In This City

Here's what happens when I can't think of anything to say for myself for a while; the obligatory media round up. It's all I ever talk about with my friends whenever we catch up, so maybe this will eradicate even those fun-sized pockets of conversation.

Music: I take back wholeheartedly what I said about the Jonas Brothers. I actually can't believe they've covered no less than TWO Busted songs; Year 3000 and What I Go To School For. They've even given them a weedy Disney Channel makeover, taking away all the thickly-veiled innuendo (taking away the words "ass" and inexplicably replacing "Michael Jackson" with "even outsold Kelly Clarkson" as if any of her songs has remotely troubled the stratospheric sales of Thriller). Annoying, because Busted never troubled any teenagers outside of the British Isles, Yankee Doodle Donny and his teenage slagwagons will lap it all up, and if illegibly spelt Youtube comments merit anything these days, they will also think that Billy Boy Jonas wrote the bloody things, rather than a record company hack dabbling with genius. Changing Busted lyrics is like dabbling with the core existence of teenagers. Not pretty. What is pretty though, is the new recommends features on Last FM, which has kindly nudged me in the back and persuaded me to investigate Swedish electropop again. I was tempted to give up after hearing so many rave reviews of Lykke Li's album I thought I'd implode, and then didn't like it, but Andreas Kleerup's album, and his lending of one of his songs to the ridiculous new Cyndi Lauper album has reset the balance, and I can step up to the table and show my hand: Familjen, Gentle Touch, Juvelen, Le Sport, Lo-Fi-Fnk, Pacfic! and Zeigest are all completely brilliant, even though a lot of it just sounds like rejigged versions of Knife songs. Added to the fact that Yearbook 2 by Studio is fast becoming one of my favourite albums of the year, despite it all being remixed, and I've pretty much settled that my summer heatwave soundtracking will be performed by plugged-in-Swedes for the second year running. There's more of the Scandinavian influence below.
Not that it's all pop punk and roses; I've also added a few more of the 2008 speciality (epic indie rock with no edit feature) to my year's favourites, including the power-chord excellence of Miasmal Smoke and the Yellow Bellied Freaks by Wintersleep, who were knocked off the shortlist for the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury Music Prize, and better yet, a little song called Mysterious Skin by a little band called Orphans and Vandals, which reminds me a little of Jack and the Tindersticks, as well as pretentious indie post rock circa 1999, although the singer sounds like Johnny Borrell breathing through his nose and ears, but it's essentially a perfectly pretentious spoke-sung tale of journeying to France, lost memories and bad sex. It's better than that sounds. I've also got no idea who Iglu and Hartly even are, or what the hell they think they're doing, but In This City is looking like a beast and all.

Films: I've now seen The Dark Knight twice, making it the first film I've seen twice in the cinema since, well since forever. I actually can't think of the last film I saw twice in the cinema except maybe Saw, but that was back in 2004 and mostly regrettable, especially because I paid both times. I did enjoy Batman, but I can't help that I enjoyed it twice as much because I thought Batman Begins sucked big old monolithic ass, and didn't have especially high expectations for this one. But rather than being like that mismatch of failed ideas, I though The Dark Knight was great, although it was essentially an even longer version of Heat with silly costumes. Even more exciting was The Mist, which came from nowhere and knocked me sideways, and is about as superior as a B movie could ever hope to be, it's really quite something, right down to the ending, which somehow manages to turn an essentially silly Stephen King adaptation that's not entire dissimilar to previous King atrocity Maximum Overdrive, into a morbidly depressing thought-piece, and ended with almost nobody going home happy. If anyone can show me a horror movie better constructed that that one, then let's all hear about it. I though Hancock was silly and shit, and Journey to the Centre of the Earth was just utterly ridiculous, not least for the fact it tried to present Jules Vernes original novel as a factual text. Often I look out of the windows upstairs at work and look across at all the cranes and builders and busy worker ants acting out Richard Scarry books across on the building site, and I wonder what the world is coming to, building shit everywhere, but then I think that in 2008 it's possible to go and see one dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the cinema, and see a trailer for another dumb action adventure starring Brendan Fraser at the same cinema beforehand, then I think maybe everything's going to be alright. Such as it turned out in Wall-E, which is like taking an Etch-a-Sketch to your own misery. Any building up of woe or angst you feel you might have bubbling under your surface waiting to jump out of your throat and try and make conversation with someone, hop on down to watch Wall-E and you'll find yourself jibbering for a few days. It'll come back no problem, but for at least a few hours after watching Wall-E, you'll realise nothing can really be that bad. It did fill my heart a little bit though, when I realised that robots with no discerned brain can fall in love with beautiful stranger robots with no bran, despite not being able to speak more than three words between them. Maybe there's where I'm going wrong; too many words, and not enough robot dancing. I can see what they see in Peter Crouch Now. I also had the fortune to finally watch one of the Lord of the Rings films, over sixty years after everyone else did. Whilst it was obviously a good yarn, I found my main two thoughts about The Fellowship of the Ring being how they got away with it being a PG when there's decapitations and big tentacles and all sorts of nonsense, and how ridiculous the concept was that I had to change discs in the middle of the film. It reminded me of having to put in Disc 5 of Monkey Island, because that was the one with all the animated sequences in,

Television. The only TV I've watched in the last few weeks was half an episode of Richard and Judy, where they had a desperately humourless berk in the studio showing Richard and "Judy" (who for that night's episode, was inexplicably Emma Bunton) boring clips of babies on Youtube. It was horrific, but it was still better than leaving the room and looking up pictures of babies myself on Youtube. I don't find babies even remotely funny. Then they showed a clip from QI was was infinitely better than anything and was an incredibly stupid thing to do before introducing a guest. It's like introducing your friend who can do keepy-uppy for ten kicks by showing them extended highlights of the 1970 Brazil World Cup Squad. The guest, whose name I luckily forget, was someone who'd written a book about trvia, and was so unutterably dull that Richard and "Judy" had to resort to showing voxpop clips of buffoons of Brighton Beach telling us there own (mostly fabricated) trivia. One plank's "trivia" was some shit about deep sea diving and penguins that was so off-the-scale for not being trivial, I'm surprised the cameraman even let him walk away, let alone stuck him in the show.

Books. As usual, I've fifteen on the go that I've got no hope of finishing, but even if I don't finish the Alex Cox, Matt Ridley or Tonya Hurley books that are propping my door open I know I'll finish The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson tonight or tomorrow. It's simply incredible, a quasi-political thriller meets twee "locked room" crime mystery, only I love it not just just because it's set in Sweden, but because it's MASSIVE and this is only the first book, and has a rotating cast of ridiculous characters, and can range from heart-wrenching scenes of aging businessmen weeping over the missing links in their family tree, to newspaper stories about people being killed and having parakeets shoved up their vaginas. It's had ridiculous comparisons to War and Peace, which I can't fathom and explanation for except for it being quite long, but I think comparing Larsson to Tolstoy is ever so slightly over-egging the pudding. Not least because I can't ever see myself investigating War and Peace in the near future, even if it was set in Sweden and was about twee electropop.
Love: Oh, too much to talk about.

