'It is with great regret that we announce the closure of Fopp.

Our store chain is profitable, well regarded and loved by our loyal customers
and staff. However we have failed to gain the necessary support from major
stakeholders, suppliers and their credit insurers to generate sufficient working
capital to run our expanding business.

We would like to thank staff and customers for their support over the past 25
years'

ENDS

A fopp spokesperson


*****PLEASE NOTE*****

PRESS COUNSEL HAVE NO FURTHER COMMENT TO MAKE AND AS IT STANDS ARE NO LONGER IN
COMMUNICATION WITH FOPP

___________________________
Well that rather chuffs the idea of Bearded getting a distribution deal there. Where am I going to buy my mid-price books and similar when I can't be arsed to go on Amazon now? Also, what's going on with that Press Counsel statement? Either Fopp's totally disappeared off the radar or they haven't paid their PR bills. Crivens.

I am going to Glastonbury in less than four hours. Despite the fact I spent the entirety of last summer sleeping in fields accumulating a new and interesting collection of bruises, I am still not remotely prepared. I have to go and buy a tent at lunchtime. I texted my old housemate at midnight last night to ask if he could bring in my old sleeping bag (he is). My dad brought me my ancient wellies in exchange for tax forms and my mum smuggled me in some socks, which my dad then smuggled back on discovering they were his cherished sailing socks. I didn't say it was understandable or, y'know, fair.

Rather like illness or small yappy dogs, Glastonbury has always seemed to me like something that happens to other people. It's big, so obscenely big I can't even imagine. People put such emphasis on having life-changing experiences there that it's actually rather off-putting. It has a huge ethos with it. I know lots of people who are going, all of whom are scattered over 100 acres, which amounts to none. I can't remember what to take. I haven't got any binliners (shit – go and get bin liners). I was in shops buying sunglasses and belts this morning and a very exciting t-shirt and a very exciting short skirt for when I have to start using mud as leggings. I went to my friend Guy's end of year exhibition at St Martin's last night (moment for Guy – he's TOTALLY in Vogue) and after a couple of drinks went home to bake cake and make disappointingly unhippie fudge to share with the people sharing my camping bit.

I STILL DON'T HAVE A TENT.

Oh God, I don't have a tent. How much do they cost? There's a tent shop about 10 minutes from work. It shouldn't cost a load because I'll leave it for the charity appeal at the end of the weekend, but it shouldn't be shit because then the kids eventually using it will have to sleep in a fibrous sieve.

The tent still doesn't exist.

Trousers. Shall I wear my nice black trousers and get them fucked anyway, or just wear my least-favourite eBay purchase all weekend until it's destroyed (coffee-coloured ball dress, too long, deserves to die in a gasping flood of soil). Either way my tent will inevitably drown in a flood.

I almost forgot there was actual music until Olly emailed me for my number to make snap decisions on bands to see. Good grief. Bjork should be very good at least, and I am actually wetting myself at the prospect of seeing Burly Chassey roll those r's around Diamonds Are Forever.

Whinge whinge whinge. Glastonbury happens to other people. It had better happen to me when I get there. Whinge whinge ungrateful ingrate grating whinge. Bloody hell it's like being a toddler again. I'm going to two other festivals this summer which will be fine. Why this one? Nobody (touch wood) is going to rape me. Or steal from me. Or drown me in a vat of good feelings.

I will most likely come back going "Oh my God it was AMAZING." However. If I come back talking about ethics and hemp, please shoot me and scatter my ashes on AA Gill's doorstep.

*Inappropriate insertion of Emily Big Brother-esque joke about leaving job in Soho here*

I've been commissioned to write a blog about giving up smoking. This is obviously brilliant, as I am going to be paid to rant about the pointless minutiae of my life, but terrible in that I really like smoking and don't particularly want to stop.

Also, I've never tried giving up before unless I've had a really horrible hangover or been too ill to even consider the idea of putting anything other than Vicks near my lungs, so I don't really know what to do. I've joined my quitters' group at work (dreadful: I feel like I'm signing up to Pariahs Weekly) and I expect there will be patches and motivational talks, but other than that I'm a bit stumped as to how to behave in the pub, at gigs, drinking cocktails, at parties etc.

I don't smoke during the day but have an almost magnetic fixation to cigarettes when drinking/in pub/at gig/after screening/at friends' houses etc and I'm not stopping doing any of that thank you very much.

The ban, which this blog is in aid of, will be a help, but even worse, that means missing out on the gossip and camaraderie that goes on outside. Damn.

Swishblog Chris's lovely girlfriend Helen has talked about her London marching band on and off for a while now and I kept meaning to follow it up in the mindset of someone who won't because they think that potentially Helen is mad. Helen is clearly not mad, because it turns out her band do amazing things like this cover of Gravity's Rainbow by Klaxons. Sadly it doesn't have a video, but Helen has made a proper slide show to go with it and, frankly, if the sound of a marching band with full brass and the like rocking out to the UK's premier indie-not-dance band doesn't inspire you, then you're a bigger fool than I.

Normally I can count the press releases I get and actually care about on the bones of my little finger, so this was a really lovely treat in my inbox: Amiina, four nice young Icelandic girls who make lush and quirky music that sticks freakfolk in a bowl with a load of bass and fumbles it around awkwardly and probably with pom poms.

It doesn't make sense, it doesn't have to because it's LOVELY. I was slightly worried about not having anything to fall in love with this year, but with Lavender Diamond's album and this, I should be ok for the next few weeks at least.

Wibbles...

ohmygodbatmanohmygodbatmanohmygodbatman...




"Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"

"Why no actually, I turned around and ran away in the opposite direction."

Who'da thunk this was Heath Ledger?

