"Hot town, Summer in the City, back of my neck dirty and gritty...Doesn't seem to be a shadow in the city"

Which city ? London ? No, not here in Waterworld. It's been raining so heavily it can't be that long before I am spouting gills and flopping around with a pair of webbed feet. I thought the evolutionary journey was out of the sea, on to the beach, head down, keep going forward, not turn back. Someone turn the Sun on...

Resurrecting the Champ
Time for me to big someone up. There's a two minute or so trailer of a film written by a good friend of mine behind this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sw65CFrL1MY link. Go on, go for it....

Whoever this shoe fits I will marry. By the way, I don't think of this all the time, just this thought popped up in my mind some days ago watching a woman struggle to free one of her shoe heels that had slipped into the meshed grating of a street drain. In there tighter than if it had been caught in a vice. So much that I wondered whether the man on his knees trying to help her might have to lift the whole thing out, or break the heel off even. Whether it was just down to sheer persistence, or a canny twist here and there, he somehow managed to extricate both shoe and heel (and still together). Not the deftest manoeuvre I've ever seen, but for a crowded, hectic street in the City of London, pretty good. Don't think I could have done it. Probably a feeble wrestle with it, then the equally as feeble "think you're looking at getting a new pair. Have you got any trainers with you?"

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the performance will begin in five minutes"

Time for someone to fold away the Guardian, tricky crossword, pity, nearly done, but it can be finished off on the train later. Another leans over to refill a wine glass. Further along the row, the last minute call to the child minder is coming to an end: " yes, not too late...that's fine... are they asleep yet?...oh good". Someone slips a choc-ice wrapper under the seat. Blackberries turned off, skirts smoothed, hair flicked back, throats cleared.

The lights fade. To a rising murmur of excitement, the entertainers slip out from the wings, striding to their positions; one hurries to the front of the stage, and with a certain aplomb, takes the microphone, pauses for a moment to savour the tangible apprehension, and then welcomes the audience:

"WAKE UP, MOTHERFUCKERS, WE'RE THE STOOGES, GET UP AND FUCKING DANCE !!!!"

Maybe most of the audience were middle class, united by grey hair (or no hair), mortgages, child raising, organic food, carbon footprint conundrums and sensible shoes, but you can't bury the punk sensibility, close the door, it squeezes underneath, bar the gate, it'll try another part of the fence. And was it out last night, full force collective. Even if it was hard to reconcile the image of portly, wattle necked spectators as the grooving, full-blooded, full on new wavers we all tried so hard to be twenty, thirty years ago.

Iggy Pop and the Stooges seared the walls of the Royal Festival Hall. My ears still humming as I write, not the constant peal of bells it was earlier today. Now it's more what I imagine someone in a decompression chamber might experience, burping, popping, like the dimples on a ping-pong ball being pushed out.

We were right at the back. Good thing in a way. Iggy invited the mosh pit up on to the stage. Blokes in suits dancing, women in frocks, people headbanging, or doing the grandparents at a wedding reception dance.

Great gig. I need my ears back in some sort of working order however.

The post box did n't hop over and grab me by the lapels this morning, but it did get me thinking that if only they could talk.

Think of all the different letters that have passed through them. Year after year. Imagine. More so than walls, they'll have been continual silent witnesses to the whole spectrum of messy human emotion.

Unwittingly privy to heartbreak: "Why, what's wrong with me...it can't be over, no, it can't...no, no, no!". Or consolation: "So sorry at this time of loss....our hearts are with you...if there's anything we can do". To letters of joy, without doubt: "..gave birth... healthy... an easy labour.....delighted...". Bureaucratic: "....please bear aware that....on the 14th you are requested to...". Or a warning: " we require payment by...or...". Commercial :"...as requested I include a deposit for...." The simple chatty letter to a friend: "....and so I told them....next month we're going....how are you?" All human life in such a modest setting.

