Time for me to come out of the wings and wish everyone a Happy New Year !

Eat the frog. That's what I was told to do this morning; start the day on the hardest and most indigestible piece of work, and get it over and done with.

Out of the in-box and into the out-box. It's tough. I'm a man whose motto has always been: why do it today if it can be put off for another day.

I've made a career on the bones of procrastination and deadlines so close they've left grid-lines on my face.

And it's stressful, I panic, scurry around frantically, come up with rash, often ill-thought through conclusions, and deliver something that usually ends up on the slab under the mortician's gloomy eye, and not the bright, perky baby that others seem to deliver.

Enough.

A change is a -comin... Archimedes will eat that frog. I'll get it down somehow.

If I do exit 2009 without a job, and let's face it, nothing looks safe right now, and it does n't matter whatever industry it is that one toils in - anyone and everyone is vulnerable - then I need a plan. Always need a plan. Everyone does.

So if it does all go gurgling down the pan and money is too tight to mention, then I shall become a bespectacled, overly literate, polysyllabic spouting, well-fed, and certainly well read, male gigolo. There must be a market. Surely. Has to be. It's untapped. I like the idea of pioneering this kind of gig.

Is there anyone who enjoys this tail end time of year? This gloomy wilderness period between Xmas and New Year.

It's the restless misery that you only get at 3 am but stretched like bubble gum into hours and days. There's a buried alive feel to London right now. Where is everyone?

Lolling in the street outside my flat is a modern fossil; a relic from a time before credit crunch; something as remote in time as Genghis Khan's hordes sweeping through Central Asia. It's a stretch Hummer. A long, multi-wheeled, snub-nosed sauropod of a car yawning and snorting. Squatting like a toad. Waiting to gorge itself on a horde of young women out for the night.

Only where I live can they still be thought of as edgy and redolent of mean and cool, when all they actually represent now is the busted flush of a casino economy.

I clawed my way to the top of a chilly York Minster this morning. It was like being a chimney sweep, squirming up the narrow spiralling pipe that passes for the stirway. My heart straining the way a pump might do at a flooded camp-site, gurgling, wheezing - and I count myself as fit as well. But I got there, tumbling out of the door-way and on to the walkway of the tower, and an exhilarating view.

Thirteen or so hours later, my legs feel like plasticine or two pipe cleaners.

It's like being slowly interred; the steady, regular spadefuls of earth shutting out the light grain by grain. It's deathly in the City. Lifeless.

God knows what it'll be like during the wilderness week between Xmas and New Year. Quieter than a John Cage composition?

I'm adding my two pennyworth to the ever growing mountain of "wow, I'm getting old!" and this is what if feels like, outbursts.

It came to me yesterday as one of my oldest friends and I slogged it through a heaving, churning London; twenty years ago, we were young guns, tireless, and able to get by on what passed for the Late 20th century version of a jug of wine and a loaf of bread: burgers and a kebab bought from the back of a van outside Brixton Academy after seeing Run DMC.

Days of wine and roses then, days of whine and woes, now. Both of us have slid in to the pose which two decades ago we certainly mocked, of truculent observers of everyone else's short-comings.

I've noticed something else: moans change, or at least their origin. The breathless, lust-ridden "oh yes" walked away in the night and never told me they were going, and left me their step-mother instead - the "Oh God, that drives me mad....I can't believe they did that..that really gets my goat, etc, etc.

Oh Yes...come back...I miss you

Tempus fugit.

"...Put me back. Liked it in there...warm. Don't cut the cord...! It's a burp, don't panic. No pacifier....gimme the real thing...can't have it ? Why ! ...Too old ?

School ? What's that ? Take me back home now...hate it. Look at me....look at me....I'm in the team !

You're not my parents ! I did n't slam it !

University ? Me ? Gap year first....I'll get a part-time job. Borrow the car ?

University ? Great. Parties, girls....

...Course I love you.., want us to be together forever....Dumped her...always on at me...Career....keeping my options open.

Conference calls, spreadsheets...in the City...financial planning, that sort of stuff ...all the team....legless Friday evening...