Three confusions: the unexpected fact that the last and very sad Ugly Betty I watched turned out to be the last one I get until the leaves start falling again; whether or not I fell asleep and forget about the little girl in Heroes; and Pirates 3, just in general.

It's released on Thursday, but the big media hoo-ha screening was only last night. Generally studios do this if a) the film is crap and they don't want the press flexing their vitriol much before release or b) the film is going to make squillions anyway and they don't need to care. This was a b moment, as made obvious by the bored-looking men standing around holding screens showing clips from the trilogy.

It was actually really nice to be able to walk into the Empire without having to hand over every electrical item in your bag and thus sharpen your elbows in preparation for the post-credits scrum later on. At the same time, it seemed curiously empty. Nobody was very excited, only a handful of people in the gigantic auditorium were wearing their Pirates bandannas, and expectations in the Empire camp were low to middling. Pirates 2 was smug and safe, in the way a lot of pictures get once the characters have their own action figures. Pirates 3 was...well, it's out in three days, you can see for yourself.

Having experienced the delights of a friend being blitzed by someone on the internet the other weekend, and then been slightly less delighted when I scrolled down to find that a bunch of his friends, me included, had been brought into the middle of it, it's only now that the whole sorry affair has been removed from the internet that I can snigger gleefully at this. Actually that's a flagrant lie, I'd have laughed anyway. Although I love paintball, and if my skin was tougher and I wasn't such a mimsying pansy I'd totally take it up professionally.

"So many memories, shared and archived…

…the day I met him, and I told all of you, “This could be THE one, or the NEXT one.”

…the night he proposed, and the morning he forgot he proposed.

…Great America… Hedonism II… Camping (I still have the scar!)… Meet the Parents (more scars, only on inside! LOL)… Hedonism III…

…the time he cheated on me with my own cousin but I forgave him because she had cancer and he was just making her feel good about herself but then it turned out she never had cancer and I still forgave him, even though a lot of you wrote a lot of thoughtful comments advising me not to."

"If anyone sees Dave, please inform him he owes me 32 thousand dollars."

Mother of god, I don't care that it's not real.

Also, some lessons in how not to make a flaming website. These include:

- Building it, and alternative flamers from your own IP address. If you're going to fork out for it yourself, you could at least sneak off to an internet cafe. Which brings us on to...

- Don't pay for it with your own credit card. Seriously, if you want revenge, at least plot it out properly. However outraged your friends are on your behalf, they need security details.

- Get your facts right. If half of it is going to be an anguished call of love, then putting in lies the (admittedly incredibly stupid) boy in question told one of your friends and calling them fact just makes you libellous.

- Don't put in stuff about their friends. Especially not if one of them is me and you've just written them an incredibly well thought out email explaining why you are not insane. Actions like this rather negate that.

- Spell and punctuate properly. Emotional turmoil is no excuse for abusing the lower case.

The thing that pisses me off most in the world, being wrong about people. Thank god I've got coffee.

I don't really think about withdrawal very much except in connection with a) my horrific overdraft b) nicotine and c) heroin. I don't do heroin. I'm not Socttish enough. I gave up chocolate for Lent when I was 16 and was so upset after two hours of the prospect of 30 days without it that I ate three Snickers.

Nobody likes withdrawal because it reminds us that we need stuff and that's wholly at odds with the idea of being free-thinking and choosing our own path down the yellow brick road. At the moment, I'm stuck slap-bang in the middle of chemical withdrawal and it fucking sucks. Rather than writing Trainspotting via Clapham ("We've run out of organic limes!") I would just like to warn you about something you probably know about already, being more interested in life/medicine/stuff that happens outside of fiction than me.

It's called Seroxat and it fucking sucks. Before I found this out, I thought it was called Paroxetine which it is, to give it its less glamorous Tesco's Value equivalent name. The three evils of job hunting, panicking about losing any grip on writing I'd made in the last two years and whether anyone would ever employ me for longer than 9 months made me even more anxious than usual, and given my brain had a tendency to self-destruct until three years ago, my doctor went all American and thrust pills at me, ones that incidentally have the highest incidence rate and severity of withdrawal of any similar pill. Like, score!

On Friday, after a month of numbness, yawning and general meh, the pills ran out. Yesterday I burst into tears within ten minutes of getting out of bed and didn't stop for 8 hours. I wrote a furious and outraged email to a friend that was way over the top however annoyed I was, and I haven't bothered checking my inbox to find her inevitably furious and outraged reply. My boyfriend thought he'd done something wrong, but nobody had – it was just my brain suddenly realising it wasn't being zapped into numbness by suicide-enhancing anti-anxiety tablets and throwing a massive wobbler in the process.

Today I just feel sick. The sort of sick where you can't see any way of getting through it because you're about to cry anyway. Everything is misted up in a grey veil of panic and upset, about absolutely nothing, about tears and the fact my head is being denied this horrendous drug. I've taken it for a month for fuck's sake, this is utterly absurd. There's a reason people go on this for so long: coming off it is exactly that – coming off. Ironic when none of the myriad tablets I was prescribed when I was actually ill did anything other than give me something to do every morning.

I absconded to BDQ headquarters in Windsor last night and for a blissful 12 hours felt safe and happy. Then I got the train home this morning and hid behind the Style section of the Sunday Times quaking in a hot puddle of saline surrounded by burly men and yummy mummies in Wasps shirts.

Depression isn't my illness anymore and hasn't been for years. I'm no happier or sadder than anyone else in London. What I am is at the mercy of my body, and it absolutely sucks. Screw Seroxat, Paroxetine, and doctors who'll throw drugs at anything that moves because the NHS gives them sod all support to do otherwise. Don't take this drug. Don't let anyone give it to you. Eat coconut and lemon meringue ice creams instead. And smile lovingly at your Pirates 3 screening ticket for tomorrow evening. Aces.

