Category: Archive

For those of you who will be attending Saturday’s London blogmeet, this is what I look like these days. Or last week in Thailand, at least.

Update: Photo now touched-up, de-red-eyed, and generally de-scarified by Mister Chig. Thanks, pet!

Note 1: I am IN THE NUDE on this photo. Yes! Contain yourselves!

Note 2: Although on Saturday, my shoulders will be modestly draped in the customary Nice Shirt. (I’m currently thinking stripes.)

Note 3: No, it’s not a toupee. But I can see where you’re coming from.

Note 4: They follow you round the room, don’t they?

With the 1984 version, there’s a sense that everyone involved – Geldof and Ure included – is more or less openly aware that, as a song, “Do They Know It’s Christmas” ain’t all that. Knocked up in a day; a means to an end; so let’s not pretend we’re working on some sort of future classic here. You can hear it in the vocal delivery, and see it in the performance, both of which retain a faintly desultory, singing-it-off-the-school-hymn-sheet quality.

Whereas with the 2004 version there’s a certain reverence at work; a feeling amongst the participants that they are honoured to lend their interpretations to such a hallowed item in the pop canon. This time round, the lyric is treated not as greetings-card doggerel, but as something approaching a sacred text.

One point to 1984 for honesty (even if it’s cynical).
One point to 2004 for sincerity (even if it’s naive).

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As a piece of music, Nigel Godrich’s 2004 production is more considered, layered, fleshed out, fully worked. Compare and contrast with the thin, synthetic rush-job of Trevor Horn’s original; in particular that lumpen, monotonous synth-disco/Hi-NRG-lite chuggity-chug bassline that runs all the way through, bashing out the block chords, sounding for all the world like a preset which came with the machine.

One point to 2004 for production values.

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On the other hand: the 1984 drumming is just great, driving the song along at a thumping old pace. But then, if I may be so bold as to point it out, Phil Collins was always capable of being a bloody good drummer when he wanted to be.

(This may not be generally admitted in polite society, but IT’S TRUE.)

One point to 1984 for The Collins Thump.

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1984 stays much on the same level all the way through. 2004’s episodic nature holds your interest throughout, in the fine old Bohemian Rhapsody tradition.

One point to 2004 for skilful deployment of the episodic tradition.

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1984 kicks more or less straight in with Paul Young. No fuss, please; I just happened to draw the first straw. I’ll do my bit, then move swiftly along. Whereas the solemnly strummed opening moments of 2004 are essentially one long build-up to The Entrance Of The Saintly Chris Martin (For It Is He) – who, being far too important to grace us mere mortals with His physical presence, phones in His part down the holy ISDN hot-line from Hollywood. (Chris Martin breathing the same air as Rachel Stevens and The Sugababes? Unthinkable!)

On the video it’s even worse, as Saint Chris (peace be upon him) fixes us with His angelic, oh-so-meaningful blue eyes, looking for all the world like the head chorister who always bags the unaccompanied solo on the first verse of Once In Royal David’s City.

By the time that Chris Martin’s piece is over, we’re already 30 seconds into the song. Get off the stage already!

One point to 1984 for unassuming democracy, and for not being burdened with the sheer weight of The Blessed Chris.

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And it wasn’t just Chris Martin; all of the first three 2004 performers of 2004 phoned their parts in. At least everybody involved in 1984 actually made it to the studio in person. Call me old-fashioned, but I think this does make a material difference to the way we perceive the output. 1984 felt organic and live. 2004 feels stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster.

One point to 1984 for Keeping It Real.

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“And in our world of plenty…” Boy George’s time at the top of the tree may have been drawing to an end (sandwiched in between the embarrassing disaster of The War Song and the total flop of The Medal Song, mere days before everyone unwrapped their copies of Waking Up With The House On Fire and realised what a big fat dud it was), but here, for what was to be the last time, he delivers the assured performance of a huge global star.

Compare and contrast with the godawful Dido, diffidently swallowing her words before she has even finished singing them properly. No-one’s forcing you to do this, love! If you didn’t want to, you should have said so!

In the George/Dido play-off, 1984 grabs the point.

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Oh, just look at that sulky old misfit Paul Weller, trying his best to distance himself from his surroundings even as he performs. No such tainted-by-association qualms for Thom Yorke, merrily mucking in and mugging to camera as he tinkles the ivories.

(Note: in 2004, Paul Weller is knocking out easy-listening cover versions for the Radio 2 crowd. You are free to ponder this irony at your leisure.)

One point to 2004, for dropping the attitude and getting properly stuck in.

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Oh look, that’s really clever! They’ve got Sting to sing “bitter STING of tears”!

One point to 2004, for its lack of buttock-clenchingly inappropriate Sting-related word-play.

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Bono in 1984: an insufferably earnest, self-important, grandstanding, big-flag-waving bellow.(Ooh, and he’s a Christian too! Isn’t it clever how they’ve given the best lines to the best people!)

Bono in 2004: imbues That Line with an unexpected power, pathos and dignity.

One point to 2004, as an older and wiser Bono swings Band Aid 20 into the lead.

