5:31 PM
What I really did on my stag night:
http://www.patrick.fm/boobies/boobies.php?text=sumption
Mwahahaha - fooled you ;-)

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9:20 AM
Just returned from my latest London trip with my wedding wardrobe. Got a black suit from Paul Smith, with extra long teddy boy-style drape jacket (to see it on the website, go to New Collections -> PS -> 8 of 11). BRIGHT pink Comme des Garcons shirt from Browns, pair of black winklepicker shoes from a rockabilly shop in Aldgate (I was really tempted by some black cowboy boot/clown style shoes which I saw in Pineal Eye - huge pointed front, extended about 15cm beyond the end of the foot, but they were £400 more than the winklepickers, and hence somewhat out of my league), pink bootlace tie and almost-flourescent pink socks, also from the rockabilly shop. Ed is making me a belt, buttonhole (pink leather orchid) and ring, and is pestering Philip Treacy for a cheap hat, something kinda Fedora-style I think.

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9:14 AM
I want a Utilikilt

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2:11 AM
Wow - just listened to a muchly inspiring show on Radio 4 - With Great Pleasure, favourite readings picked by Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector (or was that Rektor) of the Royal College of Arts.

Take one step back - before I turned the lights out and the radio on, I was reading from Matthew Parris's autobiography "Chance Witness". Parris is one of those rare people who comes across as completely frank in everything that he writes, and as such I respect him a lot and enjoy his writing - so I was interested when I found out recently that he's Lester's cousin. Lester's dad then said he would lend me the autobiography (he generally praised the book to me, amid mumblings of excuses that he found it "rather too confessional" and wished that Matthew didn't bang on (oo-err) about his homosexuality quite so much). Anyway, I was reading about Parris's childhood years in Cyprus and Africa... and as ever when I read about peoples' childhoods, parts of my own early life that have long been submerged come back to me with sudden clarity. And this set the scene for my listening.

Frayling grabbed my attention by starting with some classic Molesworth from Down With Skool - I'd almost completely forgotten the Molesworth books, but when I was 9 or 10 I loved them yet never quite "got" them - they were so clearly of a previous age, with slang that meant nothing to me and practices now quite outdated, but also they weren't like books that you read from beginning to end. I loved the fact that you could sit and read page after page, or just dip in to find one funny bit, and I think for that reason they used to live by my bedside for ages unlike "story" books which would last a night or two and then be thrown aside for the next good read.

The excerpt related to French teachers, and I didn't catch very much of it, but here's some more classic Molesworth found online which any fule should kno:

a) the russians are roters
b) americans are swankpots
c) the french are slack
d) the germans are unspeakable
e) the rest are as bad if not worse than the above
f) the british are brave super and noble cheers cheers cheers.

Next came some Italo Calvino reminiscing about a childhood obsessed with cinema. I was recently lamenting the fact that I have no golden (should that be silver?) memories of film from my youth - I'd been listening, post-Joe Strummer's death, to The Clash's Combat Rock for the first time in 18 years, and was thrilled to find that Death is a Star still made my spine tinglier than any other song. And I realised for the first time that the lyrics are about cinema nostalgia - about being caught up in films that show events that make your spine tingle, not about the spine tingling events themselves.

So lying here, listening to the radio, I searched for some cinema nostalgia of my own - and I dug up a little, albeit candy-coloured 70s spangles, no silver screen for this phantom. Well... p'raps that's not quite true. There was the 10p childrens' Saturday morning cinema show at the Odeon - the same format every week - an episode of Flash Gordon, no less gripping for being 40 years old and black-and-white, followed by some Looney Tunes, an old guy who would walk around the auditorium playing "When the Saints go Marching In" on his trumpet, Roy Castle-style, and something by the Childrens' Film Foundation which was always (a) boring as hell and (b) scary because the kids in it always did things which had me hiding my head in my hands muttering to myself "no... don't do it... it's all bound to go wrong... you'll get killed/kidnapped by the ugly guy/beaten up by the local bully/caught by a grown-up" (I was then and still remain one of the biggest cowards I have ever known). Actually, I'm sure there was something else, some main feature that made it all worthwhile. Or perhaps I just went along for the cartoons.

One time I turned up without my 10p - can't remember quite what happened, perhaps my Mum dropped me off in a rush and left before I could ask for it, or I lost it on the way there or something. I'm not sure what the outcome was either - perhaps I was allowed in after all, I certainly don't remember walking the streets of Twickenham for hours until my Mum found me - but I certainly do seem to remember having a long and incredibly stressful argument with the woman on the door. What did she think I, a child of about 7, was doing - pretending I'd lost the money so I could sneak in for free? Come on! I just told you what I coward I was/am. Actually, come to think of it I think I did sneak in when her back was turned. Perhaps not so cowardly after all. Yeah... dunno whether this is false memory coming out, but I do remember sneaking in and feeling a warm glow of succesful subversion for the whole afternoon.

