Just one final point...

I see that this blog is mentioned in Iain Dale's list of political blogs for 2007-8. Quite astounded and very flattered. He'd even figured out - how? - that I am a Tory boy. A feather in one's cap.

Departures

Two rounds of leaving drinks last night. We're losing talent like a burst artery (worse is to come next week when the Manc goes), and disaffection and cynicism are rampant. "Show me the money" is the cry often heard.

Came home bumbling, giggly and talkative but now feel yukky - eye rims dry, sore.

===

This morning's repeat of Desert Island Discs featured Thomas Keneally recalling his time as a seminarian. The closer he got to being ordained, the more he doubted the path he was on. Life was austere and the only women in the seminary were the nuns who put out the food. Then one glorious day the Von Trapp singers arrived on tour. The sight of Baroness Von Trapp and her strapping daughters was too much, testing some vocations to destruction. Cackling, Keneally revealed that in the weeks after the sing-song "about 30 blokes left".

One of his record choices, Fairytale of New York, made me cry and is making me cry again now as I play it on YouTube. That mix of melancholy, joyfulness and resigned loathing of much of the daily grind.

He was also very good on writing: it is the process through which the fear of not being able to write is controlled; it makes you miserable when you're doing it even as it compels you to do it; if you're doing it properly, it shows the world what a mean little sod you are.

I've been thinking for a while that I should stop being a mean little sod and now feels like the right moment to do something about it. Wasting time and pontificating here and in the other blogs I've done during the past two years has been mostly lovely but I want to try something else. Thanks for reading.

Astronaut dream

Last night I dreamed not that I went to Manderlay again but that I was the first holder of an Irish passport to be sent into space.

It gets better. The rocket was blasting off from Bunratty, a place in Co Clare I have never been to but know is famous for having a pub called Durty Nellys (subs, please check). I was in my spacesuit and perspiring heavily and so, even though the countdown was to commence at any moment, I undid my harness, exited the capsule, slithered down a ladder and ran off in search of a refreshing bath.

Along the way I somehow obtained a box of chocolates, a big box, golden and with a ribbon done in a bow and a silk flower glued to the top. Anyway, after dashing around for a bit, I went haring through the revolving door of a very grand country hotel, still in my spacesuit, and slid to a halt at the reception desk, where - amazingly - I was able to use the chocolates as a bargaining chip to persuade the manager to evict a couple of guests from an outdoor hot-tub.

And then the marvellous sensation of undoing all those zips and collars and cuffs and fastenings and plunging in to the warm and bubbly water - though it turned out to be unexpectedly deep and when I looked up I could see the surface 20 or 30ft above with the sunlight glistening on it.

I went up for air after what seemed like an eternity and there was a hotel flunky bearing a silver tray with a pot of coffee and some cucumber sandwiches and my mobile telephone, which was flashing with a call from one half of the Commitments who wanted to know what I thought I was doing and to get back to the office quickly.

And then I woke up and turned off the alarm on my phone.

One thought leads to another

Mr Beastly was saying yesterday how he, too, had once been to Paris for lunch, and how marvellous it was, although the lunch was rather more than the train fare, and it turned out to be an expensive sort of a day on account of his having to buy supper when he got back to London. But that's the thing - you can just go, inject yourself into another culture. Totally mind-boggling, at least to my simple, provincial mind. I am (regular readers can turn away now as I rehearse cross old lady impersonation) nearly 45, yet experienced a sort of boyish, even pre-pubescent, excitement over Wednesday's little adventure. Never was so much fun packed in to six hours. I now have in mind a course of self-improvement, at least at French, and will be turning to the BBC website, which offers coaching for dullards. Further trips planned, apartment websites bookmarked, recommendations to see the Opera House and such and such and such and such a place all duly noted. I think that's enough gabbling.

But one thought leads to another, and in the train back the other night, in that half asleep, half dead fatigue, all stoked up by the carriage lights being left on and the air conditioning blowing not quite cold enough to be really refreshing, even the contents of one's iPod starts to lose its lime zinginess. A reliable fillup can generally be found by flicking the dial around until R for Rezillos pops up, and it proved to the case this time, too. I loved the Rezillos, especially Faye Fife, who belted out lines like: "Call the Army and the United Nations/alert the police and Air Force stations/Tell everybody to run and hide because the end is near at hand" (Flying Saucer Attack, 1978) in a voice so dark, sonorous and booming that it was almost mannish. Whatever happened to her, I wonder?

Because one thought leads to another, Barbara, Mistress of the Hand-sewn Pelmets, who flexed her design degree from Napier to blag a job at Pull Yerself Together, the very posh curtain shop in the very poshest bit of Wire Town, came unbidden from the deep unconcsious. She, in fact, had run off with Faye's voice, and foghorned demurely as we sat together in the evening art class we both happened to have signed up to, although she could actually paint whereas I was and am a talentless dauber. Unlike Faye, Barbara favoured Pre-Raphaelite cables of chestnut hair, horn-rimmed granny glasses over her deepset eyes and a Dexy's-type ensemble of plaid and dungerees, plus being shod in DMs. She had come to Wire Town because her boyfriend, Cruikshank McBeardy, had a job fiddling with the Government's sub atomic particles at a nearby research facility, though in every other respect he seemed not to know his ceiling light and his synchrotron, whatever that is.

Now, since one thought leads to another, I am reminded that apart from running off with Faye's voice, Barbara also ran off with Dave, who made her eyes damn near pop out, or at least bulge nearly as much as his routinely did, when he joined the art class a few weeks later. He was an interesting fellow, and I'd seen him around, especially when he zoomed past me on the M62 in the mornings while going to his work counselling psychiatric alcoholics. Corkscrew hair he had, and stripey shirts and espadrilles, and Barbara was so all over him that she stopped sitting on the same table as me and moved to his. Pretty soon, she moved to his house, too, exchanging Dr McBeardy's terraced dinge for the stone-built gatehouse at the back of the local crematorium. It's all true, folks, every golden word.

However, one thought leads to another, and Dave had a hobby, which he engaged in of a Friday and a Sunday night, and it was to play drums with the Last Blues Band at the Lion in Bridge St, Wire Town's avenue of pleasure, vomit, piss-stinking doorways and a thousand watering holes. And while Dave sat at the back chopping away and sometimes singing, Mick, formerly of Post Office Counters, Snatch and the Poontangs and born in Latchford, 19 and 51, caressed and addressed the microphone and made his harmonicas scream and cry and dance in his hands. Mick, from lowly beginnings, had made something of himself and lectured in media studies at some former college of bricklaying in the Midlands, driving down from Wire Town early on a Monday and bobbing up at the end of the week just in time to go straight out to the Lion and the adulation of his cronies and ale-spattered, sing-a-long patrons. Mrs Mick put up with this for some years but eventually put her Born Again faith, and her other accoutrements, into the hands of a man who was around a bit more. It meant that Mick was home even less and therefore saw even less of my old colleague Uncle Fester, who lived in the villa adjacent and whose younger daughter managed to kill Mick's youngest daughter's rabbit, to the chagrin of all parties, while she was supposed to be looking after it.

You know the next bit, and Uncle Fester, who engendered my liking for Swedish and German cars and told me that I should go to work in London, once ruptured his achilles tendon and got me to convey him to the office for a few weeks while it healed, during which commuterly interludes he regaled me with stories of his time as a wannabe student leader at the LSE in 1967 and '68 and how his boz-eyed, though curiously attractive (for that very reason?), first wife, a Liverpool girl, had had an exchange with a manager at the BBC while she was temping there along the lines of: "I'm going to have to give in my notice unless I get a pay rise, I can't afford the fares." "Oh really? I didn't know young ladies still wore them."

Anyway, let's cut to the chase. Fester had been in Paris during the student riots, which is very strange, because the oddest thing that happened in my six hours was when around 30 mini-buses packed with hard-looking police went convoying by with their lights going and plainly with no intention of giving out parking tickets. All of which proves how circular life is and how all roads, or trains of thought, lead to whatever is on your mind at a particular time.

Deptford

Christopher Marlowe's dusty bones are in an unmarked grave in a churchyard near the Thames, and Samuel Pepys was full of busyness hereabouts, availing himself of Mrs Bagwell, whose husband was a ship's carpenter seeking an edge in pursuit of Navy work in the yards.

But the yards are long gone, as they are right along the south shore, and Watergate St ends in a cobbled alley with, as you might suppose, a gate and steps up from the stream. Warehouses crowd around, with a housing estate behind them and a small public space, Twinkle Park. Not far up river is the Pepys estate, an abomination of maisonettes.