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A minority view this might be, but dammit, I like Dizzee Rascal’s rap. I like its spikiness, its awkwardness, the way it suspends and disrupts the flow, stopping you short, forcing you to tune in. Anyway, he’s “grime”, and therefore unimpeachable. So there.

One more to 2004, for Contemporary Urban Relevance. Oh yes.

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Then, there’s that sombre pause – that wee lacuna, as some would have it – whose poignant eloquence stems from what it implies, rather than states. (Which, in a song as baldly literal as this one, comes as a welcome raising of the artistic tone.) As such, it’s the fulcrum of the whole record. You know, as Darkness yields to Light, and all that.

Another to 2004. They didn’t have fulcrums twenty years ago.

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And, lo! Hark! Whose cherubic tones are these? Why, it’s rosy-cheeked Tiny Tom Chaplin out of Keane, all wrapped up snugly in his little winter muffler! Gawd bless us one and all!

The 2004 points are falling like snowflakes.

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As the cameras pan round the room in readiness for the big choral coda, let’s examine the state of our stars. 1984’s lot look like they’ve just crawled out of bed, presumably roused from their slumbers by a hectoring Geldof on the other end of the line. Bad hair days all round: just look at the state of Sting! And Boy George! If Rossi and Parfitt from Status Quo hadn’t been public-spiritedly doling out the charlie in the bogs, Lord knows how they would all have managed.

In stark contrast, the class of 2004 have all been styled to buggery. Minders, PR’s, caterers – the whole circus is in town. Not very rock and roll, is it?

A much-needed point to 84, for daring to be dog-rough.

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“Feed the world…” Come on, 84: look lively! Put a bit of oomph into it! And stop staring at your hymn sheets; you should know the words off by heart by now. Weller, I’m talking to YOU. Chins up, Bananarama! And Marilyn, do stop pouting like that.

“Let them know it’s Christmas time…” Good, 2004: that’s much better. Because you actually sound like you mean it. A spirited performance all round. Give yourselves a round of… oh, you already have.

A point to 04 for sheer enthusiasm and energy – and WITHOUT the aid of Certain Substances which I could mention. So far as we know. (No, honestly. Take a good look around. Cleaner than the average Olympic squad, this lot.)

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However, we are obliged to deduct a point from 04 for the frightful ad-libbed “soulful” caterwauling of young Miss Joss Stone towards the end. Because nobody likes a show-off. And another point deducted for all that unseemly self-congratulatory clapping and whooping. Hooray for us! We fed the world!

Final score:

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Time to face facts, then. Once you get over the shock of the new, and the absurdly misplaced cries of “sacrilege” (I mean, COME ON! Get a GRIP!), Band Aid 20 clearly emerges as the better record.

Oh yes it does.

No, I think you’ll find it does, actually.

As part of his ongoing “Dirk Fest”, Moviebuff (Nottingham blogger and fellow denizen of George’s bar on Broad Street) writes about The Blue Lamp – that fine old crim-flick from 1950 starring Dirk Bogarde (as the baddie), Jimmy Hanley (as the goodie), Jack Warner (as PC George “Evening all” Dixon), and… well… my dear old mother actually, then aged 9.

It happened thus. The awfully pukka Young Ladies’ Academy in central London which Mummy attended (a rather artsy establishment for its day) regularly lent its Gels out for photographic work, including catalogue modelling (catalogues had rather more cachet back then, one hastens to add) and children’s fashion shoots. She even got to model for Vogue on one occasion, and still has the clipping to prove it.

On this occasion, a group of Gels was needed to play a bunch of East End Street Urchins who, while playing on a bomb site, would stumble across the pistol which had earlier killed Jack Warner.

(Not that this would impede his character’s subsequent miraculous resurrection for the long-running TV series Dixon Of Dock Green, but no matter. Stranger things have happened on Dallas, after all.)

Since – naturally! – it Simply Wouldn’t Do to go hiring genuine East End Street Urchins (presumably because this would give them Dangerous Ideas Above Their Station), my mother’s troupe of Nice Gels from Good Homes were required to scruff up and act Common. Particularly the lucky Gel who would be given The Line, to be hollered across the bomb site to the other children:

‘Ere! Look what Queenie’s faahnd! (click to listen)

And who was that lucky Gel to be? Well, who do you think?

The day of the shoot arrived. The Gels arrived on set: smudged, tousled and raggamuffined (*) to perfection.

(*) Traditional English, not Kingston Dancehall. Pigtails and pinafore dresses, not braids and thongs.

And… action.

Mummy (in her best “recital” voice):
‘Ere! Look what Queenie’s found! (click to listen)

Director:
Cut! Listen, dear: can we have you a little louder please? And do remember you’re supposed to be a Cockney Street Urchin – so could we have you a little more common?

Mummy (with all her might and main):
‘ERE! LOOK WHAT QUEENIE’S FOUND! (click to listen)

Director:
Cut! No, no, no. This timid little thing won’t do at all. Who else can we use?