Other than that... I think my first films were Herbie ones... Herbie goes to Monte Carlo, Herbie Rides Again, that kinda stuff. I think one of them we only got to see halfway through, because Hannah was sick and we had to leave. God, I loved that clever little car though.

Then there was Star Wars - that wasn't so much a film as a way of life. I got huge kudos (in my own mind, at least) from the fact that my dad went to see some kind of industry preview a few weeks before it was released, and I was the first in our class to get Star Wars excitement, I spread the word like an Aussie Jedi. The film, of course, was the best thing ever to happen, only midly dulled by the fact that the Star Wars figure I owned was Ben Knobi in his boring brown flares, brown vinyl cape and retractible (it hid inside his hand) light sabre. Hannah had R2D2, which was far more interesting because it had all different coloured bits on it, and I think the head clicked when you turned it (the action on Knobi's light sabre was most unrewarding).

Then there was James Bond in The Spy Who Loved Me (until a couple of months ago, the only Bond movie I'd ever been to see in the cinema) with accompanying white Lotus Esprit (now there's a real toy, probably the best of my entire childhood, with its retractible fins and four firing red missiles. Unfortunately, I played with it mostly at the nursery where my Mum worked, and where I hung out after school. The rug there had a habit of shedding bits around the axles, and at the same time the missiles could only be lost a certain number of times before they were never found again. The design of that car inspired me for years to come - I ended up writing a story about a spider secret agent who drove something very similar but with a camoflague paint job, and when I went to secondary school I even made a motorised version of the spider's car for a design technology project). I think I saw The Spy Who Loved Me on the same day as a Pink Panther film (Return of... Revenge of... I dunno which) and my friend (Jason Hallett?) and I were amazed that the Pink Panther film was a U certificate and the Bond an A - OK, so the Bond probably had more double entendre (then again, probably not), but the to-die-for female Russian spy in the Pink Panther film was virtually naked at one point... our eyes were almost on the floor!

Back to the Radio 4... there was some Shakespeare next. Odd one out. I've never really been a big Shakespeare fan - the speech-processing centre of my brain doesn't work fast enough to translate archaic stuff into something meaningful, although I have to say that this time it came close, and a couple of verbal runs dazzled me with their cleverness.

And the Poe... The Raven. Now, a confession, I've never read The Raven (no, not even that version that I just linked to). But I do have very unclear and at the same time very pervading memories of some kind of Raven parody from my childhood. Frayling mentioned a version by Mad Magazine, and I did used to have a huge pile of Mads from, I think, the mid 60s, so perhaps that's where I know it from. Wherever it was I became acquainted with it, it casts a huge brooding, I guess you could say Poe-esque, influence over me. I just have to hear a line of that poem and everything fills up with some kind of cobwebby gothic fuzz from distinctlty remembered childhood. Chilling, but in a savourable way.

Oh, The Raven also relates to one of my earliest computer experiences. Shortly after I started typing in programmes on the Grey Court school's one Research Machine computer, back in 1980, I was given a book of BASIC games for Christmas. I lived that book for a year or so - I can still smell its pages and match to pantone-precision the yellow cover. And I remember that among the Hannurabis and Checkers and Valley of Adventures (some of which worked on the machine we had, some of which didn't - you generally had to type in a couple of hundred lines of code and hope for the best - and the whole thing was very American and Commodore... or was it Apple... biased) there was a computer poetry program, that spouted out as many lines as you could care to choose in the style of The Raven. All very nice, except I wasn't too sure at the time what it was imitating.

Next came some Angela Carter - OK, hardly a childhood memory this, but The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman is one of the two books (the other being M John Harrison's "Viriconium Nights") that have had the most lasting emotional impact upon me as an adult. It was the book that Gill introduced to me as her favourite ever, just as I introduced her to Viriconium Nights, and I read it in a somewhat euphoric state and am still transported to another parallel when I think of it. And hearing this brief reading from The Bloody Chamber reminded me just how incredible a writer Carter was - able in less than a sentence, less than a fraction of a sentence, less than a word sometimes, to conjure up the most pungent sensual images and realities. Incredible, I have no idea how in the world she could be so economical and yet so baroque. It also reminded me that there's still a lot of Angela Carter that I haven't read, and I really ought to (though... savour it, one drop at a time perhaps).