Sex is Boring

I bought a book in a charity shop in Porthcawl last week called The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. One of my favourite things about being surrounded by books are that you always have the freedom to get yourself interested in things you're not interested, purely by the benefit of something being well written. This year as I've no doubt repeated and repeated and repeated like a stuck stuck record, I've immersed myself in Daily Mail sport anthologies, the horrors of the holocaust, 18th century murder mysteries, Brian Clough and now this, a lengthy analysis of evolution and the necessity of sex in this process, the hows and whys of why chosing partners for sex. All fascinating stuff, especially since I'm not in any way interested in genetics, chromasomes or evolution in any way whatsoever. But it's a well written book, that doesn't assume I was even in Mr Sharmas biology class where supposedly I learned the difference between meiosis and mitosis but I don't remember that class at all. I remember seeing posters up in the science labs at school which explained the difference, but I don't remember actually ever being taught it myself. 'Meiosis and Mitosis' sounds like it could be a pretentious metal band though. But yeah, it's a fine book, that doesn't assume I've got the intellect of a plum grape, but at the same time explains evolutionary genetics in pig English just in case I do. One of the best £1 coins I've ever spent, especially because I got a Dave Eggers book I'm never going to read thrown in free.

But I have spent my walks to and from work since trying to apply Ridley's ideas of mating and the choosing of sexual partners to my own tepid gene pool of South Wales, and most of it rings true. The survival of the fittest theory, which is all running like a greasy-smooth prick and works fine. Ridley argues that acquired intelligence doesn't play much of a part in the choosing of mates, which is also true, but humans are regularly lead to disbelieve that being witty and able to outsmart another is a great predatory tactic. Not so, as any internet message board or group of adolescents bantering about Star Wars will ultimately testify, wit just isn't sexy anymore. Take two of the last centurys greatest wits, Oscar Wilde and to a lesser extent, Stephen Fry. No evolution there. At least they've had the decency to mix up a cocktail of madness, homosexuality, celibacy and/or death to help the witticisms go down. No, fabricated intelligence resulted in nothing for either person here other than acquring the common sense not to impregnant anyone. The other thoery, that the survival of the fittest, adding hilarious inverted commas either side of fittest to make a statement about how shallow and empty the world is, is also true. But as Ridley has in a vague sort of way explained, and I'll use the analogy of the film The Hottie and the Nottie, that it's a perfectly natural to want to have moronic, exposive sex with Paris Hilton rather than her toe-faced corn-encrusted toad friend. Although I used to think this was merely because people found it more excusable to be a morally slack ho-bag with attractive people because, you know, it doesn't count if they're good looking, but not any more. I think it's because people want to have children with attractive people so they can force their children into modelling at an early age and scrounge off their Hollywood earnings without having to work hard themselves. Similarly rich people. Identical twins where one is a doctor, and the other repairs bicycles, nine out of ten people would end up with the doctor after ten minutes of conversation, because they're lazy. Even if the two stood up and doctor revealed themselves as a totally sexist bigot, a serial cheater who likes Scouting For Girls, they'd still win. It's more survival of the laziest. Attractive people think they have it easy, and in many cases they're right. Not always though, but attractive people definitely have it laziest.

Similar interests, in the grand scheme of things are drivel. I've touched on this before, but seriously, all similar interests do is fill up voids of silence. The reason mushrooms produce asexually and don't give a hoot about who with is because they don't have in rely depth conversations about Fun House and read Lord of the Rings to get through the day. We're the only species in the world who could ever allow something as trivial what radio station their partners car is tuned into dictate whether to add another generation to their family tree. It's only one thing, but I've known people to have not persued relationships any further because their boyfriend slurped his drink once, or because, well, it was just a bit of fun. No other animal gets bothered by casual sex, which is of course, the real issue here. Because mating doesn't necessarily have to result in procreation, it means the selection process can be freestyled however you want. The mating ritual is like a combination of tricks on a trampoline, eventually resulting in a triple somersualt of coming off the pill, and hey presto, the next generation. Basically, as Matt Ridley explains using the title of the book, sex and evolution is all ridiculous, because ultimately, all the adaptations a species makes and supposedly enhances, is eventually going to ruin us all. Admittedly human beings haven't got much in the way of predators right now except each other, but like an opponent in a chess game or a football match, the more obvious the tactics we eploit, the more likely it is that one day evolution will catch up with us and end the human race. And as I walked home along Windsor Place and saw awkward couples with nothing to say to each other except how nice each other looks pouring into bars to talk about work and drink away the days until one of them cheats, and I remember how easy and natural and it is to want to be there, and I start to think that day can't some soon enough.

Mysterious Skin

I have precious little else to do on a Saturday night apart from finish this delicious bottle of Australian wine (£2.99) and hammer my laptop keys. One of my housemates has done that thing where my washing has finished drying in the dryer and has put all my clothes on my bed, which I'm enormously grateful for because it saves me the bother of moving it there myself, however now I'm so enormously lazy that I've sat down on the bed next to them but I really just cannot bring myself to stand up next to the bed and perform the 5 minute task of putting them in my wardrobe. There are so many other menial things like that I could, and probably should do right now, like moving the copy of The Stuff of Thought off my window sill because you can see it from the street outside, and it probably looks like I've deliberately left it there to impress people who walk past. "Wow, clearly that person is an amazing guy because he reads books about linguistics, and he bought it from Borders too because he hasn't taken the 'half price' sticker off". I'm not sure if advertising Borders through your bedroom window is a cool thing to do or not, but I've noticed someone across the street from me has dumped one of our carrier bags in their window, so maybe it is. I'm not going to pull a James Stewart and stare out of my window through a crack in the curtains to see who they are. They might be the weirdo who buys hi fi magazines on a Saturday. There are so many other things to do; here's to anyone who can come up with an idea of what to do with the Mark Kozelek and Red House Painters Cds I amassed during the first three months of this year, which I've dedicated a special 'pile' but not found a solution as to where to store them separately, since I'm out of CD rack space, and out of space to put in another CD rack.
I also need to buy a new mobile phone and/or a sim card, as I lost my mobile phone about three weeks ago, but I'm tempted to resist doing this until I actually need to, although I'm quite contented knowing that I don't have one and don't need to use one. I can probably count the number of people I've spoken to on my phone to people other than my parents in the last six months on one hand. The only time I bought phone credit between February and June, I spent £8.60 on calling the Virgin Media crisis line to moan that they still hadn't reconnected our broadband. The other £1.40 I'm presuming I pissed away when drunk because I don't remember. I think the days of laying in bed having lengthy conversations at 12p a statement, with or without x's are a thing of the past now. I hope nobody important, like The Queen or the producers of Big Brother, or that Welsh poetry competition have tried to phone me. Still, for the time being I can put away the disappointment of hearing the double-bleep and rushing to my phone to find out who's been thinking of me, only to find it's a typographical nudge from Vodafone to hoik me up another rung on the pay package ladder. There is a simplistic warming of the heart knowing that hearing two beeps from a phone proves that someone, somewhere who knows your phone number has at least thought about you for a minute or so, sometimes longer if they've spelt the words correctly, but as time has lagged and the oceans of time between contact has waned to the point of irrelevance, it's not something I'm missing all that much. But tonight, I'm not really in the mood for sitting and staring, but if I had my phone, I guess all I would have done is sat and stared at that instead, waiting to be invited to change my life somewhere.
Births, Marriages and Deaths. In the last year, I've met people that I've seen and talked to on a regular basis who are getting married, or having a baby. This isn't interesting for anyone who doesn't really know the people involved so I'll spare the details, but in a way I've enjoyed in a small way the knowledge that these events are happening. I've been to about four or five funerals in the past few years, and absolutely zero weddings; I don't really know of anyone who's even got married, apart from the one last year Mark was best man at, but that was someone I didn't know. I'm aware of long-forgotten fairytale people who have had children but they're so far off the contact radar I don't even know what country they live in, but this is my first baby. Still not outnumbering the funerals, so here's hoping everyone else I know gets pregnant and indulges shotgun weddings. Providing none of them happen to me any time fast. I don't particularly want to snuff it knowing Marcus was the last person I shared intimacy with, in the car park of TGI Fridays. I don't really plan on getting married any time soon obviously, and I need to bring new life into the world about as much as I need to bring my socks into another person's isolation chamber.

