Satan's Wind

You know those internal envelopes that you get in offices for sending bits of paper to people in other departments when you don't know what they look like and don't want to wander around the building looking lost, or they're too many floors away and you can't be bothered to take it to them, or the building they work in is 50 miles down the road, where you have lots of boxes and you write in their name and when they receive it they cross their name out and then when they need to send a bit of paper to someone in another department but etc etc they write the name of the person they're sending in the next box down and so on? Like these ones?

I received one today that had one side full of crossed-out names, and had around nine boxes left to fill in on the other, and it occurred to me that I don't think I've ever seen one of those envelopes so close to completion. Usually by the time half of the boxes on one side have been filled in the envelope is close to falling apart, so for it to make this far seems quite remarkable. It wasn't in that bad a condition either, so it may be the first ever internal envelope to be completely used up.

This seemed so interesting when I thought of it at the time. Oh well.

I shall not reveal the name of the TV celebrity that I think I saw walking down Great Portland Street tonight, as I'm not absolutely certain that it was her - she didn't look quite pregnant enough, but then most of the pregnant women I've been around lately have been extremely pregnant and so I probably have some odd ideas about that - and so to report it would be mere speculation, something that all those involved in BBC Breakfast News' coverage of this morning's Bombdog Chaos (I think) ought to learn from.

I've returned to listening to Radcliffe and Maconie this week, having initially not taken to it but being persuaded to give it another chance by the Radio 2 review that Simon linked to and Radcliffe generally having a good Glastonbury. (Particularly his lack of enthusiasm for Mika, which would have featured in last night's entry, in which I would have suggested to the former racing driver Mika Hakkinen that he run Mika (the singer, not the racing driver) over, on the grounds that if anyone else did it we'd be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, while if Mika (the racing driver, not the singer) did it everyone would marvel at the irony of it all and forget to arrest him and that. Except I had lots to do and didn't get around to it.) I'm wondering if I'd like it more if it was on between 10 and 12, as I'm not really used to listening to the radio at this time of the evening, but if I did listen to it then I might get trapped into the vicious Listen Again cycle, whereby you end up with your evenings and weekends revolving entirely around Listening Again and you never get to listen to any music at all, or watch the TV, or go out, or anything.

It is pretty good though. And mention of Hit The North and The Verve reminds me of telling a girl that I really liked that Verve (as they were that time around) had split up, and not being able to empathise with her being upset about this because I never liked them, and her being much more interested in one of my friends despite him being a complete shit, and then a couple of years The Verve came back to haunt everyone with their dreadful, dreadful records.

Er, yes. Tonight's entry was going to be about my receding hairline, but that's going to have to wait for a while. Although not too long, as otherwise I'm going to lose my hair before I get around to commenting wryly about it.

If there's one thing I've learnt during my week off - well, apart from the bit about starting to put shelves up in the morning so that when you realise that you need a bigger screwdriver you have time to go and get it today (so, if I've learnt two things during my week off, then) - it's that if you're going to walk from Chigwell to Hainault Forest, you probably ought to invest in some sort of proper map and not rely on the Walk London one, otherwise you end up in an unidentified field looking for a nonexistent gap in a hedge, and the curiosity as to whether that bakers you passed earlier does hot pies becomes overwhelming and you end up retracing your steps and then taking a bus instead.

Walking through a muddy path through the forest, which seemed much bigger than I remembered it, I found myself thinking about why I'd never really wanted to go to the Glastonbury Festival. There were several times that I could have gone, back when getting a ticket was quite straightforward rather that the internet-site-crashing, where-are-your-papers-citizen affair that it is today, as I had chums who went each year and my parents would always offer to help me with paying for a ticket. But I was never interested.

The sleeping arrangements worried me for a start - I've never had any desire to go camping, let alone camping with a lot of 18-year-old boys prone to being sick when they had too much to drink/smoke. (I did once buy a tent for a theoretical weekend at the Reading Festival, but I was never really serious about actually doing it what with having a shower and a comfy bed an hour and a half away, which was more or less my daily commute at the time anyway.) But there was always something else that I found suspicious about Glastonbury. I think it was in the letters in the music papers with people enthusing about how they'd had their tent and everything except the horribly muddied clothes that they wore stolen but had still had a brilliant time, and a conversation I had with a chum about his festival experience in which he related a tale of sitting on a hill with a spliff watching the Counting Crows, and try as I might I couldn't imagine any circumstances under which I would consider this 'fun'. I suppose I was worried that spending a night in a tent might turn me into an idiot, really.

I'm on the phone to the publicity department of a large police force. First of all I'd spoken to a press office, who directed me to another press office, who directed me backto the first press office, who directed me to the publicity unit; you never see this on The Bill, although as I haven't watched The Bill since about 1988 I'm probably in no position to make this statement. A few hours earlier another police force had arrested Michael Barrymore, which probably made it just as well as I didn't have to speak to them. The person I'm speaking to is attempting to answer my query, but as it's slightly obscure and deals with all sorts of profound questions and grey areas, it's quite understandable when she asks me to send her more details so that she can look into it.

She gives me her email address. "That's a nice name" I think as I jot it down, and then "I've really got to stop thinking things like that".