Finally a couple of poems which didn't have any past resonance - some WB Yeats, which was beautiful and moving (perhaps aided by my already heightened emotional state) and the very brief Come to the Edge by Christopher Logue which resonated with thoughts that have been massing in my mind of late (also prompted by a passage in the Matthew Parris book) that if I want progress, experience, excitement, change, then I really ought to force myself into things more often, throw myself off the edge once in a while.

Like I said, wow.

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3:32 PM
Sony, bless their cotton socks, finally responded to six months of emailing them about my laptop problems - and very, very kindly agreed to swap my GR114SK for a totally specced-up GRX516SP - something which makes me very happy indeed. But I just discovered what a nightmare it is trying to find a decent bag for a laptop with a 16" screen. My old bag is a Tom Bihn courier bag with a laptop insert, great because it has loads of space for my clothes and other travelling gumph, but not so great because the insert isn't big enough for this new monster, and also because I'm starting to get a crippled back from constantly carring it over one shoulder (the new laptop also weighs one kilo more... argh!) So I decided I needed a backpack - and I went to PC World, because I need one by tomorrow, and they have a huge range of bags there - but the backpacks are atrocious. None of them seem to indicate what sized machine they're designed for, and although my Vaio fits inside all of them, it always protrudes out of the top of the protective inner, meaning that the top corners of my laptop are protected by approximately 1mm thickness of nylon fabric. Not good.

In the end I decided to buy a Techair "Libera Grafite" backpack, with aforementioned lack of protection, and an additional Caselogic neoprene computer sleeve which is also only supposed to accomodate 15" screens but actually stretches to envelop all 16", and the whole bundle still just about fits inside the protective sleeve in the Techair (although it's a bugger pulling it out again). Not ideal, and £20 more expensive than just buying one bag, but it's quite nice having the techair as an extra separate if I want to travel light (although the Tom Bihn offered that facility too). Also, it's worth it for the Japanese-style slogan on the cardboard box which the Case Logic came in:

It's your expression. Own it.
It's your culture. Live it.
What's protected thrives.
What's inside survives.

(actually, I just wanted a bag, but I'm always willing to pay over the odds for bad poetry)

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1:07 PM
In response to numerous requests... What I Did on my Stag Night...

We started off, Mark and I, in the Bricklayer's Arms at around 1pm, Saturday 18th January. Just a pint each (mine's a London Pride), relaxing as the winter sun pours through the windows, before heading off.

Next stop, South on Curtain Road for our lunch. JC joined us, Grimsby had left instructions for his staff to spoil us, and they did with a bottle of Copa Santa, smooth Languedoc red. I started my meal with goats cheese baked in a provencale sauce (mmm... oily as hell, warm and comforting), then roast mackrel with potatoes and shallots - again, real comfort food, and the mackrel was one of the most perfect pieces of fish I've ever tasted. I hadn't really intended to stretch to three courses but... what the hell. Croustade de pommes sounded like apple crumble to me, but it was actually apple mush in a huge balloon-topped crust of ultra-fine pastry. Very tasty too. A glass of brandy helped everything to go down.

Our intention had been to go to the Vibe Bar and maybe catch forty winks in their huge comfy sofas... but every seat was already taken (strange - it's always empty when we go there during the week). So we thought we'd head for the Great Eastern Dining Room - but it was closed. Cantaloupe was next, also too full, I think we may have tried one or two other places before eventually discovering the Shoreditch Electricity Showroom.

It's a venue that's new to me, but nice enough - we had a big table, the drinks weren't too ridiculously priced (I don't think... come to think of it, did I actually buy any drinks there?) and the ambiance was OK except whenever somebody walked through the door and we got a blast of cold air. I'm not sure how long we stayed there - I think until 7 or 8, but somehow by the time we left I had lost my marbles and gained a large group of friends. Somebody seemed to be sabotaging the drink buying - Mark, I suspect - which meant that, among other things, I ended up drinking a vanilla marguerita (like a normal one, but made with vanilla-infused tequila and sugar instead of salt), a rasberry martini and a manhattan (a long debate ensued over what spirits go into the making of a manhattan - we eventually discovered it's just bourbon, and lots of it). I also had several (wasn't exactly counting... couldn't exactly count by the end of it) Jack Daniel's & cokes, and at one point, to my horror, Mark bought me a pint of lager. I may have been mixing my drinks, but I knew not to mix that far. Unfortunately, Mark forced the matter on me by pouring much of the lager into my remaining JD & coke. My disgust soon turned to delight when I tasted it and discovered he'd made a damn fine JD & coke shandy. Uh-oh. I think that was the beginning of the end.

