Do I go to a potentially OWSOME gig, or do I go home, eat a bagel and fall asleep? I'm so tired. I have been butchered by Vidal Sassoon. Fun is exhausting. Will write something with more words in tomorrow. Zzzzz.

Herbal Essences: fucking awful advertising since 2004.

I had lunch with OIR, the most prolific blogger In The World, in a pub that beerintheevening.com rates 4.2/10 because we’re dead classy. An incredibly compassionate, funny person, OIR has a persona extension when writing. She becomes a really hardcore, take no prisoners force of nature, which, while fundamentally her and something that is clear whenever you chat, is bizarrely at odds with her enormous laugh and propensity for gin. It’s always good reading and makes me eternally shamed at not writing about things that matter.

In the absence of any gigs and being contractually obliged to not entirely SLAG OFF the Miami Vice premiere (US PRs should be dipped in bleach and fed to skunks) I was thinking about writing something meaningful, something that had really got me thinking over the last few days, but other than AA Gill’s jaw-droppingly awful report from Albania in the Sunday Times magazine this weekend (What were you thinking? Seriously?), nothing’s managed to penetrate the heat-fuddled mess slopping around inside my head.

So, naturally, we’re going to talk about hair. Our crowning glory, our glorious locks. There was a really sad piece about Gail Porter in one of the fluorescent women’s mags lying around reception that has pictures which look like she’s cutting herself. No “gardening accident” does such harsh, neat marks and nobody should have to feel like that. I don’t know anything about alopecia (other than my mother driving me to the doctor’s once and telling me, somewhat bizarrely, that I’d never get a husband if I went bald. What is this, 1952?) but I saw her at a screening a few months ago and she really is gorgeous. She has one of those faces that is so alive it lights up everyone around it. Don’t be sad Gail Porter, you’re a stunner.

Back to non-serious silly season land. Everyone’s had bad hair, but I experienced Bad Hair a couple of months ago when I made the classic mistake of a) going to a Soho hairdressers b) not being a boy c) having a lovely natter with the hairdresser d) failing entirely to watch what the hell she was doing to my head. I came out with a dyke mohawk. She used clippers for Christ’s sake. What was worse, I then went to a Kula Shaker concert and as, understandably enough, none of my friends are stuck in 1997, I proceeded to spend the evening tra-ling along to ‘303’ as the token weirdo with Bad Hair sitting in the corner spilling wine on her feet. Emo so isn’t me.

Haircuts make a huge difference to people. It can affect how attractive you find someone (oh come on, you so are that shallow), it can transform a face, hell – a romantic angst haircut can temporarily stop you snivelling after a break up and do the “I’m AWESOME” thing that those horrible soul songs with Aretha/Diana/Banana so entirely fail to do.

I lopped off six inches of hair after a particularly nasty break up two years ago and felt transformed. I stepped through the door of “Idiot! Never go out with your best friend!” into “Hello! You are already at least seven times more interesting than two hours ago.” I still felt like shit, but at least I looked the shit.

As with nearly everything that you can throw money at, it becomes addictive. Some people get tattoos, other people get piercings and having run out of places I wanted pierced after, ooh, seven fairly anodyne ones, hair became my new plaything, especially when I accidentally went too short last summer and realised “Hey! With the magic of hair straighteners and industrial quantities of mousse, I too can pull off spikes and Audrey Hepburn.”

The boyfriend at the time was less than thrilled. “I liked it long,” he said, unhelpfully. I ignored him and went on gazing at my pixie-like reflection in the mirror. Elfin. Pixie. These are words you don’t hear often when Angela Carter books classify you as a giant. They’re alluring and dangerous.

I spoke to him on MSN again today, as he’s off being musically important in India.

“How is your hair?” he asked, after the obligatory chat about food poisoning, drivers, arses and curry.

”Gettting cut on Monday. It’s getting a bit long and drifty around the shoulders.” (Mullet, rather than Julia Roberts.

“I like you long and drifty,” he said, again unhelpfully.

“Tough,” I replied.

At the moment, I like my hair short. I’ve had it long, mid, curly, straight, wavy, up, down, dyed since I can remember, and seeing as I have no real plans of modifying my body in any other way other than be getting enormously fat or getting Gym, I really enjoy the control I have over it. If other people don’t like it, then they’re very kind and keep their mouths shut. I really don’t mind. I like what I’ve done to it and for the first time in years, I don’t need anyone else to validate it for me.

