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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice things I've got in the post recently:

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

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

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

Mum phoned me a couple of months ago in rapture.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Cancer Bats have come to destroy. Fueled by a burning desire to rage harder, play louder and have more fun than any other band, Cancer Bats mix hardcore, southern metal and rock into a lethal rock and roll explosion."

Seriously, where do they get these names...

'We are happy to announce that Rainydayfuckparade are set to finally release their 4-song mini album “Meridian” through Midmarch Records.'

And, by God, so am I.

Things that aren't bands called Rainydayfuckparade that are cheering me today:

- Avenue D
- Rebellion (Lies). Again and again and again.
- The Presets. Ditto.
- Terry Pratchett finally writing a good kids book in Wintersmith.
- The fact that I am entirely unbothered by paying 80p for two slices of toast when it tastes as good as it does.
- The prospect of watching a shit film being righteously mocked by Robin Ince this evening.
- All the goodies I was sent this morning. Even if one of them was the New Rhodes album.
- The mental image of one man single-handedly rescuing art from a flooded basement.

'The Sunshine Underground will be doing interviews on Friday 20th October "before lunchtime"'

Inverted commas. Why?



(This is today's favourite video. MissYOUlikeNOThavingAholeINmyHEADif I hadONE by The Errorplains. So cute and yet so ANGRY.)

Should you be one of the terrifyingly numerous people who rang up suicide hotlines when Take That split back when I was 12, then the news of their new single should fill you with joy. Unfortunately, it's crap. Listen to it here if you haven't already and absolutely must.

My little brother has just been asked to go to the Caribbean with his West Coast lover.

While this is excellent news for my brother and his rapidly fading tan, it's making me start thinking of pissing off somewhere, with or without someone. Another trip to Berlin should be on the cards soon - oh yes indeed.

There’s some curious gene that rouses itself in Autumn, making previously agoraphobic people want to wrap up in scarves and plaid skirts and aim for the nearest green space to go for long walks. (Lesson to all of you: just because it’s green doesn’t make it nature.) Anyway, it makes them feel like romance can happen, which is nonsense. Romance can never happen in plaid. As Blaine Harrison from Mystery Jets pointed out in the Observer yesterday, “I have never felt love with someone walking hand-in-hand through a field of bluebells” and that goes double for grown-ups walking through piles of leaves.

Maybe it was growing up unhappily in the countryside, but I get horrendously agoraphobic when confronted with sunny Sundays. It’s like having a particularly aggressive gym teacher banging on your door and saying “Come on, you shouldn’t be locked inside on a day like this.” Au contraire dear Mrs Eaton, it’s on days like these that you can delight in locking yourself away from good weather. It’s Sunday, the day that was made for hiding away, the one day of the week you can be as lazy as you like and nobody will argue with you because it’s the way life is. You should chuck the key away just to show how much you’re going to enjoy luxuriating in the fact that you could be outside, but you aren’t because it’s 6pm and you’re still in your dressing gown.

If I were famous, Sundays would be paydirt for the paparazzi. Yesterday, I went to the shop in dressing gown, coat and flip-flops to get the papers, looking like Jade Goody’s less-attractive hobo sister. That’s what I do on Sundays that haven’t got plans in – I like to luxuriate in being entirely off-duty from having to faff around with eyeliner or nice clothing. It’s ritualistic and glorious, and entirely why going for bracing walks in plaid have absolutely no place in my weekend life unless it’s Saturday or I’ve somehow ended up in a Beatrix Potter book.

Hiding away yesterday meant that I got to catch up on all the crap television I’d failed to watch throughout the last week so let’s have a great big cheer for whoever invented BitTorrent and thus TV at American speed. And then a big boo for Gilmore Girls singularly failing to be even vaguely entertaining in its season opener. (“It’s an axis of evil contrived entirely by televisual witches,” protested Film Joe when I ditched his internet-self to watch it. Well, yeah, but anything that has a script 20 pages longer than any average television programme of the same length, and with more pop/culture references than your average cartoon earns my respect and love. Especially over seven seasons.)

More telly. Grey’s Anatomy, still not annoying enough to stop me watching it. America’s Next Top Model, needs more mentals in it. Yes, more. Still, at least it’s not the British version which made me want to poke out not only my own eyes, but those of everyone who had anything to do with it. I passed Lucy, the iD-a-like one, on Friday. She is tiny and not a supermodel. Studio 60 is utterly brilliant. Matthew Perry – we only lost faith for a few years, but you are now re-loved again with all the peak-Chandler passion of another time.

Before the television marathon began, RBT and I recovered from Saturday’s exploits by watching Happy Days (the Chachi sells his soul episode) and Melinda and Melinda which was just dreadful. Not even dreadful in an enjoyable car crash way, but in a “Oh God Radha Mitchell, I’d rather put the last half hour of Silent Hill on repeat than sit through this horrible film ever again” way. Woody Allen, sort it out. You had a fantastic cast and you still made another crap film you utter fool.

