February 1st 2004 - February 8th 2004
Sunday Angels instead
Saturday Not funny
Friday Wwwwweekend
Thursday Grey drape
Wednesday TV news
Tuesday Semantics
Monday Again
Sunday 8th February 2004
A much less social weekend this week - though it was nice to meet Luca and Stuart, Pano and Andy on Friday night and even nicer, because entirely unexpected, to bump into David and Paul and Lee at Escape afterwards. And the Joiners was pleasant enough on Saturday night.
A weekend of primarily solitary pleasure, otherwise: the mostly excellent Angels in America on tv, and The Time of Our Singing, which I'm enjoying enormously, in soft covers beneath the covers.
Saturday 7th February 2004
Get a grip, people.
Jokes that circulate immediately following the deaths of the rich or famous can be funny. Jokes about Chinese cockle harvesters, who were getting paid just £1 a day, and who drowned because they couldn't read warning notices, are not.
Friday 6th February 2004
Best to get last weekend down before the next one writes over it:
Matty and Richard's party, and getting there, and that thing I do, of hearing a vague description of where people live, and visualising where I think they ought to live, and turning up there and only then calling for directions and discovering I'm miles off-target.
The net effect of which is not alleviated when you get roughly where you ought to be and then phone for detailed instructions and get directed to walk down the street and look for a certain road, which you do, only to discover that you were standing in that road when you made the call. But anyway.
A pleasant party, with men and beer and cake (but who was that impertinent little woman in black?) and then on, some of us, to stand in the queue for the Scissor Sisters' semi-secret set at the Crash arches and thinking, hmm, I'm a little old to be kept standing in the cold and wet whilst some up-and-coming group gets their shit together. Though the company is nice.
And then inside, eventually, and a few more familiar faces, and more beer etc, and then it's midnight and I'm thinking, I'm too old to be kept waiting two hours for a performance that supposed to start at ten thirty but never mind, we're well near the front of the stage. And is that the tall one from Placebo?
And then we're still waiting, and discussing who the 'surprise guest' might be, and I surprise myself by suggesting Pete Burns, and it's getting rather hot and very crowded and I'm thinking, I'm too old and drunk to cope with this, and certainly too old to applaud every time some roadie wanders onto the stage for heaven's sake, so I allow myself to be pushed to the back, which is a lot less pressured but, of course, I can barely see the stage. Especially with the tall one from Placebo standing right in front of me. Although that does have its compensations.
And then the band picks its way onto the stage, and they're a good-looking crew, from what little I can see, and then they play and, hmm, they're actually pretty good. More than good, in fact. And then the lead singer, Jake is it, takes his top off, what there was of it in the first place, and, oh my, he's pretty fit, and then the surprise guest comes on and it's Pete Burns and I think, well maybe I'm not too old for this after all.
And the night wears on and I get more drunk, and the really really cute little guy that I see everywhere wanders by, and eventually, presumably, I get the night bus home and get not nearly enough sleep and suddenly it's Sunday and I'm, yes, back in Vauxhall, queueing in the rain.
But that doesn't take too long, and Dame Edna does a superb set, what with the run of chicken gags, and the stupendous piano mime for "My Baby Just Cares', and there's lots of familiar faces, and lots of new faces, and all of them gorgeous, and the next thing you know I'm in Dukes for Horse Meat Disco.
And I've never seen Dukes this crowded before, and I'm chatting easily to some young guy, and he says something about it being a school day tomorrow, and I'm smiling and saying I don't have to be at work for at least another twenty-four hours, and he asks me where I work.
And I eventually tell him, and he says "Oh, my friend N. used to work there!" And I say "N.?!"and he says, "Yes, over there" and I look over and it is indeed N., so I rush over to say hello, and he smiles, and introduces the people he's with, and says "I don't think you've met my boyfriend...and Jake from the Scissor Sisters?"
Thursday 5th February 2004
Everything you need to know about the current design scene in Malaysia based on one sentence of a conversation with my ex:
I'm a bit fed up because I'm supposed to be working on a concept for a bar-restaurant with this property developer, and I said we should call it 'Drape' which sort of sums up a lot of my thinking at the moment and he rang me up just before I left and said, no, it absolutely has to be 'Grey' - which is just so wrong!
Wednesday 4th February 2004
Last Night's Television
BBC1 7:30 EastBenders
Colin logs off gaydar and contemplates a move to Brighton
BBC1 8:00 DIY SOS
Justin Timberlake's malfunctioning wardrobe
BBC1 11:35 FlimFlam 2004 with Jonathan Ross
Wossie shares a joke or two with Alastair Campbell
BBC2 8:00 Crafty Tricks of War
Hutton Inquiry dramatisation
BBC2 9:00 Crisis Command: Could You Run the Country?
Jeremy Paxman interrogates Michael Howard
BBC2 10:00 The Kumars at No 42
Grandma's recipe for castor beans leads to a surprise visit
ITV1 9:00 I'm an Insect...Get Me Out of Here!
Ant reveals who's been selected to be squashed by Jordan
C4 6:00 The Salon
Sharon touches up Silvio Berlusconi's teflon
C4 9:00 Faking It
Michael Portillo's's malfunctioning closet
C4 10:00 Shameless
Jeremy Paxman insults Tony Blair
Tuesday 3rd February 2004
The usefulness of military intelligence has a very mixed history. Intelligence officers..can be 100 per cent wrong. Intelligence can and ought to be perfect.
The editing of the dossier's contents amounted to systematic falsification..The exaggerations are regrettable..It now seems probable that most of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the early 1990s..
What logical ruler would deliberately provoke two disastrous wars, either of which might have been avoided by the practise of a little prudence?
I'm pretty confident that my précis of John Keegan's piece in today's Telegraph represents an almost 100% reversal of what he would like you to be thinking as we prepare - sooner, rather than later - to pass judgement on our intelligence community. (His headline,'Inquiry is pointless', rather gives the game away.)
But I'm equally confident that Keegan won't be complaining; after all, he goes on to conclude:
Any inquiry would shortly resolve into a semantic argument about the nature of text editing: a sentence here, a phrase there.
Indeed.
What joy. Did you catch George Bush's live announcement of his own version of an inquiry into intelligence?
No need to make cheap jokes: his performance was a complete shambles, the very image of a man caught bang to rights and up before the beak.
We can but hope that Blair, here as elsewhere, faithfully follows his mentor's example.
Ricin? Actually discovered at the very heart of American government? On this, of all days? Got to hand it to those intelligence guys: their timing is impeccable.
(Oh but hang on..we found ricin in London a year ago..whatever happened to those guys..?)
Monday 2nd February 2004
Some months ago, after a particularly ghastly night on the town, full of drunken secretaries vomiting on pavements and fuddled trainee estate agents trying to pick up their txt msgs on empty beer-bottles, I forswore going out on a Saturday night. Too bridge and tunnel, darling.
So, of course, every weekend since, I've been bombarded with alerts from friends telling me of their complex plans for the night and I've had to reply: still at work, not sure when we'll finish, bah.
With equal predictability, on the rare Saturdays when I've not been working, I've been the one working the phone - only to haul in a dull shoal of: nah, getting a curry, got a video, staying in.
(You think you've read this before, don't you. Well hello: don't you know what day this is?)
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