Back across Creek Rd is Deptford High St, the route to the A2 at New Cross Rd. I've passed it on the bus many times, staring at the gaudy mix of former pubs, fast food outlets, places to make cheap phone calls and wig and make-up shops. It is grubby, it is shabby, it is lovely.

Not quite half way along is the railway station. Trains every 20 minutes to London Bridge. Under the viaduct the market begins - racks and racks of skirts and tops all on sale at £1 a time and women rooting through them. This is one of the parts of London where the high street chains don't reach, except for the bookie. Instead, there are halal butchers, African green-grocers, shops with huge sacks of rice, places with Scotch bonnets, okra and yam heaped up outside, a fish monger lugging boxes of ice, a stallholder with dried fish swinging in the breeze. All of which, in terms of sight, sound, smell, sensation, makes a trip to the supermarket seem like sleepwalking.

The market bulges off to the right, up the little street to the Albany theatre. It is a flea market now with skip salvage and tat on sale: even a London Transport Request Stop sign can be bought or, more incredibly, a cement mixer. Returning the High St, the market starts to thin out and there is an anchor marking its boundary and gates on to New Cross Rd.

I retrace the route, though on the other side of the street, and veer off to look at St Paul's Church, an Italianate Baroque magnificence in Portland stone. The interior is airy, with high windows behind the galleries, much panelling. Worship in the round. The Rector, Paul Butler, introduces himself and chats about its history and his congregation. He is very high church, though with a pony tail and a red star badge on his beautifully smart black and buttoned surplus. I like him immediately, the more so when he says that many Irish families "prefer us to Rome for their funerals". I look around as he sings devotions near the altar. Outside, derelicts are larking and declaiming on the church steps.

Finally to Albury St, formerly the best address for sea captains. It is very much in the style of the lanes close to Spitalfields with three-storey 18th century townhouses, shutters behind the panes, painted doors. There's a chap lugging old bricks in to his hall and a chance for a peep through to his hall while his back is turned. He is doing the place up and, indeed, they must be wonderful to live in when completed. Further along, one is for sale. I check on the internet later: £750,000. Wowzer.

Emperor's new clothes

The Observer today has an interesting thing on Page 3 about Andrew Keen, a Brit in California, who has written a book damning infantile content on the web, the navel-gazing of bloggery and how we are all going to be engulfed in self-generated content that is actually mostly just verbal diarrhoea written down. It is worth a read and he makes a few interesting points. I think a lot of what he says is right.

In fact, I hope that maybe this is the start of some sort of backlash, or a sign post at least, that will lead to the realisation that we aren't in a playground or standing next to a graffiti wall where anything goes. Ultimately, those who push and peddle drivel because it is cheap, or free, will wake up to the fact that it does all need to be cogent and moderated, even, dare I say, edited.

To quote:

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

At the current rate, he writes, by 2010 there will be more than 500 million blogs, 'so dizzyingly infinite that they've undermined our sense of what is true and what is false, what is real and what is imaginary'.

Speaking to The Observer from his home in Berkeley, California, Keen explained why he is sceptical of a world where anyone can broadcast to an audience of millions via a webcam in their bedroom. 'What kind of media ecosystem is best to encourage, nurture and reward talent?' he said. 'I don't think this digital narcissism is it. People want to broadcast themselves rather than listen to what others are saying.'

He continued: 'I'm nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I'm not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.'

I may be one of those he has in mind, but I still think he's right.

Neologisms

Tombstone, a colleague, has long regarded the office email system as a tool solely for the proliferation of his clippings of the infantile humour that circulates the world wide web. Most of it is dreadfully corny but occasionally he hits the mother lode. This arrived last night and shattered a bout of intense concentration. I was going to edit it a bit but think I will just cut and paste the whole thing in. The politcally correct should cover their eyes now.


"Once again, The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly neologism contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.


The winners are:

1. Coffee (n.), the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

3. Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent.

6. Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightgown.

7. Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle (n.), olive-flavoured mouthwash.

9. Flatulence (n.) emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

11. Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon (n), a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.

15. Frisbeetarianism (n.), (back by popular demand): The belief that, when you die, your Soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

16. Circumvent (n.), an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

The Washington Post's Style Invitational also asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are this year's winners:

1. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

2. Foreploy (v): Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

3. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

4. Giraffiti (n): Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

5. Sarchasm (n): The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

6. Inoculatte (v): To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

7. Hipatitis (n): Terminal coolness.

8. Osteopornosis (n): A degenerate disease. (This one got extra
credit.)

9. Karmageddon (n): its like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

10 Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

11. Glibido (v): All talk and no action.

12. Dopeler effect (n): The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

13. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

14. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

15. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating.

And the pick of the literature:

16. Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole."

Subject headings

Too busy for anything much this past half week, but I have a slip of paper here with things written on it that I had intended to write about. So, in brief:

1/700th of a second: The period by which the actions of a Newsnight reporter who has lived the green life for a year have postponed the onset of global warming. The bloody fool gave away his Saab 9-5 estate and allowed himself to be photographed in a biodegradable coffin with worms crawling all over his face. There was a discussion on Tuesday's show about it during which David Miliband reminded the other guests that aviation emissions were five per cent of the total and there were other things worth getting hot under the collar about. Some American geek, appearing by satellite, thought it would be better if western societies worked to reduce the cost of cutting emissions to the point where it would be realistic and attractive for the developing world to do so. He could be on to something. We do all need to do a bit though, even if in just a small way, such as turning lights off and buying less fruit and veg imported from places like Peru. Also, if Tesco can sell Peruvian asparagus for £1.90 a bunch after it has been flown all that way, I dread to think what the growers are getting.

Slow glass: I read about this in The Economist some time ago, so assume it must be true. Slow glass is the name for materials - I think they are all theoretical - through which light passes at a velocity rather slower than 186,000 miles per second. What I want to know is this: if you could fit a window in your house with some 10-year slow glass, would you be able to see, for example, how your street looked 10 years ago, or how your garden grew? You'd have to hang around for a long while, of course, but wouldn't it be cool?

Coin sorting machines that take a 7.9pc cut: While not exactly mean with money, I am careful and throw my small change into a jar or a tin when I get home. I found a month or so ago that I had raked together £330, but there was a problem. My local HSBC (are you reading this in Hong Kong?) does not operate a counter service, the staff being employed to loiter and offer various investment vehicles while customers flounder at the ATMs. There is a Barclays nearby but I don't have an account there. The nearest useful HSBC is in Greenwich. One day, I noticed that a coin sorting machine had appeared in the local supermarket but that it levied a nearly 8pc charge for shaking shrapnel. Absolute usury. Did I: a) get my friend to pay the money into her Barclays account and then transfer it; b) lug it all to Greenwich, having first sorted it into little plastic bags (also applies to choice a)) ; c) kiss goodbye to £26.07 while the machine sorted it out and printed a voucher to be redeemed for new tenners and twenties; d) inquire about where to get a cash sorting machine charging marginally less and where I could install it for all the other gulls, dupes, losers and misers out there. I opted for a) but wish I had done d) also.

Old git: To Lymm truck stop yesterday morning from where best to fortify myself for a day with the kids. I arrived just after a coach party and was delayed as one of their number fussed in the breakfast queue, getting the girl behind the counter to pick over the bacon in the tray until she found some that was just to his taste. The same performance ensued with the other components of his meal. He then got to the checkout and started to argue about the cost and wanted a receipt and then to speak to the manager. He was about 80 with white hair all greased down and old man's ears, like taxi doors left open. A simpering smile - "terribly sorry to be a nuisance" - and a cardy, shirt, tie, suit trousers and brogues. It was all I could do not to shout out or, worse, go back to the car and get my "special" tyre bar, the extending one that develops enough torque to undo any wheel nut, and, taking a long run-up with it held in both hands, knock his false teeth round the wrong way and break his specs. Couldn't think of any other way of stopping him. And he pushed in when I was getting my eating irons and ketchup. Bastard.

