Visions Before Midnight

Remember, remember

2006-11-05T09:51:00.000Z

It looks like we might have made it...

I wrote the first entry on this blog precisely 12 months ago. It was always conceived as a project as opposed to a way of life, and one with a limited existence. Treating the blog as a finite undertaking was crucial to me starting it at all, and even more of a reason for me to stick with it for so long.

Initially I didn't set a fixed end point, preferring to trust my instinct to know when the moment was right. Over the last few months, however, an ideal moment to bow out presented itself, and that moment is now.

Increasingly I've found it difficult to write here out of love rather than simply duty. The blog has also become far too introspective of late, as well as mutating into a generally gloomy, unhelpful read.

So it's time to pull the plug.

Looking back I'm amazed at the variety of thunderously ordinary topics I've held forth on, from bus etiquette and toilet etiquette to my favourite sounds and smells. I've talked about tea and trains and crisps and lost loves and Tesco and George Orwell and getting locked in and crying at films and Prime Ministers and time itself.

I've walked all the way around London and assembled an A-Z of Liverpool. I've turned 30. The clocks have gone forward then back. I've written about some of my favourite poems and also a few books.

I've seen David Cameron arrive and Charles Kennedy leave. My one great enduring prediction, that Tony Blair would be out of office within the year, has amounted to bugger all (though at least we know by what point he intends to stand down. Allegedly).

There have been some topics, though, to which I appear to have returned time and again. I seem to have exercised, though assuredly not exorcised, an unhealthy obsession with my neighbours, and a similar fondness for droning on about the London Underground, none of which can have made for particularly illuminating reading. Other than to illuminate some of my petty prejudices.

I've clearly got a hang-up about the 1990s, which depending on your age is either totally understandable or thoroughly reprehensible. I'm sick of jargon and bad English. Sleep is something I'm alternately in defiant awe of and in desperate need of, most often the latter. I miss my hometown.

I'm quite a stickler for anniversaries, marking the 100th, 200th and 300th posts with relish. Above all, though, I'm clearly fanatical about the weather, be it beautifully cold, appropriately damp or, most pertinently, too damn hot.

The most traumatic posts, though, have undoubtedly been all to do with my leaving one job and starting another, in the process moving 200 miles south from Liverpool to London.

This blog began when I was at my wits end, looking for change. When it arrived I found I was far too distracted by the emotional wrench required in leaving somewhere I had lived for 12 years than to recognise and celebrate the fact I was getting out of a job I hated. I remain profoundly at odds with the city in which I now have to call home. I also continue to miss certain aspects of Liverpool with a passion that is almost too much to bear.

Part of which is why I have decided to lay down my virtual pen. You can only take so much linguistic confession before it becomes too much of a burden - and too much of a bore - for both audience and author.

With that in mind you may consider this more of a threat than a promise, but I'm leaving the whole blog online with a view (and hope) that someday I'll feel inclined to resume entries once more. That won't happen, though, until I feel I have something more to say. It won't be important - none of this blog is important - but it will be new. And will hopefully mean something. To me if nobody else.

One whole year of my life is recorded here. To those who did, thanks for reading.

...Yes, it looks like we've made it to the end.

Loose leaves

2006-11-04T11:50:00.000Z

Paul Morley once wrote a magazine piece which, as much as for expediency as anything else, was entirely given over to the processes which he went through to complete the said article, down to the state of the used teabag he had placed on the side of a saucer when he typed the first word and which now, on completion of the text, was as useless and as barren as the gist of this incredibly long sentence.

For me, writing has always been as much a means as it is an end. Whatever I write is a struggle, because I always see it as more than simply the business of committing words to a particular medium. The way those words are assembled, for even the shortest of phrases, is I believe something that and should be imbued with the utmost care and attention.

You can evoke such rhythmical pleasures, such linguistic delights, such unexpected poetry and unforeseen music out of simply the arrangement of words upon a page. And once you know that this is possible, you can never not set out to try and do it again.

It's a lifelong commitment. You can't opt out of the practice of trying to achieve good writing, because your conscience won't allow it. The evidence will always be there, even if you throw the page away or delete the document, at the back of your mind. Moreover, it will come charging to the front of your mind as soon as you sit down and try to write again.

So whatever and whenever I write, regardless of the context, while entertaining as trivial a subject as the deterioration of a teabag, always ends up requiring an injection of substance and sincerity that comes through intelligent, sometimes over-clever, composition. And it is a blessing and a curse.

In my life so far I have written millions and millions of words. I hope that I will be able to continue to do so. Ultimately, though, words alone, just like ideals, won't pay the rent. Obsessing over a simile or a neat piece of symbolism won't fix that grouting around the bath or appease an empty stomach.

That most cruel of choices, between self-expression and self-sufficiency, plagues and persists from dawn to dusk. Maybe one day the ideal compromise will present itself. Maybe one day I will find myself in such circumstances where I live to work rather than work to live. Maybe one day I will go to bed happier than when I woke up.

Just not today.

Buttoning up

2006-11-03T11:30:00.000Z

All the cliches are true. Southerners are wusses.

At the first sign that the weather was turning cold this week, everybody wrapped up as if destined for a trek to the Arctic. It was incredible. Gloves, scarves, hats, multiple layers: what was with these people? The daytime temperature can't have been much lower than 9 or 10 degrees these past few days, yet folk have been carrying on as if it were below freezing.

Wait till its gets really cold. Wait till it gets as cold as it does in Liverpool, where the wind can numb you to the point that you can't even move. Or maybe that won't happen down here. Maybe this is winter for these people. Me, I'm still wearing T-shirts.

Anyway, here's how beautiful it looked in my local park first thing this morning.

...and retire

2006-11-02T21:39:00.000Z

Fireworks have been going off round here for weeks. They've also been going off after well past 11pm, which I thought was now an official curfew. Or at least it was last year, in the wake of government legislation.

Living where I do, however, and being sufficiently far away from ground level to avoid the danger of having a live rocket posted through my letterbox, the fusilage of bangs and crashes doesn't bother me that much. It happens in far away places of which I know little.

It was a different story in Liverpool, though; so much so that one year I went to the trouble of taping up my letterbox so as to avoid any unwelcome deliveries.

Admittedly that was when I was living in a rough area where gangs of what used to be called townies, later chavs, and latterly hoodies, would roam and glare at you with impunity. But even when I moved to a more refined neighbourhood I wasn't entirely free from gunpowder-related chicanery. One year a firework display being held by a nearby local company was so loud it cracked one of my living room windows. Worse, the local company was the one I worked for.

Earlier in my time as a resident of Liverpool I used to attend the grand municipal fireworks display down at the Albert Dock. I went with an old school friend who'd recently moved to the city and her boyfriend, both of whom worked selflessly to get me out and about the place (it was just after I'd left university and was living alone for the first time).

Yet though epic and suitably emotional, these occasions always left me feeling rather at a loss at how to respond. Should I whoop and yell and scream along with certain members of the crowd - or coo and ahhhh with others? What, in other words, was the correct way to respond at such a mass participatory event?

Things were much easier when I was younger, as is true of most things. Then you had no self-awareness or reticence about shouting and shrieking like a demented boiling kettle when exposed to the impact of some colourful sights and sounds.

Our family used to shell out on a few measly fireworks to let off in the back garden. I was always fascinated by the tortuous and arcane instructions ("light the blue touch paper and retire"), and equally terrified by the likelihood of a dud suddenly coming back to life the morning after.

We lived near a university who used to put on a free display every year, and these were exciting events as well, especially as all I had to do was stand by our upstairs landing window and see the results just as clearly as were I out in the cold and the crowd.

Later the university started charging you to attend, and then connived to move the entire display to a point where residents could no longer watch it for free. This all happened once I'd gone to Liverpool, but I still resented the way such changes were introduced almost for the sake of it. And to appease the local paper, of course, who had long railed against the supposed "lack of order" embodied by the cavalcade.

I miss the thrill of getting to watch such events, but I miss the memory of them even more. The older I get, the more the recollection of such occasions grows blurred and bleary, and the accompany sensory echoes fade and die.

Cool it

2006-11-01T17:21:00.000Z

It's turned cold. Really cold. I've been working from home today, and though I haven't needed to put the heating on (thanks to the sun streaming through the windows), I know I will later on.

I've been out a couple of times and felt that wonderful sensation of the chill eating through your skin and into your bones. There's something almost purging about being out in cold weather; it's like your insides are being excavated and cleansed of all remaining detritus still loitering there from the ordeal of summer.

I noticed another thing when I was out, and that was how the drop in temperature had brought a similar drop in noise. Indeed, the streets have been blissfully quiet all day, as if a thermostat has turned down both the heat and noise levels simultaneously.

Now it's just gone 5pm and already it's pitch black. The sun sets earlier in London than it did in Liverpool, an unexpected treat and one that helps becalm the city at its most frantic and frenetic period. I'm looking forward to seeing my first frost of the season, and feeling something - no matter how small - of those blistering icy days of long ago.

Schlock factor

2006-10-31T21:05:00.000Z

Halloween doesn't seem to be such as big a deal now as it was when I was younger. Back then you'd get wall-to-wall scaremongering on the TV and radio, in magazines and papers, and in shops big and small up and down the high street. Of late, and especially this year, it feels like it's almost an incidental event or peculiar pastime with limited appeal and a niche following.

Not that this is an especially bad thing. Given the entire occasion is an American export and trades in the hugely contentious and downright deceitful dichotomy of trick or treat, maybe it's just as well it's losing currency over here.

The whole thing's just asking for trouble anyway. Kids going round houses demanding residents hand over some delicacies or face the consequences? That's par for the course nowadays, mutter the middle class tabloids, regardless of whether it's 31st October or not. Plus isn't it rather dangerous for children to be knocking on the doors of complete strangers and asking if they can give them something?

Well it is and it isn't. It's always been dangerous for a child to knock on a stranger's door just as it's always been dangerous to walk out into a road without checking for cars or it's always been dangerous to smoke cigarettes.

It's just that society's quantification of danger has changed, and its view of people doing what other people have done in previous generations back through time immemorial gets subject to bouts of hysteria brought on by a need to create enemies. It's the power of nightmares. It's one of the few remaining ways the great and the good can keep their citizens in check.

Nobody has come round here trick or treating and nobody will. I can tell. It's that sort of neighbourhood.

Unfortunately it's also the kind of neighbourhood where nobody knocks on each other's door ever, regardless of what day of the year it is. It's also the kind of neighbourhood where children probably last played in the streets in 1955. I haven't seen one Halloween decoration or present in any of the local shops or houses.

Admittedly it did always seem to be more of a big deal in Liverpool. But even then, during the 12 years I lived there, not once did some kids come round on 31st October. Which was just as well, as I never had anything ready to give them by way of a treat. But still, it was eerie to go from a stage in life where Halloween was ostensibly a big deal (school) to it being nothing at all (after school) and not pass through any kind of in-between.

Anyway, in truth isn't it just a load of old hokum? When you think of it, what has Halloween given us? Apart from some classic Simpsons episodes, Sarah Greene being taken over by a poltergeist on BBC1's Ghostwatch, and an outlet for Britain's uncannily burgeoning pumpkin harvest, that is.

Well?

Rest awhile

2006-10-30T21:23:00.000Z

I had one of those dreams last night where you wake up and actually begin to go about your business as if it were a normal day, albeit all the time remaining fast asleep.

Things were complicated further, however, by the fact I "woke up" 12 years ago in my first year at university. I was in what could loosely be described as a bedroom, except instead of a door there was simply a hole in the wall, and my bed was a dirty mattress thrown on top of a ragged metal frame.

Through the hole I could see other people I remembered from my first year going about their business with a studied nonchalence. Everywhere was grey and grim. Some sort of coach party was assembling off in the distance, headed out for goodness knows where, and I was beset with a feeling that I too should be with them.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of tardiness and disorganisation. It seemed that I was missing out on something, but couldn't find out what it was, partly because I was too tired, but partly because the hole in the wall wasn't big enough for me to get out even if I tried.

Twice in my life I have kept a dream diary. The first time was in the sixth form at school, then I tried again during my second year at university. To be honest I'm surprised I persisted with both for as long as I did (a few weeks in each case) given how their maintenance involved writing copious and exhausting notes as soon as I woke up every single morning, before even getting out of bed.

I'm also somewhat wary of the motive behind such a pastime. Was I trying to plunder my subconscious for "material" for songs and stories? Was I conducting some kind of hopelessly rudimentary form of self-analysis? Or was I simply looking for yet another outlet to document my innermost thoughts and woefully introspective feelings?

There are as many answers to that riddle as there are possible thoughts in your head. I do enjoy dreaming; I just wish I didn't have the urge to always search for meaning in them.

Dreams, they complicate my life;
Dreams, they complement my life
- REM

Hour tune

2006-10-29T20:43:00.000Z

Today was one of my favourite days of the year: the return of Greenwich Mean Time.

For me, there's always been something deeply rewarding about the very business of turning a clock back an hour. It's like you're getting to almost control time. It's one of those precious few moments where man seems to have the upper hand over nature, and can arrest the normal ebb and flow of events to his (and her) choosing. It also gives you an extra hour's sleep, of course, which is no small added bonus.

Above all, though, it really does signal the arrival of autumn and the advent of winter. I love the fact the sun now sets before the evening begins. It's something I've always found deeply endearing.

I am not and never have been at ease with the notion of the sun still being out at something like 9pm. It's just completely wrong. By definition (well, sort of) evenings are supposed to be dark, not light. I'm convinced it does your body no good at all to see and feel the sun beating down after teatime.

Anyway, out for a walk this afternoon in the fading sunlight and smelling the onset of the first chill of the night in the air, mixed in with the inevitable whiff of domestic garden bonfires and the distinctive scent of crumped leaves, I couldn't help but allow myself the sense of being a little renewed and refreshed.

Things felt right, felt...in place.

Pete's sake

2006-10-28T11:13:00.000+01:00

In the current edition of Word magazine, there is an attempt to come up with a list of definitive "man's" and "woman's" albums; in other words, those recordings most likely to be in the collections of your average male and female.

Of the 25 listed as must-have "man's" LPs, I had half a dozen or so (while only owning one of the "woman's" records: 'Little Earthquakes' by Tori Amos). One of those six, however, was actually the first album I ever bought on CD: 'Selling England By The Pound' by Genesis.

I'm not ashamed to confess I spent a couple of years in my mid-teens developing an obsession with 1970s-era Genesis, time I know I should have spent properly embracing slightly more contemporary sounds, but which nonetheless broadened my tastes to the extent that I still listen to and cherish the band's shameless prog-orientated output today.

'Selling England By The Pound' hails from 1973 and in my opinion was - is - the best the group ever recorded. It was the penultimate album to be made with founding member Peter Gabriel, but the first (and maybe only) time the band successfully tempered tendencies towards pretension and self-indulgence with thoughtful, melodic, carefully-constructed songs.

It also boasts a profoundly affecting and universal theme: nostalgia for a lost past. Such a topic probably sounds old hat now, indeed it is old hat, but there's a freshness and imagination to the way it is tackled on this particular album which surmounts what has become musical cliche.

In addition there's something singularly Albion about the album's sound, something I think I picked up on, albeit subconsciously, from a very early stage: this was the album I chose to take with me, copied onto cassette, when I (somewhat reluctantly) took part in a UK-Germany school exchange when I was 14.

At night, lying alone and uneasy in my bed in this unknown country surrounded by people who spoke a totally incomprehensible language, I would play myself a couple of songs from the album before going to sleep. They were my connection with home, not just literally but somehow metaphorically as well. It certainly helped me through the ordeal of not just being so far away from everything I knew, but also of being in such an alien, uncompromising place. Painful, if evocative, times.

Anyway, in case you're interested, here's the full list of what Word magazine officially dubs 'Ultimate Boys' Albums' for your own consultation. The ones I own are marked with an asterisk. To be honest, I haven't heard of half of them.

'The Wall', PINK FLOYD*
'Trout Mask Replica', CAPTAIN BEEFHEART
'Live At The Witch Trials', THE FALL
'Armed Forces', ELVIS COSTELLO & THE ATTRACTIONS*
'Slanted And Enchanted', PAVEMENT
'Endtroducing', DJ SHADOW
'Feast Of Wire', CALEXICO
'Maxinquaye', TRICKY
'In The Court Of The Crimson King', KING CRIMSON
'Black Sea', XTC
'Kid A', RADIOHEAD*
'Entertainment', GANG OF FOUR
'A Love Supreme', JOHN COLTRANE*
'The Marble Index', NICO
'Scott IV', SCOTT WALKER
'Surfer Rosa', PIXIES
'White Light/White Heat', THE VELVET UNDERGROUND*
'Trans-Europe Express', KRAFTWERK*
'Swordfishtrombones', TOM WAITS
'Fear Of A Black Planet', PUBLIC ENEMY
'XTRMNTR', PRIMAL SCREAM
'Selling England By The Pound', GENESIS*
'Eliminator', ZZ TOP
'Ambient Works Volume II', APHEX TWIN
'Radio City', BIG STAR

Basket cases

2006-10-27T16:02:00.000+01:00

I've always found one of the best things about taking an entire week off work is the chance to do usual domestic tasks at unusual times.

This may sound like a pathetically trivial pleasure, but believe me, getting to go to my local Tesco on a weekday morning as opposed to the evening or on weekends is a completely different experience.

The mood in the shop is far more relaxed and accommodating. There are less people about. There are more goods on the shelves. And the people who are going about their business are classically colourful characters.

This morning at the frozen food counter I was hailed by a lady in a long purple mac*. She wanted to know, apropos nothing whatsoever, whether the vegetarian sausages I'd just added to my basket were "any good."

Glossing over the fact that I certainly wouldn't be putting them into my basket were they not any good, I politely replied that I could vouch for their tastiness and would happily recommend them to meat eaters and non-meat eaters alike. "Though I've been a vegetarian so long now I can't remember what real meat tastes like," I added jovially. "Oooh, you should try some," the lady countered unhelpfully, before continuing, "well, I suppose I'll give them a go. You never know, I might like them."

Which is true, of course: I will never know, because even were I to see this woman again, from a distance across many aisles, I would try to avoid her. It's just not the done thing to find yourself having two conversations with the same stranger when out shopping.

Anyway she was being accompanied around Tesco by an older woman who I guessed was her mother, and was one of those types who insist on reading out loud every piece of information on every piece of packaging they spy on the shelves.

Then when I got to the checkout the person on the till insisted on regaling me with how she "never shops at Tesco" preferring "Sainsbury's and Waitrose". She seemed pleased that I didn't own a Tesco Clubcard. "I don't want the shop knowing all my personal details," I explained. "Quite right too," the woman responded. "Although they have mine, because I work here. Funny that!"

Not really, I thought. But this sort of thing is what I've come to expect when shopping on a weekday. You find yourself engaged in that increasingly rare art of spontaneous polite conversation. Admittedly those with whom you are conversing are perhaps not the most articulate of folk, but then they probably see me, a single sad-looking man, and think: the poor lonely soul, he could do with cheering up with a bit of easy banter. And sure enough, harmless chatter duly ensues.

*Now there's a sentence you'd previously only encounter emanating from the mouth of Victoria Wood.

Around London VIII

2006-10-26T20:09:00.000+01:00

The last lap.

I wasn't expecting to feel quite so morose as I neared the finish, to be honest; I though it'd be a grand occasion, with a sense of pride and accomplishment surging through me and a real thrill at completing such an epic journey. Instead, as I grew closer to home and the landscape became familiar, I only felt a sorrow that the adventure was coming to an end and there was nowhere left to explore.

