructed from low grade plastic they are subject to inummerable abrasions from the cutlery that shimmies daily across it's surface, or the scalding pans that brand weals into it.

These no doubt act as a matrix for a rogues gallery of bacteria, for whom the washing up bowl is probably to germs as the Costa Del Sol is to ex-pat British felons: Warm and accomodating.

Despite being cleaned regularly with the bleach equivalent of shock and awe, ours has still managed to acquire a 24/7 greasy sepia tinge, and a bum-fluff beard of frayed plastic. It looks rank. If it was a person it'd probably be someone like one of Roald Dahl's twits.. certainly no-one you'd want in your kitchen, let alone your sink.

Doubtless someone is thinking:

"why don't you just replace it then, if it's so manky?"

But I don't want to. I don't want another one when there's a perfectly good stainless steel sink there that everyone seems to forget about. I almost want to suggest flinging it out at a house meeting but I'm sure I'll just be met with an awkward, uncomprehending silence, because, of course, the bowl is the sink: and I might as well suggest we go and wash our dishes in the blood of newborn badgers for want of any consensual response.

In one place I lived in, the bowl (and I will stop going on about this soon, I promise) was circular, and only fractionally larger than a dinner plate, so when plates were stacked within and you needed to wash them you either required a gecko-like adhesive touch (which would be better served fighting crime) or to upend the lot into the sink anyway. Arrrrgh!

I used to hide it, but my housemate would simply find it and re-manifest it back in place like it was some kitchen based groundhog day – a utensil themed cycle of eternal recurrence. But why?

There was a piece in the Metro recently discussing the imminent relaunch of Smash, which for anyone lucky enough to have been not born yet or dead at the time, is what happens when people pretend something tastes like potato when it doesn't. It seems odd to think that in these nefarious, virgin olive drizzled times, anyone could excited about a powdered substance that isn't typically inhaled in toilet cubicles, but the allure here is nostalgia, apparently. People just have an unquestioning affection for the chintz that lurked in the cupboards and kitchens of their youth.

Another prime example of this would be those plastic swing top bins, which on the surface were really neat, but whose central design conceit (the swingy bit) was actually flawed, in that it either got too full to swing (though don't we all, eh?), or the act of scraping leftover food in would typically deposit a slug trail of food on the bin's lid.

Evolutionary pressures do seem to have edged that one out the door, somewhat, but in the washing up bowl a true design parasite persists, good friends, attached, remora like, to the seamy underbelly of the nations kitchens. A simple chrome sink, or ceramic basin will suffice for my loft appartment and/or country pile (if and when I come into posession of either).

So to return to my original point, is anyone up to the challenge of defending the humble 'washing up bowl'? can anyone be arsed? I suppose there is an industry built around the construction of this tat, so it's continued popularity probably ensures a subset of the nation's injection moulders have got jobs to go to on an industrial estate somewhere, but otherwise, I'm quite literally, not buying it.

Muggings

Went out to the Sun & Doves Tuesday evening, for the film night.

The screening in question was Tod Browning's 'Freaks', which a very succinct affair, clocking in at under an hour and a half.

It's quite a wierd beast, being a darkly comic tale about the members of a travelling circus troupe. Ed tells me the director is often lauded as 'the Edgar Allen Poe' of film, and it shows, as the final twist is really quite disturbing. There are definitely shades of it in The League Of Gentleman, I would say.

On a sadder note I was sorry to hear that a friend of a friend had been attacked on Sunday, and beaten quite badly on his road in Croydon – having been set upon by 15 youths. Having been attacked myself in the past (albeit by fewer thugs) I can empathise, as it's a pretty dehumanising experience.

The sad fact is that, aside from being aware of your surroundings, there's often not a right lot you can do about it. Sometimes your number gets called, you get singled out, and that's that. In this sense, aside from keeping aware of where you are, and what's going on, it's almost impossible to legislate fully for the actions of idiots, and hence hardly worth wasting your life worrying about it. Indeed, when it happens, it often occurs so quickly you hardly have time to be frightened, and the fear itself is somewhat mitigated by the adrenalin coursing through your system and blurring the edges of everything.

When I got mugged in 2003, it was about half one in the morning, just round the corner from my mum and dad's house. I was weaving my way home, quite drunk after a night out. The first I knew about it was being slammed into from behind, whereupon I tried to turn and was swept to the ground. The back of my head rang against the slabs.

I briefly remember being pinned to the pavement by two sportswear clad rats, one's knee in my kneck. "give us yer money and yer mobile" he hissed, while they rifled my pockets. Then I passed out.

I came too shortly in the street, pretty much the textbook definition of a punch drunk with empty pockets, and managed to stagger to my mum and dad's house, where I was put to bed. The next day when I awoke, the back of my head was matted with blood, and there was a footprint shaped bruise on my neck (you could practically make out the Rockport logo).

The emotional aftermath to events like this is usually a mixture of disbelief and anger: disbelief that people will do this kind of thing for chump change, anger that you were less able to stop it happening to you. In the abstract it's tempting to fantasise how these kind of scenarios might play out if you actually were as nails as fuck, and your hapless would-be attackers were soon to receive a lesson they'd never forget, delivered with bone crushing force in some brutal and esoteric martial art.

"Leave now" you'd intone, your voice cracking strangely as they slowly encircled you "we don't have to do this"

But, alas, this isn't The Bourne Identity, I was always better at drawing than fighting, and breaking off for a quick bout of sketching mid-brawl just isn't an option sometimes.

In any event, the police were extremely helpful and understanding in my case, which is something which doesn't seem to have happened in this instance. Indeed, it sound as if the interviewing officers were pretty unsympathetic, going as far to suggest that the chap in question did something to instigate the beating he received, which pretty soundly adds insult to injury. I think he's going to complain.

Anyway. Thursday night now, and tomorrow's Friday. Can't wait for the weekend. Cecilia mentioned a 'Festival of Light' which is 'gahn dahn' in Myatts fields tomorrow eve, from half six onwards. I wonder if it will be anything like the legendary 'Son et Lumieres' which we ocasionally asked directions to in GCSE french, but which along with Citron Presses I've zero empirical knowledge of, outside of vague references in the Escalier series of French textbooks (whose protagonist, Oliver Oignon, would inevitably be augmented by a crudely drawn cock and balls on every page which he appeared).*

Come to think of it, has anyone been to a Son et Lumiere, or drunk a Citron Presse, or better yet, gone to a Son et Lumiere and drunk a Citron Presse?* Are these genuinely French cultural predelictions, or the kind of useless bollocks you ocasionally get taught in school? Answers on a postcard please to the usual address.

* I googled hard for a picture of Oliver Oignon. Not a sausage.

**I guess that would count as light refreshment arf, arf.

Rat Records and Retail

They say you're never further than ten metres away from a rat in London, though in Camberwell it's probably closer to five. This doen't really matter though, as in rats' favour there is Camberwell's very own music vendor, Rat Records on Camberwell road.

Not many Saturdays are complete for the Eyechild without a nose through the racks of this place, similar to when when I used to live on Kingsleigh road in Stockport and was contractually obliged to stride down to Mr Sifter's place in Burnage for a shufti at the wares there of a weekend (Sifter's incidentally getting a mention in Oasis's 'Shakermaker' by the way).

Being a second hand shop, it's stock does fluctuate in quality quite wildly, so as ever when it comes to digging, the key is frequent browsing, because when you do hit a seam of vinyl gold, it's usually very fairly priced.

Yesterday while doing some auditory browsing through a stack of twelve inches I came across a tune I'd been searching for for ages, which featured on a pre-hyphy DJ Shadow mix he did for Kiss Manchester in 1996. My mum had since thrown out my shoebox of mixtapes and I'd devoted many fruitless minutes googling half remembered snippets of lyrics to try and get a fix on what it was. I can now report the record in question is the the 'Dedicated EP' by EDO.G, and the particular tune being 'Acting' off the B side, which I think Shadow then blended into 'Brownsville' by MOP (Damn that was a good mix). Anyway. Fiver. Result!