This is picture of me:

What does a bunny rabbit do? Hop. What does an axe do? Chop. What do you do when you see a green light?

Highly Suspicious

Today The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction. This, I'm excited about, and I don't honest think at any point in my life I'd ever though I'd get excited about a book prize of any description. Such is the way life panned out for me, I'm in the book trade, all be it on one of the lower rungs in that my life basically revolves around flogging copies of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher to Daily Mail readers. But book prizes are different to film awards like The Oscars, when you've either seen all the films, or (with the exception of the documentary shorts and other pointless drivel) know what they're about anyway, so you're always rooting for the one you like most, or with music awards where you've heard all the nominees far too much already and are obliged to disagree and find fault even if your own band wins because it's all such a farce and all The Man anyway. No, book prizes are interesting above those because they're baffling and weird.

The Samuel Johnson Prize is an international, but British based prize awarded to what's regarded by the panel (Rosie Boycott and some other hacks) as being the best Non Fiction book of the last year (May 2007 - May 2008). First baffling point is that more than quite a few non fiction books get published a year, even working in a book store that mainly appeals to mainstreams tastes, I can see we get somewhere in the region of 10-15 new non fiction titles in each delivery. Nobody could ever dream to read all of them, especially since the average history hardback are mega-reads you can't even pick up with one hand, so picking the best is really the case of rooting through best seller charts, well received press reviews, and people swanking over gourmet dinners telling you what they're chewing over on the tube. Hardly fair, and also explains why the shortlist for the prize are comprised of precisely the above. Patrick French's biography of Booker winner VS Naipaul may have sold fuck all copies, but was reviewed to buggery. Tim Butcher's Blood River was a Richard and Judy book club book, and thus in the public eye for the past seven months. The others were all bigged up by the broadsheets. So although almost all the books are by all accounts interesting, I doubt many people have actually bothered to read them though, so at least having their names bandied around a bit more than upon publication might perform some tricks.

However, and this is rare for me, especially with the fiction prizes like the Booker and the Orange awards, I'd actually read one of the books. I'd actually read one-and-a-half, but found The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross too much and never got past chapter three in the time I had it. So by default, I found myself rooting for a book tonight, and was excited it won. I read The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale in April, about two weeks after it got published and received the inaugeral and often kiss-of-death accolade of History Book of the Month at work, but it sounded promising, a country house murder mystery yarn, complete with bonkers family and chin-stroking master detective summoned to solve the crime and sod off back to London. Very Cluedo, with a bit of 19th century true crime thrown in too. I read it on the train journey to and from Winchester when I went home for dad's 60th birthday. The Road Hill House, where the murder takes place in the book, is in Trowbridge, which is on the train route from Cardiff to London, and I found myself at the end of each chapter or paragraph gazing wistfully out of the window to look at the largely unchanged countryside to see which side of the train the house might have been resting on. I didn't even know if the house was still built, but it was a fantastic book to read hurtling through the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside. It is an extremely well-written book, that pitches itself the middle ground between true crime thriller, and historical melodrama based on life in the 1860s, neither of which have much appeal to me on their own, but together, they're lethal. Obviously then at my dad's birthday celebrations in between scoffing schloer and sausage rolls, I told pretty much everyone there to read the book, and even paraded it around at one point to ensure everyone remembered the fake sepia-tinged beige cover and investigate at a later date. I'm pretty sure they didn't, but the intent was there, and although the Samuel Johnson Prize is hardly The Brit Awards or Andy Murray, I hope if any of them hear Kate Summerscale's name on the Today show or wherever, they'll remember my good intentions and the brief speck on the radar of my life, when I was a literary critic.

Impossible

The first thing I found upon arriving back from the Gower was a pamphlet advertising new conservatories and bay windows for our terraced house in the centre of Cardiff. I know that rules aren't extraordinarily stuck to by people trying to flog their wares on a door-to-door basis, but now it just seems like the laws of common sense and good business knowledge just don't apply to people anymore. Evidently the conservatory sellers aren't doing their homework I'd like to find a single garden on this stretch of road, if not this entire region, that has enough space for an entire new room to put in their garden. We just about have enough space to fit a barbecue, and even then it's a struggle to fit people around it to tend to it, eat the food, and tip a wine bottle at a 45 degree angle. No conservatory, thank you. No bay windows either, we've only got one main window on the ground floor of our house, and it's mine, and I don't need any more attention drawn to my house more than I already to, with a CD rack and 3 toy giraffes already sat there. I did have a shoe in the window, but that's long gone.