Best Holy Moly Duty Log ever...

(If you don't know what a duty log is, it's where Disgruntled from Lancaster write in to express their concerns with their television stations. Apparently. I'm sure people write in with praise as well, but it's considerably less fun.)

"My favourite programme on TV is and always has been Heartbeat. It's one of the few programmes I allow time for. THAT IS UNTIL NOW! 8.07pm I HAVE JUST SWITCHED OFF (AND WON'T BE SWITCHING BACK ON - I DO KNOW WHERE THE OFF BUTTON IS).

The reason I have switched off is the shooting and killing of the dog. We have two similar dog's and they both had seen the dog on the TV and were barking at it. My family were all laughing 'the dogs like the show too' we said.

Then a gunshot and the dog lay DEAD. My grandchildren who were watching started to cry and I switched the show off - FOREVER. AND IT WAS BEFORE THE 9PM WATERSHED.

Everyone connected with the show is a DISGRACE."

Thirteen pups for Beethoven! It's like 101 Dalmations, only marginally more physically possible. Bless. I want a puppy. Immediately.

Yawn. Patrick Wolf has changed his mind about retiring from music and is celebrating this fact by going on a massive tour just to show how not retiring he is. Good grief. If you want a publicity stunt he could have just slept with someone. Or worn a suit.

"For me to say I was going to quit music is like saying I'm going to commit suicide," he says. "It's the most extreme thing that could happen in my life." Bless the silly chump.

From Ananova via the DJourno:

"A TV worker has been sacked for mocking the French presidential favourite in English subtitles.

"A plea by Nicholas Sarkozy for voters to join his campaign before the Sunday poll was interpreted as "rally my inflated ego".

"The subtitles were broadcast across the United States in the English news bulletins from public broadcaster France 2.

"Channel chiefs blamed it on freelance workers."

Hilarious. I'm waiting to be paid by a firm based in Spain. Apparently Spain works several weeks behind the actual world, so I sympathise with freelancers who are bored out of their wits, and rather admire their ability to crowbar a joke anywhere near the region of Sarkozy, a man who probably had a sense of humour once but decided it was spoiling the lines of his suit.

I admire anyone who has actually managed to hold on to their languages. I had to interview Marion Cotillard from the excellent Edith Piaf biog La Vie En Rose on Monday and having spoken to the PR in French had a mad crazy panic when asked if I wanted to do the interview in French.

Waiting for the next (ludicrously supercilious) PR to get her, I had horrible flashbacks to what happened when I interviewed Daniel Auteuil in French at the Hidden LFF screening. I was so nervous that I not only got my words the wrong way round but made an enormous clanger caused by having missed the only screening that week. There is no scorn like Gallic scorn or worse, pitying scorn.

Technically, I have half a degree in French. It shouldn't be a problem but for the fact that it's a degree I got three years ago, I've spoken French about six times since and mostly in Beaujolais on Litchfield Street asking what wine they'd recommend to cheer up the sad person sitting next to me.

Beaujolais is a happy place, the flipside to Ed's Diner where only bad things seem to happen to the people who end up eating their grotesquely smiley burgers. I took my dad to Beaujolais last night: it's packed full of oddly-shaped tables that don't quite fit, has ties dangling from the ceiling, blues blaring out of the speakers, over-priced bar snacks, a massive cellar, assorted cheery Frenchmen hanging around the bar and an incredibly vivacious manager who waves you off to your seat to "Rrrrrelax!" while he brings your your bill.

We had a bottle of Fleury and chatted over cigarettes and pistachios. I realised a couple of months ago that a half hour phone conversation in February was our first proper chat in about five years. My dad is brilliant and it was lovely to hang out with him, more so now that I am no longer a Vile Teenager and can actually hold a conversation without blaming my parents for something.

I nipped off to the shop to get some Sluts (Silk Cuts rather than Charing X giftshop) and was chatted up by the smooth operator behind the checkout. "Are you drinking next door? Are you drinking with your friends?" he asked.

"No, with my dad," I smiled sweetly, walking out the door. You never saw a face fall so hard.

Great piece on the BBC: French voting turn out is in the 80%s - in the estates as well as nationally, and more and more young people are voting. Depressing to think that's never the same over here, even more depressing to think I've been so focused on France I totally forgot about local elections over here. I have a horrible feeling I'm still registered in Wales...

New Harry Potter in trailer in not looking shit shocker. The Phoenix was such a lumbering dreadful disappointment that it'll be a relief for it to be slashed down into less than three hours. I'm getting excited now: last book, new film. Amazing.

Patrick Wolf's live show at the Astoria was one of my favourite things about the 11th April, but mostly of this year. So it kind of sucks that he doesn't love the press trail that goes along with music and has decided to quit (although he'll still be playing Latitude, hurrah.)

He says...

"I don't think when I was 16 and dreamt of releasing records there would ever be so much crazy speculation about the person I am and what you want me to be.

"I have become so tired of this behaviour, sometimes I wake up and have to do six hours of interviews before doing a show, then go straight to bed to sleep a couple of hours then fly to a new country to be cross-examined in the same way...I don't know what is left of me".

He adds:

"I have made a decision, my final concert will be this November, a retrospective with an orchestra in London.

"I am not sure whether there will be anymore public communications after that, in fact I am pretty sure there will be none.

"Of course, this has nothing to do with my drummer, but a creative clock is ticking and I have many many projects to be creating with my time left on this earth. I hope to share my last shows with you this year".

Hmph.