This made us all marginally more receptive to the new Robin Hood which, FYI, is like the BBC put their heads together and went “Hmm, what ratio of indie boys to tight outfits would be the most likely to give Kat an excuse to dribble all over herself.” Every other man in it looks like he’s just fallen out of an indie club. Guy of Gisborne broods like he’s just spilled JD on his Converse, the Scarlet boys look so surly that their eyebrows stand out a good three inches from their foreheads. It’s a sea of dark haired, skinny, unhealthily pale boys and that, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely what I want to be locked in the house with on a Sunday afternoon.

More useless linkage today. Oxford Street is currently having its numerous sins washed away by a downpour of hitherto untapped torrential proportions and nothing interesting has happened to me of late other than the site I edit almost-but-not-quite winning an award, drinking lots of free booze, being hit on by someone I was 104% sure was gay, getting the same window seat during last orders at the Chandos for the third time in a row (crazy magic), eating some soup, watching Borat, Russell Crowe in film, more soup, ice cream. You can't observe anything on that. Christ I need to get out more.


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Click here for Iggy Pop's rider: 18 pages of stream of consciousness bollocks that should be treasured by anyone with eyes.

Which Britpop Band Are You?

You are Blur. You're daring, fun, and a breath of fresh air. Some people may find you intimidating, but generally you're well liked. You have a tendency to speak without thinking, which usually comes back to bite you in the arse but you have a good heart and everything you say should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Take this quiz!








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Drunk bear captured near elementary school. Seriously. Watch the video - that's 20,000 calories worth of fermented apples sloshing around inside that bear...

Having spent all of yesterday listening to the new Jet album on repeat while writing the Q podcast script (very very Beatles, very very nicked from everyone else ever, strangely addictive when listened to 15 times in a row) today got me a delicious musical recompense in the form of Lebanon/France/England pop tart Mika.

I was supposed to be interviewing him at either 3.20, 12.30, 2pm or 3pm depending on Universal's everchanging press schedule, but that all got shot to shit and canned to some as yet un-named day. This matters not because I've spent pretty much the whole morning and most of the afternoon grinning inside and fighting an urge to sing along to the yodelling bits and cartoony gloriousness of it all. 'Relax, Take It Easy' is like a considerably better version of how the Scissor Sisters might sound if they covered the Bee Gees covering The Cure, while 'Grace Kelly' just makes me terribly, terribly pleased. It sounds all Kinks-ish at the beginning which is rather wonderful.

Think Prince, Freddie Mercury and Jake Shears having a fight to see who's the most flamboyant and you're pretty much there. OUTSTANDING pop music from someone who is going to go absolutely mahussive if Radio1 pays the proper attention. Check out some tunes here

I want one of these.

For assorted reasons, I need this in my life.

Best worst thing said all day.

Kimberly Stewart: "Also, breast cancer is a disease close to every girl's heart."

"...!"

I panic at job interviews. Or rather, I panic at interviews for jobs I really want. The interview for my current job was made even worse by the fact that at the time the job didn’t exist so I was utterly clueless about what, if anything I would end up doing and what this all-powerful man sitting in front of me wanted.

This ended up with me expanding on my musical knowledge to the extent that when I was being asked about my grassroots involvement in promoting music, my brain finally exploded and went careering down the route titled “BRAZEN LIES.”

“Well, I’ve been in a number of music videos,” I said, inwardly crying No! You haven’t! What are you talking about you loopy cretin?

“Really?” said my future boss looking impressed. “What bands?”

“Oh, they were all really small ones, so nobody you’d have heard of. Friends of friends sort of thing.” Stop talking now Katherine, just shut up.

My brain a-righted itself shortly afterwards, but I was still feeling guilty enough about my utterly pointless lies to apply to be in a video for the brilliant Noisettes (who did absolutely killer sets at Latitude and Reading). It’s for their new single ‘Don’t Give Up’, and I trotted along to Brick Lane on Saturday looking like I’d fallen out of Shoreditch having thrown glittery socks and hairspray at the situation. (“Dress like you’re going to a gig,” said the casting man. What, sweaty and covered in work? I think bloody not.)

Facts:

- Bank station bus stop C does not exist. There is only N and they haven’t changed the signs.
- Taxis from Bank to Brick Lane cost just over £7.
- A smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel at the 24 hour bagelry costs £1.59 compared to Bagelmania’s outrageous £2.99

The studio was hidden behind the sort of corrugated iron/barbed wire arrangement that makes you think of slaughterhouses and disused factories. As the studio is a disused factory, this makes slightly more sense. Inside the wrangling room like the leftovers of a student party – fag ends on the floor, a sofa so depressed that it requires the help of two people to get you back out of it, and art on the wall with what looks like a bullock-faced deer shaking hands with some kind of nightmarish cartoon. The only things that point out what it is are the tables covered in mirrors, make-up and hair stuff, the endless staff, drinks tables, a chicken in a cage and the band. The man with the green stripe over his eyes could quite easily be a party left-over.