Quarry Bank Mill: The kids have been pestering to see this for a while. I thought it was a flour mill (lived too long in East Anglia) but it is a cotton mill on several floors with a huge breastshot waterwheel and loads of other machines that still work. The Manc and I were chatting about it, larkingly, a few nights ago, along the lines of:
Apprentice: "Please, master, please, don't make me go crawlin' under't spinning mule again, master."
Overseer: "Don't be such a baby, lad...you've still got two fingers left."
The reality is somewhat more sobering. Contemporary accounts, written in a humane manner and with amazing word economy, record accidents which saw children losing their hands or older workers having their arms wrenched off at the shoulder. In the latter case, there was nothing to be done but take the shocked and convulsing victim by cart to hospital in Manchester - I am amazed he survived the journey - where a lingering death was his fate. History can be heartbreaking. The mill apprentices were come-by-chances or workhouse brats, indentured for 10 years from the age of nine to clean machines and mend threads. They lived in dorms in a house in the mill grounds and worked 12- or 13-hour days, six days a week, for board and lodge. They were up at 5.30am and to the mill for 6am. Breakfast - a dollop of porridge served straight into the right hand - was at 8; lunch - more of the same with the addition of root vegetables - some time after noon. The monotony was dented - it would be wrong to say broken - by way of walking to Wilmslow and back twice on Sundays for church services. One young lad lost a finger and was sewn up by Dr Holland, physician to the mill and a relative of Mrs Gaskell. He recovered but then absconded, taking a fortnight to walk the 200 miles to Hackney for a cuddle from his mother, who was still in the workhouse. Having made this journey, the lad was happy to go back, thinking himself well fed and looked after in every other regard, especially since the apprentices weren't beaten and stood a five-times greater chance of reaching adulthood than folk in the mills in Manchester. It all seems incredible, the times they lived in 200 years ago and the times we live in now. Maybe not so different.

LS Lowry film loop: I am drawn back, many times a year, to the Lowry in Salford to watch the same 20-minute film about the artist. He talks about himself and his motivation, though without giving much away: it can be guessed at - a big and clumsy boy with few friends who was devoted to his mother but could never please her; chaste but sexually curious; searching for himself by painting crowds of lonely individuals; looking for something in seascapes; sensuous landscape curves with an obelisk on a hill. Soon after Lowry's death in 1976, a photographer from the Guardian arrived at his house to see canvases being placed in the back of a security van. He asked the men doing the removing to stop so he could photograph the house and went from room to room. The gaps and marks on the walls where pictures had been gave the photographs an air starkness. The place was dingy - an Edwardian time-capsule with hardly a nod to modernity, except for a radiogram on which Lowry listened to Housewives' Choice in the morning and the Third Programme or recordings of Bellini in the evening. He had destroyed lots of paintings, views of women as sexual tormenters, and in his bedroom were the ladies he loved best - marvellous heads by Rosetti, 14 frames maybe, and one positioned so it could also be seen in the mirror on the dresser.

===

I feel pretty sure that there will be a letter in the post this week from the West Midlands Police or the Wednesbury Safety Camera Partnership (if such a thing exists), or some other spasticated branch of officialdom. Suspect I got zapped with a radar gun on the M6 while leaving flaming tyre-tracks. Not happy about it, but no one to blame blah-de-blah-de-blah.

The next generation

Well, they've arrived, the new kids who will one day be kings of the hill. They are younger and a couple of them are smarter. Actually, maybe they are all smarter (though if they were really smart, they'd have become bankers, lawyers or doctors rather than redactionists).

On the whole I think this is good news. It leaves the likes of me free finally to surrender ambition and to be mentally turned loose in the top paddock, offering advice, counsel, an impressive turn of speed when needed, the patina of experience. Keep yourself nice, don't make trouble, do a good job, adapt, learn new skills, survive, keep drawing the salary - but for God's sake stay off the greasy pole... it can leave an unpleasant mark on would-be ascenders.

Deaf School remembered

If it were possible to travel back in time to Liverpool just at the point where glam rock gave way to punk rock, the chances are that you would have come across these guys, Deaf School. As I remember, they were, or had been, art students who devised a hugely theatrical ensemble performance which seemed to owe something to Sally Bowles and with jazzy/rocky tunes whose lyrics are spine-tinglingly good even today:

"We made it cocktails at 8
it was a surefire date
and I was over the Moon
but I was mooning too soon

"She was a dame with real class
I thought I'd have one more glass
and then I looked at my watch
it was the hour at last

"But still my date didn't show
I watched the time come and go
and so I drank like a boy
and, oh, the night went so slow"

Cue incidental music for a strip show as cheery optimism gives way to the effects of many, many milligrams of alcohol per millilitre of blood. It must have taken gumption for a bunch of kids in their 20s to perform such an act in the bars and clubs of a city still in the grip of disco and shabbiness and with keyboards, horns and a banjo as well as the more conventional tools of the musical trade.

Deaf School recorded three albums, 2nd Honeymoon, Don't Stop The World and English Boys and Working Girls. There was also, I believe, a recording from a reunion in 1988, 2nd coming. There was a further reunion last year at The Picket in Hardman St. What a Way To End It All, an anthology of the albums, plus sessions recorded for the late John Peel's radio show, has also been produced. I ordered it from Amazon today after finding it by chance and hope to receive it by the weekend. Very excited, not least by being still able to remember many of the words to the songs. I'll spare you, and myself, a rehearsal of the dance routines.

Why did they not make it big - they certainly had the talent. I guess it was because all their artistry - the clothes, the make-up, the personas - was overwhelmed by the roughness of punk and the hedonism of the mosh pit. Who wants cocktails at 8 when you're 16 and can have a bucket of lager, a load of pot and a snog?

Enrico Cadillac, the white-T-shirted heart-throb and singer, went on, with Ian Broudie, to form another band, Original Mirrors, now never heard of. The other singer, Bette Bright, the blonde who famously - and outrageously - donned a red rubber dress for the cover of English Boys, became Mrs Graham "Suggs from Madness" McPherson. She was also the singer of Gruppo Sportivo, Netherlands popsters. Clive Langer, spectacles, seated on the right, wrote, with Elvis Costello, Shipbuilding. I presume they were old mates from Birkenhead.

And now the name-dropping (oh, what pathetic vicariousness). Enrico Cadillac's cousin was a buddy who struck Deaf School-type poses in the playground at our comprehensive school and who's father later kept a pub in Halewood where heroic teenage drinking - pints of sherry topped up with cider - and a certain amount of cannabis cookery was undertaken. Such a misspent youth.

I like being stuck in my teens.

Worry, worry, worry

45 in a few months. Muscle tone finally going in the upper arms; hair growing fastest on the my earlobes and in my nostrils; my head is a permanent eyebrow display unit; I need my specs all the time (although enjoy not wearing them in order to be surprised by things/people I may encounter) and I fear that all my teeth are about to fall out. Andre, my dentist, says they won't, but falling-out teeth - along with falling out in general - are in my genes and I think they will. 45 in a few months. That really does feel old.

The chequered hall

I moved to London in April 1996 and lived for a few months in a studio in Walthamstow. It was in a series of blocks built on old railway sidings: little overland trains rattled by at intervals and made the windows shake. The flat was okay but I had to lug my bike up and down a couple of flights of stairs. Having very little money, I often ate bananas from a stall in the market where the stock got progressively cheaper the nearer it was to going rotten. Spotty bananas, sickly sweet, and the costermongers shouting for trade with their smoked-out voices and stylised, elongated vowels. Very seldom went out at all, but just sat during non-working hours trying to write interesting sentences in note books and wondering if I should get an Olivetti word processor from the Granada hire shop for so much per week. There was a bit of philandering with an older woman, though it soon petered out as it was bound to. On what turned out to be her final visit, she left behind her make-up and harassed me by phone until I posted it on. Got very fit and lean and learned how to handle a skiff and row properly. Fleeting impressions from this standpoint of bicycling along Lea Bridge Rd; London brick and potholes on the highway; three-storey pubs; a Ford garage; fast-moving low cloud and an unaccustomed harshness and brightness to the light; a binbag of dirty clothes in the laundrette; a cheap haircut; okra from the Bengali supermarket. A time of melancholy - just wallowing in it, swilling around. Nothing else of note.

By November a change of scene was called for, and a bigger flat came up in Woolwich for an extra £30 a month. I loved the accommodation straight away (though never the town). There was a courtyard outside - I think the place had once been part of the artillery school, a stable block maybe - and the front door opened to reveal a hallway that ran the length of the flat and had a lovely black and white chequered tiled floor. Two thirds of the way down on the right was the door into the living room and kitchen. Opposite, a vestibule with doors for the bedroom and bathroom. It had central heating and endless hot water. Daydreaming in bathsuds soon became an inescapable part of the routine. Still is. Everything was freshly painted and the landlady, Kathy, supplied a new washing machine. I added a futon and a few bits, such as speakers for my Discman. Even bought a word processor and set out to write the last great London novel of the 20th century. The following spring, I spent most of a couple of days lying on the green carpet in the living room reading The Secret History and resolved never to write anything other than shopping lists.