A conservatory would have been lovely on The Gower Peninsular mind, as in just two nights, a lifetime of reminders why I hate camping. This weekend, which for me was Friday and Saturday, although for others was Thursday as well, and for the majority of lazy deadbeats, just the Saturday. This was probably the most organised camping trip I've been on, not least because I was with a group of dad-minded people who think ahead and bring six barbecues, a fold-up table, a windbreak and a million and five methods of wiring mp3 players up to speaker systems to flatten nearby tents with sound waves. Despite this, I left the campsite situated right on the coast in Nathan's car with the same desire to return to comfort and bed and shower and socks and Seinfeld as I have on any incident where I'd damaged myself irreversibly, psychologically and mentally, at the Reading Festival in 2000 or 2001, or the time we camped in Penmon in North Wales, where even though I didn't drink anything all weekend, I somehow returned home from the 7 hour car journey feeling like I'd been wallowing in a pigs trough of alcohol for the previous 48 hours. Which is why I fell asleep almost the second I returned and have just woken up wondering what's going on. I did organise myself this time around, and took a spare duvet, and a sleeping bag, and a pillow, and all sorts of things, yet I was still as uncomfortable as it gets when I bedded down for the night. At least I didn't have to share my tent with anyone. There's a certain culture that takes over on camping trips, where due to the combination of advanced intimacy created by sleeping right next to people you probably wouldn't if it was, say, a house party or a Thursday, and the forced familiarity created by spending more than an hour in the company of people you know too well and/or don't know at all. In-jokes spread like wild fire, minute pockets of humour, usually at the expense of others - made up nicknames related to things which are good for a yuck but 10/10 times you have to have been there, and people who don't know each other in the slightest engage in ridiculous banter which suggests they're going to be friends forever, right up until the cars are started on the way home and that's the end of that. I go through hundreds of different conflicting feelings whenever I go on these sorts of trips, which I attempt to resolve by wandering around aimlessly on my own away from the group, forging a new vision of myself, and then returning to the group only to get bored and walk off again. I think it's because the surroundings lend themselves well to studying the beauty and general prettiness of the world. Down on the beach at Hills End, there's a causeway you can't see, a few rocks and headlands that you can see, and a huge, vast expanse of ocean that you definitely can see, and does cheerily predictably romantic things like reflect the surface of the moon, and wash up jellyfish. Although it's perfectly feasible to admire the postcard-quality scenery and gentle moon from the social-binge-combat zone of a group of friends with wine and Dire Straits nothing beats half an hour of aimless wandering and staring at sundown. This might be my favourite thing to do in the world, and I guess it's sad in a way, that my favourite thing to do in the whole world can't be shared with anybody, but it makes me thankful for having even just a few friends and people just to sit in a circle with, because it's a treat to take 30 minutes out and count shooting stars. Then you can return, thankful that it's not your entire life just yet.

It might be because I'm just an insecure idiot, a safe assumption and an excuse I fall back on regularly to explain any of my random and potentially obnoxious antics. Elongated socialising stints are not my best suit when I find it impossible to start conversations and live life on the cusp of an invite-only utopia, but at festivals, and weekends away, unless they're secure units of just myself and one other person, or two, then I find them strangely more isolating and terrifying then otherwise. It's a strange paradox, but if my main memories of various trips are staring out to sea from the cliff edges of Anglesey, or getting windswept, soaked, and stared at on the beaches of Camber Sands, then I know I've got out of the weekend what I wanted. If I made any friends for life, then that's a bonus.

I don't want to feel like it's the end of a summer

Lamb and the Lion

I had a good time today listening to the George Lamb show. It's not often you'll hear me say that - like 99% of the rest of listeners to 6 Music, I find listening to his wide-boy thicko approach to radio presenting frankly unlistenable, and for a radio show dependent on it's listeners knowing their onions, and having a two-way correspondence of music adoration and the spirit of sharing, having an offensively ignorant buffoon running one of the flagship lunchtime shoes, his hiring at the end of last year is a weird and unpleasant experience. I didn't hear the whole show, simply because I just can't do it, but I found out when I got home from Maplins and Wilkinson, that Lamb had Stephin Merritt in the studio playing a couple of songs, and an interview. The results were incredible.


All Lamb's interviews are conducted in exactly the same way: The musician or band in question sit in a room adjacent, one presumes, to his normal studio. A one-on-one interaction occurs and is recorded for our amusement. Due to his general lack of knowledge of who he's talking to or what day it is, Lamb obviously reads questions off a hastily cobbled-together set of crib sheets, that aren't so much a biography as a set of pathetic DIY did-you-know? trivia, which Lamb basically reads from, instead of engaging the performer in question. Today's was undoubtedly one of the best. Stephin Merritt, who is pretty renowned for his wit as dry as a desert and bleakly romantic and deadpan nature was the perfect nemesis for this inane banter. The best thing about the interview was just how quickly Merritt twigged that Lamb was a blathering idiot, and almost by the second question, he was down to single word responses, by question five he was shooting quick-fire smart-alec responses. "You released 69 Love songs, it was a triple CD" - "it still is" and then a preposterous talk about going to hang out in a record store in London "what now?" - Merritt. It was excruciating, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out during the course of the 5 minute epic of awkwardness, where my sympathy should lean. On the one hand, I've been an admirer of Stephin Merritt, and 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields is pretty much unsurpassed as a classic album, so it was unpleasant hearing him trying to turn up, talk about music, and then perform two of his songs, only to be subjected to 'yoof' radio. But on the other hand, it was unbearable, buttock-clenching listening to a interview car crash in full top-spin, with pretty much every word coming out of Lamb's mouth being a through-the-fingers moment. It was like an indie rock edition of Knowing Me, Knowing You. I had pangs of sympathy for George Lamb, again not something I'll say often, but he was no match for the snarling, wild fire wit of Merritt, he couldn't have been more out of his depth if he was a baby in a sack of snakes
At one point they were discussing one of the instruments that Merritt plays, the bouzouki, which of course was met with a predictable gag from Lamb about bazookas, and then after he drooled "what's that then" Merritt told him it was an 8 string instrument with a gourd", Lamb uttered the immortal "how do you play it, do you blow on it?". This was followed by a glorious miscommunication in which Lamb mistook Merritt's answer of "carry-on" (regarding an instrument size) for a irritated utterance "oh, carry on!" and then
hen came a hopeless non-conversation in which Lamb jabbered on about people on housing estates, and how Merritt should show a little love for his music mentor, in which the two parties involved couldn't have understood each other less. "What, like Throbbing Gristle?' was the point at which both parties gave up. But any confusion over where my sympathy was lying was washed away with the rain after the interview finished, where Lamb and his gathering of yes-men, slobbering dogs who sit around him in the studio like a professional WKD advert, all decided Merritt was a wanker, and admitted they were trying really hard not to laugh in his face, which is, I think, about as offensive, rude and pathetic as humanity gets. But the joke was obviously on Lamb, because this ten minute snapshot of the decline of media presenting in Britain, did nothing except highlight his own ineptitude, slack approach to interviewing, and God Bless Stephin Merritt, who not only endured, and outwitted on an enormous magnitude, he also performed two songs solo, with just a ukulele, as he does on stage, beautifully and impeccably, even though his voice is so deep now you can probably hear it through the ground in the next city. He did The Nun's Litany, off Distortion, which was great because he doesn't sing that on the album, and The Book of Love, which I think is the closest The Magnetic Field have had to popular recognition, and that's only because Peter Gabriel covered it on the soundtrack to Shall We Dance. Someone should make a film of this meeting of minds, though. It worked for Frost/Nixon, this is just a slightly more quirky encounter.


