Random Targets

JELLYFISH

2012-01-08T09:31:00.000-08:00

Walking on the beach today at Broadstairs. Thought that there'd been a mass stranding of jellyfish, but it turned out they were all discarded French breast implants.

TIGER BAY

2011-10-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

In 1913 Cardiff was the biggest coal exporting port in the world, Now, it's all gone, the whole shebang. Every last ship gone, and the whole place regenerated as the Mermaid Quay, replete with trendy bars and cafes. It would be churlish not to see it as improvement. Instead of hard manual labour, half the population of Tiger Bay is now employed serving lattes to the other half.

OSAMA BIN LADEN'S PORN COLLECTION

2011-05-16T15:09:00.000-07:00

To be honest I had me doubts about Osama Bin Laden when he murdered three thousand people at the World Trade Centre, but now I've found out he used porn as well I've gone right off him.

THE KINGS SPEECH

2011-01-16T08:23:00.000-08:00

Don't know what all the hoo hah is about. It's basically Karate Kid with Speech Therapy instead of Oriental Thumping. Bet you any money it'll be a two-hander in the West End within five years.

THREAT LEVEL

2011-01-07T16:08:00.000-08:00

The terrorist threat level in the capital has apprently gone up from "Severe" to "Holy Shit!"

CARDINAL NEWMAN

2010-09-22T04:06:00.000-07:00

The Pope is absolutely right to press for the beatification of Cardinal Henry Newman. I myself prayed to the 19th century cleric for a late equalizer against Arsenal on Saturday and lo, Darren Bent did put one in in the 90th minute, so he must be a saint.

MY LIFE-CHANGING RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

2010-04-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Many years ago I had a life-changing religious experience. I lent a hundred quid to a christian and never saw the two-faced hypocritical shit again. And remember this was in the days when a hundred quid was worth something - like, er.. a hundred and five quid. Not only that, but I gave him a lift home, all the way from London to Stoke-on-Trent. I recently saw my brother wearing a badge that said WWJD, which he said meant: What would Jesus do? Well, he wouldn't sod off with a hundred quid of somebody else's money. That's for sure. Mind you, he wouldn't come from Stoke onTrent, either. Who would?

DOG HEAT DOG

2010-02-26T11:49:00.000-08:00

It's terrible about that police officer and the alsatians that he left in the car. But you know what they say - it's dog heat dog out there. Actually, they should have a statutory body that oversees such cases - then they could call it the Police Dog Watchdog. Jeez, I'll probably have my house firebombed by dog-lovers now. By the way, I live at No. 22, The Arches, Vladivostok.

TRUE ROMANTIC

2010-02-09T13:21:00.000-08:00

With St. Valentine's Day coming up, obviously one's thoughts turn to what suitable romantic gesture one should make. The temptation is simply to flash the cash, but love cannot be proved or encapsulated by mere money.

So, Poundland it is then.

WATCHDOG WATCHDOG

2010-01-18T14:53:00.000-08:00

They've just done some kind of report into the dangers of inbreeding in pedigree dogs. Presumably, the government will now set up some kind of statutory body to keep an eye on the matter. A sort of watchdog watchdog.

NECTAR CARD

2009-12-20T14:05:00.002-08:00

I was at the self-checkout in Sainsbury's last night and this computerized voice said, "Have you swiped your nectar card?" I goes, "No, I bloody haven't. It's me own."

2009-12-20T14:05:00.001-08:00

I'M COMBINING FENG SHUI AND ACUPUNCTURE

2009-11-01T14:36:00.000-08:00

FAIR-TRADE HEROIN

2009-11-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

Personally, I'm with sacked Professor Nutt on the subject of hard drugs. They're not that dangerous. No, as long as you make sure it's locally-sourced heroin, you know... Fair Trade Heroin. that's all right then.

