She saw the night and it was hers. She stared into the corners of the black and every sweeping seam of it was hers. Flashing glares into shadows that shrank, she smiled, and licked her teeth, waiting for a figure to approach, and then, turning, spurn it for something better or worse. There were no words in the dark, no thoughts of anything other than the black glory she was wrapped in, and every inch of it sent beams out into the night. She saw a figure emerge in the lights she imagined for herself and smiled wider, intent on little and much all at once. Her stare was cold and bright and hard, diamond true and blank as mist. You could see everything and nothing in it depending on what you chose, but the only truth that emerged from it was that which was known to her. There was no need, no desire, no sex, no love, no passion, nothing that could be so tidily laced into letters and swept into tick boxes of want. She wanted what was known to her, what the voice in the centre of her mind cooingly agreed upon as next. So she took it. She swept the figure down with her stare, laid it down and fucked it. She ran the body along hers and measured it with her breath, kissing it with bites and leaving nothing behind but the cold of the night air. She took it into herself and used it, discarding it, panting and exhausted. She turned her gaze onto the night, and moved on.

When I was living in France with the Orchestral Blonde, her boyfriend used to send us care packages with lovely things like Empire and Essential X-Men in for me, and books and Cosmo for her. It was while reading a particularly dreadful article about something possibly called the heart orgasm that I realised a) even in a country where English mags cost upwards of £6 a go I couldn't bring myself to read its ridiculous power bitch witterings anymore and b) I'd read the same article about 8 years previously. Now, I know that women's magazines make a living out of recycling ideas and pretending that they're new and inventive, simply because if they were new and inventive all the time their readers couldn't keep up, hence why you'll never get a woman's mag going "Fuck off you silly bitch, it WAS your fault because you're needy and desperate and have the self-esteem of a damp cupboard."

I flick through the women's mags when my friends get them simply to stay in touch with what's going on and it's pretty much always a chronic bore. New Woman's relaunch earlier this year was genuinely exciting and for a moment I felt a bit hopeful, but then it calmed down a bit and stopped. Glamour, my hitherto reliable source of gorgeous things to look at and fairly sensible articles has lost its head in a fluff of control, and that was pretty much it.

Anyway, while fruitlessly trawling the internet to find out stuff about trendy shagging for a mag pitch, I found Syd Allan's article on keeping up with trends in sex. If you have ever fallen into the trap of ignoring the person you're having sex with in favour of thinking that the people who write the sex columns in Cosmo/Glamour/B/More/etc Must Be Right (and god, it's so ingrained in my head that I still catch myself daydreaming about physically unlikely sex moves that require set squares and a very specific sort of silk scarf) then you need to read it because it's the most perfectly sharp evisceration of women's magazines I've ever read.

At one point he's going through a Cosmo list about 50 sexy surprises. It's all very dry and ridiculous, rather like the sex Cosmo readers probably end up having.

7. Sexy: You sense he's ready to climax from oral sex, so you let him release on your breasts.
Sex-traordinary: If you're monogamous, pull his butt toward you and let him climax in your mouth. "It's way more intense," says Peter*, 32.

*Names have been changed.

[Thank goodness they remembered to change Peter's name; that guy's a freak!]

17. Sexy: You trace your tongue along his lips, then slip it inside his mouth.
Sex-traordinary: Use your tongue to draw the tip of his tongue into your mouth so you can suck on it, suggests Iris Finz, coauthor of Secret Sex.

[I wish I had gotten that Secret Sex book about a month ago: a woman tried sucking on my tongue a few weeks ago and it freaked me out! "What the fuck are you doing?" I screamed. "Where did you learn such bizarre behavior?" If only someone had warned me that women have started doing this tongue-sucking thing. That's why I am going to get a subscription to Cosmopolitan: I want to be on the leading edge of every new technique.]

This is turning out to be a really good day for good articles which makes me very happy. Even if that one was written in 2003.

So much weird stuff has happened this week that I haven't had the time to take the piss out of it properly. Such is the sad fact of Christmas and the last week of work. I blame The Kooks, causing harm and destruction like so many voodoo crows. If only they'd fuck off to America and get killed by alligators I could relax into the Christmas spirit.

That MP and his Cheeky Girl
First of all, of course, is Lembit Opik's spectacular relationship with one half of the Cheeky Girls, my absolute favourite news story of the week. I was living abroad when their "fame" hit the UK and so was thankfully spared the initial onslaught of their adorable songs and surprisingly-old-for-23 looks. On the flipside, this meant that when I came back I hadn't had the jabs and got very sick, very quickly.

RBT pointed out that The Cheeky Girls had four top-10 singles, and that that was four more than AC/DC, Super Furry Animals, Cypress Hill, and Rage Against the Machine combined. That was admittedly was a rather tortuous way of being snobby about the lack of mainstream recognition for said bands from the single-buying public, even though the single-buying public is by and large populated by the tone deaf and My Chemical Romance fans. Poor, dumped Sian Lloyd has obviously done something to piss off the subs at the BBC website because instead of the usual incredibly glamorous shot afforded to the dumped and pitiful, they've used a photo that makes her look like a drag queen on a hen night.

The follow-up article rates as one of the funniest things I've read this week, along with the Evening Standard tornado "I was there" piece, if only for the interviews with Gabriela and her family:

- "Our relationship is really genuine and it's not out of a pantomime or anything like that."

- The sisters' mother and manager, Margit, said Mr Opik had been a "little bit shy" when he first visited the family home but he had got on well with their Irish wolfhound dog, Rocky.

- Mrs Irimia promised they would bounce back with a new cheeky girl, the twins' six-year-old niece Lory, singing a new version of the Hokey Cokey. The trio released a download album in November titled In My Mind (Is A Different World - A Cheeky One). --> --> --> E BO -->

God helps us.

According to Rupert Murdoch, MySpazz turns you into a serial-killing mental
The purported prostitute killer of Ipswich (needs catchier serial killer name – suggestions please) is on MySpazz. The London Lite immediately took the opportunity of calling him an "internet loner" which spells out great things for the rest of us. I've been on MySpazz for well over a year now and there are people I only talk to via the medium of comments – does this mean I'm going to throw a wobbler up in Bethnal Green and start killing hookers? Anyway, his page has now been taken down, suggesting that Rupert Murdoch and his henchmen don't put much faith in the adage innocent until proven guilty.

Andrew Lloyd Webber has No Shame
Following the "success" of How Do you Solve A Problem Like Maria (I love musicals and it made me feel cheap and used), Andrew Lloyd Webber is launching another reality music show to find a cheap way of promoting a musical into heart failure. Again taken from the title of one of his songs, (this man is PRESCIENT, surely. He and Tim Rice/Charles Hart etc must have had this all planned for years) Any Dream Will Do is going to look for some muggins to perform in a revival of perma-kiddie favourite Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Apparently Maria was very popular with schoolkids, so lowering the bar further should make them epileptic with joy or something. Anyway, it sounds horrid. Bring on Prima Donna, where they shoot the entire cast of Phantom and admit they hired a bunch of Butlins red coats instead of actual performers.

Factory Girl needs to re-read its McNae
Factory Girl's lawyers are living in cloud cuckoo land. Having a film where every character goes under their real name bar "Danny Quinn", a musician with a mouth organ and a natty line in poetry and scarves, and then crying "But it's NOT DYLAN" when he threatens to sue you for demation caused by overt insinuations that he drove Edie Sedgewick to suicide is not a good plan. Ever. Click here to admire Guy Pearce's brilliant Warhol and go "meh, bothered" over their fluffy depictions of everything else. Sienna Miller looks alright. I've never seen her films because she's always been in crap that I've had no desire to see, but she was absolutely enchanting in As You Like It last summer.

Next year you will be forced into liking a band called Ghosts.
Ghosts are Atlantic Records latest big signing and fall neatly into that "some boys with guitars, a keyboard and totally blank expressions" category occupied by The Kooks, this year. Atlantic hosted a showcase for them at Ronnie Scott's yesterday lunchtime. You could tell they were throwing the big bucks after them because we had two different types of meal-inna-bucket, as well as canapés, and wine waiters to top up our glasses for us with three different kinds of wine.

They'd also inexplicably forked out for Stephen K Amos – who I absolutely adore – to do a short bit of stand up beforehand. This was, of course, an absolute disaster. Industry liggers can't be arsed to laugh before 7pm, they'd much rather stand around and plump up each other's egos and feel Important about seeing next year's Big Thing before anyone else. Amos didn't help himself at all trying to appeal to the blatantly racist in the room with his pigeon-holding routines rather than just being funny. Worse, he fell into the schoolboy error trap of continually saying "Well, I've had better gigs than this," and "God, is anyone else dying? Or is it just me?" Don't draw attention to it Amos! You're better than that. Although clearly not at 1pm on a Tuesday afternoon.

Ghosts eventually came on, and their wanker singer smugly slagged off Amos in the manner of one who's heard what a sense of humour and wit entails but has never really managed to pull it off. "This one's called Ghosts, as are we. But then, I guess you already knew that," he said later, even more smugly. I don't like the c-word but my god that cunt has got cunt written all over his cunting cunt's face. Anyway, their music sounds like a whole load of Asda mums banging their pockets in unison, bog-standard boy indie topped off with Captain crossed with Delays only without the charm or any of the decent tunes. They'll be massive, and it's all The Kooks fault for proving that the British public will still buy shit as long as people are playing it themselves so they can kid themselves it's "valid" and "important." Cunts.

