2003: The Year In Blog.

(NOTE: If you’re looking for that dramatic Farewell Speech, then you’ll find it here.)

No, I’ve not started blogging again; think of what follows as an act of closure. Alternatively, think of it as an alternative to those “…Has Left The Building” splash pages, for which I lack the graphic design skills. Or there again, you could always think of it as the Troubled Diva Christmas Holiday Annual.

And yes, I know it’s ridiculously long, and that I needn’t have put so much effort into it. But you’re forgetting: this is Troubled Diva. This is how I’ve always done it. Remember me this way.

Or failing that…buy one of my lovely mugs.

Click on the quotes to read the original articles in full.

This article is also available in a printer-friendly MS Word document: THE TROUBLED DIVA CHRISTMAS ANNUAL 2003.

January.

January 8th.

Thus it was that, sitting on my bedroom floor aged seven or eight, I first learnt one of the cardinal rules of fiction. Namely, that happiness is almost impossible to write about for any sustained length of time. Effective fiction needs conflict, struggle, and a fair measure of suffering and misery along the way. Goodness, kindness and happiness are all boring. Evil, cruelty, pain and sorrow are all much more interesting.However, while happiness may be a poor subject matter for fiction, I would contend that rather different rules apply when it comes to the maintenance of personal weblogs. When writing a personal weblog – where you, the writer, are the central figure – then happiness is a perfectly acceptable – perhaps even desirable – state of mind with which to contend.

January 8th: The Church Of Me.

1979 was, for many of us who were around at the time, our real 1976, the year when the radicalism of the music began to match the radicalism of the manifestos. True, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Alternative TV, the Slits and the Banshees were already in existence, not to mention the Buzzcocks and Magazine, or Warsaw on the point of mutating into Joy Division, or indeed early stirrings from the Pop Group, Human League and Gang of Four. But 1979 was the miracle of a year in which nearly all these groups determinedly took off into outer space, burned their “roots” and actually started to make “new” music; things, approaches which you had never heard before. And the one record of 1979 which even more miraculously managed to pull all these strands together (dub, polemics, No Wave noise, dance, ennui) was Metal Box, the second album by PiL, released almost at the close of the year, as if to sum everything up.

January 10th.

Shiz intshi?
Am I right in assuming that person over there is a homosexual?Aya gorreneh?
I would like to avail myself of some of your recreational stimulants.

Shent fookin gerrin enneh.
Either: I do not wish to have sexual intercourse with that person.
Or: I have grown tired of supplying that person with recreational stimulants.

Get kokkart!
This stripper is taking far too long, and I have to catch the last bus in ten minutes.

January 13th – Uber.

My Top Ten CDs of the Year That I’ve Rarely Listened To and Only Bought Because I Thought They Would Make Me Look Like I was Cool and Had a Sophisticated Knowledge of Music1. Sigur Ros ( )
The title alone told me that this was coolness incarnate because, as all cool people know, ambiguity and mystery are the foundations of being cool. (Smelling terrific helps too, of course.) I bought this the day it was released as I’m wont to do with new, hip, releases from Iceland. I listened to the beginning of track number three while flossing once, haven’t heard a lick of it since. I leave the CD lying around in well-trafficked areas of my apartment so it’s easy for a guest to find and remark on how cool I am for owning it.

January 14th.

My consultant dermatologist is a brusque man, who crossly barks orders at me from behind his desk. Unbidden and unexpected, the Russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter flashes through my consciousness.Show me! Turn round! Stop! Drop trousers!

At the sight of my bare bottom, the consultant says something to the assembled cluster of underlings who are standing behind him, in rather lighter tones than he has been using towards me up till now. Everybody in the room chuckles – except me. I have no idea what is being said. Nobody has ever laughed at my bottom before. The humiliation is considerable. However, it is also tempered by the knowledge that this will make a good story for the rest of the group. Minting entertainment from embarrassment has always been one of my coping strategies.

January 15th.

The fully frocked-up Bishop and the red-faced sixteen year old school girl stood there together for a few moments, slap bang in the middle of the sex shop – until the Bishop, with admirable sang froid, simply murmured “Ah, I don’t think this is quite the sort of shop I was looking for” – and with that, calmly left the building.

January 17th: The World, Backwards.

We live in the world of Realpolitik. There’s little room for naive sentimentality about killing. Our governments are defending an ideal. Maybe eventually they won’t have to kill anybody else to defend it, and we can wipe the blood off it and it’ll look all shiny and beautiful again. Meanwhile, I can sit in my safe european tomb and bitch about it. I’d do more, but, y’know, this hangover, and I have a job and a family to support and all my other responsibilities. At least I have the right to bitch. That’s worth killing people to defend, isn’t it?Pull the duvet over your head. It’ll all go away if we ignore it.

January 21st.

No doubt as part of their whole “deconstructing the mystique of performance” schtick, the Flaming Lips helped their own road crew build their set, with the lighting turned right up on the stage. Well, most of the band helped out, at any rate. Singer Wayne Coyne mainly confined himself to rather self-consciously wandering on and off stage, occasionally throwing cheery little waves towards the audience. However, he never actually seemed to do much. He killed quite a bit of time by making tiny little adjustments to his mike stand, and seemingly by checking the stage for uneven floorboards (an all too often overlooked duty, I’m sure). But really, he was just making a great show of looking busy, to cover up for the fact that he wasn’t actually contributing a great deal. As a seasoned practitioner of this strategy myself, who has come to rely upon it to get him through most of his daily life, I can suss out a fellow traveller in an instant.

January 22nd.

20. The Hairstyle Of The Devil – Momus (1989)
requested by Douglas, Nigel R (the UK one) (sorta), and Vaughan
Before putting this on, I tell K that this track has received more mentions than any other.
(just two seconds in) “Oh…God.”
He looks horror-struck. And that lip is curling again.
(a bit later) “I can’t make a single comment.”
(short pause) “How old are your readers?”
Well, um, you know…
(warming up now) “Were they all part of that 1980s more-right-on-than-thou crowd? You know, with those little black slip-on school pumps? Dancing in that awful tippy-toe, priggish, earnestway?”
I really couldn’t…
“I detest it. Bloody Pet Shop Boys rip-off! And I hate the bloody Pet Shop Boys!”
Yes, I think I picked that bit of information up somewhere along the line during the past 17 years.

January 29th.