ENDANGERED EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

2009-10-16T04:59:00.000-07:00

BLEMISH

RADISH

SKIRMISH

VARNISH

ODYSSEUS AND THE SIRENS

2009-10-06T13:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the wonders of the internet I have found my way back to a painting that I haven't seen in over thirty years - Odysseus and the Sirens by the long-forgotten Victorian artist Herbert Draper. I first came across it as an illustration in a book of Greek myths, and when I saw it,took it at face value. I now see that it's an allegory of the war between Lust and Guilt. Not really a hot issue anymore, is it? Lust versus guilt. In Draper's painting Odysseus struggles against his bonds to get at the sirens boarding the vessel, while his oarsmen look dead ahead, eyes and hearts fixed on their duty. Nowadays, who feels so bad about their desires of the flesh.? No, the sailors would just go: Oh, Bugger the oddysey, I'm having the redhead. Yes, I know she's a fish from the waist down, but we should all celebrate diversity.

MICHAEL JACKSON

2009-06-28T15:07:00.000-07:00

Michael, you were a kiddie-fiddler, but you could do the moonwalk so that’s all
right then.

JADE GOODY

2009-03-09T14:59:00.000-07:00

You can just hear them in the offices of the quality papers, going: "I want a thousand words on Jade Goody - and make sure one of them's zeitgeist. Yeah, and er... stick in iconic and 'tabloid frenzy.' Yeah and we need the phrase 'ghoulish voyeurism' in the same sentence as Sun reader. And er... and er.. best slag off the Daily Mail while you're at it."

MY POLITICAL ACTIVISM

2009-03-03T13:47:00.000-08:00

I continue my political activism. Only last week I protested to Thorntons about the inaccurate positioning of the island of Sao Tomé on the back of the packaging of their otherwise excellent Single Origin Collection. Shamed, the company immediately replied to my e-mail. I expect my action will have alleviated suffering throughout the former Portuguese colony at 0 degrees 20 minutes, 10 second north, 6 degrees, 40 minutes 53 seconds east.

THRIFT

2009-02-08T05:50:00.000-08:00

My mam is almost comically thrifty. I often joke that if I wanted to bump her off I wouldn't have to talk her into having that short stay in Switzerland. I’d just have to go: Look, Mam – that arsenic wants using up. If you don’t drink it, it’ll only go to waste.

MULTI-FUNCTIONALITY

2009-01-12T14:35:00.000-08:00

Just got a new mobile phone. Unusually, I managed to do it without having to sit through the long spiel about all the whistles and bells you can have on your handset these days. What is it with multifunctionality? When Alexander Graham Bell launched the telephone, no one complained that you couldn't take a photo with the darn thing. Nowadays, every gadget seems to be judged on how many functions it has. I expect any day now I'll overhear someone boring on about how they've wi-fi on their ironing board.

ALLARDYCE AND MOYES

2008-12-21T16:29:00.000-08:00

Do you not think Sam Allardyce would make a perfect TV detective? He's the right age. He's got the grumpy, slept-on-the-couch-last-night kind of face. He'd be the older, cynical, seen-it-all, divorced one. Bit of a drinker, maybe even a smoker, or recently given-up. And David Moyes would be his younger, slightly handsomer, not-divorced, regional-accented junior partner. I just thnk they're made for the part.

TRAPPED

2008-10-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Picture in the Metro of some Australian surfer who's had a sex change. Says he felt trapped inside a man's body all these years. I know how feels. I often feel trapped outside a woman's body. Not necessarily the same woman, but er... there you go.

FALLING SLOWLY: A REVIEW

2008-06-12T01:39:00.000-07:00

To quote the blurb, Beatrice and Miriam are sisters, one a retired accompanist or pianist, the other a translator who spends most of her days in the London library, and although – “neither confides what is in their hearts” – it is basically the same thing, i.e. they’re both hacked off because they aren’t married. They feel cheated and vaguely hard done by. The problem for the reader is that that is so transparently not their real problem. Their real problem is that they’re bored, and the reason that they’re bored is that they never get off their fat arses and do anything.