And as if it wasn’t cruel enough to have it summarily snatched away at the eleventh hour, Mummy’s big role was then promptly handed over to her arch-rival in class – a competitive little madam with lung power to spare – whom she never found it in herself to forgive.

Thus it was that every so often throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, mostly on mid-week afternoons in the school holidays, we would gather round the TV set, eagerly awaiting Mummy’s mute two-second appearance in the right hand corner of the screen.

Any minute … any minute … OHLOOKTHEREYOUARETHEREYOUARE! … oh, that’s it.

Ah well, my mother would always say; cheerfully dismissive, already turning back towards the kitchen to put supper on. It’s bound to be on again in a couple of years’ time. Which it always was.

Of course, she’s got it on video now, stuffed at the back of a drawer somewhere, unplayed since the early 1990s. It’s just not the same when you can watch it whenever you want, using slow-mo and freeze-frame at will. What you gain in easy availability, you lose in the thrill of expectation, and in the fond idealisations of memory.

My Mummy the Movie Star. Although she never met him in person (at the premiere? don’t be silly: Nice Gels didn’t go to premieres), my mother maintained a lifelong interest in Dirk Bogarde’s career from that point onwards. Her leading man, if you will.

In any case, The Blue Lamp will always be her film to me.

Having read through the playlist below, The Long Lost Lonely One asked, with some justification: “Am I wrong, or did you go on holiday and just listen to music?”

No, no: we didn’t just listen to music, although that did form a large part of each day’s schedule of activities. I also spent an inordinate amount of time staring into space, with a soppy grin on my face, thinking about very little. Or at least comparatively little, given the usual Speed Freak From Hell pace of my internal dialogue.

Particularly when padding around in our pool, which slowed down the mental processes no end. Which came as some surprise, given my inability to swim and general phobia of water.

(Being on it: a positive delight. Being in it: OK, so long as either my feet are touching the bottom, or my hands are gripping the sides. Any other arrangement: absolutely out of the question. Being under it: sheer terror.)

But then, this was a private pool, overlooked by no-one; why, you could even skinny-dip with impunity. Thus with no curious, amused or (worst of all) “helpful” onlookers, the customary feelings of inadequacy, humiliation and slowly simmering anger were completely lifted. What’s more, this was a pool without a deep end, the water level remaining comfortably between nipple and neck throughout. Meaning no Fear Zone, no invisible Out Of Bounds markers, no Ooh Dear I Think I’ve Gone Far Enough. All of which induced the most deliciously unprecedented sense of freedom in the water; which in turn engendered a wholly new relationship with it.

So I became quite the Water Baby. You couldn’t keep me away from it. First thing in the morning, I could leap out of bed, open the double doors directly in front of me, and step straight into the water; a fantastically invigorating way to wake up. To say nothing of those languid candle-lit early evening soaks in our sunken bath, gazing up at the stars.

There was also a certain amount of reading, but less than anticipated, as Michael Bywater’s estimable little tome Lost Worlds served to keep me company all week. With its short, alphabetised, essays on subjects ranging from Chilbains to Chivalry, Dungeons & Dragons to Dunn & Co, Maturity to Meccano to Microsoft, it served as less of a Holiday Read, and more as a springboard to amiable extended contemplations. Usually while staring into space with a soppy grin on my face.

Other than that, the days were mainly taken up with: eating lovely meals; shopping for bijou objets (we did all our Christmas shopping in less than two hours, in the calm surroundings of the Banyan Tree Gallery Shop); being transported around the hotel complex in electric buggies; matching the staff’s broad smiles and warm greetings pound for pound; studiously pretending to ignore the other guests (whilst weaving pleasingly, plausibly slanderous Jackie Collins-esque narratives around them, generally involving sex, power, money and betrayal); applying vast arrays of fragranced products to our sunkissed bodies; having more of the same rubbed into us by trained professionals at the spa (the first time that a female hand has had direct contact with my bare buttocks since I was in nappies); taking two hours to dress for dinner (The Issey shirt with the Boss trousers, or the Yohji with the linen, do we think?); sipping gin; burning incense sticks; flirting with our favourite waiter (while simultaneously trying not to come on like Orton & Halliwell at the Long Yang Club); and filling in any gaps in the day with general swooning sighs and complacent purrs.

Honestly, you wouldn’t have wanted to be around us. Insufferable, we were.

Trackback: Naked Blog: Death From The Deep

Just before I disappeared off to Thailand for a week, Gordon said:

Have a gloriously decadent time. I ask only one thing, on your return we get details of this mythical “Banyan Tree” playlist.

An easy lob for the first day back, and my first chance to make profitable use of the iTunes “export playlist” facility. What follows is a list of everything that we listened to via the iPod over the past seven days, in our consummately beautiful and luxurious slice of Phuket paradise. (For the full experience, you should also add CDs by Chungking, Youssou N’Dour and Oi Va Voi.)