The photo...? Girlfriend.... together two years now...flat in Hackney. Maybe..not sure...still young. Live a bit

Will you...?

Stag night, Prague...wrecked...not a word to her...not a word...!

I do

Shopping...it's my football night ! Alright, alright...I will then...what for ?..You are ! Love you, Babe !

Out the way...my wife... I'm a Dad ! Got your eyes.... Changed her last night...work in the morning...exhausted....

My little princess walking ...Want me to read you a story ? Buy you a pony ? Let's see...

You're growing...seems like only yesterday, you were...don't talk to your mother like that ! No daughter of mine is wearing that...

Where's he from ? Working ? Thought not. Can't you find someone normal ? Engaged? Why am I always the last to....

Actually he's not a bad lad...

Married....my little princess...can't believe it...

Grandchildren...two...boy and a girl...love 'em to bits....Retired a year ago...this and that. Golf, fishing...

Bit tight round the chest, apart from that ok...well, we're all getting older...no spring chicken...

Nurse....!

The end.

You could never say night-time is quiet.

It's not the quantity, there's less noise, can't argue there. It's the clarity of what there is that matters: couples arguing, cars passing, night buses drifting by, subterranean rumble of a stereo, the aches and groans of buildings settling, sounds of love-making curling through the night-time air, neighbours closing doors, the stamp of feet on stair cases, mice scuttling through false ceilings. The last I loathe beyond measure.

The bastards have returned; I'm terrified they're going to gnaw through my ceiling.

I've found the angriest place in London: the livid, throbbing nexus of indignation and choler, where the mean air temperature is always boiling point, and rage baked in to the fabric of the building. It's the crossroads of umbrage where all the traffic lights are stuck on red.

And centigrade 100 plus is...the Associated Newspapers building, where every morning the latest edition of a hot under the collar, enraged, surly, resentful Daily Mail is sent scuttling into the world.

I've wondered why the security guards in the lobby all wear asbestos gloves; I know now - every surface is too hot to touch.

Hot coals instead of carpets to angrily stride on ? I'd bet my last euro that's the case.

What a place it must be to work in: mockery in the Gents, sneers in the Ladies, jeers in the corridors. Everyone, surely, must talk in italics, or emboldened UPPER CASE, or both at the same time. Talk... sorry, a typo, I meant bellow...

I've been trying to conjure up what a typical office there must look like. Everything, obviously, must be in black and white, though I fancy, things are shot through with lightening bolts of puce and crimson. Specially strengthened handsets - need to be, all that disgusted slamming down; keyboards the same, reinforced to take the pounding only irritated fingers can make.

I see people working there having just two expressions: righteous caviling, or more likely, open-mouthed incandescent fury (for some reason, the rictus like horror of Francis Bacon's "Pope" comes into my mind here).

Too enraged for courtesy either ("do you mind, got to write an article bemoaning it's apparent disappearance"), so it'll be sharp elbows and barging through to get anywhere.

I had trouble wondering what the logo on their flag might be, then it hit me. Obvious. Two crossed beta-blockers on a pulsating vermilion background.

When I'm in that part of Kensington next and it's raining, I shall check to see whether the rain does n't instantly turn to steam the second it hits the building. Spooky place.

I know what love is. I heard it this evening waiting at checkout in Waitrose; it's a soft female voice whispering adoringly to her partner: "...come home, I'll make you a bacon sandwich..."

Lust and food, and in only eight words. It's better than a haiku

Art yesterday, Politics today.

What a great advert Boris Johnson is for David Cameron's earnest but never less than bumptious, young turks. Cohort number four has had to trudge out of Boris's City Hall wreathed in disgrace: it's like Spinal Tap in there. Ray Lewis goes for a walk, Tim Parker out to grass, James McGrath forced in to exile, and today, David Ross.

Boy, can Boris choose people. Four of his inner circle gone in seven months. I'm so impressed. Bet David is too.

Art heals. I've no uncertainty here. It does. It soothes.

Saturday, I felt listless; something I was going to do with someone I like, did n't happen. That's all I'll say.

Moods, every one knows, do n't respect the calendar, they'll weave in and out of days. They run outside clock time.

