Holy Moly is on fire this week. Firstly with that godawful XFM film bloke's pervy answerphone message, and then with this, Graham Norton's (unprinted) letter to the Evening Standard.

Dear XXXX,

I'm Graham Norton and I shared most of page 11 in your paper yesterday with a lime tree. As dull and irritating as this must have been for your readers, imagine how much more dull and annoying it was for me. Essentially the entire story is a work of fiction and perhaps that is why it took two of your reporters to write it.

Happily since you are a quality paper, you managed to include two facts. I live in Wapping and someone has made a planning application to chop down a lime tree. From here on your ace journalists seem to have lifted quotes and even the picture of a tree from an article that appeared in my local paper The Docklands last week. If only your reporters had checked some, or indeed any, of the facts. The first clue that The Docklands isn't the Bible might have been the photograph that you reprinted yesterday. The caption says that it is the lime tree in question. Look again. Oh that's right, it is clearly a photograph of a plane tree.

Apparently I described the tree as an eyesore. Who, apart from someone who had a tree stuck in their actual eye would refer to any tree in this way? Didn't your crack team of investigative journalists find out that I'm a financial supporter of Trees For Cities?

I then go on to complain about things falling on cars and vehicles. Apart from policemen and newsreaders, has anyone uttered the word 'vehicle' aloud in the last 25 years? The journalist then heard me describe how the tree blocked light from the flats. Mmm. I live in a terrace of single family homes. Unless Tower Hamlets has seen fit to build some low-budget accommodation for asylum seekers in the branches of the actual tree, I can't understand what flats I might be referring to.

The bottom line is that there is no dispute about this tree and if there is I have nothing to do with it.

My only argument is with lazy, stupid journalists who insult their readers with this sort of dreary rubbish. No wonder your price is going up to fifty pence if you have to pay two people to read a free local paper and reproduce every fictitious word of it.

Tree lover and fact fan,

Graham Norton

DatingDirect is doing a celebrity dating auction on eBay for charity. I particularly like the fact that under "Postage" it says "Pick Up Only".

Cyber Candy hs a web cam. This strikes me as incredibly disturbing, if only because when you go in there it tends to be in a mad raving frenzy of sugar and greed. Nobody needs to see that.

I just saw the most amazing thing in the world and it involved tie-dye. Now, ordinarily tie-dye makes me want to kill people in the face, but when those wearing it are doing something called a Multi-Coloured Chocolate Swap for a delightful made-up thing like National Chocolate Amnesty Day, that's a different kettle of cabbage entirely.

Have you tried that really weird "mood" chocolate from NewTree? It's very thin, swish and called things like Serenity (very popular in the Empire office for obvious name-associated reasons) Cocoon, Forgiveness, Blush and other such Care Bear nonsense names. Oh wait, they seem to have ditched Serenity now – maybe it didn't test well. It had bitter oranges in it which was nice in a sour Christmas sort of way.

Tranquility is the best one. It's made with lavender which is not only one of the best but one of my favourite things in the world. When I was 8, me and my ludicrously intelligent friend Joanna used to pick lots of it, make it into bags and flog it to her neighbours. One of the neighbours, who called us rats and made me the Chief, used to make fudge and give it to us in exchange for not having to take a bag. It was some of the greatest fudge this world has ever seen, second only to the stuff my mum used to churn out in industrial quantities for my brother's school bazaars.

Back on the street, I want some of this chocolate. Do I have to adopt something in order to get it? Promise to actually buy one of these god-awful cardigans? No! Like the name suggests, you have to swap something.

"No papers, give us something original – something useful!" suggests the bouncy girl co-ordinating the whole thing (clearly a hockey captain at school).

I delve into my bag. Since the demise of both the Tardis and the Poppins bag, I've been forced into using my housemate's kindly lent but comparatively tiny black one. It's barely 30cm long, how the hell do people operate with such microscopic accessories?

Peering into their swag bin I can see that someone's handed over an umbrella. Damn, that was good thinking. Right. iPod, no, travel card, heck no, contact lens prescription…useful yes, but useful only to me. Aha! Generic Sainsbury's Lemsip equivalent it is. The girl is impressed, and I get a whole bar of Tranquility lavender chocolate to myself. Another lunchtime quandary is solved…

I want one of these, whatever the hell a goldendoodle is. is it like a Labradoodle? Hmm. When we had a golden retriever she moulted all over the shop so the allergy-friendly one might make sense, as well as stop killing vacuum cleaners.