Why I like Sophie [Ellis Bextor]: because she’s a little bit aloof, a little bit above the usual “Love me! Love me!” pop star nonsense, a little bit more intelligent, and maybe even a little bit arty on the quiet. You get the feeling that there are probably other things that she could be doing equally as well – but that for now, she has chosen to be a pop star, just for a while. You can just about imagine her reading paperback novels from last year’s Booker Prize list, or going to art galleries, or seeing the occasional subtitled European arthouse flick. She’s the cool older sister who doesn’t have to try too hard. Unlike all those Popstars wannabes, she doesn’t strangle the life out of her songs with all that tedious Carey-esque over-emoting. She understands the value of holding back. OK, so she’ll never send you dizzy with excitement, and she’ll never make you break down and cry – but you know what? Not everybody has to. Instead, she belongs to the same tradition of polite middle class English pop which gave us Kim Wilde and Nick Heyward, and I like her for that.

January 30th.

Our first impressions? They were bloody hard work. You couldn’t get any real sense out of either of them. Ask them even the most straightforward question, and you would get a weird, oblique, often surreal reply, laced in several layers of irony and double bluff, and almost always delivered with a faintly mocking undertone. Essentially, Simon and Andrew – upon seeing our eager, fresh-faced, neatly groomed naivety – had decided to play an extended game of Bait The Straights with us. As we were entirely dependent on their hospitality at this stage, all we could really do was play along. We were constantly being wrong-footed, set up, walking into complex traps which they had laid for us, with the intention of making us look like terminally unhip, gullible ingénues. I think this was partly because they were actually faintly embarrassed by their own hospitality (far too bourgeois), and were trying to plaster over it with their don’t-give-a-f**k Berlin Cool affectations.

February.

February 1st.

“You know that Spring is on the way when you catch the first smell of asparagus in your urine.”

February 3rd.

My conclusion at the time: this was a RealPlayer band, not an MP3 band. An MP3 band would have indelibly burnt itself onto my mental hard drive. But the [Jon Spencer] Blues Explosion were merely streaming through my temporary buffers, in three or four second chunks, leaving no trace behind.

February 5th: Blogjam.

And then, as I stroll casually through the ticket hall towards the street outside, the station tannoy crackles into life, and an official sounding woman speaks: “This is a message for the passenger with the long hair just leaving the station. I hope you’re planning to CLEAN UP THAT SHIT!”I keep walking and don’t look back.

February 10th: Ftrain.

Selections from My Name is Blanket, © 2046 Blanket Jackson.… I spoke about going to college and having a life of my own, like my brother Prince. I wanted to study veterinary medicine. But my questions fell on dead ears. Finally he erupted. “No one else is leaving the ranch! No one!” His legs were shaking, but he steadied himself and walked across the room to a statue of Apollo, flipped open its marble head, and pressed a keypad hidden in its neck. Sirens went off. The sound of deadbolts locking echoed throughout the room, and great mechanical noises came through the window. In the distance, a hippo lowed.

At the end of the clanking, a moment of total silence. Finally, my father said, “We are a happy family, Blanket.”

February 11th.

A pervy electroclash duo called Atomiser takes the stage. Their lead singer, one Jonny Slut, is the DJ/host at the uber-hip Nag Nag Nag club night, and was also a member of 80s goth band The Specimen. Goodness, he’s worn well for a man of his age. Mr. Slut appears bare-chested, with solid circles of thick black make-up around his nipples, and a pair of leather kecks which are eventually discarded to reveal quite the most sumptuous jockstrap I have ever seen. In fact, it’s more like a theatrical mask than a jockstrap. There are feathers coming out of it and everything!

February 12th: Hydragenic.

Marsyas.… To view the third opening – which is horizontally aligned, unlike the two vertical end hoops – you return to the middle of the hall and go up the steps to a small mezzanine level. On Mike’s advice, we had left this to the end and it was truly the most memorable part of the experience. As you stand on the mezzanine level, you can see up into the structure and along the most narrow part back to the original hoop by the entrance. This is when it struck me: this sculpture has so much sheer presence that it’s almost alive.

This is where I lost the plot completely and started rambling on about it having an organic energy that made me feel like I’d come into contact with an alien intelligence. It truly is like being in the presence of a benign life form, maybe a similar vibe to standing next to a five hundred year-old tree in a quiet, deserted wood. More specifically, the lines running across the structure that accentuate its shape convey the somewhat less benign feeling of being inside the stomach of a large animal (Jonah and the whale?).

February 13th.

Indeed, I spent most of my late teens in a constantly shifting state of unrequited lovesickness, with an extensive array of blithely unwitting targets who were selected seemingly at random. These scattershot attachments, while intense and fairly all-consuming, usually ran in parallel with each other, sometimes up to three or four at a time. Thus even as a lovelorn romantic, I was already a bit of a tart.

February 14th.

And so – in something of a fit of “I’ll bloody show you!” defiance – it came to pass that those tired old tits of mine got flopped out one more time, for the benefit of the whole tavern. Which was, of course, deeply liberating, and blah blah blah blah blah.Let’s leave me there, shall we? Pissed up, topless, with yet another fag on, arranging myself around the dancefloor of a shabby South London pub, in the company of some of Britain’s finest online diarists – and increasingly dear friends, I might add – beaming from ear to ear, lovin’ it lovin’ it lovin’ it.

Apotheosis of Blog. Re-connection with the Mothership of Queer. Not forgetting a joyful re-acclimatisation with the unsubtle pleasures of Cooking Lager.

Mission accomplished, then. Take me home.

February 15th: Here Inside.

I began to lean forward to kiss him, then drew back. It was unbearable. I wanted N. so much, so wanted a boyfriend, yearned to break the tension of the moment. His leg was millimeters from my hand. Make that move and everything would flow. Then caution hauled me back. Perhaps he was just bored, socially inept, oblivious — a sexual approach might mean a black eye or a broken nose; at the very least my cover would be blown, my homosexuality would immediately become public knowledge. What if someone came in?

February 16th: meish.org.

On the tube on the way to the demo.“I dug out my old CND badge for this, look!”

“Oh, that’s marvellous. I found an old ANC badge. It’s not really relevant, but I thought it was in the spirit of things, you know?”

“Oh yes, absolutely”

“I found this one at home, ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ – Jane modified it with a permanent marker this morning, see?”

“I added an exclamation mark, just there.”

“Certainly makes it a bit more relevant! Ha ha!”

February 18th.

K: (with earnest enthusiasm) This course is like a Kazuo Ishiguro novel. It can’t be taken at face value. You have to read it between the lines.(Mike grunts in agreement and carries on eating.)
(Then pauses, catches himself, puts down his fork and looks up.)

Mike: (slowly, deliberately) You do not know what an effort of will it’s going to take for me not to put that on the weblog.

February 26th.