So Saturday's tail-end slump woke up with me on Sunday morning. Dragged it's heels alongside mine, until I reached the gallery I volunteer at. Through that door a blazing world of colour, paint, freshness, ideas, shapes, angles, oddities of expression. Whiffs of bright, clear air. Into the light.

Once my sense of wonder is re-lit I'm good to go.

The creative spark in general is something I'm intrigued about. Can it be taught ? Is it innate ? Borne out of years of slog and graft? All of the above or a combination?

There's a large table full of books in the Tate Modern shop devoted to creativity: inspirational in the main, almost evangelical in a few cases.

Lots of lessons. Life stories. Incidents. But the key to it all, which seems to remain unmentioned, or is, but perhaps, just in the smallest font size print, is this: just do it. Stare the blank screen out, face down the empty canvass, and start with something. Anything.

Blogs were made for gloomsters, and in my particular case this evening, the "I wish I could have" middle aged male sob.

Put up with the heaving shoulders and chest, readers, it's worth it...for me that it is. Better out than in. Here it is, puking and mewling in the open air, documented for the first time: I wish I could have lived with someone.

To have been a participant in coupledom proper, where you buy a house together, you freshen it up, fret over paint schemes, bicker over furniture, worry where the throw rugs should go. The things that adults do. Things I've never done, never experienced.

There you go, one unfulfilled middle aged male sob.

Testing times at work. There was a fire in the kitchen which is next door to my office this morning. Acrid smoke and water everywhere. I can't go back into that part of the building for safety reasons, so I'm nomadic now, squatting wherever I can.

But that's just a minor thing; the nightmare is that I can't get to the kettle now, and I'm nowhere near creative or productive until I've drunk at least a gallon of green tea. Agony.

Japan is a melody of noise. The signals at pedestrian crossings merrily chirp away whenever the lights flick over; there's a steady, slow, deep ocean wave like "bing, bong" chime rolling across the platforms at main line train stations; and my favourite - two bars of Monsieur Hulot like accordion music every time trains pull into a certain station on Tokyo's Yanamote line.

So different to the unfinished symphony of noise that rolls through Hanoi and Saigon. Constant babble of discordant hoots, whistles, squeals, bells, rumbling exhausts.

Seoul is smooth, like jazz, like something Grover Washington might have written. Oiled and toned, all the notes fit tightly. It all gells. No bumps.

I love all three.

Two things have been gnawing at me today. When, and this is the first, will the Daily Mail print something vaguely responsible and without innuendo ?

Their uniquely joyless vision of life gets me down but at the same time, irritates me to high heaven. Give me a free one on the metaphor mixing there, but that's what the DM does to me.

In the spaces when I've not been pondering that, I've been turning this over: why do some women put hand cream on the back of their hands first, but others put it on their palms? Put me out of my misery on this one please.

Time to get the Marmite out. World's second greatest comfort food - Cacao theobroma being the first. Not that I need comfort right now. Just I'm feeling hungry and lazy, and what better nutrition can there be at a time like this than Marmite on Toast

They all look alike. People in Japan. Same hair, similar clothes, same awkward stance in public places. Uniformly sized, nearly identical features. Amazing.

The Japanese? No. Us.

You never realise just how conformist Westerners are in shape, style, and manner, until you see them (Us. Me) abroad, and never more marked for me anyway, as I experienced in Japan. We all look the same: overweight, pallid, every man is bald, or at best tonsured like me. Virtually without exception, we're ungainly and unsightly in standardised leisure wear. Male and female. Sorry.

On the other hand, the Japanese are formidably well-dressed, instinctive flair too; it all flows. Even those who dress eccentrically do it with a panache and style that's inaccessible to us.

My money would be on them if there was anything like an international dress off event. They leave the French and Italians panting for breath in the accoutrement stakes.

I always have a little bit of uncertainty whenever I buy anything that has a slogan in a foreign language - does it really mean what the people in the shop are insisting it does ?