I do wonder how the owners of Rat Records manage to make a living out of it though, as by all accounts, trading in Camberwell isn't easy, unless your'e a fried chicken vendor or sell rotgut cider – the demise of Wordsworth Books alone is testament to this. (In fact, for a fascinating insight into the pressures which beset the Inn Trade round here, you should get yourself to Camberwell Online and read Mark Dodd's comments in this post. You might have to dig down a bit, mind.

The problems which beset specialist music retail are not specific to Camberwell of course. Looking at the amount of record shops which have closed in recent years in Soho surely gives some impression as to how tough the market is. My old mate DJ Phase once got talking to Nicky Blackmarket in erm, Blackmarket records, who was lamenting the impact online shops had had on trade. The counter argument to this I suppose, might run that buying online saves you the hassle of circumnavigating the bloated egos of people who quite often work in record shops; but we will all miss them when they're gone. Anally retentative vinyl enthusiasts will anyway.

The advantages of shopping online are obvious though, just in terms of it's convenience – and it always great getting a package in the post. Depending on an item's obscurity you are also far more likely to find it on the net – recently I tramped round all of Soho's specialist music stores searching for a copy of K-Def's rather wonderful instrumental album "Willie Boo Boo – The Fool" only to be met with blank looks. I eventually got a copy online from Fat City in Manchester, but someone in London lost a sale there, by missing a trick.

Speaking of retail there was a spot on London Tonight the other day reporting how Westminster council might use compulsory purchase orders to hound out the traders who perpetually hawk naff logo shirts and discount jeans round the Tottenham Court Road end. The main thrust of their proposal seemed to be that these kind of shops cheapen the tone of Oxford Street and their ousting would pave the way for a more gentrified shopping experience. There were a few gormless voxpops with the man on the street, mostly along the lines of "Better brands down the other end innit".

Now as I'm not in the market for nylon Union Jack knickers or a t-shirt with the legend "Nobody knows I'm a lesbian" embazoned across it, I'm probably the last person to actually frequent these places, but I have to admit, they do have their place in London, and do, in their own way, add local colour. The fact that Oxford street at times resembles an obscure plane of Dante's inferno is such a cliche it hardly bears recanting, but the spectacle of shops in perpetual liquidation and 'golf sale man' are merely props in this scene rather than their causal origins.

Frankly, I find the notion of discussing regeneration purely in terms of retail unimaginative in the extreme. Sure, the Tottenham Court Road end of Oxford Street does look as rough as dreads on white guys, but the kind of development I'd advocate would be things along the same lines as the proposed redevelopment around the base of Centre Point, which in it's current incarnation is to civic planning what daisycutter bombs are to human life.

Moreover, I find the prospect of simply copying and pasting the same mile of bland brands that populate the other end of Oxford Street immensely depressing. One of the things that does get me down about London is the flavourless corporate facade of high street chains that wallpaper practically every stretch of road, such as yes, you guessed it, Starbucks (a handy whipping boy in these kind of rants if ever there was one). Why anyone would want to allow these coporporations to gain more of a chokehold over London is beyond my ken (see diagram attached).*



So back off Westminster, You don't know jack.

*Photo by Cpl. Benjamin M. George. Apparently.

Friday 13th

Another day, another dollar.

This is turning into my longest stint so far this year – two and a half weeks so far and I'm booked in here next week too.

It's been a week of late(ish) nights, due to a pitch that's just gone down. Wednesday I was here til half one, and all in all. it's been quite tiring.

On the other hand, it hasn't really infringed too much on my generally nocturnal nature, as I don't generally get to sleep before half one anyway, and I felt more sorry for the account executive briefing me, who's been working as late or later than that most nights and has been in over the weekend.

She came into the studio yesterday and got a little weepy because she was so tired, and had been skipping her regular physiotherapy to get the job done. She was really under pressure to stay in right up to the pitch, but I think eventually managed to hand over what was essentially a job well done and go home and get some sleep.

Anyway. I've made some money which is good.

Bumped into S the other day in the lobby, who I worked with quite a bit last year. She really is quite distractingly pretty.. so much so in fact that I find it quite hard to work out whether I'm talking or breathing when in conversation with her. She's got a lovely face. I don't see much of her here anyway, though. *sigh*

It's now Friday the 13th, and I've just had fish and chips for lunch from the cafeteria, which was quite nice – the batter was good and crispy anyway. It also came with some homemade tartare sauce which was a nice touch. The chips weren't as good, mind. Bit flabby.

Thus far I've usually gone out for lunch and wandered up to Camden, to take in the sights (alternative looking people with eccentrically coloured hair and complicated boots) sounds (usually some warbling trance) and smells (joss mostly, and troughs of Chinese food).

Unfortunately I forgot my Freelancers pass today, which makes moving round the building a bit like Alien Breed when you ran out of keys. Indeed getting past the tag team of cheaply suited receptionists in the lobby is such a bore I won't even endeavor to face it today.

Anyroad. The weekend comes, my cycle hums. Groovin' all week with you. Not sure what I'm up doing over the next couple of days, but I could really do with getting a new digital camera. My old Nikon Coolpix is well and truly fecked (even when fully charged it now only takes about three photos before the servos within utter a piteous bleat and the lens retreats, turtle-like back into it's shell) Any suggestions as to make and model gratefully accepted.

Tax Tuesday

I'm working back at a large ad agency in Camden. There's a variety of accounts, but I've mostly been occupied with that of a certain high street retailer.

For professional reasons I obviously can't divulge who this is, but if I said:

"This isn't just retail advertising, it's ..... ... ....... advertising"

In a breathy female voice like the Cadburys Caramel rabbit (remember her?) you might have a clue. And if you were to think of a certain 60s model who currently features in their campaign, I'm sure you'd soon twig who I'm talking about.

Also, this brand is very close to the national heart – you could almost say it's the opposite of sado-masochism.

On your marks, get set, go!

Anyway. I'm bored right now, hence writing this.

Weekend was OK. Went out for Ed's new housemate Madhu(?)'s bithday on friday. Thirty three apparently, but she looks much younger.

Anyway we went to, yes, the Hermit's cave and generally shot the breeze.. The place was thronged with art students in tight jeans, some of whom were ogling the Kinder egg I gave Madhu until Ed had a word.

About the most eventful thing was someone shuffling over and offering me 50p for a roll-up, which I refused, offering instead that he help himself. At this point Ed took receipt of the Pentagonal coin, and our new friend took this as a cue to calmly lift the packet of Golden Virginia from the tab and dart out the pub, causing all three of us to do a double take.

Exeunt me and Ed, pursuant, only to find the street outside as quiet as Margate in the winter, bar the usual usual convention of hop-heads, rudeboys and assorted lost souls who trickle down Camberwell Church Street's leg at all hours.

Slightly puzzled, we retired inside, only for odd-lad to return five minutes later brandishing the baccy pouch and demanding we return his 50p. Things get slight hazy here, but seconds later I found myself outside having to separate him and Ed, and telling the bounder to:

"Just smoke it all mate"

which was itself a a nearly subliminal uppercut I thought.. proving my innate superiority by refusing to brawl over tobacco of all things (plus tobacco is bad for you, so perhaps he'll smoke it all get ill and die. Which would be poetic comeuppance I suppose).

Perhaps he'll even contribute, in the grand scheme of things, to me giving up (again).

Anyway. Sunday went round for a roast at David's flat. Ate loads, then started playing board games – including Trivial Pursuit, which my team triumphed at, before receiving a sound birching at 'Cranium', which is over-wrought and stupid anyway. I also had a Pop Tart for the first time since, ooh, 1996? (and vowed to reacquaint myself with said toaster pastries soon).

Also trying to sort out PAYE on my limited enterprise, but the company acting as accountants seem, as usual, to be doing very little to help. I think the new year might be time to part ways with them, however much of a temporary inconvenience it presents.

In the interim I seem to spending a lot of quiet moments ringing an engaged number in Shipley. I'm almost glad it doesn't connect as the Inland Revenue is one of the more bureaucratic articulations of the human spirit, and trying to explain why I've not paid tax I'm not yet due to pay, to a bored someone-or-other in East Yorkshire on a tuesday afternoon (whilst at work) has fairly obvious limits in terms of enjoyment.

On the other hand, much like dental surgery, it really isn't worth deferring too long, so I would prefer to get it out of the way, pronto.