1993: I Will Always Love You – Whitney Houston. (62)When you’re heart-broken, to the point you’re actually quite enjoying it, shameless wallowing in this track is understandable. Ten years on, you finally see it for what it is: an insincere, self-promoting, over-indulgent, flaccid, fifth-rate imitation of the Real Thing. Bit like the one who broke your heart in the first place, really. (Nigel R (the UK one))

Decade scores so far (after 7 days).
1= (1) The 1970s (28) — Medallion men! Bra-burning libbers! Shut that door!
1= (2) The 1980s (28) — Red Wedge! Nouvelle cuisine! There is no such thing as society!
3 (3) The 1990s (23) — Monica Lewinsky! Black Wednesday! I’d like to be a queen of people’s hearts!
4 (5) The 1960s (21) — Grosvenor Square! Arts labs! I have a dream!
5 (4) The 2000s (20) — Ring tones! Retro-modern wenge sideboards! I love blinking, I do!

February 28th.

There’s little to choose between 1988’s two new pop princesses on the block: Tiffany and Kylie Minogue. Like any good music snob, I hated both of these records at the time – and yet now, I find them utterly charming. What is it with music snobs only being able to appreciate good throwaway pop ten years later? And what is it about good throwaway pop that makes it endure in a way that so much other supposedly “quality” music fails to do? After all, who do we celebrate now: Abba or Gerry Rafferty? Kylie and Tiffany, or The Christians and Terence Trent D’Arby? I rest my case.

February 28th: FunJunkie.

The Great Goose Egg Experiment.So, yesterday I asked you lot how I should prepare my most enjoyfully anticipated Goose eggs. It seems I made a mistake in telling you that the most popular method would be employed by me, for my dinner.

You all voted that I should cook them with a hair dryer. You bunch of bastards…

March.

March 3rd.

Which decade is Tops for Pops? VOTING IS NOW CLOSED. All five decades are sitting anxiously in our Green Room, waiting for the first of the final eliminations to take place. By the end of today, four of these decades will be going home disappointed, while one of them will be officially declared Best! Decade! Evah!

Obviously, the mood backstage is very tense – although there has been the most marvellous cameraderie between all the decades. Well, all except the Eighties, that is. The “Me Decade” has been keeping noticeably aloof from the proceedings, disappearing into the toilets at regular intervals to re-apply its make-up and re-lacquer its hair.

Ah, there are the Sixties, handing round the cocktail snacks. Over there are the Seventies, slumped into bean bags and, er, mellowing out. Meanwhile, the Nineties seem to be hugging everyone and telling them how much they really, really love them, and how these friendships are for life, yeah? Are you looking forward to the results, Nineties?

“Yeah, nice one, top one, sorted. We’re mad fer it!”

And how about you, Noughties? Feeling tense about the first elimination?

“Well, at the end of the day, one of us has to go, right? Which is obviously really sad, but those are the rules of the game, and we all knew that we when we came in here, but at the end of the day, it is just a game show, and we’re really lucky to have got this far, so…”

Yes, thank you Noughties. Love that freshly ironed hair, by the way. My compliments to your stylists.

March 5th: My Ace Life.

And now, for your delectation – the my ace life bathroom cabinet of wonder.Come with me as I share with you my secrets of how I manage to stay so radiant, so beautiful…

March 14th.

Thursday, 13:00. A lightbulb flashes on in my head. Yes, why not try for the longest ever comments box discussion – but make it a sponsored attempt for charity? Hang on – tomorrow is Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day! Now that my job is secure once again, what could be a more apposite way of repaying my karmic debt? OK, let’s investigate further. The current record holder for bulging boxes must surely be the American super-blogger Wil Wheaton. I take a peek at the front page of Wil Wheaton Dot Net. Good grief! There’s a posting there with 234 comments! (It’s a flame war about “freedom fries”, incidentally.) Right then: 235 is my target.Thursday, 13:13. Comment #38 introduces the project. 235 comments by midnight on Friday, and I’ll pledge £100 to Comic Relief. But there’s going to be one key feature: I’m not going to come out of hiding to promote this in any way. Too obvious, too easy, too – well – desperate really. I’m not about to start whoring myself for hits. No – I’m going to test the possibilities of effective meme propagation instead. The only allowable publicity for this caper has to come from my readers. In other words: I’m comment-whoring by proxy. I’m comment-pimping, with my readers as my bitches. This is the sort of dysfunctional relationship which appeals to me. God, but what if nobody bothers? This could end up looking really pathetic, couldn’t it?

March 14th: World Of Chig.

Other people in the crowd had stopped pogoing. They were now nudging each other and tittering. For there, on stage was a seven foot man with three feet high hair, in brightly coloured velvet loon pants, happily giving his all vocally, but with his zip now forming an oval shaped hole and, yes, you guessed it, his willy had popped out. Using the word ‘popped’ is actually exaggerating the drama of the moment and giving the doctor more than his due. With most men, I would have expected to use the word ‘flopped’, but no, not here. We stood. We stared. For there, nestling like a single egg in a bird’s nest, was the tiniest penis I ever saw (until the internet, at least).

March 15th.

Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974.In 2003, nothing made me laugh harder than this.

March 18th.

Saddam Hussein is a brutal, corrupt dictator. He isn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. We are not generally given to overthrowing brutal, corrupt dictatorships by bombing their countries to pieces, and nor should we be.The war will further provoke anti-Western sentiment in the Arab world, thus increasing, not decreasing the risk of future terrorist attacks against the UK and US.

Thousands will die, and many thousands more will suffer.

If the US succeeds in this action, then a terrible precedent will have been set, which I believe will form the basis for future unilateral actions against other regimes, in order to further equally illegitimate interests.

Plus all the usual conspiracy theories and amateur psychology, obviously. Obviously.

The only hope I have left: that I’m proved completely and utterly wrong, and end up feeling like a complete twerp in six months’ time. Frankly, nothing would bring me greater pleasure.

March 19th.

As I progressed down the page, I entered a strange, split-level state of consciousness. My rational brain (or what was left of it) was aware that it had not even the faintest idea of the literal meaning of the poem – nor even whether it was good, bad or indifferent. Nevertheless, my instinctive brain could still, somehow, pick up on an overriding mood, or flow, or structure – or something – despite the fact that my sensually perceptive brain was by now so comprehensively battered that every letter on the page appeared to be in a different colour. At the end of my recitation, which had been received in total silence, there was a brief, respectful pause, followed by a flutter of soft, almost post-coital murmurings: “Oh…wow“, and “You read so beautifully“, and – from the host himself – “Thank you so much for doing that”. I felt simultaneously like a a gifted lyrical interpreter and a big fat fraud.