The fact I was walking wounded didn't help. I'd cut my hand climbing over a gate covered in barbed wire; I'd hurt the muscles in the bridge of my left foot and was limping; I'd also got soaking wet shoes thanks to it pissing it down yet again and most of the route taking me across sodden fields. But the weather undoubtedly leant proceedings an atmospheric air, which my photos, particularly the last one reproduced below, go some way to capturing.

I also had to walk through Harrow, a village seemingly owned entirely by the titular school, and through whose playing fields I had to walk - the playing fields, of course, upon which the First World War was won. Allegedly.

The entire undertaking has been a real eye-opener for me. I'd never have banked on there being so much isolated beauty and variations in landscape within the boundaries of Greater London. I'd also never have expected to spend so much of the walk entirely alone. I can't quite believe what I've done, and perhaps never will, but the evidence is recorded here and on my camera and somewhere in the back of my mind.

I've certainly done nothing like it before in my entire life. I doubt I ever will again.

Day 8: Sudbury - Hendon
Miles Added: 8
Total Miles Completed: 78
Total Miles Outstanding: 0

Year's end

2006-10-25T17:57:00.000+01:00

I've just noticed there are precisely two calendar months until Christmas Day.

This feels wrong on so many levels. There hasn't been enough of a change in the weather for starters. It seems like it's only late August or early September, whereas in reality we're less than one week away from Halloween. The air isn't sharp or fresh enough, the ground isn't cold enough, too many trees have too many leaves for it to be this close to the festive season and, erk, 2007.

I'm also not ready for the collective bout of celebration and introspection that accompanies Christmas. It's usually the time to put a stamp on the year and total up the balance sheet for the preceding 12 months. Instead I feel like I'm too close to events to treat 2006 to any dispassionate concern or detached observation.

There's also the stuff that I fear about Christmas and which is hence lurking all too readily around the corner: forced conviviality, office merriment, and mass hysteria.

Plus it doesn't feel like one year since it was last here.

Maybe I'll become more well-disposed towards it when the weather gets colder (which it surely must) and the decorations go up and the Christmas double issue Radio Times comes out. At the moment, though, it feels not two months but two continents out of reach.

Around London VII

2006-10-24T22:16:00.000+01:00

I've got the week off work, which has afforded me - among other things - the chance to get my circumnavigation of London wrapped up.

It was the penultimate leg today, picking up where I left off last time in Richmond and striking north to get as far as I could towards my home turf of Barnet before exhausation took over.

As it was I made far more progress than I expected, aided in no small measure by the weather. It was pissing it down for much of the time, a complete contrast to the climate in which I finished the previous leg. Indeed, autumn was inescapable all along the route, even when the sun came out towards the end. Yet it made for excellent walking conditions, even if it meant navigating by far the muddiest stretch of my journey so far. I've never walked through so many puddles in such a short space of time.

Yet again I was alone for miles and miles. Occasionally I would pass a runner, or fisherman, or even somebody who looked like they might have been gripped by the same idea as me and were making their own tottering way around the capital's edge. But for most of the time I was completely by myself. London: the most crowded, most lonely city in the world.

I did pass through Greenford and Perivale, however, neither of which were particularly deserted, and both of which had nothing to distinguish them apart from the former appearing in a Fry and Laurie sketch and the latter having dubious Doctor Who credentials.

Day 7: Richmond - Sudbury
Miles Added: 10.75
Total Miles Completed: 70
Total Miles Outstanding: 8

Arresting developments

2006-10-23T20:09:00.000+01:00

I was woken at 6.20am this morning by the sound of my intercom buzzer being pressed repeatedly.

After a split-second of utter panic, chiefly caused by the shock of being suddenly dragged from a deep sleep, my next thought was to ignore it completely. I presumed it was some neighbour or other wanting to be let in to the building, and that having found no response from my flat would try another number on the keypad by the main door. But no. The buzzing continued.

Struggling out of bed to put a stop to the screeching din (the buzzer makes a sound like a million lorries reversing), and pausing to note only it was pissing down with rain and completely dark outside, I answered the call. "Is that Callum Harvey?" said a voice. "Er no, it's not," I replied somewhat lamely. "Can I come in?" inquired the voice. "It's a warrant officer."

I had no choice, of course, and let the man in, utilising the few seconds it takes for someone to walk all the way up the stairwell to my front door to try and compose myself.

I already knew what this was all about. Ever since I moved into this flat eight months ago, stern-looking letters have occasionally arrived addressed to Callum Harvey. Some were final demands. Some looked like they were from an official inspectorate or other. I don't know how long ago Mr Harvey lived here, but he'd clearly exited the premises leaving a lot of unfinished business behind him. Now some of that business was evidently catching him up.

When I opened the door I was conscious of how utterly undignified and vulnerable I was, having 60 seconds earlier been completely asleep. In front of me was a man dripping with rain but dressed very formally and brandishing his ID at me. "Callum Harvey?" he asked again. "No no, he doesn't live here," I replied meekly. "I'm not him. I've got some ID."

The warrant officer was resolute. "You're not Callum Harvey?" "No. I've lived here for eight months. Mail still comes for him, though," I added pathetically. Why couldn't I sound more confident, assured, in control? "Could you show me some ID?" the man continued, stepping inside my flat. "Of course," I responded hastily, and scurried off to where I keep all my bills, bank statements and personal documents.

I returned with a folder full of paperwork. "What would you like to see?" I began. "I've got..." "Just a utility bill," the man muttered tersely. "There you go," I countered, trying to sound more dispassionate and drawing his attention to a letter from Thames Water. "That's fine," he grunted and promptly turned on his heel to leave.

"I've got plenty of other..." I continued, somehow feeling compelled to argue my defence even though I wasn't guilty of anything. "No. That's fine," he concluded, and disappeared.

The warrant officer returned to his car in the road outside. I watched from my bedroom window, in darkness, as he sat writing something down. After a minute or so he drove off. And that was that.

Except it wasn't. The whole unexpected, brief and blunt encounter had been seared into my brain and it was impossible to go back to sleep. I lay in bed pointlessly trying to calm down. At least it wasn't too early and I only found myself forfeiting an hour or so's rest. Thank goodness he didn't call round at something like 4.00am.

Was I forceful enough in persuading the man of my identity? Could I have done more? Why was he so quick to terminate his investigation? Will he be returning for a more protracted visit?

Wherever and whoever Callum Harvey is, I wish he'd turn himself in. Then I can forget worrying about any of those four questions. And maybe get some sleep tonight.

Look East

2006-10-22T22:13:00.000+01:00

I've spent the weekend visiting an old friend who now lives in Cleethorpes.

Despite the long trek on the train, there was something instantly reassuring about being back in the north of England. Indeed, when I was changing connections at Doncaster station, I could immediately tell I was in a different part of the country thanks to the way people walked, what they wore, how they spoke and even the speed at which they went about their business.

My mate's flat overlooked the Humber Estuary, commanding the kind of views normally associated with seaside retirement homes and guest houses. Luckily the sun was shining when I strolled the few dozen yards down onto the beach to take a few photos.

Clock watching

2006-10-20T11:09:00.000+01:00

A letter arrives in the post from the Department for Work and Pensions. Somebody somewhere has calculated, on the basis of my National Insurance contributions to date, the amount of state pension I am likely to receive upon retirement. The figure is £79.17 a week.

The letter goes on to point out, in an unnecessarily coy voice, that such a sum might not support "the sort of lifestyle" to which I am used, and hence "if you haven't yet begun to save, it's never too late to start".

I'd certainly not expected such a communication so (relatively) early in my life, nor one of such quasi-mocking tones. I'm also not ready for such a stark reminder of the passing of time, nor the implication that - despite being perhaps even 40 years off retirement - I'm already not doing enough to set a little something by for a rainy day.

£79.17. What would that buy me in a week? My food, certainly, and probably my gas and electricity. But not my rent, nor any other costs I'd need to incur as I went about my elderly business. At least you'd get your TV licence free. Or not, depending on who's in power in 2050.

Christ. 2050. I'll be 75. Such a date, such an existence, such a period of time, seems utterly inconceivable.

Yesterday, today

2006-10-18T21:21:00.000+01:00

24 hours late, I know, but this is still worth a mention.

The British Library will retain everybody's submissions, so generations to come will be able to look back and wonder at our obsession with listening to loud music on earphones in public places, grumbling about more pollution while refusing to pay more tax, drinking water out of bottles instead of taps, and expecting pop stars to say profound things about anything other than their favourite colour.

It's the kind of exercise that's been done before, perhaps most famously in the 1930s through the Mass Observation Archive. This was a collection of journals penned by folk right around the UK, commissioned in the spirit of democratising history and empowering citizens, but also to assemble a picture of Britain from the bottom up (this was the time of the Great Depression) rather than the top down.

A different sort of initiative was mounted in 1988 by the British Film Institute, who, on Tuesday 1st November of that year, invited the entire population to keep a diary of what they watched on television, again collecting the results for posterity.

Back then the notion of being able to find out what the country really thought about something, and to take the temperature of public opinion, was a startling novelty. Now the reverse is true, but before blogs become as redundant and passe as Laserdiscs (it could happen!), the least we can hope is that 17th October was a day that will be remembered for centuries.

Your blog can be uploaded anytime between now and 31st October.

Cold comfort

2006-10-17T10:15:00.000+01:00

Perchance it could soon be my fortune
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.

These lines are from a poem by my friend David, written - or rather composed - in 2001 using a fridge magnet kit comprising words and phrases culled from the collected works of Shakespeare.

The magnets were stuck on the door of my mum and dad's fridge. During one of my visits back to my family home he and I were selflessly idly away time in the kitchen, when for reasons lost in memory one of us suggested using the magnets to try and construct a full-length poem.

I'm hoping he won't mind me reproducing the results here. I know it can sometimes come across as incredibly self-aggrandising to plug the work of close friends online, especially if you try to make out it's epic poetry or the product of undiscovered genius. I know it can seem equally arrogant to assume that anybody else in the world will be at all interested in the work of somebody they know absolutely nothing about.

Yet this particular poem, given the curious nature of its birth, unusual lifespan (it remained on the fridge door for months, long after I'd returned to Liverpool) and improbably conception is, I'd like to think, deserving of a mention. Not least because I'd forgotten about it entirely, and only by David putting it up online himself did I recall its existence.

Anyway, here's the complete work, hailing from that distant summer of 2001, when the world seemed (in retrospect) a more surer place and I was far less wizened than I am now.

Wherefore the thought
Ask ne'er for mercy;
Only madness and golden midsummer straw.
Leave humility at the window,
And scorn frailty.
Laugh at thine sorrow;
Lost kisses die with haste,
Passion knoweth mercy nor reason,
But life will ever give chance and circumstance.
Love is sometimes a tempest
But always as sweet and noble
As winter ghosts drunk on dreams of summer.
Perchance it could soon be my fortune
To bid farewell to blind despair,
And wonder at this kingdom of the sun.

Smell? Smell?

2006-10-16T17:58:00.000+01:00

It's something of a dust-covered cliche to talk of how a particular scent can evoke a particular memory, and one that can hail from as little as a week or as much as a decade ago.

Nevertheless I found myself being so profoundly affected by the whiff of something today I couldn't help but feel compelled to record both it and a few other similarly nostalgia-inducing odours to which I find myself susceptible:

- Hash browns: these make me think of my sixth form canteen, specifically the combination of vegetable spring rolls, hash browns and baked beans, which back then I thought was the nicest meal in the whole world.

- Tar: this reminds me of one hot summer in the mid-1980s when the council dumped a load of asphalt in our road with the expectation that residents would take it upon themselves to repair all the potholes themselves.

- Curry: I used to smell this on a particular stiff winter breeze when walking to school in the early 90s, a route which took me across a university campus and very close to some halls of residence kitchens. The combination of the spicy odour and the freezing temperature was perfect.

- Damp: I'll always associate this with February 2001 when my roof started leaking while I was away for the weekend and I returned to find my living room soaking. It had been snowing as well, and the place stank of dirty water. While it took relatively little time to dry up and clear away the damage, the smell persisted for weeks.

- Cut grass: school playing fields on a hot summer morning

- Permanent markers: school classrooms on a hot summer afternoon

- Funny cigarettes: not that I encounter the smell much these days, but when I do - walking down the street, usually - it always reminds me of the time I lived directly above a group of unfettered drug-sozzled layabouts in Liverpool who did nothing with their lives except sleep until early afternoon then smoke until the early hours. They hung around for about 18 months or so before suddenly disappearing, leaving behind a flat entirely empty of furniture except for one filthy sofa, plus strange daubings on the wall including a giant spiff and - inevitably - a naked woman.

- Chips: this never fails to make me feel hungry, even when I've just eaten. And this was the smell that caught me off guard today. Just after I'd eaten my lunch.

Breakfast time

2006-10-13T23:19:00.000+01:00

7.30am this morning. The first time I've seen fog in London. I sincerely hope it won't be the last; the serenity it lay upon the otherwise harsh and rattling rush hour was beautiful.

1:40

2006-10-12T22:06:00.000+01:00

By way of a pathetic self-fulfilling prophecy, the Foreign Secretary has already done precisely what the opening paragraph of an article in today's Guardian predicts and vacuously denied any of its contents are true. Which is all the more reason to take the article and its conclusions entirely at face value.

Medicine bawl

2006-10-11T17:43:00.000+01:00

I had to go to the doctors' today, and it was the first proper visit I'd made to my new local surgery since moving to London.

It might be unfashionable to say so these days, but I have to confess to experiencing a surge of reassurance every time I step inside a surgery, confirm my arrival with the receptionist and take my seat in the waiting room. It's almost like I suddenly think I'm halfway towards feeling better already.

Being held within the benevolent arms of a giant organisation is comforting to me. Again, it's unfashionable to say as much, but I like the idea of having the state waiting just around the corner to protect me from cradle to grave.

I like the notion of a government-run web of organisations watching over me from youth to old age. Greatest of them all is the NHS, and I can't help but feel a surge of appreciation each time I step onto one of its thousands of premises.

Which is what happened today. My new surgery is only five minutes from where I live. It's clean, spacious, friendly, expertly run and efficient. In short, it's fantastic. And I left with a piece of paper in my hand which will, of course, make my life and my health 100% in no time at all.

Well, you've got to have a bit of hope in somebody.

Evenin' all

2006-10-10T23:33:00.000+01:00

Strange goings-on last night.

I was woken at about 1am by the sound of voices outside down below, including the distinct and heart-stopping phrase "the police want to get in."

There's an intercom system operational in this small block of apartments, and for someone to gain access to the stairwell a resident has to buzz down and open the main door. I don't know who did this, but within a few seconds I heard raised voices getting ever closer and then the ominous thump-thump-thump of a front door being pounded.

It wasn't mine, thankfully, but the one of the flat opposite me across the way, occupied - as far I could tell from merely seeing the tenant coming and going - by a large Afro-American woman with a propensity to go about her business at a speed roughly equivalent to a tired snail.

Pretty soon her voice could be heard shouting from within. "I will call the police! I have my passport! I am a UK citizen! I am calling the police!" "This is the police" informed the uniformed contingent the other side of the door. "Could you let us in please? We need to check you're all right." "I have my passport," the women wailed. "I am a UK citizen!" "We don't want to check your passport," they consoled. "Your sister wants to know if you're all right." "I don't want to see my sister!" came the response. "You can arrest me. I have my passport. I am a UK citizen!"

Well, this went on for some time. It soon became clear the women was, if not hysterical, then mentally unwell - there was much talk outside the door of the lady's condition and the fact she "hadn't taken her pills". The police soon went back outside and I could see from my window there were friends and family of the resident among them as well a nurse and several other uniformed officers.

I tried to go back to sleep, but it was pretty clear this situation wasn't going to end until there was a resolution, and one that involved the woman being made to leave her flat and climb into the ambulance waiting in the road.

I could still hear her screaming about "just needing something to eat" and how her sister "wanted to assassinate her". The drama of the occasion was accentuated by it being now almost 2am and the fact there were no other sounds to be heard anywhere in the whole district except the lady shrieking.

Anyway after what felt like an age the party of visitors came back in and on the premise of wanting to check her passport managed to shuttle her out of the flat, down the stairs and out into the ambulance. She was babbling and chuntering the whole time, but the unsettling thing was the way her body language was so at odds with her voice. She moved slowly and calmly, with dignity; no arms thrashing, no restraining of limbs, nothing by way of a forced escort at all.

I'm not sure if she's been back since. I can see into one room of her flat from one of my windows, and the place looks, well, decidedly normal. Up until last night I'd never heard her speak. I barely knew she existed.

Those days

2006-10-09T09:07:00.000+01:00

I just wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me.

The first time I saw the film Stand By Me was at a friend's birthday party. It must have been 1987 or 88, and the friend, Luke, had only invited a few of us round for what was, for a group of young teenagers, a bizarrely sedate affair comprising a sit-down meal and an evening in front of the TV.

I remember stupidly arguing with him about wanting to watch Octopussy which was on ITV that very same night, but Luke insisting - rightly - that we watch this video he'd got out especially for the occasion. As such I gave neither the film nor the occasion the attention they deserved, which was stupid of me but I wasn't old enough to know better.

The next time I saw Stand By Me was a good many years later, and I reckon at first I didn't realise it was the very same film I'd only half-watched first time around. Either that or I subconsciously didn't want to concede that I'd treated such a masterpiece with such disdain, and revised my memories accordingly. I recall being profoundly moved and affected by the film, its mood, its music, its comradeship, its sentiment and above all its timelessness.

I caught it a couple of times on TV during the 1990s, but hadn't seen it for ages until last night when I watched it on DVD and found myself instantly transported back into that same cloud of emotion I experienced the first time I saw it properly. I let that cloud wash over me and wrap me up in a fog of shameless nostalgia, and I realised again, were it need re-stating, that the film is an example of genius and one of best movies of all time.

It happens sometimes. Friends come in and out of our lives like busboys in a restaurant.

Why is it an example of genius? Because of the way it so deftly takes universal themes and personalises them in the shape of its four protagonists, who don't know it but are representing the hopes and fears of every single child in the whole world, and every single adult who looks back on their childhood as a period of missed opportunities and dashed dreams.

Because it affords the viewer the luxury of transferring their own past onto that of the collective characters and filtering their own particular take on growing up through the glorious gauze of reminiscence. Because it has ace music. Because it is beautifully shot. Because the four kids speak such profound wisdom and achingly truthful insights one minute then indulge in the most fantastic casual swearing the next. Because it has great jokes. Because it is deeply, deeply human.

Because it reminds you that what you gain by way of experience in growing older you lose by way of innocence and charm.

I guess one of the luxuries of being an adult is the chance to romanticise about your childhood, but it's a far from positive indulgence, and can often - speaking from experience - lead you into psychological cul-de-sacs of reverie you can't reverse out of. Stand By Me is a way of accessing your own childhood at one remove, and therefore can't help but feel a more harmless, even safe, form of historical tourism.

Yet the impressions still run deep and its litany of quotable lines and visceral images touch me in a way not many other films, let alone TV or music or books, can do. It's impossible for me not to measure the scope of my own childhood against that of its fictional foursome and invariably find it wanting.

But then that's surely what such films are for. To afford you the chance to idly rate reality against fantasy and draw succour from the discrepancy. To articulate the sentiments you lock away deep inside you. To give you the emotional tools to excavate your own past so as to better steel you for the present.