It's still raining. If only weather weren't such a lazy metaphor for mood, otherwise I'd write a paragraph here about the different in the weather between Winchester and Cardiff. I'm going camping on the Gower tomorrow until Sunday. Lucky I'm not scared of drowning.

Sixteen Days (Part 10)

It started raining the second I left Winchester and hasn't yet stopped. I kept falling asleep in the car, but just before we crossed the Severn Bridge, we stopped for lunch in a pub in the middle of nowhere but posh enough for the dishwashers to have memberships to golf clubs. They served probably the best gravy I've ever tasted.



When I got home, I went to the pub. The rain made sitting under the parasols a nightmare, but it was a relief to have a convesation with someone who wasn't an 18 year old college drop out ontop of a hill.

Sixteen Days (Part 9)

Hat Fair Day Two.

Started Saturday as i do every Saturday, listening to the Adam and Joe show on Radio 6. Joe was back this week, and I did all the things I should have done yesterday or the day before or the day, pottering about in the kitchen, making coffee, poring over my laptop, washing up the mug I'd just made coffee in, drying it, and then using the exact same mug to make coffee in. I finished reading the Hampshire Chronicle. Basically, any excuse to stay in the kitchen listening to radio and not having to unplug the radio, take it somewhere else in the house, and then plug it in again and retune it. It wasn't a particularly memorable Adam and Joe Show, and they especially teed me off my by announcing they weren't going to be on for the next three weeks, although one week they are going to be replaced by David Quantick who is better than everything, as anyone who used to listen to Collins and Maconie's Hit Parade on Radio 1 in the mid nineties, or read Quantick's World in Select. Or maybe even the hundreds of things he's done since, but I can't name any so I won't. Text the Nation was good, all about sitcom.

The Hat Fair traditionally reaches full strength on the Saturday. The Sunday is a lacklustre affair where the entire shebang ups sticks and sets up in Oram's Arbour, a splattering of grass and beech trees in a different part of town, near my old dentist and halfway to my school. It used to be a drinking ground for 16 year olds, but not on Hat Fair Sunday. You basically get all the magic and mayhem of the previous two days events, only crammed onto some grass that's too small to house it, and nobody's drunk, and there are dogs and bees and shit everywhere. I think I've been on the Sunday once, and this year, I'm not going to double my experiences. To counteract these, I decided to rinse as much circus water from the dirty Hat Fair dishcloth today. So as it was, I arrived in town to see the performances, right from the very second they started. Bad news for me then, that the first performer anywhere in town, was the same idiot Scottish woman, who looked even more today like a cross between Helena Bonham Carter, a cartoon with and Jude, the old receptionist in Casualty with a nose piercing. She was as bad as the previous day, her act appeared on every level to cover the exact same territory every single time. The only difference appeared the be that people were actually watching her, and enjoying here. Clearly the bonus of busybusy Saturday and a different pitch, in the Broadway, helped. The Broadway isn't as exciting as it sounds, it's just a stretch of road where buses go up and down and cars park in a zig-zag fashion leading up towards the big statue of King Alfred which sits on a plinth at the head of The Broadway. This area is normally a road, but to annoy drivers even more than merely closing half the parks does, they close one of the main roads into Winchester off as well, and let people juggle there instead. This is where the Scottish woman was doing her act, and I didn't want to loiter anywhere near her in case she ripped my head off and stole my wallet, so I went back up to the cathedral. My deja vu vein started throbbing as once again, I turned out the cathedral close and the Irish gobshite and Swedish accomplice were doing their trapeze thing yet again. I almost couldn't believe what I was seeing, and double backed immediately, and went back down the town. This to-ing and fro-ing went on far too long, to break up the tedium I went into Blockbuster and told the woman behind the counter that she should definitely watch Funny Games because it was really good. It is really good, but I was worried she might not like it very much, hunt me down, and break my legs with a golf club. She seemed impressed when I said "it's got the bald guy from The Lives of Others in it" as if suggesting the two films were in any way similar.

Out on the street, there was a fantastic act calling themselves The Urban Playground, which basically revolved around six people dancing, jumping, doing acrobatics and basically acting like human fleas over the top of some makeshift scaffolding planted steadily in the middle of the street. In other words, free running, break dancing and six shades of awesomeness, for 45 minutes. Terrific stuff, and probably the only act of the entire weekend which stepped out of the very pip-pip hippy ethos, and all the better for it. The only downside was the soundtrack music, which had "written especially for the show" all over it, combination of diabolical trance breakbeat guff, and a child with pro-tools and a copy of Exit Planet Dust. Rubbish, but I'd watch these cats doing turning somersaults and backflipping over their own shoulder blades wearing dinner jackets, to the sound of Greensleeves if it works. I'd rather see that, actually, with all of the gung-ho urban warriors decked out as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. But that was not to be, and I walked back up town to watch the bloody Scottish woman again who was set up opposite the buttercross. The Indian chap from yesterday was back at the bottom of town. I felt like I was stuck in a nightmare set in a hall of mirrors, and it was starting to make me feel uncomfortable. Walking into the Abbey Grounds to find that the Train Station people had set up there and were halfway through their act, was the last straw, even though there was a barbecue set up in the far corner of the Abbey Grounds and the smell of minted lamb and DIY sausages was steaming across the flower beds. There was also some ludicrous sideshows that weren't there the previous day, which cost far too much to take part in, and the prizes included a variety of plastic guns. BROKEN BRITAIN. I went home.

I had planned to go back in to watch some of the evening performances, but a quick scan of a programme I picked up told me that all I was going to see was The Urban Playground again only in the rain, and although I was secretly tempted by the idea of seeing them all slip up on the wet pavement and break their necks, doing a You've Been Framed, but I thought better. The alternative were a wanko jazz band, and slitting my wrists. I took option D and stayed at home and watched the rain from the spare bedroom in the house until my parents got home. I'd love to say that the Hat Fair experience of 2008 wasn't a let down or a disappoint, but I can't lie about it. After nine years, I was expecting better, but as I sat in the spare bedroom and logged on and off the Internet like an indecisive sheepdog, I realised that the Hat Fair was never good in the first place, and all the interest and excitement was entirely of my own creation, and the natural instinct to believe that things get better in time. A different matter altogether, but The Truck Festival in Oxford, I went to that in 2001, and then every year until 2005. By the last time I went, it was big and busy enough to have extra fields for camping, and bands people had heard of playing. This year, the Lemonheads are playing. In my naivety, I thought The Hat Fair might have blown up too, and be bigger, more exciting, and terrific. All that was improved was a few stalls set up in a car park, and some sort of pyrotechnics shit that I missed because I thought it was on the Saturday night, and it wasn't. The sheer fact that the highlight of the weekend was a solo pub crawl that largely ignored all facets of the Hat Fair, and then listening to the Durutti Column, tells the whole story. In the evening, My parents drove me out to Sainsbury's for shopping. The whole store was full of attractive twenty-something couples buying organic olive oil and red wine vinegar and I felt sick and wanted to leave.