Apparently while I was drinking tequila and thinking that was actually a good idea at Thursday's office party, Zane Lowe was busy playing the new Arcade Fire track, ‘Interruption’. Happy Monday, it's now been streamed. (Do you remember when, if you missed something and forgot to tape it, that was it? I love the internet with its myriad of people to do it for me…)

Third listen now and I’m still waiting to get excited. It’s actually quite boring, which is shocking considering a lot of Arcade Fire is up there with Bat For Lashes in the soaring heartbreak emotions stakes. Interruption’s rhythm is the sound of your maiden aunt dancing lumpenly around a village hall. Worse – and horribly, unnecessarily, dreadfully – they’ve totally raped the Belle and Sebastian angle. The organs, the twinkly da – da-daa –da-daa background, the sound of small children echoing in the background (for god’s sake…) although given Joanna Newsom’s precedent, it could just be the band. Typically frenzied lyrics and the odd Hallelujah, but it’s so well-produced you half expect Trevor Horn to turn up on the credits. Oh please, don’t let this be another Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Fourth listen now. Mind, it’s not miserable enough to alienate the mainstream (the sheer power of Rebellion (Lies) did for ears what Garden State soundtrack tried and mostly failed.) so this could be the year they take over the world in the sense of appealing to people other than indie/folk children and those poor cripples who need to have music in order to synthesise actual emotions.

“If that doesn’t get you somewhere special I feel sorry for you,” said Zane Lowe showing half an eyelid of emotion. Shut up Zane Lowe, you deadpan audio nuisance, the only special place that song’s taking me is back to iTunes and ‘Funeral’ on repeat.

Arcade Fire - Intervention @ Hype Machine

Things tend to fall out of my head after a while. I've lost a lot of French and Italian, and last night I had a conversation about sharks where I drew a total blank on the smallest shark in the world which is jawdroppingly sad. I used to know lots of poems off by heart. When I was small and read everything and anything I could get my hands on, by torchlight under my duvet, on the stairs, I would get the odd 50p off my grandma by reciting poetry to her when I visited. I liked the sounds of the words, the mystical pull on people when you did it well, the deserved praise for something I was good at. Acting for me was never really about showing off, but about wrapping myself up so entirely in words that I forgot about me and everyone else. All that mattered was giving the words to someone else and making them REALISE and, reading that sentence over, I just want to shoot myself in the head.

This is the first poem I ever learned.

Tarantella by Hilaire Belloc

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the bedding
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in--
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.

We’re always supposed to pay more attention to what people who come in inverted commas say (and mark your fingers in the air accordingly). The elderly, children, the poor, the sick, everything they say is tinged with some significance that is supposed to be syruped and souped up by our impressions, their impressiveness. This is unfair and cuckoo-ish and, quite frankly, a load of bollocks.

In Oxfam adverts, or the usual hand-holding drumroll of interviews with African people, their richly accented voices rolling words around, letting us go into admiring orgasm about their dignity in the face of such oppression and deprivation. It makes us feel better about having more, because we’re spiritually deprived and obsessed with material goods and isn’t it good that they’ve got inner peace and we’d absolutely go for inner peace, but we just don’t have the time or the willpower or the BEING ARSED and if only we could do it through the medium of Ashram yoga or whatever that shit that isn’t pilates is. Who reads books by African writers? Start doing that instead. It won’t make your mind peaceful, but you’ll stop putting this pressure on people to fit into your well-established boxes.

The “out of the mouth of babes” is always a popular one. I went to see The Holiday last week, and apart from the fact it was terrible and I didn’t have my housemate to blissfully lap up that fact with, the two little girls in it reminded me of me c 1988, all adorable moppets of precociousness being sly and silly and so terribly, terribly clever. They showed off less than I did though, and their fort was like some kind of princess castle, which just goes to show they probably didn’t appreciate what a table, a rug and a cavernous imagination can do for you. I wonder if my life would have been different if my dad had been Jude Law and he’d built me a castle. My dad built me a beautiful dolls house which, stupidly, in that hulking way you have when you’re 14 and in denial of ever having been a child, I got him to sell because I didn’t use it (as if that is ever the point).

Kids Say The Funniest Things – do they? Or aren’t they just pointing them out because they don’t have the social skills to use white lies. Kids are considered to be cleverer, more astute, wiser, wittier than grown-ups because they haven’t got a clue about what’s going on yet, and any time we use that old head on young shoulders schtick it’s depriving children of their right to be children, however clever they are.

The elderly – well, I just don’t have the sort of relationships with my elders that engenders great conversations about the meaning of the world. I very much doubt I will ever have a conversation with my grandma that unleashes great insights into her life or mine, simply because our family isn’t like that, we’re very cagey and closed, dancing this great private dance around each other that frequently ends in farce and occasionally in tragedy.

My great aunt makes me birthday cards on the computer, with daisies and fine script. They make me cry because alongside her cheroot smoking, her determination to keep up and learn, is the fact she can’t leave her house and I haven’t seen her really since 2002 because she lives miles outside Norwich. That’s not the only reason of course, if I’d actually wanted to go, I would have, but I don’t, so I haven’t. I don’t know this person and if I go it’s not necessarily going to start some comedy duo because it’s sad, bitter, flailing towards the end. Oh yes, she came to stay at my parents’ house a year or so ago and tripped heavily over one of the carpeted steps on the landing upstairs which gave everyone the mixed sense of annoyance and pity. That’s pretty awful. Not even pretty, just awful. It will happen to me in years to come. The last time I went home I talked to my mother about euthanasia – my mother is vehemently in favour and says if she shows the slightest signs of dementia she’s getting her passport out. You’re supposed to listen to the elderly to garner wisdom about life, the importance of this that and the other. That doesn’t mean you necessarily get it, although you can come away with some good stories.

And the sick. Specifically those who are facing death with good humour, good Oscar-winning humour, grace, acceptance. I say fuck that. I’m a dying of the light person and I’ve felt far too terrifyingly miserable and overwhelmed by living in the past ever to let that happen again. My palms tell me I will be dead before 40, rich and widowed (this by people reading them for me, I’m not hearing my hands…although that would be a rather fantastic eccentricity). I can almost accept that, but I am not going to die before I’ve winkled out as much as I can get, observations, conversations, people, the simple act of being alone and not having your mind go wild all the time.
One person who managed to write reams about dying, about cancer, about raging against the dying of the light (and how we love those words because again it gives us the image of a much-loved film character who’s lusty and vigorous and stubborn, so brave poor lamb but he’ll be dead in one act’s time) was the journalist and broadcaster John Diamond. He wrote about being diagnosed with throat cancer in his 40s for the Sunday Times, and then about the ongoing fight, and then when his tongue was removed and he couldn’t talk anymore, to being shut down into a tiny martyred saint through sheer dint of his illness.

When he got to this point, three years after he was diagnosed, people started making asking him about the secrets of life, like he was the suburban Dalai Lama. I came across the end of his response today after getting a fluid rant about memory from RBT. I’d put that up there, but it’s his. This is the end of John Diamond’s reply to all those people, printed in the Observer on 31/12/00 shortly before he died.

"The answer is this:

This is what it's all about. It's about reading a paper on a Sunday morning while you're thinking about whether you can be arsed to go to the neighbours' New Year's Eve party tonight. It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have expressed them. It's about the breakfast you've just had and the dinner you're going to have. It's about the random acts of kindness which still, magically, preponderate over acts of incivility or nastiness. It's about rereading Great Expectations and about who's going to win the 3.30 at Haydock Park. It's about being able to watch old episodes of Frasier on satellite TV whenever we want, having the choice of three dozen breakfast cereals and seven brands of virgin olive oil at Sainsbury's. It's about loving and being loved, about doing the right thing, about one day being missed when we're gone.

And that's all it's about. It isn't about heaven and hell or the love of Christ or Allah or Yahveh because even if those things do exist, they don't have to exist for us to get on with it.

It is, above all I suppose, about passing time. And the only thing I know that you don't is that time passes at the same rate and in much the same way whether you're going to live to 48 or 148. Why am I happy? Because I'm alive. And the simple answer to the question 'What the hell is the point of it all' is this is the point of it all. You aren't happy? Yes you are: this, here, now, is what happiness is. Enjoy it."

That came from a sick person. Does that validate it? Does it make it sound any less like the reluctant writings of someone who’s been pestered for divine grace responses and finally caved? It’s common sense, it’s been written better, you’ve heard it before, you’ve said it better. You know that life is about passing time, and how you pass it depends on you. But I think the one sentence that rings this around is this:

“It's about getting angry with me for having different opinions from yours or not expressing the ones you have as well as you would have expressed them.”

That fight is what makes us know we’re alive, just as much as kindness.

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
You know Kapranos isn't his real name, I assume

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
It was his mother's maiden name he adopted when trying to "break into showbiz"

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
In this band he was called "Lord Huntley"

Kinky Fantastic says:
oh ha

Kinky Fantastic says:
how disappointing

Kinky Fantastic says:
although quite clearly the man is not greek

Kinky Fantastic says:
what name would you have

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
I've always used Alex Tannin as a fake name

Kinky Fantastic says:
why?

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
I think it was when I needed a fake name quickly, and my dad's cousin has two sons called Alessandro and Tannino

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
So I just anglicized it

Kinky Fantastic says:
Dude, anglicising Italian is like putting Asda ketchup on foie gras.

Keep white in the office, call it Jerry Heller says:
"The Italianated Englishman is the devil incarnate"

Small child: "Where are we going?"
Morrissey: "We're all going mad."
Small child: "Oh, I thought we were going to Kew Gardens."