1. Come on, admit it: the sound quality on a CD is still appreciatively better. Listening to MP3s works fine on headphones, but on a decent set of hi-fi speakers, their weaknesses become cruelly exposed. OK, so you could encode at a higher bitrate, but then you’d lose storage capacity – and as someone with an abnormally high appetite for music, capacity is something I’m not too happy to lose. So I compromise on 160, and put up with the consequences. (This also means that I won’t be giving up on CD purchases any time soon.)

2. Those crappy little “please mug me now” white headphones. Don’t use ’em. Instead, I’ve plugged in the super-comfy, hi-fi quality Sennheiser headphones which K’s sister gave me for my 40th birthday.

3. Damn, but these things scratch easily! After less than a week’s use, my machine already looked like a beaten-up piece of ancient old kit. Hence the need to purchase a matinee jacket (see #16 in the post below) for a whopping extra nineteen quid.

4. But then the iPod won’t fit onto its cradle, or onto the docking port on the external speakers, with its matinee jacket still on. Meaning a whole lot of squeezing and shoving on a daily basis, meaning still more scratches in the process.

5. That bloody AAC format. By default, iTunes encodes your CDs not as MP3s, but as AAC files with an M4U suffix. Which wouldn’t bother me unduly, except that I use something called Mixmeister to make proper DJ-mixed compilations, and Mixmeister doesn’t recognise the format. OK, so you can change the default setting in iTunes, and you can convert your existing AAC files into MP3s. But the file conversion process takes a fair amount of time, and I’m spending long enough mucking around with iTunes as it is.

6. That bloody “Alternative/Punk” genre. If it’s got electric guitars on it, and if it’s anything more leftfield than, I dunno, Bon Bloody Jovi or something, then iTunes decides that it’s “Alternative/Punk”. Even Keane! (Yes, OK, OK, I know what I said about them. But Somewhere Only We Know is still a good song in anyone’s book. Except maybe this person’s.)

7. I don’t see why the backlight shouldn’t stay switched on by default, whenever the iPod is connected to the mains. Because I’m rapidly tiring of wandering over to squnt at the thing. At my time of life!
Update: Aha, so there’s a setting which you can change, is there? Good. Fixed it. Take it all back.

8. When a song title is too long for the display screen, the iPod will scroll it across the screen in “marquee” mode. Except that by doing so, it renders the song title almost illegible. And it doesn’t even attempt to do the same thing for artist and album titles, which remain stubbornly truncated.

9. What to do about “standalone” MP3s, which don’t belong with any album? If you leave the original album title on the track information, then your album list becomes cluttered up with “phantom” albums which you don’t actually own. But if you go to all the trouble of replacing the album titles with something like “Misc 2004”, then you lose the information entirely. (I’ve ended up cutting and pasting album titles into the comments.)

10. Click-wheel fatigue. Ooh, I’m just in the mood for some Yo La Tengo. Well, don’t give yourself RSI of the thumb in the process. And are you quite sure you wouldn’t rather listen to Air instead?

11. When selecting an album (or playlist) on Shuffle, the iPod still starts by playing Track 1. Which really is something of a fundamental design flaw, wouldn’t you say?

12. When playing a mix album, the iPod inserts a short but all-too-noticeable gap between the tracks, thus fatally disrupting the flow…

13. …whereas iTunes fades tracks into each other just before they’ve finished, causing similar disruption in the opposite direction.

14. The iTrip needs a strong signal, and full battery power, in order to transmit the iPod’s signal to your radio. Anything less, and the background hiss becomes too great. Which means that it’s a complete dud in the car after the first 10 minutes or so. Which means that I’m looking at purchasing yet another accessory to connect the iPod to the car’s power supply.

15. Using the iTrip to connect with the hi-fi system in our holiday villa over the past week, we found that it worked absolutely fine for about 90% of the tracks. However, the other 10% contained some particular bass frequency which distorted the sound horribly. Which you don’t want when you’re trying to relax with a gin and tonic of an early evening.

16. You find yourself drawn, quite against your will, into the scary world of MP3 Player Politics. Darlings, have you seen the comments box attached to my previous, rather more enthusiastic post? There are detailed, point-by-point refutations in there, in amongst all manner of disproportionately abrupt surliness and point-scoring superiority. (Apparently, I’m a gullible dupe of the corporate capitalist conspiracy, or something. Well, aren’t we all.)

Smelling something of a rat (just who were all these strange new names?), I checked my stats, only to discover something of a traffic spike in my absence. It turns out that I have been comprehensively rubbished on a message board which is hosted by the makers of a rival product – complete with personal abuse, amateur psychoanalysis, and sniggering references to my sexuality. And all this over an MP3 player which, whatever choice is made, will doubtless be considered hopelessly obsolete in a couple of years’ time?

As Michael Bywater says in his admirable little tome Lost Worlds (my constant pool-side companion over the past week):

Choice perplexes us. It puts the burden on us, so instead of shrugging and making the best of it, we traduce ourselves for our failure to make the right choice. A European, a Japanese or an American wanting to buy a camera faces an appalling task of discernment, in an area which he or she is probably no expert (the difference being that he thinks he is), being thrown to the mercy of salespeople who are working to an unknown agenda, and one may be sure that, whatever they eventually come out with, there will be plenty of evidence to suggest that they made the wrong choice.

