Competition ripper ever since 13..

A short youtube video of Biggie freestyling, sometime in 89 I guess..



Proof positive if needed that even at the 'tender' age of 17 the big guy could rap. I kind of wish you got to see the guy he's battling's attempt though..

Saturday

It's been a pretty barren week really. A featureless desert of mediocrity punctuated by the odd spike of misadventure.

On Valentine's day I stayed at work 'til eight, photo-shopping visuals of sub-menus on mobile phone screens. That was my hot date. As I left the building I smashed my knee against the plate glass door in the lobby with a crack like a rifle's retort. A couple (it would be a couple) passing by whirled round in surprise, and determined not to add insult to injury, I feigned insouciance, strolling up the street until I'd turned the corner, whereupon I collapsed double, clutching at my knee in agony.

The rest of the night was redeemed somewhat by the presence of a couple of bottles of Czech beer, and 'Preston' storming off Never Mind The Buzzcocks because Simon Amstell was taking the piss out of 'Chantel'.

Thursday night I went to Allez Allez, which was good, but I was fairly pissed before I even went there as I quaffed about four pints in the Bath House on Dean Street with my production homies. I wobbled out around eight, and purchased some food from the Japanese place on Oxford Street. Two triangular rice briquettes with teriyaki chicken hearts.

The night was good, anyway. The journey home wasn't. I caught the 35, and promptly fell asleep, waking up just as it was passing through Elephant.. on its way back into town. The bus had gone all the way to Clapham, and I'd awoken on its return orbit. It was ten past three.

I walked, tired and confused, from London Bridge to Elephant, where I bought a Columbian pattie.. which was like a fluorescent yellow deep fried samosa. Caught the bus home and got to sleep sometime after four.

I was tired on Friday. Fucking tired. Work was dull, as it has been, but then ended suddenly, as these bookings do. I retreat a point of sale hero. Freelance bookings, when they finish after an extended stint, are always a bit like a mini redundancy, announced with minimal fanfare: "Tom, it's quietened down now, so we won't be needing you next week". Which is fine, but after three months, I have to undergo a desk clearing ritual – weeding sign-off sheets from the miscellaneous bale of paper chaff perched on the end of the desk, doing some cursory filing and sweeping flakes of breakfast pastry into the cold five milimetres or so of Starbucks Venti Americano in the paper cup abandoned left of the blurry monitor. Even though I was pretty content to be going, there was something slightly sombre about the affair.

Three months working somewhere also seems just enough time to get a broad understanding of a particular workplace's politics. Who's shagging who, who's good at their job, who's crap at their job (by general concensus or otherwise) what drugs such and such did at the last Christmas bash etc. etc. Kind of interesting in a gossipy kind of way, though I'm glad I don't have to get too embroiled in it all. Nice bunch of people there, generally, though it was all quite quiet and intense. A real heads-down graft type of place, or as one of the artowkers was saying " a bit like a library".

Desk cleared I hiked up to The Angel after work, to meet Fran in a pub on Liverpool Road with her friend Kev. It was really good to see Fran, who was over from Jersey for an audition. The part sounded really interesting, too.

I left around eleven to get the tube as I didn't want to sleep on anyone's floor. A huge poster for Orange Mobile opposite the platform was really getting on my tits. The current campaign's strapline is: "People are good together" and the poster depicted two girls lying in a park in the sun looking at something out of shot.. only, by some trick of perspective they appear to share a single head. Like most of Orange's advertising I found it to be annoyingly obtuse, but more than that — misguided. I think Orange are attempting to give themselves a kooky offbeat appeal by the slightly whimsical tone of their imagery, but this was just slightly creepy; hallucinatory, David Lynch-esque. I moved up the platform to get away from it.

On the tube I read Friday's copy of the Metro, which had a really depressing spread on the Peckham shootings. One quote in really managed to wind me up a bit, where Charles Bailey of anti-gun group Don't Shoot said (amongst other things):

"Guns aren't coming from black people but they are being sold to black people. We need help from the Government to stop this happening"

Huh? Meaning what? Shouldn't sale of guns be stopped full-stop? Is this some kind of conspiracy then? Surely of more paramount importance is demarginalising whole swathes of angry south London kids, and teaching people not to fetishise violence. A proliferation of firearms is no good thing, but more worrying still is that people—kids—actually want to buy them and use them so wantonly.

Anyway. A hairy topic that I'm not going to attempt to grapple with right now.

I arrived back in Camberwell around 12. There's an Eastern European alcoholic guy I see a round quite a lot. Mid-thirties. Stubbly. Generally wears a baseball cap and shades. He quite often sidles up to people and starts holding forth in a rambling pissed diatribe he finds hilarious. The other day I saw him outside a liquor store with a laundry bag stuffed with nine two-litre bottles of rotgut cider. He had a can in his hand. Last night he was involved in some kind of argument with a group of rudegirls who were aiming high kicks at his chest, and yelling things like "Fack off dirty tramp man". Oh dear.

I got in and retired to bed feeling slightly troubled by it all.

Saturday today, and on a more positive note.. Tlon books has had a stay of execution. Yes, rumours of its demise were greatly exagerated by yours truly, though things aren't looking too sunny. According to the guy at the counter the landlords (Southwark council no less) have been upping the rent, and seem to want to evict them so they can effect the much lauded renewal of Elephant with no strings attached. I signed a petition about it, and he's going to email me some info, which I'll post here when I get it.

I might go to Old Street tonight.. might not though. Not sure if I can be bothered. I'm also pretty skint until I can transfer some money on monday. We'll see.

Tlon books RIP

I made a fairly typical foray down the Walworth Road at the weekend, to nose round some charity shops, with my ultimate destination being the Elephant and Castle shopping centre. Hardly the most auspicious of locations, and I'll freely admit the only reason I ever ventured into the big concrete and plastic cube at all was to visit the slightly creased second hand bookshop therein: Tlon Books.

The last time I went up I picked up a couple of half decent crime novels—Dog Eat Dog by Edward Bunker and Blood in Brooklyn by Gary Loveski—for a very reasonable price, and was returning to see if I could repeat the trick.