March 23rd.

And we hadn’t even had our desserts yet. Dear sweet bountiful Lord in Heaven, the desserts! These completely finished us off. While K tucked into his hot fig tatin with sambuca ice cream, I babbled and twittered my way through an exquisite (for there is no other word for it) hot passion fruit soufflé (the inside of the dish lightly smeared with dark chocolate), accompanied by a blood orange sorbet. Like everything else on offer, there was nothing pointlessly twiddly or fiddly about them. They had an honesty. They had an integrity. Yes, this was the sort of breathless of crap we had now started to spout.

March 26th.

How to blend with the English – a bluffer’s guide. 2. Sartorially, either go for anonymous muted tones from Marks & Spencer (you will think of this as your “classic” look), or else adopt a suitable street-style which “expresses your individuality” in some way.

3. Your sense of humour should be evenly divided between gentle self-deprecation, wry observation and bitter, withering sarcasm.

3a. If you consider yourself to be a person of breeding, then you should also add “hilarious” impersonations of regional dialects to the above list.

March 27th: Anna, guest-blogging.

The main differences between roses and spoons.11. Spoons don’t smell nice. Unless they’ve been somewhere nice.
12. Roses always smell nice. Unless they’ve been somewhere horrible, like up an animal’s bum or something.
13. At the end of a ballet, people don’t generally throw spoons at the stage.
I think they should.
14. People don’t wander from pub to pub, selling ‘a spoon for the lady, sir?‘

April.

April 3rd.

You know how people keep banging on about “A-list bloggers”, like the A-list is some sort of abstract concept – a mere figure of speech? Well, these people are wrong. The A-list is – of course! – a real list, written down on a piece of paper and kept under lock and key in a secret location. Because why on earth would the A-list be an imaginary list? That would be just stupid.So, (now gather round closely, and not a word to anyone, and if you do then I’ll only deny it) get this: our intrepid little group had managed to discover the location, sneak in, pick the lock, and steal the A-list. Look, here it is! Except…it’s not the A-list any more. Oh dear me, no. We have replaced it with a new list. Our list. Ahahahahaha!

April 7th.

Yes! At last! Thanks to the efforts of my mate Rob and his team, who have been working late to meet the promised go-live date, official Troubled Diva merchandise is now available.Because we’re no longer just a weblog, you know. Oh no. We’re a fully fledged Global Marketing Concept now. And this fine range of exclusive quality goods (T-shirts, mugs and mousemats, in a choice of two designs) is the cornerstone of our Brand Awareness Campaign.

April 10th.

9. The expected Snotty Parisian Attitude never materialised. Not anywhere. Instead, everybody was uncommonly polite and charming: hotels, cafes, bars, taxis, the lot. Maybe this was partially because we were well away from any of the obvious tourist haunts. Or maybe that Snotty Parisian Attitude isn’t quite as prevalent as people seem to think.10. All things considered, I think I might get to quite like this Travelling Round Europe On Business lark (if it indeed does materialise). At any rate, this was a good start.

April 16th.

Stats Vertigo, I call it. A wobbly, giddy, “how the hell did I get up here, and how the hell am I going to stay up here?” feeling. Too many people popping back each day, wondering what caper I’m going to pull next. Yes, I know: an illusory, self-invented pressure. But when is vertigo ever a rational feeling? I have always had a terrible head for heights.

April 22nd.

Our very own Chardonnay Lane! Only much classier, of course. Perhaps we should call her Viognier Boulevard instead. Viognier – a thoroughly good sport who has neither eaten raw fish nor visited a gay bar before tonight – throws herself into her new surroundings with gusto, bellowing along to the strains of the Grease Megamix with the best of us. By the end of the night, she has learnt a lot about The Ways Of The Modern Homosexual. Particularly about, um, that particular activity that some of the more adventurous amongst us like to do with their, er, hands. So that at the end of the night, when a young employee of the bar politely asks us to finish our drinks and make our way outside, she is able to inform him, with an air of some authority, that he really ought to trim his fingernails. “Because I’ve heard that it’s very important…“

April 23rd: Invisible Stranger.

Stripped down to shorts, vest and knee-pads (driving Daleks is sweaty work), you climb in, and the top bit is lowered over you. It’s surprisingly roomy inside; there’s even a ledge to rest your Evian bottle. There isn’t any claustrophobia either: the grille around the Dalek is made so you can see out, but others can’t see in. And, as your hands are going to be pretty busy manipulating that gun and sucker-arm, a leather strap dangles in front of you. Grab that by your teeth, and the eye-stick it’s attached to will wiggle up and down.

April 29th.

American Life. (from American Life)Even more stark, even more stripped-down, and only not what we were expecting because, frankly, we were expecting something rather more unexpected than this. Inspiring more accusations of being another unimaginative reduction/re-tread (and the stylistic similarities with Music are indeed undeniable), this is by turns awkward, stroppy, pissed-off, cryptic, confusing, mocking, self-obsessed and just plain daft. As album openers, Erotica said “Let’s indulge ourselves” – Survival said, “I’m still here and I’m still smiling” – Drowned World said “This is the new me” – Music said “Let’s all party” – and American Life says, flatly, “F**k it”.

May.

May 2nd.

I discovered that you can dance the Hard House on beer, provided you have an awful lot of it – at which point the music suddenly starts sounding nice and crunchy and punky and rock and roll, and the overall mushiness of the sound becomes quite appealing, and you can start lurching about to it quite cheerfully, without that nagging “why am I even doing this?” feeling. So now I know. Good. Shan’t be doing it again.

May 7th.

So, yeah. We’ve got a brand new cottage garden – which we didn’t actually design, construct or plant ourselves – and it is making us very happy indeed. That’s got to be wrong, hasn’t it? Have I sinned properly now?

May 12th: Diamond Geezer.

Over the years, people have found many different ways to avoid boredom, many different ways to fill their time. Over the next few days I’m going to list 20 of the most successful methods people use to keep boredom at bay. The list will reflect society’s top time-fillers, and not necessarily my own. Maybe the list will be useful next time you’re staring at a hole in your life and wondering how to fill it. Or maybe you use a lot of these methods yourself already, in which case you almost certainly won’t have time to read any of it. Lucky you.

May 20th.