Well, quite.

(This started out as a list of 12 things, but I keep thinking of more.)

1. The design. Sleek, sexy, fully functional, and manifestly created with love. You can just tell that sentient, compassionate, dedicated professionals who take a true pride in their work have taken the time and trouble to think through every last little detail along the way. So THAT’S where all you slavering Apple junkies get your hitherto mystifying brand loyalty from. Well, why didn’t you SAY?

2. “Shuffle Songs”. The Killer App. Instantly turns your music collection into a decent approximation of your own personalised FM radio station. But without the DJs and the adverts. Meaning that…

3. …just as with the mythically perfect radio stations of your youth, you can once again experience the surprise and delight of being stopped in your tracks by something unexpectedly apposite to your current state of mind…

4. …but without the corresponding inevitability of having to sit through all those dud tracks in between. Because, naturally, there are no duds on your iPod. And even if there are, you can just reach over and skip them.

5. iPods breathe fresh life into disappointing purchases, and can make played-out albums sound good again. You know all those CDs which your fingers automatically flick past, because you can’t countenance the thought of being stuck in their company for the next 45+ minutes? All of a sudden, they’re no longer dead weight, but rich seams of unexpected treasure. (Notable examples from the past week alone: Junior Boys, Micah P. Hinson, Feist, Sondre Lerche.)

6. Playlists. Last night, I dragged and dropped a stack of albums (taking care to omit any duff tracks along the way) into a “Banyan Tree” (see next post below) playlist of suitably laidback holiday music. After no more than twenty minutes, I then had a customised sequence of music which, if played end-to-end without a break, would take a full six days to listen to.

7. The next level: smart playlists, which automatically update themselves based on the selection criteria which you have supplied. Example 1: every track which I’ve ranked with five stars (an accolade which I only use very sparingly). Example 2: every track bearing a date stamp of 2004. (I’ve already got 1140 of them, and I haven’t even finished going through some of the stand-alone MP3s.) This is going to be an enormous help when drawing up those all-important Best Of 2004 lists, and when compiling the annual Best Of 2004 double mix CD. (Don’t look at me like that. These things matter.)

8. Rolling compilations. Thanks to playlists, you can keep that Top Forty Favourite Tracks Of The Moment compilation constantly updated with new favourites, dropping the songs you’ve grown tired of at the very instant they begin to bore you.

9. The accessories, which you can pick up at the Apple store in the (deep breath, because I can’t believe I’m going to say this) Broadmarsh shopping centre. (Top level, near the escalators that bring you out by Oddbins and Limeys.) Stock up on the right accessories, and you then have…

10. Portability (hardware). If I’m in the bathroom (or lounging by the pool in Thailand), then I can use the cute little lightweight speaker system, with a docking station between the speakers. If I’m near the hi-fi, then I can use a cable with a headphone jack at one end and phono plugs at the other end. Or if I’m near a radio, or in the car, then I can use the iTrip: a simple gizmo that plugs into the headphone jack and converts the iPod into a short-range FM transmitter. There’s no need to plug anything in: just select a free frequency on the radio, and Troubled Diva FM becomes a tangible reality.

11. Portability (software). No more stressing out over what CDs to pick for long car journeys, or for weekend breaks, or to take to the office. No more bulging bags and briefcases, stuffed with far more CDs than are strictly necessary, “just in case”. No more tatty shoeboxes stuffed full of CDs, endlessly making the journey to and from the cottage.

12. Format compatability. Now all your Soulseek and Fluxblog MP3s can mutually co-exist on an equal footing with your album collection. (Because let’s face it: when have you ever got round to burning your favourite MP3s to CD, as you always said you would?)

13. Similarly, you need no longer be tyrannised by the demands forced upon you by your singles collection. Say goodbye to Getting Up And Changing The Disc Every Four Minutes Blues!

14. Peace of mind. Show the door to Pre Middle Class Dinner Party Angst! Simply load up your “Middle Class Dinner Party” playlist on shuffle, and press Go. This also saves you the inevitable panic-stricken dash to change the CD just as the soup has been put on the table. (Ah, gentle observational comedy. You can’t beat it, can you?)

15. iTunes. Suddenly, Winamp seems so primitive as a playback device, and CDex so laborious as a CD burning device. And I’ve even heard that you can do something called “purchasing legal downloads”, whatever that is.

16. The surprisingly intense surge of paternalism which I experience before leaving the house each morning, as I squeeze my iPod into its bendy “skin” in order to protect it from the ravages of the outside world. “Come along, my lovely; let’s wrap you up nice and warm in your matinee jacket. Easy does it. There’s a good boy.” Followed by the corresponding evening routine, as I gently prise off the matinee jacket (or is it a Babygro?) and place my baby back into its cradle.

17. The ooh-ing, aah-ing and coochy-coochy-coo-ing of friends and co-workers, as they crowd appreciatively around the new arrival. “Isn’t he lovely? Lucky you! Can I have a quick play?”

I only wish that I’d never heard about this, which reached me by e-mail from a concerned well-wisher only yesterday.