Film night at the Sun and Doves tonight, but I'll probably give it a miss as I've got some other stuff that really needs doing. Cheerio.

Referrals

Something I ocasionally do when I'm trying to avoid getting down to more important stuff is have a nose through the referrals page for my blog, which (for the uninitiated) basically breaks down things like visitor numbers and frequency into statistics. The referrals section itself is a bit where you can see what phrases people fed into a search engine to rock up at the front door of your web place.

It really is quite fascinating in a limited kind of way. Recent searches that led to The Eyechild include:

lily allen earrings

funky eye glasses for kids

deven miles (That's ma boy right there)

funky town lipps ink (sic)

number 9 printed all over hip hop fashion t shirt (presumably bad buoy fave Akademics tings)

nearest cashpoint lock tavern pub

Given that my blog is about the least useful thing ever unless you're interested in wasps, me slagging off tv, or the Hermit's Cave, you can but feel sorry for the poor souls directed here by the web equivalent of faulty Sat-Nav. Without judicious use of quotation marks search engines do rather seem to snuffle excitedly at disparate words in any body of text, sometimes in my blog's case when the posts are months apart.

On the other hand, part of the internet's charm is that you can easily waste hours of your life being lured from point A to B by the graffiti that daubs the walls of the information superhighway, so maybe people enjoy the average 1:14 minutes they spend here once they've arrived.

This post is particularly low on content due to it's very self-referential nature, so for anyone led here looking for something critical to your continued existence, now's probably the time to hit return and revise that google search.

London Lite

In another day, another age, a paper with the word light in the title may have been alluding to illumination, with it all it's attendant, noble, journalistic associations (bringing truth to light etc).

Not so Lite London, which can't even be bothered to spell light correctly, opting instead for the four letter variant beloved of soft drink marketeers, for this is lite as in light as air, as in air headed.

It's often said that war is if nothing else, a catalyst. Granted mostly for new ways of turning people into catfood, but hell, the Cold War gave rise to the internet, which is why you're reading this, so it can't be all bad. Also bear in mind please that at the minute, opium production in Afghanistan is exceeding that of the country pre the conflict that followed 9/11, so that's more heroin than we could reasonably be expected to consume. The brown's on the Taliban, kids!

We can but hope, therefore, that something good comes from the so called 'free paper wars', though it seems unlikely it'll have anything to do with journalism. indeed, the aphorism "The first causalty of war is the truth" seems far more apt judging from the weedy gauntlet Lite has thrown down into the arena.

For this paper trumpets its own inanity from the rooftops; this paper wears it's own witlessness like a cross-eyed badge of honour on it's sleeve.

Presumably aimed at a post-MTV demographic who judge information's value in terms of screen loading times, Lite delivers lashings of chicken McNugget sized prolefeed, with sick-burp celebrity soundbites and lavender coloured bulleted columns of lifestyle advice that are effervescently anodyne.

This paper doesn't just cater for people with limited attention spans, it wants to bomb attention spans back to the stone age (or further back, when we were all still fish).

I got a copy of all three free papers yesterday for comparison (well alright to read). In a Newsnight style roundup of the front page news here is what the three were saying:

Metro: "Britain's first war criminal"

thelondonpaper: "Shop your children says reid"

and, sigh

London Lite: "Harrow girl 'was killed for kitten'" (note use of inverted commas)

Hey? I'm sorry? Granted this is a very sad story – someone deeply odd kills someone young and much-loved, and female (and pretty), but this claptrap hardly does it any justice. Indeed, the opening paragraph throws this bold statement into immediate doubt, stating:

"The daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster may have been killed after a quarrel over a kitten, an inquest heard today"

So it's not actually clear whether this even was a kitten motivated killing, and even if it was, she wasn't killed for it, was she? Admit it Lite: You just wanted a headline that had the words 'girl', 'kitten' and 'killing' in it, and fortuitously, some handy alliteration in the second two. The only possible better headline would surely have been:

"Harrow girl was killed by kitten"

Though that would have been to good to be true.

Other big newsworthy events were Steve Irwin's funeral, and Kate Moss's £3 Million Top Shop Deal, though if you looked carefully enough, there were token articles on the Pope's recent Islam gaffe and John Reid's recent, um, Islam gaffe, wedged back to back between pictures of Paris Hilton and diarhettically watery lifestyle pieces. It'll be interesting to see if such kindred articles are hounded into similarly content themed half page ghettos in future editions of this rag.

Some of it is just badly concieved. Does anyone really care if the BBC's This Life is set to return? Even allowing for Lite's bubblegum content, this seems curiously irrelevant for today's readership. And I thought the review of the Biba fashion show hilariously innapropriate in format. Why give a fashion show that happened last night a star rating? It's not like it's something we can consume, even retrospectively, so why would we care? I might write in and suggest other things Lite could apply a star rating to, such as countries or major religions.

The most irritating features though are the self congratulatory "I Love Lite" roundels which are strewn amongst the pages, where members of the public offer up quotes as to why they 'love Lite', despite the fact it's only been in print for a fortnight or so.

"It's really colourful with a really vibrant feel about it"

burbles Marco Barbuti from Wanstead.

Even aside from the fact that the point-one-five of a second's worth of fame that having your photo printed in Lite grants is the only reason anyone participated in this, the use of Vox Pops in an attempt to validate a publication is doubly annoying because A: I'm already reading it so can make my own mind up, thanks, and B: heaping self praise on yourself by proxy in this manner is akin to masturbating in public with someone else's face grafted onto your genitals.

About all that Lite really has going for it compared to the Metro is it's claim on the cover that it is:

"PRINTED WITH INK THAT WON'T COME OFF ON YOUR HANDS"

And I just hope that applies to other areas of the body as well, though I wouldn't say it's even up to task as toilet paper frankly, which is a shame as that would effectively cut out the effort of recycling this utterly superfluous rag into something more useful (Indeed my personal vote would have been for Lite never having changed state from oxygen producing trees in the first place, but there you have it).

There are just too many free papers being printed now. Yesterday on my way back home from Vauhall I practically had to burrow through drifts of the things just to get home, all the while dodging the purple-shirted gimps responsible for shifting their personal paper mountains onto the public. It's starting to get annoying already. Presumably they make their money off advertising revenue, but unlike say, Vice magazine which is reasonably exclusive and distributed through stores whose customer base is the advertiser's target market, it's approach seems as scatter-gun and wasteful as most direct mail (and a lot of it does seem to end up as rubbish, too).

I'm practically getting misty eyed as I reminisce over the good old days, when a copy of the Metro was a covetable thing on the work run in the morning; when acquisitive commuter eyes would scour carriages for any sign of the familiar blue masthead.*Sigh*

I am aware by the way that The Metro isn't all that good itself, just seemingly better than it's two new rivals without exerting any extra effort. There did seem to be more of these about too (though not as many as Lite) so maybe they're weighing in in response too. I've not really deleved into 'the london paper' vey much, but wheras Lite London is conspicuously bad, the london paper appears unremarkably indifferent, right down to it's all-lower-case-wannabe-the guardian logotype. So I won't bother to comment.

Anyway, if anyone can think of a good use for Lite London, let me know, as I personally can't see any, bar the aforementioned (recycling).

Faustian Fear

Working back at an ad agency in Soho which is fine but..

I've just been offered six weeks work. Great you might think, and the money is good, but the work sounds fucking shit.

It's an in-house role doing Quark work for estate agents of all people. I'm guessing I'll be the only 'person' there, and there'll be lot's of really boring re-flowing of text on glossy coated stock for the kind of sharks who wear Hackett shirts and bray into mobile phones in expensive but culturally bereft bouroughs of London on the weekend.

Having just slagged off Estate Agents (and I do know one who I like) I'm aware that ad agencies aren't exactly awash with the milk of human kindness, but I'd still far prefer to work in one. It's very possible that someone could ring up in a week and offer me something more interesting, which I wouldn't be able to do due to my chilling up in dicksville.

I also suspect that within a week I'll be bored rigid, and just about willing to commit suicide (after having killed everyone else there, of course).

But the money is good, and I've just got back off holiday, and have also spent a large slice of the summer sitting reading sub-par science fiction in Brunswick park (admittedly with the aim of avoiding bookings like this).