She mentions that she needs to speak to the Income Generation Unit. I am fairly certain that the Income Generation Unit has never featured in The Bill either, although possibly a cop show about the head of the Income Generation Unit and his unorthodox means of generating income are in the pipeline as we speak. "Dammit, Jim, we can't have a loose cannon as the head of the Income Generation Unit!" "My job's to generate income, Maa'm, and I'll do so by whatever means I see fit!" "All right men - let's get out there and generate income!" etc. Of course, were I someone who likes cars and not someone who enjoys seeing people who like cars getting upset, I would probably complain about speed cameras at this point, but I'm not and so I shan't.

It's getting light outside

I finally gave up on morning radio last week. Ever since 6 Music had decided to employ Shaun C Keaveny or whatever he calls himself (presumably on the grounds that as everyone else employs an unamusing idiot to front their breakfast shows, they should as well) I'd been experimenting with other stations, but nothing's quite worked out. The music stations would all be unbearable even if they didn't employ burbling idiots between songs, and none of the speech-based stations really appeal. I realise that as an adult I should probably listen to the Today programme (The Today Programme? I'm no good with capitalisation these days), but it reminds me too much of fraught mornings at my ex's and leaves me slightly depressed, even when the news isn't depressing, which is invariably is. For the moment I've found some alternative programming as I perform my ablutions, and have managed to replicate the radio's important function of telling you what the time is by putting my travel clock in the bathroom.

However, I still have the radio as my first alarm in the morning, and sometimes it teases me mercilessly. Today, for example, I woke up in time to hear I Can't Stand My Baby by the Rezillos; however, any thoughts that the day was starting particularly well were immediately quashed by the presenting lunkhead announcing that you, the public, could vote as to whether you wanted to hear Kids In America by Kim Wilde in the "hey, let's play a really bad record! And not just because it's the new Gossip single with all of the life of the original version completely bludgeoned out of it, but because we've deliberately picked one because it's crap!" slot.

Now, I thought I'd reached the nadir of the Guilty Pleasuresisation of music when I was walking around a large chainstore the other week and noticed their "Hey, Buy These Records, They're Really Crap!" stand and was appalled to note that in addition to Supertramp and Toto and the like, they'd added Slade (perhaps just about understandable, maybe, but clearly wrong) and The Lightening Seeds (again, maybe just about understandable if the only hit they'd ever had was the football one, but otherwise, plainly not). But this sunk seemed even lower than that. Kids In America? A timeless pop gem from down the ages? Lumped in with More Than A Fucking Feeling Thank You Very Fucking Much Whoever's Idea That Was? How, precisely, did it come to this?

Logically, this is going to end up with idiot burbling morning DJs being incapable of announcing a song in any way except with quote marks implied around them, and everyone collectively snapping and gathering outside Sean Rowley's house, flaming torches aloft, before dragging him out and flaying him alive, his screams drowned out by More Than A Feeling playing on a continual loop. I fear it may be the only way.

If you only download one Song To Learn And Sing, it should probably be the one by The Lapse. Because I'd forgotten precisely how good The Lapse were.

(I recall the selection process behind my own Song To Learn And Sing; originally I had decided to choose something obscure so that everyone would be impressed at the depth of my musical knowledge, and then it became clear that everyone else was picking obscure things so that people would be impressed at the depth of their musical knowledge, so I chose something by a band that everyone had heard of, and instead of describing how important it was decided to relate a tale from fumbling courtship, which is the best kind, I'm saying.)

Tonight, to commemorate the beginning of what I can only describe as 'my early 30s' in about an hour or so's time, I was going to write something about having a bit of a wobble at the start of the week, a mini-crisis of the like of which people kept asking me if I was having last year, and it seeming to pass after going to see Los Campesinos!, but I don't seem to be capable of writing anything particularly worthwhile or even vaguely coherent at the moment (which was one of the main symptoms of the mini-crisis) and so I have abandoned it for now. However, it should be stated for the record that Los Campesinos! live are at least as good as you'd hoped they might be (which possibly sounds like faint praise, but I've been on a bit of a run of bands not being as good live as I'd hoped). Yes.

Turning on the TV in an attempt to break the drudgery of sorting out my paperwork, I note that in the corner of the screen there's a clock counting down; 3:40 to The Derby, as it it's New Year's Eve or something. This seems slightly confusing, as there can't be people across the country frothing with excitement at the start of this horse-race, surely?

Back when I was 10, when the people who ran horse-racing understood that sometimes having big events on a Wednesday was a good idea (which it probably was, because if you're going to have a big horse race on a Saturday it ought to be one which lasts slightly longer than a minute and a half otherwise there's a terrible risk of people saying "oh, was that it then?" when it's over) and so I would have to dart around to my nan and grandad's to watch it as they only lived just around the corner from the school, I'm fairly sure that they didn't have clocks counting down to the start of the race. Possibly this was because they assumed that people were intelligent enough to look up when the race started when they were interested, I don't know. Also, I'm fairly sure that the commentary wasn't a minor-celebrity wankfest entirely devoted to telling you where (say) Lester Piggott was. But maybe that's just me getting old.