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º July 23rd - July 29th 2001
Sunday Heat
Saturday Watermelon
Friday Wear linen
Thursday Scrunching
Wednesday Meanwhile
Tuesday No flowers by request
Monday Brandreth

º Sunday 29th July 2001

I guess the nation voting for "gay air steward Brian" as their favourite Big Brother resident represents some kind of progress (despite his opinion that 'There shouldn't be all these different political parties, just one.')

Not quite the same as a gay Prime Minister but hey... one step at a time, my pretties.

Speaking of heat, I forgot to mention that Mount Edna was on smouldering form at the Vauxhall last week. I especially liked her take on the Jeffrey Archer affair (a version of La Morissette's "Isn't it ironic") though it came and went before the audience got to grips with it.

Temperature in Sydney today: 18°C (64°F); in New York: 25°C (77°F); in London: 31°C (88°F). Phewhatascorcher.

º Saturday 28th July 2001

I've written about my next-door neighbour before, and our long-running low-key war over the way her yelled conversations with her grandchild slice through the paper-thin wall between our flats to interrupt my fuddled slumbers.

Did I mention that our relationship escalated to a new low a month or so ago, when she stopped me in the courtyard for an extended public harangue?

Since then, I've spent considerable time trying to devise the answer I should have given her; "Don't wave your finger in my face. And don't call me an arsehole" doesn't quite cut it in the mutual aggression stakes.

Maybe I should have added: "And don't threaten me with the attentions of your son who, as far as I can see, is a skinny litle junkie whose major threat capacity seems to be almost exclusively directed at your good self - given that the last time I heard from him he was standing on the street shouting 'Nigger-lover! Nigger-lover!' up at your kitchen window" Or maybe not.

At an early stage in my relationship with this woman, when I'd protested at being woken up by hitting the wall with a book (a very, very thick book), she speed-slipper-shuffled along the balcony to bang on my door and declare I had no right to be asleep at 8 in the morning anyway.

So I've also wasted many minutes trying to devise a scheme to let her know that my late-rising is due, not to degeneracy, but to, oh I don't know, some kind of worthy night-shift? I even contemplated faking a postcard which might get posted by accident through her letter-box rather than mine: "Dear Ian, just a short note to let you know how much we appreciate your invaluable presence through the long and lonely nights here at the Hospice."

For all my imagined bravado, the woman scares the shit out of me, and on more than one occasion I've stood trembling behind my front door waiting for her to stop screaming down at her kids and go back inside before I dared venture out onto the communal walkway.

But last week I sailed out of my flat only to find her emerging at the same time. Instinctively, I gave her a cheery helloo and, hurrah, she greeted me back. Even better, she shot me one of her best suspicious looks (she does a great suspicious look, I suspect she may be very short-sighted) and said "What happened to your hair?"

Now that, by now, is a question to which I have some very well-rehearsed answers ("Industrial accident" "I sold it" "Woke up one morning and it was gone") and, bless her, she managed, somewhat grudgingly, to respond with the correct compliment ("Takes years off you"). Gold star, that harridan.

Confirmation that normal relations appear to have been restored came at 9 o'clock this morning as I trudged back from the sauna, stoned, spent and sexually-satiated.

We met on the stairs, her on her way to work, me doing my desperate best to look like a man who has spent the last twelve hours mopping the fevered brows of widows and orphans.

Brightly, I cried: "It's going to be a very very hot day!" She paused on the step, narrowed her eyes, and demanded: "Do you eat watermelon?"

I'd have admitting to eating shit and broken glass sandwiches had it come to it, just to get past her and home, but she promptly launched into a long mumbled moan about "...honey dew ...grand-daughter ...watermelon ...fridge ...going to waste" and before I knew it I was standing on her stoop as she pressed a Tupperware box into my hands ("I'll have the container back") together with half a melon that is, literally, more than a foot wide.

I muttered something about going on a Watermelon Diet; she sighed and grumbled "I'm on steroids..."

Whoah. I guess that makes it official: I eat watermelon.

º Friday 27th July 2001

My fellow Brits, be brave! Wear linen! It's going to get a lot lot worse before it gets better.

º Thursday 26th July 2001

I was never a scruncher - I don't see how you can achieve the minimal amount of necessary digital penetration with that method.

Later in life, I trained myself to be a folder - a casual folder, but a folder nonetheless - thus facilitating the abuse of only one unit at a time whilst minimising concomitant poke-through paranoia.

I must have saved tonnes of tree by this change of method - a hefty branch at least.

Well, that seems to have gorn orf ok then.

º Wednesday 25th July 2001

It's 5.00am in London and therefore somewhere around midnight in New York and, as I write, Jonathan and David are somewhere in some Scene of some Act of The Great TransaAtlantic BlogMeet Show. I'm so jealous. Or is that envious? Whatever.

Tell me, guys, is it the last scene of Hamlet? Or the closing number from Chorus Line? Or halfway through the movie version of the Boys In The Band?

Some London to counteract my sibling rivalry:

I contracted to work a short shift - from seven pm to midnight sharp - on the fifteenth floor of Canary Wharf this evening (Tuesday) and allowed myself to be persuaded into a long shift - sixish to, like, when it's finished.

The shift was enlivened by text msgs from abroad, live updates from shopping trips, penetrating heart-warming mgs like "We have been shoplifting. Now in Christopher Street having a rest in a bar" and "You are 32 and 32, right?" and "We have blogged. See joke on Tin Man."