Imagine my dismay then, when I rocked up to discover that it was shut. Dismay that only deepened when I read the cursory typed letter affixed to the door, which stated effectively that the proprerty had been seized by the landlord, and anyone attempting to gain entry to reclaim stock would be subject to legal proceedings, or perhaps more likely in Southwark, visited by a man and his dog for a 'chat'.

So another one bites the dust.

With Wordsworth and now Tlon gone, the only Bookshop nearby is the one in Brixton (as far as I know) and it really is something of a loss for me. I do a lot of reading both in the small hours and and on the bus and tube, and probably get through two books a week, so being able to buy cheaper second-hand is a boon.

Tlon books wasn't the cheapest, but it was fairly priced, and I enjoyed going there for an hour or two just to browse the shelves. Being able to buy cheaper also means that I felt able to take a risk on something I might not otherwise have bothered with, and investigate other genres or writers I'd never come across before. It was fairly compendious too, stocking everything from fiction to reference books on everything from art and design to history.

The note on the door seemed to suggest the shop's seizure was due to unpaid rent, and I've got to admit, if there's precious little money in books, there's even less in second hand ones, and hardly enough to satisfy the ambitious, or ultimately the landlords. I always suspect that independent ventures like this, and record shops of course, are often run and worked in by fanatical hobbyists who do it for the love rather than cutting a healthy profit, but if you can't even pay the rent.. well. Game over. Sad really. I really have something of an affection for institutions of great merit but with little financial acumen which soldier on anyway. A bit like Hugh Grant's bookshop in Notting Hill (joke: I haven't actually seen it. The film that is, not the place, obviously).

It got me thinking about London, and how, while I love the city, one of the things I really dislike about it is the price of rent. Not so much personally as that's pretty reasonable, but in terms of the ludicrous value of property in general, which motivates the landed to some fairly greedy profiteering.

The business of buying and renting property these days often strikes me as a fairly sordid area of business, what with everyone being either obsessed with pursuing property or thrashing round in the ensuing money-pit, and this extends from the guy you rent your bedsit from to the corporate behemoth that leases office space in Canary Wharf. Let's face it. No-one's a landlord out of charity, and even the good ones generally have something of a shall we say, laissez faire attitude toward upkeep.

Astronomical rent ultimately ultimately prices out the small guy or the independent trader, as it eats into their modest income. There used to be a pretty good comic shop on the Charing Cross Road, which shut down last year. On the day of its closing, I overheard the owner talking to a customer and telling him (almost inevitably a him in a comic shop) that the landord had suddenly hiked the yearly rent from a pretty damn expensive £60K to a jaw-dropping £100,000 per annum. A sum that seems not so much astronomical to me as interstellar.

As his customer observed "how many comic books would you have to sell to pay that?" and the proprietor stated that he was reluctantly migrating his business online. It sounds to me like the landlord heard somewhere of a similar property going for as much, and appetite well and truly whetted endevoured to stoke the fires of their greed with bales of the crisp folding stuff.

I quite often walk past that same shop, and it seems now to be full of crappy plastic umbrellas. I can only assume that they're the landord's own, as I can't see how they're going to pay the rent. So.. a tenant gone, a property vacant, and London slightly less interesting for it. I've seen it happen to a few places over the last year or so, and I can't really see the situation improving.

I also noted with dismay that both the Astoria and Hammersmith Palais are closing shortly, and while I must admit I've only ever been to one of those venues, I'm aggrieved in principle to venues such as this shutting down in the name of some bland homogenous progress. These are outlets for the music that gives London such a vibrant night-life, and once they're gone, they're gone.

There was quite an interesting piece in the Guardian last year—penned by Banksy—which cited the negative effects of the Melbourne games on the thriving street art scene there, before in turn positing that much the same might happen in East London when the Olympics arrive in 2012. Pessimistic or not (and I'm only so bothered about 'street' art), I agreed with some of its points. Too often these days the landscape of our cities is dictated by corporations which flatten all before them in their quest for monopoly, by buying up space to hedge out the competition.

Ultimately this would leave us with the same lineup of poe-faced brands—whose hegemony is already apparent crowding our public space in ever more intrusive ways. I don't necessarily mind places like Starbucks (they have their place) but when their nitrous runoff stagnates and chokes the city of its diversity, then I'm pissed. Yeah, let's have your shop with its extravagantly priced infusions derived from beans you paid someone in the third world fuck all for, but let's have some greasy spoons too, some Italian caffs, some local flavour.

Ultimately of course, oversaturation could be their downfall. Globalisation makes for a handy catch all term here, though I personally find the slow annexing of britain by supermarkets the most obviously irritating thing (sometimes it feels like I'm being slowly surrounded by Tesco Metros). People are already somewhat desensitized to the hi-gloss of advertising, which is why all too often these days, big business strives for ever more resourceful means to displace its mass, through viral incursions schemed to slip beneath the radar of credibility. As consumers become ever sophisticated, the more advertising strives to camouflage itself as 'street-buzz' or word of mouth, using the slang and tropes of oral and visual youth culture. This can pay dividends but also backfire disasterously, as was evidenced by the 'blog' Sony set up to promote the new PSP last year. As fast moving consumer groups mover ever faster, the tone of such campaigns must become ever more nuanced if it is to keep up without being outed, though it is highly, highly amusing to see them cock up, poor dears.

It is quite ironic that big business appropriates the cultural capital of subcultures, while at the same time marginalising them, but nothing new. I just hope that after the Olympics come and go, there is still affordable rent for the starving artists to keep on starving up east, and more generally, bits of London are allowed to persist as areas fertile for interaction, excitement and creativity, regardless of whether they are covered in spray paint or you can purchase a skinny venti latte there..

Anyway. I've ranted about this before and I am positive, but in the short term, where can I buy a cheap book? Tlon, I'm gonna miss ya.

Thursday

I'm tired. And a bit drunk.

Work's been a grind this week. No successes, no victories. Just trying to get stuff out the door. Quietly fielding phone calls off the tired account manager, from the phone on Lydia's desk, while Mac OSX's eye/beachball of death whirls at me from the screen of the slightly flustered G4 I'm working with.

Drunk, tired, yadda yadda whatever.

Tagged (twice)

So on Thursday last, Gridrunner tagged me with a viral question meme, which invites you to volunteer five facts about yourself that are, to quote the man "(less than obvious)". This is actually the second time I've been nominated for this, the first being over Christmas by the chap over at TracknKern. Man's got a dot com, works and plays in Oz. Peace.