Were they were on the level when they said that the swirl of Japanese characters across the front and back of the two t-shirts I bought is a delicately balanced, elegantly constructed, sensitive haiku that Basho would have been envious of ? Am I wearing something that says that - and by extension references me as nuanced, discerning - or did I shell out nearly £40 just to walk around with a tee-shirt that says oldest virgin in town?

I think I'm ok...after all I did buy these particular t-shirts in the grounds of a Japanese temple, and that has to be a positive sign. But what about all these people who have weird oriental symbols tattooed along their arms and across their shirts, what are they saying here: funky, edgy, with a meaningful piece of prose, or is it a line from a takeaway menu, they've had inked in to the skins.

I don't like tattoos full stop, but imagine you've undergone the agony of having one of the damn things done, and all that exquisite oriental calligraphy really says is "Chicken with bean sprouts". Tattoos are for life as well.

At some point it's going to happen: I'll come up with an original metaphor, an image that's pulled fresh from the earth with the soil still stuck to it's sides. It'll happen, I know it will, that baseball field will be built; but between now and whenever, it's going have to be an old image, dents in the panels beaten out, tyres retrod, to carry the essence of what I want to convey.

I don't know how, or indeed why, icons appear, just that they do, and that occasionally some transcend cultures, and in fact, become so embedded in daily global life, you can say they're part of the cultural DNA. No can, in some cases, the working verb is are. Take the Beatles as the uber-example.

There's no country I've been to ( and that's coming up to nearly sixty), where I've not heard a Beatles number in one form or another: someone lazily strumming Fab Four tunes on a levee in pre-Katrina New Orleans; an elderly trio crooning Beatle hits in a hotel lobby in Chennai; sat next to a very young man on a Tokyo subway train who was flipping between an English language biography on John Lennon and it's Japanese language equivalent. They're part of the fabric.

Of course they're not on their own here, I think they're the most powerful global icon, but there are others in the iconosphere - Elvis for instance, can't forget him, pretty powerful presence, and there are sports icons, especially football (Soccer if you're American and reading this), and this inevitably means one particular powerhouse brand - Manchester United. Just knowing a few of their players is akin to having the ability to speak a global lingua franca.

They're everywhere. I've seen people wearing MUFC shirts mooching through Hollywood; plenty of places in Europe, with the most unlikely sighting being in the DMZ. The most heavily defended border in the World, nearly half a million men on each side of the wire facing off, the last thing I expect to see in an exhibition room on a series of North Korean infiltration tunnels in a small complex, bang up to the DMZ and surrounded by a minefield, is a signed MUFC shirt taking pride of place. Not long before Manchester United become part of the global cultural genome if this kind of thing keeps up.

Three countries, fourteen plus hours, two planes. Back home. And why do those two words always cause my heart to sink - back home. I'm never homesick, never have been, in all likelihood will never be, it's the fact of having to come home that makes me sick

I`m in Tokyo right now. I`ve moved forward literally in space, time, and daring. It makes New York look old and weary, Paris like Toytown, and London like Stonehenge.

Japan is the most uniformly affluent society I`ve been to as it is the most formidably well-dressed; Prada and Louis Vuitton are like chain stores here. I`ve not been to a city yet that does n`t have one.

It's come round to the time of year when I take a couple of weeks off to go traveling, so there will not be any more postings until the end of November. Normal service resumes then.

Progressive, Liberal minded Americans, you can come out of hiding. Stop pretending you're Canadians...the clouds have lifted. America is cool again.

I'm a man with a shopping gene..and it's been firing on all cylinders since last Thursday.

I've been to the Westfield shopping mega-mall on four consecutive days - simply entranced, bewildered, stunned by it. Massive. A spectacle. Eye-popping, jaw dropping, and it's just so close. Five to ten minutes by foot depending on traffic conditions from where I live

But today, I can say confidently " ...spell broken...". I've not been there during the last twenty four hours. Self-discipline or poverty, either, or both. Who cares.

I know something else: Westfield deserves a chronicler. Like an official artist who follows armies, Westfield needs a Chaucer, someone to record the first unexpected birth, the first credit card induced heart attack: I'd say the first shoplifter caught, but that's already happened. Three hours open and some someone tries to lift a scarf. Of all the places to choose....a place teeming with police and store security....how bright...