I once travelled all the way from Los Angeles to Boston by train. Took three days. There is no better way to encourage piles than to sit virtually motionless in the same seat for an unnaturally long period. At least when I travelled across Russia some years later I walked around, up and down the corridor mainly. On this occasion, nothing. I could have been an astronaut; except for one function (guess), I lived, slept, ate and drank in one air-conditioned place. But I did change my clothes, though, I got standards.

My Nick Hornby moment.

Sometime ago I let things get the better of me and did something I've not done before in words, I wrote down a list of books I felt worth reading, those books that I've battered people's ears with, spoken in italics, emphasised in bold, and stabbed my fingers with conviction in the air that these are the BOOKS.

I tried to apply the brakes when I got to ten (why is ten the default maximum these days for a list, incidentally - certainly seems that like), they failed to hold and I skidded and went over, seriously over the line. Individual choice when it comes to books - just as any choice - is deeply subjective. One person's meat and so on. Therefore what I evangelise about, bang the gavel down on, comes without any guarantee; you may enjoy or wrinkle your brows out, or just ask why in that head-shaking way. Each of these books, nevertheless, has for whatever reason stopped me dead in my tracks. Transformational literature in that regard, but don't go looking in the self-help section of the local bookstore, they're not that kind of book.

Don Quixote
Affectionate and endearing, for all those prey to chivalrous delusions. You are out there, are n't you...are n't you?

Things Fall Apart

Dues finally paid to Chinua Achebe with the Man Booker prize going his way. Fantastic novel.

Skintight / Double Whammy / Tourist Season

Crime thrillers but unlike anything you might expect: eco aware and very funny. In fact, I would n't stop with just these three, I'd freely recommend about everything Carl Hiaasen has written.

If this is a Man / If not now when.

What the human spirit is capable of doing to ensure raw survival. Bluntly, essential reading. Primo Levi spent a year in a concentration camp.

Sorrows of Young Werther

A love sick misery guts; terrific writing.

Herzog.

You have no Saul Bellow on your bookshelves, none? What kind of reader are you ! How can we talk ? My favourite book by my favourite author.

One of Ours

By Willa Cather, where the prose reads like Keats.

Babbit.

I remember reading this at university, being enraptured and begging my tutor to devote a tutorial to it. The memory alone.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

Years and years since I read this, no idea now of the plot; all I'm able to recall is that I never wanted it to finish. Can't beat a bit of Mario Vargas Llosa. Make sure this goes into your shopping trolley.

Manhattan '45

By Jan Morris. To write just one line of prose like hers is all that I ask of this life.

America Day by Day

THE book about the US; I ought to know, I've read most of them. There's also a very moving, haunting memoir of the last days of her mother by Simone de Beavoir that's worth getting hold of.

Anything by Tobias Woolf and Raymond Carver

Anything is n't the name of a book of theirs: it means read ANYTHING that has either name on it. The prose, the prose...

Confessions of Zeno

When I first moved to London, I spent time working in a West End fast food restaurant. Bored, fed up, over-tired and facing utter intellectual ruin, the only thing that got me and several others through was to talk about books, and as all of my colleagues were foreign, I, by chance, had an unexpected and very welcome introduction to the world of European Literature. Stop number one on that journey (and still going strong even now) was this book by Italo Svevo. I've never smoked, but this will make anyone give up, and, no, it's not that kind of confession.

House of Mirth

I'll stick my neck out here: read as much Edith Wharton as you can lay your hands on.

Christ stopped at Eboli

So there I'll be in my dotage stood in the middle of the Shepherds Bush roundabout alternately haranguing passersby to lay their hands on the Clash's London Calling, Springsteen's The River, absolutely anything by Saul Bellow, and then this book. It is that kind of book.

Bonjour Tristesse.

Francois Sagan wrote this when she was 18....unfair to be so good so young....when's my turn

Therese Raquin

Or how I got turned on to reading Zola. I read this in a day. Could not put it down. Murky, unremitting naturalism.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte's masterpiece. The other book that I read in a day and which I cannot return to; it's forever crystallised in my mind as unsurpassable...and if I go back, well, then, I might see cracks...