Still. I thank God I didn’t have a camera during the mohawk stage.

And again on the subject of words, this might be one of the cleverest things I've ever seen. Rutland Weekend Television presents an interview conducted entirely in gibberish. Curvaceously mucking squirrels indeed.

"Foreskin mousetrap view Mount Everest intray lobootomy in England."
"Saddle bags, saddle bags."

Spellchecker firm corrects typo

Well, I'm sorry but isn't that just the loveliest headline you've ever seen? It is for me at any rate, I'm a grammar nazi of the highest degree and get really upset when apostrophes go walkabouts and the like. Although, I've become less of a twat about it recently. This is mostly because my brain and my fingers don't seem to want to type in harmony and I've started getting my they're there and theirs in the wrong order, which is the GN equivalent of starting a holy war.

Anyway, this headline comes from a PR company handling a firm who make software to eliminate spelling mistakes on the web. You can pretty much guess it from here, can't you? The PR company had to re-release their own press release after mis-spelling one of the words in it. To be fair, they didn't really mis-spell anything, they just left a letter off the end. You're typing in a hurry, it can happen to anyone, but that wouldn't make grammar nazis laugh so much.

La BBC says: 'Canadian company TextTrust, which sells software to eliminate "the negative text impressions on Web sites", had to send out its own statement again.

The release listed "the 16 million we (sic) pages it has spellchecked over the past year".

...

"I made the mistake, not TextTrust - they do a much better job," said PR manager Pat Brink. "It's certainly egg on the face of this public relations person." '

I don't really remember why I'm so picky about grammar. When did it start, this absolute compulsion to have everything done properly? I certainly don't give a rat's ass about using whom, mostly because even I haven't swallowed that many plums, but spelling, puncutation and grammar are so important for me. It's like respecting the person I'm writing to, I suppose. I could always just be polite, but that requires far too much effort.

Text speak gave me the ebgbs on an epic scale. Writing in full sentences didn't mean SMSs would be huge sprawling things unless I became Lady Terse of Curmudgeonland, predictive text is not hard, people. Although, my folks have never got the hang of it, so I get text speak from them. Bless. How modern they are.

I used to be a lot more militant about spelling than I am now, but I used to be a lot more inflexible as well. I no longer worry (as much) that random people who talk to me on trains are planning to abduct me and I no longer need a rigid two guitar, bass, drums line-up to make my ears happy. I still fucking hate James Blunt though - but he's very funny in interviews. That's as far as I'm going on that point.

Cool skills of the week! My mate James has just done a documentary for Radio 1 about being disabled and into music (no, don't fall asleep, he rocks it - listen here. 2h 30 for doc start, 2h 37 for start of James). The boy is so bloody charming he got involved in it through a girl he met in a park. No feeding the ducks for him: busy lips mean free trips to Roskilde.

Anyway. Everything apart from his bits and the Blaine Harrison i/v are so worthy and depressing that the egg shells the BBC seem to be so keen on treading on have been worn into the ground. They have Staind soundtracking it for God's sake, how much more self-flagellating can you get? I don't pretend to know my arse from my elbow re having proper mental or physical difficulties, but seriously: disabled people don't need to be poked with the cautious stick, otherwise that's entirely defeating the point of having an equal opportunities documentary.

Still, it should have been made. The access amendment to the Disability Discrimination Act came through in October 2004, and so few places have done anything about it. Unless he's mashed, James is incredibly nifty with his chair and general moving about, but there's an entire swathe of the population who are going to carry on being royally fucked by not having ramps, or even somewhere just to enjoy the music without feeling like someone's elderly aunt, just so they can cram in more standing room. I'd say it's unbelievable, but of course it's not.

Anyway, flawed as a lot of this documentary is, it's worth listening to just for James's point blank refusal to play up to the injured party stereotype, and for saying "happy bunny" on national radio. Good call Ballardie.

I’ve met a lot of people who are beautiful. At least, that’s what the papers, magazines, websites and telly have told me beforehand. Close up, they look nice but surprisingly unremarkable - that, or they’ve got bad skin from all the make-up – and you feel a bit let down.

I realised this yesterday on my way to day two of half-yawn half-hurray dancefest Lovebox, when I finally saw a woman who literally took my breath away. You read that phrase so often, but it’s generally a load of crap: maybe a “Ooh, pretty,” or a “Meh, generic” sort of appreciation. I hadn’t noticed her before because I was listening to some tunes and staring into space as you do on the Tube, so it wasn’t a bolt from the blue. Well, sort of. Her kid had just thrown her Gameboy DS across the Tube carriage. You could tell it wasn’t the Lite version because it bounced off my foot and bloody hurt, so I encountered this woman with a sort of bewildered scowl.