Sixty gigabytes, not 40? Up to 15,000 songs, not 10,000? Fifteen hours of battery life, not 12? And with the capacity for storing photos?

Suddenly, I feel so… impoverished. So… second generation.
Emergent technology can be such a fickle mistress.

Diamond Geezer doesn’t do holidays. Initially, I was shocked. But after the experience of the last few days, I’m beginning to think that he might have a point after all. Because this morning, frantically trying to tie up all the loose ends at work while grimly contemplating the mad dash round the shops that will constitute my lunch break, I experienced something of an epiphany.

We don’t take holidays to recover from normal life, with all of its soothing routines and established divisions of work and labour. Normal life we can cope with, for the most part. No: we actually take holidays in order to recover from the hellish weeks of preparation which precede them. It’s one of those self-perpetuating circular thingummybobs, innit.

Tomorrow lunchtime, K and I fly to Bangkok, and thence to Phuket, where a week’s stay at the über-swanky Banyan Tree spa resort awaits us. Basically, everything about this trip has been conceived as an antidote to the rigours of our recent Peruvian “experience” (vastly worthwhile in so many ways – but ultimately draining, both physically and spiritually). So sod authenticity, stuff your temples, and give us the artificial luxury bubble which we so deeply crave!

Orchids on the pillow at turn-down time! Therapeutic “treatments” involving liberal lashings of wickedly over-priced aromatic gunk! Somewhere to plug in the iPod! Freshly opened coconuts with little umbrellas sticking out of them! Our own private outdoor sunken bath! Our own private swimming pool, for f**k’s sake! Even though I can’t swim a stroke! Because I can still f***ing PADDLE, OK! Al fresco breakfast and afternoon tea, served daily to our villa by impeccably courteous liveried staff! A choice of eight international restaurants where we can swan around in our diaphanous layers! The new Tom Wolfe novel! It’s had crap reviews! But I don’t care!

Oh, just bring it all the f**k on, why don’t you. My needs might be crass, but at least they are well defined.

Peru and Thailand. Thailand and Peru. Bookends to an interregnum.

Which reminds me to make the following announcement:
From Monday December 6th, Troubled Diva will revert to a full regular service.

I have just completed my first Reiki session in one of the upstairs meeting rooms.

I feel strange. Pleasantly strange. But oddly non-verbal. So I can’t really tell you much about it. Except that it was strange, and pleasant, and yes, “things” did happen. Mostly around the face and the soles of the feet.

Of course, I do realise that people whose only contact with me is via this blog may raise their eyebrows at the use of the word “oddly” above. Considering the oddly non-verbal state of this blog over recent weeks. But maybe this experience will have unblocked my Blogging Chakra, or summat. You never know. It would be nice, though.

I take it all back re. The Line Of Beauty, by the way. Once Hollinghurst gets over his narrator’s breathless obsession with antique furniture (the Louis Quinze escritoire “with fronds of ormolu” that used to belong to Madame De Pompadour being some sort of campy apotheosis in this regard), the novel takes a sharp upward turn. From then on, it’s almost unreservedly brilliant: beautifully observed to an almost forensic level of detail, and quietly devastating. You think you know roughly where it’s heading, and it almost takes you there, but with subtle plot twists that have left me chewing over the novel’s morally ambiguous conclusion ever since. Proper Literature, indeed. A richly deserved Booker winner.

I really do feel quite altered right now, you know. This is all very interesting.

For all my occasional cheap sneers at the dull, predictable tastes of the ten-CD-a-year crowd (Keane and Snow Patrol? Oh, the horror! I must reconsider our friendship immediately!) there is an instant, crushing comeback: when it comes to books, I am every bit as safe and slack. Evidence for the prosecution: my holiday reading this year consisted of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and last year’s Booker Prize winner, DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little – two choices which make Keane and Snow Patrol look positively underground. Because basically, if it’s not MASSIVE, then it simply falls under my radar.

All of which helps to explain why I’m now reading this year’s Booker Prize winner, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line Of Beauty, despite finding his last two novels really pretty bloody irritating. We have an altogether strange relationship, Hollinghurst and I. Although he frequently drives me to distraction, I somehow feel compelled to read him, and I’m not sure I altogether understand why.

This was particularly the case with his previous novel, The Spell, which juxtaposed drug-f***ed urban scene-queenery with gracious gay living in the shires in a manner which sometimes had me openly hurling abuse at the page, and at its maddeningly pathetic central four characters. And yet, and yet: was a large part of my irritation not a reflex reaction against an uncomfortably sharp recognition of realities which the book all too accurately depicted? And if I hated it so much, then why did so many of its scenes continue to resonate within me for years afterwards?

Actually, my main bone of contention with Hollinghurst is probably much simpler: it’s that damned writing style. It’s dry, bloodless, and emotionally disengaged; but most annoyingly of all, it’s self-consciously “literary” in such a mimsy, precious way. For example, when one of the characters in The Spell sprays himself with aftershave, Hollinghurst has him “stepping into the costly mist”, if you please. Jeez Louise, it’s only a bit of pong!