Excitingness of excitingness, part-mime part-art part-wonderment band The Irrepressibles have got a brand-spanking new 10-piece line-up and PR representation and everything. (Jamie looks like he's goosed Marilyn Manson, it's quite charming.) I know this because the PR company in question are giving the guestlist cocktails, a lure which would bring a glint to my eye even if it didn't involve the most visually inventive band I've seen in years and one who, more importantly, sound AMAZING.

They're playing a massive Shoreditch warehouse (54 Holliwell Lane) on Sunday 17 and have teamed up with a load of sound artists to basically make the place sing. Sounds horrific, actually heartbreaking. They're bloody good. There will also be "progressive performances" from Futureshorts, Strangeworks, Scottee, Hand To Mouth and Victoria and Anna. They'd better be a damn sight more able than the twat in the hat and feather boa who massacred the sound of rock at the Fashion Week gig last year. Words failed me so I just chuckled instead.

If that doesn't sound your cup of tea, you should thence to lastminute.com and buy the discounted tickets to Robin Ince's Christmas Book Club at the Bloomsbury Theatre which I am going to instead to wave flags at Opera Cat who will be singing in it. It is incredibly lovely and brilliant, with lots of excellent comedians and silliness, so come. To either one.

In other news, I've just seen the video to 'Maneater' by Nelly Furtado. It's rubbish. It's like a less clothingly-inventive version of 'Turn Back Time', only with more fire and less sailors. Nelly loses dog, goes and dances badly with some sulky looking teenagers, finds dog. Whoop-de-whoop. The greatest song of the year deserves a much better video and the director should be horse whipped.

Orchestral Blonde works for the press department of HM Customs and Excise, or Exercise or whatever it is they do. Exorcism? She's never explained this to me properly, all I know is her training involved going through sex tourists' luggage and that if you should accidentally swear in emails it gets sent back to you because HM C&E's internet server disapproves of profane language.

Regardless, this is a very proud day for me because she's just written her very first press release all about 20kg of heroin worth £1 million. Who knew that heroin could induce such maternal feelings?

And, um, it's also quite a proud day for me because I'm finally a recognised Rotten Tomatoes critic. Even if they were for two utterly dire films.

MySpazz isn't working. Still. Everyone else's is, apart from mine. It troubles me that I'm actually getting a bit prickly and anxious about it, even though I know that most likely I will eventually sign in and be greeted by "New Event Invitation" to something shit and very little else.

I think I have a problem, in fact, I know I have a problem. A friend of mine who's been holed up in Ipswich for the last month is moving down to work round the corner from me next week, and our main correspondence for the last year has been via MySpace (and email, which makes it somewhat less horrific). I should probably transfer my addiction onto something less awful, like smoking during the day again. Although, seeing as I have to sing quite high and relatively purely next weekend (for reasons to be detailed later and involve bells and Shoreditch), that's probably out as well. Sigh. Am going to go and eat lots of meat at lunchtime with Film Joe. Hopefully that will act as some kind of sedative.

I just went out to buy some Christmas cards. Given that I work on London’s busiest shopping street, you wouldn’t have thought it would be that hard, but then again it probably goes some way towards explaining why all the cards were such crap.

Victorian Christmases make me happy. That means lots of glitter, baubles that have nothing to do with reindeer (humming birds from The Conran Shop, £12, get one). I love the carols, the haunting ones in minor keys that bring to mind the somewhat confusing image of Jesus Christ being born in the Lake District. I love the idea of peace on earth, goodwill to all men. I reviewed a DVD of a film called Joyeux Noel recently, about the Christmas Armistice in 1914. The film was a horrible mess, but the enchantment, the ritualistic certainty of Christmas as a pure thing in the midst of such insanity was perfect. I’m a festive sap, basically.

This is why being confronted with selections of charity Christmas (Christmas! Not fucking Winter Wonderland, not fucking Season’s Greetings) cards was akin to someone taking a paper chain and slicing bits of my skin off. It was painful. Reindeer buckling under sleighs covered in presents – “A Christmas wish”. A lovely tree, the floor in front of it covered in used and abandoned wrapping paper – “A Merry Christmas”. A self-satisfied fash-mag-slag cartoon ice skating smugly – “Have a fabulous Christmas”. What the fuck? Presents? Sure, everyone likes presents. And ice skating. But is that it? Who says you’re going to get that fucking awful Bratz doll when you’re such a ghastly spoiled child? Santa ClasusAt the other end of the scale, you had some terrifyingly grim angels and a Madonna and child you’d cross the street to avoid. Joy to the world indeed.

Yesterday the Little Blonde Snapper and I went to Banksy’s anti-Christmas grotto, perfectly positioned at the can’t-get-any-shitter end of Oxford Street. A confident bouncer greeted us on the door and ticker-taped us off as we entered. The Mona Lisa flashed us at the entrance, while a faceless ASBO kid in a black hoodie stuck his head through the wall, frozen. Modern Toss had a load of pictures about sarcasm. Traffic cones, redecorated ironies, piss-takes, absolutely no subtleties. Good grief, they’ve repackaged Christmas and delivered it.

Next door, a little sparse tree stood dolefully on a chair, while a massive picture of Michael Jackson beckoning Hansel and Gretel into his house hung on the wall, tinsel hanging across the top of its frame. A skull from a Nightmare Before Christmas reindeer sagged next to it, while a cheery man with a beard (not that one) bellowed out information about the hoop-la. A little cinema showed films in a tiny curtained-off room. One of LBS’s friends had done mosaics of film characters.

It was like a funeral to Christmas, but the horrible, glossy, uncaring “I’ve got to get my Christmas shopping done at any cost and you’ll be damned grateful for whatever you get” ethic. Not the slightly eerie atmosphere of waiting, the glorious feeling of hope.

Because that’s what Christmas is about, the season rather than the day. Up until Oliver Cromwell decided to throw a tantrum, it used to be customary for the community to take off the whole 12 days of Christmas and just sing, dance and feast. It’s about hope, excitement, anticipation, the wind changing. Enjoying the Nativity scene doesn’t make you a Christian, just as buying an Easter egg doesn’t fully pay you up to the pagan club, but it’s a lovely story. The birth of a child, goodness to others, the hope of peace finally coming from somewhere. People coming together, being with those whom they love, looking after people, feeling the tingle of something other-worldly. The Christian values that don’t extend to sending gay people to hell or fighting new Crusades.

It’s about kindness, love and looking to the future. So why can’t I find a bloody card that says that?

I was so depressed I went to M&S and bought a load of chocolate biscuits and then, to try and minimise the collateral damage, sent an email around to the office so I wouldn’t eat them all. And look, everyone’s happy because everyone likes biscuits. And I am happy because I am buzzing like a fruit fly, albeit slightly worried that my diabetic boss is going to keel over if he keeps on pouncing on the box.

Oh! Wow! Greed by proxy is obviously a virtue because Swishblog Chris has just made me a Christmas card! (It's the picture, isn't it?) And look, Santa Claus is reacting against all this over-consumer bullshit! (Santa Claus goes to greedy kids, Father Christmas is part of Christmas). Oh my god, I feel like what’shisname and the end of that horrifyingly depressing film, only with an army of biscuit-fed colleagues instead of the town. Am I…oh my, I’m nearly crying. Atta boy Clarence.

EDIT: Oh wait, then this happens: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/07122006/344/son-arrested-presents.html

FESTIVE CHEER DESTROYED.

You can pretty much see where this is going from the last three words in the link. Ho ho ho. As Ashlea says, "What a bitch huh?"

Then again, as DJourno (who somehow managed to get out of work and a copy of london lite) says: "I think it's brilliant and should be encouraged - he's obviously a horrible toe-rag (admittedly with adhd) who could do with a little tough love. only in america/hanging's too good for 'em ectect"

And Orchestral Blonde... "I read about this - brilliant. I bet the kid had been a right s*** and she'd had enough. Jean always said to me that if I was arrested for anything she'd leave me in the cells for the night!! She would've done too...."

Fair enough. The kid is 12 after all.

A game - stop into Clapham High Street’s charity shops and guess which size 12/14 clothes might have belonged to me between 1999 and 2006. I’ve had a righteous clear-out this week. Considering I live in a room roughly the size and shape of a garden shed, you’d think this would be relatively easy, but this is until you consider the twin facts of a) navigating a tall frame in a space without much, er, spacethe quite staggering amount of tat and curios I’ve accumulated over the last 18 months. This included:

- Tickets to things I enjoyed but have nowhere to keep because I distrust memento books.
- CDs of bands I loathed (but, well, someone else might like)
- Odds and sods from festival goodie bags (it was free, it would be bad to throw away)
- A first-class airplane kit thrust on me as unwanted reward for babysitting a fucked D-list sleb on a flight to South Africa
- odd envelopes (I might find the matching card)
- photos ( I NEVER throw away photos, even if half the film was taken by drunken people with lens-obscuring fingers)
- a pile of very old magazines (research, possibly)
- Christmas decorations bought last year as a forgotten Secret Santa present (justified through dint of hanging them up in my room now.)
- ill-fitting tat from film junkets (to sell on eBay when I get time)
- ill-fitting eBay purchases (ditto)
- clothes unworn for years (ditto squared)
- my beloved and be-fucked up shirt that belonged to my beloved Dad (he’s not dead by the way, I just love the shirt)
- postcards, letters, application forms for limboed bank accounts
- countless boxes bought from Emap sales because they were pretty and might be useful (no and no)

If my flat were firebombed tomorrow I probably wouldn’t remember what half of the extra stuff was, but sitting down and getting rid of things is not something I do easily. I’m a “just in case” person (although I don’t really see how 17 half-working pens are useful to anyone other than those cursed with both illiteracy and ADHD). Still, even though my room looks disappointingly unchanged, there is at least less of a sense of being part of a game of domestic sardines.