She looked up at me, smiling pleasantly, apologised and Jesus, I nearly froze. She was black, with closely cropped hair and the most ‘Greek’ pair of eyes I’ve ever seen. You know, the ones that come with stories of goddesses and Herculean labours attached. Weirdly though, you couldn’t imagine people vying to claim her as they did Helen, it was a beauty that just was. She had a kid, she grinned without being self-conscious, she wasn’t a possession. Maybe that’s why I actually gasped: she had the beauty that we never see today because with a good air-brushing, anyone can look like a superstar.

Take MySpazz pictures for example. Hardly anyone truly resembles their picture because with a good camera and the internet, we can control the image of us that we’d like other people to see. Well, teenagers certainly do. I freely admit to having a set of pictures that are horribly self-indulgent, but that was because I got spotted by a shit model agency, got bored and decided to have some headshots done for a laugh. All that taught me is I am photogenic about once every 40 frames and my spoken Italian has gone to shit.

We worry about pictures of ourselves because if we get a bad one, it’s like a review. “Oh no, I don’t actually look like that, that’s my bad side,” we chorus when our double chin and hangover spots come out in our holiday snaps. But we don’t look super-groomed and moody all the time either. So, how the hell do you capture the real you?

That’s pretty easy I guess. Get the fuck off the internet and go to gigs, the pub, the park. That’s the only time you get to see the real anyone, and chances are, it’ll be their best side.

I hate Burger King. I hate it in the same way that people hate McDonald’s. To me, it represents everything that’s wrong with the world, and it comes with worse chips. I particularly hate the way people think that its burgers are somehow better because they come with a tomato attached to it. This is gash. Burgers are either proper gourmet ones that come with thick malt shakes on the side, or the ones with Big Mac special sauce in. There is no in between, particularly not for £4.50 and a Superman cup. Anyway. A Sprite at Burger King costs marginally less than food at Burger King, and I was hungry. What a fucking mistake. I got that other-people’s-McDonald’s feeling of intense fury and disgust with myself. What with that and the fact I was forced to read Vogue for ten minutes, by the time Random Birth Twin rocked up, I was about as happy as syphilis.

Cocktails make us happy. This is what RBT and I do. Occasionally we play Scrabble, or go to the pub, or do something non-cocktail related, but mostly it’s cocktails. The drinks are mostly incidental, it’s just nice to have a conversation somewhere where you can deliberate about the amount of pretentiousness you put in your glass.

Last night’s stop was at Loungelover, off Shoreditch High Street, a place which has travelled so far through the kingdom of Ironia that it’s lost its passport back. It has flames and stone lions outside the front door. Jesus. Inside, impossibly smart staff stand at the door burning joss sticks (how very 1995) and talking to more interesting people on their mobiles. By the time you’ve adjusted your eyes to the gloom, it’s too late to leave – truly, Loungelover is a boho’s drunken eBay binge gone mad. Chandeliers, bits of anatomy drawings on the wall, self-conscious velvet sofas and really bad candles. Ouch.

RBT had one of the sugary girlie drinks he always has, followed by something with Wasabi in it that tasted of dip. You could have dunked sausages in it, not drunk it. I had a Mark Thyme. Supposedly it had thyme and tarragon liqueur in it, but mostly it tasted of bourbon, which kind of spoiled the point of having something as ludicrous as thyme listed as an ingredient. One thing Loungelover is very good for is playing ‘spot the media twat’. RBT spotted a kingpin example, wearing a white flatcap, black glasses and a scutty beard that looked like a cross between a soul patch (ask him – something jazz players have, apparently) and a goatie. Poor man. We decided he was a short film director and left him to it.

The whole point of us being in Shoreditch was to see ex-Gorky’s wunderkind Euros Childs play at the Spitz. He’s probably a bit old to be a wunderkind now, but having caught his set at Latitude, I didn’t really care. RBT sulked about not getting to go to gigs he wanted. He’s choosing next time, as long as it’s free. HSBC hates me. What with it being beyond meltingly hot in the Spitz, we ditched the dull support band for juice and stuff. Ooh look, they do oysters. “They’re quite good,” says RBT, a fish fanatic if ever there was one. “How come you’ve never had them? You’re middle-class. I thought you people ate oysters all the time.”