Thank you America....I can unclench my sphincter muscle now. Obama is Prez ! Hooray. The nearer it got to Election day, the more I started to fret that the Republicans might just sneak it. Dust settled. Smoke cleared. Clear skies. It's the right man - the only man - who'll be stepping up for January's inauguration. Thank goodness.

Of course, it's the transition from expectation to the realities of actually governing, we'll be transfixed by now.

That sphincter image ? Not mine, wish it was. Something I purloined from a facebook comment left by an American friend.

Weird and exhilarating.

Weird that it'll soon be possible to buy Prada or Versace in Shepherd's Bush.

Not that it ever has n't been. It always has in a sense. Virtually that is. You could lay your hands on something close, nearly there, but not quite; still it resembles one of those mighty premium brands. Logos might not be in the right place and the colour not exact, a shade or two off, but leave exactitude to the connoisseurs. What mattered was that it was almost identical. Close...and a cigar as well.

From this month, it'll be the real thing. No copies. Pure. Pukka. Courtesy of Westfield, the shopping supertanker that's moored itself permanently by Shepherd's Bush Green.

I still find it bewildering that somewhere I've known as a near neighbour has all sorts of high end, luxury shops and others just as alluring and exotic.

Exhilarating that in around forty-eight hours, there'll be a new US President, and it'll not, if there's any karmic justice or plain common sense, be a Republican.

I now know that as a child I was n't alone in secretly imploring the local library to stay open so that I could wander across the shelves for just a few more minutes. Please...A few more minutes...please...

Twice a week, Monday and again on Thursday, I'd put myself through the delicious ordeal of choosing two books to luxuriate in. The magnitude of that task - which book out of so many. An old friend, or something new ?

Then home to release those caged words and be taken away from the fact of a small, hilly Yorkshire village and into the boundless world of imagination that only books offer.

I had an accomplice, or perhaps, more aptly a fellow sufferer, a few miles further north in the same county, and a few years older. And I only found that out on Tuesday when I went to see the very cheerful poet Ian McMillan at the Barbican. He confessed to the very same affliction. Not alone. A fellow traveler. Hooray !

He has buried himself in words; I see him as either a very jovial miner breaking the surface with words stuck in his hair and fluttering from his face, or poking through like a dog snuffling truffles, a gem here, a treasure there.

Another South Yorkshire bookworm too, who loves the romance of a small village library, that words are more than symbols on a page, they are portals to other lives and other worlds.

The boy done well too. No doubt that they may have maddened him as they do all of us, that they'll not stay still, or don't look right, or fall apart at a touch, but words have n't abandoned him. Letters have n't swarmed overboard. He writes very well, and in that lovely effortless style, which you know is only that way because of long hours at the keyboard, pacing up and down, waiting, hoping, for the moment when a recalcitrant sentence finally behaves itself.

God, I admire him.

Occasionally I set out fishing for inspiration, and find nothing, not a sprat, not even a sea urchin. Like today. Rattle my head, but it's empty. Still if you can't fish, you can mend your nets, which in my case, means a lot of reading is coming up.

I think my little furred friend has dipped a toe back into my flat; this morning and again this evening, I noticed something that looked like leavings. I do not under any circumstances want to this flat the sanctuary of St Archimedes, the patron saint of all things verminous. No, my saintly role model here is St Patrick, as he did with the snakes in Ireland then so should I - cast 'em out

I understand it now. It's all become clear to me. Sarah Palin's VP nomination is an example to the world of the US's meritocracy; whether you've been there centuries, or just arrived, and struggling with the language (as she seems to be), everything's still open, there are no obstacles, you can aim as high as you want.

Canny man, that McCain. He's trying to win the "...English is not my mother tongue vote...", and that's why SP is on the ticket; she's there as living evidence that wherever you hail from, or irrespective of the fact that your English is shaky... third, fourth language that kind of thing... you can still go places. So subtle. Taken me ages to spot this.

What a politician McCain is. She's there to get the immigrant vote.