So anyway, here goes, five things about ME:

1. My favourite colour used to be yellow, but I think it's green now. Is that allowed? When it comes to design I sometimes wish I had more of a synaesthetic response to colour and could assign straightforward associations to a pallete. It's never that simple though and there's always going to some duality to what emotional response a particular colour evokes, e.g. green can be perceived as relaxing or connote envy. It's all contextual I suppose. The standard colours of retail press advertising also happen to be the red black and white beloved of national socialism. Go figure.

2. The last thing that made me cry (sniff) was the end of 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy, which I really didn't expect. It's a fairly harrowing read, set in the onset of a nuclear winter precipitated by a cataclysmic war he describes simply as: "a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions". It follows a man and his son on their journey south in search of warmth and food, beset by the gangs of marauding cannibals who stalk the blasted roads of America after a fire that has scourged the earth of life; where no plant, beast, bird or fish prospers.

Needless to say, It hasn't got a happy ending, though.. Nah, go read it yourselves.

3. I don't get football. I don't mind it or anything.. I just can't ever get excited about it. One of the questions I get asked a lot upon happening upon a new work environment is "what team do you follow?", to which, with a sub-vocal sigh, I must—almost apologetically—mumble "Er, I don't really follow it to be honest", which pretty much nips in the bud that avenue of banter.

While I wouldn't exactly class this as a handicap, I must admit having no interest in the de facto male opening conversational gambit probably eliminates at least 50% of the conversations I might be having with geezers I don't really know. Football is the lingua franca of the bloke, and even a passing knowledge of some of its trivia seems to function as a kind of masonic handshake, wherever you are in the world.

When backpacking in Hostels across Europe, my friend Andy told me how he would sometimes end up cohabiting with groups of guys who spoke no English, while he himself didn't speak a word of, say, Polish. In situations like this where communication was a problem, all he had to do however was rattle off the names of a few players on the Polish National Squad, and sure enough within minutes he was all but being borne aloft on the shoulders of his cheering, newfound buddies.

When it's not inspiring them to glass each other on the terraces whilst wearing Burberry, football breaks more ice amongst groups of men globally than American industry's carbon footprint does in the Arctic Circle, and by not having a working knowledge of it my 'arsenal' (pun intended) I am already at a social disadvantage. Sometimes, on slow rainy days I even contemplate getting 'into' it.. but nah, fuck that, I'll just apportion more of my energy to my other overwhelmingly male trait: accruing and hoarding crap I don't really need.

This is my favourite footy song.

4. One of my favourite musical genres is disco. No seriously. Back in the days when my mates were raving to acid techno this used to get a few raised eyebrows, but to quote 'Withnail and I' even a stopped clock keeps the right time twice a day, and I harbour grave doubts that anyone will be listening to Routemaster Records in thirty years time (me-yow!).

One of my all time musical heroes, if I'm permitted them, is undoubtedly Vincent Montana, who conducted the orchestral backing for more classic joints on both the Salsoul and Philadelphia labels than man's had hot meals. The march of technological innovation in music these days seems to be towards democratisation, where a bedroom producer can put out records that can all but rival the high end production gloss of the big studios. Against this, the idea of making dance records with a full orchestra seems quaint, unwieldy, fantastic, decadent, and frankly unlikely. But that was how it was done back then. No matter how much I love electronica, I would argue that there is an emotional charge that live instrumentation imparts that no amount of studio wibble can lend, and it's the strings that do it for me; the crying voice of the violins soaring and zigging above a track always makes the hairs on the back of my neck just stand on end.

Heady and escapist, exquisite and seedy in equal measure, diso was the effective precursor to modern day dance music for the clubs. A hybrid form straddling the genres of Latin and soul it was at its best also a profoundly inclusive genre, bridging differences in class, race and sexuality. I suspect I'm just getting nostalgic for scene I never participated in, but I do sometimes fantasize about what it must have been like to be alive and partying in new york in the 70s.. maybe living in Brooklyn?

I must remind myself of course that utopias never persist for long, if they even exist at all, and it did all get quite nauseatingly rank in the dark days of its twilight. As cretinous as as Steve Dahl's 'Disco Sucks' campaign was, the cheesier excesses of the Bee Gees and Abba are enough to induce a gag reflex in anyone, and are rightly reviled.

And even these days, that stigma lingers, though what with everything being so post-modern and everything, it's getting better. And of course, some people understand, with disco having advocates in some very surprising quarters. One of the best disco jocks I ever saw was a dude called Big Rob, who was big, had corn rows, and looked like he should be back-spinning MOP joints, rather than the sublime 70s plastic he was serving up. Special mention must also be made of Stu and the Love The Action crew back up north, who'd be guaranteed to give you a firm nod of approval anytime you fancied cueing up a Quincy Jones track.

OK disco rant over. Any non-believers should track down a copy of Kenny Dope's 'Disco Heat' where he edits together and seamlessly mixes up a range of records that you'll probably recognise from the house tracks that sampled them. Either that or get over to Mixoftheweek.com (not actually that weekly as far as I can see) and get plugged in to 'The Sound Of Philadelphia' trio of mixes.

5. My favourite mode of transport is walking, and I think I'm pretty good at it at a fairly mateur level. One of my favourite wastes of time (and I've a few, believe me) is just walking round town to my favourite places, checking things out en route. It's a fantastic way to explore and see things you wouldn't catch from the tube or even the bus window. Just occasionally I'll suddenly find I've wandered on to a slightly rough looking estate, and start counting bin bags in trees and leashless dogs to try and quantify the danger, but really, what's life without a little excitement? Sorry if that sounded like a broadcast from the Ministry of Walking.

Anyway.. that wasn't so bad. Hope I didn't bore any of you. Now the not-so-hard-part (there aren't that many blogs I read really). I nominate:

Si
Doppelganger
Zeno
Lord Bunty Chunk
Mountainear

CELEBRITY SIGHTING* – UPDATE

Just spotted: comedic tag team Punt and Dennis in the Pret A Manger on Wardour Street. Just now. Literally. If you run you might still catch them (though not if you're coming from Stockport).