And, of course, to make you cry.

Chris: You're gonna be a great writer someday, Gordie. You might even write about us guys if you ever get hard-up for material.
Gordie: [wiping away tears] Guess I'd have to be pretty hard-up, huh.

Bush whacked II

2006-10-08T16:20:00.000+01:00

Here's something which combines two of my favourite subjects: the writings of George Orwell, and shameless George W. Bush-baiting.

It's an article discussing and paraphrasing Orwell's famous essay 'Politics And The English Language', ticking off the salient points and applying them to today's world, culminating in a thoroughly fantastic clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It's deeply reassuring to know that this kind of television is still being made and broadcast in the United States.

Welling up

2006-10-07T16:36:00.000+01:00

I was surprised, off the back of some idle office gossip the other day, to hear so many men readily testify to having cried while watching a film. This flew in the face of the common stereotype which dictates that males are only permitted to weep, or confess to weeping, at football matches (the same place, of course, where men are also allowed to openly embrace each other).

When it comes to films, or music and TV for that matter, it doesn't take much to make me start welling up, and it never has done. I can't cry in public, though, partly because I know how unflattering and ugly it makes me look, but also because it has always felt an avowedly private emotion and one that is open to such a degree of third party misintepretation.

I remember crying once at school, when I failed my driving test for the third term running. I remember crying twice in front of my parents, once three years ago down the phone when I really felt my life had reached the last remaining atom on the bottom of the barrel, once when I was 16 and right in front of them after I'd been verbally abused by the dad of a sometime friend.

In each case the circumstances were somewhat extraordinary. In private, though, it is the most mundane and everyday of occurances which can and will set me off. Aspects of my appearance, forbearing and prospects can hit me hard when I'm low, but more often it will be some moment, some gesture, some transient mood and feeling evoked by something I have seen or heard that does the trick.

But contrary to received wisdom, I don't always "feel better" for having cried and "let it all come out". Usually I feel worse, somewhat dishevelled and shabby and at an extremely low ebb. And here's the crux of it, because if someone was around to see me weep and blub all over the place, maybe that expulsion of emotion would translate into some kind of positive epiphany. But of course there can't be anyone around, because I'm too ashamed.

It's enough to make you weep.

Fifteen score

2006-10-06T22:29:00.000+01:00

This is the 300th post I've made on Visions Before Midnight, but things have reached that point now where such milestones start to have diminishing resonance. 300 might as well be 350, or 400 - it's just another Big Number.

I suppose were I to make it to 1000 I'd feel a surge of, well, something (pride, hopefully), but that tally just feels so far off and implausible that it too has no meaning. Quantity has officially been superseded by longevity, and I will soon be able to measure the existence of this blog not by individual entries but calendar years.

Saying all that, I'll promptly do what I've done loads of times and flip things around by stating I can't think of anything offhand that I have notched up 300 instances of. If you see what I mean.

Discounting such practices as meals, nights sleeping up a particular roof or journeys along a particular route or path, to have done 300 of something is a rarity for me. Rather, a rarity for me at this time of my life. I own more than 300 of various items, formats and objects, but I didn't create them. They're not my handiwork. So I suppose 300 can be imbued with some degree of significance, albeit qualified by the all-encompassing cloak of being a Big Number.

The act of creating should be something to be celebrated in its own right, pursued for its own right and perpetrated for its own sake. If it has any consequences, positive or otherwise, upon yourself or anybody else, then that should be purely incidental and coincidentally fortuitous. If everyone is done to order, order becomes the substitute for impulse and then everybody is doomed.

Nasty party

2006-10-05T21:26:00.000+01:00

The Tories will not win the next General Election.

They are being led by a man who's fighting the battles of ten years ago and who's trying to paint himself as "Blair's heir" (his words, not mine), neither of which will induce enough members of the public to vote for him or his party come polling day.

David Cameron's performance at the Conservative Party conference this week was a wispishly constructed PR exercise from start to finish. It's utterly self-deluding and counter-productive to make a virtue out of not outlining policies, not least because when he does start outlining them people will already have grown bored of his voice and won't be listening. In other words, let's hope he goes on speaking about what he's not going to do rather than what he is, and hence discourage more people from giving the Tories the benefit of the doubt.

Then there's the Shadow Chancellor George Osborne, a man only 33 years old yet a man trying to take over the running of the nation's public finances. His utter inexperience and remote sensibilities will fortunately see to it that he never gains office - either that or his spectacular lack of self-awareness, as demonstrated by his branding Gordon Brown "autistic".

Deep down the Tories are, of course, still utterly divided: over Europe, over tax, over state education, over the NHS and over defence. The same old fissures will open up as the months go by and MPs feel less obliged to fall in behind Cameron and tolerate his endless platitudes.

If all that wasn't enough, any relief at the prospect of seeing Tony Blair out of office will have been used up way before the election when the man steps down of his own accord. As such there will be little impetus to "kick out" the incumbent Prime Minister at the next election given they'll have only been in office a couple of years.

Not that any of this excuses the fallabilities of Labour and the fact they have frippered away all the goodwill upon which they were carried into power in 1997. It's just that, at the same time, the opposition will neither deserve nor have the ability to effect enough of a defeat at the ballot box to kick them out next time around. Which, depending on how you look at it, is either an enormous boon or...an enormous boon.

Syntax burden

2006-10-03T21:10:00.000+01:00

By way of a coincidental follow-up to a comment I made the other day, a BBC producer has triggered a discussion about why the Corporation always refers to "the so-called 'war on terror'" or "the American-led 'war on terror'".

It's something I actually hadn't picked up on, subconsciously processing such turns of phrase as entirely legitimate and understandable. But inevitably, by calling attention to the practice, the Beeb has invited a load of crackpots and nutters to turn up and exercise their usual demented warped logic and lunatic prejudices. At least it helps the rest of us to know who to steer clear of.

A particular favourite of mine is the one who breaks out into a fit of Daily Mail hysterics: "The so-called British Broadcasting Corporation. You have nothing to do with my Britain stop taking taxes off us and go out into the real world and get proper jobs you losers."

Face time

2006-10-02T08:15:00.000+01:00

I'm sure you've already come across this piece of video before, but it's worth a plug here, not only for reference but also for the way it collapses six years into six minutes.

Battle hymn

2006-10-01T16:44:00.000+01:00

Watching Downfall on More4 last night, I fell to wondering, as I always seem to do when confronting such visceral reminders of global warfare, whether I would, if so called upon to do, bear arms for my country.

Such a notion seems fanciful when viewed as an abstract, of course, because it's not going to happen in my lifetime or, quite possibly, anybody's lifetime given the nature of modern conflict and mechanised armoury. Yet what if it was 65 years ago and I was facing conscription into the army to fight the forces of fascism in some far-flung corner of the world?

The answer is in the question. 65 years ago I would, I'm sure, think nothing of seeking to join the defeat of fascism by any means possible. When your enemy did you the service of so clearly defining himself by way of an aggressive ideological evil sitting on the opposite side of the English Channel, the choice is obvious.

Yet this doesn't clear up the matter of just how I would prefer to contribute to the defeat of fascism. Would I be able to prove myself intelligent enough to spend the war far away behind enemy lines sitting in Bletchley cracking codes in the hope of one day ending up being portrayed in a film produced by Mick Jagger? Or would I feel enough patriotic stirrings to actually happily join the army and fight in the front line?

There are moments, increasingly so as I get older, when I can only conclude the answer to that last question would be yes. It doesn't follow that I consider war to be anything other than abhorrent and good for, to coin a phrase, absoutely nothing, yet one of the values of experience as opposed to youthful innocence is a deepening awareness of the fabric of society and the continuity of history. If the call came...surely, ultimately, honestly, you would have no choice?

Well, perhaps it's more constructive to introduce that woefully pious division between a 'good war' and a 'bad war'.

As helpfully itemised in The Simpsons, 'good wars' include The American Revolution, World War Two, and the Star Wars Trilogy.

'Bad wars', it can safely be stated, include every possible kind of conflict since 1945, including the present stupidly-named 'war on terror' (as if you can fight a war against a noun) and the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whereas you can see the rationale, I would hope, in taking part in a 'good war', there is assuredly no worth in lending your support, be it physical, vocal or implicit, to a 'bad war'.

As such Hitler embodied the ultimate 'good' baddie: desperately easy to categorise, even simpler to demonise, whose only concern was to spread hate around the planet. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, while an obvious dictator, did not wish to spread hate around the planet and was not, when leader of Iraq, easy to categorise.

Indeed, we spent most of the 1980s selling him weapons, then spent most of the 1990s trying to make him dismantle them, and look like spending most of this decade trampling round his erstwhile domain turning more and more of his erstwhile citizens into enemies of the West.

It's a singular problem. Fortunately, as I said, there will never be a moment in my lifetime when I have to consider whether I should go and fight in a trench. But spool back three generations and I'm increasingly convinced it wouldn't have been a matter for consideration at all. For lest we forget, as memorably cited in the cartoon series Dungeons And Dragons, "from bad can come good." Although, as memorably retorted in the self-same cartoon series, "try telling that to my math (sic) teacher."

September Song

2006-09-30T12:07:00.000+01:00

I can't help feeling it's been a rather itchy, shabby month.

September, for me, has tradtionally represented the start of something: a new school, a new term, a new season, a new sense of freshness in the air. Up until this year, however, when instead it seems to have been almost wholly devoted to the end of something. Specifically, the end of the long hot summer, including the end of suffocatingly balmy nights and relentlessly blistering days.

It's taken a hell of a long time for remnants of the heatwave to pack up and move out. Even this week the temperature was back in the mid-20s in central London. Signs of autumn kicking in last month were deceptively premature; there was still plenty of discomfort to come and I wasn't ready for it.

The other night, though, there was an exciting foretaste of autumn in the shape of a romantically gloomy wet and windy storm. There is little that is more evocative in life than lying in bed late at night listening to the rain falling outside. I defy anybody to do such a thing and not be moved, be it into some profoundly cosy state of mind or a nostalgically-tinted reverie of other similarly-tinged occasions.

Autumn should, by rights, deliver up a good few dozen such experiences. It's what I always look forward to this time of year, along with the joy of seeing how the evolving climate can have such an immediate impact on things.

A brief rainstorm changes the look and feel of the world around you in as dramatic a fashion as nothing else. Even the colour of buildings and streets alters before your eyes. After months and months of endless sun beating down and imperceptibly bleaching the pavement and grass, the forces of autumn and their restorative, levelling influence upon the very fabric of society are what I'm aching for.

I hope their arrival has been postponed temporarily, not indefinitely.

Paper tigers

2006-09-29T23:10:00.000+01:00

Sitting in a corner of my bedroom in one of many similarly-dusty, similarly-unassuming cardboard folders are a couple documents I wrote in the late 1990s.

One is a screenplay, the other a script. They hail from a time when I thought the sort of thing I should be doing with my life was getting stuff down on paper, regardless of merits, regardless of consequences. I was at a crossroads, between university and a proper, full-time job; I was also at several loose ends.

I don't think I've looked at either finished works for a good five years or so. Their presence simultaneously annoys and taunts me.

They symbolise concrete evidence of how I used to be and how I used to think when I was quite a bit younger and far less rational than I am now. As such their contents, from recollection, are embarrassingly self-righteous and unashamedly polemical. They were my attempt at putting the world to rights with a pen rather than, well, a sword. They were completed in part for expediency, to prove I could do it and to prove to others I could do it. But they were also, and remain as such to date, the last pieces of creative writing I ever did.

Throughout my early childhood I was always dreaming up stuff and committing it to paper, be it in a formal capacity at primary school or to pass the time at home. At secondary school I sort of lost my way and got too embroiled in the business of studying for the sake of it, devoting far more time to the business of homework than any sane person should and throwing away part of my teenage years as a result.

Later on again, especially during my A-levels, the process flipped back and I rediscovered the joy of creating, be it prose, poems or songs. That feeling and passion persisted through university and out the other side, culminating, you could say, in these two epic productions which, in fact, are neither epic and have never been produced. But still.

One, a screenplay entitled 'Illusions', was a preposterously ambitious art-mirroring-life affair, tracing the fortunes of five former school-friends forwards and backwards in time up to the start of the new millennium.

I stuffed it full of allusions to real events and people, crammed it full of my favourite songs, and shoehorned into it every technical camera and staging trick I'd ever seen or read about, including a scene where characters spent two minutes walking towards a static camera, another where the camera spent the entire scene moving slowly into a café then out of it, a third where proceedings turned into an episode The Avengers, and so on.

I showed it to three friends, each of whose personalities had been shamelessly imported into the script. I don't know what kind of response I was expecting; none mentioned the liberties I had taken with their own characters, which was very gracious of them. Equally, none ever made reference to the screenplay ever again, which was probably just as kind. I wrote the entire thing in the summer of 1997, just after graduating from university.

The second document, a play script entitled 'Hustings', was a shorter piece but no less pretentious. All the action took place during one night - the night of a general election - and once again featured an ensemble of characters with various affinities and affiliations squabbling and falling out and making up and mouthing off.

I wrote the thing in 1999 when I had lost all patience with New Labour and its machinations of government and when I was perilously interested in writing about politics and nothing but.

Both pieces are now relics, echoes from an earlier age when I thought I could see the world for what it was and everything was black and white.

If they were conceived to put a full stop on the end of my life as, for want of a better word, a writer of fiction, they certainly did that job. But where they failed was to sufficiently wrap up enough unfinished business, answer enough questions and resolve enough internal and external dilemmas for me to put them and their concerns behind me. Maybe it's time for a sequel, an update, a 'reunion' of the characters - after all, it'll be 10 years next year since their creation.

Except of course that's not true. The characters have been with me in one form or other all of my life, and putting them onto paper was just an artifical means of preserving them in a form which, as I once thought of myself, would and could never change.

Own goal

2006-09-28T22:15:00.000+01:00

What's most amusing about these wretched videos is that they appear to be sitting on the same company's very own website, thereby receiving implicit endorsement from the very organisation the clips are so pitilessly lampooning. Somebody's looking the other way...

Tone deaf

2006-09-27T21:17:00.000+01:00

There's no doubt the Prime Minister made an impressive last stand at the Labour Party conference yesterday; he's always had an undeniable flair for oratory and theatrics which have seen him through many a scrape in the past and which (almost) always seem to come to his rescue at times of personal crisis.

But in reality his slick presentational skills and nifty turns of phrase have long since changed from being an addendum to Blair's problems to being the one sole problem above all else. Where once his way with words would charm and impress, now it just grates and offends. He no longer convinces, persuades, cajoles. Rather he merely drones, blathers and shouts.

The initial reaction may be the same - of someone who can make you listen and catches your ear like nobody else on the Labour front bench - but the lasting impression is quite different from that of, say, 10 years ago.

There's now a huge swell of indifference to the business of taking Blair at face value. Once he didn't have to fight against such a thing. Once he stood a reasonable chance of being accepted and trusted and respected. But then came, in the words of another infamously derailed Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, "events".

Ultimately Blair became his own worst enemy, his way with words being both his making and his undoing. Lest we forget, it was one soundbite too many - "45 minutes" - which triggered his fall from grace.

Will we miss Blair when he's gone? You bet , but only in the way you miss having something to moan about, the way you miss idly picking at a scab once it has healed, or the way you miss cursing the British weather for being too hot when winter arrives and it's too cold.

Besides, he'll make it his business to not be absent from the scene for too long. You can guarantee his face will still be popping up all over the place, just no longer as a representative of the people (ha!) and instead as an unelected, unaccountable celebrity. Or more likely, checking in overdue books behind the counter at the Tony Blair Memorial Library.

Pet project

2006-09-25T22:13:00.000+01:00

On Saturday a cat appeared on the scaffolding outside my flat.

Heaven knows how it had got there, but it seemed perfectly content and effortlessly happy, basking in the sun, snoozing for hours on end and casually watching the world go by.

It was still there as night fell. My initial enchantment at such a domestic scene turned to worry. Perhaps the cat was stuck. Surely it would want to go home? Wasn't it hungry? Wasn't it cold?

When I got up the following morning and saw it was still there, I knew instantly it couldn't get down. Either it had been chased up the scaffolding or scuttled its way up in a fit of wild exuberance, but now it was well and truly stranded, and it seemed like I was the only one in the entire neighbourhood who had noticed.

The problem was, just as the cat couldn't get down, I couldn't get up to rescue it.

The bottom part of the scaffolding was pure iron bars - no ladders or climbing frames in sight. What's more, the plank on which the cat was sitting was too low for me to reach from my own window. All I could do was watch it, helpless, willing it to work out a way to escape or summon up the courage to climb down the ladders it had originally clambered up.

Last night - Sunday night - was the worst. The cat was mewing and whining for hours. I felt absolutely dreadful. Should I call the fire brigade? After all, it's what people used to do when a cat got stuck up a tree. Should I call on my neighbours and try to organise our own rescue?

Yet both ideas felt utterly ludicrous and far-fetched. I would be laughed out of court. Everybody would say they had better things to do. Nobody would believe me.

My sole hope was that today, Monday, the workmen would show up and help the cat to safety themselves. I couldn't bank on it; last week, when I worked from home for a day, not a single person showed up to do any work on the scaffolding whatsoever.

My abiding fear was that I could return from work and find the cat still perched up there, miaowing its poor heart out, desperate for food and shelter. Or worse, the cat would be up there, but dead. Starved into extinction, having been sitting in front of my own eyes the whole weekend.

Well, when I came back from work the cat had gone. Vanished. It was already dark, so I couldn't see any sign of how it might have got down or to where it had made its escape, but the poor creature had definitely disappeared. Helped down, hopefully, and allowed to trot off to its owners.

Daylight will confirm the fact and not, as is still my deepest, darkest dread, the sight of a cat lying immobile, stretched out not on another plank of wood, but far far below me on the ground, silent, still, alone.

Shana Tova

2006-09-24T21:11:00.000+01:00

This weekend has marked the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hashanah.

It's something ordinarily I would have no awareness of or interest in, but now that I'm living in one of the most predominantly Jewish areas of London it's an event that has proved hard to miss.

In truth I didn't know it was happening until I was doing some shopping and noticed the greater concentration than usual of Jewish families out and about, in particular the crowds pouring forth from the various local synagogues and temples.

Two things above all impress me about Judaism: the fact it's a very dignified religion, and the fact it's a very sociable one as well.

The former is self-evident from the pride Jews take in their appearance on important religious occasions and holidays: immaculately dressed, impeccably behaved, unwaveringly polite.

The latter is equally self-evident from the way you'll see large groups of friends and families passing the time of day and swapping chat on street corners, in the parks, by road junctions - anywhere in fact that can lend itself to the exchange of conversation and discussion.

From my limited experience of Christianity (when I was young I used to earn some money by playing the organ at weddings and funerals) you certainly get neither such traits in the Church of England. I recall seeing people show up to services in the tattiest of clothes, then pissing off afterwards without even bothering to return their hymn books.

It's undoubtedly instructive and also somewhat humbling to be exposed to the cultures of the world's great religions. Just living in the same borough as a large concentration of Jews has led me to read up a little on their New Year, ascertaining that, among other things, it's just turned 5767 in their calendar, and the event marks the start of what are known as the ten 'Days Of Awe', culminating in Yom Kippur - a name which, for students of history like me, comes bearing ominous resonances of the eponymous Israeli war of 1973.