Why didn't I have a birthday party like this? It was clearly invented just for me.

"Our parties are recommended for children ages 4-13, but emotionally stunted 24-yera-olds are given priority."

I'm going to be in a play on the Edinburgh Fringe this summer.

Blonde Drama Queen texted me a couple of weeks ago to see how much holiday I could feasibly take off without getting fired.

"We're going to do W;t. Come and do it with us." she said. It's a play about a social rockface called Dr Vivian Bearing who analyses her horrific cancer treatment in much the same way as she analyses John Donne poems until it all becomes too much. It's funnier than it sounds, although it clearly doesn't end well. I played her in my last year at Durham and it was amazing.

BDQ made a "serious offer" today, which given my flathunting of late makes me feel like I'm a house. Maybe a maisonette. Or a duplex penthouse apartment overlooking the Spitz.

Other than saying "like, duh" I don't quite know what to say really because I'm actually really nervous. I'm nervous because I've only done two versions of the same play once before, for that time in Edinburgh, and then there was only a three month gap between goes. This one has a totally different cast, a sporadic rehearsal schedule and I'm worried about fucking up, partly because it's very affecting, partly because Vivian doesn't leave the stage, and partly because I'm worried about doing something retarded in front of BDQ's beady-eyed cast from Eton.

"Old Etonians I hope," said Opera Cat, who's singing at the grown-up International Festival around the same time.

"No. Proper little ones." I'm the token old person who's been wheeled in because 50's pushing it for a 16-year-old. Also, technically everyone is little to me.

"This is like your Mrs Robinson moment," she helpfully pointed out. "Only Benjamin's richer than you are."

"Awesome. So if I fuck up that's in front of someone who could buy me in 10 years time?"

"Well look on the bright side. You could end up staying in the castle."

Sheryl Crow, a woman with presumably the tightest sphincter this side of space, has turned her attention to stopping global warming by telling us to use less bog roll. Rather than foisting horribly smug charity concerts on us, she plans to restrict the amount of toilet paper people use, although quite what that's got to do with carbon footprints and fossil fuels escapes me.

She says, "Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating," (like, duh Sheryl Crow, if you don't think that who the hell else is going to?) "I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

Under the Crow regime you'll be allowed "only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required". This had better be Andrex Triple Quilted otherwise that's not just pesky but bordering on masochism. How does she plan to do this monitoring? Someone send her a copy of Monkey Dust for tips.

Paper napkins are also on Sheryl Crow's hitlist as the "height of wastefulness", so just to show how cross she is, she's designed some clothes in protest (Sleb dating forms must run along the lines of design clothes, stop poverty/global warming/orphan crisis.) They have a detachable dining sleeve which can be replaced after you've wiped your mouth after eating. Is this not the most repellent thing ever? Apart from the fact you're essentially a step away from sitting back in a high chair, it's quite hard to get a good clean grasp on your sleeve and do it without making everyone at your table feel a bit ill.

Bad Sheryl Crow. Bad.

Sheryl Crow, presumably with the tightest sphincter this side of space, appears to have got bored of failing to write any more songs and turned her attention to stopping global warming by telling us to use less bog roll. Rather than foisting horribly smug charity concerts on us, she plans to restrict the amount of toilet paper people use, although quite what that's got to do with carbon footprints and fossil fuels escapes me.

She says, "Although my ideas are in the earliest stages of development, they are, in my mind, worth investigating," (like, duh Sheryl Crow, if you don't think that who the hell else is going to?) "I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting."

Under the Crow regime you'll be allowed "only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required". This had better be Andrex Triple Quilted otherwise that's not just pesky but bordering on masochism. How does she plan to do this monitoring? Someone send her a copy of Monkey Dust for tips.

Paper napkins are also on Sheryl Crow's hitlist as the "height of wastefulness", so just to show how cross she is, she's designed some clothes in protest. They have a detachable dining sleeve which can be replaced after you've wiped your mouth after eating. Is this not the most repellent thing ever? Apart from the fact you're essentially a step away from sitting back in a high chair, it's quite hard to get a good clean grasp on your sleeve and do it without making everyone at your table feel a bit ill.

Bad Sheryl Crow. Bad.

I've no idea what this is, other than lyrics to a song a friend of mine is using to make her mind work better and transport her back to being 15. It mostly transports me back to feeling useless and panicked at university about the unlikelihood of my ever doing anything with my life, failing my degree, and ending up living in a gutter because I'd get thrown out of everywhere else. Which is cheering. Anyway. It reminds me of things being far more clear-cut. You know when you think that the world only existed in black and white and the shades of grey that my friends and I had battled out over drink and endless, stretching time. It didn't feel like it was endless though, things never do: rather like standing on a treadmill and watching the bit where you drop off coming closer. It's nearly summer now which always reminds me of being at university, idling around doing a play, singing, going for picnics and late-night jaunts. Happy, but terrified at the same time.

Kick the sheets off get out of bed
Good morning, de ja vu
Is this the best thing in my head?
Good morning, now what to do
Look at my day
What's the first appointment?
Lunch in heaven
What a disappointment

I could run away with Captain Courageous
I could live on fruit in Montego Bay
I could run a bar in a war torn front line
I could do it all
But just not today

Good morning T.V what's been said
Around the world whilst I'm in bed
Nothing changes cos we're still being fed
On little white lies and stale white bread

The latest soap show misery
Four hours, every day
I live for them and they live for me
For hours and hours every day

I could free my mind
become a rich man's guru
I could take the time just to feed the world
I could drink all day until I find all the answers
I could do it all
But just not today .....

I meant to mention this yesterday - some fucking fuckers are planning on closing down The Spitz.

This is rubbish.