But in the morning, with all done and dusted, and what remained of the spell completely broken, this awful quietness and retreat descended upon the room. A shuffle back from intimacy to cordiality. From “oh yeah, me too, absolutely” to “do you want a shower now, or wait till you get back?” From new best mate, to cipher, to statistic. No phone numbers. No point. Respective little black books already bulging, with page after alphabetised page of half-smile memories, mild accusations, slowly fading obligations. Was that all it was, a way to pass the time, a virtual reality wank in a Glorified Travelodge? Yeah, see ya, take care. He slipped ahead through the lobby, tacitly adhering to the accepted drill for shady interlopers the world over, while I tactfully hung back on the half-landing before striding purposefully on down for breakfast.This was the best piece of writing that I posted on the blog all year. If you only pick out one article from the archives, then make it this one.

May 21st.

It was a proper Grown-Up’s evening, almost like the dinner parties which my parents’ generation would have thrown. Like the dinner parties at which I used to sit quietly, all those years ago, the archetypal neurotic, misunderstood adolescent, inwardly squirming with self-consciousness. Unfortunately, I was all too aware of the echo. Slowly, unstoppably, a strange sort of mist started to envelop me, as I begain to retreat further and further back inside myself. As the mist grew thicker, and as the internal diaologue grew louder, and as the voices of the people around me grew fainter, and harder to latch onto for any longer than a few seconds at a time, so I found myself increasingly desperately trying to claw my way back out.

May 28th.

So there we are, me and the Life Partner, strolling into town yesterday evening, and it’s his birthday, and I’ve just given him (amongst other things) a beautiful Roman wine amphora dating from around the 2nd-4th century A.D, and a glossy coffee-table picture book which contains a photo-spread of the architect-designed house that (having visited twice) we are seriously considering buying, and we’re discussing the new garden in our second home in the country which has just been designed by the guy who’s doing Princess Diana’s memorial garden…

May 29th.

Before we know it, two strapping young firemen have jumped out of the vehicle. Oh my God, Latvian firemen!They have stripped down to their underwear. Oh my God, Latvian fireman in their pants!

Ordering us to stand well back, and with one of them clutching a thick grey blanket, they wade out into the waist-deep water. Oh my God, Latvian firemen in wet pants!

(Meanwhile, just as a little side-show to the main action, their driver is, with much languid stretching – ooooh, it’s just too hot to be wearing this sticky uniform one moment longer – slowly stripping down to the waist. I scarcely know which way to look.)

May 30th – June 2nd: Naked Blog.

At school today Miss Bennett was telling us about the Coronation next month. She said the Queen is the richest woman in the world, even though she’s only young like my mam. She’s going to wear the most expensive dress in the world, covered in jewels. And a long purple robe that takes six girls to lift it off the ground and stop it getting dirty.

You have to get a thing called Radio Times to find out what’s on the television which is stupid as well. Everybody on the television talks really, really funny and they all got funny names. Plus they smoke even more cigarettes than me mam and me dad. Me Nana says it’ll never catch on. After the Coronation that’ll be the end of it she says. But me mam shouted at her and called her old-fashioned.

…we had to go out to the front of the class and get our special gift from the Queen which was a toothbrush and a mug. The girls got pink ones and the boys got blue. On the mug was a picture of Prince Charles and Princess Anne and there was a packet of dolly mixtures inside. Miss Bennett said we could eat the sweets with our school milk at playtime.

June.

June 3rd.

After a few more minutes of general banter with the throng, The Wogan announced his retreat.
“Well, at least you lot will be spared from having to listen to my commentary tonight.”
Oh, the twinkly-eyed gentle self-deprecation! Eurovision wouldn’t be Eurovision without!Last year, I gave you a detailed song-by-song critique of every entry, as performed on the night. This year, I fear such a task is beyond me, with the 26 songs passing by in a delirious vodka-fuelled blur. For this is how I see it: if the rehearsals are for chin-stroking, connoisseur-style evaluation of each song’s chances, then the finals are for putting all critical faculties on hold, going stark staring bonkers, singing and dancing in the aisles (there was a pleasing lack of heavy-handed security, and the aisles were nice and wide this year), flag-twirling, whooping, screeching and generally Surrendering To The Madness. I expect that you get much the same sort of thing at the Smash Hits Poll Winners Party. (Yes, it’s to time wheel out that hoary old chestnut, The Strange Cultural Affinity Between Teenage Girls And Gay Men. See Juile Burchill columns passim.)

June 5th.

I wuv my kittie so much dat I gave him his vewwy own Identity Crisis!!! LOL!!!

June 12th: Wherever You Are.

Hello, I may or may not be Esther Rantzen. You might remember me from such televisual classics as Funny-Shaped Vegetables, The Dog That Said Sausages and, of course, Get Britain Singing, with the late but not overly lamented Doc Cox. However, that’s my dubious humorous side. I’m here tonight – in complete, utter and almost buttock-numbing seriousness – to ask for your help with this month’s Wherever You Are appeal. It’s on behalf of Mike, better known to some of you as Troubled Diva.

June 13th.

Yes returned to the Royal Concert Hall, and so did we. Long-standing readers will remember my ecstatic review from December 2001, in which all my prior worries about the band being ponderous, preposterous, anachronistic embarrassments had been joyfully allayed. Unfortunately, for the whole of the first half of this gig, Yes (now reunited with Rick Wakeman) were all four of these things. Actually, they were atrocious.

June 16th.

Although I do slightly miss the presence of SJW’s emotional safety net, I suspect that what I really miss is the comforting knowledge of having that safety net. In other words: I think there has been a strong psychosomatic element to the various trials and tribulations of the withdrawal process. What SJW did for me: if ever I felt a tug downwards, I was able to say to myself “Nope, not going there. Staying just where I am, thank you.” But as the frequency and intensity of these tugs steadily diminished, so there seemed to be no reason left for protecting against them.

June 24th.

As the afternoon wore on, I found myself slipping into dealing-with-the-public-courteously-and-informatively Tour Guide Mode with an ease that bordered on the alarming. Do feel free to step up this way…do feel free to step up this way….yes, that’s a Rambling Rector…yes, lovely, isn’t it…yes, we’re so pleased…do feel free to step up this way…do you know, I hadn’t picked up a hoe until seven weeks ago, and even then I held it upside down, ha ha ha!(Upon hearing this last comment, Mark from the Boutique Hotel rolled his eyes suggestively at me, muttering seditiously that maybe you should think of a way of re-phrasing that.)

June 24th: prolific.org.

His voice goes straight to my chill bone. Stipe sinks to his knees at the edge of the stage, clasping his microphone. Something in his timbre that is just right. Something in its rasp gives me the shivers. It starts at the bottom of my spine and ends at the tips of my fingers.“Fah-yiiiiiire!”

July.

July 2nd.