I think you should all check out this Akira The Don cartoon because a) it's set out a bit like a kids book which is rather nice and b) it might persuade you to listen to some of his tracks. I don't massively like hip-hop, but he's one of the, ooh, four hip-hop acts I can listen to without wanting to commit murder. Endorsement!

Three nice things to round the day off with:

1.) Top Gear's Richard Hammond is stable after his car crash.
2.) Richard Branson's giving £3bn towards slowing down climate change.
3.) Sway vs Lily Allen

I went to an absolutely blissful festival at the weekend called End of the Road. Somewhere between Dorset and Wiltshire, my wobbly geography went out of the window as soon as I left Salisbury train station in a large cab filled with Swedes and Londoners. For three days I listened to ravishing music, sang in fairy-lit glades while people called Nigel and Dan played pianos, ate ridiculous amounts of ice cream and talked to people I’d never met before and might never again. It was wonderful.

While wandering around waiting for someone new to come on the Garden stage (surrounded by peacocks, peahens and chickpeas) I heard some earnest-sounding poetry coming from the Bimble Inn tipi tent. I don’t like earnest poetry, it’s horrid. One of my favourite places in London is the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, largely because it has a lot of Scrabble sets and cheap wine, but whenever you go you’re sure to have to navigate Earnest people talking about Art, and Stuff, in a tone that announces to the world the fact that they are incredibly Earnest about Art, and Stuff.

I didn’t have anything else to do so I went in, at which point I could actually hear what was being said and realised it was actually quite sweet and funny. He did a wonderful poem about kissing, which at the time made me feel absolutely right about kissing, even though it was in couplets which is a bit nauseous. His friends were sitting on my rug, and when he’d finished his set I asked him if he had a copy of the poem I could sneak away. At this point he started looking a bit worried – and to be honest, if some unwashed freak with a quiff the size of a tenement block started asking me for poems I’d probably run away screaming “FIRE” – but regardless gave me the copy of the poem he’d written out beforehand, as well as one called Eponymous, which turned out to have been written for his ex-wife on their wedding day. You can read that on his blog, but this is the one I heard. Apparently the ‘owed’ is significant.

Owed to a kiss

If I could hold your hips or hands
Or touch you places you can’t stand
Then turn around to face your face
We’ll kiss and feel our pulses race
When on the corners of your mouth
To dream my dream of journeys south
I’ll hold your cheeks in both my palms
And feel my back within your arms
A pause to help us catch our breath
This matters more than life or death
My fingers wrapped around your throat
The paradox and antidote
Into the fray I taste your teeth
The all around and undernreath
So soft and hard and right and wrong
Like singers of a wordless song
And bitten lips and nibbled tongues
The air sucked out of fondled lungs
Our mouths entwined in heedful bliss
Defining essence of our kiss

Mmm, lovely. One of my favourite things to do is to read the personal ads in the papers and see how people advertise themselves. You always take the piss out of people who put “kissing” down as one of their hobbies, well, I do anyway, mostly because it looks slightly incongruous when put next to “clubbing” and “fine wines”. But I reckon these people have actually got a point: kissing is one of those things you forget the value of until you’re actually doing it again. A really great kiss is just magic. It can be a gentle, thoughtful thing where you’re taking little exploratory steps towards each other (like shaking hands only a bit damper). A quick but tender peck goodbye. A lingering early morning kiss of pure laziness and contentment. A passionate, violent thing where you and the other person are so intensely entwined in each other that all sense of technique is forgotten and you’re almost swallowing each other in the attempt to get closer. (Admittedly, I’m less of a fan of the swallowing, but the excitement of such kisses makes up for occasionally being engulfed in a washing machine.)

Humans are the only species on earth who kiss, and it’s a weird thing to do. Apparently it started off with cavewomen mimicking birds and transferring food to their children, and progressed from there, presumably with knackered cavemen trying their luck after a hard day’s clubbing other cavemen on the head. I like the theory that states “kissing gets you close enough to smell the mood, food and recent adventures of whomever you are kissing, so you can work out how to handle them.” But really it’s primarily lust and investigation isn’t it? Well, not kissing your grandma obviously, that’s a barrel of worms that doesn’t need to be opened.

There was the most incredible storm in London last night. My housemates and I turned off the lights and sat down and watched it. Babs sat cross-legged on the cushion she uses when playing the N64, Iani sprawled over the window sill, and I curled up on the sofa idly thinking about going to bed.

The storm made us feel slightly better about the fact we’d never bothered to get curtains for our huge bay windows (a fact which fucks off anyone who stays because they have no choice but to wake up atsunrise), because last night it became the world’s GREATEST plasma screen telly. The brightest swathes of light we’d ever seen flashed and lit up the room like a Dulux swatch, sneaking in between the glass and darting around the walls. Purple-white, blue-white, pink-white, pure white, all you needed was cornflower and you’d have a tasteful design statement.