On work days, after pushing my bike across the courtyard, I would emerge through an arch and catch a glimpse of the steam rising from the pyramid atop Canary Wharf tower. Wheel along on Hill Reach, through Charlton village, passing Blackheath rugby club and on to the Standard. Then pedal past the girls' school and on beside an uneven patch of ground with gorse bushes. I've learned recently that this spot is referred to as cowboy and Indian land: never was a better nickname thought up for a venue for childish games. I would cut through Greenwich Park, swoop down the hill and on to the one-way system, pass Cutty Sark and dismount for the descent by lift into the foot tunnel. Bicycling inside is forbidden but I did very often ride through. Exhilarating. Take the lift to Island Garden and wiggle across to East Ferry Rd. Would sometimes see Mrs Sew'n'Sew doing the fetch from Asda or Walter walking his gun dogs. He lived nearby in a grubby house where he buttered bread with a hatchet. His nature abhorred a vacuum cleaner.

I stayed in that flat for a year. It was big enough for my kids to come to visit, big enough for Nick to bring his guitar for a blues jam and sing-song, big enough for Rog and I to roar all night and sink a bottle of tequila as Labour swept to power. I think my television licence may have run out by then, but no one from a detector van ever came knocking. These were brilliant times.

It was 40 years ago today

Anniversaries are much in the air - 10 years of Blairism, 25 years since the Falklands war and so forth - but here is something now almost forgotten, and it is worth copying it out word for word, or at least cutting and pasting, from the On This Day feature in the Register of today's Times.

An oil slick 18 miles long by four wide drifted south tonight from the stricken tanker Torrey Canyon, aground off the Scillies. The Ministry of Defence (Navy) said that unless there was a change in the weather it would miss the Scillies and Cornwall. Tonight, Cornwall, Devon and Dorset were hoping for an offshore wind to keep the vast oil slick from their beaches. An appeal was made to local fishermen to lend their boats for the fight against pollution.

Nearly 15,000 gallons of detergent were on their way to Cornwall from Scotland, Wales and Southampton. The chemical is believed to cost 8s. a gallon. There is considerable doubt, however, whether the amounts available will be sufficient to prevent disaster. Some estimates put the amount needed to destroy the slick as high as 3m. gallons.

The Torrey Canyon (listed as owned by the Barracuda Company of Bermuda and the Union Oil Company of Los Angeles) lay holed tonight with her starboard rail awash, and her bows beneath the choppy seas on Pollard Rock, one of the Seven Stones. She was still seeping oil. The vessel was on charter to British Petroleum and was on a voyage from the Persian Gulf to Milford Haven. There were fears that if the tanker broke her back, another 80,000 tons of oil might spill free.

The oil patch is believed to be the biggest ever to threaten the West Country coastline. The greatest danger is to the holiday season, which starts in two weeks. St Ives could suffer most from oil pollution. Its six sandy beaches are its main attraction and are little more than 20 miles away from the stricken ship.

It is interesting now for its own sake but also because of the way the words are rendered. Very old school, packed with facts and completely without top spin. It is just a report about the thing itself with not really much of an attempt made to "take it on". Also, the constant references to "tonight" seem both twee and portentous.

We were innocents then about environmentalism. It turns out now that the heavy-handed reliance on chemicals to break up the slick retarded the recovery of marine life. Surprise, surprise.

The following year, 1968, my parents took on their ill-fated hotel business between Helston and the Lizard. I can remember going to the gravelly beach at the bottom of the hill and finding balls of tar - remnants of the wreck that escaped the clean-up - on the shore or lurking in rock polls. It was an absolute no-no to get any of that dreadful sticky ooze on my clothes.

Westie watch

Ah, here is Pc Ian Sutherland, of the Northern Constabulary, fulfilling Hamish MacBeth-type fantasies, although the West Highland White terrier, Bruce (what else?), belongs to his predecessor, Pc David Inglis, left.

Pc Sutherland, 41, saw off competition from officers all over Britain keen to police 900 square miles of mountain and moorland in north-west Scotland. Is it any wonder? The area has a population of just 1,100, and a record of around 10 crimes a year, none of them serious. The last major incident was the sudden death of Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, while walking on Ben Stack in 2005. Pc Inglis never dealt with a single murder, drug offence or serious crime in his nine years on the beat and investigated only one break-in. In July last year, his final month in charge, he tackled one unpaid restaurant bill of £11, a minor road accident and investigated the unexplained death of a sheep.

Unlike Hamish MacBeth, played by Robert Carlyle in the BBC series of the mid 1990s, Pc Sutherland doesn't have a Westie to take around in his van and will patrol instead with his alsatian.

Isn't that little dog just adorable?

Beer, swines and spirits

I was in Brighton yesterday, noting Keith Waterhouse's dictum that it "looks like a town that should be helping the police with their inquiries". It is quick to get there on the train from London Bridge, an hour or so, and to emerge from the station is to be enveloped by a strong and spicy smell - suggestive, perhaps, of a disturbance in the kitchen of an Indian restaurant during which a big pot of curry powder has been knocked flying.

The place isn't sleazy, exactly, just totally, gloriously relaxed, like a middle-aged ale gut or an orgasm on the edge of sleep. I've only ever been there to have fun and, therefore, associate going there with having fun.

Impressions: upsy-downsy streets with bright-painted houses and funny little shops, smoky cafe bars and backstreet pubs with books to read and leather sofas to slump in, the British First Party trying - and failing - to drum up support in front of the pier, fish and chips eaten sheltering from the breeze, a pit bull terrier with its paws on a pavement table trying to knock over a pint of Stella, shabby and not so shabby hotels, much loitering, posing, things and people to look at. I loved it, and will surely go back.

Memo to self: beg, borrow or steal half a million quid and somehow acquire a dear little bow-fronted Regency house - in or near Norfolk Square, ideally - and live happily every after.

===

Yes, the trains are quick, but full of fools. On the way down were three daft lads - one in white shoes, for pity's sake - who passed the time getting outside some tins of Castlemaine XXXX, swearing and fantasising about being police marksmen. Coming back there was a somewhat over-enthusiastic father, whose cooing and mwhahaha-ing at his toddler daughter soon got on everyone's tits. He flung the child around and up and down, trying to tire her out. "Katie, where's daddy, where's mummy?" More horseplay as the train jigged along towards Haywards Heath. "Katie, do you want some attention ...do you want some attention ...do you want some attention? Look at me, look at me....mwhahahaha...haaaaaaaaa". Slowly but surely, the collective will of the carriage turned against him and how the other travellers wished that Katie, instead of oooohing and aaaaahing, would pipe up with: "Shut your yap, you fucking imbecile, you're making a show of yourself."

Got back to town, had a couple of firm G&Ts and went to bed.

How to write

Tap in a few sentences that begin to convey some sense of what you are thinking or feeling or trying to describe. Read over them a couple of times, correcting the spelling and grammar and knocking out words that don't need to be there. Read over them again, deleting phrases and clauses that aren't working. Read over them again to refine the structure so that it hangs together better. Repeat the steps described until very few words are left: if you are lucky, you might have an idea worth preserving, a fragment of bone. If your luck and your nerve and your patience hold and if you keep reiterating the process, you might eventually have enough bone for a finger joint and then, days, weeks, months or years later (and possibly - no, probably - never), sufficient for a hand or a foot. And if you persist still, you will begin to assemble the parts of a skeleton, with lots of little heaps of bone lying around in the work space inside your head. The time may come when these start to make sense and you can set out the skull and the neck and the spine, the arms, legs, ribs, hands, feet, fingers, toes. Maybe the bones will turn out to be your scenes and you will soon need some sinew - would that be the plot, the story? - to lock them together.

So, in however long it has taken, you've gone from fragments to a structure. Now you have to start again, fashioning the insides and outside, the nerves and the blood vessels and the organs, the layers of muscle, with changes in tone and texture. What is it that you are writing about? What do you need to devise, manufacture or synthesise? Is it a good idea to write bits borrowed from reality and then invent the rest? If it is, you could work on different levels by turns, building some bone here and some flesh there. If it isn't, is this because what you are writing is too close to reality and you can't get yourself out of the picture?

And maybe you will panic or become frightened by the scale of the task or forget where you put down the handful of ideas and images that you need this very second to cover some hole which has opened up to expose your suddenly extremely rickety skeleton. Just make sure every day, when you're done with writing and reading and writing and reading and writing and reading, that you read over your stuff one more time and junk most of it, if not all of it. Better yet, leave it for a fortnight before re-reading it: you'll chuck it all out then for sure and resolve to give up the whole thing and stick to blogging or keeping a diary.