Property

I firmly believe that to properly understand history, it's imperative to experience it through the eyes of a fiction writer. History and it's effects have to be understood holistically, which means attempting to wrestle with motivations and individual psychologies. Property does this perfectly. How hideous the slave trade. Valerie Martin fully deserved the Orange Prize for this.

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

Ladies, slip a copy into your handbags, Gentleman, put this into your back pocket. Both: this'll see you through good times, bad times...

A Confederacy of Dunces
You're on the bookshop equivalent of supermarket sweep with two minutes to fill your trolley. Get this in there. The funniest book I've ever read and at the same time uniquely sad
You can breath out now, all done. I reckon this list can hold it's own against any other comparable list comfortably. But, I've not been compiling a fight card. Reading is idiosyncratic and as I wrote earlier, one person's meat is n't necessarily another's cut of choice. Enjoy.

I wonder what Euclid and Pythagoras would have made of this. I actually experienced geometric weather yesterday stood on the platform at Blackburn station: horizontal wind, vertical rain. Pure right angles.

Incredible. What next ? Elliptical heat? Rhomboidal fog? Polygonal hail?

The next step in personal finance has to be an ATM that tells it like it is, plainly and clearly, and in a language that's easily understood, so there's absolutely no margin for error. No bland welcome message popping up on screen seconds after it's ingested your card, no solicitious "what would you like to do today ?" appeal. No, none of that. Time for messages that actually mean something, that really have something to say.

Tough, hard messages for tough, hard times. That's it: an ATM that dispenses tough love. You go up to it, tap your numbers in, choose a transaction, and you get something like this: " Want to do that? You do, Ok, then make sure there's a doctor near by or at least take a tranquiliser because when you see what you've got left in there, you're going need help, it's going to hurt " Or what about this injunction: "Friend, stay in and catch up on sleep, because you are going nowhere till payday, and I mean that, nowhere" Then again, there's this: "Checked all your accounts, the loose change pocket in those jeans in the laundry bin, lifted up the sofa cushions. Scrabbled around in the cat litter. Nothing. Do yourself a favour, forget it..."

Speaking clocks, ovens that turn themselves on and off, washing machines that pick the right cycle, we have the technology, so is an intuitive ATM that far behind? Really I could have done with one this morning. However hard I wished, that was no coding error on screen, that damn decimal figure was in the right place.

What unites people in this country more than the English language is the never slaked thirst to leave and go somewhere else. Usually abroad. Make that always abroad. I'm no different. I've long day-dreamed about a rive gauche atelier or NYC wooden floored apartment. Even about renovating a ruin in the French countryside, except I'm no great shakes as a builder (no shakes, really).

What I do not want under any circumstance is to be marooned in some Roast Beef ghetto in the South of Spain. Where the Spanish have been run out of town by my aggressive, obese, boorish kinsmen. Where high culture means being surounded by a mouldering pile of week old tabloid papers, drinking a pint in a bar called The Horse and Crown, a widescreen TV on in the background replaying premier league game on Sky Sports, with a big plate of bacon and eggs waiting for me on the counter.

No, not at all. My inner snob would n't allow it.

Bilko, I know you're desperate to go out...I do honestly. I'm not letting the other one out simply because they have special privileges or bought favour, it's not like that, there are no trusties. This is n't a prison. Although, I agree if the full facts were not known, it could definitely seem like that: fed the same food twice a day, only water to drink, and confined to quarters. Taken out of context then, none of that reads as if it's exactly been penned by a Human Rights activist, I admit.

I can't let you out, you have to stay in, you're still in recovery (now it sounds like I'm running an AA Clinic). Don't forget you had an operation. You hurt your hip. Remember? I definitely do, it happened on my watch, though I've no idea how. We could do with talking about how that happened, except we can't. For obvious reasons.

Camping by the back door hour after hour, and then putting one of your limbs between the door and the frame to stop me closing it. Nothing, nothing says how much you want to go outside...Weasel words I know, but I'm only following orders...I am... I am... !