And I probably won't get any work in January, and maybe not December, so maybe I should play the ant of the parable, rather than the grasshopper..

Or would I be better off again waving two fingers at the 'the man', subsisting off my monetary fat deposits, and trying to get some work I actually want to do?

Argh. Decisions.

What do I do.

PS: Celebrity (sort of) sighting update – Nigel Havers talking into a phone and wearing a sport jacket/blazer on St. Anne's court in Soho, yesterday lunchtime. Beat that.

Greek internet

I'm sat in a bar/internet cafe in Loggos on Paxos. Some unbelievably bad pop tune sampling 'Funky Town' by Lipps Inc is burbling away over the radio. In fact, the station itself seems dedicated to the playing of formulaic disco remixes with the same dreary 4:4 beat.

It's quite overcast today though it has been really toasty the rest of the time. I'm quite brown, and my feet are covered with mosquito bites which I'm leaning down to scratch intermittently.

It's been a good holiday, though other than the obvious holiday pursuits of lying around, eating, drinking and swimming, there's (peers around) not actually a right lot to do here, which is rather the point I suppose.

Anyway, I've been nosing around taking photos with my dad's old Nikon SLR, including an old decaying soap factory on the beach this morning, which is full of bits of rusting engines, and looks like a hidden level off The Chaos Engine. I'll get them up on Flickr as soon as I'm home (and have got them developed).

I turn 29 tomorrow. Not sure how I feel about that, but with any luck, Ade's got me the animal posters that came with the Guardian this week, which is something to look forward to at least.

Anyway, some old dude has sat down at the machine next to me and is announcing things aloud to no-one in particular, which is my cue to leave.

Cheap?

I'm in the airport. It's about midnight. I've got a long wait ahead of me before I check in and ultimately, fly.

I thought I'd indulge in a spot of blogging, or surfing, seeing as I've got so much time to kill, but unfortunately, airports being airports, the good ole net is prohibitively expensive, costing a rather steep 10p per minute. So a quid gets you 10 minutes.

This is probably about as much time as some people will waste on the internet in their lifetime, before they retire to organic yurt in the Forest of Dean, but I'm not one of them.

Nor however do I think I'm the kind of person who's going to shovel six quid into the coffers of 'Spectrum Interactive' (who curate this monetary black hole) for an hour's worth of webbery. And plus, the connection's really slow (twenty seconds to load Blogger) which makes something already expensive, blatant daylight robbery. At those kind of prices I want warp factor 10 connection.

There are a load of free sites you can visit, but without actually having ventured there, I expect they'll merely be gleaming nodes of consumerism, extolling the virtues of airport shopping.

So I was going to write a rather long winded bit of proey waffle about holidays I've really enjoyed in the past but instead I'll conclude with the following:

"Eat a dick Spectrum Interactive"

or

"Why didn't I think of it first?"

UPDATE:

After having gone and sat in an uncomfortable chair for a bit, I was eventually driven back when some people sat next to me and started talking loudly about 'integrated agencies'. I returned to the internet, and out of sheer boredom checked out the free bit of the internet service. It was just as I'd predicted. Lots of click through ads for various non-entity type companies. And you only got two and a half minutes at a time before the thing reset (remember: time is money) so to be subversive, I composed a letter by writing a letter in the 'question' field of various corporate website's comments sections, then sent it off to a range of people by copying and pasting it afresh. It cost me nothing, and killed some time, so all in all was an unqualified success.

This is costing me big time though..

Anyway, here's what a bunch of IT companies and Web Developers will be finding in their inboxes real soon. (Frustratingly, Loan and finance companies were only contactable by phone. Boo.)

Hi, whoever you are

I'm writing to you because I'm sat in a terminal in Gatwick Airport, waiting for to check in in a couple of hours.

It's two thirty right now, and I'm trying to find ways to fend off the spectre of excruciating boredom boredom which I suspect is, even now, hunting me down through spotlit corridors like a beast from the Doom series of first person shoot 'em ups (Do you know of them? ah, this a website, of course you do!

Anyway, the internet would be an ideal way to while away the hours, if the hourly rate charged by the incumbent internet cafe were not so eye gougingly prohibitive. (An ideal metaphorical nail gun to fend off the aforementioned spectre of boredom in this tortuos analogy).

In fact, in order for me to spend any time 'surfing the web' here, I'd have to sell that sizeable chunk of prime Tokyo real estate I simply do not posess, so you can see my problem.

Instead, I've opted to traipse through the 'free' section, which links to such catatonia inducing, mediocre corporate web presences as your own.

I presume you are, in some way, paying for this advertisement, which is unfortunate, as you only get a couple of minutes 'free time' anyway, and given that the loading speed on this portal moves at a pace which molluscs would snigger at (if they could) there's hardly any time to form an opinion of your no doubt excellent service, before you're sent crashing back out of cyberspace.

I've managed to get around these time constraints by typing in the 'Question' fields of comment forms, then copying and pasting the message as the time expires. Cunning eh? Also exceedingly wierd, granted but as my options are appreciably limited, by my not being heir to the Hilton millions (billions?) I hope you'll understand why I've chosen to contact you, the person responsible for checking the email of a mundane corporate web portal I couldn't give two solid farts about.

Anyway, all the best, and if it's Monday in your world, my commiserations. I'll probably be sat on a 'real beach' as my post modern 'e-message-in-a-bottle' washes up on the shores of your inbox. Fancy that eh?

Not that I'm gloating or anything, I'll be back where you're sat (so to speak) before too long.

All the best.

<0>

ps: A delicious irony about all this is that this proprietary browser won't actually let me view my blog as it's offensive. Ha!

Greece is The Word

In my world.

I'm been working back at M&C this week. Good to see all the people who I worked with so much last year, and handy as the booking took me up to my holidays. One of the good things about that place is that getting a decent cup of coffee is never a problem thanks to the Gaggia machine in the foyer, whose frothing roar as milk is steamed is a veritable siren song for caffeine fiends such as myself.

Was slow off the blocks yesterday morning as I was busy lying in bed, and kept intermittently hitting snooze on my alarm clock. The clock itself is on my desk on the other side of the room, which is a setup I engineered to make me get out of bed in the mornings, but it rarely works. Instead I lope back to my nest like a cave bound bear with a tranquiliser dart embedded in it's neck.

Part of the reason for the morning's sloth was that I was awoken at about two fourty-seven AM by someone stumping round the kitchen below my room and eating cereal loudly. Dink dink dink chimed the spoon against their bowl. Slam went the cupboard doors. GO TO FUCKING BED thought I. Thankfully it didn't last long and I drifted off again shortly after.

Wednesday morning's hike to work was vaguely notable for a few things:

1: Getting a smile off a pretty girl through the window of the Jungle Cafe Grill on Camberwell Church Street. Cheered me up no end.

2: Seeing (I think) Jonathan Ross, in a brown suit and shades striding across Golden Square

3. 6 Japanese hipsters camped outside the Bathing Ape 'busy workshop' just off Golden Square, presumably for the privilege of spending £200 on a limited t-shirt. Three of them were wearing identical BAPE camo tops and didn't look as cool as they thought they did.

On my way out for lunch I also glimpsed the big man himself, Maurice S, rocking trademark huge glasses in the foyer. I'm sure he must be the inspiration behind the 'Ad Nauseum' character in Private Eye.

That evening, hooked up with Ed who's working at 'The World's Most Famous Bookshop', Foyle's on Charing Cross Road. There's a pirannha tank in the kid's section, and I stared at it's grimacing residents while he finished stocking up. Then we went for drinks in Soho (French bar, nice cider) then The Hermit's Cave in Camberwell.

It's now Thursday, and, Lord Willing, I'm off to Paxos in Greece tomorrow, though, me being me, I've still got various things to do. (pack, for instance). Can't wait though.

I'll try and get at t'internet while I'm out there, but I'm not sure if it's going to happen. Toodle pip.

Podcasts

Does anyone know of any decent podcasts? I quite got into the Ricky Gervaise one for a bit, then stopped when they started charging and it invevitably, so I'm told, became not as good as it used to be.

Subsequent attempts to get into it have so far merely confirmed Sturgeon's Law that '90% of everything is crap', but I'm sure this can't be the whole story.