Of course, the principal realisation is “My God! I should have done this ages ago!”, like all those people who spring clean never really understood the joys of ditched clutter as clearly as I do now. I even replaced the knackered Oyster card holder I’ve been using as a purse for the last seven months. I could, realistically, have just bought myself another wallet – the last having disappeared somewhere between singing ‘She’s Like The Wind’ with Olly Richards at Empire karaoke and waking up at 3am in Crystal Palace – but instead I am now quite unnerved by the fact that my life doesn’t spill over strangers’ feet whenever I clock into Oxford Circus.

The hoarding again, the “just in case”. When I say I hoard things, this extends to people. That wallet had business cards belonging to Birmingham photographers, Welsh comedians, PRs for computer game firms, musical directors, restaurants in places I’d never go again (“might” never go again), tickets, newspaper clippings, scribbled down bits of things I love and very occasionally, money. At the beginning of this year I decided to teach myself to do The Times cryptic crossword by cutting out the crossword and then matching it up with the answers the next day. This worked pretty well until I stopped picking up the paper in the morning, and ended up with 30-odd newspaper clippings that didn’t belong to each other. I didn’t throw them away, because…you know. They might come in handy should I ever come across someone with the same idea but the corresponding days.

My bedroom at my parents house – in name only, I haven’t slept in it since I was 17 because I banished myself to the much larger bedroom hidden away at the other end of the house in the guise of not wanting to wake my parents while I read at 4am – is still filled with old crap from college and school, tickets, photos, books from university, a toy rabbit a friend at school gave me one birthday, old clothes, love letters in boxes and Jiffy bags, compilation tapes, lamps shaped like goldfish that don’t work but that I loved, things that I look at and instead of being covered in dust, have memories stamped all over them.

As my mother is quite rightly getting fed up with this messy shrine to several incarnations-worth of Kats, every time I go home I am marched towards it and given several bin liners and Meaningful Looks. At this point I shrivel. I can’t throw anything away, ANYTHING. I’ve got about 11 Elles in my cupboard and I can’t fucking stand Elle. I’ve got the Doc Martins my parents bought me as a consolation prize after I fell off my bike and broke my teeth aged 10. (They still fit, horrifyingly, but that’s not why I kept them). There’s a load of clothes I never wear or think about, but can’t do anything with because they’re soldered to memories. Same with old toys that old friends who disappeared ages ago gave me. Things I won. Things people gave me. So either I sit on the floor and start looking at everything and getting bittersweet nostalgic, or I do what I did last time which was close my eyes, scrabble everything in bags and run away throwing a childish wobbly.

In the past I have hung on to friends and lovers who were also well past their expiry date. This was either because we had nothing better to do than each other, or because I couldn’t accept the sense of failure I felt from not being the one who worked. It took a while for me to realise that they weren’t the one who worked for me either, and that was just as good a reason for ending it. As you sift through clutter, old tickets, old shirts, old memories, and consign them to the bin, so you do the same for friendships and relationships. People are cut off MSN. Conversations dry up before they’ve started.

Then there are others that you look at and hold on to. There are people I have got out of my life and then there are people who I’ve held on to because they’re worth more, worth now. They haven’t necessarily made you feel good all the time, but that’s not what people do, wha they’re supposed to do. There’s still too much good left to come and pride is too selfish an emotion to make you see that clearly, all the time.

“If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you” is a line that has burned itself into my mind.

If life were so clear-cut we’d be living in Pleasantville, and people aren’t like that, with or without Reese Witherspoon. I’m not like that. I’m a total fucking bitch at times, although I try very hard not to be. We have horrible sides, selfish sides, complications and curiosities that charm some and revolt others but which are unavoidable sometimes.

If you can get through that in the same way they have for you, and know that not everything is made of bread and roses then you can see things more clearly. It makes you look at the person realistically and recognise each other’s fallibilities as well as their glories. Which, in the long run, makes them entirely human, and as far away from the pedestal they always feared because you’re just there – looking at each other, face to face, without the clutter.

When threads go wrong. What with The Kooks (FUCKING KOOKS) currently trying to break it in the States, Stylus magazine decided to write a tongue-in-cheek review, as RBT says, "done in the style of some fake e-mails sent betwixt the Kooks' A&R and PR men. Drownded In Sound and PlayLouder then both reported it as actual real news that Virgin's e-mail account had been compromised. Conclusion: UK online music journalism run by morons"

Now, the DiS thread has "mysteriously" been deleted, but we've still got the Playlouder article, reprinted here in case they delete it too and then I have nothing to chuckle over tomorrow...

HAVE A KOOK AT THIS
Leaked emails reveal foul brains of industry men
30 Nov 2006


Now, everyone suspects that music industry men are bloated beasts in suits and sniffy noses who might as well be flogging marshmallows as rock & roll.

And occasionally, something happens that proves it, like this rather magnificent exchange of emails between various people in the Kooks US operation discussing how they're going to get the band massive over there. Leaked by the excellent Stylus magazine, this makes for illuminating, if highly depressing read. Stylus replaced all specifics, and we use their replacements below:

----- Original Message -----
From: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
To: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 4:12 PM
Subject: The Kooks

We finally got the IFPI [International Federation of the Phonographic Industry] certification through—it's all signed off and there's a bit of green tinted plastic you can show the boys when they next stop by here. Of course over one million European sales is good, very good, but I think we have to understand that these sales are nearly all domestic. The album has been on the UK chart almost 40 weeks now but looking at the data available the album has only got to 107 in France and only to 32 in New Zealand. If we are to make this act a workable long term investment I think we have to make international recognition our first priority, then focus on domestic consiladation then and set up the second album as an international breakthrough. It is my firmly held belief that this band have a strong enough brand appeal to our keynote demographics to put them on the A list of priorities for 2007.

----- Original Message -----
From: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
To: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
Sent: Thursday, November 23, 2006 6:03 PM
Subject: Re: The Kooks

That's great. I agree that this lot are really shaping up nicely. I was, I must admit, a little worried before radio got hold of Naive and the album took off. Having a third single peak at 12, with the kind of push we were giving them was disheartening to say the least. Getting them to agree its single release was a nightmare Luke [Pritchard lead singer of The Kooks] was very precious about it but I had to lay down the law with him, I told him that if they didn't have a radio hit they'd be going the way of BRMC [Black Rebel Motorcycle Club US group who parted company with Virgin records in 2004]. That shut him up.

His point that the production made it sound like Athlete before they sounded like Coldplay made me laugh. We made it pretty hot in the mastering so it sounded great on the radio. I agree international success is a priority and now with Inside being out there in the US market place, we can build their profile and maybe come second album time get a 'Chasing Cars' out of them. I think we are going to have to miss the indie appeal in the US and go straight for the 'OC.' In the UK the leather jackets and scruffy hair does half the work, I mean the cred of The Libertines and the all around appeal of Busted is an obvious no brainer domestic but in the US both of those bands did shit.

One plus point: internationally I reckon no one is going to give a toss about them going to stage school or whether one of them shagged Katie Melua. We had to do a little damage control after that Amstell [Simon Amstell, UK Television Personality] prick took the piss on Popworld. I mean no one gives a fuck if spotty [Weekly UK Music Publication] readers think they don't write their own songs but it's important we keep a bit of serious artist credibility round them. That aspirational indie vibe is pretty important when reeling the 25 - 35's in. I gave him [Pritchard] a bit of a hand with that piece in [Monthly UK Music Publication] about Bob Dylan. Anyway nothing to get too hung up about it's just we don't want people damaging the magic of the group, I mean we have done very well, so far all the press have been pretty much onside. I did have a bit of trouble with [UK Newspaper] but we got a decent enough review from them to put a quote on the TV spots. Thanks for your continued support!

----- Original Message -----
From: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
To: XXXX@[UK Record Label]
Sent: Friday, November 24, 2006 2:55 PM
Subject: Re: The Kooks

Someone should get in touch with [Music Industry Figure] at Sony and stop him from letting that pillock from Kasabian calling The Kooks girls music or whatever it was he said. Anyway I saw the TV spot last night, it's now running as part of [UK music retailers]'s Christmas campaign. That black white photography works a treat and those press quotes are all great. I know Ooh La didn't do as well as we hoped but with a decent push I think we'll get a third or even fourth wind out of this one! I had another listen to the album on the way home yesterday there's some catchy songs on there aren't there? That Jackie Big Tits song is a laugh, we wouldn't have been able to get away with something like that 10 years ago with all that PC nonsense. I don't think we need to be quite so defensive on the PR front, the only people likely to give them a bad review are people like [Major Webzine] and the kind of geeks who read that crap don't even buy records anyway.

Good luck keep up the good work.

The stalking potential is just overwhelming. Click http://www.geomobiles.net/ and type in the number of someone you want to find to within about 50 metres, a bit like Google Earth only in 1984 style.

I've never been very good at talking to people about things. I'm very secretive, and in the past this has got me into all sorts of misunderstandings and trouble. In the same way I've never used the internet as a confessional: I've always found it rather distasteful, like you're putting your emotions on display to see how many comments you get. Some of my friends have livejournals. Someone I know detailed at great length a break-up that she had, and got comments from all sorts of sympathetic people the world over, ready to hand over their cyber -pathies and dead-shot criticisms from behind the safety of their avatar. The LJ community freaks me out for its intensity and narrow-eyed cliquiness. I hate cliques.