And then to turn round when I'm out in the garden to see two luminous yellow - green eyes peering plaintively through the perspex of the cat flap, the pad of your paw held against it...I have a heart. I do, believe me.

Just hang on a couple of days, get the all clear that you're healed, then it's back to business, you can go outside freely, and do whatever it is cats do. A few more days that's all.

If only we could talk to animals. That's got to be one of the next great scientific breakthroughs. To look this cat full in the eye, have him seated on the couch, where I could properly explain why he's not allowed out, that he's temporarily confined to barracks for a reason - he hurt himself, and he's not been forcibly removed of his rights as a Cat to roam or loll in the Sun. Be so much easier. Take some of the guilt away I'm feeling, certainly.

"Spontaneous ...really, you got to rehearse that...not easy."

I know someone whose knees knock every time she runs into someone in her place of work. Or did. In the way of the rom-com movies, he's leaving, so the ethics of workplace romance don't need looking at it.

Sticking with the movie trope, the day he left, they had a heart to heart, their first, the unburdener of hopes; up till then everything had been articulated through red-faces, stammerings and palpitations. From the snippets she's given me of that conversation, and in some ways it must have been like one between two infatuated teeny-boppers, he's effectively given her clearance to land, priority at the baggage carousel.

She's been out of the dating game for a while. Not on the bench, waiting to be called on, no, she was in a long term relationship, which came to a grinding shudder. No idea what to do, or what the rules are (there are none as far as I know, it's down to hope).

I'm called on for advice. Flattering to be approached, but she'd really have been better off, seeking someone out with experience. I'm great on theory, unbeatable, when it comes to homework, I'm your man...just actually field-testing it all....putting the hours of study into practice...well...

Anyway, rely on being natural, yourself, that's the first thing, I said to her, threw the usual line or two that everyone hears at some point: if it does n't work, don't worry, there's more fish etc...

Anything else ? Slaughter a goat to propiate the Gods ? No, not quite that. Picture it as an audition, have some lines ready just in case it's ebbing when you want it flowing. Be prepared, rehearse being spontaneous.

Dating advice provided by a single man in his mid-forties. I see no connection.

I have a good friend who would n't blush or shuffle his feet if you asked him what he loves doing. It's making music. It's that simple.

I've been listening this evening and it's left me in a dinner jazz, acoustic soul state of mind. Hear for yourself: http://blog.myspace.com/leemurraymusic

Music from deep within that tells stories and paints sketches. Think of winelight and conversations that slip and stretch long after the sun has set. Impressions and heartbeats from just a voice, a guitar and keyboards.

My hair...where did it go? Did I say something and it decided enough was enough? Let's talk, sure we can sort this out, just a misunderstanding, got to have been...

Anyone handed in a clump of very dark brown hair at the Baker Street Lost Property office?

Owner looks for hair, last seen...well...some time ago....reward offered.

"Tell me again...I've got triple stranded DNA?" How? When? I..I..I'm too old for this...

What am I going to do? Well, this: stop peering at what people are reading on the Tube. That's what. I have this habit, a quick glance, really, no more than that, of trying to see just what the commuter in the seat next to me is reading.

Only happens when I'm bored, or have n't anything to read, or like this evening, distracted from reading by a couple of people having a very loud conversation. Never done overtly either; I don't ask them to:" hurry up I've finished that page, or you're reading that, don't bother, I'll tell you the end" No, none of that. All above board, two second glimpse. Done.