So, once we had everybody, we moved on to a pub - the George and the Dragon, I think. I remember very little about it, except that it was very crowded. It felt like we were only there a few minutes, but judging by the fact that several people started disappearing (and later insisted that they didn't leave until "after ten") perhaps it was longer than that. I don't think I drank very much there, probably JD & coke again.

Among the disappearers were Jim and Will, who rang me to tell me they were over the road in Café Kick. I rounded up everybody (slowly slowly) and went there - only to find that Jim and Will weren't there, and Mark had gone off somewhere too. I felt rather dispondent - the beginning of the end already. I also felt rather queasy, and thought that it would be a good idea to control my drinking. Not sure whether I did - well, I think I may have had a glass or two of water, but probably also several glasses of something more alcoholic. Eventually somebody proposed heading back to Ed's Studio, which sounded like a good idea (I needed a more controlled environment).

We diverted on the way to a party that JC knew of. I met a very nice young lady who played viola, I think I asked her to come and play some Bartok at our wedding, but soon afterwards I realised that I had lost the ability to speak coherently, see straight, or stand up without wobbling. It was slightly scary being so afflicted and yet being fully aware of how incapable I was. We didn't stay at the party long, we headed to the studio instead.

At the studio I started to recover my cool - but in the meantime I seem to have lost vast quantities of water. I was no longer able to consume alcohol, but was knocking back about a litre of fluids per minute without any discernable benefit and with the added disadvantage of needing the toilet every thirty seconds. I started to miss the party atmosphere, and JC (who hadn't come with us) kept ringing to say "come back, you're missing all the fun". So we did.

At least we tried. We walked around the block to the party, but were met at the door by the host (the viola player) saying she didn't want us coming in. Very confusing. I wondered what we'd done to upset her, but apparently (we were told later) she was just rather out of it and rather paranoid and rather scared at seeing a large group of much-older men turning up on her doorstep wearing all black and leering uncontrollably. Ah well.

We went back to the studio again, and eventually JC returned bringing two young ladies with him. One (his date for the night, I gather) was Icelandic and stunning in a kind of junkie-scarecrow-with-too-skinny-fingers way (or maybe I'd just been starved of female company for too long). The other I'm sure was very nice too, but somehow the night had taken its toll, I tried to make conversation but ended up losing my thread, swaying uncontrollably and feeling very, very dehydrated. Very suddenly (or so it seemed) everyone departed leaving just me and Jim. We threw a coin for the sofa (I won) and went straight to sleep. It was 5am. 16 hours drinking and partying, not bad.

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12:15 PM
I just popped into the local coffee shop for a mid-morning snack, and sat flicking through an old copy of Esquire. There was an article by a guy who'd been on the 81st floor of the World Trade Centre when the planes hit - I thought I'd fully dosed myself on stuff like this at the time, when I spent days consuming blogs and other online reports (somehow so much more real than anything I read in print), and I was a little skeptical of Esquire's claim that this was a must-read piece, the "fastest 3,883 words you have ever read". But it was. It was totally compelling.

I ended up sitting in the corner of the coffee shop with tears in my eyes (OK, so I got tears in my eyes after the Pokemon movie, I'm a hyper-emotional cripple, so what) after a quick zip through every emotion in the book. From the down-to-earth humour of this guy joking with his friend in the 81st floor toilets, through the big bang and moments of confusion, suspended belief, excitement because surely nothing bad could really happen, and then total shock when he neared the ground floor and, looking out of the window, saw the carnage (windows painted with blood where jumpers had landed too close, "a woman's head with meat attached" - eurrgh, my stomach turned enough when I heard of Janet's foot detatching, and her death-leap only took three floors), the terror and despair of near-death experience and thoughts of the surviving family, and the numb happiness that followed surviving (reminded me a bit of Deborah Spungen's feelings after Nancy's death, described in her excellent book And I Don't Want To Live This Life - which also made me cry, OK?).

I'm just off to lie down for a bit, alright?

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10:10 AM
I walked into town with Lola on my back on Sunday - was on my way to Meadowhall to meet Cath for lunch. First of all I headed to the canal basin to show Lola the boats. Then, as the trams weren't running, I headed East looking for a bus-stop. Didn't find any (I was walking in the wrong area) but we did hit the River Don and I spotted a sign indicating a footpath along the "Five Weirs Walk" to Meadowhall.

The walk was awesome, urban decay and countryside tipping-ground all mixed up with a bit of fast-flowing water. Seriously, there was so much junk that it became part of the landscape, and added an ugly beauty to it. As soon as I find the battery-charger for my camera I'm going to go back and photograph rubbish.