True, Beatrice and Miriam are fictional characters and fictional characters don’t have moral obligations, but what is so repulsive is that both characters go about their daily lives in the full rosy glow of their creator’s approval. At no point does it occur to either of them that instead of “wondering how to get through the rest of the afternoon” they might get up and do a hand’s turn for somebody else. And what’s worse is that since Falling Slowly is, I think, the eleventh of Anita Brookner’s sixteen novels, one can only conclude that there is a large constituency of rich, metropolitan women out there who think this is acceptable behaviour.

Excessive self-absorption may be forgivable in an adolescent, but in a person of fifty or sixty, it’s just not on. It’s not even as if Miriam and Beatrice have the excuse of a hard life to keep their minds off other people. They live in a flat off Sloane Square – and if you’re reading this from beyond London, believe me, that’s the posh end – for which they don’t appear to pay either rent or mortgage. They take taxis without a thought to the cost and they hardly do a stroke of work. Indeed, Beatrice retires somewhere around page ten. Do they ever, even for a second, realize how privileged and lucky they are? That most women don’t lead lives like that? No, and, clearly neither does Anita Brookner. There are a couple of working class characters – mere walk-on parts. One of them – I think she’s meant to be their cleaner’s daughter – gets a job in a supermarket, for which she is made to express cheery gratitude. The fact that the hours would be long, the pay low and the work dull doesn’t occur to either characters or author. It’s as if finer feelings are for the middle class and the lower orders can’t be expected to share them.

Anita Brookner is very good on the inner life and speech patterns of her own class and gender, but beyond those narrow confines her portraiture is sketchy and clichéd – so a small boy is given a love of dinosaurs. Fair enough, small boys love dinosaurs, but it’s precisely because they love dinosaurs that they don’t make mistakes like saying “Dinosaurs are distinct.” when they mean “extinct.” Real boys (and I’ve got one, so I know) talk about dinosaurs with amazing facility, effortlessly throwing in tongue-twister names without a second thought. If Anita Brookner were any good, she’d know this. And then there is the character of the scientist, in whose reality we are expected to believe on the basis of a few airy references to test tubes. It’s just not enough. It’s too thin, too lazy – like bringing on a Scotsman and proving it by calling him Jock, or giving him a kilt.

Indeed, laziness – or perhaps it’s just weariness – is one of the key features of Falling Slowly. When one of the sisters has what might be a stroke and begins the slide down toward a natural death, Anita Brookner kills her off with an offstage car accident, an awkward deus ex machina that reeks of cop-out. It’s Anita Brookner saying, “Sorry, Folks – can’t be bothered to go through with my own plotline. Will this do?” Well, no it won’t, actually.

She probably imagines – and there are evidently critics prepared to bolster her in her delusion – that she’s mapping out a part of the human condition. That once you get past the menopause, this is what it’s like to be a woman; this is the Female Experience. It’s not. There are dozens of authors who outsell Brookner by the shed-load, but because their subject matter and their reading public are working class women, they are unlikely to get the respectful reviews. Verdict: read and weep.

ACTUAL FLORIDA

2008-03-30T13:31:00.000-07:00

Overheard in the Glades Shopping Centre, Bromley. "They fly into actual Florida." So, not the virtual one, then.

SIMULATED SEX

2008-01-05T16:05:00.000-08:00

My agent rings and asks if I'm prepared to do simulated sex for a drama on Channel 4. I say, that depends. She says Well, how far are you prepared to go? I say Anywhere within the M25.

BEYONCE

2007-11-26T13:42:00.000-08:00

Overheard at my son's after school club. "We've been drawing Beyonce for Black History Month."

Now, when I first heard that, I took it as a stand-alone gag and assumed that the child in question had veered from the National Curriculum - but no, according to the local paper, they have indeed been learning about Martin Luther King and Beyonce, seemingly in the same breath. The idea that Beyonce is a) already history and b) in the same league as MLK... well, what can I say?