*When I loosely apply the term 'celebrity' I'm referring to anyone alloted more than the standard 15 minutes of fame, who I've seen on TV more than once, and considering the rampant bar-lowering by shows such as Celebrity Big Brother as to what constitutes a celebrity, I reckon even I count as famous by now, so there.

The weekend, The Running Man, Tuesday.

After a slightly stressful Friday evening maniacally tabbing contract documents where the person who'd set it up hadn't bothered to name any of the layers, I escaped about half seven to meet friends in the Theatre Bar on Charing Cross Road, for Kay's Birthday.

We had a few drinks, then ducked out when everyone went for karaoke. Sorry, but I just can't go for that, even if they do have Hall and Oates.

Saturday met up with Ben at the corporation in Shoreditch, who was over from Ireland to see his gran. Alright place the corporation. Interestingly shaped first floor bar, anyway. It was very busy, and there seemed to be quite a few lesbians there, though not the lipstick sort who write advice columns for mens magazines such as Loaded.

Wound up at It's bigger than, where we were regaled with a set of squidgy house by a DJ in a trucker cap. I couldn't be bothered shelling out for the after party, so caught the 35 home. A couple of my housemates were up, and I sat with them for a while in Marv's room. He managed to get an inky oil paint fingerprint on my Adidas jacket when giving me a drunken hug, which is the second item of clothing of mine he's managed 'clart up' in as many weeks, along with my Stussy shirt he splattered with red wine just before New Year *sighs* "Ma-arv..".

On Sunday went round to Helen's new place in Brixton for dinner, which Will cooked. We popped out for a drink at the pub round the corner – The Effra, which is one of those places you would probably never stumble across if you didn't live locally or get taken there, sitting as it does just off the beaten track. Interesting mixed crowd and gloriously down-at-heels pubby-ness. Dan Sarabji was over from Cypress, which he's planning on leaving soon for Paris, having decided to leave the Archeological profession. There are only so many things to dig up, in so many ways, it would seem.

Watched Verrhoven's 'The Running Man' last night, which I always enjoy. There's something crudely effective about his films, a streak of visceral nastiness he doesn't attempt to disguise, and rather glories in instead. It pushes buttons for me. Big early nineties ones.

Tuesday now. London's rush hour traffic is back up to speed, or lack of, and now costs more than ever to participate in. The servers are down at work. All of them. Which isn't really surprising as this is the land that IT forgot. This sort of gives me an excuse to wander round the internet, idling away the hours, but I'm also aware that there's loads of work lurking in the wings, which I'll just have less time to do – or more time to do in the evening, which in spite of overtime, I can't really be bothered with right now.

Film night tonight, which the Sun and Doves website tells me is a Jean-Pierre Melville film, Le Doulos. I may go, or might be working on Point of Sale. Couldn't really say, though I know what I'd prefer to be doing.

Anyway. Anyone got any tips for removing oil paint stains from acrylic sportswear? Answers on a postcard to the usual address..

January

It's Thursday the fourth of January, and I'm back at work. Indeed I started back on the second. Perhaps ironically I'm back at Start in Soho. What more fitting way to commence the year than this.

I don't think I've worked on the second of January since, well, ever. Returning to work is always something of a shock, but doing it this abruptly feels as brutal an introduction to the new year as being woken from sleep by crashing through a skylight into a pool of ice cold water, perhaps on the back of a giant concrete pigeon. Two weeks off seems just long enough to forget, utterly, what work is like (someone tells you what to do, you do it, a short while later a sum of money is deposited in your account).

Januarys truly are the Monday mornings of the year, and by that reasoning it's going to be three-point-seven weeks before lunchtime, when I can at least pop out for a sandwich from Marks and Spencers. The cheery, alcoholic bonhomie of Christmas has evaporated, ethanol-like, and once more the Londoners resume the daily grind, commuting in the gloom, hands feverishly questing for copies of the Metro, iPod earbuds inserted.

Although Christmas oficially ends on Twelth Night (the sixth of January) I really can't be doing with Christmas decorations after New Year's Day, and spying them is a bit like smelling a liquer you drank until sick in your teens: faintly nauseating. The corporate decorations above regent street will probably be here until March (it's just the way these things work) but otherwise most places seem to be shedding their tinselly skin pronto: good.

January is named after the Roman god Janus—the god who looks both ways—presumably as even then it was seen as a time for both reflection of the year past, and anticipation of the year to come.

Last year was.. ok. Some good things happened, but there were also a lot of disappointments I can't really be bothered dwelling on. I don't really go in for New Years resolutions, but apart from the usual guff (drink less, smoke less, be amazing) I am going to try and be a bit more proactive (whoah there!) and perhaps make a bit more effort to stay in touch with certain people. This has been the first Christmas in a while when I didn't see a couple of people I usually see at that this time of year, and it's all to easy to drop off people's Christmas card lists, so to speak.

As for New Year's Eve.. it was fine. After some Mexican food, much Cava, and a game of Pictionary (which my team WON) we walked round the corner to a party at a squat overlooking Burgess park, that seemed to be mostly populated by Spanish people. It was a nice flat too, apart from some predictably wonky new age graffiti of suns and moons, and a hole in the shape of Africa someone had carved into the kitchen ceiling. We had fun and my housemate Cecilia got more drunk than I've ever seen her before.There were a couple of DJs, including a Japanese guy who looked a bit like Towa-Tei because of his beret and oversized sunglasses (despite it being past midnight). He proceeded to play a couple of boxes of funk seven inches, badly if that's possible, though the tunes were good. There was someone else playing dub too, which made for a nice change. I eventually left when the house band came on and started jamming in a Spanish stylee. The rhythm was a bit fuzzy as the drummers and accompanying clapping kept slipping out of phase, and it was a bit like trying to dance to hail.

We sat up for a bit at home, where Marvyn tried to get people to rap along to Nas, some with limited success, but eventually the food and booze tooks its toll, and I crawled up to bed.

In years past, New Year's Day was generally something of a hedonistic affair, and I'd often be in the pub (or more likely The Bar in Chorlton) from one in the afternoon onwards, quaffing european lager with my partners in crime. Not so this year, as what with working on the Tuesday n' all, it wasn't really practical. Instead we went for a few beers in the evening at the Hermit's, then trotted off home for two hours of soaps.