This description has since entered our private repertoire of stock catchphrases, deployed whenever one of us catches the other brandishing a bottle of Eau Savage/Burberry Weekend in the bathroom (delete as appropriate).

“He stepped into the costly mist.” Titter, titter. Sets us off, every time.

Although I am only on the third chapter of The Line Of Beauty (and you should hear the way K scornfully pronounces that title alone) I have already started a small collection of similarly toe-curling phrases – which I delight in reading out loud, just to watch him squirm and howl in that peculiarly satisfying way of his.

Here’s what I’ve amassed so far. For maximum effect, these should be read out loud, in a voice pitched somewhere between Brian Sewell and Hyacinth Bucket.

• “The first flight of stairs, fanning out into the hall, was made of stone; the upper flights had the confidential creak of oak.” (We already do rather a nice line in confidential creaking.)
• “Nick would see him from the balcony and go down to join him, slightly breathless, knowing Toby quite liked his rower’s body to be looked at. It was the easy charity of beauty.”
• “To Nick the whole house, as yet only imagined, took on the light and shade of moods, the life that was lived there as steeped in emotion as the Oxford air was with the smell of lake water.”
• “…and at the far end the tennis courts, whose overlapping series of serves and rallies and calls lent a calming reminder of other people’s exertions to the August dusk.”
• “He went over to the much neglected piano, its black lid the podium for various old art folios and a small bronze bust of Liszt – which seemed to give a rather pained glance at his sight-reading from the Mozart on the stand. To Nick himself the faltering notes were like raindrops on a sandy path, and he was filled with a sense of what his evening could have been.”

Oh, I’m being too cruel; it’s a perfectly good read, with some beautifully turned observations of the nuances of social behaviour along the way. Just so long as I can vent when I get to the poncey stuff, I’ll be fine.

As you probably know by now, it’s being sarky little madams that keeps us going.

Thursday 21. Received a substantial offer of compensation from our mortgage provider, the Northpoint Mortgage Lenders, having previously lodged an official complaint with them regarding our poorly performing endowments. All K had to do was copy and customize a standard letter which he got off the web. Money for old rope, basically – and a highly recommended course of action, if you think you might be affected. Because £8300 (from £66k worth of endowments, taken out 12 years ago) is most emphatically NOT to be sniffed at.

Update: There’s more information here, and the standard letter generator can be found here.

Enjoyed a meal in a Polish diner with long-estranged old friends, newly re-united in grief over former guest blogger Alan’s permanent departure from Nottingham. (Right now, Alan doesn’t know whether he’ll end up in Shanghai or Southampton – although at this precise moment he is airborne, travelling from Brussels to his home in Cape Town. Selfishly, I’m kinda hoping for Southampton.)

From the menu, which is something of an extended eulogy to The Delights Of The Pig, I choose tripe soup (surprisingly palatable, given that I was expecting a Major Taste Challenge) followed by pork steak stuffed with ham and cheese; this latter because I felt strangely drawn to its tautological perversity. (“Yes, what that Dead Pig needs is a bit more Dead Pig; it will lift the flavour…”)

Polish beer is between 5.5% and 6.7% in strength, and is served in 500ml bottles. We all had two. And that was after the introductory shot of Polish vodka. And that was after the pre-dinner gin and tonic. And that was before the post-dinner pint in the Sir John Borlase Warren. And that was before the “nightcap” gin and tonic up the road. Yes, well. We had a lot of catching up to do.

Wednesday 20. Preview of the annual East Midlands Contemporary Arts Auction at the Lakeside Arts Centre. If you’re going: we liked the hyper-realist painting of the piles of green bank notes and slightly melted coins. (Funny, that.) We also liked the photo of what looked like a submerged lido on the beach at Broadstairs (although we would have liked the photo to be a bit bigger).

Afterwards, a drink with Dymbellina and Dymbel, who was due to be interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme the following morning. (You can find out what happened on his blog.) Dymbel also gave us a signed pre-release copy of his new Young Adult Fiction novel, which – thrillingly – mentions our village in Derbyshire by name. (The heroine’s mother lives there, in what the heroine scathingly refers to as a designer “cottage”. Note the stealthy use of quotation marks, if you will. It’s OK though – we’re old friends. Besides, at least I don’t live in Derby, memorably described a couple of pages further on as “the armpit of the Midlands.” Heh.)

Update: Just finished it. Superb, powerful, affecting stuff, and one of his very best.

Finally finished Matthew Parris’s superb Peru travelogue, Inca Kola, which – despite having been written in 1989 – still perfectly captures many aspects of the experience of being there.

Tuesday 19. Booked a week’s holiday in Thailand for late November, staying at the celebrated Banyan Tree near Phuket. Because frankly, we both need a proper holiday, rather than another “experience”. (Peru, as you might have gathered, was not without its rigours. Maybe I’ll tell you about it some day.)

Picked up a useful personal recommendation for a non-NHS therapist; this might well be the way to go. (Although it has to be said that the wobbles have abated considerably over the past two weeks.)