They're following me ! We found a cockroach in the office kitchen this afternoon. I've become the patron saint of Vermin. Everywhere I go, I attract the damn things, why can't it be women I have this effect on!

"...of no consequence to anyone..." is how Michael Heseltine is trying to explain away George Osborne's fascination for Russian oligarchs...and yet, it would be if it was a Labour politico and the Daily Mail was circling maliciously.

It actually is of no consequence to anyone anyway; what happens when Bullingdon Club members fall out is flatly irrelevant to the country (although I do like the sound of 'when Bullingdon club members fall out', said in a certain way it does have the ring of a fairly racy 1950's novel).

Yet, and is n't there always one of these, it does appeal to my karmic sense of justice. George Osborne gleefully told tales and stoked the bile of the right wing press with tales of Peter Mandelson, and now the shoe is most definitely on the other foot. What goes around comes around.

I can only wonder if other indiscretions are waiting to break over Mr Osborne's rather smug face, indignantly wounded as he may seem right now. As the Daily Mail would proclaim in banner headlines about any other politician who was n't a Tory - "no smoke...etc..."

I've been watching Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food series since it started and I have only admiration for him.

I know Rotherham and I know it's avidity for cheap, bad food, for kebabs, chips, Pizzas, burgers. I go there monthly - it's a wonderland of obesity. People cocooned, swaddled in fat, marbled in it. Heart straining, gut busting diets handed down the generations. Children who in all likelihood could find their lives medically compromised, or even shortened, because of junk food

It is inarguable as it is inexcusable that so many of them are effectively malnourished, wholly over reliant on cheap bad food, in a world where the ping of the microwave and the takeaway container passes as cooking.

What Jamie is attempting cannot be condemned - some people may enjoy a richer, more fulfilling, hopefully longer life because of him. Provide a counter argument to that. Do we want to be in the position where we have witnessed the reversal of progress ? Youngsters dying before their parents?

Everything's inverted. The free market Republicans have more or less nationalised most of the main US banks and the Tories are caught soliciting money from the Russians ! No wonder they fought tooth and nail to get Boris elected as Mayor, with a name like that...

I'd always thought it was Labour's role to be deep in the Kremlin's pocket, at least that's what the Daily Mail has proclaimed...oh, since...the time of the Zinoviev letter. All this is doing my head in.

Tough days ahead. I'm seeing that headline or variants of it more than I see the Starbucks sign, and understand me here - there's a whole lotta latte brewed in London. It's a personal choice kind of thing: you believe, part believe or not at all. As a good fence sitter, I'll not bother saying where I am on this point.

But what does worry me is that the City has put itself on a yo-yo diet - up two hundred points one day, down three hundred the next. They gain it, they lose it. And all that bouncing between extreme emotional states as well, never high enough, never low enough, up, down. Elation, depression, yet no look-in for reason.

Parachute mood disorder counselors into the City. Send boatloads of food behaviorists towards Canary Wharf. Flood Threadneedle St with Therapists. A psychiatrist on every street corner. Specialists in equity anorexia and bulimic bail-outs outside every City cafe and coffee shop. Yo-yo dieting in the City, who'd believe it. Tough times indeed.

I've been trying to come up with a recession breakfast platter. So far it's credit crunchies and sour grapes. Trying to think of other things to add in.

I wonder as well what the keys on my keyboard say to each other after I closed my laptop up. Today at work, for instance, I've literally thrashed the keyboard. Fingers pounding away like pile drivers - smash, smash, smash....Truly the unfinished keyboard symphony.

Probably in the moments after I've put the lid down, there's a pause, then a collective intake of breath, before individual keys begin calling out to each other: " how you feeling ? what a day....he never stopped...All day...I know....if he could only use more than two fingers that would be something....my springs are killing me....hey at least, you're not a vowel...imagine...exactly I'd never want to be want to be one of them....might think themselves special but who'd want to be driven in to the ground the way he hits the keys...it's bad enough just being an R...why could n't I've been another character ? Has he ever used { or ^...? Never...no wonder they're always so fresh....what a life eh...."