I rather wish I could do that, the confessionals, the angry shrieks into space that are said exactly as you wish because you're typing rather than speaking and your brain is free to think as fast and hard as it can. But there's nothing to say, really. How can you? I made a point of keeping my MySpace as free of "Oh, today I went to the supermarket with karen, we had a great laugh, I got FUCKING HAMMERED!!!!!!" blogs as possible because they're a) quite boring to read and b) I don't want cyber friends, I want people I can network with and bounce off. Not literally. That would be odd. Although the guy sitting opposite me on the 149 yesterday could have volunteered. He was reading Eragon. I'm covering the premiere of that soon and have very little idea what's in it apart from a dragon, although, I quite like dragons so that's pretty much all I need to know.

Is this the most ridiculously cute set of pictures ever? Um, mostly yes. At least, since the tortoise and hippo at any rate.

So, Robert Altman's officially dead. The four minutes before he was were quite skin-pricklingly exciting in a weird way. Meh.

You can't take it with you. If you buy cheaply, you pay dearly. Haste makes waste. It's a good horse that never stumbles. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
Once bitten, twice shy Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. History repeats itself.
If you're in a hole, stop digging. There's no time like the present. Even a dog can distinguish between being stumbled over and being kicked. It's a poor job that can't stand at least one supervisor.
Hawks will not pick out hawks' eyes. From Isle of Beauty by Thomas Haynes Bayly Scritching like a Whitnick Give and ye shall receive. - Jesus Christ The pitcher goes so often to the well that it comes home broken at last. This is often misstated as the proof is in the pudding.
A good surgeon has an eagle's eye, a lion's heart, and a lady's hand. Blood will out. Hunger makes good kitchen. New broom sweeps clean.
Keep a thing seven years and you will always find a use for it. You will not rise to the occasion, you will default to the level of your training That I have no time for Like father like son. Keep no more cats than catch mice

Some spam I was just sent.

As someone who managed to entirely miss the Jordan Eurovision entry, it gives me great pleasure to watch the wonderfully bewildering video to her duet with Peter Andre on 'A Whole New World'.

NOOOO!

*cries*

Have just had a phone call from upstairs. I pitched a load of names to Empire's Where Are They Now section, one of which was the little Brody kid from Jaws. Now, Jaws changed my life. It was the one film that made me realise what films were, why they were great, the power that they had, and, more importantly, my parents rented me all four of them by the time I was 8. Basically, Jaws is not just my favourite film, it's a film I hold on a pedestal. I see its imperfections, but it got me into film, cemented that in fact.

So, imagine my joy at finding out Nick had manage to track down this guy. And then imagine how annoyed I feel when I realise that I'll be driving up to Glasgow when he wants me to do the interview.

Rubbish. My ancient mood ring just broke. It cost about £1.99 and doesn't even work anymore, but I loved it. Now my middle finger is bare for the first time in four years and I feel all off-balance. Hmm.

When I come back from bankrupting myself in Scotland seeing The Singer this weekend, I might go and cry on someone and see if they can find me a similar ring. Some of my friends are becoming Important. I don’t mean in a Neo/Bono/Jesus sort of way, rather that employers have seen fit to give them responsibilities that would ordinarily require several pounds of Valium and a Russian mistress to cope with, so I think finding a mood ring wouldn’t exactly prove a trial.

It’s lovely to see friends you’ve known for a long time getting what they deserve. If you don’t agree with that, then either you’re jealous and impotent, or they’re not really your friends. Of course that works the other way. I hold grudges very rarely, mostly because my temper is so explosive that I’ve usually forgotten about it within half an hour, but there are a couple of people who I could quite happily, coldly watch fail, based purely on actions done years before.

It’s not a mature attitude to have, which most likely goes someway to explaining why I am not a head-hunted opera singer, teaching the world-runners of the future at Eton, telling businessmen how to run their companies, or running the internet. Then again, if I were told to go and do any of those things I’d probably throw myself off a bridge screaming, so that’s all for the best.

Film Joe has recently become one of these sorts of very important people, and last night I went round to doss at his work before we trooped off to see a late screening of The Return (commonly known as fog, or Fuck Off Grandad, screenings after Empire’s Dan Jolin had a kid and couldn’t stay out late anymore). Dossing around meant I got to check my MySpazz in one of MySpazz’s headquarters which is just hilariously absurd. More excitingly, Film Joe got to meet Tom at the weekend. Yes, that one, your first friend. He’s not a fable, kids and they didn’t nick some dead man’s school photo.

“What’s he like? What’s he like?” I asked, nearly choking on the charitable important-person-to-poor-person fag that Joe had given me. “Has he proved he’s the second coming for emo kids, or did Rupert Murdoch have him crucified already?”

“American. Looks American. Speaks Americanly. He’s very Americanish,” said Joe, considerably more excited about superheroes and the fact that News International’s building has little paper-carrying robots running around everywhere.

We talked about Neko Case and played on Guitar Hero 2 with his ridiculously attractive co-workers. Whoever said working on the internet attracts ugly people was clearly lying, although the brocade wallpaper in Joe’s office probably makes people 99% more seductive. (Why else would you have wallpaper so expensively stiff you could walk on it? I find the concept of office workers having Donald O'Connor moments in unison charming but unlikely.) The wallpaper in the boardroom where they’d set up Guitar Hero was black and covered in mirrored silver swirls. Joe said it reminded him of me. If this is true then I am Quality Street incarnate so I punished him by blitzing 'Message In A Bottle'.

We sloped off to Yo! Sushi for some expensively decorated ventures into fish. I still don’t quite get sushi, but I bought RBT a cucumber roll flash drive for his birthday so it’s alright I suppose. Our waiter (of such heavy accent and flamboyance that he’d probably escaped out of someone’s Eurotrash nightmare) was obviously a VIP manqué. His being wound up tighter than a mechanical corset suggested success was eluding him. “When I am waaaalking, I am beezy,” he flounced at one of the lesser waiters. If you’ve ever seen Singin’ In The Rain rip-off America’s Sweethearts, think Hank Azaria wanting to go to the “hoooonket”.

While I snacked off the conveyor belt weighing up the likelihood of there being food at the screening (and, joy of joys there was), Film Joe ordered proper food which never turned up, and eventually we nicked some off the chef. After 15 minutes, Hank Azaria traipsed back and set down chicken katsu curry with the patronising smile of Mother Teresa feeding unfashionable orphans. Joe gave it back and apologised. Hank Azaria’s face slid down into a sneer of annoyance.

“Neeev'r mind,” he sighed airily and stalking off. “Aaay am sure it wasn’t your fault.” (At this point Joe and I made the fatal error of catching each other’s eye and collapsing into the sort of incredulous giggles you get when your auntie’s sat on something awful and hasn’t yet noticed.)

“Teeem!” called Hank Azaria imperiously as he flounced away, in tones that suggested Teeem was in for a serious bollocking.

“I’m sure it wasn’t his fault,” I said, shaking.

“There’s no I in Teeem,” Film Joe whispered and we fell off our chairs. There's no room for being important on Poland Street, innit.

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/IDcards/

OK, so the ones for the Intrepid Fox and the Astoria didn't achieve what was hoped, but if it makes you sleep at night, then here you go.

(And a spiel from Empire's Helen O'Hara...more lawyery than I can write.)

It's a petition to stop ID cards which, as a bit of research will show, are illiberal, ineffective in combatting anything they're meant to combat, and expensive. It probably won't do anything to stop the government investing in the damn things and turning this place into a police state, but I'd feel better if I felt I'd passed it on, so here you go.

Boo to Desert Orchid dying, that's quite sad. Classic FM's racing bloke said an awful lot of crap about his being equally popular with punters and housewives. Well, not really, they'd probably rather have Rod Stewart, but it's a nice idea. He died aged 27, as all good icons should. I wonder if I'll be an icon when I'm 27. I'm already predicted to die before I'm 40, I'm already set for an early death. On the bright side, my idol status is set with this: it looks like I can quit learning the guitar and still write songs. Brilliant, and at the same time, oh. :(

Am listening to the new Jarvis Cocker album. He's ditched his surname in some sweet attempt to become an anti-brand. It's not very enjoyable yet, although that might be because my ears are still damaged after having 'The Best Kids Christmas Album In The World Ever, Ever, Ever' inflicted on them this morning. Ow...

In other news, Spiderman 3 looks set to be AMAZING. Spiderman 2 was one of the best films, never mind blockbusters, I've ever seen. Watch the trailer to 3 and see what you think.

I've never finished a short story before now. I hope it's not shit. It doesn't have a title because yesterday I called my interview with Jet's Nic C 'Can You Guess What It Is? Jet!' and so I don't trust myself to call anything anything anymore. There are no hidden meanings. Give advice please.

THE BEGINNING

Richard had delusions of grandeur. Admittedly, he liked the way that sentence sounded rather than actually understanding what it meant, but since the only person who’d know was himself, that never posed much of a problem. He liked rolling the words around in his head, thinking it made him sound philosophical. Arch even.

He also liked living with Liz. He liked that a lot. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a good figure and his mates were impressed. “God no, we’re just friends,” he’d say, mock-disgusted with them for even suggesting such a thing. But he was pleased that they did. It all went with this new lady-killer writer image he’d been slowly cultivating over the last year. No more clerking for him once the book deal was sealed.

Cradling whisky which Sally had given him for his birthday, he leant back in the chair, swirling the glass around so the liquid glinted in the lamplight. He didn’t much like whisky, but if he was going to be a writer he figured he’d better cultivate some kind of eccentricity, and he loathed getting fag ash on his laptop. He smiled across at her now, curled up in the armchair: good old Sally, tiny and frowning with concentration, engrossed in his book. With her blonde fringe falling into her eyes she looked like some kind of urchin Dickens might have dumped on his doorstep. Richard frowned again. Ooh, good that. Might use it for something.