Sixteen Days (Part 8)

The Hat Fair is an annual event that takes places on the streets of Winchester every July. The timing of the Hat Fair always used to be totally erratic, to the extent that I haven't known when it's been happening, or at least, supposed to be happening, for a long, long time. Now it's every first week of July, as the hundreds of banners, bunting and bonus bollocks up around town barks at you every three steps. I think the last time I actually went to the hat fair was in the year 2000, I missed the Friday because I'd just come back from New York. It was one of those holidays where you're away for very short time, often away for less than a week, but upon returning, felt a lot longer. But I went on the Saturday, and drank Smirnoff Ice in the Cathedral Grounds which you're categorically not allowed to do. So this year was my first Hat Fair experience in 8 years, my first Hat Fair Friday in 9. What's the Hat Fair? Oh, The Hat Fair is, to boil it down to as simple an explanation as possible, it's basically a crap version of South By Southwest, only with rubbish jugglers and acrobats and street magicians instead of bands. Or a festival comprising exclusively of the shit bits of Glastonbury. The name is derived from the fact the performers pass around a hat at the end of the performance and look at you menacingly until you cough up your dinner money. It's basically organised bullying by terrifying hippies with fire clubs and organic sausages and a fun family atmosphere. I walked into town expecting the worst.

Eight years is a long time in showbusiness. For example, since the last Hat Fair I've stopped being even remotely impressed with juggling or stilt walking or playing a banjo with your toenails. You can't go through the best part of a decade of inner turmoil and heart-sinking emotional angst, and still expect a "hoots-mon" Scottish bint juggling balls and riding a unicycle in high heels to cut the mustard, and the first performer I saw did not. Part of the schtick with street performing is getting the audience involved, and first thing on a Friday morning, the Hat Fair dead zone, nobody was in the mood, and although the lady in question was arguably competent at all her tricks, nobody could give a flying mother fuck, least of all me. Interestingly, The Hat Fair has become a lot more organised than I remember. It could be they've always done this, in which case I apologise to all concerned, but actually having designated people in certain areas or on certain roads, like tents and stages at a festival, was commendable, although there was a free-for-all in a lot of the other areas for buskers to just turn up. The epicentre of Hat Fair life though, is in the now tee-total Cathedral Grounds. The detoxing of what used to be the most beautiful and historically fascinating pub garden in the entire world, is a real shame and I hope they change it back soon. Anyway, although half of the grounds are dedicated to allowing the next generation of crummy plates-spinners to acquire their art in a gigantic circus skills free-for-all, the rest has various 'pitches' where various performers do their thing. These vary from the very basic (Man balances a broomstick on another broomstick) to the unnerving (man plays on a set of decks whilst a "monkey" (dwarf in a suit) dances in a box) although the two main areas were dedicated to two static acts. The first of these had erected a large set of scaffolding, and did a very by-numbers trapeze and balancing act, but I found it enjoyable, because the woman kept talking in Swedish for no reason, and literally didn't stop smiling the entire 45 minutes, even when her act dictated her to be spinning hula hoops whilst standing on a table and showing off her pants. I though she was ludicrously attractive, but with the sun in my eyes and standing about 50 metres away, Her accomplice, a plucky Irish gobshite with sideburns, was an absolute twat, and although he was clearly the stooge for a lot her more obvious talents, he did a rum turn as a ringleader. Best trick of all though, was how most of the jokes were clearly unsuitable for children, and Irish gobshite did say "piss off" at one point. Excellent. The other main act in the grounds were called The Bash Street Train Station, which I thought sounded a) libellous, and b) rubbish, but I went and had a look anyway, because there was nothing else to do by this point, and they'd built and entire stage up to look like a train station, and there was a bizarre man who looked like a cross between Mr Leach, my old head of year, Tony Robinson as Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth, and a bespectacled onion walking around in a green cardigan. Whatever the premise was, it was completely lost on me, but it essentially involved three silent comedians who all played about ten characters each, bumbling around the set getting head over the head with suitcases and hanging off balconies and signals and similar things. There was a plot of sorts, involving the theft of the Mona Lisa by some gangsters with violins that can only be stopped by the patrons of Bash Street Station. The entire thing was soundtracked, thrillingly, by a bearded man with an accordion, who not only played the accordion non-stop for the entire hour, but also did all the sound effects - laughing, trains chuffing in an out of the station, the twitterings of an old later, French people saying "hee haw" and even a few spooky "ooooohs" and "aaarghs!" when the gangster was on stage. The whole thing was borderline lunacy, and hence why it was absolutely incredible. It was a cross between Nosferatu and Zzzap! Also brilliant.

There are a few other pitches dotted around the town, much fewer on the Friday than the Saturday. The Buttercross, which for anyone who's not familiar with Winchester, is a statue monument thing that nobody really understands apart from that you can sit on it. From here, I watched Haggis and Charlie, These two literal clowns, are Hat Fair stalwarts, and I believe they've been a feature of every Hat Fair since it started in er, 1876. Quite fantastically, I sat down, and within five seconds their act started, and it was, and I'm not joking, the EXACT SAME ACT as it was in 1999. I couldn't bring myself to watch them; they're a slightly formidable sight as well, the type that would punch you in the face if you accidentally trod on their flower bed. I went back towards the cathedral and watched an Indian man trying to get people to donate their watches for his magic trick. It was very awkward, because nobody was interested in donating anything to him, especially not their money. I didn't stay long watching him either, Instead, I watched a youngish boy who looked like Andy Warhol wearing a Gonzalez t shirt mucking about with some mini scaffolding and a hat with spikes in it. I figured he was setting up his act, but by the time he'd got ready, I was getting cramp in my foot so I got walking again. I'd run out of things to watch, because the sordid trapeze woman and the train station were already going again. Fed up with how little activity there was, I walked via the Colebrook Street car park, which is an area I'm sue didn't used to be dedicated to Hat Far shennanigans, but all it had in it were some miserable looking craft stalls and a few streamers strung up over the lamp posts and rubbish bins. Not inspiring, but the idea of an ice cream van and a maypole irritating a load of drivers (there was no sign anywhere saying the car park was closed until you got right up to the barrier) warmed my heart. Standing and watching a procession of pissed off drivers approach the entrance, silently swearing and turning back into the side street to try try try again, it was a more entertaining sideshow than most of the buskers I'd seen so far. I went home.