A major difference between bloggers and journalists: bloggers lack sub-editors. On balance, I think this is a Good Thing. I suspect that an efficient sub-editor would probably take a scythe to all my most cherished woolly digressions and florid sub-clauses, leaving just the stark bare bones behind. I would feel neutered, sanitised, homogenised.On the other hand, I do use far more adverbs than are good for me. So maybe a little exercise in brevity is in order.

July 10th.

As Thatcher burbles on – confidently, amiably, but making absolutely no sense whatsoever – a mounting sense of unease develops within the abbey. By now, she is drifting aimlessly around the area between the pulpit and the lectern, oblivious and unstoppable. Something must be done.A tight phalanx of morning-suited functionaries moves slowly and silently towards her.

July 16th.

Hive been cough James-Burke tick for the mast two maze with a Mad lace of Nobby-Stiles (shoe, the Michael-Caine!), so I haven’t belt Screaming-Lord-Sutch like Noggin. Lorry about that. It also beans that I won’t be mowing to Anita-Harris tomorrow, which is a bit of a frame. Still, the Nobby-Stiles are on the U-bend now, so I mustn’t crumble.

July 22nd: Frizzy Logic.

He writhed on the seat, leaning near horizontal in his effort to pull something from deep within one tracksuit pocket. It was a large scrumple of prescriptions.“Could get two hundred for this” he shouted, leafing through the crumpled bundle.

July 23rd.

I loved watching Cameron’s squirming, wriggling reaction, when asked to give his views on gay relationships.It said:

Shite. Shite. ShiteshiteBOLLOCKS. If I answer this question truthfully, then I will be throwing away any chance I ever had of winning this game. All those WEEKS of suppressing my opinions, of biting my lip, of trying to fit in without selling myself out – all come to NOUGHT because of this ONE wee question.

July 26th-27th: The Search For Love In Manhattan.

Gay dating haikus.How is it you knew
I wasn’t faithful? Oh, yeah.
Bite marks on my ass.

You’re cruel and petty
And you like to make me cry.
When can you move in?

“I need time away,
To figure out who I am.”
I can tell you that.

It’s our second date,
And I’m not sure I love you.
It’s time to break up.

“Let’s have a drink first.”
Excuse me? I didn’t join
Men4talk.com.

August.

August 1st.

But why does the fact that they’re CRACK-whores bother me more than if they were Olde Englishe Ladyes Of Easye Virtuye? Is it because the desperation is more clearly writ? As opposed to the old desperation, which was more artfully concealed – y’know, so that we could almost pretend that they were actually cool with the whole thing? Tarts with Hearts, and all that sentimental nonsense? I think I’ve spent too long in this little bubble of Gracious Living, in this Exclusive Residential Area Of Outstanding Architectural Importance, this little piece of Hampstead in the heart of Nottingham which we call THE Park. Maybe I actually NEED to walk past a few more crack-whores.

August 2nd.

Freedom beckons: freedom from the tyranny of the word count. The Fat Elvis period is drawing to a close. Through this process of purging, this blood-letting ceremony if you will, Troubled Diva is about to be reborn.In just six words’ time.

August 19th.

Your life is being made into a Moulin Rogue style musical. Which songs would be used to emote your life?Cue Ewan, cue Nicole, cue orchestra, hankies out, and we’re off…

This “Zbornak mini-interview” is probably my second favourite post of the year.

August 20th.

Interviews and photo-shoots.The readers of Menstrual Moments might be ready for Challenging New Design Concepts Which Successfully Fuse The Period And The Contemporary – they might even be ready for Swanked Up Poofs Flagrantly Sprawling At Each Other’s Feet – but they were clearly not ready for Cutting Edge Casual Footwear. The horror!

Meanwhile, this post probably generated more reaction than anything else I wrote all year (until the Big Farewell Speech, that is). It’s the one that people always remember, at any rate…

August 26th.

Standing on the pavement outside the pub with a hundred or so similarly sweaty queens, when a double-decker bus emerged from underneath the railway bridge, full of revellers returning to Brixton from their annual outing to the Notting Hill Carnival. The entire top deck – and believe me, I do mean the entire top deck – is on their feet, jumping around, blowing whistles, waving, whooping and cheering at us, while we all whoop, screech and wave back at them. I think this is called “two communities paying their respects to each other”.

September.

September 2nd.

Secondly – that Jagger fellow. I found him strangely obtuse. Yes, he was the consummate showman. Yes, his energy levels never dipped for one second. Yes, he threw every classic Jagger-esque shape in the book, and then some. And yet, I could never quite shake off the feeling that behind the performance, astonishing and compelling as it was, there was something of a void. With Richards, Wood and Watts alike, you could readily, visibly, sense their huge and genuine enjoyment at being onstage. They would catch each other’s eyes and grin. They would lose themselves in their playing. With Jagger, however, the mask never slipped. I couldn’t help wondering whether his onstage persona had long since ossified, and that all we were seeing was a perfectly executed sequence of stock postures.

September 2nd: Scaryduck.

The BBC makes mistakes. It makes bad programmes *cough* Eldorado *cough*. They keep giving work to Dale Winton. Sometimes its news stories aren’t as fair and unbiased as the government would want them to be. But bloody hell, public service broadcasting is about making mistakes, taking risks and courting unpopularity. It’s not for some here today, and dare I say, gone tomorrow government minister, or even less so, some transient opposition spokesman to threaten freedom of speech with the lowest common denominator of the so-called free market. While the BBC gives a balanced meal, the alternative on offer is a pot noodle.

September 4th.

Actually, I found this resurgence of wacky hairdos and self-conscious “individuality” rather re-assuring; maybe there’s hope for our youth after all. It all reminded me of hanging out in Berlin nightclubs in 1984. The same stock figures were there: the tight little bopping gaggle of impeccably dressed Japanese girlies – the extra-large woman with the black bob, white make-up, black shapeless floor-length dress and the “seen it all” scowl – the clubland “face” weaving through the crowds with his phalanx of outriders fore and aft (“important clubland face coming through!“), complete with the little wannabe fella trotting along at the rear, content just to be walking in the same direction – one or two token tattooed love gods (for balance) – and the occasional “I just don’t get where this is coming from at all” out-and-out fruit loop (my favourite being the dude in the striped flannel pyjamas, clutching a copy of the Daily Mail all night). As for me, I was more than happy to do my “retired elder statesman beaming approvingly from the sidelines” act. From the Stones at Wembley to this, in just under an hour? Talk about culture clash.

September 8th: Baghdad Burning.