Two Sundays in every month I work as a volunteer at a small art gallery in North London. It is probably one of the most delightful jobs I've ever had - surrounded by sumptuous paintings and sculptures. Bathed in colour. It's like being dipped into an aesthetic, painterly spa. A blissful experience.

The visitors are fun, they're knowledgeable, curious, and many are artists themselves. And I learn which is a state of mind I can never get enough: about colour, the daring uses of a palette, the deliberation behind brush strokes, the motivations that fired the artist's sensibility.

You know that thinking is a promiscuous activity, you hop around, one thought leads to another then another, then one more, and so on.

I spent a very pleasant afternoon yesterday idly wondering what all the artworks do when the curator and staff have turned the alarms, locked the last door, and are receding footsteps across a crunchy gravel drive. Do the images in paintings squeeze out of the canvas, give themselves a shake and pop into three dimensions, and then reflect on the day ? Are there rhomboidal shapes leaning against walls popping a beer whilst talking football with a sturdy, heavy set farmer of the Dutch School? Are there gaily dressed flighty courtesans a la Hogarth flirting with Poussin's satyrs? Anyone hissing "bitch...she gets all the attention... and why...?" at the Mona Lisa?

Or are they sat around talking about us - the visitors and the staff ? "I had that bald guy again...straight up to the canvass...his breath...Jesus..." "...did you hear that crap about colour field theory....where do they get this from...?" "You can go years stuck on these walls before you hear anything that even resembles an original thought..." "...another canoodling couple...and they think they're the first...seen it all..." "Why do they stare so much...rude, man..." "see the students were back...and do they come over to see us ? No, straight to the Hoppers and the De Chirico's every time...and people wonder why I look so glum..."

Thank God that investment bankers are n't responsible for evolution, we'd all be extinct by now.

For many months, I've only been able to look at stock prices if I've had a painkiller the size of a manhole cover.

Today, I reluctantly accept that a piece of flippancy I wrote earlier has virtually become true: there is more investment value in my supermarket loyalty card than in my bombed out equity portfolio now.

I went to the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern on Saturday. I shall go again and again.

It is an encounter with the supernatural, but not in the sense of that word as we so often accept it, no, this is transcendental, of glimpses of things beyond. Almost like standing before reflecting pools.

Canvases, the colour of dark, arterial red blood or charcoal greys, with subtle gradations of tone and heat. Floating in the approximate centre of many of his pieces: faint, scarcely visible images of arcane symbols, almost of the type you might expect to find scratched on the surface of some long dead alien world.

Rothko could certainly work a colour field composition. I cannot wait for my next immersion.

Battling mice is wearisome, and I could stretch a riff out on the subject, except I don't want to. I'm fed up with it all. But, who said it's only ever black, or only ever white? There's always some little bit of odd joy to extract from somewhere. Mine is that I can finally see the externals, the first budding shoots of the Heron Tower appear above ground. The vertebrae of a great building is starting to take shape. Love it. London cannot have enough skyscrapers. One on every corner, or better , one for every Starbucks there is.

A break from the rodent wars.

At last the House of Representatives has passed the $700 billion bailout plan. Could this finally mean the corner has been turned and financial blood will begin to reach all the parts it withdrew from so abruptly. Right now, I have more investment worth in my Tesco club card than I do in what passes for my equity savings. I'd like to see that ratio changed.

Interesting to listen to other people's experiences with rodents. Squirrels in attics, mice in sofas, and so on. Someone I know who comes from Holland told me about the agility of the canal rats in Amsterdam. Up through the bathroom plumbing. Incredible.

That's the thing, you see. Recent circumstances have forced me - against my will - into conducting a low level counter insurgency campaign against flies and mice. That's never what I wanted to happen.

Writing pieces that subtly advanced the human condition that's what I had in mind, not exactly Montaigne or Pascal, still something that might help and guide in it's own way. But what turned up instead - me sat at my laptop churning out sit reps from the rodent front line. The Plato of Pest Control.

The rules of my flat are simple: whoever pays the bills stays. No pay, no stay, so the mouse has to go.

The Pest Control guy did his stuff yesterday. Bait boxes everywhere. They eat the poison and retire to their nests...forever.