And then, lo, clever me, the shift finished up at seven minutes past midnight. Forty quid more for working an extra 67 minutes floats this boy's boat. Rushing out of the building just in time to catch the penultimate tube to catch a matching connection that got me home by 20 past midnight floats it even further and faster.

So I texted John (another John): "J*iners still open till 2 on Tuesdays?" and got a reply "Yes. Please cum!" and replied "OK. May walk a bit on the way" because I'd noticed what a balmy night it was.

Noticing that I'd mislaid my last twenty pound note somewhere along the way (hey, call it a tax-deductible charity donation) I walked up to the garage and the cash-point, only to get the big cathode No. "Your branch has declined to accept this withdrawal." Bet they don't talk like that in New York, ha!

Walked back home to get my other card, noticed that I'd taken out the wrong card anyway, cheered up, stood on the street awhile, found a cab, got to the J*iners at slightly past 1am.

John was at the bar, only slightly crazed, with Peter and Kalil. Told Kalil: "I didn't recognise you. You look so..." without having to continue, thankfully. He turned from a dusky disco-bunny into a Muslim fundamentalist overnight. Wuh?

Late-opening closing time came and went. A couple of exotic cheroots came and went. Various mildly attractive young persons came and went. John and I ended up discussing Big Brother. (No, no, you had to be there - it was, like, deep. Really.)

Stumbled out of there about 4. Walked south via the bandstand at Arnold Circus (one of the nicest compact spaces in London), down Brick Lane (noticing how the brick is now covered with posters for design student end-of-year shows), through Huguenot-haunted Spitalfields.

Stopped for a pee in Petticoat Lane (no sign of the naked forty-year old librarian who lapped up my urine from the gutter last time I was there), past Toynbee Hall (where Profumo did his good deeds post-Keeler), and paused for a moment by the Whitechapel Gallery.

An unlit black cab beetled towards me like a cockroach on steroids. I waved my arm in a languid manner. He drew to a halt. I did my best imitation of a totally sober person and he condescended to drop me, ten minutes and five pounds later, at the corner of my estate.

Threw various containers of food into an oven, checked my answering machine, checked my e-mail, checked my stats. Texted New York: "Updates! I need updates!" Wrote this.

I really really wish I was in New York right now.

But London ain't so bad.

º Tuesday 24th July 2001

David and Jonathan spent their last 24 hours in Boston exploring the great outdoors (by day and by night.) Apparently it's hot and the city is "covered in seamen". In a fine example of life not imitating art, a sailor ordered them to put their shirts on; when last heard of they were heading for Cheers...

 A reluctant gardener who finally agreed to knock down a shed after 25 years of pleading by his wife has discovered it was standing on important Roman remains. Archaeologists have uncovered a substantial area of cobbled street and several pottery fragments dating back to at least 400AD.

Pursuing that story to its logical conclusion, I may spend tomorrow tidying my desk: should be worth a couple of square inches of Tudor pavement at the very least.

I don't know if it's a specifically East End Tradition, or for how long it's been going on, but watching the funeral procession last month of the woman who had lived opposite me, I was particularly struck by the floral tributes that literally spelt out the relationship between the deceased and the wreath-giver: MUM, NAN, JEAN and so on.

The undertakers took their time wiring all the various wreaths to the roofs of the hearses; they were obviously much exercised by the need to balance decorum and physics. Happily, it wasn't a windy day. JEAN went on the front of the lead car, with the other tributes on the second car, MUM at the front and NAN at the back.

(I never did see what they did with the giant floral model of 20 Senior Service.)

Yesterday, wandering around Abney Park Cemetery, I found a freshly occupied grave still heaped with wilting wreaths and I felt a stab of sympathy for whoever had been in charge of decorating the hearses. Sprawled across the other wreaths was a construction some five feet long: GREAT-GRANDAD.

Difficult to see how it could get much more challenging than that. FIRST COUSIN (ONCE REMOVED) perhaps?

º Monday 23rd July 2001

Nick's photo of me at the blog-meet made me run screaming to the mirror to check to see if I'd accidentally plucked out half an eyebrow in my sleep. And, hmm, it seems I have. Ah well.

Note to fans: I am much better-looking than this in real life. On the inside, at any rate.

Jonathan and David had a "run in with a drug baron" (in Boston?!) and were off to "galleries, observation decks and aids marathon" when last heard of.

It ought to be easy enough to despise Gyles Brandreth (q.v.) a well-educated man of obvious intelligence who squanders his talents by writing (or at least putting his name to) things like the Puzzle Party Fun Book and The Bedside Book of Great Sexual Disasters.

And yet when Deborah Ross interviews him for The Independent she makes him seem almost loveable:

- He interviewed Anne Widdecombe for the Sunday Telegraph and described her as "Danny DeVito meets Margaret Rutherford"

- "When he told (his wife) he'd accepted the position as patron of Lesbians for a Conservative Victory, she said: "Well, Gyles, you are probably a lesbian's idea of a real man."

- "Truly successful people go from A to B. To leave here, they'd go straight to the door. Archer would go straight to the door. But I think: 'Ooh, the people at that table look amusing; I'll just stop there.'"

The mention of Archer is salutary, and it can't be just coincidence that this interview appears in the same week as the Great National Vilification. It highlights the two notable omissions from Ms Ross's interview: sex and money.

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