I looked at the house across the street and saw that three cars were lined up in front of it, as if in a funeral procession. Ihsan followed my gaze and shook his head solemnly, “They didn’t bring him home- they’ll bury him tomorrow at dawn.” He handed me the bread and turned to run back home. As he darted away to cross the street, he lost a flip-flop. He squealed as his foot hit the hot asphalt and hopped around on one leg like some bizarre stork.From Riverbend at Baghdad Burning, this piece moved me more than anything else I read this year about the invasion of Iraq – and somehow, it also told me more. I strongly recommend reading it.

September 8th.

– So you’re not into singles, then? What about the Top 40 – do you follow that?– (with authority) I think the Top 40 is really silly. Because there are only about 2 or 3 people in our class who buy singles, and they’re all the same sort of person anyway. What’s that CD you’re playing? Can I take a look?

[picks up Yes CD (“Fragile”) and examines booklet]

– Eurgh! They’re all really ugly! (amused) Did you really listen to that stuff when you were young?

September 15th.

Gracious in defeat.I’m sorry, but having only sixty people who LOVE ME is a bitter blow indeed. Some might even go so far as to say that it is a paltry reward for the major contribution which I have made over the years. I, of course, could not possibly comment.

September 18th: Uborka.

The first couple of years consists of oneliners about who is currently friends with whom, and the welfare of my guinea pigs. We then move on to a wealth of schoolgirl crushes, which are all pretty much characterised as follows:18/11/83
Today in science RC used MY pencil. I was the very second person he asked!

September 19th.

“Here’s his foot! And here’s his other foot! And here’s his leg … and here’s his other leg. OK: you take the left leg, I’ll take the right leg, and I’ll see you when we reach his … what is this bit, Mummy? I can’t work it out.”“That’s his tummy, darling.”

“But it’s got all funny lines on it…”

“No darling, that really is his tummy. Come on, quickly now…”

September 23rd.

Right at the end of the Tillmanns exhibition, a video installation piece. Inside a large, pitch black room, pumping techno music blared out. Bloody good pumping techno music, at that. Grade A stuff. Mid-nineties vintage, at a guess. My era, in other words. It drew me in, like a moth to a flame, even as K started nervously looking at his watch. (“I’m not sure we’ve really got time for this…“) The far wall was a giant video screen, showing various images of club lighting. The lights were synched perfectly to the music. The camera never panned down to the crowd below.I was transfixed…

This piece, which describes exhibitions at Tate Britain by Bridget Riley & Wolfgang Tillmanns, is another one of my favourites.

September 23rd: Fauxhemia.

You see, the trick to answering loaded questions is to untangle them so that their real constituent parts – a difficult question, and a pointed threat – can each be addressed in earnest. This may prove difficult for the occasional male who doesn’t enjoy facing a sudden power discrepancy, and it is this fear of coping properly that leads to fumbling answers such as “No. Yes. Yes? Maybe? What do you think?”

September 23rd: Kill Your Boyfriend.

“The man is going to call back, and we are going to talky talky, then he will tell me a place to meety. We go to the meety in a place in the da Mission. We sitty sitty, and waity for the car to drive by. I hop in and give him the money money and he will give me the druggy druggies.”

September 25th.

Effects.· Each player in turn will experience a sudden sensation of euphoria and light-headedness, possibly accompanied by a giggling fit, and repeated exclamations of “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”
· If these effects are not judged to be sufficiently powerful, then the player may optionally move on to Emergency Stage Two.

September 27th: k-punk.

The first four doctors had a naturally alien quality. Davidson’s problem was his winning, fresh-faced toothsomeness; something intelligently offset by his reading of the character as beset by an ancient melancholia. Colin Baker, on the other hand, looked like a smug office manager in pantomime costume. He had a solid, doughy ordinariness, more deadly to Dr Who than any Cyberman or Dalek.

September 30th.

I was fully expecting the world of Am Dram to be populated by the sort of characters you find in Alan Ayckbourn plays. There would be a grande dame figure called Pat (half-moon spectacles on a chain, voluminous paisley shawl), with a serenely magisterial air; everyone would be secretly a little bit in awe of her. (“You’d have to check that over with Pat, I’m afraid.“) There would be a “character actor” called Bernard, who would be given a Comedy Turn cameo role in every production; he would play all of these parts in exactly the same hammed-up way, mugging furiously to his loyal crowd in the audience. (“Good old Bernard – couldn’t have a show without him.“)

October.

October 1st.

Once again, just as I had done four and a half weeks ago, on the afternoon of the audition, I started to fret. What if my entire characterisation was a hideous mis-calculation? Crass, cheap, reductive and – if viewed in a certain light – even rather homophobic?

October 7th: Robin, guest-blogging.

Divorced Beheaded Died,
Divorced Beheaded Survived.My son thought it referred to two queens, both cruelly treated but one luckier than the other. I suppose that is what got me thinking about the poem again and marvelling at its balance, brevity and utility. Six famous women who, albeit unconsciously, gave us a classic of school literature. Think about it. If just one of those six queens had failed to play her part we never would have had that poem. I take inspiration from that.

October 11th: Mr.D., guest-blogging.

Rantwords e.g.Restaurant – an eaterie where you complain endlessly about the poor service (after you’ve left)
Colourant – a whinge peppered with salacious adjectives
Vagrant – a moan which meanders aimlessly
Expectorant – a very vocal grumble where the topic eventually coughs up at the end
Tolerant – a tirade which is nonetheless considerate of its subject’s sensitivities
Immigrant – a foreign diatribe

October 13th: Aunt Cyn, guest-blogging.

Of course, the danger with hanging round all those trees is that you might catch something. And so it was that my dearest, darling Cecil went to sleep for the last time in 1983, having succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. I was traumatised, since he’d never told me that one of his legs was wooden (we never slept together, you see, due to my peculiar lifelong phobia of being in close proximity to other people’s knees; ours was a purely intellectual marriage). Distraught that the very things I’d sought to save had taken my beloved, I vowed never to save another tree and, since then, I’ve fought a one-woman campaign to cut down and burn as many of the branchy little bastards (sorry! I get quite emotional about this!) as possible.

October 15th: quarsan, guest-blogging.

After a safe interlude, a film appeared. Trainspotting. It took place a good decade later – indeed it showed my old flat and made a reference to an earlier generation. This did show a picture of addiction close to what I saw, but it was sanitised. I remember watching it with a friend, one of only a handful that survived the eighties, we looked at each other in the darkened room and he just sighed and said “lightweights”.

October 20th: Fiona, guest-blogging.

I’m not talking about dog-tails that are more like wire coat hangers dipped in a Hoover-bag, but prehensile muscular tails that rival limbs. Tails you could dangle from trees with. Tails you could carry that extra bag of shopping with when your fingers are going numb and breaking out in blisters. That’s the sort of tail I’m after, but what sort of consequences would it involve? For a start, as with every new invention or discovery, the sex industry would find a way of exploiting it.