He closed his eyes, luxuriating in the warmth of the flat and thoughts of reviews in the TLS and prominent shop floor displays. Pyramids of his book there’d be, surrounded by female English students in awkward skirts. Oh yes, they’d be hunched over copies which, being £18.99, they couldn’t afford to buy, so they’d keep coming in each afternoon for the next fix. Yes, that would be good. Richard smiled, and took an invisible sip of whisky, grimacing in what he hoped might pass for a manly fashion, then settled back to his book.

“Richard!”

Instantly, the pyramids disappeared.

“You twatty shit, don’t you DARE fall asleep.”

An A4 folder splayed through the air and hit him sharply on the temple.

“Ow,” Richard winced, rubbing his head and reaching out to pick up the paper that had fallen out, “that hurt.”

Sally glared at him, and rescued her melting gin and tonic from the table.

“I should bloody think so. Managed five pages before I realised there wasn’t enough gin. What were you thinking, inflicting that self-indulgent crap on anyone without proper warning.”

Richard’s eyebrows slid down towards his nose in martyred disappointment.

“I worked really hard on that,” he protested hotly, “I was going to send it off to people tomorrow.”

Sally snorted, uncurled her legs and leant towards him, waving her glass around for emphasis. The ice cubes had caused the gin to overflow. That’d teach her to be a greedy dipso, Richard thought distantly.

Slosh. (Ha! thought Richard.) “If there was any way I could get out of this without causing you mental distress, I would,” said Sally. She took a large swig and exhaled violently. “Probably. But there isn’t. You can’t write for shit.” Slosh. She glared at him again, the gin now aimed at Richard like a bayonet. “You remember when I went through that Danielle Steel phase when I was seeing Jo?”

Richard nodded.

“Worse than that.”

Richard recoiled. “Fuck off!”

“Seriously. Your metaphors are pure teen poetry and I like adjectives too much for you to abuse them in such a cack handed manner.” She sank back in her chair, flourishing her glass in exasperation. “Do you actually have any idea what happened in medieval France? Because it doesn’t seem like it from this.”

Stung, Richard took a larger mouthful of whisky than he’d intended and spluttered violently.

“Loads! I spent bloody months on that book and you don’t even bother to read beyond the first five pages. Seriously, what the fuck?”

Keys jangled faintly through the hall and heels clacked inside.

“Hello-o!”

Richard got out of his chair and stalked off into the hall

“We’ll talk about this later.”

She rolled her eyes and groaned limply. “I can’t wait.” Then, leaning out of her chair she called, “Just don’t make me wait in ‘hours garnished with aching silences’, is all.”

Richard fumed to himself. Bloody Sally, of course she’d laugh, he should never have shown it to her.

“Is everything OK?” Liz poked her dark head around the kitchen door, over-balancing slightly as she kicked off her boots. Richard relaxed. He’d always liked Liz, she always seemed to know how to make him feel better. One day he’d ask her out. Maybe. He had a sneaking feeling that she might say yes.

“Hmph.”

“Ah. Did Sally not like the book?”

Richard’s lip curled. “She only read the first bit, then she threw it at me and said it was crap.”

“Ah. Oh well, never mind eh?” She hugged him affectionately and turned to hang up her coat on the coat rack in the kitchen. Richard paused.

“Liz, do you think my book’s crap?”

“God noooooo!” floated back to him. “I just had no idea you were so into the whole Cadfael in France thing. Shit!” Sound of tripping over abandoned shoes. “We really need to move those. No, really Richard, it’s really impressive.”

Richard leant against the wall awkwardly, feeling slightly less wounded. Liz came out of the kitchen beaming.

“There! Now come on you, let’s go and patch things up with Sally. You’ve known each other too long for this shit to hang around.”

Richard let her take his hand and pull him back into the living room where Sally was staring into the bottom of her now empty glass. She looked up at him innocently: tiny, blonde, butter wouldn’t melt.

“Sorry I said your book was shit Richard. It is, but I’m still sorry.”

Still basking in Liz’s compliments, Richard ignored her and turned to pick up his whisky. Liz mouthed something furious at Sally, who was now refilling her glass, and bustled up to Richard sweetly.

“Look, go and get that nice bottle of red Dave dropped round the other week and we’ll get some Thai from Ari’s. Oh hang on, we drank that. Why don’t you pick up some of that Rioja from next door?”

“Ok.” Richard obediently grabbed his keys from the table and went out through the hall. The front door clicked.

Liz dropped her frown, and went over to the armchair. She slipped her hand into Sally’s, massaging the knuckles with her thumb.

“You could have been a bit kinder you know. He really values your opinion.”

Sally pouted, leaning her head on Liz’s shoulder.

“Nah, I’ve known him too long. And it really was awful.”

She took another slug of gin. Liz felt the gulp and smiled inwardly.

“It’s more than that now anyway,” Sally said irritably. “I know he thinks you’re a-maz-ing and stuff, but I’m getting fed up of him thinking he’s going to end up with you.” She poked her fondly to punctuate. “This is all your fault for not dating anyone since you moved in. He probably thinks you’re pining for him.”

Liz laughed, pulled Sally to her and kissed her.

“Well. We’ll have to tell him then.”

The door slammed.

“They didn’t have the Rioja so I got some of that other stuff we had!”

In the living room, Liz leant her forehead against Sally’s and kissed her again, twisting her lips into a smile. “You know, it might take his mind off the fact his book’s so shit.”

THE END

It's still far too early to watch YouTube videos this explosively bouncy. The Singer is bad for MSNing me such links. "It's strangely hypnotic," says she. No. No it's really not. It's horrible and sounds faintly like that 'Vindaloo' single, just with Orlando Bloom saying "We're taking the Hobbits to Isengaard" over and over again.

7000 views on MySpace. If I were a band, this would mean I were quite popular. As it is, it means it's lots of bands going "Oh, you're a journalist, maybe if I send you spam you'll become our most slavish follower" which is significantly less interesting and liable to make me cry rather than think positive thoughts about the Sunday Times reading my blogs and hiring me as a columnist in three years time.

I interviewed Nic Celesti from Jet a couple of days ago. He did the expected "Oh I don't read reviews" spiel on the Pitchfork fiasco (which was the only thing he really could do without screaming "WANKERS" very loudly), but the best quote came from talking about groupies: "It’s always safe to say that at the end of most shows there will be ladies making sexual advancement on band members but let’s face it it’s not always the stunners that makes themselves available."

RBT: "I didn't realise you were interviewing Bernard Manning."

I have been 24 for five days now and I am still not dead. Considering tha massive panic attack strop I had coming home at some silly hour the night before after squealing at the Butlins red coat unconvincingly playing a sexy ghost-type person in Phantom of the Opera, this is quite impressive.

I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was the combination of feeling totally Lilliputian having just returned to a theatre I hadn’t been in since I was about a foot and half shorter, but the idea of turning 24 made me flip out. I know people who are older than 24 who are cool, sensible, not-dead (as opposed to undead, natch) people. One of my best friends is 27. But somehow she carries off being 27. I, on the other hand, was unable to think of anything other than harp-playing hero Joanna Newsom, on her second miraculous album at my age. Or last year’s culprit, Brandon sodding Flowers, who’s had to have a new metal invented to describe his albums because platinum’s getting too cheap. I’ve never gibbered before, but I was fairly sure I was gibbering when I got home.

I opened some presents that my mum had sent me home with a few weeks ago. Nice to see she’s picking up my own thrifty habits, as they were all wrapped in paper that I’d originally bought for my brother’s birthday in August and had since been used (twice) for my Dad’s. Softly nestled in layers of tissue paper, was a plastic funnel.

“Is she trying to get you pregnant?” asked my housemate, rusty from lack of The L Word.

What do you do with a funnel? Well, yes, funnel stuff, but to my knowledge turning 24 hasn’t affected the several thousand pounds worth of reconstructive dental work currently enabling me to chew my own food. Anyway.

On the actual birthday, somewhere in between wide-eyed panic and cake, I went to Dans Le Noir in Clerkenwell for supper with the Random Birth Twin. The premise is you eat in the dark, served by partially sighted waiters.

I was saved from jumping off a cliff in misery at being old, by Film Joe’s sage words: “You’re the same age as Jack Bauer, and Jack Bauer kicks ass.”

Practical Fishkeeping's website beat all of the people I work for and more at the EMAP awards on Friday. With stories like this, you can understand why. Oh my God, and also, this.

I wrote a blog once about something particularly embarrassing that happened to me at a film premiere. The good news for you is that something even more embarrassing happened this week and it involved Ben Affleck and Adrien Brody. The bad news is that I didn't fall over, so you can't schadenfreude me any.

Thanks to my ridiculous collection of jobs, I get to interview a lot of film and music people and have absolutely no compunction about getting autographs for my friends. The scrawls of the terrifyingly vulpine Kirsten Dunst and perfume-ad incarnate Hugh Dancy are lovingly nestled in my flatmates's bedrooms – Hugh wasn't keen to sign, in fact he looked slightly scared – and that makes them happy, so that in turn makes me happy and slightly less mindful about the fact I have just debased myself to someone half my size.

Talking to people you admire is cool - in most cases you accept the fact that they're made of flesh rather than angel kisses - and I've only asked for an autograph for me, twice, once from Richard E Grant and once with Meatloaf, which should be a mandatory part of being a music writer or something. Oh, and the Harry Potter cast, but that was Film Joe's idea and we did it for legitimately cynical eBay purposes.