So c'mon kids, hook me up with the good stuff and show me where that 10% is hiding.

Saturday Night TV

Having decided not to go to Manchester for the Bank Holiday Weekend, Saturday was decidedly low key. Got up, bought bacon from kennedy's (5 rashers, no smoked alas) before jumping on the 12 into town.

Checked out UNIQLO (the clothes store from Japan) and discovered that apart from their usual quality basics, they've got a set of t-shirts in designed by Tokyo's Power Graphixx. Unfortunately, on further inspection, they were 68% polyester, and would probably itch like the clap, so I left it, which was a shame, as standing at the intersection between effortlessly crisp vector styling and misappropriated Japanish (I just made that up) the designs themselves were cool like the 70's, which is also, unfortunately, the only excusable cut off date for shirts constructed from man made fabrics.

It would also seem Oki Ni on Saville Row has shut up shop in London, which is aight by me as their shop seemed almost soley predicated to flogging a vast surplus of naff Duffer shirts on my last couple of visits.

Was looking for an album so trawled round Soho to no avail for an hour or so. Bumped into Gemma and her beau just off Kingly Street, who were drinking coffee and waiting to go and see Avenue Q, which is, as far as I understand it, a 'Muppet Musical' or somesuch, though by today's standards, the idea of hiring someone with a furry mitten to act the fool seems curiously antiquated when you could probably get Big Brother's Nikki for half the cash.

The rest of the evening was ok. Stayed in as due to the alignment of certain stars, I didn't have shit to do, which resulted in me watching a whole mess of Saturday night TV.

I don't watch too much TV these days. About the most entertaining thing right now seems to be Dragons Den. Lost had me interested for a while, but it's intricately silly plot twists and tortuous flashback sequences left me choking dust a while back (by now, no doubt, the maroonees have discovered all the Earth's missing socks have been hoarded on aminiaturee Death Star presided over by a mysterious blah blah blah all in a concealed cavern, somewhere under the Island etc).

Saturday night tv, like endemic alcoholism, is a problem england is all to familiar with, but no-one ever talks about, because all the people who actually give a shit are doing something interesting. Like going to the pub. The fact it really is enough to drive you to drink makes me wonder whether there isn't some kind of agreement in place between breweries and programmers, in order to lever people from their seats and send them to the Dog & Duck for ten pints of Brainfuzz.

First up was Casualty, which has been a metronomic constant in the Beeb's programming over the last couple of decades, though I've not watched it for a bit. In fact, the last time I saw it, the guy who, ironically enough, got stabbed in the neck by a broken bottle in 'The Long Good Friday' (by Bob Hoskins, no less) was still riding the BBC's drama gravy train, averting his eyes heavenward in a worthy attempt to combat bureaucracy on the floor of the A&E Department. Charlie I think his name was. Yawn. I sort of watched its spinoff Holby City for a bit, but it got shit when Dr.Meyer slithered off into the sunset, and his stubbly protege went off do do the tiresome Peugeot ads with the 'French' girlfriend (you know the one, "Fwance", "Ze Eifell Tower" and so on).

It was all boringly worthy and Beeb. But worse was to come in the cringe shaped 'How To Solve a Problem Like Maria' which lurched over the hill at nine o' clock, featuring a studio lit up like a particularly power hungry Christmas tree, and a hooting, baying mob, presided over by the puce jacketed demagogue Graham Norton, himself as camp as the festive season.

Also present was director/criminal Andrew Lloyd Weather, excreting thespian pronunciations from a mastermind style swivel seat like a turtle headed Pez dispenser: ("You're no Maria"). Scouse bore-next-door Clare Sweeny was also on hand to offer such germs of advice to the contestants during the farcical 'endurance test' as: "Stamina is so essential girls", though presumably her true role in the programme was to reassure them that anyone with one head could feasibly get as close to the nation's heart as cholestorol.

The wobbly fulcrum over which the programme's format labours it's fat arse seems to be them all taking turns to regurgitate nuggets of pop trash in an increasingly histrionic mode, and on a serious note, what is the current broadcasting obsession with this shit? Who cares? People often allude to the Japanese love of Karaoke as eccentric, but at least they've got as far as hiring private rooms to do it in with friends rather than broadcasting it across THE WHOLE FUCKING NATION and masquerading it as primetime entertainment.

The climax of the show was all the contestants lining up in pinafores and colour coded dresses, singing their fame hungry hearts out like a troupe of competing Teletubbies. No-one won. One of them lost, and retired to the sidelines to weep and be cajoled by the victors in some weak semblance of professional sisterly solidarity and oh god it's fucking rubbish. It's like a variety show without the variety, so come back Morecombe and Wise, all is forgiven.

Then it was the news, which despite being quite depressing, was actually an effective palliative to the supperating wound that was the night's television, as it did actually make me feel genuinely grateful to be alive and well in England. I didn't much fancy New Jack City at half eleven though, so staggered upstairs to bed, to reflect on my non-eventful evening.

Thursday/August Bank Holiday

London quite often gets on my tits. It's stern impassive visage, a bit like an Easter Island head set in concrete and wreathed in smog. can be all too forbidding of a wet morning.

On the other hand, sometimes I wouldn't be anywhere else. Like yesterday, on the way to work, there was a guy in Trafalgar Square with a falcon on his left hand, texting with his right, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

This, for the uninitiated, is the guy who makes sure that pigeons steer clear of Trafalgar Square now that Red Ken's administration has served notice on their greasy feathered asses. Now that's a job. He's essentially a pigeon hit man, whose weapon is another bird. A rifle with a beak.

He was back there on Wednesday, only this time his feathered gun was 'stuck' up a tree. He was trying to entice it back by wafting what looked like a golden hamster pelt in its general direction, but it wasn't having any of it.

On a less inspiring note, there was a group of studded bracelet wearing alternative kids queueing for a signing outside the Virgin store on Oxford Street (and presumably to beg eyeliner tips off a favourite bandmember).

One girl, flushed with glee at her own wit, was brandishing a cardboard square, with the legend "Smile if you wank!" written on it in upper case marker pen. Happily, it didn't emote even the vaguest response in me as I stumbled past slurping Benjy's coffee, though judging from the faces of those clustered around.. well.

Hooked up with Sam last night, and we went to BRB in Camberwell for a pizza and a couple of drinks, then the Castle for one, before returning to mine where Sam raided some MP3s off me, before heading back to Hackney on the 35.

Bank holiday weekend eh? I notice Time Out is doing a guide The Notting Hill Carnival, with Lily Allen on the Cover like a smirking Queen of the May. If I'd got to curate that feature (unlikely, I know) I'd have just settled for a double page spread, full bleed image of some tarmac littered with: A half gnawed corn cob, a crushed Red Stripe can, some broken glass and rivulets of some unknown liquid, all stippled with an arc of clotting blood. The words 'Don't Bother' would be superimposed over this.

The myth of Notting Hill Carnival is that it's a kind of merry multicultural utopia, with jocular policemen dancing to reggae, while throngs of smiling people wearing bright primary colours eat wholesome food to the accompaniment of Steel Drums.

In reality this version of events is about as real as Sesame Street, as even putting to the side such awkward things as 'bad men with sharp things, sticking up chumps for change', it's impossible to actually do anything there, bar being swept in rivers of humanity, along roads steeped in piss and fishbones. Great.

The time before the time before last I went, me and my friends caught a bus down from West Hampstead. In a presentiment of what was to come, someone at the back asked an asian chap if he had the time, to which he replied "I aint giving you the time mate – this is the ghetto" (this was before the film Notting Hill, mind). A girl wearing antennae also mimed biting my arm, which was to become the highlight of the day actually. Immediately after we decanted from the the bus we were met with a troupe of dancers in Devil costumes, who were merrily slapping red dye on anyone and everyone they passed and though I did manage to escape this, my friends weren't so lucky, and looked like they'd in indulged in a spot of mid-carnival painting and decorating.

Later on, my friend's girlfriend were jostled by a rudegirl who kept jabbing her in the ribs (thankfully only with her elbow) and intimating violence, and I also glimpsed a Rastafarian guy threatening to throw a plastic crate at some asian shopkeepers through the doorway of a newsagents. And those were the bits I remember, though inevitably I suppose. it's always the bad stuff that sticks in your mind.