I've seen some of my favourite people play some of my favourite gigs there, and been introduced to some of the worst support acts ever along with some of the best.

If you're remotely bothered, sign a petition. It probably won't do shit, but if people can get het up about the Astoria, they should certainly get het up about The Spitz.

Gumtree's opened up a whole load of new sections for people who can't find a flat/job/fuckbuddy to waste time on while praying for the fjb to materialise. It includes a thank you section which seems to be a place for people to vent ("St Thomas's Hospital is corrupt! If you're a journalist email me for the truth!") or write little private messages ("Thank you for last night. It was amazing.") and also to write little secrets that nobody will ever find. It's like postsecret all over again, an old curiosity shop filled with the spillings from people's lives. Like this one for instance.

"Thank you Maria for who you are! Thanks for being such a great, lively, friendly person. Thank you for the beauty and warmth you spread around! Your friends all adore you so much! and your smile is the most beautiful thing I have seen.
You take my breath away every time I see you. I can't speak my mind when I am near you - being close to you always makes me a bit shy and wish I could be more assertive with you. But I wish you liked me more. Thank you for allowing me to be your friend .....

I wish I could tell you how much I love you."

Dr David Lewis, formerly of the University of Sussex, and now of the Mind Lab, and most definitely of the “I’m never getting laid again” brigade, has done some research, probably to prove to women that men really are wholly unnecessary and there’s no need to get your legs waxed when you can buy a better snog from a machine.

Unsurprisingly, this essential study was funded by members of the food industry, although nobody’s owned up to forking out, although a MASSIVE clue comes from the chocolate they used was a new dark chocolate from Cadbury’s, so expect that to turn up in an ad campaign soon. It’s a crying shame that dark chocolate is hideous and vile because it is apparently quite good for you: my heart rate would probably go up in leaps and bounds too once I’d realised what I’d just eaten, shortly before washing my mouth out with bleach.

"There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz,” said Dr Lewis, who got a load of 20-somethings to melt chocolate in their mouths and then kiss which seems a bit messy, although also the best thing in the world EVER.

Of course chocolate is better than kissing, it’s utterly selfish. It’s delectably, thrillingly egotistical. You can break a piece off and give it to someone as a cursory wave towards the concept of sharing, but only you decide how much to eat of it and when. It’s up to you whether you mechanically munch your way through, or whether you press it against the roof of your mouth and suck off the layers one by one until your jaws are coated in luscious fragments of goo. You get the breaking waves of goodness smoking their way into your serotonin receptors. Cor…

Still, unless you’re in 9 and a half Weeks, you don’t generally share chocolate with people in the way you do kissing. Passing a box of Roses around the room doesn’t quite have the same frisson as curling your tongue around the inside of someone’s upper lip (unless it’s a seriously good praline in which case kissing be damned).

Although the study found that kissing raised the heartbeat, the chocolate increased heart rates more from a resting rate of about 60 beats per minute to 140. When you bear in mind that the volunteers were standing in a lab wearing electrodes attached to their skulls, and heart monitors, they’re probably going to be scared out of their wits. I’ve had electrodes on my head before and it makes you feel like Frankenstein about to sit an exam. I reckon the volunteers stressed out a bit about not getting the right result that the excitement of finally being on the test made their heart rates soar, and then getting the kissing afterwards calmed them down a bit. Either that or they were too busy concentrating on getting the chocolate off each other’s teeth to notice that their heart rates had stopped doing the tango. Funny that they don’t mention the exact results of the kissing except to say chocolate did better…

I’ve tried giving up chocolate for Lent a few times, and other than the fact I waved goodbye to the Church when I was 9 and therefore have little interest in keeping my distinctly grubby Lenten vows, it didn’t work because I love eating chocolate and have an acrimonious relationship with self-restraint.

The Cadbury’s sponsored-advert of my life will go as follows. I will be played by Julia Stiles( who will be flawlessly attired in a Petite Salope dress and Chanel accessories._

It’s Sunday. Kat (played by Julia Stiles) lies curled up on the sofa with the papers. The delicate tendrils of a Cadbury’s Picnic unfurl in her mouth. She probably makes a Bisto face.

CUT TO

Summer. SFX: The hollow ‘click’ of a barky strip of Magnum breaking off and girl then curling her upper lip around it to stop it falling down her front and making her look like messy toddler.

CUT TO

Most days in Autumn. K (pbJS) making a really gorgeous chocolate sauce and pouring it onto ice cream, then mushing it all up. Or not. Depending.

CUT TO

Cake.

CUT TO

Maltesers Easter Eggs: that lovely cloying malty chocolate in a whole egg. If you haven’t ever had one, you haven’t truly eaten chocolate. Fuck what Europe says, I like “family” milk chocolate. Cocoa content be damned.

CUT TO

Cake, also, éclairs.

CUT TO

Mavericks. Chocolate you can’t get anymore. Guerilla chocolate.

CUT TO

The massive chocolate montage. There will be a tap dance, chorus girls in a can-can line, a large pond and unleashing of doves and it will climax with everyone stringing up Johnny Depp and Gene Wilder and setting the original Roald Dahl free.

ENDS.

(No, not quite ends. There needs to be a kiss at the end, and one that makes K (pbJS) heart go significantly above 140bpm.)

That’s better.

ENDS.

I got an email from someone at Surrey university a week ago. If this was you, could you email me again as I forgot to put it into my inbox and junk's deleted it, sorry.

What I did on my holidays: got drunk mostly. And threw sticks down a very steep hill for my parents’ ridiculously over-excited dog while my mum and I sat down and soaked up spring sun.