The common expression of good wishes, meanwhile, is "Shana Tova", and the occasion is commemorated by eating, among others, round challah bread, apples dipped in honey, and pomegranates.

I'm sure any Jews reading this will think my innocence and naivety laughable. I gladly hold my hands up to any accusation of ignorance you'd care to muster. Yet I've ended the day knowing something more about the ways of the world than when I started it, and that can only be a good thing.

Around London VI

2006-09-23T18:05:00.000+01:00

From my kitchen windows I can see, on the horizon, the woods of Richmond Park - around 20 miles away as the crow flies, I'd say. Today I actually got to walk through these famed, illustrious pastures as part of the sixth leg of my circumnavigation.

And to be honest, wild deer aside, they weren't much cop. In fact, I didn't really enjoy this stage of my journey at all. I'm not sure precisely why, though the weather definitely had something to do with it: unseasonably hot, sticky and dry. I don't know what the fuck has happened to our climate this year, but it's been behaving in the most petulant fashion since round about March and I dearly wish it'd settle down.

You'd have thought late September would be a time of cool winds, gentle colours and calming sunlight. Struggling through acres of Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park today I could well have done with any one of those three things.

A grim and relentless trek all told, and one that didn't lend itself to many decent photos.

One of the best, in fact, I took on the train journey out to Wimbledon. This itself was a joke, lasting a total of 95 minutes: longer than it takes for me to travel from London to my hometown in the East Midlands. I know I was travelling to the furthest place from my starting point on the entire circumnavigation, but 95 minutes was taking the piss.

It was a blessed relief to arrive in Richmond and to see, after previously leaving it dozens of miles away and a month and a half ago at Woolwich, the River Thames.

Day 6: Wimbledon - Richmond
Miles Added: 8
Total Miles Completed: 59.25
Total Miles Outstanding: 18.75

Here, now

2006-09-22T17:56:00.000+01:00

"I will observe the Islamic process."
"The Islamic process, but not the democratic process?"
"That's right, yeah."

On the Today programme this morning, John Humphrys tried to interview the activist Abu Izzadeen, the man who'd heckled that recent press conference by the Home Secretary John Reid. The results were utterly gripping.

Lib doomed

2006-09-21T20:49:00.000+01:00

This cartoon by Steve Bell in The Guardian pretty much sums up the state of the Liberal Democrats at present.

Watching them at this week's party conference has been akin to eavesdropping on an overlit, understated tupperware party.

Old age reeked from every pore, along with equally ancient bugbears and brickbats. Everybody smiled and laughed on cue and nobody raised their voice too loudly. When they clapped, they clapped with reticence and timidity. Standing ovations quickly curtailed to modest muttering. Policies were debated but to no true end. There were no anti-climaxes because there were no climaxes. The conference merely began, quietly cleared its throat, then disappeared.

The fire has gone out of the Liberal Democrats and all that's left for its old-timers to do is rake through the embers. Menzies Campbell should have burst out the starting gates upon becoming leader and stamped his authority and personality throughout the party in his first 100 days, like all decent political helmsmen do. Instead he dithered and declined and withered and waned and said little of any consequence to nobody in particular.

The result has been a wasted year, a squandered inheritance (the highest number of MPs ever) and falling public credibility. I remember watching footage of a Lib Dem rally during last year's General Election and being amazed at the scenes of tumult and excitement ricocheting around the venue. People of all ages clamoured to lend their support to a party which had bravely and correctly stood up against the war in Iraq and student tuition fees and ID cards and denying old people free health care and a raft of other lunatic destructive Labour policies. The atmosphere, even at one remove, was palpable and potent.

By contrast the atmosphere detectable at the Lib Dem conference this week, what there was of one, was stale and indifferent. I voted for the party at the last election and, despite at the time living in an ostensibly safe Labour seat, helped make enough of a dent in the sitting MP's majority to turn it into a winnable proposition next time round. That was assuming the Lib Dems continued on the same kind of trajectory as they had up to 2005.

How quickly everything put together falls apart.

Iron brew II

2006-09-20T17:24:00.000+01:00

Here are some immensely exciting photos of what has happened to the outside of my flat. Clearly what with a coup in Thailand, allegations of corruption at the heart of English football and the trial of the UK's first Iraq war criminal, the state of my brickwork is the most important thing in the whole world.

Iron brew

2006-09-18T20:58:00.000+01:00

I came home from work this evening to discover almost the entire outside of my building caked in scaffolding. The whole three floors, from ground to roof level, had been virtually enclosed in a cage of metal pipes and wooden platforms, with only a bit of space at one end to allow daylight into the flats within.

I felt like I'd walked into a Terry Gilliam film, or that a dozen Kafka-esque anonymous authority figures were about to materialise from nowhere and escort me off the premises while the mysterious "repairs" were completed. Nothing of the sort transpired, naturally, but the presence of this unappealing, unwieldly lattice of iron right outside my windows is immensely off-putting.

I don't know why it is there. I don't know who put it there. I don't know for how long it will remain. I don't know to what end it was so artfully constructed then so artlessly left standing without explanation.

Part of it has been built so close to my exterior walls that I can't actually open some of my windows. The ones I can open are right by ladders or walkways or other highly accessible vantage points. The wind has picked up during the last couple of hours and now the whole edifice is shaking eerily and groaning melodramatically.

I'd feel a whole lot better about the situation had I been told it was going to happen. I can only surmise it's something to do with the state of the outside drains, which as you know are highly unreliable and which I guess need a thorough overhaul to avoid any future cases of self-combustion.

Better it be done now than in the middle of winter, I suppose, but better it be done in a way that didn't suggest a stranger was about to drop into your living room the moment your back is turned. Still, at least old fag ash Fred downstairs can't open his windows anymore, thereby depriving my flat of the omnipotent odour of his pipe smoke.

Humble pie

2006-09-17T09:50:00.000+01:00

There's an episode in the first series of The West Wing where the American President, as played by Martin Sheen, agonises over whether he and his staff can find a reason for commuting the death sentence on someone.

Against all of their better instincts, not to mention a great dose of common sense, the President bows to what he cites is public opinion (specifically a poll which says something like 70% of the American public support capital punishment) and allows the execution to go ahead. Immediately racked by guilt, he turns to his childhood Catholic priest, who he has deliberately invited to the White House as if to anticipate this very moment, and offers up his confession.

It's a startling, shocking moment of drama - it was when I first watched it over five years ago, and it was again just yesterday when I watched it again on DVD. Its potency, however, seems all the more visceral now compared with then.

It surely beggars belief to ever ever expect the present occupent of the Oval Office to even consider offering up his confession as forgiveness for any possible act or deed. It would simply never happen. He probably thinks everything he does and says is blessed by God already. In fact he already thinks and acts this way.

For one of the most powerful people in the world to ever contemplate showing an ounce of humility would be a truly wonderful thing indeed, but at present can surely only occur in fiction, in some parallel White House filled with decent, self-aware, dignified people, prepared to accept blame and acknowledge mistakes.

When The West Wing was first aired it felt like a joyful escapist fantasy, a benchmark against which other TV drama and the practice of politics could be measured. Now it feels nothing less like a clarion call of hope for the restoration of sanity in an increasingly off-kilter and demented world.

Paper chase

2006-09-16T11:47:00.000+01:00

London has recently been blessed with the arrival of not one but two new "free" newspapers, both published mid-afternoon and both intended to be perused by "urbanites" on their way home from work in the evening.

In their short lifespan London Lite and thelondonpaper - equally shit names, I'm sure you'll agree - have already stirred up a rumpus, thanks not just to their over-hyped rivalry and fierce competition, but also for the latter's hapless editorial and production values, typified by this amusing faux pas.

This isn't to excuse or even condone the quality of the former. In fact, both are as lowsy, sloppy and unappealing as each other - hardly surprising, really, when you realise one, London Lite, is published by the same company that is responsible for The Daily Mail (Associated Newspapers), and the other, thelondonpaper, is the work of Rupert Murdoch (News International).

What a grubby, pitiful and ultimately pointless contest: two disreputable organisations trying to outplay each other for the same tranche of upmarket of readers and the same downmarket content. I'd happily cast a plague on both their houses. In a war between the owners of the Mail and the Sun, nobody can ever emerge with any dignity.

Yet the worse outcome is surely the amount of litter being generated by their simultaneous publication and blanket consumption on the Underground. Previously the situation was already pretty dire thanks to the ubiquity of the Metro, the "free" morning newspaper, copies of which were always and still are knocking around on trains 12 hours later.

Now, though, that has been compounded threefold, so you find carriages caked in the remains of the Metro, London Lite and thelondonpaper (those names don't get any nicer to look at, do they?).

Plus you've got the Evening Standard still widely read and equally widely jettisoned, together with any other publications commuters may have deigned to shell out for on their way to and from work.

All in all it's a really unedifying and ugly (in every sense) outcome. Heaven knows what visitors from around the country and abroad make of the capital at the moment, its streets and transport system swimming in acres of rain forest while the vast majority of its inhabitants are apparently happy to go about their business choosing to bury their faces in these tawdry rags rather than read a book or even, say, look up at things around them. A practice which you sense would, undoubtedly, enlighten them far more to what was really going on in the world than the contents of any "free" daily newspaper.

But then there's no accounting for taste. As the starched housewife on A Bit Of Fry And Laurie intones, "My husband and I read The Daily Mail. We prefer it to a newspaper."

Frequency modulation

2006-09-15T21:53:00.000+01:00

Popular sentiment suggests that a reliable measure of increasing age, if not infirmity, is when you spot a policeman on the street who looks younger than you are.

The moment your local constabulary starts to resemble what appear to be pleasant, open-faced teenagers is the moment you know you've passed the full flush of youth and are heading deep, deep into adulthood.

I'd like to propose an alternative benchmark for the advancement of years. It is the moment you realise BBC Radio 4 continuity announcers are younger than you are.

The current edition of Radio Times features an interview with a member of the said profession who gives his age as a somewhat preposterous 30. That's a mere 12 months away from being a twentysomething. It's the same age as me. It's the sort of age you'd ostensibly assume was comfortably removed from the vocation of continuity announcer by a good couple of decades at least. Not anymore.

Popular sentiment suggest the folk who do "the bits inbetween" the programmes we watch and listen to are veterans of the broadcasting establishment - reliable, unflappable old hands who exude calm and authority, who would know what to do the moment any technical foul-ups or "gremlins in the works" reared their head, and who could handle even the imminent end of the world with noble stoicism and avuncular aplomb.

Now it turns out they're no more advanced in age or experience than someone that, like yourself, was still at school when the Berlin Wall came down, was doing their A-levels the time Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, and had only just finished university when Princess Diana decided not to avoid driving into a brick wall.

There's something profoundly wrong about such a state of affairs. But then I would say that. After all, I'm now officially the age of the professional curmudgeon.

Bush whacked

2006-09-14T22:35:00.000+01:00

Bin Laden Celebrates Whitney Houston's Divorce By Cancelling Jihad.

Formative fields

2006-09-13T22:23:00.000+01:00

Somewhere in England.

Slight return II

2006-09-11T22:28:00.000+01:00

Some great news. The Bluetones are back, and moreover, back with an utterly fantastic new single.

Shit happens

2006-09-10T13:14:00.000+01:00

A drainpipe has exploded outside my flat. Mercifully it's not right outside, rather a little way along the walkway that connects all the small buildings that make up this residence. But it still means I have to negotiate my way around, or more precisely through, the debris in order to reach the main road, and it's not a pleasant experience.

I can't think how it has happened. I'd spotted that the pipe was leaking a few days ago, but thought nothing more of it. Sure, every morning as I left for work a small puddle of old rainwater had gathered on the pavement, but it had always disappeared come my return in the evening, either drained away or evaporated in the sunlight.

What must have come to pass to render the leak into a combustible crucible of crap? Maybe the person whose flat the pipe belongs to has been suffering from the runs, thereby contributing to a larger than usual quantity of effluent flowing through the mains and creating a situation where something had to give. Maybe foul play is afoot, and someone has sabotaged the pipe in order to engender such a shower of shit. Maybe it's just shoddy workmanship and what has been threatening to happen for months and months has finally come to pass.

Whatever, it's a fucking disaster area with water everywhere and what looks, from a distance, to be lumps of suspiciously-flecked mud splattered all up the side of the wall. As I said, it's not my wall and not my pipe, so it's not my fault. But is it my responsibility? I can't see the damage from my flat, nor can I smell it. Part of me hopes it will just go away. All the same, as I write nothing whatsoever has been done to clean up the mess and I haven't spotted anybody bothering to investigate the source of the catastrophe.

The flat the pipe belongs to has its windows open, implying residents are present and going about their business. Haven't they spotted what has happened? Isn't the whiff of stale excrement drifting merrily into their living room at this precise moment?

Even if it is, I bet they can't be arsed to do anything. Still, who can blame them. It's the same everywhere you look. And what, at the end of the day, can you do? Shit happens.

Around London V

2006-09-09T17:47:00.000+01:00

Not such an epic hike this time, and nowhere near as geographically varied as any of the legs I've completed to date. This was very much a sojourn through suburbia. But that, as it turned out, was no bad thing, especially when it included the genteel middle class boroughs of Croydon and Bromley.

I found myself in a part of the country best known to me through Sherlock Holmes stories: names like Norwood, Copper Beeches and Reigate were all around, while many of the streets had a quaint, otherworldy air that could have had you mistakenly thinking you were ambling through the late 19th century. To continue to sleuth associations, at one point in Balham I went past the building used as the main location for ITV's Poirot series.

Plus there was a whole slew of hills: Herne Hill, Biggin Hill, Fox Hill and Tulse Hill, all of which keep bringing me up above the horizon and affording fabulous views in all directions. The latter, of course, kept reminding me of Carter's reliably pun-laboured song '24 Hours From Tulse Hill'. And just after I'd got 'The Only Living Boy In New Cross' out of my head from last time.

At one point I was crossing a street in Streatham (SW16), looked to my right, and far away at the end of the road was, somewhat unbelievably, Wembley Stadium (NW10) which is only a mile or so from my flat.

I also saw a Muslim man reciting his daily prayers on a mat in the middle of Norbury Recreation Ground. His calm nonchalence and personal devotion, provoking not one iota of reaction from anybody passing by, was somehow deeply reassuring.

Day 5: Crystal Palace - Wimbledon
Miles Added: 9
Total Miles Completed: 51.25
Total Miles Outstanding: 26.75

Counting down

2006-09-07T20:13:00.000+01:00

I have to say I found this highly fitting.

So many of Tony Blair's grand declarations and pious recitations as Prime Minister have taken place in school playgrounds or assembly halls with pupils and teachers playing the role of mute, anxious bystanders. It was ironic, then, that on this day of all days, it was this particular speech that was the first to be interrupted by a bit of long overdue rabble-rousing.

It was also fun to see how the protest got straight to the point - 'Tony The Poodle' - and boasted students as young as 13 amongst its ranks.

In truth it's surely now the case that the majority of the country, from 13 to 113 (were such people in existence), are in broad agreement that the man's time is most definitely up and would be quite happy (i.e. not that bothered) were he to have told the media he was stepping down next week rather than next year.

Instead what we could be looking at now is month upon month of agonising back-biting and name-calling - more agonising, were it possible, than the kind which has been going on for the past, ooh, nine years - forming a complete distraction from the carnage in Iraq, the slaughter in Afghanistan, the tensions in the Middle East and the follies of the Anglo-American alliance. Never mind the state of this nation, replete with a population deeply ill-at-ease with itself and its ruling classes.

I sorely hope Blair will go before Christmas, not least because it will bear out the prophecy I have made several times on this blog, but also because I'm now terminally weary of finding the man's haggard yet petulant face popping up all over the place believing it's what the public want to see.

Plus I'd hate to be 13 and to have known no other Prime Minister than Tony Blair. Imagine growing up under just one PM, forever unsure if and when they will finally shuffle off the scene. But then I don't need to imagine.

'Arms way

2006-09-06T21:30:00.000+01:00

I was thumped in the stomach today on two non-consecutive occasions.

London seems to boast an inordinate number of pedestrians who choose to go about their business swinging their arms in an acutely unselfconscious manner. These people are particularly prevalent in areas of concentrated crowds, where their affectation takes on, in inverse relation to their immediate surroundings, even more of a violent trajectory. Consequently it's pretty lethal trying to make your way along the pavement, as I discovered today. Twice.

I've never come across such behaviour before. It's like being back in primary school music and movement classes, where everyone would be cajoled into finding "a space" and, to the sound of a hopelessly out-of-tune piano accompaniment, swing their limbs around in a vague approximation of a tree being caught in a thunderstorm.

Only these people are adults. And, in theory, somewhat more reserved and appreciative of their environment. One of my assailants was parading around swinging her right arm out behind her almost a full 90 degrees, while leaving her left arm near-motionless. After making contact with my stomach, she didn't apologise (naturally - nobody does in London), choosing instead to simply carry on with her demented limb-flapping somewhere else.

The other person was walking towards me leaving enough room, or so I thought, to pass cleanly by without collision. Oh no. As he neared I could see his arm was swinging in a quite preposterous fashion all over the bloody place, and inevitably I was thumped without remorse or pity.

It's the little things that can push you that bit nearer the edge and set the seal on an otherwise indifferently tough day. It's the little things that stick more in your mind when the evening comes and you're reflecting on the previous 12 hours and which end up overshadowing any number of more significant and portentous issues.

And it's the little things which invariably contrive to hit you where it hurts as opposed to the big things which just fester away inside and whose damage only become clear ten years down the line.

Door stopped

2006-09-05T19:45:00.000+01:00

Yet another development to report on the Underground.

Twice in one day I have witnessed people in such a desperate rush to jump into a carriage that their luggage has got caught in the sliding doors and the entire train has been held up waiting for the confusion to be resolved.

Yesterday morning it was a bloke with a giant rucksack, who somehow contrived to end up standing on the platform with his bag poking through into the inside of the carriage. Some charitable passenger jumped to his aid and tried to push the rucksack back through, while another person on the platform joined in and tried the pull the rucksack out. It was all to no avail, of course, and a huge palaver ensued before the driver realised something was wrong and opened up all the doors. Not before a great deal of time and energy had been expended for no reason.

Then in the evening the same thing happened again, although this time involving a person who'd made it into the carriage but whose luggage was still protuding half-out. Again a lot of faffing and flapping ensued, and again everybody was held up waiting for the doors to be properly opened and the offending bag freed.

Such cases are probably quite common, but in each instance I don't blame the driver. I blame the passengers who have the nerve and idiocy to believe a closing door isn't in fact closing but is somehow going to magically let them through despite being made of glass, plastic and lots of electrical wires. When the tannoy booms out "Mind the closing doors", they seem to regard this as an instruction to do the precise opposite. No wonder so many people are injured on the Underground every year simply boarding and dismounting from trains.

I'm still waiting for the occasion when I get to see someone have their tie or a piece of jacket caught in the machinery behind them and then have to stay jammed up against the door until being "freed" at the next station. It'd certainly make commuting a lot more fun. For me, that is.

Mersey tales

2006-09-04T18:12:00.000+01:00

It's now just over half a year since I moved to London and six months exactly since I started my new job.

Time seems to have raced by, yet I can't help but feel the sensation that my life in Liverpool (all 12 years of it) might just as well be a generation ago. Everything feels so distant to me now.