Watched Fahrenheit 9/11 on DVD, having missed it at the cinema. Despite some heavy-handedness and the occasional misfire (e.g. the harrowing but still somewhat pointless scenes in front of the White House, where a weeping mother grieves for her dead son), this packed some mighty punches, refuelling all of my anti-Bush ire.

Monday 18. !!! (a.ka. Chk Chk Chk) at the Rescue Rooms, which had become Trendy Hairdo Central for the night. Like the Ordinary Boys a couple of weeks earlier, this was another 1981 Revisited experience – particularly in the case of the support band (Spektrum), who both looked and sounded like something off Dick O’Dell’s Y Records label (ask your trendy uncle), and could have fitted happily on the same bill as Rip, Rig & Panic and Maximum Joy (ditto).

However, likeable as they might have been as individuals (“Ten out of ten for sheer exuberance and energy”, as my old music teacher might have said), Chk Chk Chk still have a long way to go and a lot more to learn. Specifically: songwriting skills (as opposed to endless ten-minutes-plus jam sessions), rhythmic and melodic invention (as opposed to a thick, stodgy soup of clattering percussion and chukka-wukka-wukka white-boy-funk guitars), light and shade (instead of relentless full-tilt-at-all-times intensity), and emotional depth (instead of over-enthusiastic and ultimately wearing calls to party on down). The unavoidable comparisons with Stop Making Sense era Talking Heads ultimately worked against them, as did the too-much-too-soon cult success of last year’s punk-funk anthem “Me & Giuliani Down By The Schoolyard”.

F***ing OWW! My poor forefinger! Enough already.

Although absent-minded at the best of times, my levels of scattiness now appear to be going through the roof. Especially in the mornings.

On arriving at work yesterday morning, I realised that my mobile was still sitting on the chest of drawers in the hall, and that my pen was sitting by the PC in the study. Having administered a suitably painful self-kicking, I then booked a taxi (at 11:40) for my dental appointment (at 12:05). Remembering last week’s unfortunate little debacle (actually, let’s not), I repeatedly reminded myself about this all morning – and, miraculously, managed to get myself out of the office on time. (Even if this did involve walking out halfway through a complex technical dicussion which I myself had instigated just five minutes earlier.)

However, my sense of triumph was somewhat dampened when, upon presenting myself at the dentist’s reception desk, I discovered that I was a full day early. The appointment had been correctly entered in my diary; my only problem was being unable to differentiate between the “Tuesday” and the “Wednesday” sections on the same page. (Do you ever get that? No, thought not.)

In the bathroom this morning, I started the day by cheerfully moisturising my entire face with hair cream. (Wella “polishing cream”, to be exact. Awfully good stuff. For the hair. On the face, it causes a mild stinging sensation. To say nothing of clogging up the pores.)

In the kitchen, I added milk to my tea from the half-emptied carton, poured out my cereal (Special K, as always), then calmly went back to the fridge, took out and opened a fresh carton, and poured that onto my cereal. Only then did I notice both cartons on the work top, gazing at me with that peculiar baffled expression that milk cartons sometimes have. (We’ll get to the delusions in another posting.)

Naturally, this left me so traumatised that I left the house without my diary. The diary which contains the time of today’s dental appointment. Which, equally naturally, I had already forgotten. Thank God I remembered my phone, then. (Although remembering the phone also required an extra-special effort of conscious will, so determined was I not to repeat the mistakes of yesterday morning.)

It usually gets better after lunch.

This morning, I think I might some need extra help. Tell you what: if you read this posting in time, and if you have EITHER my work e-mail address OR my mobile number, then PLEASE E-MAIL ME OR TEXT ME AT 11:30 (UK TIME) TO REMIND ME TO GET THE BLOODY TAXI ALREADY!

Thank you, my little online support group. Thank you indeed.

(*) I also – and I swear this isn’t a contrived stunt – forgot to give this post a title before posting. Quod erat demonstrandum, and all that.

Update for a concerned Karen: I made the appointment 15 minutes early, and eventually saw the dentist 15 minutes late, giving me ample time to catch up with the fascinating world of men’s lifestyle magazines in the interim. I’ve gone off my dental practice; they’ve been taken over by a national chain, whose overriding motive is pure profit. All the nice folksy “don’t eat sweets, kids!” posters have been taken down in the waiting room, and replaced by pictures of glamorous young models saying things like “Teeth whitening is so easy! I only wish I’d done it earlier!” And my reassuring, diligent old dentist has been replaced by a shifting stream of perky new dentists in their mid-twenties, who obviously see the place as a staging post on the way to greater (i.e. non-NHS) things. Also, these perky new dentists don’t see fit to sully themselves with mundane tasks such as scaling and polishing any more. Oh no. Instead, they farm that sort of stuff out to a separate (and private) hygienist, who charges 30 quid a session and “recommends” that I visit her every three months, if you please. It’s all part of a VAST PLOT by EVIL CORPORATE HOMOGENISING BASTARDS who are SUCKING THE… sorry, should I be saving this stuff for 10pm on Friday nights?