Last week I went on holiday to Brighton sort of by accident as I’d got fed up of thinking up fun things to do and failing, and so instructed someone else to do it instead. Skirting past the surprise grannies and our general poverty it was utterly, utterly wonderful. Why haven’t I been to Brighton before? Well it’s quite far away, and I have one a bit nearer. A beach, not a Brighton. Brighton is amazing.

I drank Champagne on the beach, sifting the pebbles with my feet. I went paddling, and soon regretted that fact once the charm had worn off and I had to hobble back up cascading stones to my cigarettes. I ate a whelk (or a cockle, they both look like sticky sponge) and it wasn’t disgusting. I bought ice cream off a French man, and walked along the beachfront at night. I was spun around like a gangly carousel, and drank Old Orleans cocktails like I did when I was 17.

It was brilliant.

Later that week I got very, very drunk. Childishly, university drunk, the sort of drunk where you play pool at 3 in the afternoon and can barely see to do so because someone called Harry has just given you sambuca. I even had cocktails, bonding with my brother’s housemate in a ludicrously over-priced faux-Indian bar called Mint Leaf run almost exclusively by thickly-tongued Russians. We discussed the seemingly endless merits of Jilly Cooper and decided that Wicked was probably a recycling too far. There’s only so much sex you can have where you plunge in joyous as an otter, and seeing as Rupert Campbell-Black is pushing 60 I very much doubt he’s still Mecca to most women. Gold diggers, probably.

Falling back to Hampshire, my brother and I had a drink in the eye-gougingly awful Reef bar at Waterloo. If you haven’t had the misfortune of being drunk and thus unable to spend half an hour in Smiths instead, Reef is the sort of place where alcoholics get priests to bless their gin beforehand in case of unwanted reprisals from the dark side.

Peering over the balcony I saw Camilla Batman-Ghelidja below: she’s fairly impossible to miss because she generally wears a colourful kaftan and matching turban. She is also one of my very few dead cert heroes. I flung myself down the stairs and went starstruck. She was lovely and said “wicked” (Jilly would be proud and probably put her in her next book verbatim). I went back upstairs in a total haze and spent the next ten minutes trying to explain to my brother why that was probably the coolest thing that would happen to me this year.

I have no idea how to pronounce Ghelidja, so isn’t it rather wonderful that today’s Mother Theresa is basically Camilla Batman?

Let us now play the first line of article Kat is writing game.

“Until last week I thought that the most exciting thing that would happen to me and a lift would be if the Diet Coke man stepped out of it. How wrong I was!”

Guess what comes next. I dare you. Clue: it doesn’t involve sex or the Diet Coke man.

It’s a bit odd to be at a new job now, having been somewhere else for two years. Sort of lonely. Still, nothing the Edith Piaf film and a trip to Patrick Wolf can’t temporarily sellotape together.

OMG! It's sea otters! HOLDING HANDS! This is almost better than BBC Panda Day which almost had me in a dribbling heap on the floor.

Chris Swishblog did this for his dissertation or something (yes: otters holding hands) and he thinks they're not really best friends but battling the current or something. Which is obviously far too disappointing to take as fact and shall henceforth be ignored.

My brother and I are arguing over which is worse: job hunting or flat hunting. I say flat, he says job. Then again I've just got a new job and he lives in a palace where he never has to do any cooking. It also helps the argument that he's looking for dollars and I move out in July – yes it's early, but I've been looking since last March. I do that: I have a domestic clock that yearns for elegant chairs rather than toddlers.

I'd been job hunting for a week before I realised that I'd never actually been job hunting before and had no idea what the fuck I was doing. Before you start chuntering about jobs-in-laps, silver spoons strapped to tonsils etc, I'm not as fiscally helpless as my accent might otherwise suggest. I've had a job since I was 15 and working in the kitchen of a dreadful pseudo-Swiss patisserie in our local town. It was vile. It was run by a vile woman called Mel who got herself vilely pregnant with a child who, if they'd known what they were in for, would probably have stayed in the womb and pretended to be an ulcer.

Other crap Kat jobs include:

- Life modelling. Sounds glamorous and daring, isn't. At the time, The Archers was mid-way through Siobhan and Brian's fling which always meant I'd get over-excited and move, thus engendering the rage of whichever pretentious artist was scribbling my thighs at the time.

- Bars. Every student works in bars. It's part of the course.

- Box packing. Clutching my degree in French and Italian, I strode purposefully to the temp agency in Durham, only to discover that the only thing they needed was people to pack boxes of reconstituted meat. Yes, I packed meat.

- Victorian street tour seller. Trying to make money during an Edinburgh show I donned my best Victorian garb and attempted to sell tickets in the middle of the Royal Mile. Hideously embarrassing, lasted half an hour before scuttling off to the pub.

- School French assistant. Not in any way a crap job – come on, teaching adorable little children how to make convincing French horse noises for their end of year show? – but had immense backfiring effect of my insisting I be called 'Madame' for the two weeks afterwards and confusing myself with having actual teaching abilities.

My favourite job, in the sense of "I love the fact I did that," rather than actually liking the work was when I started temping in Cardiff. My secretarial-ish course, forked out by my mother in the vague hope that I'd marry a banker, was no use whatsoever so I worked as a dinner lady. I had a hair net and was driven off to school everyday in a big black car that looked like a hearse. In the first school, a primary with cheery Welsh doctrine drawn on the walls in wobbly crayon, I was in charge of pudding, which meant that in the eyes of small children I had a power akin to that of God.

The second school was a secondary, whose kitchen was staffed almost exclusively by bullet-faced females and disenfranchised Polish artists who worshipped at the altar of Vitamin Chip. While I would generally sell my own father for a plate of oven-fried and ketchup, the smell of oil and merciless ignorance of vegetables made me feel like I was leading all these nice children to an early grave instead of expanding their frontal lobes and preparing them for the afternoon ahead.