THE NATION'S FAVOURITE MOORE

2007-11-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

Long time since last posting, but I have been up to my ears in it with my new TV pilot: The Nation’s Favourite Moore. So far we've got Alan Titchmarsh putting the case for Bobby Moore and Grif Rhys Jones is going to do Dudley, but Hat Trick still haven't found a presenter for Henry.

FEZ

2007-06-08T03:19:00.000-07:00

SLUG LINES FOR FILMS

2007-06-08T02:59:00.000-07:00

Up until recently, if you wanted to get your film-script considered, you'd send in a short synopsis, but now that roughly two thirds of the entire Western World is writing a film script, no one has time to read an entire synopsis. Instead, what you have to do is sell your idea in ONE LINE. These are some of the movies I have on the backburner:

Cricket was his passion. But he batted for the other team.

In a man’s world, it takes a hero to do the hovering.

Trust No One. Especially Not Him.

Global Warming Melted his Heart and his Tundra.

Science made him a monster. Homeopathy made him a bit better.

Horror has a new name: Melanie.

Jack Keegan has 48 hours to save his career, his marriage and an endangered species of reptile.

He was fat. She was tubby. Together, they were About This Big

They made him spill his Tizer. Now it’s payback time.

Love tore them apart. Clingfilm brought them together.

A Nation At War With Itself. A Man Divided. Lengthways.

2047 – and to a parched and dying world, he brought the priceless gift of laughter.

For Lester Shanklin being a double amputee is only half the fun.

Journey Beyond The Bowels of Your Imagination.

She was looking for headlice. What she found would change her forever.

Chuck Webley sold his kidney. Now, he’s taking it back.

She’s holding out for a hero. Till the end of the night.

RADNOM'S BEST OF BRITISH

2007-04-20T02:14:00.000-07:00

Too often today we are made to feel ashamed of being British. While others are encouraged to celebrate Diwali and Black History Month, often by stamping on the Union Jack and being made to vote for Malcolm X as “Greatest Briton Ever,” we English are made to feel ashamed of our heritage. In fact, Britishness is a dirty word. How often, nowadays do you hear politically correct mothers saying, “Don’t tread that Britishness into the carpet.” Well, to fight back - here’s my list of fifty reasons to be proud of this island nation.

Anti-Climb Paint
Asbos
Auto-Trader Magazine
Binge Drinking
The Bratz range of Girls’ Merchandizing
Childhood Asthma
Congestion Charges
Croydon
Dierdre’s Photo-Casebook
Dixon’s
Echinacea
Eccles Cake
Easijet
Those free cellophane gloves you get from petrol stations
Garden Decking
Hen Weekends
Hospital Superbugs
The Isuzu Trooper
J. D. Wetherspoons
Key Stage Two In Anything
Leylandia Hedges
The MMR vaccine
NCP Carparks
Nectar Points
Oyster Cards
The Otis Spunkmeyer Range of Biscuits
Pitbull Line-Dancing
Ringtones
Sales of Il Divo
Scrappy bits of polythene in makeshift roadside memorials
Shiny Toilet Paper
Signs Saying Unattended Packages Will Be Removed
Smooth Classics on Classic FM
The timeless comedy of Hale and Pace – especially the so-called ‘unfunny’ later series.
That painting by Jack Vettriano where there’s that couple and that bloke with an umbrella
Virgin Mobile One to One
Wheelybins
Yakult
Zigzag Lines outside schools

BEYOND THE SUSPENDERS

2007-04-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

Looking through my old files, I come across my postgraduate thesis: Beyond the Suspenders: Changing Styles in Interior Decor In the Backgrounds of Fiesta Readers' Wives 1971-90.

ECHINACEA

2007-03-15T02:07:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend has a bad cold, but there is a silver lining. It’s the only time of year when I don’t have to listen to lectures about how I should take echinacea to stop me getting colds. Personally, I can't wait for echinacea to join the fossil record of quack medicines alongside complan and sanatogen. Forty years from now, the word's only usage will be in the wearied tones of middle aged daughters forced to go round the houses "so I can get my mother's echinacea," one more chore in their already overburdened lives.