The other extras are divided into ones that talk, ones that don’t, and one who pisses me off immediately by talking like a diva. Sweetie, there’s only one diva allowed here, and she’s the one wearing the tutu dress and having UV paint applied to her cheekbones. Much beer is bought, and drunk, then later wine is also bought and drunk. Girls are swept away to the make-up and hair chairs and come back looking like contemporaries of Peaches Geldof. Boys come back with glittery stars on their cheeks, and the three 14-year-old Pete Doherty wannabes from Guildford lurk around in the corner looking terribly cool, but not quite pulling it off due to their voices not having broken yet.

My worrying over being 20 minutes late (a mother hang-up – if I am going to be five minutes late anywhere I start sweating) are naturally kyboshed when we’re still sitting around at gone 9, on our fourth beer and munching on bagels we bought in bulk at the bagelry. Stories are swapped – one girl managed to be hospitalised after getting electrocuted by a garden tap – and the same 20-second burst of ‘Don’t Give Up’ blares out of the next door studio from time to time. Jamie the drummer comes and shakes hands with everyone in the methodical way of a cheerier politician, and guitarist Dan has his hair made bigger, while Shingai and her family joke around in hooting, whooping giggles.

A shopfitter called Adam, a lovely girl called Kim and I are the only ones not to get primped by the hair and make-up people. We look fine apparently. This is NOT the point at all – being primped is terribly important and we want it to happen to us. I lurk hopefully by the unimpressed make-up artist (clad in glorious green tracksuit top, sort of like Goldie Lookin’ Chain if they shopped in Hoxton). This doesn’t work in the slightest.

I knew about the waiting. This was not a problem. We smoked, drank, chatted more and peered at the chicken who purred disarmingly and was soft as a kitten. (“She’s called Korma and is going to be thrown across the stage”) One of the extras lives round the corner from me, another one lives near my grandparents, and Kim went to school with some of my friends. The world is tiny, even on a Saturday.

Jamie comes round with a tray of Quality Street for us. This is lovely. It’s less lovely when the chocolates turn out to be all white and elderly, but goes back to loveliness level 10 when the production manager runs off and gets some Celebrations instead. We’re, like, totally spoiled.

We’d almost forgotten what we were doing there when we finally got called in. The set was all terribly voodoo, skeletons, UV bits painted on walls, and a big Baron Samedi stick wearing a top hat that Shingai pranced around with. We were arranged around the sides of the stage - Adam and I next to the skeleton and in front of a coat rack that kept on sticking in our backs when we jumped around. The lights were fiddled with, the director shouted out for the music to go on and suddenly there was lots of music and the band were jumping around and, er, so were we.

Dancing on demand is rubbish, especially when you’ve got precisely 15 square inches to do it in. It requires too many decisions. Potentially, a whole inch of you could be on the telly so what do you do? Do you mosh (which looks fucking retarded when you’re wearing a mini skirt and are not a boy), do some kind of ridiculous dance move? Fuck it, just pretend you’re shit faced in Barfly.

After about the fifth take though, everyone suddenly got into it. Takes would be finished, everyone would clap and look around each other grinning like fools. As time went on, people got more ridiculous – “Hit the stage!” Shingai demanded and we all beat the stage like kow-towing crowdsurfers. Girls clawed the air in voodoo trances, everyone shouted “Don’t Give Up!” over and over again…and then it would all stop and we’d stand there grinning again and occasionally going “Woo”.

Just when I was getting into my half-mosh half-insane Monkee dance, Shingai grabs my hand and yanks me on stage. There is some stumbling, some swooning and then before I know it I’ve stumbled back into the fireplace, one arm lounging artistically round my face.

(“Arse first or head first?” asked RBT later.

“Arse first. It was ARTISTIC. There was lounging and it was VERY COOL,” I snapped.)

I don’t think my Courtney Cox moment will end up on film. This is probably a good thing because I can’t actually dance. (“Congratulations, you’re only a tampon ad away from fame,” texted Chris from the middle of his 42-hour Bond marathon.) I met some really nice people, had some drinks and a giggle, and got to do something that I’d never ordinarily see happening. All I need now is two more videos and I can look my boss in the face again. Meanwhile, I’m off to go and dance in front of my mirror and practise moshing on cue.

Facts:

- The Noisette boys are lovely.
- Shingai has a laugh that could set off car alarms.
- She also knows a very chic looking man with blue sideburns.
- This is their first video with a proper budget and crew and everything, the last were shot by their mates.
- The Violet Orchid cocktail at the Casa bar on Brick Lane is very, very nice. The barman, however, is a bit sleazy.

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.