And this week's been fine, really. Not much traffic on the roads, and the kids are still off school, so getting to work's a relative cinch. I'm reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman and really enjoying it. No real plans for this weekend, but it's Kay's birthday, so am meeting her for a drink in the Theatre Bar on Charing Cross Road tomorrow. Other than that, who knows?

CELEBRITY SIGHTING UPDATE: Ian Hislop in the offices of Private Eye in Soho on Tueday (so no real surprise there really).

Shunt, Allez Allez, Banking, Santa's Ghetto

Thursday

It was Allez Allez last night, so I headed out at about eight o' clock with Jess, to rendevouz with Ade, Robin and Hannah at London Bridge.

I don't go out in London Bridge much, the only other times I can remember of note being my ex-housemates Christmas bash at The Hop Cellar last week and drinking in some cheesey hostel bar (Belushi's) with Lucy last September.

The venue this time was somewhat mysterious, and the directions could have only been marginally more obscure if tatooed on a dwarf and then sent to me through the post, but nonetheless after some ambling around in the frigid cold, me and Jess eventually found the place in question, Shunt Bar, which is located under the arches adjacent to London Bridge Station.

After entering a tiny unmarked doorway, you are directed down a long corridor, through a succession of arches, housing chairs, benches, and in one case, a small cinema auditorium, screening some arty flick to an audience of one. All of this works as a dramatic prelude to the bar itself, the sound of whose revelry floats up as you traipse uncertainly down, and basically it's like rocking up on the outskirts of a very tame, somewhat underpopulated suburb of hell (perhaps at some kind of judgement day wrap party).

The bar when you actually arrive is a cavernous, post-industrial affair, with bare brick floors, bare brick walls, decks on trestle tables, and a shed. I bought a bottle of Magners and a Baileys for Jess, who had the luck of getting the end of the bottle, as the girl behind the bar gave her a dose of Nesquik-esque proportions. After this we found Ade et-al and sat down.

This venue seems like something of an anomaly for touristy London bridge, and seems to have attracted the kind of hip crowd you'd usually catch wearing drainpipes and pointy shoes in a watering hole in Hoxton. It is a truly remarkable space however, and exactly the kind of 'cool' thing I came to London to participate in. Jess liked it so much she didn't want to leave.

But leave we did, wherupon one of the venue's institutions kicked in – an artistic 'happening' where a naked man smeared in axle grease capered round to the strains of some suitably manic music, and had plum tomatoes and dust upended on him in different corners of the room. It was like a version of that children's TV mainstay 'the gunk tank', for the inebriated chattering classes, and the highlight (no pun intended) was when someone trained a lazer pointer on the chap's todger as he prepared to shower in passata while standing on a chair. Apparently this always takes place at 10.30pm, though I'm not sure whether this is just on Thursdays.

Then off to the bijou Allez Allez, which got really busy this week, as anyone not nursing a hangover on the last work day of December can probably expect a written warning from Ken Livingstone himself. Katie and Penny were there, neither of whom I'd seen in ages, along with Kaye and various It's Bigger Than affiliates (I spotted Cutmaster Max and Leo The Amateur reppin' at the other end of the bar).

Caught a taxi home at about half three, and sat up for a while wolfing down cold Chinese food from the fridge and hiccuping at Jess, before swaying to bed at around five.

Friday

I full intended to leap out of bed this morning, but only just managed to blearily field a phone call from a recruitment consultant in the entire AM (does anyone else sleep with their mobile under their pillow, or is it just me?). Eventually got up at around half one, and consumed my own body mass in strong coffee and white toast with vegemite.

After this, the day's business began in earnest, as I had to both go to the bank to transfer funds from my business account and do my Christmas shopping, which in a break from tradition I opted not to leave until Christmas Eve.

I first went to the HSBC—they're the world's local bank, don't you know?—in Camberwell, and was immediately reminded why I usually go the branch on Baker street when I want anything doing. The customer service stand had simply vanished, to be replaced by a sheepish looking conglomeration of chairs, which were arranged in a formation reminiscent of the aftermath of a creche at a church hall somewhere. There were a few people sitting uneasily around, not really sure what was going on, or how to behave without a qeueue.

"Oh, for fucks sake"

I thought, while at the same time being vaguely amused that any institution with the chutzpah to brand themselves 'the world's local bank' could so shamelessly do away with the symbolic apparatus of customer service in a local branch.

"Sorry, no, if you want customer service the nearest branch is on Oxford Street"

I could imagine being told, but actually got seen to after about twenty minutes, after which I hopped on the twelve into town, for the aforementioned Christmas shop.

It was all relatively painless, though Oxford Street was rammed, but I braved it for one last nose round 'Santa's Ghetto', the temporary shop Pictures On Walls have put on in an empty store for the last few Christmases I've been here. All the Banksy stuff had sold out in about an hour on the first day, apparently, as everybody is Banksy crazy these days. I'm undecided about Banksy.. some of his stuff is very witty and some of it.. less so; but one thing's for sure, the guy is a very smart cookie. I was in Bristol just when he was starting to make a name for himself there, and even at the time he was really pushing the faceless artist bit (he didn't bother turning up to the opening night of an exhibition of his paintings at the Riverstation) and there seemd to be a little bit of low key 'hating' going on too (some fellow graffiteur took Banksy's trademark stencil logo and reworked it into 'Wanksy'). Either way, I'm kicking myself that I didn't buy one (or eight) of his prints in the 2004/5 sale, which cost about fifty quid then, and I've recently seen being bid for on ebay up to the tune of about £800. Ouch. Anyway, some other good stuff, including some prints by a guy called Sickboy, who I think went to the University of the West of England and was in the year below me at the Bower Ashton campus. A lot of the stuff had been sold, but I bought a screenprint by Insect, whose style I like (though it's not the Warhol influenced DJ Shadow album art one, which was influenced by Andy Warhol both in terms of style and the ambitious scale of the edition).

After that I had a look in the Hideout, and the Maharishi shop, where the back wall was dominated by custom painted variants of Marc Gonzalez's priest toy. They're selling an amazing Fedora hat in there by Kangol and New York shop Alife, which is great, but a little out of my price bracket at £700.