The evening was one I'd planned all week. My parents were due back the following night, so Friday evening was really the last chance I had to get wasted in town, and then come home, cook pizza, smoke in the garden and throw my fag ends over the wall, watch TV really loudly and then fall asleep on the sofa listening to the Durutti Column for a while so I made the most of it. I decided to do a mini-tour of some of my favourite pubs in Winchester. It didn't quite work out that way, but my intentions were good. The first port of call was The Railway, which is figurehead, surely, in the memories of everyone who was ever a teenager in Winchester; the only real live music venue (although Laura Viers playing at the 'Discovery Centre' (Library) is a new pretender to the throne) and centrepiece of the alteno-loser scene. This scene was in full flow as I arrived and sat in the garden. The old guard was still hanging about, I was served at the bar by James aka 'Bollocks', who fits somewhere into the peg holes of my memory, and he did say "..John, isn't it?" but time has been unkind on my memories of 'Bollocks', I'm sure he wouldn't have said that whenever it was I was supposed to know him well. Anyway, the garden was full of fucksticks in dapperwear, all looking sufficiently like a bonsai George Lamb in a Trilby. I sat and read The Fly, which is freely available by the dozen from The Railway. The notably pisspoor writer that annoyed me the last time I read The Fly (which was the last time I was in The Railway, interestingly enough) has now left, but the quality of features and writing are still shocking. If anyone can find me a band with less personality than Black Kids, then I'd like to hear all about them. For some reason, I had two drinks in the Railway, embarrassingly because a girl turned up with a suitcase and a book and sat on a bench facing mine about ten metres away, and I naturally thought that if I was twice and drunk she'd definitely come over and invite me to take here away to Sweden because she'd already packed. This didn't happen. My next port of call was The Exchange, which I loathe to describe as an old haunt because I think I've only been there twice before. It has quite a tarted up garden, and the jukebox was on ridiculously loud and you could hear it from the street outside. I didn't mind, because rather than the usual pip-pip anarchy that starts a party normally in town, like Hard Fi and Kasabian, they were hammering "I Need Some Fine Wine, and You, You Need to be Nicer" by The Cardigans at top volume. The pub was boring though, and I had to sit on a table right next to a voluminous oaf who couldn’t stop putting forward to his drinking partners his own manifesto for attracting more customers to the golf course he worked at, which is, to quote him "the most affordable round in, well, in England". He probably rakes the bunkers. I then went through some back streets and alleys, and carefully resisting the urge to go into the Old Vine and shit on their decor, but opted for The Eclipse instead. The Old Vine, back in Victorian days, used to be called The Sun, and The Eclipse was named as such to say "yeah, we're better than The Sun" so The Sun had to change its name to something else again. This rivalry is now sadly over, because The Old Vine can go fuck itself, and so The Eclipse it was. My favourite memories of The Eclipse include sitting in there a few days before Christmas in 2002, doing the NME Christmas crossword, as well as a couple of nights of the summer of 2003 where I sat inside after work and read the sleeve notes of the CDs I'd bought. It's a nice, small, friendly pub that was tonight packed to the rafters with Hat Fair celebrities, including the Irish gobshite and his Swedish accomplice, who was significantly less attractive, decked up in a tracksuit and a boyfriend on her arm. I sat on a table outside, and a succession of other customers politely embarrassed me by taking away all the other chairs from the table so I couldn't even pretend someone else was going to sit with me.

The last pub I went to was the same place I saw the football on Sunday. It felt like weeks ago, not five days, and as I looked around and stood under the balcony in the rain looking around at the awful people there, the categorically unrepresentative misfits and high collared teens. I looked in disdain as they took photos and talked about putting the photos up on Facebook. Then I went outside and did the same. I was going to stop at The Mash Tun on the way home, which is a lovely little pub for dreadlocked art students and dog breathed loons, and where I spent New Years Eve 2004. But it wasn't there any more. In its place was a Tapas Bar, which looked like it has about as much soul as one of the Chicken Satay excuses for food that they shove on a stick and plant on your plate there. I went home in the rain and watched TV really loud, smoked in the garden and threw the fag ends over the wall, listened to the Durutti Column and passed out on the sofa.

Sixteen Days (Part 7)

Today I really wanted to go to Southampton. I think everyone has to say that once in their life and mean it. Now that I could walk again, and inspired by my journey down to Portsmouth, I decided to go the other big city of Hampshire to have a walk round and to poke my nose in the horrible areas and take unrepresentative photos of how crap it was, hopefully with yet more pictures of ugly 70s architecture with the sun in the background, for a change. I've been to Southampton a lot, lot more in recent years, simply because it's on the train route home from Cardiff. If I'm getting the train to Winchester, I have to change at Southampton, and because the train station there is relatively close to the town centre, unlike Bristol, then it's no big deal to have a walk around because the trains are invariably shite. Also, because of it's proximity to Winchester, and Chandlers Ford were some of my friends used to live, then I've seen more of it and lived in it a lot more than Portsmouth or anywhere else in the south. This of course, doesn't mean it's much of a city, it's familiarity through necessity. Southampton was the site of my first gig, when I was 13, and also the site of my first kiss, four years later. Both took place at the Joiners Arms, a notorious and slightly famous venue just off the main stretch of town. The band were Joyrider, an Irish indie rock band who had one hit, a cover of 'Rush Hour'. The kiss was with a fucking idiot slag girl Rachel Stamp fan and like nearly every incidence of my life that involved the word 'kiss', I'd much rather forget it as I'm sure she did, three seconds later. There have been many varied and boring events of my life that have taken place in Southampton; meeting Coldplay, getting drunk on the bandstand in the park listening to Violator by Depeche Mode, sitting the same bandstand listening to Use Your Illusion 2 before gigs at The Joiners, someone trying to strangle me in the toilets of the Rhino Club, losing my phone for the first time. My orthodontist who described my fucked up teeth as 'the most bizarre he'd even seen' was based in Southampton, on Bedford Place, a road that looks like it has pound coins melted in the pavement. I'm sure there are many others, although the highlight of any trip is of course, going down the subway that Craig David mentions in '7 Days'

Luckily, although not unexpectedly, the bus to Southampton is still running, and running so regularly that you can pretty much guarantee there'll be one waiting in the bus station almost as soon as you arrive, a collectors item, and also a relief. After a debacle involving my realisation that there isn't a bloody cash point any further down town than Abbey National anymore now that, and I'm away of how much I sound like a stuck record, because they've moved the fucking post office, there isn't one anywhere near the market, I was glad to find a place to sit. Although Wintonian pedants will argue that have just got on the bus right outside Barclay's, but one of the reasons I love the Southampton bus, is the fact that it's a double decker, and if you get on at the bus station, you can guarantee the top row front seats, which as any fool knows, is the only way the travel double decker. I achieved this, and I quite like the ride through town on the top deck, mainly because the drivers don't think twice about piling straight into the trees as any given opportunity, and as the bus swings out of town through St Cross, Compton, where Dr Dre lives, and Otterbourne, which probably doesn't have any Otters, but the residents like to give the impression that the place is teaming with them, since there's a pub called The Otter, and all the signs have pictures of otters on. My friend Tom used to live in Otterbourne, and we went and sat in the woods a few times and everyone got drunk. I think this was during my short lived period of being tee total, as I can't remember it very well. The bus goes through Chandler's Ford at lightning pace, and before long you're on the main stretch into Southampton. It's called The Avenue, and it's fucking nightmare. One of the worst roads in the whole world. It's the sort of highway of utter ineptitude that's about five miles long, and has to have traffic lights every three metres, including those hulking, horrible overhead ones. At any given opportunity, you can look out of the window and see upwards of eight red or green lights. It usually takes half the journey to get to the other end, but today I think the Gods were smiling, because I was in the city centre. Much has changed in the centre of Southampton over recent years, although nothing in the last five years or so, as far as I can tell. The biggest event was the building of the West Quay shopping centre, a building so gargantuan you can probably see it from space. It's bigger than the entire high street and the other two fuck-arsed shopping centres crumpled together. It's a frankly beautifully vile retail extravaganza, it's like one of those out-of-town wallet-suckers like Cribbs Causeway or that one in Sheffield everyone goes on about, only this one's slap bang right in the centre of town, and boy howdy is the rest of the town still struggling to come to terms with it,