October 21st: Zena, guest-blogging.

When I really lost it, and started shouting and smashing things up again, they pushed me outside – it was raining heavily – “to walk it off”. I didn’t have a coat, and I was freezing, and scared. After about ten minutes, I begged to come back in and said I would “behave”. They put me in their spare room with a couple of litres of water (D had said early on to keep drinking or I would dehydrate, and I was paranoid I would die).

October 26th.

The rest of the world had moved on, leaving behind a bunch of rather passé looking matrons in matching tartan berets and mini-skirts, marooned in a shed in Ramsgate.

October 28th: Danny, guest-blogging.

Now, I don’t know whether any of you have ever been inside a darkroom when the lights come on, but it is a sight I will never forget. People spring apart from each other with startled expressions, as if they’ve all just been given an electric shock. Bloody hell, have I just been sh*gging that? Meanwhile, funny little old men in zip-up cardigans, with pasty skin and hollow eyes, are scuttling out of corners as fast as their legs will carry them; like ants under a rock which has just been lifted.

October 29th: Asta, guest-blogging.

Today, I’ve little doubt social services would have been alerted, an inquiry launched and a team of psychologists deployed. My teacher and parents were wise enough to realise that it was just a bunch of words to me. And it was a different age.

November.

November 4th.

You see, I’ve never personally suscribed to what I call the “NME indie band” ethos of blogging:“We just do what we do, and if anyone else happens to like it then that’s a bonus.” (Fact: sooner or later – but mainly sooner – all indie bands say this to the NME.) Don’t get me wrong here: I have nothing but admiration and respect for bloggers who operate to this principle, but it just isn’t me. The whole point of Troubled Diva is that it has an audience. Without you, as they say, I am nothing.

November 11th.

Look, it’s quite simple: ALL of the royal family are gay. Yes, ALL of them. It’s some strange in-bred genetic thing, probably.

November 16th.

“Oh yes, I’m an online writer. Working with words and images, I deploy a variety of multi-disciplinary techniques to distribute my work in a broadly reverse-chronological format, in a medium which seeks to build overlapping networks of disparate yet interlinked online quasi-communities, whilst simultaneously encouraging active participation from community members in which the boundaries of “provider” and “consumer” are gradually broken down by means of an iterative process of…”

November 17th.

I have retreated into myself far too much over the past couple of days, losing the ability to engage fully with the world around me – as if there was a layer of invisible cotton wool wrapped around the inside of my head, muffling external reality. Inside the cotton wool, I’m over-thinking everything; in a lurching, scattershot fashion, flitting between random neurotic impulses with little rhyme or reason.

November 17th: londonmark.

I get the impression that I live in a semi-permanent state of confusion, seemingly always missing out on the one line of dialogue which would make the entire conversation make sense. Recently, it’s been happening a lot. I’ve been getting the wrong end of the stick or, on some occasions, completely missing the stick entirely and even getting hold of a different stick. And boy, do I get stick for that. I mean, I get different stick from the one whose wrong end I have already got, or not, as the case may be. Sticky, eh?

November 20th: orbyn.com.

If we like George Bush so much, why are we force-feeding him chicken with cabbage while blowing pipes in his ear and serenading him with a “banjo breakdown”?

November 21st.

“I can see the sun rising above your arse, and it looks beautiful.”

November 24th: Acerbia.

“Were you watching this?”Of course I wasn’t watching this, it was only the news. I’d rather exist in a misinformed guess-world composed of my own flawed perceptions of the events that surround us gleened from my intuitive methods of reading tealeaves! By all means lets watch four idiots with a nailgun rampage through a house with floral wallpaper and abominable taste in furniture in a race against time to see who can cause the most hideous case of color-blind MDF drive-by interior devastation.

November 25th: Zena, guest-blogging.

I love emotional voyeurism as much as the next person. I’m a twenty-first century babe who wants to let it experimentally all hang out, and there’s something utterly compelling about sharing and hearing reality. It’s Big Brother or The Salon (like, duhuh?) only with better grammar, and – in this case – you got to see the sex. Think of it like a fascinating woman you met at a cocktail party who left before you got her phone-number.

November 30th: Mad Musings Of Me.

They are fuv=cking marvellous marvellous people. Ig you wre ther e there there ou wouls understabd how fucking marvellou sth eUk blogosphere us –

December.

December 1st.

I cannot remember that last time that I felt the need to be equivocal about my sexuality. I will say “partner” and “he” in the same sentence, in any situation, with no more than the slightest “so now they know” flutter in my stomach. I no longer watch what I say on the street, in shops, or in bars. I greet gay friends with a kiss in public places, without first checking around for potential trouble. OK, so I don’t actually skip down the street with my hand in K’s, but I’m not altogether sure that either of us would ever want to; some behavioural patterns are so established that it would feel false to attempt to change them. In short: we’ve come a long, long way, baby.

December 2nd: It’s Funny Because It’s Shit.

I drift off, accompanied. The disc ends. I sleep on. So far, so good. Some 13 minutes later, I am horribly startled by an entirely unfamiliar hooting and scraping: it is The Hidden Track. What in the sweet and blessed name of ARSE is the point of these things? They are the musical equivalent of…. no, they don’t even deserve the creative effort of a decent simile. They are a shit idea, shitly executed, of invariably shitious music. This was no exception.“Ok, that’s the mix nailed down. I think we’ve done great work here”

“What about the hidden track?”

“Aww, man… do we have to have one of those?”

“Yeah. People LIKE surprises. It’s cute and fun, and we’ll probably make it onto some list in Q Magazine.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Well, something shit, obviously. No point in hiding good stuff. Let’s do a cover version of the 4th movement of Bruckner’s 7th, with Ginster’s pasties instead of instruments. It’ll be hilarious.”

December 2nd: Rogue Semiotics.

I imagine Duchamp’s grandson, struggling now to maintain the crumbling pile into which he was born, one wing of which is now entirely closed off for repairs that will never happen. All over the house heaps of grandfather’s eccentric constructions fight for floorspace with heaps of accumulated tat. That pile of damp mattresses was probably one of his, but now nobody’s quite sure. Their spring has sprung long since. The famous urinals are now pressed into service as urinals. Duchamp III is forced into hawking the familial talent for a meagre living, handcrafting and sending up to a thousand gibberish emails a day, each one uniquely absurd. “Sati fa tion gua teed!”, he types furiously, “yygd mryu”.

December 7th.

Fuck off, I’m dead. Now go outside and look at the fucking flowers.