Like I say, partly it's down to boredom; little bit of curiousity - "humm, not read that, looks interesting"; perhaps a touch of reader's anxiety - "why have n't I read that!" I know it happens the other way, plenty of times, I've caught sight of someone eyeballing the book or paper I'm reading. It's the Tube, different social rules. Normal service resumes the moment we decant from the train

Catch sight of a couple of single-sided pages covered in 12pt Courier, where terms like CUT TO and DISSOLVE, amongst others stand out, and everyone's name is CAPITALISED before a line or two of dialogue, then I'm like a hunting dog in the fields. Got to have a peek. Read a couple of screen plays myself, so feel ever so remotely connected to a kind of script reading freemasonry. Person next to me was thumbing a script on the way home this evening. Katherine Mansfied has her moments, unquestionably enjoy her short stories (that's who I'm reading at the moment) just I see a script and that's it, I'm that errant husband of a reader, I have to stray even if it's only moment, and this is how I picked up this gem of dialogue, the piece that kicks off this entry.

I'm waiting for an answer, an explanation, from anyone: why are so many novels written in the present tense? Is it a creative writing school diktat? Or fashion, this year's Hula hoop?

I like writing that's matured in the barrel, been laid down in the cellar, and this means past tense please.

From opera to arena and back again. That's my working day, imagine it's yours too, everyone of us probably. Be it at the helm of a laptop, or a trawler; piloting a blackberry, or simply picking them; jump-starting a stalled heart in the operating theatre, or re-wiring a broken down car on the side of the road, I don't think I'm far wrong when I say all our days go like this.

Think about it. The arena is the workspace, where we do what we do, the cockpit, where the conflicts happen, the dramas, the successes, the failures. Everyone casting an eye upwards looking for some sort of sanction. These days it's not so clear-cut as it once was. Voted out of the Roman arena is n't like being voted out of the Big Brother house. No, not at all, in any way, shape or form. Yet, the principle of today's arena is as constant and as enduring as it ever was: it's approval, we want it, have to have to it, covet it.

Where do we celebrate or commiserate or prepare ? Why, the opera, naturally. What better place is there to revel in glory, cock-crow, preen? The emotion of what you're going to do, that raw, heightened state of trepidation, excitement and anticipation, just as much as the drama of what you've been through in the workplace arena, where it can be anything from wound licking and high dudgeon, all the way to glory, needs a home. It certainly needs a symbol, so why not Opera. Find me a better home for melodrama.

The arena is about focus; the opera about letting it go.

So now, I don't go to work: I wrestle in the arena, have my nose rubbed in the dirt from time to time, on occasions climb out of the ring, weary, but with a notch on my belt, and then onto bare my soul at the opera

Now this is something I've not seen in ANY British newspapers. Wonder why? "Expedia, the online travel service, conducted a survey of tourist boards around the world that rated British tourists as the most obnoxious" (courtesy of the NY Times). What, we saintly Brits? Surely not.

God, I'm like a weathervane: the slightest change, the merest distraction, I change direction. I can turn 180 degrees better than most ballerinas can pirouette. More flip-flop than Mitt Romney...in my own way that is.

I'm still reeling from seeing a film about Joe Strummer last week. I've been pounding the walls with a Clash greatest hits album all weekend, disturbing the neighbours with someone else's punk rock electric guitar; pestering a friend who once worked in music PR for any Clash anecdotes - none; and idling in Chiswick Waterstones thumbing through whatever books I can find on the great man or his band.

What a difference two hours can make, a mere 120 minutes or so, which is roughly the length of "The Future is unknown". I strolled into Panton St cinema, eulogising to a friend the wonders of Provence, how, if only the money was there, I'd sell up, buy a farmhouse, and spend my days wandering through my lavender fields in the dawn and the shade of my olive trees at dusk a la Peter Mayle.

We leave, shell-shocked, stunned by what we've just seen: raw, visceral, in-yer- face music from the only band that mattered, whiplashed by their phyiscal power, four fireworks skidding in all directions, tremendous concert footage. I now want to form a band. I know a chord...I think...but I have a name, oh yes, I have a name - The Weathervanes. A salute to my capricious temperament.

The People have spoken...so it was only three of them, but when they speak, you gotta obey, and it's don't go, boy, a Stag weekend is no place for you. It's like Big Brother, or Pop Idol, put it to the people, they decide. Now, it's just the graceful apology , the bow out, to think about.