I've been since so I think I've given it a fair chance, it just does strike me as being the most overhyped thing ever prior to Coke Zero, though perhaps that's just me getting older and less excited by crowded places and Red Stripe.

So this year I think I'll take my chances with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or whatever Ian Fleming penned bank holiday crap is on the tv, and indulge in a fantasy world where I don't have to qeueue to use the bathroom. Either that or I might go to Manchester, which'll will probably take less time all time, all told, than an in excursion to 'the Hill'.

Monday 21

A quiet weekend.

Friday sat in and watched the Big Brother final with the housemates, with a Thai Curry from the Thai house and a couple of bottles of beer (Tyskie and Budvar) from the 'mini-mart' a few doors up. The eternally gestating Davina McCall looking less avian than she has in the past, the feathered edges of motherhood having presumably softened her corvine, beak-like features.

The blonde girl, Aisleyne, wept on cue while wearing mostly nothing, the Welsh lad reminded me why I don't go to Wales very often, and the winner Pete, dissolved into a series of fractured twitches and squawks like a self consciously 'childlke' Max Headroom, or a glitch remix of Frank Spencer and Woody Woodpecker.

After that watched Chasing Amy – one of Ben Affleck's better roles, which isn't saying much in my opinion.

Saturday didn't do a right deal. Went and bought a few cheap CD's, inluding an album by The Fall, a Slick Rick album from 99, and a New Electronica compilation from 1994. I'm getting quite into buying techno from this era, and trying to work out if its still any good – and some of it is, very good. Some of it has aged like old socks though. Also popped into Rat Records, where in a spot of Hi Fidelity style geekery, the guys behind the counter and one of the customers were comparing the basslines on Norman Connor's 'You Are My Starship' (as Sampled by Mobb Deep on 'Trife Life') and Freddie Mcgregor's 'Natural Collie'. Practically identical by all accounts.

Saturday night went to The Lock Tavern in Camden to see Sam DJ. I thought Kay was playing too, but she was absent, and Ade couldn't really be bothered going (presumably the thought of attending that venue without a drink to steady your nerves isn't worth contemplating).

True to form is was completely rammed by the time I got there, which was 09:15 ish, and it was one-in-one-out time already. Nevertheless I got in almost instantly, only to have my progress checked at the stairs to the upstairs bar by a buddha-like Eastern European bouncer who kind of looked like a set of stairs himself (belly, manbreasts and head stacked in order of decreasing size.

Somebody eventually rolled a natural 20 on my behalf, because after about fifteen minutes I was waved upstairs, and the spectre of irritation departed to vex the next person who had to wait.

I think it was Sam's last Saturday there, which is fine by me really, as regardless of influx restrictions imposed by bug-bear like bouncers, the place always has the sardine like air of a tube carriage in rush hour, with added beer and cigarettes. Someone had the bright idea of removing spare tables earlier this year, though they just seem to cram more people in now as there's no extra space.

In the end it was alright though. I sat next to Sam and chatted to him between him putting on records. Got a couple of beers on the DJs tab and smoked some roll-ups. Bailed around half Eleven to catch the tube from Chalk Farm.

Sunday stayed in doing some work, and only left to go to the Chinese Supermarket, where I found to my consternation that they've stopped doing three for a pound sardines. Luckily the Turkish place at the top of Camberwell Church Street still does, so a dietary crisis was averted. I noticed the continental market seemed to have departed the green early, for which I can't blame them. When I walked past on Saturday custom didn't seem particularly brisk, and the only other people on the green were a group of winos drinking tins of super strength cider. Not the sort of folk generally associated with consumption of premium deli foodstuffs.

Rounded the weekend off by watching David Cronenburg's 'Spider' on channel 2. It's quite different from most of his stuff, as it doesn't feature his usual technological fetishes, though it is nontheless very disturbing. I really enjoyed it.

Back in the studio in CHI. Managed to avoid doing very much last Friday but I suspect I'm going to have some retail ads sprung on me any minute now.. Sooner the better I suppose.

There's a cute Japanese freelancer at the other end of the room – she's got really short hair and is rocking a houndstooth dress, glasses with narrow frames and large earrings. She looks like she probably moonlights as an electro deejay. The entire ensemble is making me have to stuff my eyeballs back in intermittently.

Saturday 12

A grey, cool Saturday to be precise.

Awoke early and couldn't get back to sleep. Went and bought some bacon from Kennedy's, who sell the best pork round here. Anyone remember putting crisp packets in the oven as kids, and shrinking them to the size of bus tickets? That's what most bacon seems to do under the grill. Not Kennedy's. None of this '87% pork' for them. Just as well I went early as they quite often sell out by midday.

Came back, drank coffee, read the guardian, and listened to the Arvo Part CD I bought yesterday. How exceedingly middle class of me.

Saw Marvyn looking like he'd just invented a subgenre of hangover. Having gone to an award ceremony for the bank he works for last night, he was unashamedly late.

Not sure what to do now. Might hop on the bus (then the tube) and go 'somewhere'. My friend Vic is down this evening, for eight hours, to go to an Northern Soul all-nighter at the 100 Club on Oxford Street.. Don't think I'm going to make it there, but I might hook up with her for a few beers this evening.

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.

Jaspers

It's summer but.. something's missing.. hmm. sun – check, beer – check, barbecues – check, Tim Henman losing at Wimbledon.. yeah, wait a minute that's it, WASPS! I don't know about you but I've seen hardly any this year!

And where are all the wasps anyhow? Have they been priced out of London too then? Not that I'm bothered, they were hardly key-workers in the accepted sense. In Manchester the advent of summer always brought with it the shadow of the wasp, who would be there before you at the beer garden (like Germans at the sun loungers, yeah), and almost certainly there after, hovering drunkenly round the last quarter inch or so of your pint of Stella. Wasps get pissed too, in all senses, especially in late summer when they're just looking for trouble, and should you get lary with them, they release a pheronome, so all their mates show up minutes later for a piece of the action. Truly, they were the bane of the sugary drink drinker's sunny afternoon, and universally disliked.

Seriously I reckon even Noah probably planned to ditch the wasps prior to the flood and it was only after he awoke the morning after setting sail to hear two rattling away behind his blind that he realised his scheme had been thwarted. Wasps posess the apex of that blind insect instinct to find their way into your room, through any hole – no matter how small, without being able to do it in reverse, even were you to demolish the wall of your house and attempt to usher them out with a jet turbine. I assume they navigate by the moon/sun like moths as they also have a tendency to fly directly into any lightbulb with a sound like someone training a dentist's drill on it. Eww that sound. I also remember wasps flying into my bedroom, perching on the lampshade and audibly crunching away on the paper (of course, this was before I got into listening to techno at artillery volume, so a wasp would probably have to be inside my ear now before I could hear such a thing). Terrible thought.

One thing about wasps is that pretty much everyone is united in their hatred of them. This blog here is like some kind of wasp genocide bulletin board:

"It’s us against them people. We can’t let the enemy take over our homes! I’ll let you know how it goes. Great stories!"

froths one contributor excitedly. Uh, ok, they are kind of annoying I guess.. Ever read Watchmen? One thing's for sure, if it turned out wasps were poised to take over the world, Osama Bin Laden, George Bush and Kim Jon Il would be united in their struggle agaainst the striped menace quicker than you could say "Yeehaw let's nuke those fucken yellerjackets!".

Anyway, here's my favourite wasp anecdote (you might want to save this for halloween, mind) Are you sitting un-comfortably? Well I'll begin:

I was back at my mum and dad's one summer whilst studying at uni. My brothers were in the two rooms next to mine. I awoke at about three in the moarning hearing an all but subliminal "WHHHUFF" sound from my brother Harry's room, punctuated by short panicky gasps of "shit!" coming from the lad himself.

Seconds later 'middle-bro' Dan awoke, and stomped into my brother's room..

"What THE FUCK is going on"

He roared.