Then I jumped on that most heinous of bendy buses, the 12, to get back to Camberwell. It was predictably rammed to the gills with festive folk, and when we got to Elephant, a troupe of African street preachers boarded and proceeded to belt out an impromptu sermon, interspersed with bouts of song. Initially entertaining, it got slightly annoying after a while so I put on some earphones to drown it out. I was moaning about this to some friends later until Vicky pointed out that if you can't expect this sort of thing at Christmas, when can you expect it, and it is the true meaning of Christmas after all. So there.

Went round to Vicky's house in the evening where she cooked up some lovely pizzas, and I had a couple of glasses of wine. Ed really wanted to go and meet up with some of his Foyles homies in town, and I begrudgingly agreed to tag along, before having a last minute change of heart at the bus-stop. It was just too cold, I was too tired, and the thought of standing shoulder to shoulder in a Charing Cross Road bar at someone elses works do was too much for me to face right then.

Off to Mancunia tomorrow, and following my last farcical misadventure 'on the buses' I opted for the train this time, which should be significantly quicker than a coach. Honestly, people point to the fact that a lot of pensioners use National Express but I suspect they just got a few stops earlier and were my age when they boarded.

In any event, it looks like I got my ticket just in time too, what with most of the papers prophesying festive transport doom: 'Travel Chaos' screeched the London Evening Standard the other day, whilst pointing a shaking finger at the James Herbert-esque fog bank rolling across London, and they seem to be intent on manufacturing a scenario of Die Hard 2 proportions round the grounding of flights at Heathrow, with the villain of the piece being the aforementioned low-lying cloud, rather than a renegade Army Officer.

Anyway. Merry Christmas one and all, and I might write again from Stockport or Wales if Santa tells me you've all been good.

Cheerio.

Walworth Road Army Surplus

I love army surplus shops and have consequently whittled away many hours of my life thumbing through piles of threadbare tat in pursuit of some elusive rare camo that doen't exist. At my behest a couple of friends also recently trawled some shops in Sweden in a fruitless attempt to locate some rare Swedish splinter camo. No luck (it all gets burnt after service, apparently).

Unfortunately surplus stores, like charity shops, are mostly rubbish these days. Instead of some weird one-of-a-kind zebra-print camo suit worn by an African dictator's imperial guard you're probably just going to find racks of brand new Alpha M65 USMC jackets priced at 70 quid each. Yawn.

At first glance the surplus store half way down the Walworth road looks like a veritable elixir to any camo-hound's jaded palette. "Levi's (sic), Wranglers, Dr Martens" announces the signage proudly, with rows of khaki wares dangling from the rafters in the entrance like a unit from some long forgotten army. Pavlovian response well and truly excited, I bounded over, saliva already pooling on the lapels of my button-down shirt.

Unfortunately, like so many things in life, up close it's a different story, and this shop rewards scrutiny in much the same way a web-exported jpeg doesn't. Upon approaching the windows one suddenly becomes aware that all the articles in the window are not only shrouded in dust-bunnies, but have been long bleached and faded by the sun's daily intrusion as it steals across the sky. Suddenly the articles suspended from the ceiling attain a faintly gibbet-like air, swaying uncertainly in the impartial winds that gust down the Walworth road.

"What.. happened here?"

You wonder to yourself.

Nonetheless, fortune favours the brave, so the more courageous amongst you might venture within, where it all just gets weirder. Upon stepping foot inside, one is immediately greeted with a loud, slightly accusative

"Can I help you sir?"

Uttered by the shop's proprietor, who emerges, stoop-backed from the gloom like a shop bound troll. And this nasal catchphrase is essentially where where pleasantries begin and end: any response in the negative – even a "Sorry thanks, I'm just browsing" is not advisable, as it will usually be met with an unflinchingly brusque: "Come on you must want something" or even better yet "Well get out then and stop wasting my time, I've got a business to run here".

Even in this day and age, let's not pretend anyone really gives that much of a shit about customer service, otherwise customer enquiries wouldn't be routinely directed to a call centre in Mumbai to be dealt with by someone reading the same ten answers of a prompt card. Nonetheless, everyone likes to pretend they're the customers best friend, so it's actually quite refreshing to encounter someone prepared to dispense with all formal niceties, because this man is plain rude. The last time I went (and I do, strangely, return) a West Indian family were exiting, having just been driven from within.

"Not gonna buy anything in there anyway" huffed the mother, irritably "Man's got no manners innit".

"Ah" I thought. "You've met him"

Basically the Walworth Surplus store is like a sketch from a comedy that never made it past the cutting room floor, and entering into any kind of dialogue with its bizarre owner will have you craning to see the hidden cameras, so utterly surreal is the setup.

His is the pinnacle of some Olde Worlde Institutionally bad service, where the customer is not only 'not right' but 'always wrong', and a necessary evil that must occasionally be tolerated (much like foreigners and women). This is the only store I have ever seen with a sign at the door that reads 'Only one customer in the shop at any one time'.

It's all a bit of a shame really, as the shop actually looks like the Alladins cave it should be, piled high with all manner of esoteric merchandise. But, browsing is simply not tolerated, and if you don't know exactly what you want, when you walk in, then get the hell out. I think the guy must own the place outright, as driving your customers away is hardly what I'd call a robust business model, and the only way that this guy could possibly be more offensive is if he implemented small arms fire as part of one of his customary exchanges.

To be fair, I think he is actually more mad than bad, and only slightly more surly than some of the bores who work in comic shops. He's something like a character you might encounter in Monkey Island 2 who resets every time you meet him, the limits of his slightly wonky AI being demonstrated by his stock of five or so witheringly curt phrases which he wheels out like siege engines. This guy doen't mince words, he just lobs them across the counter like grenades.

And in spite of all this, I have actually spent money there (a pair of gym-style pumps I wear round the flat and to go to the shops in). I'm just frustrated that he might have all this amazing stuff sequestered away, which is unobtainable soley because I don't know to ask for it. Much like a text-based game on my Spectrum 48k, visual clues are in short supply, and progress usually relies upon inputting exactly the right phrase ("What is "FUCK OFF" etc.) and maybe, just maybe, if I uttered the magic words "ripstop pants in experimental T-pattern camo, 32" waist" such an item might be plucked unceremoniously from a high shelf.

In my heart I doubt it though, and you have been warned "Abandon all hope ye who enter here".

Next time: Somewhere with good service.