It was such an upheaval coming down here, and such hard work trying to put down new roots, that since the move my energies and attention have, for good and ill, been utterly consumed simply with the business of staying alive and keeping going. I haven't had the space nor stamina to contemplate what I left behind. I suspect there's a part of my subconscious that doesn't want to allow me to either.

In truth I have been thinking about Liverpool increasingly of late, and of how many different kinds of experiences and rituals I had to abandon in order to break free of a soul-destroying job, a humiliating salary and a character-humbling workplace.

I don't miss that particular vocation, of course, nor most of the people who passed as my colleagues. But they weren't all a bad bunch, and I was fortunate to fall in with a small group of allies and confidantes amongst my immediate peers who, during the three and a half years I spent in that job, proved selfless in their support and understanding.

I miss them; but I also miss...

- the serenity around where I used to live, which allowed me to hear the birds in the morning and the trains at night;

- hot buttered toast from the bakeries in town;

- blustery western winds that would blast all the cobwebs from your crumpled office-bound exterior;

- neighbours who actually spoke to you and took an interest in your welfare;

- the reassurance of being somewhere you've lived for so long and the confidence in knowing that, however many times you go away, you'll always want to return after not too long;

- the cavernous starry skies at night;

- decent haircuts for just £5;

- public transport that doesn't roast you alive;

- the rain, falling hour upon hour with untempered abandon and sparkling delight;

- revisiting old haunts;

- the coolness, even in the height of summer, lurking in any nearby park or garden;

- the parts of the city I somehow never found the time to visit;

- the desolate romanticism of Lime Street station;

- being so close to the sea;

- nicer accents;

- living amongst so much of my past;

And a million and one other things that made up the fabric of my existence in Liverpool and which were completely unravelled in the process of moving 200 miles south.

I wish I could have them all back. I really do.

Immaterial girl

2006-09-03T09:05:00.000+01:00

Sifting through more intriguing clips of David Letterman I was particularly glad to find this, such was its notoriety at the time plus the fact that you would never ever get anything like this unfolding on British television (for shame). Why can't we do talk shows over here like they do over there?

Aisle bet

2006-09-02T19:36:00.000+01:00

Two people in my office at work have just got engaged, and have been subjecting all and sundry to their hopes and plans for their respective marriage ceremonies.

They're not engaged to each other, let me make that clear, but in a way that has made things even worse seeing as how the rest of us have to sit through twice as much nuptial nattering as would otherwise be the case.

It always depresses me when somebody I know, be it a friend or colleague, declares their forthcoming intention to head up the aisle. It's not that I'm depressed for them, far from it; rather I can't help but end up feeling sorry for myself as yet another person ostensibly of my "age" has got their life into enough of an order to want to "settle down" by way of committing themselves legally to spending the rest of days with somebody else. I can't help but compare their fortunes with my own - or rather, their confidence and security and self-assurance with my own.

I also have to confess to being somewhat surprised as to how fashionable and popular marriage appears to have become once again. I thought ours was the generation that wasn't going to have anything to do with that nonsense of till death us do part, let alone doing it so early on.

Perhaps that misconception is erroneous. Most, but not all, people I know over 30 (and granted that's not many) are either married or in intensely long-term relationships which might very well end up in knots being tied before too long. Equally most people I know under 30 (ditto) are similarly settled, albeit with not such grand designs for the future nor such a feeling of settlement about them.

One of the websites I write for has witnessed, amongst its staff, a wedding once a year for almost the past five years. What began way back as something being written and edited solely by a bunch of single (well, unmarried) blokes, for whom it was the principle thing in their lives, has changed utterly both in status and priority. I'm now in the minority by dint of being wholly unattached - and also by still, uncoincidentally, having just as much time to spend on the site as I've ever done.

Ah well. I guess it's like any kind of gang anywhere in the world: there comes a point when everybody grows up.

Go now

2006-09-01T19:01:00.000+01:00

It's great fun reading the numerous comments people have posted in response to a 'Have Your Say' feature on the BBC News website concerning when Tony Blair should stand down.

Virtually nobody has a good word for the Prime Minister, and virtually nobody would like him to stay in his job one day longer. Most wish he'd quit months ago. Some would've liked to see him go a few years back. A few would really quite have preferred it were he never to have become PM at all.

The quantity and focus of vitriol seems, at first, quite astonishing when placed against the fact that a mere 18 months ago Labour won a General Election with a very safe majority and until about three months ago had enjoyed a lead in the opinion polls which had remained almost unbroken since 1992.

But on second thoughts it pays to remember how Blair only won last year with a 35% share of the vote - almost one in three of those who cast their ballot. And that figure itself was from a turnout of a little over half those eligible to vote. In actual fact only around 18% of the electorate voted Labour in 2005.

With over 80% of the country having not elected to support this Government, little wonder such fierce resentment is surfacing in such a manifest fashion. But remember, the Conservative Party polled even less at that election, with even fewer people expressing a desire to see the Tories back in power. Although David Cameron has scored a few opinion poll successes of late, and will undoubtedly continue to do so, it remains a truism that opposition parties never win General Elections, it is always governments which lose them.

Hence Cameron won't win the next election; instead it will be Blair's replacement who, on the surface, will have lost it. Of course in truth the damage may have already been done, and it will be Blair himself who will have cost his party a fourth successive victory. Or rather, it could be the cumulative amount of gossiping about the damage he could be doing which ultimately creates the climate in which Labour can do nothing but lose.

Whatever, it's a turbulent party conference season that is about to begin and proof that we remain in one of the most dynamic periods of political upheaval in this country for a generation or so.

For the first time in a very very long time we don't really know what's about to happen and when. And for someone who grew up during 18 years of endless Tory rule, only to see it inevitably replaced by 9 years (and counting) of endless Labour rule, the number of unknowns surrounding who and for what reason the country will vote for come the next polling day can't multiply fast enough.

Shut eye

2006-08-31T21:56:00.000+01:00

I'm suffering another bout of chronic weariness. No matter how much sleep I get I always seem to feel tired. I'd put it down to the changing weather and Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) were it not the case that I seem to experence these symptoms regardless of season or climate and have done for years and years.

There simply aren't enough hours in the day to take for granted. Disposable time is what helps you survive - I've learnt that now - and not a desire to fill up every minute of the day with some kind of specific activity.

I remember an old English teacher of mine once saying how much she enjoyed going to concerts as it meant she wasn't spending her free time surrounded by the tools she had to wield during her working day, i.e. words. She was in a text-free environment.

Given how much of my life is governed by it, I could do with spending a bit more time in a time-free environment.

Leg it

2006-08-30T20:42:00.000+01:00

There was an incident on the Underground this evening involving a group of youths, a businessman and an older bloke in a suit who ended up playing the role of honest broker and peacemaker.

It happened just as the train had pulled into Brent Cross and the doors had opened. Because of the inordinate number of bodies crammed into the carriage it was impossible to see precisely what happened, but it looked like the youths charged at the businessman, presumably in an attempt to relieve him of some of his expensive belongings, but got waylaid by the aforementioned older bloke and the sheer amount of people standing in the way.

I say presumably, but I can't think what other reason they would have for charging at the man, other than purely for the sake of it, which may have been true were we all in a playground and not an Underground carriage bristling with travellers festooned with all sorts of very obvious pricey accessories such as phones and MP3 players. Why folk have to make such a habit of displaying their costly wares is a mystery to me, rendering them as it does a walking invitation for pickpockets.

Anyway the youths ended up tripping over themselves, which was quite amusing, and then being made to stand in a group on the platform while the victim, the honest broker, and a few other people who joined in for the excitement, carried out some kind of inquisition. The behaviour of everyone else left on the train was absolutely shameless: desperately peering out to see what was going on, necks craned, eyes popping, tongues wagging.

Anything out of the ordinary, anything exhibiting the merest whim of scandal or controversy, anything involving somebody being apparently wronged by somebody else, and you can guarantee you'll have a train full of commuters agog. After all, it's why so many of them read the Daily Mail.

Positive charge

2006-08-28T15:59:00.000+01:00

By way of a challenge, and as a counterbalance to all the moaning I've done on here about my time as a student, I've forced myself to come up with a list of ten good things about my first year at university.

1) It made me a vegetarian.

2) It taught me how to use a laundrette. This would prove vital over the ensuing (count 'em) nine years.

3) It warned me off becoming a member of a political party. The hair-raising fanaticism of the Socialist Workers was truly eye-opening.

4) Living on the edge of Sefton Park and going walking there in the middle of a snowstorm.

5) That gigantic bath in the communal bathroom on my floor in my hall of residence, of which I have already written at length.

6) Seeing some live bands, including Gene, The Boo Radleys and REM, none of whom I'd pay money to see now.

7) Getting the chance to have satellite TV in my bedroom.

8) Meeting a small handful of kind, interesting people, few of whom I was able to stay in touch with beyond my first year, and only one of whom I am still in contact with today.

9) Getting to see some ace films at Liverpool's various cinemas.

10) Learning to live away from my hometown for the first time. Albeit not particularly successfully.

Five years

2006-08-27T20:22:00.000+01:00

Two video clips neatly show the kind of profound change received opinion in the US appears to have undergone in the last half decade.

One is from David Letterman's first show back on air in September 2001 after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The second is from Letterman's recent encounter with the execrable Bill O'Reilly off Fox News.

Both make for highly illuminating viewing.

Around London IV

2006-08-26T20:41:00.000+01:00

It being the bank holiday weekend, replete with one extra day to play with, there was no excuse for me not to complete another leg of my circumnavigation.

So I have, spending today walking clockwise from Falconwood to Crystal Palace, adding almost another dozen miles to the tally and in the process passing the halfway mark. This wasn't so significant, however, as the fact the weather was mercifully kind: cool, overcast, fresh and occasionally rainy.

Despite it only being a few weeks since the heatwave ended, it was somehow reassuring to see the grass in the various parks and town squares that I walked through already recovering its colour and vibrancy, while everywhere there was signs of autumn: horse chestnuts, leaves turning brown, wild blackberries and raspberries, a softer light in the sky.

Not that there weren't some grim and depressing stretches of the route; there always are. But one of the real joys of this entire venture has been the way the wasteground and graffiti and cascades of litter lurking round one corner are more often than not gone when you go round the next; and what is a resoundingly desolate part of London this half hour will always give way to something else, something different, half an hour later.

Day 4: Falconwood - Crystal Palace
Miles Added: 11.75
Total Miles Completed: 42.25
Total Miles Outstanding: 35.75

Electronic watchamacallit

2006-08-25T22:36:00.000+01:00

It's always the way that the things which conspire to frustrate you in life swing from one extreme of magnitude to the other.

Today was a bit of a nightmare at work after I spilled some tea on my computer and, despite mopping most of it up, ended up with a right cursor key that no longer worked. Given the fact I only received this computer a couple of months ago it was all rather embarrassing, not to say deeply irritating at the way the malfunction impeded my normal tasks and kept sending my machine haywire.

What's doubly frustrating, of course, is the fact you can get so angry about being so frustrated by such a remarkably inconsequential and trivial thing as a computer key in the first place. It's a sobering reminder of how in the thrall you are to otherwise inanimate bits of plastic, metal and circuitry, and how they have the potential to render your life a torment despite existing only to do what you tell them to do.

I can only hope any remaining tea sloshing around inside the machine dries out over the bank holiday weekend. And I can only hope the weather outside doesn't do the same.

Holden Caulfield

2006-08-24T21:16:00.000+01:00

"If you had a million years to do it, you couldn't rub out even half the 'Fuck you' signs in the world."

I've just finished reading The Catcher In The Rye for the very first time, and have no hesitation in declaring it to be one of the ten best books ever written.

I rue the fact it's taken me so long to get round to actually discovering it. I can't believe I've waited until the age of 30 to read something that would have made such an impression on me were I 16, the age of the book's narrator, hero, subject and everyman.

Still, it's moved me to tears and caught my breath and made me laugh even now, so either it has a timeless quality applicable to people of all ages, or I've still got too many blatant adolescent traits rattling around inside me for my own good.

So many universal truths are put into the mouth of Holden over what is, in essence, a fairly slim volume focusing on a very slim period of time. But what truths they turn out to be:

- "Anyway, I'm sort of glad they've got the atomic bomb invented. If there's ever another war I'm going to sit right the hell on top of it. I'll volunteer for it, I swear to God I will."

- "I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes. That way I wouldn't have to have any goddam stupid useless conversations with anybody."

- "Goddam money. It always ends up making you blue as hell."

- "That's something that annoys the hell out of me; I mean, if somebody says the coffee's all ready and it isn't."

- "But what I mean is, lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most."

And so on.

Holden is such a plausible character it's almost painful to believe in him. His relationships with his few friends, his parents, in particular his younger sister, are beautifully drawn and desperately poignant.

But above all it was writer JD Salinger's ability to imbue even the most trivial of instances and common of occurances with such poetic beauty and emotional resonance which so affected me. Running across a snow-bound road; standing in a rainstorm; watching people from a hotel window; walking through a park at night; travelling on a train - he elevates all these experiences into grand epihanies and personal revelations.

It's a masterful book with a masterful message, and if you've never read it, I urge you to do so as soon as is practically possible.

Fringe benefits II

2006-08-22T12:15:00.000+01:00

As I was saying...

"We were supposed to go to an exhibition together but when it got down to it I wasn't interested, didn't have enough energy or money and wanted to escape. Which I did, by going up Calton Hill again, where my newspaper blew away so I had to spend more money on a replacement."
- 17/08/1994

My time in Edinburgh in August 1994 became witness, towards its end, to the resolution of an issue which had been assailing me for ages.

For the entire previous 12 months I'd been trying to figure out the nature of my feelings for someone in the 6th form who'd become a very close friend, who was in a number of my classes and who was now on this trip to Edinburgh.

The details are, I have to admit, somewhat nauseating in their adolescent angst-filled complexion. We'd both conceded that we felt something for each other, but always to third parties. Well, that's slightly misleading, because she'd intimated as much to me one evening backstage at a school concert, but I'd been too stubborn and blinkered to respond.

We used to flirt outrageously, and it must have been pretty clear to anybody else with even the smallest involvement in our respective lives that we fancied each other, but nobody ever tried to set us up or do the decent thing and bring into reality what seemed, at most, to only ever be a safely confined fantasy. I still wonder why this is.

Anyway, in August 1994, in Edinburgh, time was running out. We'd both be going our separate ways in a month or so. She wasn't seeing anybody else - she hadn't for ages and ages, almost as if she had purposefully crafted an opportunity that was there for my taking.

We were now, in theory, around and in each other's company, 24 hours a day for almost two weeks. We were 200 miles from our hometown. What more excuse, dammit, did I need?!

"On the way back from the Assembly Room me and Kate had another pathetic childish argument since she was limping from cramp and I wanted to get home as soon as possible. We ended up not talking at all on the long road back to halls, at one point walking on opposite sides of the street. But as soon as I got to my room I realised how stupid and damaging the whole thing was and went to apologise, as she did to me. Apologise, that is."
- 18/08/1994

Oh, the humility. With a cruel and belligerent hindsight which kicked in precisely 60 seconds after I left her room, I knew that this particular occasion, this precise moment, on the night of Thursday 18th August, following the day on which we received our A level results, should have been the point at which everything should have come good. It was obvious. It was nigh-on pre-ordained. It was all too good to be true.

So why did I walk away, just like I'd done so many other times? Why did I end up back in my own room, yet again, all alone? Why did I know, even then, that I'd blown it as on so many occasions, but this time for good?

I went and lay on my bed and cried - at the hopelessness of it all, of the emotion of the day and the whole last few weeks, of the sheer fatigue at spending the entire summer in unfamiliar places and contemplating unknown futures.

And at the fact that she should have been the person I was sharing a room with, not that other clumsy oaf.

In later years several people told me they were bemused as to why the two of us never got together. I am still bemused. For a while, after leaving school, I still saw her from time to time, visiting her in Leeds where she was at university and, sporadically, back in our hometown.

In February 2001 I even decided to use the pretence of an ordinary visit to set the record straight and pour my heart out to her, to what end I've no idea* given she was in a long-term relationship at the time and very patently had no interest in me whatsoever.

That turned out to be the last time I saw her. Or hear from her. She remains, for me, that forever elusive, forever self-denying, soulmate who in another world I would have ended up spending the rest of my life with.

Sadly, it was, and still is, a different world.

"Back home talking to others on the phone reminded me of how time has passed, how this summer has vanished through the power of new experiences and yet been an emotional and physical drain. And how there's very little time left with things as they are. And how much time remains for things to come. Not sure which one to praise, and which one to pity."
- 21/08/1994

*A lie. I knew full well what I wanted the end to be.

Fringe benefits

2006-08-21T11:46:00.000+01:00

Heaven knows quite why I ended up being asked to take part in a play at the Edinburgh Festival, or for that matter how, because at this moment I can't remember the circumstances of either.

"After a sleep filled with nightmarish dreams of yet again being trapped in a smoke-filled room choking to death, I dragged myself out of bed and began to pack my bags."
- 10/08/1994

I wouldn't have said yes were it not for the fact three of my closest friends were going, and I knew a few of the others, and those who'd made the trip before testified to how it was well worth the time (a month's rehearsals followed by 12 days away) and the effort (ultra-concentrated line-learning, ultra-pointless warm-up exercises, ultra-intense expectations).

Following directly on from my trip around Europe, it meant virtually my entire summer was eaten up doing stuff, which was itself a novelty, and which undoubtedly paid dividends in keeping my mind off the looming shadow of university in September.

But having done next to no acting at school short of helping out mates with their A level drama exams I felt, all the while, not just a shameless novice but also a complete fraud. I was really a stranger in a foreign country in which I couldn't recognise or comprehend anything, receiving very little help in trying to understand both the customs and the language.

Being cast in the role of a woman didn't much help either. But then this was the point of the play, it turned out, with all the female parts being filled with males and vice versa. An act of breathtaking pretension, sure, and one I'm quite sure 95% of the people who actually saw the thing being performed could make no sense of whatsoever.

However this was but one of the many whims and fancies of the director of the play, a woman who'd once taught drama at my school before leaving in mysterious circumstances to try and launch her own theatre company, of which this was to be the inaugural production.

Another all-too-tangible whim and fancy was the involvement of a bloke who she used to go out with, ostensibly a theatre 'professional' but in reality a pompous buffoon, present in the cast simply because of his 'experience' but who conspired to fall right out of favour with the director and hence make everyone's life a misery.

Especially mine, as I was having to share a room with him in Edinburgh, a stupid twist of fate given he was the person I least liked and knew least about in the whole cast. It could, it should, have been so different.

"Being introduced to a city at night is at the same time both an amazing and disconcerting experience. Especially if you end up in a pub surrounded by drink and smoke which you've no idea where it is or how to get back from."
- 10/08/1994

Edinburgh itself proved to be a revelation.

The city was, and is, a beautiful one, forever etched in my memory for having so much of itself open to the sky: broad streets, rolling roads, innumerable hills, empty spaces and imperial views in all direction.

Contrary to cliché I soon found it very easy to escape the hustle and frenzy of the festival, in particular by walking up to the top of Calton Hill, a place disclosed to me by my best mate David who'd been to the festival the year before and now graciously introduced me to some of the city's most beautiful nooks, crannies and hideaways.

Given the performances of our play - for the record, Blood Wedding by Federico Lorca - weren't until teatime, there was always the day to fill and initially I spent it purposefully watching as many shows as possible. But then my patience, energy and money all ran out, and for the latter part of my stay I saw very little, preferring instead to wander round the streets or rest up in the hall of residence which we were using for accommodation.