What, it transpired, had happened was that a load of wasps had chosen to nest in the roof just outside his bedroom window. Now my brother liked to keep his bedroom window in summer (and bedroom light on), and perhaps unwisely, the presence of several thousand stinging insects just outside was not sufficient to deter him. You can perhaps guess the rest.. while he slept and under cover of darkness, the wasps let themselves in and my brother had an extremely rude awakening when a wasp crawling over his face decided to sting him on the cheek. The first sight to greet his no-doubt horrified eyes when he opened them was a roiling vortex of wasps circling beneath his room's naked lightbulb. Not to be deterred he rolled out of bed, grabbed a can of lynx and a lighter (cricket, clipper, who knows) and got medieval on those wasp's tapering asses.

Yes, that "WHHHUFF" sound was none other than a deodorant based flame-thrower my brother had hastily fashioned. A quick glance around his bedroom door the next morning revealed a war zone, with drifts of scorched wasps lying everywhere. It was like The Wasp Factory in there, or Aliens redux where the marines win. Those wasps fucked with the wrong guy alright. They sure got to know the true power of the Lynx effect.

Nowadays, I'd like to think I'm not too bothered about wasps. Live and let live, god's creatures etc.. and wierdly beautiful too, amongst other things* One swooped quite near me in Highbury fields the other week, and I barely noticed, honest!

But still, maybe it's the NIMBY in me, but I'm not sure I'd like some sort of government funded wasp farm in my back yard (even though it technically belongs to the landlord, Mr Spyrou, so he could do with it as he wanted I suppose).

Maybe I should actually try and sort my life out rather than posting blog entries about wasps at half eleven on a monday night. Who knows.

*critically important in natural biocontrol or course, thanks Wikipedia.

Photo copyright Alain Labat 2006

Rise

On Saturday me and Gridrunner headed North to check out the Rise festival at Finsbury Park. Can't either of us lay claim to coming up with the idea, but the man responsible – Ed, wasn't present as he and John had headed on a mission to Ikea in the dark heart of Croydon, and were presumably circumnavigating the winding path that wends its way through forests of flat-pack pine in all it's stores. Ed was also assuming the enforced air of radio silence that comes FREE! without a mobile phone. So we left without them.

It was aight, though..

For festivals to work for me a few things have got to be true.

Firstly there's got to be few of you. You've got mates yeah? Now's the time to show them off, as you saunter round drinking off-cool Red Stripe at three fifty a pop in a camouflage jacket and shades. Otherwise you feel like a bit of herb. Urban (what you call it?) festivals especially are where everyone and their Staffordshire Bull Terrier seems to come to hook up with someone else and their squat muscular pet.

You need to find somewhere and sit down. Plant a flag. Put down a blanket if that's your thing, but crucially, sit down soon and put down the plastic bag with the luke-warm wine cooler in and start interracting as normal. There'll be plently of time to go and buy some overpriced falafel or see some local crew, but for now, act as though you were sat in your local park on a particularly busy Sunday. Or you could have a plan, but personally, I feel all other festival plans are incidental besides sitting down somewhere.

It can't be too busy. Okay, busy enough, but not rammed. Notting Hill sounds like a great idea until you get there and realise it's like a bigger, louder, hotter, busier version of Oxford Street on Christmas eve. Two years ago Me Ade and Dunc fought unsuccessfully for the best part of two hours to fight our way to the mythical Norman Jay sound system, before finally giving up and shuffling around wearily next to the Trouble On Vinyl soundsystem playing out the back of a truck. Actually getting out of the place is the most terrifying prospect of all however, as you are swept along remorselessly in rivers of people. For me, no amount of saltfish can compensate for the fact that your free will is effectively circumvented by the whims of the million or so people squashed up in your face. If John Carpenter ever ressurects Snake Pliskin and the "Escape From.." franchise, the third one should be set here. Kurt Russel wouldn't stand a chance.

It's got to be hot. Ok not essential, and a bit of rain's quite fun actually, certainly no surprise, but put it this way – at least one or two of the previous rules need not apply if it's actually a blazing hot day. Shouty urban grime acts are prolific in London; sunny days less so.

Sadly, non of these cardinal rules applied to me and Ade. We arrived late, unwashed (me anyway) and jostled through the thronging crowds. We had arranged to meet Ed by ringing his housemate John but there was no network coverage. The sky was the colour of grey milk, and the atmosphere moderately torpid. Most of our time was spent queueing for things, and wandering round clowning around whie Ade took pictures of beer bottles and reflections of bins in my shades.

Eventually we went to the the Finsbury pub across the way and sat out front with a pint. In a rare moment of synchronicity, a couple who had been sat a table away in the Hermits the night before were also there, two tables away. It got cold, but I couldn't be bothered going in the pub as the footy was on and Gary Linneker's face was leering, big brother style, from every screen in the joint.

Went home via Oval and got some food from the Silver Lake, opting, on the Chinese lady's suggestion, for some Malaysian style Mackerel. Very nice. She also showed me a laminated A4 photo of a bearded Kenneth Brannagh, thesping it up out the front of the shop.

Then went and watched 'Live Flesh' round at Ed's, before going home to sleep. The end.

Stuff

What have I been doing.

Last thursday I went on a sort of date thing with someone I met off t'internet. It was an experience I don't think I'm going to repeat any time soon. Nice enough, but I couldn't quite get over how out of sync she was with the mental picture of her I'd built up in my head. We went for a drink in Camden, before making mutual excuses and heading our separate ways. Actually, she made the excuses, but it's my blog.

The most annoying thing about the night was, while waiting at the top of the escalators at Camden tube, a policeman came over and started talking at me while I was trying to send a text.

"Can I ask you what you're doing sir?"

he enquired.

"I'm waiting for someone" I answered

"and do you often wait for them here?"

"it's the first time I've met them"

"and who might they then"

"it's a date"

"Oh a date is it" he said, staring off at an angle perpendicular to my head. All the time he was maintaining a studied bored monotone, and I didn't much care for the sardonic edge to his voice that suggested all this was the dramatic build-up to some cretinous punchline. He was going to ask me to move, and I found his circuitous route both irritating and irritating.

"look, shall we cut to the chase here?" I asked, wolverine style claws pricking at my knuckles.

"don't take that attitude with me" he said, all traces of flaccid humour suddenly having evaporated "move out of here and stop causing an obstruction"

Which I duly did. What annoyed me was the moment I exited the turnstiles I was duly pestered by various people trying to sell me 'skunks', all of ten feet from robocop, who stood officiously staring at the hall of the tube station, ready to thwart wrong-doing in all its static, loitering forms.

Don't get me wrong, I've nothing against the police (some of my best friends are police) but shouldn't he have been out trying to catch some real criminals? James Blunt and the person ultimately responsible for the 'Tom Tom' sat-nav advertisements are a couple of obvious examples, but I could go on.

Anyway.

This week I've been working at a Corporate Identity consultancy with lots of Germans, which was either miles better than that sounds, or lots worse, depending on your perspective. The grid system was king, and there was no decent coffee – for me at least.

Their offices were in a huge victorian terrace with white walls and wall-to-wall blue carpeting. It was pretty much silent but for the ocasional conference call and the incessant clicking of mice. Every once in a while an insect would stray into one of the uplighters on the wall and perish with a piercing smell like burning hair.

Tasty.

Now it's the weekend. Went for a bite to eat at a Spanish place in Hackney with Sam and Kay, before going back to theirs for a couple of glasses of wine and a game of 'Buzz'. Also bought a copy of the Guardian, soley because today it came with a free poster depicting various types of octopi and squid (and cuttlefish). It's now pinned above my desk and I can tell it's going to be a slow month.

Post 100: Charity Shops

When I finally get around to assembling my 'Fantasy Football' band – 'The London Ipods,'* (consisting of me, Brian Eno, KRS1 and I dunno, one of the Cheeky Girls) my first single is going to be called 'Charity Shops Are Crap These Days', which is basically going to be a wailing lament/torch song about the current charity shop circuit, which as any dedicated charity shop scenester will tell you, has gone well downhill.

When my friend Sam got back from LA recently he was all like "The second hand shops out there are amazing man" he was all like "Dior t-shirt" and "Camper-style-shoes", and "vintage dresses" (Kay's, not his I might add), while I could but sit there agape.

Time was charity shopping here used to be one of my more preferred methods of wasting a Saturday, trawling through bins of mouldering old vinyl, and rails of motheaten old clothes in the hope of uncovering that elusive holy grail (which I'm reliably informed actually happens in a Neil Gaiman story).

