Having nearly fallen asleep at the bus stop at gone 1 this morning, I crawled onto the 88 and settled into the back with my book. An old man and his rent boy came and sat opposite me. The old boy wore a good-ish suit and these weird shoes that weren’t trainers or loafers, not really anything. Anonymous, brown rubber shoes. His boy had the reddest eyes I’d ever seen, rips along the side of his otherwise spankingly white trainers and a very unfazed, placid expression. Occasionally the old boy would say something in passing and the boy would tilt his head momentarily, but otherwise they just sat and waited nonchanantly for time to pass until they got to Stockwell.

I have nothing to say on the subject of rent boys. It’s not something that has ever really appeared in my head before. Those two words together always put me in mind of some kind of early-90s dance group.

If I get any poorer, I’m going to have to find a second job. But hey, aren’t we all? People are skint: this is not news. “People are a lot more skint than me, people are a lot less,” chunters The Guardian. To hell with that: none of them are me and for the absolute present I am sitting squarely in the land of “Aaargh! Fucking HSBC offering me graduate loans!” egotism.

I find it a nagging insult that those who ‘entertain’ on the telly get paid squillions, and people doing the same (loosely) in newspapers do also and b2b (even looser) ditto, but anyone else – like consumer magazine writers, editors, online writers, fanzine writers – get fuck all. For Christ’s sake. Having spent last week ranting on about how proud I am of all my friends for taking unpensioned creative jobs, I’m now sleepily furious about having just worked out that, in order to insure my possessions, I’m going to have to adopt a nigh on monastic attitude to seeing my friends. On the bright side, this means that RBT is finally getting dragged round tomorrow night to watch Grease 2.

Death From Above 1979 have split up, which is a bit of a shame. The DJourno points out that the rather wonderfully named Canser de Ser Sexy have a song called ‘Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above’ which is currently tickling my ears. It’s just making me feel a bit sad really. It’s not so much about the band, who I enjoyed but wasn’t totally ravished by.

It’s partly because it’s one of those scutty days where I haven’t had nearly enough sleep, the weather’s horrid, I’m wearing a jumper and feeling proper Octobery. October is all well and good when you have lovely leafy fields to stride around in clutching at Labradors on the end of bits of string, but in London it does rather suck. Blank days blend into one and it’s hard to feel any kind of joy or energy, and that’s not even S.A.D., it’s just Britain’s weather being dull. Hey you! The three Americans I know are reading for some reason! Got weather? Or got summer? I swore off summer when I was 17 because it made me feel even more breathtakingly white than usual. I’ve stopped such silliness now.

Well, one band who aren’t splitting up are Girls Girls Girls, two members of which I bumped into at a comedy/theatre thing in Camden last night. I clocked the keyboard player onstaqe and thought “I was SO at university with you.” They claim to be a pop band. This is of course nonsense, as it’s far too high concept to be anything even vaguely approaching pop, (and don’t start on high concept pop either or There Will Be Consequences) but seeing as their previous incarnations took a rather stern view towards modern life through searingly witty lyrics, I suppose it rather is, by their standards. ‘South America’ has some really sharp harmonies on it and it’s all very upbeat and slightly Buzzcocks.

Ed and Jeremy were particularly nice to talk to which was surprising: one thing I hate about bumping into people you never really knew very well is having to do the chat thing and finding that one or the other of you are darting to get away. It was generally good, I did not dart, Jeremy smoked cigarettes, Ed took pictures, MySpazz’s were talked of.

The one downer of this very long Sunday evening was that my 21st birthday present fell off my finger somewhere in Camden. Plus ca change.