We ooh’d and aah’d like it was the Common fireworks all over again, but better. The fireworks never do enough of those beautiful golden stockings, the ones that drizzle down the sky like little diamonds and make you feel totally focused on wonder. The lightning just kept on outdoing itself: brighter, sharper, covering the sky and taking absolute control. “You there! You scummy peasants sitting slack-jawed in your house - you’d better turn off that N64 because I rule this sky and if I can be arsed, I will certainly slide down your aerial and burn you bastards to a crisp, and then the only one not weeping will be Kat because she’s the only one who’s got any insurance.”

(I am still fuming about the fact I am paying to hope I don’t get robbed.)

The only thing that screwed up this gorgeous scene was the Noise. Gentle rumbles of thunder I find really peaceful and calming. It reminds me of being snuggled up under a rug at my parents’ house, with a roaring fire and a plate of crumpets to shut out the monsoon drowning the Hampshire countryside. That’s one of the nicest feelings in the world, especially at Christmas when you know there’s going to be something involving Martin Clunes being worthy coming on telly in a minute and you can have a good doze halfway through. That thunder is good. The Noise however is not. I become utterly useless when confronted with sharp, abrasive noises (an irony my folks used to roll out endlessly when I was a Vile Teenager) so whenever tractors, or ambulances, or motorbikes pass I have to clap my hands over my ears like a particularly delicate old biddy.

In terms of thunder, the Noise is that tumbling crack you always associate with forked lightning, where it feels as through something is trying to force its way through the sky. That’s truly horrible. It makes me panic – I lose the ability to think clearly and get that rare feeling where you suddenly remember you’re an animal, or at least have all those survival instincts buried within you. (Incidentally, it’s a sign of how fucked up we’ve become as humans that that instinct only kicks in for namby-pamby things like thunder and pictures of furry spiders, and not for, ooh I don’t know, crossing the road in front of a moving bus.)

”It’s not finished,” proclaimed Iani in Vulva-esque tones.

The thunder cracked again.

“It’s finished.”

One of my lovely co-workers feeds my penchant for ridiculous news stories on a regular basis. They are invariably ridiculous and I enjoy them tremendously. Today's I have to share with you simply because I laughed so much that I compeltely forgot I was supposed to be stalking Nelly Furtado around the building, and had a nervous collapse instead.

Penis-pump driver crashes into bus (from The Register)
'Auto-sex' Slovak pile-up

A Slovak driver who ignored a give way sign and crashed into a bus was subsequently extracted from his car unconscious, half naked, and "with a vacuum pump on his penis", Channel 4 reports.

The unnamed 42-year-old was driving his old Citroen in the Slovak town of Levice when the accident occurred. Police officer Peter Polak told Reuters: "It's very likely he had auto-sex while driving: it is a matter of investigation. After the accident he was found lying in the seat, his pants were off and it [the pump] was placed on his penis."

Unsurprisingly, Polak added: "I've never seen anything like this, nor have my colleagues."

The man was taken to hospital with "head injuries", the report concludes.
__________

Yes, I have the sense of humour of a guttertroll. But it was the headline and the last sentence that did it for me. God bless that sub.

I'm going to be terribly highbrow tonight to make up for it. Possibly.

The Sun's online Bizarre page shows its respect to 9/11 in the best way it can. Those web editors should probably have a check on their ad placements. Oops...

I read two alarming things today. One was me, somewhat erroneously, being described as “a girl who is into hip-hop” and the second was it being “refreshing” to have a girl being supportive. While the first is so totally wrong it makes me giggle a little bit inside, the second reminded me of this graffiti that’s turning up in grotty venue toilets all around London: “If girls weren’t so bitchy, we’d rule the world.”

Girls can be mean, dispiriting, cruel and downright harpie-like in nature, and ‘Mean Girls’ went some way towards showing that in a mainstream manner. There has to be something to counterbalance all the earth mother hormones sliding through our bodies going “Make a baby you retard!”, and bitching is it: kid gets the love, fellow woman get bitch slapped with unkind remarks and insecurity.

Both the alarming things came from comments on a blog. Everyone’s panicking at the moment, especially boys. The DJourno was getting into a tizzy about packing for Bestival, and, wherever he is, the Journalist is probably winding himself up about something that’s happening in the Middle East. This post was written by one of the few hip-hop acts I genuinely like, Akira The Don (read it here now). The man usually writes very good, insightful blogs. At the moment however, he’s writing snippets and snappets, presumably because he’s got a lot of other stuff on like running a radio station, releasing a single and plotting how to overthrow the government.