On Monday though, I had such a narrow brush with disaster that I thought "Fuck it" and threw my principles to the floor. Having turned up on journo time to the Hollywoodland screening at the LFF (PRs always want you locked in an hour before anyone turns up, with the result that most people tend to saunter in five minutes before) I was greeted by harried PRs who proceeded to whisk me past the hacks lined up by the Haagen Dazs stand and upstairs to the bar. This let off cold sweaty alarm bells in my brain as it meant face to face interviews. Now, ordinarily, face to faces would be a great coup. When you haven't seen the film, however, you have Hugh Grant's Horse and Hound moment all over again.

My plan to ring Helen in a blind panic and ask for HELP failed when I realised my shiny new fucking phone hadn't carried my numbers across. I rang Sam. Nothing. Film Joe? Hadn't seen it. Eventually I got a number from someone and gabbled down the phone to Helen who did her impressively calm ex-barrister schtick, normally saved for prosecution witnesses and particularly tiresome Empire forum members.

"…so yeah, they think he probably killed himself," she is saying. Something blonde and PR-shaped walks into the corner of my eye.

"Kat? This is Bob for you."

Holy mother of God, it's cheerily bald gangster icon Bob Hoskins, and he's being ushered into the chair next to me. I gabble something to Helen in the Language of Shit and fumblingly drop my phone on the floor. I've had to do a lot of red carpet line-ups blind, which I don't like as it makes you look like an idiot and means you can't ask exciting questions. Interviews are only fun when you actually know what you're talking about, although when they involve sharing airspace with Adrien Brody, you get over it. By the time I made my first fuck up ("How was it filming with Ben, Adrien?" "Actually I didn't at all.") I was too bombed to care, and got two of what Seth Cohen termed the 21st century autograph on my phone.


Lover


Husband

What all this end-of-Wednesday nonsense is creakingly, slowly building up to, is that today I was so star struck I actually blushed. I was on the phone to the person at the time which is just beyond rubbish, but it was DR KARL OFF NEIGHBOURS so I should be excused. Technically he's in a band, which meant I was technically (I'm really pushing the meaning of technically here) allowed to interview him for the Aloud Gig Guide.

I hadn't been this excited since I got Richard E Grant to sign my copy of Withnails, at which time I blushed so hard that my face became camouflaged by the Rex's red plush seating. I would have had him autograph both breasts and my face I was so excited.

This is Dr Karl.

You've had sell-out shows in the UK over the last year, were they there for the band or Dr Karl?
We couldn't believe it, we had no idea how people were going to receive us, it was a full on adoring rock crowd right from the start. A lot of kids came to see the gig because they were coming to see Dr Karl, they had no idea what the music was like, but every one of them loved it. Kids were coming up to me and saying "We thought it was going to be a bit sad, but actually it was alright," and that's very flattering. It's great to attract people, but there's a difference between people coming just once and coming again.

Who'd win a Battle of the Bands – Waiting Room or Rogue Traders (Sony-signed dance outfit with Izzy in it)
I think Rogue Traders would blow us away simply because of the strength of Natalie's upfront performance. When they did an exhibition gig it was just incredible. Man, she's got it all.

You performed together in a charity Rocky Horror you both organised, will you duet in real life? And will it be as good as Kylie and Jason?
I shouldn't think so, I don't think Sony would let that happen! Nobody's going to beat that Kylie and Jason one. Actually Natalie's just done a duet with Shannon Knowles, runner up in Australian Idol who's gone on to become one of Australia's most successful recording artists. It's called 'Don't Give Up'.

You've said in the past you'd quite like to play Glastonbury. Has Michael Eavis been in touch yet?
He hasn't yet, I'll have to send up another beacon.

As well as your own songs you do a lot of covers in the band. Are there any new bands you've heard recently that deserve the treatment?
I really like The Kooks and The Feeling and I heard a terrific song by The La's last night, I wrote it down actually I liked it so much. (Sound of rummaging down phone line. Fails to find paper.) It's very 60s, the sound at the moment, you can hear that in bands like McFly. In the next set we're doing the Foo Fighters's 'Best Of You'. It's kind of still doing Kaiser Chiefs, we have been doing 'I Predict A Riot' which I think is one of the best songs in the last ten years, and now we'll be doing 'Na Na Na Na Naa'. We also do five originals just to keep the interest in Waiting Room.

Back to Izzy, how did Karl fail to realise what a horrific cow she was?
More to the point how did he not work out the maths on the baby? Although there's something coming up with Sky and the maths is a bit off again. Shocker, poor dear. When you've got a bloke who's almost 50 whose the lover of Izzy, you're not going to ask a lot of questions you're just going to count your lucky stars, blinded by the whole thing. What was interesting was that although he desired her and she's very beautiful, there was a big part of him that was desperate to get away. He needed to get away after the Susan thing, but was so quickly trapped by the pregnancy that he wasn't entirely comfortable. But she was very good at hiding things.

She's a conniving Jezebel.
Well, the audience has to cut Karl some slack, they could see things that he couldn't.

Are Karl and Susan meant to be together?
Absolutely. They're right on the brink but there was a shocking incident on Tuesday where Karl accidentally slept with Izzy again, not quite sure how that happened. He needs to get an eye test, he needs a good night sleep! That's a good little story and it shows what an excellent woman Susan is. They want to be together, but you can only bring them back together when the audience believe that she can have him back. You can't jeopardise the Susan character.



How proud would Karl be that Billy is now a doctor working alongside Hugh Laurie?
I think he'd be over the moon, constantly ringing up him with autograph requests for Hugh Laurie! 'House' is my favourite TV show, it's wonderful to see him having such fabulous success, partly as I know he remains completely unchanged by this success, he's just a good honest Aussie bloke.

Were you upset when Cassie the sheep died? We were.
That was a very important moment for Karl and Susan, and helped bond them back together again. Both of them were there for the funeral, and of course they had a moment where they saved a little lamb from a snake and brought them back together for one night. The writers wrote it very poetrically… (Ed - we think he is being serious. It is quite hard to tell.) Casserole was the same sheep all the way through the show: just one thing about sheep is that lambs get big very quickly and Cassie was massive. Sheep in the backyard isn't really going to work.

Who, out of all the cast, is a liability on a night out?
They're all pretty good. Some of them are very seasoned night clubbers: Blair McDonald (ex-Neighbours, played Stuart), we've been partying in London together. He's a professional, knows where he's going, never gets messy. The cast so a lot of partying: we had the TV awards last night, Jackie, Natalie, Blair - we stayed til the death. We're no slouches, us from the colonies.

What would be your fantasy storyline for Karl?
The one I'm pushing for is that everyone in Ramsay Street finds out that he was never qualified and he gets covered in shame and ignominy. I have actually suggested this, s that we find out he never passed his final exam and he has to take it again. Seeing as the man can cure leukaemia, do brain surgery, works in a hospital and as a GP to every single member of mankind, I think that'd be quite cute!

How long do you plan to stay in the show?
You can't call the future, my contract runs til the end of next year so I'll still be on UK screens well into 2008. I love playing Karl, I love playing music but I would happily see the two walk hand in hand.

British people love Neighbours. How strange are they?
The weirdest one was when a fan came all the way from UK to Melbourne airport and announced that they were there to live with the Kennedy family so we looked after them for a bit then sent them home. Most people are very happy, friendly and supportive. I haven't had any really strange ones.

Why are people so obsessed with the show?
The writers are good at crafting good characters and the casting people get great talent. Make no mistake, a lot of people who've gone through Neighbours have gone on to success at higher levels. Also, there's a light touch to it, a lot of comedy. Not slapstick but ironic humour. Australians always look for the opportunity to bring something down a notch, so none of the characters will get too big for their boots. Paul Robinson is the epitome of evil and manipulates everyone's lives in Ramsay Street, but he still gets pulled down a few pegs every now and again!

And finally, is it true that all the Ramsay Street postboxes are actually full of funnel web spiders?
Well, you wouldn't stick your hand in any of the letterboxes, but that's the law in Australia. The good old backyard spider is very common, but you don't run your hand through the woodpile without giving it a kick first!

___________________________

Whaddaguy.

(In other news, my flatmate is taking me to see Phantom tonight. We haven't been since we were 7. I am so excited I feel like I'm having a stroke.)

Greatest news ever (if far too late for me and my dreams of party shoes / working as a maid in a Victorian house. No, I don't much understand that one either)

Jim'll Fix It's coming back to the telly!

One thing I was never able to comprehend about grown-ups as a kid was why they chose to eat such shit cereal. My way of thinking was that once you're old enough to choose what you eat, you can eat all the Frosted Wheats, Coco Pops and Weetos you like. (Lucky Charms are pushing it a bit – much as I crave their magically delicious marshmallows, you can only get them in cybercandy and £5.99 a box is fucking ridiculous.)

This is what I thought would happen anyway and as usual, it turns out that I was a very naive child. At lunchtime, foraging in the dishwasher for a bowl to wash and put soup in, I remembered that my sarky cynical side is counterbalanced by occasional flights of relentless optimism, and this was one case where I'd overstepped the bounds of flight.

I don't know whether it's people in the media specifically, supposedly caring about their figures while they sit on their arses in front of a monitor all day, but eating what looks like a bowl of shredded glass can't be good for you, whatever the packet says. Alpen. Porridge. Special K. All Bran. (Actually, I'm lying, nobody eats All Bran.) Anyway, when you come to wash it up it's just a load of beige bits washing miserably around the side of the bowl. If they'd had Coco Pops, this wouldn't be an issue. They're so delicious you eat them all. Do you scrape every last speck from a bowl of Alpen? Do you fuck, it tastes of boredom and gives you all the thrills of a 2p piece.