But job hunting, for a real, proper job instead of something to tide me over between bottles of gin at college and university, I'd never done before. It's really boring and un-fun, right up until people start looking at you like they actually want to employ you. The last time I looked, nobody wanted to employ me at all, and I had to combine outrageous amounts of luck and actual knowing stuff to get jobs that I was lucky enough to adore. The fact that people would apparently like to employ me now surprised me so much I've spent the last week bankrupting myself with celebratory eBay purchases/bottles of drink/expensive bottles of drink with £16 off which means I have to buy them even though I'm already hung over and likely to be very sick if I drink them.

The result, somewhat inevitably, is that I woke up on Sunday going "What have you done you stupid cow?" and my bank have sent wolves after me. I'm sure they must have wolves. Film Joe got a letter from our collective bank telling him he was over his overdraft limit that was dated 25 December. Do these people never sleep? Still, with a new job comes great responsibility or something. Bring out my catsuit.

An email! From a celebrity!

Hey Kat

Thank you for your support throughout my time here in the UK.
If you can, please join me on Sunday night at the Shepherds Bush Empire, London, for the final performance of the tour, including aftershow party.

Doors 7pm, i'll be on stage at 8:45pm
Please RSVP **@**.**

All the best
Steven Seagal

Steven Seagal knows my name! Or at least a PR has managed to give that impression through the magic of mail merge! This should be outstanding.

The man is, of course, mad. I was going to interview him last year (on Boxing Day for some ridiculous reason) so a friend who'd also interviewed him sent over these extra treat facts gleaned from the interview with the suavely fruitlooped one:

— He once encountered a mystical white dog that spoke to him in English and told him his dojo was on fire. He never saw the dog again.

— His favourite film is Regarding Henry.

— He also loves Ringu and other "Chinese" ghost stories

— He owns many pets, including a llama, several cows, Rottweilers and cats. He doesn't have to keep the dogs and the cats separate, as they are all friends.

— The last film he saw was the remake of The Hills Have Eyes. He liked it but had a problem with the lighting.

— He rewrote all of Tommy Lee Jones' dialogue for Under Siege.

Good times.

On another email tip, I am currently locked in battle with some man called Daniel Miller about a preview I wrote for le-cool.com about 300 at the Imax. I loved 300. The big screen version is incredible, really beautiful and spectacularly well choreographed. I didn't find it particularly gay, or particularly hot, just fascinating. The people I was with thought it was the gayest thing they'd seen in months, so I put this into the preview.

Now, despite not apparently having seen the film, according to DM 300 is a "racist, fascist, chauvinist film" and I am a "glib propogandist" for saying otherwise. Bollocks. If I were any form of propogandist I would smoke a cigar and have posters with me pointing my finger angrily at conscientious objectors.

(EDIT: This no doubt mature and in no way poorly endowed specimen of a man has now posted our entire email exchange on his website. Is it just me, or is that really rather rude? While it's quite exciting to be subject to a smear campaign, I do rather wish it had been done by someone capable of using English and not making it cry in the process.)

Three emails later, he urges me to read reviews before I make my mind up (because seeing a film with your own eyes counts for so much less) before finishing with this magnificent line: "In the meantime you are cheerleading fascism, and as such making yourself a friend of the fascism which is presently engulfing our planet. I leave it you to consider whether or not you think that this is a role that you are happy to play."

I pointed out that no, actually being called a fascist made me rather cross, but this got no reply. I asked him three times if he'd seen the film which he's totally failed to answer - I mean god, if you're going to argue about the content of a film, at least watch the bloody thing before clambering up onto your giant high horse.

So then, facts to beware of. If you like 300, you are little better than the Mosleys because while you might think it's about a story that came to life as pottery decoration it's really about how the West is so much better than the East (and how English is the only acceptable accent for anything to do with Ancient Rome/Greek heroes) and that being portrayed as straight is infinitely better than being portrayed as gay (dear lord, Spartacus anyone?) Also, READ REVIEWS. Because they are the law. Pitchfork will be thrilled, Jet probably less so.

Interesting debate on the Guardian about same.

In other news, I went to Slough this morning for a job interview. It is very annoying to get to at 7am, and its Debenhams has the worse underwear department I've ever seen. It was sunny though and I got to do some grammar tests, so it wasn't a total loss, although after my second interview I noticed that my frothy coffee thing had left chocolate powder all the way up the left side of my mouth so I looked like a grubby toddler rather than an efficient and desirable employee entirely deserving of a significant pay increase. Damn.

I've spent the last week re-learning about girls magazines in order to write a feature for Mizz. By re-learning, I of course mean reading, and since that was mostly on a bus in the unfriendly wilds of extreme North London I felt like a paedo of extreme proportions. Although paedos probably live in other parts of London, but still.

Anyway, the feature is done and I had to write a QUIZ to go with it. Now, ordinarily I love quizzes more than I love golden syrup on ice cream, but in this instance I kept on wanting to write "GIRLS! Don't have sex."

Take the quiz, but be warned, you'll spend the next hour using words like "goss" and "snogs".

WHAT'S YOUR STAR POTENTIAL?

1) You’ve got a supercool party to go to, but nothing to wear. Do you:

A) Refuse to go to the party and stay at home moping.
B) Get the girls round and make new outfits from all your clothes.
C) Throw a hissy fit and DEMAND that your mum buys you a new top.

2) You’ve got a school project to finish but it’s really boring. Do you:

A) Completely panic and paint your nails instead.
B) Do it as quickly as you can, then reward yourself with something fun.
C) Bat your eyelashes at the school geek until he does it for you.