Loosely, it was about an email he got from a fan in Swansea, Gina, asking him to vote for her in the FHM High Street Honey’s competition so she can go to vet school, but really it was about his shock at the government retracting grants and making a nation’s women prostitute themselves to the grand altar of China White. You should go there and read what was said because otherwise this will just be a blog repeating another blog and other comments which is far too PWEI a concept for me to entertain at 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

Certainly girls are capable of some rotten things. Some of the worst bullying I ever experienced at school was from girls in the years above me, probably because they despised my nerdiness and general social ineptitude. When I moved to London last year I was in the totally unfamiliar position of not having any male friends there with me. I love my boys. They are sane, logical and funny. Happily, I found out over the next few months that all my girlfriends have the same qualities and they won’t bite. Only one of them has ever given me any grief, and that was because she was going through some kind of mental fuck-up of her own and disappeared for months.

My girls are wicked, but GIRLS can be horrible. I went out with a very nice boy when I was 19, whose best (female) friend got very possessive and started flirting with him whenever we all went out together which, seeing that she was four years older than me was practically retarded. But, quite often because we sub-consciously promote a society in which men are stereotyped as cock-brained thickos who need to be led in the right direction by someone in fabulous shoes, we compete with each other where there’s no need. We’ve become so “equal” with men, that sometimes women patronise them by treating them like territory, and any ravenous slag who gets in the way had better cross herself. This, naturally, is not conducive to a good female image.

Just as most women’s magazines promote this ridiculous idea of men as post-feminist doorstops, so do men’s magazines promote a similarly far-fetched image of women, but that is not the point here. Why, when books like Belle Du Jour are so bloody popular is it considered the final sin for a girl to enter a lads mag competition? I suspect it’s because while Belle Du Jour is a fantasy that women can claim as their own, the lads’ mag market is for an (illiterate and breathtakingly stupid) Average Joe’s eyes only and so it’s as though she’s staking her claim on being the sexy one which is going to freak out people who don’t get that it’s all smoke and mirrors, just like Hollywood, just like being a popstar. Only with more tits.

“I have real problems with being friends with most girls because so many of them are so insecure and bitchy,” Gina said, and you can just imagine the reactions of same when she says she’s going to be in an FHM competition. I bet some stupid twat calls her names, even though she’s an ecology student. I hope she doesn’t, because if she wants to do it for the right reasons (ie; not using it as a quick step to a footballer husband and a Juicy Couture tracksuit) then there shouldn’t be a problem and I do not mean this naively.

She wants to raise money for vet school for Christ’s sake, and if any person, man or woman, can’t see that that costs a shed load of money and wish her well, then that shows how little they understand about the line between the images themselves and how they’re obtained. It’s work, not glamour, and she’s not going to be stealing away her mates’s boyfriends by stripping down to her scanties. Unless the boyfriends are really, really thick and incapable of telling the difference between fantasy and reality.

Hey girls: you can vote for Gina by emailing honeysvote@fhm.com and titling your email Gina Bartlett number 93. Let FHM do something good for once and give the world one more vet.

When I got home yesterday I was greeted by a fat envelope from eBay. “About bloody time, seeing as you fund the bastards,” my housemate had scrawled on it, depressingly accurately. I buy a lot of stuff on eBay, mostly because it’s cheap and I can get clothes when my real ones start falling apart.

What was troubling was what they had sent me. “As you’re a star eBayer, you deserve a treat…” said the flimsy bit of card. (“Brilliant!” I thought, “discount central here we come.”)

“You must have become good friends with your mouse by now,” it continued somewhat crushingly, “so here’s something you can both enjoy”. It was a mousemat, complete with “hilarious” eBay mouse hole. Well colour me pink and call me Santa, whoop-de-bloody-doo. I’ll just add that to The Omen one with the squashy blood floating around in it, and the one from Direct Line in the promotional tat pile.

When I mentioned the mousemat this morning, Swishblog was outraged. “I’ve got over 200 feedback and I never got one,” he said bitterly. Maybe they just liked what I’d bought. Or the fact that I occasionally go through phases of absolutely no self-control. What was really weird was that I’d never heard of this happening before. It was like being initiated into a secret club, albeit one with a really shit welcome pack.