FEMALE INTUITION

2007-01-24T14:19:00.000-08:00

Thank God for feminine intuition. Why, if it wasn’t for feminine intuition married men might start running around leading complex double lives so they could cheat on their wives for years on end. But luckily, thanks to feminine intuition, that could never happen, could it?

A STUDY OF READING HABITS

2007-01-21T04:21:00.000-08:00

An old man sits alone in a room with nothing before him except the manuscript of a novel. We do not know who he is or how he got there and pretty soon we realize that actually we couldn’t give a shit anyway, so instead we read an article entitled India Knight’s Weight Loss Journey. We do not know who India Knight is either, but at least there are some nice pictures.

THAT NIGHTMARE

2007-01-14T14:03:00.000-08:00

Four a m. I wake up in a cold sickly panic. It’s that nightmare again – the one in which my teenage diaries are being serialized on Radio 4’s Morning Story. Worse still, they are being read by Martin Jarvis.

SMOKE ALARMS

2007-01-02T15:06:00.000-08:00

I have been road-testing smoke alarms for an online consumer website. The Ei103CC is smart and functional and takes a single 9 volt battery, while the Homewatch HR1211 has the edge when it comes to ease of installation. However, the one I’d really have to go for the is R101. It’s shaped like a banana, it doesn’t need batteries and it’s voice activated. You just shout: For Christ’s sake it’s only the toaster and it shuts up.

OBITUARIES OF 2006

2006-12-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

Extracts from one or two obituaries which you may have missed this year:

Ipanema Huddle (Musician (1919-2006)

“... her early mastery of the Azorean slide trombone is said to have influenced men as different as Yehudi Menuhim and Shirley Bassey…”

Loon Gamelan (Politician, Statesman and Rumba Champion)

… guided his tiny Caribbean nation to independence through the choppy waters of the 1950’s. Will best be remembered for his cover version of I Enjoy Being A Girl which went to Number One in three countries none of them Britain…”

Professor Geraint Manifold (Plug Technologist (1942-2006)

… his work on rubber bung dynamics at the University of Wales during the 1970’s is still regarded as a benchmark in the field…”

Lt. Col. Jock Grant-Menzies (Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Spy) (1918-2006)

… it was during the dark days of 1940 that the young subaltern won his George Cross for a daring raid on the Italian positions at Mascara in what was then Italian Somaliland and is now Carphone Warehouse.

Zinnia Thickness (Childrens’ Author) (1934-2006)
“...her own schooldays were fraught with loneliness, as pupils at St. Cedd’s were only allowed to send one letter a week, and that to the Home Secretary pressing for an early release for the school chaplain, the Rev. Glubb-Pasha.

Professor Sir Derek Snowball (Historian and Author) (1924-2006)
“… his 1961 book Marital Breakdown in Fifteenth Century Flanders brought him a worldwide audience and was later made into a film with Tony Curtis and Gina Lollobrigida.

‘Digger’ or ‘Chigger’ Boondock (Entertainer) (1929-2006)
“…one of the finest Post-War limbo dancers that Surrey has ever produced… Sadly, in later years Boondock became increasingly reclusive and would only speak through his solicitor, which was a small glove puppet called ‘My Solicitor Mr. Jowell.’

GIRLFRIEND TROUBLE

2006-12-19T14:51:00.000-08:00

She announces that our whole relationship has been a mistake. I wish one of my mistakes brought me tea in bed every morning.

HOLOCAUST DENIAL

2006-12-14T04:16:00.000-08:00

While David Irving and his ilk have undoubtedly got it wrong about the Holocaust, not all historical revisonism is to be sneered at. I for one would argue that the Swinging Sixties never actually happened - least of all in Hartlepool, where I think statistics show there were ten times as many woodbines smoked as spliffs. Not only that, but I think you'd find that Ken Dodd consistently outsold Jimi Hendrix and that no Afghan coats appeared until at least 1983.

I rest my case.