You should try to daydream for a moment, hold the thought and see how far you can take it. If you were a smoker, you might think of it as getting a longer and longer bit of ash - a quarter of an inch, half an inch... any more? You would finish up standing each fag on its end and letting it burn away until just a column of ash remained on the filter. Now, collect the columns, without breaking any of them or letting them blow away, and put them together in a line long enough to make a hand rail for the QE2 or the Great Wall of China. Easy, child's play, any fool can do this.

It is also worth considering what lies beyond the piles of bones and columns of ash, what it might actually be like to be published. Would it be enough just to be published, or would the desire to be swept immediately by the critics into the inner circle of literary greatness be so compelling that mere sales and shelf space would mean nothing? How terribly unsatisfying to be pigeonholed with the pulp fictionists and exponents of chick lit. How galling to be told that, although a recognised author, you write "like someone doing self-help books" or the person who has to compose cooking instructions for packets of fish fingers. What multi-layered irony - you have a three-book deal, enough by way of an advance to sink the navy and the time and imagination to generate ideas and yet still you aren't happy.

The downside would be the publicity - you have a name and an ISBN number and can be Googled. But the real nightmare is actually becoming popular and having to endure the newspapers writing about you after raking though police records, school records, work records and the divorce statistics and giving bundles of money for exclusive access to so-called "friends" and former lovers. "Oh, so he stole from his infant children's building society accounts, did something beastly to the woman next door over the wash house sink and had a poo in the daffodils, did he? How shocking. And that was all on the Monday before Woman's Hour, you say? My word, Middle England will have to be told." There would be the inevitable questions over the telephone or on the doorstep. "Mr So-and-So, a former partner has made certain allegations about your conduct. Have you anything to say?" It would be good at this point to pretend that you hadn't been born or, at the very least, to wish for nothing so much as to be in a hole in the ground. So far as replying to the question, you would be well advised to have nothing to say, except possibly: "It's all in my book, so why don't you run along and write something really horrible so that lots of people will buy it and make up their own minds as to whether it's true."

Irritations

Can't find iPod charger. It is in the house somewhere, but every drawer contains a muddle of stuff that seems when I look inside to turn to a shattered mirror with nothing clearly discernible. Just been out to the car to scour around in nooks and crannies but with no luck. This is trivial and mundane but also hugely annoying.

Hoping for cheery drinks in the pub last night, but it was a gloomy little session with much depressing talk about prospects. Ended with the feeling that this line of work won't last as long as I want/need it to. Also, suspect I may have caused upset with a clever-dick remark as a little grouplet not in our company left. Stupid ass.

Most irritating, the topic of blogs came up amid general derision and then someone chipped in with: "Do you still do yours?" I could hardly deny it but hope the subject will be forgotten. Fuck, buggeration and bollocks.

His mother hid him in a drawer, you know

I watched agog last night as BBC4 broadcast a documentary on Alfred Wainwright, the well known and much loved curmudgeon and author of guidebooks to the Lake District and other places. He started life 100 years ago in Burnley and was a curiosity because he was born with red hair, a fact that led his mother to become so flustered when people came to look at him that she hid him in a drawer. Totally incredible! Alfred escaped the mills by dint of being a know-all at school and, aged 13, became an office boy at the town hall. A few years later he went on holiday to the Lake District and had some sort of epiphany atop a hill. When the chance came to join the Borough Treasurer's department in Kendal, he took it. In the early 1950s, and deeply unhappily married, he sat down one evening and planned to write a series of guides to the Lakeland fells, sticking at it night after night and walking for the whole of each weekend to gather further material for seven volumes. Fourteen or so years later the job was done. His studied neglect of the first Mrs Wainwright was shocking and after she walked out on him (heart-rending little tableaux of her trudging away with a suitcase and her dog on a lead having left him notes on how to change the bedding etc) he married a younger women. All of that was a bit regrettable. Nevertheless, what I liked was that he was extremely bloody-minded, stuck stubbornly to the task he had set himself and did it the way he wanted. The programme is on again tonight, I think. Worth the licence fee in itself.

National Gallery favourites

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors (1533), is a fine example of anamorphic painting. The two envoys to the court of Henry VIII look very grand in their robes, but mortality haunts them, making them just the same as any other man. The brown smear on the floor is puzzling when viewed from the front, but seen from the right it is transformed into a skull. For the full effect, go and walk around in front of the canvas. The pleasure for me is in the dawning realisation of just how mind-bogglingly clever and able Holbein was to pull off such a trick.

===

JMW Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up (1839) is a milestone in the artist's journey from painter of landscapes and maritime scenes to painter of light and, arguably, a signpost towards Impressionism. He called the painting "my darling" and wouldn't sell it. I have spent a very long time standing in front of it and see something different on each occasion. Apropos of nothing, there is a Temeraire St in Rotherhithe, a lasting reminder, one imagines, of where the breaking up was done.

===

Joseph Wright of Derby, who completed An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in 1768, was a master of representing artificial light, moonlight and traversing from light to dark. In this picture his technique plays up the horror on the faces of the observers but also seems to show the dispassionate mindset, or perhaps the wonderment, of the experimenter, who stares ahead, oblivious of his audience: it is as if he is conducting the experiment for us, viewers of a later age.

You cannae be serious?

Ok, confession time. I want to wear a kilt, have always wanted to wear a kilt, think I would look very fine indeed in a kilt and am damn close to ordering a kilt.

Naturally, the usual problem for kilt wannabes has arisen: I cannot legitimately claim any connection to Scotland, other than a liking for being there. It doesn't matter that I hate the English in the way only someone who has grown up with English manners can. It is of no consequence that I hold Irish citizenship and have a Welsh surname. The fact that my favourite old rugby shirt bears a Saltire is neither here nor there. None of these things, nor eating Tunnocks caramel wafers or oatcakes and fondling the haggises in Waitrose makes me in the least bit Pictish.

Now, I didn't know this but there are also Irish and Welsh tartans. I have no idea if they are genuine and hark back to the blood and the cruelty of feudal times or have been dreamed up by some marketing whizzkid with a lorryload of plaid bought in a fire sale. The fact is, though, that these "lesser" tartans are just the thing, even though some of the Irish ones have shamrocks on them. Yuk. Happily, there is a Welsh one for my name.

As to styles, there seem to be two routes. One is the eight-yard full dress kilt and the other is the five-yard "leisure" kilt, in a wool of a slightly lighter weight. This seems more probable, since it is modelled with hiking boots and the aforementioned rugby shirt. The trouble is, I can't see it catching on in Jamaica Rd - and especially not on the blowy Underground - or in the chavtastic parts of East Anglia I frequent. It fact, wouldn't it be a guarantee of exposure to hatred, ridicule and contempt? I'm not quite as keen as I was when I started typing, but watch this space.

Meditation on the Prebendary of Wetwang

A short break in York, where the Ouse can't contain itself and is lapping over the cobbles and flagstones outside our hotel on Queen's Staith. This causes amusement for the tourists who pack the capital of the north at all times of the year, though the burghers seem to take it in their stride, especially those with homes and businesses on the banks. Instead of panic, the mood is weary resignation and the order of the day to find the crank that operates the flood barrier.

I have been going to York for nearly 30 years. The first time was as a wet-behind-the-ears lower sixth-former. Gruppo Sportivo and The Ruts were in the charts as well as on the radio in the coach my school had laid on to facilitate an "improving" itinerary, which included the National Railway Museum and the Minster. It must have been a very long day, but all I seem to remember is that most of it was spent supping ale on the sly. Since then there have been day trips, weekend breaks, overnight stops and even a honeymoon, though the less said about that the better.

This time, the girls and I took the train: 20 minutes to Peterborough and then just over an hour on a Glasgow express from King's Cross - a service that would make it possible to have elevenses at home and lunch at Bettys, of which more in due course.

As always, our wishlist includes a walk around the city walls - "2000 years in two miles" is the slogan employed to promote an ancient monument so grand and beautiful that it speaks for itself - and the Minster grand slam - undercroft and treasury, tower (275 steps up and 275 steps down), the choir, with its statues of kings from Williams the bastard to Henvy VI, and the Chapter House.