My roommate had more or less pissed off out of everyone's life, only showing up for the performances, and this suited me fine. His woefully eccentric habits - indulging in artsy physical exercises on the lawn outside every morning, strolling round our room naked, sitting on his bed staring into space, bawling swearwords out of the window - had quickly paled from the amusing to the deeply irritating.

"Because I'm on the less popular floor, I found myself, not for the first time, being left out/forgotten from the majority over what was happening. I decided not to fight the feeling and went shopping, a bit pointlessly since there was nothing I needed to buy."
- 12/08/1994

By this point, however, another issue was working itself through to a resolution. It was one that had been dogging me for the best part of a year, but the resolution which came to pass was, I realised all too quickly in retrospect, far from that which I had always desired.

To be continued

Perfect ten

2006-08-20T11:37:00.000+01:00

20th August 1996

"There's just been the most amazing thunderstorm I think I've ever seen - more akin to a wild electrical tropical storm than the usual run of the mill brief burst of lightning that happens round here. It began while I was on the phone to David at 8.40pm with only very faint rumbles of thunder and steadily increasing sheet lightning.

"Then the rain began and all hell broke loose - thunder rolled and charged around the sky for at least the following hour with a perpetually flicking and flashing display of both sheet and forked lightning.

"The power went off twice; the rain became torrential and the power of nature was truly awesome. This was the world out of control, totally wild and primitive, with no man-made interference of possible supervision: amazing. We watched with the lights out from the landing window.

"Now, of course, the air has become wonderfully fresh, pure, light and clear after pressing down relentlessly for days. The storm has died down now, moved on east, but only since about half an hour ago. It was raging Lear-like for over 60 minutes. Once in a lifetime, I reckon."

Proposition situation

2006-08-19T19:40:00.000+01:00

So there's this worrying new linguistic quirk that seems to have taken root at work, and unlike previous and existing instances of verbal violence, this one is proving increasingly difficult to avoid and to imitate.

So what it involves, in essence, is framing each and every sentence as if it were some kind of universal proposition following on from an unspoken preceding assumption. So in other words, that means starting everything you say with the word 'so' even though there's nothing to which the 'so' refers.

So what this in effect does is render each and every other form of opening a conversation redundant, chiefly because each and every conversation ostensibly follows on from some previous remark and hence is not an opening at all. So nothing is ever an introduction, only a continuation. So nobody can be bothered thinking of any other way of beginning a sentence.

So you see, this is a singular problem, especially when, as with this sentence, the use of the word 'so' is actually justified and correct but feels, following on from so many unjust and incorrect appearances, somehow out of place. And choosing to begin a sentence with something other than 'so', like the word 'and' for instance, now equally feels somehow contrived or gauche.

So it's yet another objectionable peculiarity spreading like a forest fire around the office, and all the worse for being the kind of thing you don't have time to stop yourself saying, coming as it does at the start rather than mid-way through a remark.

So much for the English language. So what? So that's all I really have to say on the matter, lest you think me an irritating and obsessive so-and-so. So long.

London's Chimney

2006-08-18T22:13:00.000+01:00

"It's obscene what's going on," a passenger was berating a member of the London Underground staff the other day. "It happens every single time. Every time I want to go somewhere something is wrong. And we're never told why. We're never told when things are going to be sorted. We're just expected to go along with it. Cattle have more rights than us."

Fortunately, perhaps, this tirade was interrupted by the arrival of, yes, a train, and more importantly one on which the complaint actually wanted to travel. The member of staff in question, meanwhile, had stood stock still during this rant, occasionally agreeing, occasionally frowning, mostly looking defiantly nonplussed and wisely indifferent.

I didn't hear what, if any, response he had to the charge of travellers being treated with less rights than a herd of cows. This was a shame, because in truth this was one of the most preposterous bits of abuse I've ever heard, and it more than deserved an equally hysterical comeback, maybe along the lines of cattle knowing when to shut up, or never talking back, or having at least one demonstrable purpose in life that isn't giving somebody else a load of grief.

Besides, the decisions placed before cattle don't involve exercising the kind of rights equable with Underground passengers (the right to moan, the right to put your bags on a spare seat, the right to selfishly close the window when the temperature is close to 40 degrees, the right to hold a private conversation at the volume of an urban festival sound system).

Such a volley of pent-abuse inarticulacy could only have happened on the Northern Line, aka the Misery Line, aka the Armpit Line, aka London's Chimney.

The network has had a terrible few weeks, with things breaking down, going wrong and falling over on a daily basis. Earlier this week the entire branch line which I use to travel to and from work was closed en mass after a train came to a stop just outside Mornington Crescent station and couldn't start up again. Several times a signal failure up at Edgware has shut a slew of stations without warning and indefinitely. Points failures down at the other end of the line have an unerring capacity to make the rest of the system seize up like an arthritic joint, so a glitch somewhere near Morden can have a knock-on effect as far north as, well, my neck of the woods. Which is about as far from Morden as you can get.

As far as I can see the Northern Line has suffered these kinds of afflictions for years, and as far as I can tell it has been blessed with a rotten reputation for just as long.

Neither will be remedied as long as the entire London Underground is run on the basis of making a profit rather than delivering a service, which, unpredictably enough, is a state of affairs now enshrined in law, not by a Tory but a Labour Government. This Labour Government.

I don't know if and when a change will ever come. The moment it does, however, will be the moment they stop calling us "customers" and start using "passengers" once more.

Final score

2006-08-16T22:39:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow is the day when A Level results come out, and I will find myself, as I do every year, thinking back to the day when I received mine and the day when, to all intents and purposes, my school life came to an end.

The occasion was about a dozen times more potent than it needed to have been, thanks to me being nowhere near the school in question and instead at least 200 miles further north. I was in Edinburgh, in the middle of appearing in a play at the Fringe Festival.

This state of affairs, while in its own way profoundly enjoyable and assuredly memorable, was far from the ideal scenario in which I'd always envisaged I would receive those tatty scraps of paper and take my leave of comprehensive education.

I'd assumed, if not hoped, it to be similar to that in which I got my GCSE results: everyone all gathered together in a rather desperate noisy throng, jostling and japing outside in the late August sun, waiting to be let into that section of the school which had been specially opened up to dispense the good and ill tidings, everyone still in a holiday mood, nobody quite taking it seriously.

Of course when it came to my A Levels, it was, as Smash Hits used to say, nothing of the sort. While almost all of my peers were indeed standing outside in the August sun waiting to be let into the school 6th form common room, me and five others were not just in another place but another country.

I'd rarely felt more alone and more helpless on that grim Thursday morning, sitting alone in my bedroom (in, oh the irony, a hall of residence), wondering how and when the news would be conveyed to me. All I or any of us knew was that the teacher in charge of the trip, indeed the director of the play in which we were appearing, would somehow turn up in our rooms at some point before lunchtime and pass on our grades. The fact this teacher was at the least somewhat eccentric, at the most downright demented, did not make matters one smidgen easier.

Our play, about which I'll write more later this month, always began late afternoon so there was literally nothing to do and nowhere to go until the results arrived.

My roommate, who I hated, and who was about ten years older than me and only on the trip because he used to go out with the teacher, was thankfully nowhere to be seen. Neither, though, were any of my mates - few in number on that trip, for the cast was made up of both present and ex-pupils, and I only really counted three of them as close friends.

So I waited. And waited. I can't remember what precisely I did while waiting - listened to the radio, probably, because I do have a vivid recollection of being tuned to the Radio One Roadshow presented by Simon Mayo and feeling faintly petrified (though the two may be connected).

Eventually I saw the figure of the teacher striding stupidly across the long wide lawn in front of the building. I guessed she was on her way to put us out of our misery. Or into it, depending on what tidings she brought. She never said much to me at the best of times, and in this instance she simply knocked on my door, handed me a bit of folded up paper, and left. She might not have said one word.

When you're at school, every time you get a set of results, be they examinations, tests, swimming badges, musical grades, gold stars, certificates or even a special mention in assembly, you're made to feel, and to a degree you secretly believe, they are the most important set of results you'll ever get.

Until the next one, of course, and the one after that.

Back then, however, clutching that hopelessly tiny scrap of paper, I suddenly wanted to be with everybody else who had made that self-same journey to the end of the line, all of the people back home who I knew would be by turn celebrating and comforting each other and feeding off the babble of collective adrenalin and excitement which I knew from experience couldn't help but surface on such occasions.

Instead I had but a few minutes of ebullience with my close friends, immediately tempered by the fact not everybody present on the trip was getting some results, and among those that were lurked a couple of people who displayed such narrow-minded indifference to getting utterly crap marks as to leave me virtually speechless.

Later in the day I tried to ring a couple of people back home (using a payphone, naturally) to catch up on their results and those of our mutual acquaintances. At the time I dutifully recorded as many sets of marks as I could in my diary, believing it to be important for posterity and to provide a suitable epilogue to the preceding chapters of life in the sixth form.

Soon enough, however, thoughts turned to other matters; to the performance of the play that evening, to the nature of our stay in Edinburgh, to the things we'd won and lost while being there, our changing and unchanging relationships, our feelings for the city itself, and our feelings for home and everyone we'd left behind and - though we weren't minded to properly acknowledge it yet - everyone we would leave behind a second time in just a few short weeks.

Although my A Level results were the end of the road as far as school was concerned, and to me felt like a far more substantive achievement than my GCSEs, within a matter of months they too had ceased to mean a thing. Just as my subsequent degree does now, and indeed every single exam I have ever sat in my entire life. Indeed, the job I am in now I didn't get because of my A Levels, or my degree, or any exam.

Such notions are all relative, but I can't still but wonder why and whether those particular results should not have added up to much more in the grand scheme of things.

They were, after all, the end product of the two best years of my life.

Turn again

2006-08-15T21:14:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I would not be mistaken were I to surmise that whoever looks in on this blog from time to time must think I am, by and large, pretty miserable. Or rather, that I always post about largely miserable things. And in particular that I lead a largely miserablist life.

I can't counter and criticise your opinions, of course. I can't argue that you have no right to hold them. What I can and will say in my defence, however, is that writing here, as I do, late in the evening, produces a particular kind of tone and style of blog that would assuredly be different were I to write, say, early in the morning.

I invariably add to this blog when I am tired, feeling low and in that bleak, washed-out period just before sleep. This is not good.

It generates posts which are snippy, sour and po-faced. It makes me look like a grouchy old man who sees no good in anything. It catches me when I am at my weakest and most intolerant. And it cannot help but, as with the daily written diary which I keep and have kept for almost 20 years, leave an impression of someone forever out of sorts with the world.

The trouble is, there is no other time of the day when I can write here. I simply don't have the time or the means to do so. There are some entries, true, which have appeared during daylight hours and which I've been able to compose with a clearer, fresher mind on weekends or in moments of snatched respite at work. But they remain in the minority. As, I suspect, they always will.

So as a change I am going to devote tonight's post to recording two instances of positive things.

I say devote, but I have as yet wittered on solely about wholly negative matters. So enough of that, and instead rewind back to 6.15pm this evening, when an elderly Chinese lady was having difficulty carrying her shopping trolley into Leicester Square station, asked me for help, and I happily responded, lugging the great unwieldly item all the way down two flights of steps and into the booking hall. And then I went back for the shopping trolley (ho ho).

Then, a few minutes later, a befuddled American tourist approached me for advice on navigating the Northern Line. I gladly offered up my four penn'orth, neatly and succinctly explaining the way the line separates into two at Euston and that he was on the wrong branch and this is how he could rectify the problem. He seemed very grateful, as did the Chinese lady, and in both instances I went on my way in the belief I had made two people's days that bit easier.

I have nothing further to add to these tales, other than to say if one good turn deserves another, heaven knows what two good turns merits. It'd be nice, though, were it to show up in my life pretty soon.

Animal tragic

2006-08-14T16:01:00.000+01:00

It's taken me a while to notice, but there are precisely zero domestic animals anywhere in this borough of London. Not one. There are no cats, no dogs, no - so far as I can tell - budgies or cockatoos or any other fowl perching from people's windows, nothing. No pets whatsoever.

This, for a city that supposedly boasts the most number of cat owners in Europe, seems preposterous. It's also pitiful.

In Liverpool I lived next to a house owned by an elderly couple who boasted not just a dog but two cats who would, without fail, saunter past my living room window every day, and who were two of the two cutest felines you've ever seen. Once they even tried to climb in through my window.

No such luck here. I haven't seen one cat since I moved to London. Just consider that sentence for a moment. Not one cat. And that hasn't been through choice, or through being cooped up indoors in my flat the whole time. Quite the reverse, as my ongoing treks through the city's suburbs have hopefully made clear.

It's not like I'm living in a bustling, high-rise, car-dominated area. And it's not that I'm living amongst folk who, for want of a better phrase, don't look like pet-lovers. So how come I haven't seen any cats mooching around the place, nor dogs being taken for a walk?

Now that I've realised there aren't any to be seen, I'm missing seeing them more than I did when I hadn't noticed. It's as puzzling as it is regrettable. Losing the sound of the birds was one thing, I was expecting that. But seeing such a total disappearance of animal life is very depressing. It renders the outside world defiantly, uniformly, humanoid. There appears to be no room for anything else except people.

The sight of a cat going about its business isn't too much to ask? Is it?

For sale

2006-08-13T10:31:00.000+01:00

Margaret Thatcher, butcher of Grantham, milk snatcher and all-round bad egg, once professed her one driving desire was to turn the nation into a land of owners.

Property owners, share owners, private pension owners, second car owners - pretty much anything went. This, she reasoned, was the truest way of giving her citizens a stake in their country - as opposed to all those state-run nationalised industries like gas, water, electricity, oil, transport, coal, aeroplanes and telephones, which we all owned anyway, but she conveniently overlooked that point.

What's happened, however, is that my generation, which endured its formative years cowering under Thatcher's beady eye, is going to be the one that journeys through life actually owning less than any previous generation in, say, the last 100 years.

We'll be the ones who, proportionately, own less houses than our predecessors, own less pensions than our predecessors, who certainly own less material goods than our predecessors, and who quite probably own less actual money (in the form of real, concrete, reliable savings) than all our predecessors combined.

I'm taking about ownership outright. Of really and truthfully owning your own house, car, pension, stereo system, dishwasher, whatever. Consider, for instance, how the amount of personal debt racked up in Britain topped the one trillion mark last year. More people of my age group borrow more and have larger overdrafts than any other demographic. We're a nation living on the never-never!

Or consider how my generation has had to complete its education only by amassing thousands of pounds worth of debt in the bargain. Luckily I've made it this far through life without ever earning enough to have to start paying back my student loan. Unluckily, I breached the cut-off point when I moved to London, and now have month upon month and year upon year of deductions coming out of my bank account.

Which, incidentally, is the only account I have. I don't have a building society account, I don't have an ISA, I certainly never had what were once ludicrously called PEPs and TESSAs, I don't own any shares, I don't think I have any premium bonds (though I'm not grumbling if I do), I don't even - get this - own a credit card.

This isn't through some Luddite aversion to new-fangled gimmicks and gizmos. It's just that I've never felt myself able to embrace, never thought myself in need of embracing, any of them.

Equally I've no idea when I'll be in a position to open a private pension, though fuck knows I'll need to given the way the economy is being run. I've never had a work or company pension either. It's not the sort of thing that keeps me awake every night - just some of them.

I hate being in debt to someone - something - else, from my landlord to my bank to my mum and dad. Neither a borrower nor a lender be runs the saying, which is a pretty puritanical, not to say selfish, creed. At the same time I wonder what level of respect my generation will, in time, come to show towards a country and a political establishment in which it has precious little invested, of which it can own even less, and with which it has practically nothing in common.

Western wind

2006-08-12T17:08:00.000+01:00

There's been a hint of autumn in the air today.

When I was out earlier not only were the skies grey and heavy with rain, but leaves were falling off trees and beginning to collect on the pavement and in gutters. A breeze was blowing, different to the ones of late, in that it was tinged with a chill. People were wearing coats and making a point of not walking slowly. Their faces weren't turned up to the sky, but cast down to the ground. A mournful, subdued atmosphere leaked out of shops and businesses. Very few voices could be heard.

I'm tempted to declare here and now that summer is over, but I know that if I did I'd be proved wrong within a week and we'd suddenly be plunged back into blistering sun-drenched hell.

Indeed, I read that one of the few responsibilities ceded to John Prescott in Tony Blair's absence is that of co-ordinating the government's response to any likely future heatwave (along with taking charge of a new report on Britain's stock of seabass).

Hopefully this was done out of jest at the fact, or the hope, that there most certainly will not be another heatwave ever in this country while Blair remains in office. Fingers crossed on that score.

Still, given it gets dark around 8pm now, and the mornings aren't so fiercely light quite so early, even if the hot weather did return it wouldn't be anywhere near as relentless as last month or have such a punitive grip on nighttime temperatures. The August bank holiday isn't that far away either, and that's always a symbolic marker between the vast barren wilderness of the summer and the onset of the evocative, wistful sirens of autumn.

A portent of sorts was in evidence on the Underground last night, where the carriages weren't just a lot more empty than usual (I've no idea why), but a great deal more cooler as well.

It's been a thankless couple of months, and the sooner they're over the better. I know I'll have to go through it all again next year, but at least then I'll know what to expect.

Love is...

2006-08-11T22:43:00.000+01:00

As befits the received image of life in the sixth form being somewhat formless and freewheeling, I will never forget one English A Level lesson spent, in part, discussing the nebulous question 'what is love?'

This was about 13 years ago, so what time has done its best to muddy and mollify it has equally rendered more wistful and wishful. All the same, it was a hopelessly ambitious topic for a bit of conversation, coming as it did off the back of a rather ponderous discussion of a section of Margaret Attwood's 'A Handmaid's Tale'.

This was also but a few months after that never-to-be-remembered vocalist Haddaway scored a top ten hit single with a song forwarding the accusation, "What is love?/Baby, don't hurt me/Don't hurt me/No more!" If he couldn't find any answers, what hope did we, a bunch of disparate and flippant 17-year-olds?

From what I recall, we were quick to pin down was love wasn't. We weren't so hasty or indeed willing to hazard a guess at what it was.

In retrospect it was a preposterous discussion to be having at all, and boasted more than a little of that faux-articulate, faux-mature, anything goes attitude which seems to thrillingly pervade much of your life when you're that age. Still, at least we were willing to have a go. Trouble is, even now, I still don't know what the answer is.

If love is, as some conventions dictate, that sense of knowing instantly and compulsively that you want to be with someone else for as long as possible, and that when you're with that person you are, quite literally, overcome with emotion, it's news to me. I don't think I've ever felt such an extreme response towards anyone.

If love is, however, formed out of regrets and resentments for not taking the time and effort, or having the wherewithal, to realise you could have made something out of what you once casually and fussily sought to treat as nothing, then I have been there and felt that and wondered why. Why I couldn't bring myself to make something of it at the time, and why I still linger over that resentment so many years down the line.

One of the reasons I've never liked the song 'Regret' by New Order is its central theme, to me a seriously selfish and arrogant one, of denying the singer exhibits any of the eponymous sentiment whatsoever. I cannot believe that anybody anywhere passes through life not regretting something. What I can believe, though, is that less people pass through life not regretting someone, and that more people have the courage of their convictions than me, who is, at heart, a fatally shy, forcefully solitary and often acutely lonely person.