CRIME FICTION BLURBS

2006-12-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

I've got a job writing crime fiction blurbs for MacMillan. This is what I've done so far:

A woman’s body is discovered face down in the peat outside a lonely Scottish castle, the only clues a large kitchen knife and an eight-page signed confession by the bloke that did it, but for grumpy middle-aged detective Rick Steinway zzz zzz…

When a well-respected authority of parasitic worms is found face down in the Serpentine with a rolled-up copy of Fiesta up his arse, Detective Inspector Henning Swarfega knows he has his work cut out for him...

When a retired art expert is found dead with twenty-four stab-wounds in the exact shape of Botswana on her ovaries, Detective Inspector Seaton Carew…

When a world-famous ballet-dancer is found hideously mutilated with a fish-slice in the menswear department of John Lewis, grizzled middle-aged sleuth D. I. Neil Soduku knows he has his work cut out for him. But first he must confront his demons and in particular the demon….

When well-known wine-critic and bon viveur Milton Obote is discovered lying face down tits up in a skip halfway up the London Eye, suspicion immediately falls on the enigmatic Hansi Enig-Matik, but for world-weary, middle-aged detective Matt Cubicle this could be his last chance to save his life…. and his marriage.

The body was found in dense underpants on Hampstead Heath, the face hideously mutilated, the thyroid gland carefully removed and around its neck a single piece of paper with the single enigmatic word: single… written on it…but for D.I. Jack Vettriano, this is only the beginning of a dark ride into the dark underbelly of web and corruption that lies at the heart of this dark web of dark sort of stuff.

UNLESS - A BOOK REVIEW

2006-11-23T08:02:00.000-08:00

Carol Shields was the kind of writer whose books evoke two responses. On publication there is the standard fancy dance of obeisance as the critics bow and scrape before the Great Intellect, falling over each other to say how profound, how brave, how clever it is – and then another response two years later when the same critics preface their next review with a line like “After the disappointment of her last novel…” How often must readers see such a line and heave a secret sigh of relief, free at last to admit that they couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, and actually found the book as dull as dishwater?

Well, there isn’t much dishwater in Unless. Reta Winters is a middle-aged novelist and translator living in a nice bland town in a nice bland country – Canada, as it happens. She’s married to a doctor. (How aspirational is that?) and nothing so messy as dishwater is allowed to rear its ugly head. And then suddenly nineteen-year-old daughter Nora decides to sit on the pavement begging with a sign round her neck saying “Goodness.”

Unless promises to tell the story of a happy life interrupted by sudden sorrow. Perhaps it even means to show that unhappiness is inevitable and cannot be sealed off by wrapping oneself in the trappings of bourgeois life. The problem is that the life isn’t interrupted. Pages pass, whole chapters pass, and not only has the story not started but we haven’t even met the wretched girl who is the cause of all this misery. And what is Reta Winters doing while all this is going on? Gazing at her own navel, mainly. She talks about her career. She does lunch in the Orange Blossom tea-rooms. We’re taken on a tour of her house. She spends another chapter going in and out of boutiques trying to buy a scarf. Not that the chapter is called ‘Reta Goes In And Out of Shops Trying To Buy A Scarf.’ Good lord, no – that might give the game away. Instead, it’s called something like… well, ‘Instead,’ actually. All the chapters have cryptic titles: ‘So’ ‘Otherwise’ – all suggestive of hidden depths.

Fictional characters are under no obligation to behave well, but they are under an obligation to behave plausibly, especially if they happen to be in a novel with literary pretensions. The fact is that Reta’s inactivity just doesn’t ring true. There are half-wits in the audience of daytime confession shows every morning of the week who could tell you what a real mother would do in her situation. She’d get out there, she’d be on the phone, she’d talk to her daughter’s friends, she’d blame her daughter’s boyfriend, she’d run the gamut of emotions. She’d do something. Reta not only does nothing, she feels nothing. She says she feels pain, but it’s a sanitized version that is hard to believe in When her husband withdraws into his hobby of trilobite research, she more or less says, Ho hum. Fair enough. She calmly listens to her friend the aged feminist grandee come out with rubbish like “the tyranny of penetration” without batting an eye. When we are in pain and another person tries to trump our pain with something that is clearly not in the same league, we get angry. From Reta we get nothing.