I had forgotton, though, how beautiful is this last. The Dean and his pals sit on stone seats running around the inside circumference of the room, which has a medieval domed roof with much carving. There are name plates afixed to the wall above each seat - Canon Suchabody, Prebendary of Wetwang, the Ven So and So, Bishop of Osbaldwick, etc. It must be quite sight when all those prebendaries, precantors and chancellors sit down to jaw, jaw, jaw in their vestments. Do they talk of the constant struggle to raise the money needed to keep the Minster upright - £2.50 for every 30 seconds, apparently - or do they, as I suspect, talk about whatever the latest bit of clerical gossip is: who is engaged in the laying on of hands, and to whom - and will the Sunday papers find out? Poor fellows... perhaps they can take in some port to pass around. They can certainly rest their feet on the grille over a circular channel in the floor from where air warmed by dinky radiators reaches the parts their Catholic cousins are not supposed to reach. What a blessed relief that must be in the winter.

I don't believe in God but deem myself a sympathic agnostic. I am always moved, though, by great churches and enjoy services in them - and none more so than here. While we are still in the Chapter House, the Blonde gets going on career opportunities: "How do I become Archbishop of York?"
Me: "Well, you'd have to start by being Christened and then opt for Anglicanism rather than the other things you could do. You'd also have to actually believe. But even if you did all that and then had a theological training, your chances are limited by being female."
Blonde: "Well, how about being Pope?"
Me: "You have an infinitely greater chance of being Archbish."
Blonde: "Ah, but can the Pope become the Archbishop of York?"
Me: "I suppose it might be theorectically possible, but he already has a better job and, anyway, it's not like playing for Man U and then going to City. It doesn't work that way."

The discussion turns to supper, and it has to be the Swiss patisserie heaven that is Bettys. They'll let anyone in, but the prices are such that the Filthingtons and their like stay away. Little old ladies can spend hours among the potted palms and mirrored pillars listening as a gent in a white DJ strums harmoneously at the piano. The maitre has a little moustache and a suitably subservient manner - drummed into him at the University of Bettyology, or wherever they train the staff - and recommends fish and chips. We demur: Lucifer and the Blonde want to munch the club sarnies and I have kaeschnitte...er, a ham and cheese toastie conceived in Alpine pastures and costed by the gnomes of Zurich at £9.50 per slice. My kids are at the age where no amount of food fills them for long. We'd had a huge lunch and now they were at it again, ordering with the sort of abandon the middle-aged can only dream of. L, for pud, picked the Bettys sundae, which came with the most perfect strawberry I've ever seen and whipped cream like shaving foam. Too good to eat, actually.

Day two brought some retail therapy plus a ride on the ferris wheel at the railway museum and - most terrifying - a go in a simulator that replicates the 51-mile train journey from Victoria to Brighton in four minutes from the viewpoint of the front of a stream loco. It was done with time-lapse photography but the equivalent speed is 765mph - faster than sound. Yes, sound. It was only yesterday but I cannot remember whether there was sound, so awful was the experience of being jolted up and down, tipped over and wondering if the bridge or train or set of points coming at you would be the last thing you ever saw.

Afterwards felt very peculiar and had to sit down. All I wanted was a breath of air but you couldn't go outside into the diesel yard on account of the whole place being overrun with screaming kids pestering for a ride on Thomas the Tank Engine which had pitched up for half-term to fleece their parents. Make that Thomas the Twat.

River Terrace - now with extra river

Ah, here is the posh end of the street in which I have my country residence - not for nothing is it called River Terrace. But all the snow and rain has swelled the Great Ouse to the point where it has overflowed into the meadows of Eaton Ford and into Regatta Meadow, from where best to watch the rowing races in the summer. Today, near the end of winter, the sluices are wide open and the river, normally slow and steady, churns through, about as attractive as cold cocoa in a food processor. The Blonde and Lucifer are staying with me for half term and after our tour of inspection we went to Caffe Nero, where a scooter club had gathered outside, and to the local bowling alley, where we were in the next lane to the Filthingtons, a family of chain-smokers whose adult members were surely strangers to birth control and whose junior members are surely future recipients of Asbos: they had to be slapped and scolded (though not by me - you can be had up for that) to stop them purloining our bowling balls and lobbing them down the adjacent empty lane just for the hell of it. The bowling alley is on two floors and we were upstairs. As the Filthingtons - an afront to the NHS's entire public-health effort - loitered, waiting for us to finish our game, I toyed with the idea that they could be transported to the lane directly below and that I could somehow drop the heaviest ball available though the floor and scatter them or - better yet - score a direct hit on Ma Filthington's head, pushing it into her chest cavity, Tom and Jerry-style, and leaving the fingerholes on the ball resembling the circles of a pair of surprised eyes and a mouth. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy.

Afterwards, the short drive to Gumster, parking on the quay, and over the Chinese bridge to view the floods on Portholme Meadow. The half mile or so across to Huntingdon was like a lake and very beautiful in the last of the light. Walking back to the car I saw Angus McGob in his Come On Eileen tweed cap and coat, though he didn't see me. That made it an even better day.

Carbon offsetting

All my suspicions about this were confirmed on reading a slip of paper which came in the veg box yesterday.

The farmer behind the co-operative which grows the veg wrote: "I have just entered our data into a carbon offsetting website which tells me I need to plant exactly 16,506 trees to offset all out transport-related emissions. No ifs, no buts; that is a precise figure and for a modest consideration they can arrange the conscience-salving plantations. Intellectually, morally and scientifically, carbon offsetting and carbon trading (especially as conceived by our Government) are very dubious and I am delighted to see more articles in the press questioning the validity of what is often PR-drive greenwash".

Hear, hear.

Right, I'm off now to start the car just for the hell of it.

Treachery

I'm not proud of myself. I pulled out of a long-standing work arrangement for today at the 11th hour yesterday in order to take more favourable work elsewhere, letting down people I like and respect. As the new door opened, the old one was slammed shut behind me - quite rightly after such a self-serving act of treachery. That's showbiz.

Really useful adverts on the Tube

Mundane journeys to work would be so much more bearable if someone advertised something actually interesting and useful on those mini-hoardings near the ceilings in the carriages of London Underground trains.

For instance, instead of gooey patent remedies in pouches for office boys with colds and flu, clinics for sad bastards fretting about their receding hairlines and websites where you can call Bhutan for 1p a minute, you could have Lift-o-Plunge, a sure-fire way to be rid of annoying co-workers or bosses, boorish bus drunks and ignorant imbeciles who push in at the queue for the tea machine or the hole in the wall.

With Lift-o-Plunge, you simply press a button on a mobile telephone-sized device and the object of your ire is transported by invisible hands to the nearest lift shaft and thrown to the bottom. For the recipient of a Lift-o-Plunge plunge, no amount of grabbing hold of lampposts, taxi panic handles, desks or policeman's ankles will do a bit of good, and their journey to the basement will be accompanied by a few bars of the Hallelujah Chorus audible to within 100 metres of the plunge site. You could have other tunes, too.

Another useful product can be found on adverts for seenitdoneitreaditknowitbackwards. This provides, by means of a wireless internet connection between a chip implanted in the back of the skull and a computer at the British Library, the antidote to clever dicks who claim to know everything and everyone and think they are interesting and gifted conversationalists. All you have to do is bring the discussion around to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or some similarly mind-blowing topic and let your opponent begin to drown in the deep water of quantum mechanics while you intone on the mysteries of the momentum of electrons. It also works for unravelling Sanskrit, translations of Homer and coming up with the names of the Rochdale Hornets backs of 1960.

For travellers wanting a change of scene, there is Cottage In A Box. This is really clever and comes in several different flavours, including Scotland, Ireland, East Anglia and the Cotswolds. What you do is stand in a field, or a car park, or your garden, pour a pint of water into the sachet that comes inside the box, give it a shake and tip the mixture on to the ground. In 10 seconds it takes on the form of a lovely little stone cottage, fully furnished and with bread baking in the kitchen. There are roses around the door and birds twittering in the sunshine-dappled garden. For a few quid extra, you can have one with a pub next door and all the beer you can drink. The cottages last for a fortnight but the developers are working on a one that recreates the South of France for a month at a time and also a ski chalet in northern Norway.

A couple of late entrants: Washing-up-for-life-in-Advance where, for a one-off fee, all your washing up is done. For ever. And a day. Also, Social Niceties-Away, an interesting concept whereby investors get to wear a deeley bopper-type device which measures and assays mutual sexual interest from fellow commuters and, providing the correct level is reached, lights up a sign on your T-shirt saying "How About It?". But what happens if the interest is from several members of both sexes? Well, you never your luck in a big city.

Shuttle launch up-speaking intonation

It is always refreshing to hear the enthusiasm of the men and women who do the countdown when, as happened a couple of days ago, the Shuttle is launched. After the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 bit, they say something like "main engine start" and then (and this is where the over-enthused up-speaking comes in) "and lift off of the Shuttle such and such, on a mission to take B&Q guttering to the International Space Station"... or whatever it happenes to be.