3) You win a prize at school and have to make a speech. Do you:

A) Get your mum to phone in sick and pray nobody notices.
B) Thank the people who helped you win the prize
C) Grab the mic and thank everyone you’ve met in your entire life – for 30 minutes.


Mostly As
Scaredy Cat
You’d like to be famous, but it seems like too much hard work. Be brave and you could surprise yourself!

Mostly Bs
Hollywood Sweetheart
You’re dedicated and great to be around – the perfect girl next door, just like Kirsten!

Mostly Cs
Diamond Diva
You want it bad but your attitude’s a bit scary. Fame’s no fun without people to share it with, so lighten up!

According to the Guardian's cutesie little career profiler I am a stress loving mercenary mother hen. Now, pardon me while I entirely fail to realise how it's possible to only care about me and my job when "the people you work with are like your babies. Little children to be protected". Also, stress is rubbish. I'm not fond. Although the whole deadline/last minute thing is quite good I suppose. And I did all my university coursework at the last possible minute. Oh, hang on...

My nemises have ganged up on me: either that or Sainsburys staff are more twisted than I thought. The vegetable section has changed into something out of Silence of the Lambs. The bananas are on the right, breathing their spider-harbouring odour at you, the brussel sprouts are on the left, probably about to masturbate onto your ear, the oranges sit wussily on the end trying to look like they're only there by accident (not Lecter-like, just being oranges).

This being a particularly yoga-organic area of South London, the banana section stretches on for a good three or four feet more than it ought to, but what's with brussel sprouts? You eat them once a year and then they go away to wherever it is brussel sprouts go when they're out of favour. These are the rules, this is the only reason kids will eat their one solitary sprout, because they know it's the only time of the year that they have to.

The idea that people eat brussel sprouts out of choice is incredibly disturbing. It's like those people that enjoy eating cabbage and cauliflower. Cabbage tastes of squeaky dishcloths. Cauliflower tastes of flowery, mouldy dishcloths. They both taste of nightmares. Whenever people try to convince me otherwise, that these are actually delicious vegetables, it tends to be along the lines of "You really need to sprinkle on some nutmeg and lemon juice to bring out the flavour, or whip up a really good béchamel for the cauliflower," basically telling me that these delicious vegetables only taste good when they've been DISGUISED, in much the same way as the Grinch trying to steal Christmas by putting on a Santa suit. Either way, in the end they both fuck up and nobody is fooled.

On the way home I was disappointed to see that my only Sunday religion, the Style section of the Sunday Times, was having a man's week. The Style men's issues are mostly quite boring and this week their bit of totty was the tamely underwhelming lady from the M&S undie ads. Crikey. A few pages on, AA Gill was being reliably vitriolic, this time about the concept of having a hero, with some fairly rushed interview jobs with Style-friendly stars tacked onto the end (Stephen Jones the milliner picks Stephen Jones the rugby player because "We share the same name and my mum fancies him". Shudder. Also, Stephen who?)

Heroes the TV show, I'm fully on board with. It's brilliant. The concept of having heroes though, personal ones, I'm a bit unsure of. I don't even think I have any heroes anymore – lots of people I admire, absolutely, people I get a bit nervous around, definitely, people I'd freak out at the idea of meeting, maybe a handful. All the literary, musical and cinematic heroes have been dulled a bit through having met a lot of the last two sides and realised they're mostly normal and non-starry, except Richard E Grant who I asked to sign my copy of Withnails and went back to work in a gibbering state grinning like some insane lunatic.

So, heroes as of now.

1) Mam'selle at my first primary school. She held regular reading hours with my class where we'd read along to books like The Witches. She read like my dad: every line felt like words were being stitched into our heads on a big tapestry, lots of drama and excitement. If kids had that sort of thing now, they'd read more.

2) The "Angel of Peckham" Camila Batmanghelidjh. Born into a wealthy Iranian family, she studied in the UK before the Iranian revolutions basically wiped out her entire personal history and she had to stay permanently. She become a psychotherapist, and then stopped her mortgage repayments in order to found Place2Be, and later on founded the charity Kids Company. Both help vulnerable children. A woman who makes you feel better about the world really.

3) AA Gill and Dorothy Parker, for making words dance on the page.

4) Whoever invented the name Bohemian Raspberry as an ice-cream flavour. Being Ben and Jerrys it is of course, disgusting, which is why I got Pralines and Cream Haagen Dazs to mop up the disappointment afterwards.

I am a lucky girl. Frequently this needs to be pointed out to me, not in the sense of poor children in Africa, people who live in Camden etc, but that I do something I enjoy and am surrounded by people who are fun, clever and think that I’m good.

It’s difficult to think of yourself objectively, mostly because you’re stuck in your head and have no way of clambering out and standing there to dole out praise or slaps where necessary. This isn’t depression, it’s a state of mind, it’s something you’ve got used to, like sleepwalking through getting up every morning.

It’s odd how we need accolades from others in order to feel valid in what we do. We’ve become a society so intent on celebrating ourselves that by rights we should be confident to the point of unbearable. I know several fantastically gifted bloggers who brush off their skills as something akin to cleaning the toilet once a week. Again, I know beautiful people who don’t believe that they are, and then there are those who despite being outwardly confident to the point of arrogance possess a level of self-loathing that most masturbating Catholics would whistle at.

There’s modesty, and then there’s being crippled by low confidence. Modesty can only go so far before it becomes a hobbling set-back. It should make me feel better, or less alone, to know how many people I love and respect have fidgets about aspects of themselves that are, to me, truly awe-inspiring, but it doesn’t. This being of course because I can see what they can’t. And they can see what I can’t. And, try as we might, there’s no way of combining the two.