Only in literary fiction is such cavalier disregard for the need to tell a story enshrined and encouraged. In film and television, there would be squadrons of editors and co-writers drafted in to make sure something happened. The final result might still be a dog’s dinner, but it would be a dog’s dinner served up by people who were at least trying to meet their audience halfway.

The prose is beautiful, full of sentences that seem to be reaching out to a second life as stand-alone epigrams, such as you see in reviews or at the beginnings of other novels, but without the solidity of plot or engaging character, the effect is all silk cushions and no settee, all picture and no wall.

At one point, Winters/Shields upbraids an ageing literary lion for not mentioning any women in his list of great writers. It’s a fair point, but if what she really means is, “like me, for instance” then I’m with the literary lion.

NATURE NOTES

2006-11-18T11:53:00.000-08:00

Getting to the top is a hard slog with the wind against us, but the view is magnificent and we are rewarded with a sighting of two crossbills and a phonebill - while from the spinney opposite, a pair of shuttlecocks flit to and fro between the alder and the elder. The alder is older than the elder, but the elder alder is still younger than the new yew, which is said to date back to William and Mary or even William and Glyn. This autumn however has been particularly wet and the yews are blighted with the tell-tale circular bracts of ring ouzel.

We head south along the B1096 toward Dalton Sweekly. Here where the Cartesian limestone meets the Edwardian gallstone, Sir Edward Elgar composed his famous Enigma Variations, so vital in cracking the German code during World War II. The view has changed little since Elgar's day - you can still see the surprisingly well-preserved spire of St. Cliff-Within-Richard, and flocks of fieldfares and busfares still gather on the winter wheat.

Descending toward the mudflats where the East Tine joins the Turpen Tine, we hear the low 'tut-tut' of a flock of red-faced curmudgeon, down here from their brooding grounds in Scandinavia, where they tend to brood rather a lot - while from the reed-beds opposite, a solitary male sniper snipes at his dowdier and more downtrodden mate. Suddenly a wrong-headed bog-trotter breaks cover from the osiers. It is smaller and bolder than its Northern cousin the level-headed bog-trotter, and normally eats small millibars. Today though, it is feeding on the messy triangular pods of the pig's ear or dog's dinner, an untidy plant at the best of times.

The sea is gun-metal grey beyond the dykes, but the western sky is full of "the piled gold clouds" of Larkin's poem Four O' Clock Outside Carphone Warehouse.. December generally brings in a fair crop of winter visitors to these shores, and the casual birdwatcher can usually rely on finding the odd pair of winklepickers stepping nimbly along the ebbing tide - though the same cannot be said, alas, of the Arctic turncoat, which can’t be trusted to turn up at all.

GREEN IVF TREATMENT

2006-11-07T13:38:00.000-08:00

My girlfriend and I have decided to go for green IVF treatment. They only use sperm from sustainable erections.

THANDIE NEWTON

2006-10-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

Working today with Thandie Newton on location with Run Fatboy Run directed by David Schwimmer and starring, among others, Simon Pegg and David Walliams. I wonder how she came to be called Thandie. I expect the people to ask would be her parents Thtanley and Thuthen.

THINGS YOU NEVER HEAR OUTSIDE THE CINEMA: NUMBER ONE

2006-10-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

And then when she gets chained to the altar stone by screaming savages, and this gigantic gorilla comes and grabs her and fights off all these dinosaurs, and then when she goes back to New York and the giant gorilla escapes and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building with the girl in his hand… I just thought: THAT’S my life! You know what I mean?

PRISON OVERCROWDING

2006-10-09T15:54:00.000-07:00

I have long been pressing the home secretary for reform on this point and it seems to me perfectly clear that the way forward lies in having gap years for prisoners. This would ease overcrowding and mean that they were all off burgling someone else's property.