More of this burdensome waffling another time, because it ties in with another story to which I have promised to return, that being the summer of 1994. In the meantime, upon the subject of 'what is love?', I suppose a couple of verses from Adrian Henri's titular poem is, at least, something to go on.

Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a fanclub with only two fans
Love is walking holding paintstained hands.

Love is the presents in Christmas shops
Love is when you're feeling Top Of The Pops
Love is what happens when the music stops.

Face time

2006-08-10T21:43:00.000+01:00

Since moving to London I've chanced to spot a number of celebrities strolling around the West End close to where I work, most of them defiantly C-list, a few quite possibly edging towards E-list.

Within a few days of starting my new job I happened to spy tousle-haired funnyman Neil Morrissey schlepping along the street looking discomfited. Shortly after that I spotted erstwhile TV wife-of-a-jailbird Linda Robson appearing equally riled clutching a few bags of heavy shopping. At this point I thought I was going to be in for a parade of stars nigh-on daily.

Then it all went quiet. A sighting of that grumpy one off of The Office, the one who went on to play Arthur Dent (my ignorance is, of course, calculated), did little to improve matters, nor did a glimpse of veteran troublemaker and gay activist Peter Tatchell in a tasteless glittery shirt.

I thought I walked past John Hurt a month or so ago, looking about 85 years old. Him, not me. When I noticed the same gentleman the following morning strolling down precisely the same street, however, I concluded it must be a lookalike. A very crap lookalike, sure, but enough to get me wondering.

Then yesterday I was going down the escalator at Piccadilly Circus station, when who should pass me coming up the other side but former angry young man turned middle aged balladeer James Dean Bradfield.

He was completely alone with only a rucksack for company, and he looked very hassled. Still, he was making no attempt not to catch your eye, as he did mine for a couple of seconds. Nobody was talking to him and nobody seemed the slightest bit interested in troubling him for, say, an autograph.

For all I know I might well have passed him many times before, such was his affable nonchalence. And for all I know I might well have passed his former bandmate Richey James many times before, despite him being missing for over a decade and despite the demented assertion of Noel Gallagher than Richey is simply "with some bird, and he's lost his passport, and he doesn't know where the fuck he is." An affliction with which Noel obviously has a great deal of affinity.

London is no less filled with stars as it is paved with gold. I'm not so fussed about the former, but I'm most put out about the latter. They'll be saying Father Christmas doesn't exist next.

Post #250

2006-08-08T21:56:00.000+01:00

360 degrees, clockwise, 10pm:

1) right hand typing this
2) postcard from Mortehoe
3) London A-Z
4) pad of A4 ruled paper turned upside down
5) coffee table
6) two clean T-shirts waiting to be put away
7) four remote controls
8) sofa
9) double glazing with condensation on the inside
10) dining table
11) new Radio Times
12) CD tower
13) TV et al, replete with two pot plants, empty video cases, carriage clock and TARDIS
14) clothes horse
15) bookcase #1: history, politics, music
16) door
17) bookcase #2: TV, radio
18) bookcase #3: autobiographies, comedy, annuals
19) electric fan
20) printer
21) Virgin Megastore receipt
22) open CDs: 'OK Computer', Radiohead; 'My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts', Brian Eno & David Byrne; 'Something To Remember', Madonna
23) telephone
24) mouse
25) left hand typing this

Choking apart

2006-08-07T21:41:00.000+01:00

Having just got nicely settled into the business of not having to worry about the neighbours in the flat below, thanks to there not being any, my period of joy has inevitably been curtailed.

Someone who I'd previously thought was only visiting to look round, or possibly popping in to check up on the premises until a proper tenant was found, now seems to have moved in for good. He's an old man, smartly dressed, very respectable and hardly makes a sound. The one problem, however, is that he smokes.

He smokes a pipe. Out of his windows. Directly underneath my windows.

Great clouds of noxious fumes are now irregularly wafting into my flat. At the merest whiff of an oncoming fug, I have to face around shutting all the windows, regardless of how hot it is outside.

He also smokes possibly the foulest smelling pipe in the known world. The stench is vile and inescapable. How it can bring him any pleasure whatsoever is beyond me. How he thinks he can bring pleasure to anybody else by smoking out of his window, thereby funnelling all of his pollution directly into my lungs, is equally mystifying.

Such a practice is surely the acme of anti-social behaviour. You are presuming not to want to dirty up your own premises with the odour of your own tobacco, but at the same time generously infecting someone else's abode with the self-same cancerous miasma.

There's only one other person I know of who smokes a pipe, and that is one of my uncles. I haven't seen him for decades, but the two most vivid memories I have from my youth of going, as a family, to visit him in Chesire were a) his astonishing fondness for casual swearing ("I've had an arse-ingly bad day at work, my boy!") and b) his filthy pipe. He had a pipe "chair" in which he always sat to ingest the thing, directly above which on the ceiling was a large patch of yellow. I don't know how his wife put up with everything; she hated it, and said so, regularly.

Anyhow, wisps of reminiscence are now floating back whenever I catch another whiff of the petulant pipe man below. Wisps, plus a load of dirt, dust and pestilence.

Still, it's a step up from Chris De Burgh.

Washed up

2006-08-06T20:10:00.000+01:00

I haven't had a bath since 2003.

This is not through laziness or poor hygiene, but by design. The last bath I took, and will probably ever take, was followed about 30 seconds later by an alarming attack of flashing lights inside my eyes, a rush of blood to the brain and me staggering through to my bedroom in order to ensure that if and when I did pass out I wouldn't bang my head by falling onto the floor.

The experience was so traumatic, even though it had passed in about half an hour, that I resolved to never put myself willingly into a position where I might suffer such an ordeal again. And luckily, given showers exist and will assuredly continue to exist for a good many years to come, there have always been alternative ways to keep clean that don't involve lying down in a tub of hot water.

It's unfortunate, because I always used to like baths - even when I was really young, when convention dictates you're supposed to hate them, especially those on a Sunday evening in order to get you spruced up for a return to school the following morning.

One of the happiest aspects of my one year in a university hall of residence (and there weren't many) was the discovery of quite the largest bath I had ever seen, in which I used to soak for a good hour or so of an evening while my neighbours were carousing in the junior common room downstairs. I don't think they ever found out about this. In fact I know they didn't, because one time I head them sincerely pondering my "absence" just outside the bathroom door, unaware I was a mere two metres away.

Later, when I lived in Aigburth in Liverpool, I would purposefully run a deep bath on Sunday nights, especially during winter when the place was always bitterly cold, and lie in it for ages, usually listening to a sequence of easy listening programmes on Radio 2. I acknowledge that this kind of behaviour, for a twentysomething, was hopelessly anachronistic. But I was living alone, and I did it because I could. Besides, I needed some way of keeping warm.

Now that pleasure is denied to me, and the same way some people can't drink beer sitting down, I can only wash standing up. Given there's a drought on, it's probably just as well. But what I've gained in efficiency, I've undoubtedly lost in quality of life.

Around London III

2006-08-05T22:23:00.000+01:00

After a break of several weeks, I was, at last, today able to resume my attempt to circumnavigate London on foot.

I say attempt, but there's no way I'm not going to do it - bar the end of the world, or I lose both my legs, or something equally trivial. Still, I'd been itching to get back out and carry on walking, having previously been prevented in doing so by the unreasonably hot weather and work commitments.

Yes, even on a weekend I have been unable to escape the office of late, thanks to a system whereby members of staff take it in turns to "look after" the website out of hours for a week at a time. My shift ended yesterday, hence the recent markedly infrequent (more markedly than usual) updating of this blog.

Anyhow today I was able to pick up where I left off - West Ham station - and press onwards in a clockwise direction, notching up my biggest daily tally so far: no less than thirteen and a half miles. I know this is peanuts when set aside the accomplishment of those John O'Groats to Land's End veterans like Sir Jimmy Savile and Ian Botham, but it felt like a hell of a distance to me. Especially as it had suddenly got hot again. And especially as the route was particularly thankless.

The problem was precisely down to the period of time between today and the last time I walked. Specifically what has happened in the interim. Namely, sun. Where once I was able to enjoy strolling through very pleasant and agreeable forests of green, today I found only mile upon mile of brown. And when you've seen one patch of burned grass, you've seen them all.

I really couldn't believe how much dust and straw there was. It made great chunks of the route boring and thankless. I know - I hope - I would have enjoyed it more in cooler, more temperate climes. As it was I kept pushing on in the belief I would get to another bit of shady forest or quiet suburbia. Hence the higher than normal tally of miles.

Highlights included approaching and then crossing the River Thames, which I did via the Woolwich free ferry; getting a wonderful view of the North Downs; stumbling upon a flock of white doves; and finding, yet again, most of the route entirely deserted of people.

I'm now heading west for the first time, and feel like I'm making real progress. Indeed, the next leg, I reckon, should see me pass the halfway mark. As long as there's not too much sun. And something other than parched earth under my feet.

Day 3: West Ham - Falconwood
Miles Added: 13.5
Total Miles Completed: 30.5
Total Miles Outstanding: 47.5

Busted flush

2006-08-03T22:33:00.000+01:00

If Tony Blair were President, not Prime Minister, and there were nationwide elections due to be held tomorrow for his position, I have no doubt whatsoever that he would be defeated by one of the largest majorities in history.

If there was a General Election tomorrow, however, run on precisely the same rules as all past contests, I'm minded to conclude that Labour would probably squeak home by a tiny margin. A victory, but a minute one.

The fact is that, as far as I can tell, public discontentment with the Government isn't being applied to the Government as a whole, but a specific and marked coterie of individuals who have made it their business over the past few years to identify themselves as the only people of any importance in the country.

These aren't the people whom voters will have met on the streets of their villages, towns and cities over the past nine years, canvassing, dealing with problems, supporting local causes and throwing open the doors of their surgeries to try and sort out a hundred and one squabbles and complaints. And these aren't the people who get regular access to the national airwaves.

They are the people who have so removed themselves from the day-to-day life of the country that it's no longer possible to believe or trust anything they say. They are the people who seem happy to hitch the UK to the back of the clapped out station wagon that is the US and get towed this way and that regardless of what the rest of the world thinks and says.

They are the people who so rushed to identify themselves with Labour's early successes that they cannot help but completely associated with Labour's more recent string of failures. And they are the people who fall into line behind Tony Blair every single time.

I despair of and for the state of the world when a country such as the UK, once perceived as something of a honest broker on the global stage, is now not part of the solution but a whacking great part of the problem.

But what can I do about it? Come the next election Labour will lose a whole swathe of seats, culling scores of those decent backbench MPs who've worked tirelessly for democracy and freedom and proper constitutional government, but will stay in power clustered around the same old craggy faces and even craggier policies. And so it will continue.

Rarely has there been a more apt moment for a new kind of politics, even a new kind of political party, to emerge and tap into the vast well of anger seemingly boiling up across Britain at the practice of power and the misuse of privilege. For the dam to break, however, everyone first needs to know how to swim.

Which is either a profound aphorism or a glib sign-off. Take your pick!

Water cycle

2006-08-02T22:21:00.000+01:00

It's raining outside at the moment, a stubbornly quiet, effortlessly falling rain which reminds me of how it used to rain for hours on end in Liverpool and I would sit by the window and watch it tumble down, hypnotised by the monotony and the sound and the way it would change the world right before my eyes.

I remember one particular evening, round about this time last year, when I came back from an absolutely horrendous day at work spent in one giant non-stop meeting, and after having tea I sat on the sofa in the living room, opened all the windows and just stared at a downpour that seemed to last forever. Water splashed in onto the floor and all up the walls but there was something cleansing and theraputic about allowing it just do what it want and for me to half-lie there and let it.

This rain didn't give a fuck about my day or anybody else's. The noise it made as it carried on falling, hour upon hour, almost helped to numb me from all the ludicrous business to which I was having to devote so much of my waking day (this was when I was at a particularly low ebb, having just failed a series of job interviews).

It was an experience that stayed with me for a long time. I hadn't seen it rain that heavily in the middle of summer for ages. What I wouldn't give to see even half such a downpour now, here in this acrid, parched, dust and straw-filled city. The rain would remind me of other, older, times and places. The rain would help sing me to sleep.

Achilles heel

2006-07-31T23:12:00.000+01:00

I really don't know what's going on. I've hurt my right foot somehow, to the extent that I can barely put any pressure on it and have resorted to walking about the place like I have a wooden limb.

Worse, the effort of not exerting any strain down my right leg has resulted in me developing a strain in my left knee, which too limits my ability to move around in anything approaching a normal fashion.

I'm only 30 years old, yet I feel like I might as well be 70. Earlier on I found myself stumbling painfully slowly across the room to pick up the phone, shouting "don't hang up, don't hang up - I'm coming!"

Maybe this is ordinary. Maybe your body starts winding down when you least expect it. I know I strained my back earlier this year from simply climbing up a step. One step. It's laughable, were the laughing not of a kind that hurts me even more.

I really don't know what's going on.

Glasses, please

2006-07-30T22:05:00.000+01:00

Chasing time from hour to hour,
I pour the drinks and crush the flowers

During another compulsory after-work social "event" the other week, I was asked on no less than four separate times as to why I didn't drink. The same thing happened during the away day to the south coast last month, and indeed came up as a topic of conversation back in March during the very first week of my new job.

I'd no idea this subject would prove to be such a source of interest to people. It certainly wasn't in Liverpool, but then thankfully there were never any compulsory after-work social events in Liverpool (there were never any voluntary ones either).

It's not, I try to explain, due to some cathartic break with the past, some personal epiphany or some terrible breakdown in my younger days. It's just that I never really liked the stuff, and as I got older I thought, well, why bother with the pretence of simulating enjoyment in something that doesn't really figure in my life that much anymore and doesn't demand such mass, all-pervasive populist participation. Both of which were true during the years when I drank the most, between the ages of 18-21, when I was at university.

I say drank "the most", but by most other people's standards I hardly drank at all. I think the most I ever consumed in one night was around four and a half pints. This, in a culture where upwards of eight or nine were considered par for the course, and that was before retiring back to your abode for a few more cans to round off the evening.

For some reason I never cottoned on to the idea you could just as legitimately drink bottles of beer at the same rate others drank pints, but that was probably because nobody I knew drank bottles of beer at university, such was the crowd into which it was my luck to fall.

So I always ended up stumbling hopelessly through the first couple of pints keeping up with the others, then meekly giving way to my lacklustre constitution (beer makes me feel horribly bloated), passing on the offers of another round, and quietly battling with the business of merely finishing what was left in the glass in front of me. And often, when backs were turned, pouring it away on the floor.

Yes, I know that sounds fucking pathetic, but what started out as our Liverpool local, the Dovedale Towers, was initially fitted out with the most rank set of carpets I'd ever seen in my life, and one more beer stain made no discernable difference whatsoever. Neither did a dozen, for that matter. But that was the culture in which I was living. I felt compelled to do what I could, in a modest way, to fit in.

It was a hell of a shock to the system. I hadn't really drunk anything much at all before I was 17. From the few sips I'd curiously sampled from the occasional bottle in the family cupboard, I already knew I hated the taste of wine and spirits. Not that my mum and dad drank much either. Throughout my entire childhood I never saw a can of lager in the house.

I never knew, and still don't, whether this was through choice (they didn't like it either) or design (they couldn't afford it). Suffice to say there was rarely a bottle of anything doing the rounds, and I was never inclined, or allowed for that matter, to be mingling with friends who were already frequenting pubs at the age of 15.

Anyway, all this meant that when I was exposed to the full-on pub culture of university, my body took a real battering in the practice of being able to take, and being seen to be able to take, my beer.

I wonder on how many of the times I pretended to still be sharp and focused and fully awake and aware after just two pints, when in reality I was well on the way to feeling pissed, people could see right through me. For what it's worth nobody ever said anything. But I'm sure they knew I was a lightweight, and a bit of phoney.

The first time I found myself absolutely drunk was on the occasion of my 19th birthday, when I was more or less frogmarched down to the Dovedale to be served up weird cocktails and deceptively sweet-tasting brews which left me barely able to stand and resulted, on the short walk back to the hall of residence, in me holding a number of animated conversations with complete strangers.

The morning after I suffered my first full-on hangover, though luckily I had no lectures or any reason to go out of my room. I lay in bed for hours wondering how long the agony would continue.

By mid-afternoon, of course, it had all gone and I was eating again. But the memory of the extreme intoxication and the confused aftermath persisted long in my brain and I don't think I ever permitted myself to get so pissed ever again.

The ludicrous flirtation with great big pints of beer persisted as long as I remained an undergraduate, however, though once I was through my first year I more or less opted out of sprawling nights in the city and stuck to quiet visits to nearby hostelries, now including a horribly revamped Dovedale Towers and the agreeable Rose Of Mossley Hill (the scene of my bizarre meeting with Robbie Fowler).

Unfortunately one of the people I'd ended up having to share a place with during my second and third years was a shameless and utterly clichéd beer monster, who loved consuming vast amounts of alcohol along with his similarly-inclined mates then barrelling back into our house in the early hours shouting and cackling, waking me up and keeping me awake for hours.

It was fucking dreadful. I hated those nights, and I hated him and his friends. And they hated me. They used to insult me to my face, which when I look back on it was blatant bullying, no more, no less, and I handled it like I handled all the times I was bullied in my life: by running away.

In later years, after I'd graduated, I began to realise that, just like you can choose the company you keep, you can choose where to keep it and on what terms. And I discovered bottled beer. Then, as I ended up leading an increasingly more secluded life, I found I was contriving to avoid social occasions where alcohol was involved altogether, or if I did go, I didn't drink. And that was that.

I once tried to write a poem pissed, just to see what it looked like in the morning. Naturally, it was shit.

I never did, and still don't, understood the value of socialising and talking to friends and acquaintances in a situation where you steadily lose control of your own faculties and your very ability to socialise and talk. But I see the vast body of the population doing otherwise, and enjoying it, so there you go.

I guess it's just me. I don't like losing control. And I never much liked the taste anyway.

Positive ions

2006-07-29T17:28:00.000+01:00

At last: the heatwave has lifted, the air has freshened, and there are proper summer skies overhead.

Although I bet in a few days it'll be back.

Blackout blitz

2006-07-28T19:48:00.000+01:00

It didn't surprise me in the slightest to find the power cuts in London's West End on Thursday ending up making the national news in print, on TV and on the radio.

Word emerges that an area of a scant few square miles loses electricity for several hours...and it's suddenly a major news story jostling for attention alongside war in the Middle East, Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course if it had happened anywhere else in the entire country, even on a scale ten times as large, it wouldn't have won as nearly as much coverage - if any. No, it was just because this all kicked off on the media's doorstep that it found itself worming its way up the news agenda and colonising the headlines.

It's happened again today. In fact, the order came from the office that we shouldn't even bother making the journey in, and instead spend the whole day working from home. Which I subsequently did, albeit popping out at lunchtime to chase up my landlord and to get my hair cut.

The upside of this was that I didn't have to use the Underground at all, on what turned out to be yet another sweltering day. The downside was that I had workmen gutting some basement or other right outside my windows. And that it got very hot. Which wouldn't have been a problem were I sitting in my air-conditioned offices. The very same air conditioning, lest we forget, which caused the power cuts in the first place.

Role on winter, eh?

When no doubt all the pipes will freeze and burst and there'll be even less water to go round.

London collapses

2006-07-27T21:33:00.000+01:00

Or some of it, at any rate.