Xmas Card

I think I need a new mac. Working on this kept crashing my grumpy old powerbook, annoyingly when just nudging layers. It was quite a large image to begin with, but nonetheless I'm beginning to think I need to put the old fella out to pasture as an MP3 jukebox or something.

Anyway, this is my Christmas card for 2006, which in order to cement my starving artist credentials is only getting sent digitally. Then again, this is 2006 and nearly 2007, so I'm surprised that (A) paper still exists and (B) we all don't live on the moon, so just think of it as moving with the times.

Sharon Osbourne Disguise Kit™

Man, the animal posters were a pretty good freebie, but for those who missed it, Saturday's Guardian came with this free mask which allows you to 'become' X Factor judge Sharon Osbourne.

Way to go Guardian.

Allez Allez

Still working the same place in Soho I have been at for the last few weeks, and not really enjoying it very much to be honest. It's pretty manic with stuff being churned out for Christmas, and if I have to look at another mobile phone direct response ad I think I'm going to cry blood. I've felt shattered all week. No respite next week either, though I'll try and think of what I might plough the money into next year.

A lot of people there are using Adobe Indesign to exploit layer effects in Photoshop within a page layout program, and the jury is still out on whether this is good practice for when it actually goes to print. I'm not actually sure I care that much, but on a momentary aside I've got to say: Quark Express are screwed.

There are still sume clunky things about Indesign—it's sometimes really irritatingly fiddly to select type boxes for example—but it is so much more powerful than Quark it beggars belief. The fact that it integrates better with Illustrator and Photoshop and you can get all three packaged for less than the price of Quark's crappy software suggests to me that the latter's days are truly numbered.

Quark rested on their laurels for too long, lazily assuming their staus as the industry standard desktop publishing package was assured, and didn't really bother to try and develop the software or patch up the multitude of problems that pepper it like moth-holes in a deeply unfashionable sweater from the late eighties.

They do seem to have suddenly woken up to the fact that Adobe are probably going to take a huge slice of their business away from them, but their sudden frantic attempts to shore up their archaic enterprise frankly reek of desperation. The debacle surrounding their laughable attempts to rebrand being an own goal they could probably have done without as well.

Having said that, if I never had to use a page layout application again it wouldn't bother me hugely.

Went to my friend Sam's night Allez Allez on Thursday, which was great. I warmed up with some music for them but it was Weekend Steve and the man like Deven Miles who turned the party out, and you can hear the guys enthusiasm for what they're playing booming out of the speakers. The music is pretty eclectic (though that's an annoyingly broad term) but generally on quite a clubby, housey tip if that helps. I had a really good time, though I sure felt it the next day. It's early days yet, but I really hope it grows to be the success it deserves to be. Check out their blog here. They got podcasts and everything.

Saturday now. The landlord had arranged for an electrician to come round this morning, and he was banging round at about nine thirty. I got up and went to the post office to get a package, a belt from Oi Polloi in Manchester from their own line they did with the Japanese Paul Smith subsiduary, R Newbold. The buckle's based on their logo, which was designed by Rick Myers. I kind of wanted the Magpies one but that sold out in a hot second. They also sent a few pin badges too, which was nice.



Meeting up with ade in a bit, as he's just got back from Barcelona where he was visiting his brother. Maybe catch up with Marvyn and Ed too.

Chargers

Hey, what happened to all the chargers, anyway? I'm talking about battery chargers in general but special mention must be made of phone chargers.

Time was that the earth used to groan beneath the collective weight of phone chargers, that dominated the horizon like menacing sillouettes in a Max Ernst frottage.

They were prime examples of the kibble that Phillip K Dick prophesised, technological by-product slowly swelling in mass to produce mountains of black plastic worms, intertwined like slumbering rattlesnakes in kitchen drawers throughout the land.

But now, they all seem to have vanished.. Something has decimated the charger population, and I want answers. Was there a charger amnesty I missed? or a cull on power sources in general? I used to have al least four—three Nokia, one Sony Ericsson with a really self consciously 'technological' attachment doohicky—and truly, they were times of charger excess. No place of residence was complete without about half a dozen of those things (each, per person), which would nestle like plastic umbelici in the corners of every room, warm to the touch. In much the same way a bedouin tribesman might offer you some weird tea or something whilst guesting in his caravan, a prerequisite of hospitality in Chorlton circa 2003 was unlimited acesss to a home's collective battery replenishment wealth.

"Does anyone have a Nokia charger..?" you'd ask, gazing at the mournful one-bar on your phone's screen, despite already knowing the answer.

Not so anymore.. It's like Mad Max round here when it comes to phone chargers, a trusty Nokia Type ACP–7X having suddenly having attained the same status as 'the last of the V8 interceptors' in these lean, mean times. I asked my housemate if I could use hers the other day and she actually had to think about it.. "Erm, yeah alright, I might have to use it in a bit" she said uncertainly.

Now I've got one, and I keep misplacing it.. I think it's making a quiet desperate bid for freedom, to follow it's compatriots to whatever alternate dimension all the odd socks and biros holidayed in in the eighties, and one day will simply ping out of existence when I turn my back on it, without so much as a "So long and thanks for all the DC power supply".

Perhaps they'll all return, someday, but like the entwives. I doubt it.

Because friends, I think we were destroying them, not so much through technological euthanasia as simply feeding them too much: leaving them plugged in for extended periods when not even charging, which eventually burnt them out. Our kindness killed, and they simply had to escape.

In fact.. all this would make for a 'great' Disney Pixar 3D animation! 'Pull the Plug' (working title) would follow the adventures of a rag-tag group of DC power transforming appliances as they seek to escape a student flat in a suburb of Stockport for the shargri-lah of (uncertain about this bit). Along they way they would befriend a gruff car battery with a heart of gold they meet in a shed, and seek to evade the local bully whose hobby is throwing mobile phone chargers on to fires. Comic hi-jinx would ensue, and along the way there'd be lots of room for post-modern adult humour, aimed at the grown ups sleeping in the audience eg: '"I'm getting turned on here!" "Well you are a charger!"' Hah Hah Hah etc. Vocal acting talent would be provided by Nadia Sawahla and Joey out of friends.

Any Disney execs reading this can get in touch through the usual channels, but I warn you, genius like this doesn't come cheap. And I'm clearly a busy man, as my writing of this blog post proves.