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10:02 AM
Will somebody please explain to me how to make CSS clipping work?

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12:35 AM
I played the indecision game in London on Monday night.

This is a game which I seem to be playing with increasing regularity, and in different versions - in fact, I just played about 2 hours of indecision before coming up here and typing this. But the version I play in London is by far the most common and tends to go on for the longest.

All I need to get started are some time to kill and a neccessarily vague idea about what I'd like to do during that time. The challenge is to spend all of the time flipping between "shall I shan't I"-type thoughts. So on Monday, I had most of the day to spare, decided that as I was in London it would be good to see a film. I spent about 2 hours in Ed's studio before setting off, thinking "shall I go and watch a film", "where shall I go", "what shall I watch", etc. In the end, the indecision was too much for me, so I set off into London without having filled in the details as yet.

The next choice was how to get into town - I didn't fancy joining the rat-race at the nearest tube station (Aldgate East), so I walked on in a general westerley direction trying to settle on a tube or bus to catch. In the end, I didn't settle, and I walked all the way to Covent Garden (which took about 90 minutes). Now came my first, and probably only, real snap decision of the day. I passed my first cinema, the Odeon on Shaftesbury Avenue, and saw that Donnie Darko was on. I knew nothing about Donnie Darko, except that I had once read a positive review of it (couldn't remember what the review said, only that it was positive), and the name "Donnie Darko" had haunted my sleep the night before. And the film was on it one minute, so it seemed kinda predestined. Even though there were other films showing that I'd previously wanted to see much more, i.e. Bowling for Columbine and Dirty Pretty Things, I walked straight in and bought a ticket for Donnie with my last £5.

Donnie was great, although I felt I was missing some part of the plot, and dearly wished that I had Gill with me to explain it all. I walked out of the cinema into a greater dilemma - the (and this is the one that always hits me in London) eating dilemma. I still had time to kill, and was feeling a little hungry. I got some more money out of the bank, but I didn't want to spend much as I'm still very skint. I had a vague idea of cravings for a sandwich. I thought about stopping at an Italian deli and ordering some ciabatta with an avocado salad, slathered in mayo. I meandered back East, in the general direction of Ed's studio, but didn't see many delis, and didn't really fancy those I did see. The craving altered - I walked past a couple of Indian restaurants, which almost swayed my preferences. But I definitely wanted something Italian. Something a bit more junky-sloppy-filling than a sandwich. A Pizza! But not a pricey one. I dunno, maybe a Pizza Express or something, though I'd prefer one a little more authentic. Meanwhile I passed pubs... pub grub wouldn't be too bad for this state. But... going into a pub to eat alone. Oh, how I wish I could do it. I'd love nothing more than to stroll into a pub alone, sit at the bar and engage somebody in conversation, to feel like I could just flit in and belong in any London hostelry. But chronic shyness soon put paid to that idea. Damn!

I was beginning to wonder whether I'd ever find the Italian bistro I was dreaming of, when I found 2 almost next to one another, near Smithfield Market. Unfortunately the juxtaposition just fuelled my indecisiveness. I had to keep going.

It finally dawned on me that I was getting close to Exmouth market, somewhere I've strolled through several times on recent indecision trips, where I always fancy the look of the restaurants. I quickly pulled myself into Strada before I could change my mind - certainly not the cheap eats I'd had in mind, but also indubitably Italian enough for me. In fact, I totally spoilt myself, drinking Peroni Gran Riserva beer while munching my way through polenta con funghi (gorgeous creamy melting comfort food) followed by salami pizza (ouch! 3rd lapse into non-vegetarianism in as many weeks, after some 17 succesful years. But my god... the puddle of mascarpone in which the salami, artichokes, olives and smoked tomatoes floated was... mmmmMMM!). I even couldn't resist a dessert... Pannettone cooked-up bread-and-butter-pudding-style soulfood. And the waitress mistook my request for a Vin Santo to accompany... and brought me some cantuccini as well. Mustn't complain.

And finally I wobbled out into the night, considerably poorer, still dying to go into a pub or somewhere and make contact with previously-undiscovered humans. Instead I went back to Ed's, and switched my brain off far too early and easily.

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2:04 AM
I just woke up to an amazing track on the radio - I think it was called "In Between Two Rooms" and I think it was by a band called Zayla (or could it have been Sailor?)

Gonna have to trawl the John Peel page at the World Service for another couple of weeks, by the look of it, until I get the answer. Whatever it is I want it - ambient body-rhythyms that meshed perfectly with my hypnagogic state.

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