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.