Generally I'd operate alone – as dedicated charity shoppers do; you don't want to be sharing the goods with another enthusiast should you actually strike a seam of metaphorical charity gold, nor boring the shit out of those of your friends lacking the shopping chromasome.

Still the times were good, and there were bargains to be had. The shops you were after were those run by two little old ladies who loved cats, (and thats's about it) and who had an absolute absence of what might be termed 'street smarts'. By this I mean they had a howling void in place of anything which could vaguely be termed A: an aesthetic sensibility, B: an appreciation of design merit or C: any kind of nose for value. Sounds harsh? Well that's word to ya moms B; the last record any of these girls bought was probably a waltz on Shellac or a music hall number from the mid-late 40s. Other good signs were if it smelled of some enigmatic cocktail of mothballs and sick (the exact breakdown was never clear), and was for a singularly odd charity such as 'Pigeons for Jesus' or somesuch.

I remember triumphantly purchasing a Phillip Starck lemon squeezer (admittedly a bit of designer tat if ever there was one) boxed, for a couple of quid in the Royal Society for the Protection of Blind Sparrows shop by the Heaton Mersey Somerfield.

"Eh love, you really want to buy this?"

Queried the old dear behind the counter, eyeing the chrome object suspiciously. I did indeed.

And records.. not often but ocasionally you'd arrive just in time to snap up someone's collection of disco 12s or Soul lps – an entire crate of sometimes pristine wax for an absolute song (so to speak).

And clothes of course.. retro, ironic, it was all there.

But that was before 'the dark times'. I suspect that there was a golden era of charity shopping towards the arse end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, when people rushed blindly to ditch their old clothes and records in favour of exciting new fabrics and those shiny drinks coasters we call CDs, little realising the kudos that these scorned artefacts would be garnering scant years later.

With the advent of ebay, and perhaps more so the arrival of the well worn rut of cheap BBC daytime programming – 'Tat Hunt', "Crap in Your Attic" etc, a phonemenon ocurred wherin the same crud people would pay other people to take off their hands a few years back suddenly became as potentially valuable as reconstruction contracts in recently deposed dictatorships; through some mysterious sleight of hand and under cover of relentless jocularity David 'The Real Lovejoy' Dickenson became apotheosised as some kind of sloganeering antiques neo-christ. Things were never to be the same again.

When charity shops got smart, the laminate flooring moved in and the bargains moved out, to be replaced by tat of such calibre I'm genuinely aghast any of it sold in the first place – the kind of synthetic jive St. Audrey would have been ashamed to have in her living room when she was rocking a lace necklace. While these once holy bastions of the bargain buy masquerade as shops, all the good stuff is creamed off in some warehouse to be auctioned for a premium on ebay, leaving me to panhandle through shelves of crap I'd deign unfit to throw rocks at. Now where's the fun in that I ask you?

It has to be said, it may just be symptomatic of the wider malaise that is the rampaging webber-beast devouring the high street, as it's not like anyone's going to root through racks of crackly Kanye West MP3s in ten years time is it? (or is it?). Only the other day I noticed Dixons had got eaten.

GOOD STUFF

Anyway. Here's a top ten of things I'd like to find in a charity shop. Pretty unrealistic I guess but you get the picture.

10. A stack of well thumbed 60s design magazines such as Avant Garde.

9. A load of brightly coloured seventies glass sculptures shaped like fish. They'd look really ironic in your bathroom at a party.

8. A cardboard box full of seventies science fiction paperbacks on the Panther imprint. Art direction on the cover is generally a stylishly shot photo of a lava lamp, or one of the glass fish from number 9 above. Stanilsav Lem might be well represented here.

7. Some cool t-shirts – badly screenprinted shirts from holiday destinations, obscure local businesses, and old computer games such as "Shadow of the Beast" earn extra karma points in the afterlife.

6. A clutch of original Blue Note lps from the 60s, slightly worn maybe, play fine though.

5. A pair of nicely worn in 'Big E' Levis.

4. Some retro electronic 'Grandstand' game, such as 'Munchman'. (Wimpey to Pacman's McDonalds, basically)

3. A couple of prints from the seventies – frame is cracked on one. Maybe from the Moebius 'Starwatcher' series? Yeah that'd be nice.

2. Shit.. I dunno, some Star Wars figures? Actually fuck that.. FUZZY FELT.

1. A Louis Leathers 'Super Sportsman' jacket, brown, size 40" please santa. (ironically, my ex housemate Paul did actually find one of these, it immediately rocketed to my number one and proved there is hope yet)

BAD STUFF

And Now, a top ten of the kind of raw shite you're going to have to wade through in your vain quest to find anything worth posessing.

10. Some James Last LPs. Never heard anything by him to my knowledge, never intend to. The art direction alone elicits the kind of panicked fearful response in me as some dogs have when they walk across the sites of ancient battlefields.

9. Some crappy home decoration book such as "Stencil Your Way To Success!", which isn't even on some ironic Readers Digest type flave. Avoid.

8. A 'Windows 98' handbook, though as Ade noticed the other day, our flat inexplicably owns one of these already (though I suppose I could take it to a charity shop).

7. Nylon shirts. Lots of them.

6. Mid 90s Topman t-shirts bought for the unreconstructed lad by his girlfriend. There'll probably be a faux-distressed picture of a mini on it, or a six-pack of some beer with the legend 'Six Machine" written on it; or (most heinously) the name of a developing country or suitably ethnic quarter of New York: 'Harlem', 'Bronx' etc. n.b. – this 'isn't the same' as the 'tourist' t-shirts described under 'good' in point 7. That cannot be emphasised enough.

5. Same weak assed chic-lit with titles such as 'Chardonnay Wedding', 'Man shopping' or 'Shopaholic Crimes'.

4. Some slightly sweaty looking Nike Trainers in size 6. And no they're not Dunks.

3. A simpsons tie. Though actually, it could be any Simpsons merchandise ie: boxer shorts, waistcoat, bubble bath.

2. Some god awful toy that has been spawned by some corporate sponsored tv franchise, A 'Tweenie' maybe, or that horrible purple dinosaur.

Fuck this is getting boring.. but you get the idea. Any ideas for the number one gratefully accepted.

ps: Hey-yah. One hundred posts deep. I'm popping the Chandon as I write.

*Apple's lawyers allowing.

Woah

Proving that my mum's blog is more interesting even than mine, here's my uncle kissing a certain stoney sea-lord somewhere high above the streets of London.

She gets all the scoops.

Ol' Brown RIP

I'm cat-sitting in Hackney at the minute, which makes for a change. The cat's nice anyhow, and so friendly you could mistake it for a dog. It was mewing and scratching at the bedroom door the other day so I let it in, thinking it would just sleep on the bed. Instead it stood on my chest rubbing its face against mine and pacing up and down incesssantly until I ejected it from the bedroom of eden, to the wasteland of the hall outside.

I got in quite late last night, having sat outside the Hermits for a bit with Marv and Gregg, who was stranded in London having missed his coach. As I was crossing a junction in Shoreditch the bag I've owned for nine or so years caught on a railing by its strap, which prompty ripped in two. There were a couple of hipster girls crossing the road behind me: "nice" commented one in passing, as they strode by.

I mourn its passing. In it's short life it's carried weighty tomes of critical theory from college and back (often largely unread), stacks of vinyl and cans of lager to parties, and socks and t-shirts to weekends away across this green and pleasant land.

Back in Soho again this week. This place has got air conditioning too, which after last week, is a godsend, especially considering the weather today was like a hot day in Spain. Shame to have to work, really.

I'm tring to sort out a tax return for 2005. I don't want to. I keep getting stern looking letters off the Inland Revenue urging me to get it in soon or else.. Or else what? You sent it to me late for starters.

When I tried to fill in the self assesment form I found that you have to send off for a subsiduary form about employment – which has just arrived a week later. To save time I tried to register to self assess online, and when my password didn't work, rang the IR helpline up to confirm it.

He said he'd send it in the post, as they don't give out such details in the post. And it'd take about a week. Sigh. What gets me is all this password would enable someone to do is potentially complete my tax return for me. If anyone fancies doing mine, they're welcome to it.