I bet Nasa runs a course in launch-announcer up-speaking with sessions on how to put the necessary amount of stress on syllables (far too much in my view, which, after all, is the one that counts on this blog), and on how to sound especially cheery and up-beat. Maybe the announcers also practice at home in front of the wardrobe or dressing table mirror. Personally, I'd rather play air guitar or pull faces.

All of which seems to highlight a difference between the former colonists and the downtrodden passive-aggressives who stayed in perfidious Albion. You can't imagine anyone here getting so het up on the microphone even as thousands of tons of Shuttle, crew and payload are being hurtled towards escape velocity - not even Premiership football commentators. No, it'd be "5, 4, 3, 2, 1...where's my coat?"

The closest thing Britain has to it are the generalities on the headed note paper, signage and websites of officialdom, such the Met Police's "Working together for a safer London" - or whatever it is. It's all a load of imperfect participle bollocks.

My father's finest hour

may, in his own mind, have been during his service as a minesweeper skipper in the 1939-45 war, giving orders while all about him were vapourised by the Luftwaffe. But I prefer to recall a few summer days at the end of the 1960s when the Kinks came to stay at the hotel he kept in a then very remote corner of Cornwall.

It is fortunate indeed that the memory of the incidents themselves remains pretty clear because, actually, I cannot be sure quite when it was. My best guess is that it was between '69 and '71 because by the following year, when I was 10, we had moved.

Back to the hotel. It was a few miles from the Lizard, a few miles from Helston, a few miles from RNAS Culdrose, in a one-street village where the road petered out on a beach with a church on one side and a links course behind.

My father dressed beautifully. Grey suits with Navy tie or, more casually, Tattersalls shirts, with ties, cords or twill pants and a fawn cardy and tweed jacket. One day in the season, two E-Type Jags purred onto the gravel, their fat tyres like big paws crunching and churning the stones. Some people got out: a couple of blokes, a couple of blondes, various ragamuffin kids. Words were exchanged and they went upstairs and occupied at least a couple of double bedrooms.

My father came in, ashen-faced. "The Kinks are here. How awful. The bloody Ginks in my hotel." I had heard of them and knew about what was then called the Hit Parade and Radio 1, though wasn't allowed access to either. Now I wonder why a band riding the wave of fame should come to such a flea-bite of a place and can only assume that it was for that very reason: to get away from dedicated follower of fashion-type sickmaking adulation, which must pall fairly rapidly for anyone in showbiz with something between their ears.

I can't say what they did during the day but I know they were back in the late afternoon and, I am guessing, adjourned to the boozer next door for sundowners because the hotel did not have a bar. Always behind the times, my father felt that a drinks licence was, like en-suite facilities, somehow below the salt. Anyway, they came back for dinner, the Kinks, joining the rest of the guests for prawn cocktail, which was served in a mixture of salad cream and ketchup, deep-fried plaice with chips, frozen peas and grilled crown-cut tomatoes, tinned peaches and evap milk, coffee or tea, cheese and biscuits. They seemed happy enough.

All went well for a few days until my father came into the flat at the back where we lived and said he had had to choke off one of the Kinks women for letting her child block the toilet with paper. Worse was to come. I went out of the back door later that day to see him on the lawn giving one of the men, who I now assume was Ray Davies, what for because he had been smoking a huge cigar in the garden and knocking divots out of the side lawn while practising his golf swings. And because he had long hair.

I don't think they stayed around for long after that. The Jags purred off and we were left with the Bosomworths from Sutton Coldfield and their like - the ordinary sorts who came back year after year.

With an acute sense of timing, my father sold the hotel early in '72 for the huge sum of £9,000. A few months later there was a property boom.

All of the above trickled out because a Kinks CD found its way into the player.

I should like to know what Mr Davies thought of his stay.

The fabulous Mr Fox

The back garden is 12ft wide and 30ft long, maybe a little more. All is laid to brick and the fencing on three sides is of overlapped vertical planking. To the left and right are neighbouring gardens, the one on the right being terribly overgrown with a rotary drier dwarfed by leggy shrubs. Running behind all three plots is the wall of a rehearsal room and theatre warehouse and there is a small gap, a foot or so wide, between fence and wall that is choked with the roots of a virginia creeper and with fallen and dead foliage from a badly clipped leylandii rooted in the corner of the garden to the left.

It is from this gap that the fabulous Mr Fox comes to call. He is seldom seen during business hours but has been spotted from time to time at dusk and is to be overheard clattering the fencing, digging in the galvanised steel planters, scuffling at the french window to the downstairs bedroom. He had great sport with a pair of old sandals left on the step, dragging one away and cavorting with it among the pots at the far end and, a couple of nights later, being bold enough to come back for the other, which he stowed under the trailing ivy on the left-hand fence. But he has manners, too, and is timid. He has poked his nose only once through the open door, fleeing when he saw a person. He has also come up the steel steps to the balcony to sit on an old wicker chair but didn't stay long.

I rather like and admire Mr Fox and wonder how he might be made more amenable to human contact. He is long and skinny and most often has his back turned, a great sweep of marmalade fur with a patch of black just where his voluminous brush erupts. He seems in pretty good shape though appeared earlier in the year to have a spot of mange. It has gone now.

The present advice is that urban foxes should not be offered dog food or kitchen scraps because they are perfectly capable of finding sufficient to eat. Maybe I shall leave the sandals outside again so he knows he is among friends.

===

Christmas visiting arrangements with The B and L settled yesterday. A great relief.

How to spend it

Much musing over what I would have done if, as I expected to, I won the stupendous, idiotic, avarice-inducing, rolled-over-12-times Euro Millions Lottery last evening. This game seems to be a sort of Eurovision Song Contest for greedy bastards. To scoop the big prize - it was £120 million this week but is usually just a few million (A FEW MILLION, DID YOU SAY?, OH, HARDLY WORTH BUYING A TICKET, THEN) - you need to match seven numbers and, in order not to share it, hope that no other poor, deluded sap has matched them too.

Someone far more sensible and nice than me suggested that, if I won, I should give 100 away. I thought she meant £100, but no, she meant £100,000,000. "You could open your own wing at the National Gallery." That, of course, would be an ideal way to gain admittance to the circle of the great and good. Maybe I could use it instead to buy myself a double first in astrophysics from Cambridge, tossing Stephen Hawking out of his chair - the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics I mean, not his buggy - as the dons, fellows and College heads simpered approval in their velvet gowns and floppy hats. That's it! I'd found a new College - Bugger Hall! Think of the kudos, think of the brown-nosing and fawning - think of the tax breaks.

Slightly more appealing, given that I detest brown-nosing and fawning, would be to build, or cause to have built, Le Corbusier-style pavilions in the countryside to sell to the upwardly mobile. This, however, might be doomed, too, since I would fit the places out the way I wanted, not the way they wanted. The customer is seldom right, in my experience.

Royston, work colleague, vouchsafed that if he won, he would lead a conga around the office then climb up onto the ledge in front of the executive suites and bare his bottom. Nice, but just too theatrical. No, the best thing would be to pack in work, sit at home quietly for a few months, and calm down.

===

I was so crestfallen at not winning (again), that I thought I would snub the National Lottery and not bother to buy a ticket at all today. These people need showing who's boss.

Oh dear, surely not?

Quite right

An all-pervading sense of being harassed this morning, not helped by a maddening - and very loud - fire alarm test. My nickel and dime grumbling, though, is nothing when measured against this magnum opus on the awfulness of Britain from Scan. If I may quote at length:

I was going to say that the country's a mess but it wouldn't be quite right. What's wrong is the politics, corporationalism and bureaucracy that have used each other to become absolute necessities.

1 of 3
Yesterday I got my monthly bank statement through the post and despite cancelling the insurance on my phone mulitple times, Carphone Warehouse have taken yet another three months of insurance out of my account. As money is short at the minute, being thirty quid down is most unwelcome.

2 of 3
Before I left, I needed some paperwork from the police for my work permit and I waited and waited, then waited some more. Tired of waiting I tried one quick phonecall; 'Oh yes Mr. Whoeverthefuckyouare, we've had it for the last month or so but we haven't sent it out for some reason. Would you like us to post it to you?'
''Yes I fucking would! Why the fuck would I ask and pay for something I don't want?''
'Okay we'll send it out sometime within the next week'
''Sometime next week?! You could very well have lost me a job. Next week's no fucking good, is it?''
'Okay Mr. Whoeverthefuckyouare we'll post it tonight'
(N.B. The conversation may not have unfolded exactly as above but it's how I'd
prefer to remember it).