You know you're working in an ad agency/design group when..

There's a copy of that Dilbert strip that takes the piss out of advertising.

There's a humorous Pantone 'tea' swatch chart sellotaped to one of the cupboards in the communal kitchen, while on a nearby cupboard there'll probably be..

..An A4 sheet instructing people to please keep the kitchen tidy, on which will be grafittid typographic markups (bring up to line above, close up etc..) some wag might even have inscribed 'stet' next to one of these.

You're in Soho.

That's about it.

Cynical food, good food, Stussy, Pan's Labyrinth.

Friday at work was pretty pants, workwise. Didn't really get a lunch break, so when someone suggested getting a take-out pizza from Pizza Hut I elected—In the interests of studio solidarity— to 'chip in' as it were, much against my better judgement.

I don't know what I was thinking. The pizza, when it arrived, was revolting: A flabby base that tasted of damp cardboard, with a thin smear of ersatz tomato sauce and sweet processed cheese. It both tasted and looked like something a child might construct out of play-doh. The biggest piss-take was the toppings however, consisting as it did of a handfull or so of harassed looking ingredients engaged in some kind of end-state diaspora over the wide flat topography of their pizza world.

And these things aren't cheap either (Half a 12" pizza cost me £6.50). One extra piece of needless gymcrackery was the addition of a hollow crust piped full of yet more of the disgusting plastic yellow cheese (it felt like eating the Simpsons), which I surmise was a ploy to distract from the complete lack of value for money that this food represents.

This is essentially food for people who don't like food, and then some. There is something so horribly cynical about this kind of fast food, where they don't even attempt to use the corporate leverage the scale of their enterprise allows to give you a better deal on the ingredients and quality, and charge you more for your meal than would cost in a fantastic Italian restaraunt.

Moreover, much like sandwiches, you do actually have to try quite hard to bugger up something as simple as a pizza, the rule of thumb basically being: great ingredients, fairly apportioned. Especially at this rate.

Anyway. On Saturday headed up to the Truman Brewery on brick lane for the Stussy warehouse sale. There was some alright stuff there, and the t-shirts were a snip at a tenner. I was kind of hoping they'd have some flat caps with a bandanna print they were hawking instore earlier in the year, but no dice. Bought a few shirts and headed out.

Caught the 55 from Old Street up to the top of Oxford Street, and from there walkied down into Soho. Went and checked out Libertys, which I've never ventured into before, and has much more of boutique-y feel than most other department stores. Some nice stuff in the menswear bit, though I was mostly looking for a 'brooch' they had in one of the window displays, which was basically a large pin with some small antique keys on it. Sounds a bit weird but trust me, it'd look great on a jacket.

There's also an exhibition of prints from the Scrawl website, whose curator Rick sold me a Stefan Plaetz t-shirt in the City Tavern in Manchester a few years back, when I was living there and he was up for a Man U game. His business is also, oddly enough, incumbent in the design group I'm working in right now. Anyway, some good stuff.

Also went and looked in the Levis store Cinch off Carnaby Street. They seem to have dispensed with the RED line altogether there, which is a bit of a shame as I thought they did some really nice pieces. Now they seem to focus more on the 'vintage' range and the new twisted series (into which they seem to have diffused some of the design elements from the RED range).

One thing I don't really get are the iPod compatible jeans, which strikes me as the ultimate in cheesy designer excess. Certain brand collaborations really seem to work (Stussy and Levis for example) but I don't think this does, mainly because I fail to see how an extra iPod shaped pocket with a built in plastic spinwheel is in any way superior to a, y'know, traditional pocket.

The beautiful thig about pockets is you can put anything in them (up to a point) iPods included. These jeans mainly seem to be about shouting "LOOK AT ME, I"VE GOT AN iPOD. iPODS ARE COOL, AND NOT ONLY THAT BUT I'VE GOT SOME iPOD JEANS WHICH MEANS I'M COOLER THAN YOU EVEN IF YOU DO HAVE AN iPOD'

After this I was hungry, so went to a falafel place called Maoz on Old Compton Street. Now this is actually quite good fast food. I can't make any particularly bold claims about the nutritional worth of Falafel, as it does seem in the main to be vegetarian stodge, but this is pretty wholesome all the same. The standard meal came with some nice chips, a drink and as much salad and toppings as you like for £4.90, which seemed pretty reasonable. Pizza Hut take heed!

After that went and met up with Will Ade and Helen at the Covent Garden Odeon, to watch Pan's Labyrinth, which I really enjoyed.

Superficially at least it bears some comparison with other stories where the protagist is a female child who finds herself in a otherly realm (Alice in Wonderland, Spirited Away for example) though in this, the tone is much, much darker (and maybe more akin to A Company of Wolves in this respect.

It is set in Spain after the Second World war, and the 'real world' narrative centres around an outpost of Nationalist guardsmen attempting to stamp out a local group of Socialist rebels who live in the forest. The central character Ofelia, moves here with her pregnant mother, who has wed the captain - himself as evil a character as any I have seen in film recently.

Against this backdrop of guerilla warfare, brutality, cruelty and torture Ofelia retreats into a world of her imagining, where she meets a Faun in some local ruins who reveals she is in fact a princess, the daughter of the king of the underworld, and in order to return home, must complete three tasks.

While much of this fantasical element of the film is truly magical, it is also inarguably far more mordant in aspect than I was anticipating. This Faun is no Mr Tumnus, and certain other sequences seem more reminiscent of Clive Barker's Hellraiser than they do the 80's muppet flick Labyrinth.

Nontheless the interplay between these two contrasting strands is handled very well, and the entire thing is tremendously exciting, and I dare say, thought provoking. I can't say it's particularly happy, but I would highly recommend it.

It's Sunday now. I just rang Lucy on her stall in Greenwich Market and will hopefully catch up with her in the week as I don't think I'm going to make it over to see her today. Anyway. Ade should be coming over shortly to pick up his brother's coat, and we might head out somewhere for a pint.

Incidentally, I've been published in a book! Yessir one of my blog entries has found its way into the pages of The Blog Digest 2007, where a throwaway anecdote about my brother and some wasps has been immortalised in print. The tagline reads 'Twelve months of the best writing from the web', so apparently, I'm part of that. Who'd have thought it?

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.