What annoys me even more about this obsession with 'healthy' breakfasts is the queues that start for the microwave. If you want a cup of tea, you have to fight your way between four women (it's always women, the boys get toast, or organic porridge from Crussh) lining up their porridge bowls. Last year it was worse because the Empire kitchen is the size of a small box, and as we shared it with Sneak, there were more ladies with health food regimes to squabble with. At least the Aloud kitchen is big enough to dance in.

I went on a health food regime once. I'd been on one before, but that was when I was forced to by my mum after she went through a phase of taking me to nutritionists and acupuncturists to see what was wrong with me (I was depressed, but apparently also deficient in copper, magnesium and something called radium). This regime was different because I chose to do it, and it was accredited by the Sunday Times Style section which is my blissful place of happiness.

Anyway, being pre-GI and written by nutters, it was based entirely around juice. I'm not sure if you've ever tried to live on juice before, but once you've forced a beetroot, carrot, lime and root ginger through a bargain bin juicer, you've worked up an appetite, and juice doesn't do it. It also failed to give me the skin of a 14-year-old princess. I have good skin anyway – or at least I do when I'm not living the drawn-out London season change – and I failed to get any bounce, vitality or joy from living on juice.

I lasted about four days on this ridiculous diet before giving up and buying a fish pie from Safeway. 99p vs many pounds. No brainer.

A mere year after he started doing it, I've found out that the Random Birth Twin does a music and nonsense podcast for Stylus. It's very good, the bastard. Do yourself a favour and subscribe to it here: http://stylusmagazine.com/stycast/archives/category/little-ole-wine-drinker-me/feed/

Nice things I've got in the post recently:

- Cheque for £100 for ghostwriting flight column
- Magazine containing said column
- Truly AWFUL homemade t-shirt from the wonderful Errorplains, whose music is much better than their arts and crafts.
- The new PJ Harvey Peel sessions CD

I went home to my parents this weekend for a birthday dinner involving drink, food, two fights and Armagnac, which smells like poppers but tastes less corrosive. I’ve never really got the hang of spirits ended in –ac, or –y, preferring to stick to ones ending in –ka and –in, but this was very alright.

Having a day to flop around before being expensively fed, I played with the dog and wandered into the kitchen garden (it’s filled with vegetables and is next to the kitchen) to have a look at my mother’s latest treasure. Here I must state that my mother is neither mad nor prone to buying horrendous garden ornaments, because Eric the Regency Gardener is something so awful that the 70s would run away from him screaming. A proud figure, one foot resting a-top a garden spade, he’s the dandy Adam Ant would have been if he’d been made of stone and had less sex.

Mum phoned me a couple of months ago in rapture.

”I’ve bought something for the garden!” she screamed down the phone. “His name’s Eric and he’s a gardener.”

“Are you retiring?” I asked, adjusting the volume on my mobile to Ma-level. (It’s a stereotype that all middle-classes mothers screech on the phone. My mother was the prototype.)

“Nononononono,” she explained. “he’s a statue. It’s a silly bit of fun. We’re bringing him home tomorrow.”

Sadly, Eric met an early death when the builders lifting him out of the van dropped him onto the ground and smashed him into many tiny pieces. The garden centre had another one – crap Regency garden statues obviously being hot tamale in Hampshire this summer – but one that hadn’t been weathered in yet.

This became painfully apparent on inspecting Eric – a figure so camp you couldn’t imagine him going anywhere near a garden unless there was champagne in it – who glowed with an almost iridescent whiteness fresh from the garden centre’s mould. What my mother forgot when placing him tenderly in the kitchen garden, is that she stood him right on top of the graves of my brother’s hamsters and my goldfish, whose corpse I brought down from Durham in a fag packet in 2002. Eric might be sod all use as a gardener, but he makes a significantly better tombstone than the lolly stick crosses we had before.

Heading back to London, two happily mad things instantly reminded me why my mother’s sudden interest in crap garden statues can be forgiven. A German family of tourists were standing along the platform at Waterloo deeply engrossed in a poster of Badly Drawn Boy’s new album ‘Born In The UK’. This isn’t a particularly interesting poster, but that didn’t seem to stop the dad - a bald man in his 30s clutching a city umbrella - from giving his patently uninterested daughter an English lesson.

Every time he pronounced a syllable (“Bad! Ly! Drawn! Boy!”) he’d bang the upturned umbrella against the wall for emphasis, his chest so puffed out with exultant importance that he looked like a Christmas robin with a crew cut. My German is limited to two stock phrases (one of which suggests a retard from the 1900s, the other being of no use whatsoever unless I have a pressing need for stamps) but it soon became clear that English was moving on to Geography.

“The UK,” blasted Herr Dad in ringing tones, “is made up of England” bang “Scotland” bang “and Ireland.” Bang. He forgot Wales, as a lot of silly people do.

The child stared gormlessly into the wall, fingering something in the pocket of its stripey raincoat, while its mother gazed off at an advert on the station wall. Herr Dad, having run out of useful information to glean from the poster, sheathed his umbrella under his arm with the proud air of one who has just imbued Youth with the rich gravy of Learning, and the family dutifully pushed off along the platform.

The second thing was two cheery teenagers walking down Charing Cross Road, guiding between them a small child with an open purple suitcase covering its entire body.

“She’s shy,” said one of them simply. From inside the suitcase, the child giggled hysterically.

I am hardcore. I know this because I got a bus from Streatham to Brixton this morning and nobody shot me. This, considering the wanton abuse of handguns on Brixton Hill recently, means that I must therefore possess the aura necessary to getting around South London without being mugged.

It's not like there aren't enough theoretical people to do the mugging and killing in London, indeed there are plenty of kids who'd like to fool you into thinking that, instead of heading off for double geography, they're off to do someone in with a baseball bat and indulge in some light burglary. I sat behind a 15-year-old on the bus yesterday who was wearing a baseball cap with the label still on it (the dress equivalent of clutching your mobile and using it as a stereo). This apparently insinuates that he's nicked it from the shop and is therefore Well Hard, which instantly marks him out as a Johnny Try Hard because, clearly, no self-respecting shoplifter would need to bother.

What topped off this prime example of Being Very Hard were the kid's sunglasses. Now, obviously he couldn't fit his sunglasses under his cap (because if he didn't keep it jammed on someone might nick it) so, brilliantly, he'd hung them under his chin like some kind of delirious stethoscope. He is so hard! Fucking hell, he's nearly as hard as me.

I was swapping mugging stories with lovely usedtobecool last night over enormous glasses of wine and drum n bass folk, before suddenly remembering that none of my mugging stories actually belonged to me. I've managed to get through over a year in London without even a sniff of physical aggression and, quite frankly, this makes me nervous because it means my number will very soon be up.

UTBC Dan has a friend who is the Mugging King – not of nicking stuff off other people, but of getting out of it. He's talked people out of mugging him, fought them off, been too poor to actually be worth robbing and, simply, run away. "Nobody could catch him you see, he runs like the devil," said Dan, eyebrows raised in the universal sign of admiration.

Or In Rain got mugged in Brixton once. Rather than doing what I think I would do in the eventuality of being mugged in Brixton (burst into tears and find a policeman immediately), she did what I fantasise I would do: kicked off her boots and sprinted after the fucker, screaming like Boudicca. The image of someone quite small doing something so cool is an impressive one (sadly she didn't catch him), which is why I think such effort should have been rewarded instead of returning to the station only to find someone had made off with her boots.

I admit to being fairly lax when it comes to walking anywhere sensibly at night, and am starting to think that this perhaps is my subconscious hurrying the mugging along so we can get it over with. I do stupid things like walk home "the short way" through dark roads while listening to my iPod (actually, fuck the fear, I'm clearly such a moron that I should be beaten up and left to die in a ditch.) Part of the reason I think I'll get away with such provocative behaviour are the twin weapons of my being 6'2 (and, as cinema has taught us, all people over 6' are either henchmen or proficient in martial arts) and, secondly, having an unattractive travelling face once described as "a murderer eating lemons".

With this inevitability awaiting I've become a bit jumpy lately. When shadows start coming up behind me quickly at 3am, I turn round to make sure whoever behind me isn't clutching a chloroformed sack. I've started doing this in the mornings too which is a trifle extreme. I very much doubt any mugger would want to mess with commuters at before 9am.

Still, it's quite hard not to come up with some kind of escape plan when, as a kid, your mother drills it into you that people on the internet can see into your brain, and that talking to strangers is equivalent to writing "ABDUCT ME" on your forehead. I was about 18 before I actually had a conversation with a stranger on a train, an old man who'd fought in the Falklands. This could have opened whole new doors to the gleaning wisdom from older passengers, but came to an abrupt end when a father of two lunged at me in the Norwich station taxi queue after sharing conversation on the train from Peterborough. Let it be said that no good ever came to anyone at Peterborough train station.

What it boils down to is that I live in a slight cuckoo land where I don't believe much bad will happen until it does (I still keep bags and precious things very close though, I'm not fucking Pollyanna). I love dipping into Brixton. I love the green space in front of the cinema, the hidden away cafes, and the fact that you can get a barbecue and music for a fiver from the Windmill on Sundays. I don't want the fact I like it to be tarnished by being mugged, which is why I treat it with the sort of respect you give to tetchy cats.

If I have to be mugged anywhere, I would much rather it be Camden.