THE NAMING OF PARTS

2006-09-27T03:48:00.000-07:00

Time was when inventors made a rough stab at communicating what their gadget did, sometimes in plain English, as in say 'vacuum cleaner', sometimes by recourse to Latin and Greek. Tele phone to transport sound. Tele vision to transport pictures. Nowadays, you’re surrounded by things whose names give no clue to their function: iPOD, bluetooth, the verb to google. And there’ll be more. Young men’ll be braying into their mobile phones, going “Hi, yeah. We’ve just got yak-butter.” You’ll hear two guys in the office going, “Does your pinnacle have sex-fiend? Mine does two thousands corbetts a second.” The Future’ll be a bit like having had a stroke. Everyone under thirty will be talking complete cock.

A WRITER'S DIARY

2006-09-22T03:21:00.000-07:00

Did another six hours on my novel today. It is a disturbing Dystopian novel about a future where civilization has broken down to such an extent that you can’t get Broadband on your mobile.

2006-09-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

Did six hours on my novel today. V. pleased with self. Am writing disturbing counterfactual novel, which posits what Britain would have been like if Sunderland hadn’t won the F. A. Cup in 1973.

2006-09-12T13:03:00.000-07:00

UNSUCCESSFUL CAR BRANDS

The Nissan Hitherto

The Fiat Verrucca

The Vauxhall Hattersley Espace

The Mitsubishi Scrotum

The Isuzu Hutu Militia

The Ford Poncewagon

2006-09-11T15:28:00.000-07:00

The BBC have been running and re-running various shows about or with the late Sir John Betjeman, all of which remind that he was rather more kop as a TV presenter than a poet. Entertaining though he was about posh gels in tennis gear and the charm of English churches, he was also incapable of profundity or even noticing much. Still, it would be interesting to have him around today. What, I wonder, would he have made of the new album by the Arctic Monkeys or the road-holding ability of the Citroen Xantia? Would he have tried dogging? Alas, we shall never know.

2006-09-10T14:40:00.000-07:00

IN THE TARDIS

Bar 38 down on West India Quay may be in a building that’s over two hundred years old but the toilet is like SO… modern, with like these like… CIRCULAR urinals. They probably won some design award. The guy who designed them probably lives in a loft conversion and drives a Porsche on the back of that toilet. And I recommend it. It’s the nearest you’ll get to having a wee in the Tardis. You know: that bit in the middle that went up and down whenever Dr. Who took off? It’s just like that. Of course, unlike the Tardis, it does smell of stale piss rather a lot, on account of the fact that with a linear urinal, you only have to smell the bay in front of you and the two on each side. Whereas when you’re pissing in the round, you’re within haling distance of everybody’s wee.

The washbasins are of a similar Time Machine design, and are clearly eco-friendly. In order to save water, for example, there isn’t any – or there wasn’t when I was there. Just what you need to put some truth into that urban myth about the nuts on the bar.

September 10th

2006-08-18T15:45:00.000-07:00

The 'A' level results prove once again that the cleverest people in the country are all 17 or 18. They should run the place. Not only could they solve Global Warming and the Middle East Crisis, but they'd know who Gnarls Barkley was and how to operate an iPOD without getting into a cerfuffle.

Of course, the downside would be that every time you switched on the news, you'd see some oik with his trouser waistband six inches lower than his underpants.

STATE OF ALERT

2006-08-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

The country is at its highest possible state of alert ‘Bikini Black’, which is only one below ‘Brown Trouser.’ High Alert means 250 police officers with sub-machine guns and body armour at every airport. As opposed to Low Alert, which is one black man in a kiosk with a puzzle magazine.

CROYDON CROWN COURT

2006-08-08T13:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes there is no one serving at the cafeteria so I help myself. Later on, the staff turn up. I ask for three cups of tea and a flapjack to be taken into consideration.

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FIRST POST

2006-06-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the Institute of Directors with my friend Jasmine and we have decided to set up a blog. Hopefully, my next entry will be more interesting.