By lunchtime, rumours were going round at work that parts of the West End had been subject to a power cut. The local company were apparently rationing the supply, such was the demand being caused by a million air conditioning units and cooling fans. There was some idle speculation as to whether our offices - just behind Piccadilly - would end up the same way, but nobody was taking it seriously. I mean, the very idea of electricity being rationed - in this day and age? Preposterous!

Anyhow sure enough just after 2pm the power went off and the entire building was plunged into darkness. And intense heat. And misery. And the eerie glow of a hundred battery-powered laptop computers.

To begin with everybody just carried on as normal. This was, of course, a thoroughly typical British attitude to the circumstances, and, in that sense, a thoroughly hopeless one as well. Sure, we may have been able to do a bit of work, but the batteries in the computers only had, at the most, a couple of hours life, the temperature was rising steadily with each passing minute, and we could tell that the streets outside were filling up with people who'd only too readily abandoned their desks for the thrill of being sent home early.

No word was forthcoming as to what we were expected to do. No word at all. And so the time passed, and the amount of stuff actually being done slowed to a crawl. The situation was ludicrous. The phones went down. Machines started dying. You couldn't even go to the toilet, as you couldn't see anything inside the cubicles.

Finally it was decreed that we would be allowed to leave the premises and go home. Not to relax, though, but to continue work. For there was stuff that had to be readied for tomorrow, and it needed to be completed one way or another. So that was what I did. I was back here by 5pm, and after having a shower and my tea I picked up where I'd left off and worked on through till 8pm.

At which point I discovered there was no water in my flat. Nothing was coming out of the taps - not a thing. I phoned up Thames Water to be told that - yes - a power failure had knocked out the pumping station serving the whole of north west London. This, by the way, was a different power failure to the one affecting the West End.

For a dreadful couple of hours I have sat in the knowledge that, during one of the hottest heatwaves in history, I couldn't even fetch a glass of water or wash my face.

Then, a short while ago, I heard the gurgle of something trying to make its way through the plumbing and, thank heavens, the water returned. Spluttering and stuttering, to be sure, but it was there.

I can't help but wonder for the future of our supposedly advanced society when basic, fundamental utilities are so prone to being simply wiped out, seemingly in the face of anything we can do about it.

Either that or it's just too fucking hot.

In absentia

2006-07-26T21:53:00.000+01:00

Rather excitingly, and totally unexpectedly, the neighbours downstairs, who from time to time blasted me with bursts of bhangra beat alternating with Chris De Burgh, have vanished. They've disappeared. Fled the building. Ran off.

I know this because the owner of the flat told me so. He knocked on my door earlier, eager to see whether one of my outside walls was suffering from the same kind of damp that was apparently running amok one floor below.

Why, in this weather, any sort of damp is able to flourish at all is somewhat beyond me. But it was while pursuing this line of enquiry that he casually revealed his tenants had gone, more or less overnight, and he was reluctantly beginning the process of tidying the place up ahead of putting it back on the market.

He's not the same person who owns my flat, the one who is mysteriously absent from his office everytime I try to ring him. No, this was somebody else. And he looked mightily pissed off.

I have to admit I did suspect something was going on when, coming back from work yesterday, I noticed none of the windows were open in the flat. Usually they're all wide open, especially during these last few weeks of scorching heat.

That reminded me of how, on Sunday night, or rather early Monday morning, I was woken up at something like 5am by the sound of raised voices drifting up from downstairs. Of all the times to have a slanging match, 5am does not suggest itself as the most obvious. Clearly something was up.

Anyhow, they've gone and I can be slightly reassured by the knowledge I won't have to put up with any sudden interruptions of 'I've Been Missing You' or 'A Spaceman Came Travelling' for the time being.

Although saying that I was stunned and not a little peturbed to hear the sound of 'I Want To Dance With Somebody (Somebody Who Loves Me)' by Whitney Houston come barrelling out of somebody else's open window at around 12.30am last night. Does nobody ever sleep in this accursed city?

Hell is...

2006-07-24T22:16:00.000+01:00

...quite possibly being stuck in a stationery Underground carriage on a muggy Sunday night sometime after 11pm a mere 10 minutes from home with no explanation as to what's happened and no idea how long it will be before you're able to breathe fresh air again.

Twelve plus

2006-07-23T08:41:00.000+01:00

The best summer of my life was 1994.

It was the summer between the end of school and the start of university, a bucolic buffer separating two distinct periods of weighty expectation and apprehensive socialisation, but one elevated and elongated and made that much more special by twin commitments I had agreed to only a few weeks before.

The first was to spend a couple of weeks away travelling by train around Western Europe; the second, following on immediately, was an entire month spent rehearsing for and performing in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

I'll talk more about the latter some other time. The former, though of less personal consequence and emotional resonance, remains just as vivid and affecting even now, a dozen years on.

One of the undoubted reasons for this is that it remains the last time I ever went abroad; indeed, the last time I ever took what could pass as a holiday. Another reason is the way it gave me a useful introduction into the kinds of judgements and responsibilities which adulthood demanded, from overruling your acquaintances over something as rudimentary as finding a place to sleep for the night, to learning to live with someone 24 hours non-stop seven days a week. Or fourteen, as it proved here.

This point was the most potent. I found my feelings towards my immediate travelling companion flickering between toleration and despair most days. There were four of us in total; me, one of my friends from school, his sister and one of her friends. I never approved or even conceived of this particular line-up; for starters I didn't know his sister's friend whatsoever, and to be honest didn't get on with her at all from the moment we left to the moment we returned.

But that was nothing compared with the way my own friend had this habit of getting under my skin with unwavering frequency, usually over the tiniest and most inconsequential of subjects. Like whether to sit in the sun or the shade. Like whether to walk down this pavement or that. Like whether to sleep in the top or bottom bunk. Etc.

I hadn't really seen him like this before, and wasn't prepared for it either. I wasn't prepared for a lot of what I had to endure on that whole trip, in fact, right from spending the first night trying to sleep in a desperately uncomfortable seat on a ferry from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, to spending the second night in a bunk bed with a light bulb suspended mere centimetres from my face and which remained switched on until morning.

Then there was the time I was sick in a gutter in a Paris sidestreet at 8am, more from fatigue than anything else, having just disembarked on the overnight train from Brussels and not having had anything to eat for 14 hours. Or the time I was woken up in the small hours by a host of Japanese tourists flocking into our bedroom looking for a place to sleep. Or the three days in Nice, when I thought I would never experience weather as hot as that ever again.

But the flip side were the insightful, memorable moments that may not have registered at the time but took on an ever greater resonance the second I arrived back home and the entire trip began to fade into the past.

There was the occasion I was wandering around a small church in Arnhem, Belgium, when I found a poster advertising a concert given by the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra, several of whom I knew from back home but who were due to perform the very night we were due to move on.

There was the weird experience of walking around the streets of Amsterdam mid-morning and seeing all the bordellos and drinking clubs and showgirls open (quite literally) for business.

There was spending the night of 14th July on the beach in Nice, watching the city's Bastille Day celebrations and fireworks.

There was going out into the Paris streets after breakfast and finding all the streets washed clean, fresh and sparkling in the sunshine, and wondering why such a practice was never pursued in any British city.

There was taking a train from Nice right to edge of the Italy, then nonchalently strolling across the border, spending an hour or so loitering in a new country, then nonchalently strolling back again.

There was the very business of travelling by train, a joy in itself, particularly across the broad, unendingly beautiful and eerie landscapes of the Netherlands, but which could just as well have been Norfolk or the Fens or some of the low-lying meadows around my hometown.

And there was, of course, the return to Britain, that wonderful feeling of accomplishment capped by the reassurance of having made it safely back in one piece, of being on familiar ground, of seeing everything just as it was and just how it should be. Of feeling at the same time both completely exhausted yet quietly exhilirated.

I had no time to recover, however. The very day after my return, I was up at school beginning rehearsals for Edinburgh. And that...no. Not for now. Summer's lease has some time still to run. Those days, and those memories, can wait a little while.

Inside view

2006-07-22T17:06:00.000+01:00

Today hasn't quite gone to plan, thanks mainly to me finding myself, at around 12.30pm, trapped in my own flat. Not locked out, but trapped in.

When I went to go out just before lunch I found I couldn't open the front door. Both of the locks worked fine, I could feel the hinges trying to swing, but the door itself wouldn't move. It was stuck. I was stuck. And I had no way of immediately altering the situation.

If someone had been on the outside trying to get in - me, for instance - they would have had no problem. They could have simply forced the door open. As I said, both locks were working fine.

As it was, the body of the door was jammed. I had no way of exerting enough force to pull it open, save trying to claw a grip around the edges - which would have worked fine if I had the fingers of a small midget. Not just any old midget, mark you. A small midget.

Of course, not knowing any of my neighbours I couldn't very well shout for assistance; nor could I ring anybody up to come round and help get me out. So instead I had to phone an emergency locksmith and brace myself for the inevitably steep call-out charge and labour costs and VAT and the price of replacement parts and the price of replacing the existing parts with the replacement parts, and so on.

In fact first of all I rang round several local firms to get a quote. One company instantly put me on hold (going down in my estimation straight away) and then forced me to listen to several verses of 'Rescue Me', a song no doubt chosen by someone in a particularly waspish frame of mind but of absolutely no humour value whatsoever when you're stuck having to hear it for a good five minutes or so. Suffice to say I didn't take them up on their offer.

The company I did opt for seemed amiable and responsible enough, and thankfully were round in just over an hour to come to my aid.

It turned out all that had happened was that one of the screws on the opposite edge of the door to the hinges had become so loose it was simply preventing the whole thing from swinging past the frame. Had I been on the outside and pushed the door hard enough it would have opened perfectly, and I would have spotted the problem instantly.

The screw still needed replacing, though, as did a couple of other parts. The Yale lock also needs completely replacing, but that can - and most certainly will - be fixed up for another time. First I've got to confront my landlord with the bill for today's events (£88.13), which I already know is going to prove a right pain in the arse given every time I walk past his office he's never in and every time I've tried ringing him up today he's never answered his phone.

I suspect he's buggered off and some completely different company is now in charge of this flat. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened during my life as a tenant.

Anyhow, at least I can now get out of my flat. Not that I particularly need to go anywhere. In fact I don't need to go anywhere at all, and I don't especially want to either given the fact it's the temperature of a sadistic kiln outside. But it's nice to know I can.

Besides, when it comes doors, it's only ever an open and shut case.

Flag day

2006-07-21T18:10:00.000+01:00

The front cover of today's Independent was bang on the mark (as is so often the case). Britain in America's back pocket, refusing to sway from the party line, even at the cost of alienating virtually the entire world. There's no hope for peace when such petulant posturing is exercised by, for good or ill, two of the planet's most influential brokers.

No yolk

2006-07-19T22:45:00.000+01:00

This preposterous picture just about sums up the lunacy of the weather at the present time. There's no way that egg has just been fried on that bonnet. It's been placed there for the camera, dammit!

Doesn't this woman have anything better to do? Like, say, fry an egg for somebody to actually eat?

I don't know what's going on anymore. I feel like I'm trapped in a neverending continental balmy fug which is rendering everything utterly unfamiliar and alien. The heatwave shows no sign of stopping. Its grip merely tightens, and its deathly hand upon all aspects of my life is unremitting and intensely terrifying.

I dream of days when thinking about the weather was never an option, when it was just there in the background, unnoticed, unexceptional, unthreatening.

Wedded bliss

2006-07-17T20:50:00.000+01:00

"Look love," huffed the man into his mobile phone, "I don't care what you think. You can ring up Victoria station if you want, just don't give me a whole plate of bollocks."

The whole Underground carriage couldn't help but hear. The man was talking at such volume it was impossible not to hear. But what with everybody's blood pressure sky high given the accursed heat and absence of fresh air, this outburst seemed natural, even inevitable, and well worth paying attention to.

"Look, I've been up since half past five, I've been out working in the sun all day, I haven't had a bean, I haven't had a drink, and you think summat funny's going on?" The speaker was wearing a red England football shirt, a dirty pair of shorts and a crooked frown. "I got on the train at 5.51! How many times?!"

Quite a few, as it turned out. It beats me why people feel moved to have such prickly, personal conversations in such unashamedly public environments. Even if you find yourself engaged in a trickly exchange of contrary views, why bellow and fume rather than whisper some terse threats until a more dignified and secluded moment arises?

Fortunately, or perhaps not, I got off the train before this exchange reached its conclusion. By this point the man was almost sprawled sideways along the side of the carriage, somewhat betraying his earlier protestation of abstinence, and snarling to himself like a wounded dog.

You just knew he would walk into his house and expect his tea on the table "and no funny business."

Year's end

2006-07-16T21:03:00.000+01:00

Back when summers didn't used to just be about battling to work in 30 degree heat and trying to find ways to keep cool during dementedly balmy nights and dreaming of a chance to find a way out of it all, these months used to symbolise limitless potential in the form of the great big school holiday.

So ingrained in my system is the idea of everything winding down and packing up in June, then re-starting anew and afresh all over again in late August, that I still behave as if these particular weeks are down time: dead days, days of transition, days when you should be nursing wounds and resting up and if necessary remaking yourself before plunging back into the fray of an autumn term.

In fact, every year of my life up till I was 21 was lived out this way. Calendar years meant nothing; academic years were everything, and after such a long apprenticeship it's impossible to shake-off the practices and patterns of the past just like that.

So July remains, and perhaps always will be, the twilight time.

It carries with it the hallmarks, not to say the scars, of periods spend totally alone and away from all familiar faces and landmarks. Of cocoon-like spells in contemplation and study. Of family holidays to the same strangely reassuring seaside hideaways year after year. Of endless days spent wondering whether to wait for friends to call you rather than you dare to call them first.

Of growing up and not noticing it. Of growing apart from others and not knowing it. Of chance sightings of school allies and foes around town and deciding whether to keep your distance or wait until everyone was back on safe territory - the playground - before attempting an approach. Of wondering whether anybody else in the whole world was thinking of you.

Then came the run-up to returning to normality as the end of August approached. This was always a period of nervous anticipation and double-edged apprehension.

It would be exciting to know you'd soon be back in your old haunts with the same people showing up, like you, day after day, for the familiar rituals, the comforting routines. But it would be terrifying to think of what might have changed, not just in people's appearances, but their attitudes.

A hell of a lot of ageing could take place during a summer holiday. More than once I would begin a new academic year (both at school and university) to find new relationships had suddenly formed between previously unallied acquaintances. More than once this left me hurt and confused. All the familiar points of reference would have shifted while my back was turned, and I was left having to fathom a new map to chart my way through the ensuing months.

But the process could work in reverse. People who seemed reasonably mature and level-headed before summer would return gripped with some manic desire to run amok and ruin everything that had gone before. Equally those who you could rely on to fall in with when it came to, well, needing someone to fall in with would now treat you with disdain and lofty arrogance. At times it was almost a case of anything goes.

They were tumultous times. The quirks and quakes resonated within me relentlessly. And later I would do my best to shed the burden of those days whenever and however I could, even if it meant, ultimately, cutting ties with a lot of those faces and places I once longed for so desperately.

Yet even though the memories of a hundred summers spent waiting for the autumn or looking wistfully backwards to spring are, with criminal predictability, growing ever harder to recall, their ripples are still washing over me, even now, all these years later.

Scorched earth

2006-07-15T22:24:00.000+01:00

Today was St Swithin's Day, when tradition dictates that, if it rains, it will continue to do so uninterrupted for a further 40 days.

Fat chance. The sun beat down from dawn to dusk, as it has done for the past week or so, and looks set to do again at least for the next few days.

I think the reason this numbingly hot weather is affecting, and afflicting, me so much, is that I get to feel the sharp end up of it twice a day during the week when I have to use the Underground.

If I was able to walk or get the bus to work, or didn't have to leave the house at all, I'm sure it would be less of an issue. Instead I know I'll be having to once more take a seat in the equivalent of a mobile furnace for around 40 minutes on Monday morning, a thought that fills me with despair.

Saying that, and at the risk of repeating myself (just for a change), the absence of any substantial rain from London for what feels like months is now both a physical and psychological curse. It's reached the point that, during a TV drama I was watching today set in World War Two, a scene set in a room with rain falling outside left me profoundly moved - not so much because of what was being said, but of what was not being said. It just looked and felt the way the country is supposed to be: damp, temperate, breezy, withdrawn. The way the country seems furthest from ever truly being again.

The polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St Swithin's Day
- Billy Bragg

Running dry

2006-07-12T22:33:00.000+01:00

Apropos anything more constructive or illuminating...

...goodnight.

Weary bones

2006-07-10T21:45:00.000+01:00

It happens every time, but I'm still startled by how just one day back at work after a short holiday leaves you floored with exhaustion. For some reason almost every joint in my body aches. I almost fell asleep on the train home - never a good sign. I'd even had to spend a couple of minutes sitting in the toilet at work resting my eyes.

Once again I am amazed at how, by contrast, some people have conditioned their bodies to treat work almost as an adjunct to the main business at hand, i.e. going out in the evening and in effect beginning the day all over again. Where do they find the energy? The composure? The peace of mind?

I'd say they must spend the whole weekend sleeping - except they come back into work on a Monday with tales of debauchery and decadence on a Caligula-esque scale. They could be making it all up, of course. They could be taking the piss. In which case I envy them even less.

Right now I feel like I could sleep for a week. Unfortunately that is presently not possible, and I must therefore find some way to cheat and sneak my way through to the weekend. A cup of camomile tea might be a start. Well, it worked wonders for Helen Daniels.

Low, low

2006-07-09T21:14:00.000+01:00

Feeling very down at the moment. Not sure why, but it's being compounded by fatigue, an unhappiness with various aspects of my life, loneliness, and a sense of loss for something I can't put a name to.

I remember reading how, at the start of the episode of The Simpsons called 'Moaning Lisa', the writers deliberately wanted to have Lisa appear sad for no specific reason. I recall thinking what an amazing thing this was for a mainstream American sitcom to do - but also how instantly genuine and utterly universal.

There's a stigma of guilt attached to the notion of feeling depressed when you're no longer a teenager. But conversely since when did life become immediately understandable the second you turn 20 years of age?

Answers on a virtual postcard.

Around London II

2006-07-08T16:04:00.000+01:00

I've notched up the second leg of my circuit, by way of another nine miles clockwise from Finsbury Park round to West Ham station.

I had mixed feelings about setting out on a Saturday, as I'd no idea how busy the route might be and how cluttered the city would feel. As it turned out I saw barely a dozen people the whole time (out walking, that is), and it was only on the journey there and back that I had the misfortune to brush up against thronging crowds of tourists and fellow travellers.

This leg was a real mixed bag, taking me through some right shitholes, to be frank, but also some real gems. Apparently a lot of the area is due for redevelopment ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games, and judging by the state of most of it, the work can't come soon enough. However there were stretches where, once more, I could have been walking out in the countryside anywhere in Great Britain.

I went past the old Big Breakfast house; through the cemetery where the founder of the Salvation Army is buried; by ornate disused 19th century pumping stations and sewage treatment factories; along the edge of both Walthamstow and Hackney Marshes; crossed over the Meridian (which I shall do again south of Greenwich); and saw Canary Wharf appear on the horizon for the first time.

Despite it being a Saturday I made an effort to pick up where I left off before 9am, and like last time I was through by 1pm. One day I'll actually try and walk in the morning and afternoon, but for now my feet and my stomach aren't quite ready for it.

Day 2: Finsbury Park - West Ham
Miles Added: 9
Total Miles Completed: 17
Total Miles Outstanding: 61