3 of 3
(The final straw) A phonecall to Tiscali (Option 2), placed and logged on
27th July, cancelled my subscription on 6th August. A phonecall to BT the same day cancelled my landline on the 6th August. Strangely enough I handed the keys to the house over to the landlord and flew out of the country on 6th August. I was amazed when further down my bank statement Tiscali appeared with monthly regularity. So back to the phone and back to Option 2; 'Mr. Whoeverthefuckyouare we don't have a record of you cancelling your subscription.' ''Well I logged the call so can you check your records?' ''Yes, Mr. Whoeverthefuckyouare, you did call cancellations on 27th July but we have no record of you cancelling it.'
''Why the fuck would I call cancellations if I didn't want to cancel my
subscription?'' 'Well, can you tell me the cancellation code?' ''I don't have a
cancellation code, what are you on about?''
'We emailed you a cancellation code on 27th August.' ''So you do have a record of me cancelling my subscription?! And what's the point of sending me a cancellation code nearly a month after I cancelled?''
'All I can tell you is we never received your cancellation code'
''But I never got it anyway, so how can I cancel it a month after I asked for it to be cancelled if I never got it? If you check my records you'll see there's no activity on the account."
'Well, I have a record here that you used your account from your authorized phone number the day before your bill was due the last two months, therefore the account is still active.'
''That's impossible! 1) I've been out of the country the last two months so I haven't been able to use the connection. 2) The BT line doesn't exist anymore. 3) The house is up for sale and empty so even if the phoneline was active no one has access to it. 4) I'm on the website now and there is no activity logged since, surprisingly,
August 6th. You're a liar, love. I find it highly suspicious there's a record of me logging onto my account a day before I owe you money and the only communications both of us have failed to receive are the pieces of information that prevent you taking money out of my bank account''
'Well I'm not billing I'm only cancellation. I can cancel it now and you're final payment will be November.'
''Whaaaaat?! I'm not paying another month to you thieving gipsies! How about I cancel my direct debit and you go sing for it love?''
'I must warn you we will send out debt collectors if you take such action'.
''Where you going to send them?''
'Well, to (the address we have on record)'.
"I don't live there you silly cow I've told you that!''
'I told you I'm not billing, I'll transfer you to billing...'*...ominous sound of being cut off...*

Right, that was long and boring but I'm glad I've purged. I can't wait to
fuck off again! I totally despair for the cliched good, honest, hard working
people of this country who are shat on at every possible opportunity. I also
despair that people happily or expectantly continue to take it without even
looking at how they can make theirs a better lot."

He hits the nail on the head concerning the absolute impossibility of getting anything done without having to deal with layer after layer after layer of imbeciles, a monolith of paperwork, form-filling, e-mails, passwords and PINs that would make Kafka wince. We seem, despite being told several hundred times a day that the opposite is true, to have moved into an age where the concepts of public service and helpfulness have gone out of the window. God help you if you are old, frail, arthritic, confused and fazed by computers or the push-button glibness of call centres. Why can we no longer talk to people locally who able to provide straightforward answers quickly? Why can we no longer buy raisins in a paper bag without having to go to a ludicrously expensive themed market stall? Why do we put up with crap food from high street purveyors servicing people with hardly enough time to think, let alone stop for half an hour to sit down for lunch?

The Daily Mail reported a day or two ago that the average salary for males in the Square Mile now tops £100,000 and that pay grew in the City last year by 21 per cent. Very greedy, and divisive too, because the average for women is nothing like that. So much for three decades of legislation on pay equality. At the other end of the scale it is a race to the bottom. I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago to find that I was being charged only £40 an hour for labour by a car mechanic in London. This is cheap - almost as cheap as the little chap who looks after my car at the country seat - but the reason it is cheap is that all the mechanics are called Dimitri, come from somewhere east of Felixstowe and work for the national minimum wage or less. We are in a low-wage economy where success is measured by how far one can get away from the bewildered and ever-growing underclass. It is all contradictory and back to front and sometimes it drives me mad. The hectic, never-quite-catching-up rush.

===

In moments of mental idleness (most of the time), I am revisited by a somewhat theatrical fantasy. The floor at work has two glass staircases, one at each end of one of the long sides. It is clear that at some point in the future there will be a further shake-out and I feel certain that when the day comes, the teams - hordes even - of £1,500-a-day time and motion specialisation and personnel consultants and the now-underemployed Project Leaders who are studiously avoiding a return to their former dirty-hands jobs, will arrive in top hats and tails and tap dance down those stairs in the style of a big Hollywood production number, touching those to be dispatched on the shoulders with their silver-topped canes. Oh, the decadence! Ready when you are, Mr DeMille

Down the Pole

A late drink at the North Pole, three pints of Guinness in about 40 minutes, and I arrived home in a mind-racing state and was gabbing and up and down for pees until after 2. Last orders and then a lock-in with a handshake from John, mein host, and a hug and kiss from Margaret, attentive wife at the end of the bar, as we unbolted the door on our way out. I liked it in there because it made no effort to change to suit the arrival in E14 of yuppies and City types. John offered all sorts of fanciful excuses for the sometimes poor state of his Marston's Pedigree, once blaming the cellar's proximity to the chilly dock (it was 100 yards away...effing liar). It was the company local, much preferred to the themed watering holes on the Wharf. Some monstrous nights were had in there. I seem to recall being stupified by too many sausages at Prof Madhouse's leaving do in 2001, and, worse, getting so pissed on Kronenbourg that I collapsed in the bushes near the London Arena some time at the end of the 1990s and woke up half an hour later shivering and disoriented. Also, it was great for lunches - egg, chips and ham for a couple of quid with big slices of bread and butter thrown in. The temptation though, was always to sup too much. Jones the Breakdown, Gaffer and I were nightly attenders for a while and I dread to think how much we passed over the bar. Maybe I can still go in for lunch occasionally: it's one stop on the Tube and a 10-minute walk, for God's sake.

===

The rain is coming straight down outside and no blue is to be seen in the easterly sky. Autumn drabness, and in my mind's eye there are the pavements, shops and housing blocks on Jamaica Rd soaked and droplets being held by surface tension on the park railings and leaves rotting on the path. The buses go by, windows steamed up, glum faces.

The time is ticking down to the point where I have to go to work. This is one of the few disagreeable things about keeping these hours - knowing every day that only a certain amount of seconds and minutes can be devoted to idleness, pleasure and domestic chores. I never thought this would happen, but I seem to have arrived in middle age with the idea that, while enjoyable, work is also just a bloody nuisance and I would much rather be free of it, though, of course, keeping the salary. Does everyone get like this or have I become cynical overnight? Oooof, how unattractive.

What was, what is

An object lesson in the transitory nature of things earlier this afternoon. I was walking past my old workplace and could not resist popping in for a look. I thought my pass would no longer be active but it got me on to the floor, there being one or two stragglers hanging around for a few days yet. This was the room where I spent 10 wonderful years. The work was great, the people were great, it was all great. It was my rock and my refuge in hard times and a place about which, all bar being bollocked up hill and down dale a couple of times for being a dickhead, I have only good memories. What a sad sight it is now: devoid of the clutter of the job, the chatter of the people. Most of the chairs have gone and some of the computers. Only broken examples remain waiting to be collected and put in skips. In my desk drawer, once hailed as the Ink Lending Library on account of all the to-be-thrown-out books I stored there, the only thing I could find was an out-of-date Vacher's. I stood on a desk at the back - the naughty boys' bench, it was called - and snapped it all on my phone. Desperately sad. I miss the talking, the laughing, the fun.

Later: A sage sentence from Justypops: "It's like the fall of Saigon in here." The office upstairs, in which I am working for the last time tonight, is also being cleared out to move to the new place. In between times, I have been rooting about in empty offices...just exploring nooks and crannies I won't have the chance to see again. I push a door and enter a side room, cooler than the rest of the place, with chests of drawers where illustrations and plans were stored. All the drawers are empty. I wish for a moment that I could stay in there forever and walk out with the overpowering sense of something final having happened. In another room there are bookshelves and two fridges. The shelves have been filleted clean, the fridges contain various screwtop jars - set honey, pickled stem ginger, caperberries, anchovies (that final one unopened, thank God). Outside, I find a ball made of elastic bands and thwack it around with a cardboard tube. On a nearby desk there are a few books to leaf through: a guide to posh hotels, photos of sad prostitutes in Bombay, another book of photos, a history of Shepperton Studios. Abandonment.