He’s got us confused with walruses. We get some oysters. In Spitalfields Market. This is weird: last time I was here I ate Welsh Rarebit and looked longingly at furniture with Polly. Bloody nesting instinct, I keep on having blissful daydreams about battered leather armchairs. We sit down with our juice and oysters next to two Americans, one of whom has those snakey tattoos down his arm favoured by unimaginative teenagers and members of Slayer. One thing nobody ever bothered to tell me about oysters is that you have to physically remove them from their shell. They’re attached by some kind of suction cup that required three minutes of prodding to detach, by which time the horrible thing was slopping around like somebody’s earwax. So much for elegantly sliding them down your throat: you need a Cub Scout to hand just to prepare the damn thing.

I chucked it back the way you’re supposed to, a sort of headbang in reverse. It tasted of sea water - worse, wrong fish. I didn’t feel particularly turned on by the sensation of it going down my throat, but it didn’t feel like snot either – not that I’ve ever swallowed two square inches of snot, but you get the idea. I suppose if you’d been starved of conversation, vision and sex for a long enough period of time it could be seen as feeling vaguely sensual – it sort of rubs against your throat instead of sliding – but only if you can deal with the fucking awful bitterness of the sea taste.

I had a second one to prove it wasn’t as shit as the first. It was. RBT had three, then we ran away to watch Euros Childs and drown, slowly, in our own sweat. Burgers, oysters and the Welsh. What a weird fucking evening.

kat brown -- [noun]: A real life muppet 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

At this point in time, I couldn't have put it more succinctly.

Today's best news story. What the hell? Have I fallen asleep and missed April?

Sophie Ellis Bexter has been found head-butted to death in an apartment of a French footballer.

Police say it was Murder On Zidane's Floor.

How ace is this? It's Elvis baby, Elvis! Well, sort of.

I always feel slightly left out of those utterly insane conversations where people I start channelling The King through their cereal boxes. Honey Nut Cheerios are fairly crap at picking up that sort of telepathic activity. I fully reckon that Lucky Charms would do the trick, except England seems to have quietly banned them, probably because all those delicious Charms contained enough E numbers to turn your average school into an army of screaming hoojimongers. I relish the memories. Relish them.

I got so bored of having a blog where nothing worked that I have ixnayed it altogether. From now on the only fluffy kittens on this bastard will be the ones posted from stuff on my cat! Oh yez!

OIR has finally succumbed to the blog phenomenon and you can read her here. I say read because unlike me, OIR actually writes great long diatribes about Things, whereas I tend to have a diatribe maybe once every two months and the rest of the time get distracted by links. That's the thing though, isn't it? If you spend your whole day writing, you don't tend to write for relaxation. Maybe I would if I were a poet like Barney, or reet musical like the Autistic Muso, but I'm not so there we go. I wrote and recorded some fairly terrible blues which these guys are apparently turning into an electro track, and more importantly I made a pom pom when on holiday. So I don't give a shit.

This weekend I'm spending my time interviewing people I really like. Interviewing is possibly my favourite music thing to do ever (except, errr, listening to it) and I'm VERY excited. And Paolo Nutini, who I can't get excited about at all, despite the Blonde Drama Queen's best efforts. Maybe he'll be lovely. Anyway.

So, tomorrow I will mostly be plugged into the computer, listening to a boatload of tunes and grinning like a lunatic about the fact I get to meet talented people who I admire and respect. Three days of gin will surely follow.

I would quite like some now in fact. But that would be wrong. Happy Birthday Mother Brown.

This "Italy training camp" vid on You Tube can most likely be applied to Portugal as well. Shocking ;)

Someone must help this poor man crush his Peugeot 307. Inspired by The Simpsons (as all good things are, natch) he's got so fed up with the company refusing to sort out his rapidly decaying car that he's raising money to get it squashed. And raise money for charity, he's not a complete arse.

"Why?
Because this particular car is the worst Peugeot 307 ever built, and Peugeot UK has been completely uninterested in fixing my problems or trying to resolve the situation despite the assistance of WhatCar? magazine who featured this car in March 2004.

I was fed up of being told that it was only my car that had experienced problems when a quick scout around the net proved that lots of owners were having the same problems.

The final straw came this week after the exhaust dropped off after just 26k miles. According to Peugeot this is normal and they won't discuss it any further."

26k. That's a bit shit even for Peugeot.