Two years ago, when trying desperately to forget that we were doing our finals, OIR lured me into joining a website called OKCupid. It’s run by the people who did TheSpark.com and pioneered those crack-addictive personality tests. It was like a 10,000 quizzes version of MySpace, but much less fun, although my Grease 2 and Jaws quizzes rocked the OKC community quite hard. About a year in, I got an email saying I’d been added onto The Hot List, which meant I was “hot” and could therefore look at pictures of other “hot” users. I rang OIR in a fit of “I’m not going to die alone!” excitement.

“Oh yeah, I’ve been on that for a while,” she said coolly, as if being voted hot by a load of Americans was something that happened to her everyday. I refused to be deflated. It was only after the initial smugness had worn off – yes, I was hot, but a cure for cancer was still quite a long way off – that I started questioning why it had taken a whole year to become part of this mythical list. Why was I only deemed worthy now? Was I hotter in 2005 than in 2004? And who are these people who get to pull aside the velvet rope and beckon you inside?

The point is that with all such secret clubs, you only find out when you’re in. It’s like networking. “The *** don’t employ anyone they don’t know,” said a friend of mine when I was feverishly scribbling my covering letter. “Oh,” I said, disappointed. “Well, my covering letter had better be bloody amazing then.”

I should point out that I am utterly shit at covering letters. Also, pitches. Give me something to write about and I will quite happily research, dig and delve until I have enough material to write a small book. Should I have to sell myself in the cold, exposed world of email however, I invariably come across like someone who knows what a personality is, but has only ever seen pictures of it in books.

So I wrote an email to the reviews editor of a magazine I worked at for a bit last summer.

“Yeah that's not bad. Shocking first line,” he said. I rewrote it and sent it back. “This is a bit of a tortuous sentence, and I'm not sure what it means,” he wrote. “I suspect it may mean, ‘The *** reviewer is reviewing the band they were commissioned to write about’ - perhaps a rarity on certain websites, but vaguely essential to professional journalism. Also a typo.”

Arse. Still, at least I hadn’t sent the thing off. And, most importantly, this lovely man actually gave me a load of really good advice. I think that was networking.

“I’m really good at networking,” announced a smug RBT yesterday, having just landed some freelance subbing work thanks to a friend of a friend. (Why is it always friends of friends? Why can’t our actual friends be useful?)


“Well, I’m good at networking too,” I said defensively. “I found you a load of jobs to apply for. I managed to introduce a girl I know to Kerry King at the Kerrang Awards, without having actually met him before. I hooked up an Inde journalist for an interview with the nice one out of Fightstar. I’m really good! Although the nice one out of Fightstar will probably never talk to me again.”

“Ye-es, but you have to be more selfish if you’re going to network for actual work,” said RBT, leafing through his piles of freelance money (possibly). I opened my mouth to retort, then shut it again, defeated.

The word ‘networking’ used to fill me with impotent rage. To me it was synonymous with nepotism: Daddy’s friends with the head of Conde Nast so you can go and work on Vogue for three weeks. My aunt runs a record label. My sister’s boyfriend is the chief sub on Mix Mag. That sort of thing. My parents had no interesting media contacts at all – although, bless him, last year my dad did pull out some newspaper sportsmen out of nowhere – and so I was filled with the righteous anger of one who thinks they’re being gypped. “But I’m BRILLIANT, why aren’t I working at Select in the school holidays?” I’d rage. Well, bully for you kiddo, you make your own luck.

I recently got some MySpazz messages from a girl in Cambridge who was similarly disenchanted with the networking thing. She was doing all the right things, she just didn’t have a break. “Whaddya mean you don’t network?” said a PR friend I met at Latitude. “You’re doing it now, slagging me off about Radiohead!”

I see her point in a way. You’re networking all the time. Each time you get pissed with someone, or say “Hello!” to someone you vaguely remember from a gig, or befriend someone nice you met at a festival, that’s networking. Eventually, it’s helping people out, and you can be helped out in return. It’s the same with the magazine last year. Whether or not their (very nice) reference helped to get me into Empire or not, it can’t have done anything bad for my chances.

Back to my younger self’s self-righteous grump, there is, granted, that real pisser of having to be in the field (or any field) in order to meet the people to chat to. It’s probably what was running through the minds of the magazine I wanted to pitch to: it’s much less hassle to get in people you know are reliable and known to you, than trying out somebody new.

What pissed me off when I was younger was that I knew I could do it, I just didn’t have the opportunity. Then I got off my arse and got some work experience instead. It didn’t get me a job, but it meant I would start learning what the hell I was supposed to be doing.

And right now, I’m doing it in sparkly new Adidas, as delivered to my door by eBay yesterday morning.