First warning sign was where the bus stopped, near the Guildhall. I can't remember if it's been like this for a while, but there used be two big department stores lined up next to each other in this area, a C+A Fabrics, and a shitty affair called Tyrell and Greens which I used to dread because it's where mum always bought my school trousers so I had to suffer the annual loss of dignity by being pulled by my ear into the schoolwear and had to try on trousers, when all I wanted to do was go in Our Price and flick through the 49p singles. I'm glad it's gone. The other noticeable absence is that the McDonald's has closed down. Seriously, what town has a McDonald's close down. I used to think Winchester was outrageous because our Burger King didn't last, but no High Street McDonald's, something's seriously up. I'll sympathise with Ron and the Hamburglar though, there is still a restauranty-cafe-y thing on the stop floor of the new centre, but you do have to worry. Another flagging point is the state of the Bargate Centre, which is the third biggest shopping centre in the city centre. The fourth biggest is an utterly ridiculous building called the East Street Shopping centre, which I kid you not, only has one open shop in the entire building, and that's a knock-off back-of-a-lorry furniture giveaway which is impossible to even look at without feeling like the furniture's having more fun that you are. The Bargate though, was never phenomenally popular and vibrant, it was mostly a place for alternative kids and college drop outs to gaze wonkily at surf shoes and loiter around the spikey belt shop. Now it's even more barren, the only activity in the entire place was on the basement floor where tattooed banjo fingered web geeks were hammering away at World of Warcraft and gobbling milkshakes. Any other corner, it was like being in a mausoleum. The only shops I went in were a clothes shop, that was either called "NME fashion" or "Closing Down Sale" because the signs were of equal size but either way it was awful and appeared to sell nothing but ugly boxer shorts with cartoons on. I thought, not unreasonably, being an "NME fashion" shop I thought they might sell band t shirts or - here's a crazy idea - CDs, but no The other shop I went in was a book shop, that took me far too long to twig was a Christian bookshop. I think it was the fact it sold DVDs through me, but on closer expection, they were things like Amazing Grace with Ioan Gruffydd, and those ridiculous Bible Stories films with Gary Oldman as Pontius Pilate. I U-turned of there pretty fast. Not because I've got anything against Christian bookshops, but because I thought the woman at the counter might start talking to me about Christian bookshop things.

I did go into the East Street Shopping Centre, for about three seconds. Not even Forbidden Planet is down in that area of town, so there's absolutely no reasons to go there. The place makes the Bargate centre look like the Trocidero. I was actually embarrassed to be in there, especially when, laughably, I saw a security guard. I like to think that he'll remember me, the only customer in the building, on Thursday July 3rd. I wonder if he works Saturday. I ended up going across the park to the Joiners, which felt closer to town that it used to be, but then I guess most of the times I went there, I got dropped off in a car rather than walking across town. It looked identical to how it always was, but a quick scan of the forthcoming gigs neatly summed up the changing of the guard as far as live music in the Hampshire goes. I think I recognised three bands on the entire list, and two of them were playing together. I think the era for one-hit-wonder indie bands and girls with plastic bracelets and crap glam rock shows are long gone. I doubt I'd have gone to anything listed for the entire of June or July, even if I lived nearby. It's become like a lot of Barfly's, all run by promoters who don't actively seek bands, they just seem to wait for bands to roll up and demand to play. That's why the entire listing was clogged up with local shite. It was disappointing, but after that I walked through a shitty market and through a shitty housing estate with a shitty playground, and everything was alright. My overall aim for the aim was to find Ocean Village, which was a marina-based retail and entertainment shitfest before the days that marina-based retail and entertainment shitfests were the done thing. There's also a crappy Cineworld there with only five screens. The last time I went down that neck of the woods was in the year 2000, after going to the dentist. I remember it being awful, so I figured a good photo opportunity would arise. The problem was, as was the problem last time, that I couldn't find the bloody thing, so after bungling around various uninspiring bits of dockland, and then got hopelessly lost in a new residential area that was so posh and stinking of money and yachts that I started to feel nauseous and ill, and after walking the entire perimeter of one building I almost gave up, but then I realised that the cinema was exactly where I'd just been, but for some idiotic reason they've faced it away from the main road, away from the road you walk down to get into the main area, and even after that, they've put a fucking tree up in front of the entrance. I'm not just finding excuses for my own idiocy, I'm finding excuses for their idiocy. But I found it, and I went in, and I saw Hancock, and it was shit. They were playing trendy US college rock in the foyer though, but I couldn't work out what it was, and the chewing girl at the box office said "unlimited card?" like she was asking me to do a shit on the desk. It's always weird when you go to a different Cineword having spent the best part of a MILLION YEARS only going to one particular one, and I don't know if the one in Cardiff is like, the best Cineworld in the entire chain, but all the others I've seen have been pretty poor

My foot started falling off when I got out of the cinema, so I headed back into town I cheated and got the bus, which had just gone up to £1.25 to cover the rise in fuel prices, although the sign on the lamp post assured me that this was only the second price hike in seven years. Nice to know. I can see why the bus services in Cardiff don't do that, because their prices have gone up seven times in the last two years, and they don't give you fucking change, and the bus drivers like to stop in lay bys to go in shops and buy cigarettes. They don't put any of that on a sign on a lamp post. The bus dropped me off just outside West Quay, so even though I was now visibly limping, I couldn’t resist a glance over of the cavalcade of retail extremities that is West Quay. For about a minute, I didn't even pause as I went up the escalator and through John Lewis, where I then realised I'd gone the wrong way and had to double back on myself, which meant the same woman from the haberdashery saw me dragging my right foot towards two different 'out' doors, but eventually I got out, and after wasting yet another 30 minutes of my life at the bus stop near Bedford Place as for the tenth time in a row, the first listed bus never turned up. In a day of few surprises, I shouldn't have expected anything less.