Just that word, nests, though; I was rather hoping my...er...visitor, was a sterile bachelor.

Got a few more guests wanting to move in to my pocket handkerchief sized flat. Mice. I saw one dart past my washing machine late last night.

Today, I await the Pest Controllers who are called, reassuringly, Agent Orange. Do what you have to guys.

Infestation of flies, then mice appear; are these signs, omens ?

"Tap on the right side, tap on the left for me...how does that feel ? No sharp edges, anything like that? Great...we're done then"

It is n't often I need a filling -years go by before that has to happen - still this afternoon I did. The corner of an old filling had sheared off whilst I was gorging on handfuls of nuts and seeds (see healthy eating can have a downside to it).

Probably this is his mantra; the train of words that pulls out the moment the drilling, the swabbing, and the setting of the new filling are done. Said solicitously, but in the tone of a professional who knows his stuff. Almost the way I might imagine a master craftsman would hold up a finished article, confident in it's integrity and substance. Nothing haughty or overweening, just pride in a job well done.

For the short time it took him to complete everything, it felt ,oddly, like something was actually being sculpted inside my mouth: he drilled, then scraped away the ruins of the old filling, then kneaded the new malleable filling into place, smoothed it's edges, stepped back to view then returned for a finishing touch or two, before asking how it all felt.

I don't intend as you can probably imagine my mouth to become a sculpture park; one filling is enough.

I am watching a re-run of the first Presidential debate as I write this, which is the equivalent of someone trying to type a review of a film whilst the action has scarcely moved beyond the opening scene and the outcome of the plot is still unknown even to the director.

Open to the accusation of presumption ? Of course, it's undeniable. I realise that I've put myself up for an easy fall here; there's hubris sniffing round my ankles here, I know.

Still, I cannot ignore what my eyes see and my ears hear: John McCain is an old ham. He's virtually recycling the gestures and idioms that Ronald Reagan used nearly thirty years ago. Effective then; today needs something else.

I need to see politics of substance, where ideas are weighed and their suitability assessed; positions defined and explained - I simply don't get that from McCain. It's theatrics and grandstanding instead.

The US deserves more than breathy recitations of stories and anecdotes, it needs - desperately - prudence, wisdom, a coherent strategy, a steady hand and not knee jerking, a fresh voice to articulate it's fears, worries, and equally, it's hopes and aspirations. That's Obama.

John McCain's statement that he will temporarily withdraw from the Presidential election in order to focus on pushing through the urgently needed financial package to stabilise the US, and by extension, the Global economy, is something I still can't get my head round.

It's like a cut diamond held to the light; turn it around and the beam it casts changes.

What he's done, smacks of honour and does obviously underline his"country first" message. It is an act of selflessness, and from what I know of him, in line with many of his previous actions.

Yet, he is a politician, who as a breed are different to us in so many ways; the lure of a quick, showy victory is like catnip. Irresistible. I remember William Hague once saying that he would only ever talk on the topics of the day, which I've always understood as a less than intelligent excuse to exploit something without properly thinking the consequences through, in other words, opportunism.

It's opportunism that I think could be driving John McCain - be see to be doing something, act and look Presidential, even if the anointing has n't even happened, and may not - the electorate has n't cast a single vote yet.

When I rotate my cut diamond through the light I sometimes see something else: desperation. Turning the spotlight back on to his campaign not through the hard work of selling proposals and policies, traditional, austere, unflashy campaigning; it's sturm und drang gesture instead. Take Sarah Palin as his VP nominee for example.

I do like McCain - it's an extraordinary personal story. As much, though, as I admire him, there's this sense I get that he's really an impulse purchaser, tacking to every different breath of wind, and not setting a defined course and holding to it. That worries me.

It's his impulsiveness that I find unsettling. This is a serious world we live in: issues are subtle in detail, complex and nuanced, not black, not white, but grey, and difficult to unpick; there's a need for detailed scrutiny and thinking through, and not imprudent, hasty, on the hoof decision making.

How strange that of the two candidates, it is the younger Obama, who looks to possess the gravitas necessary to fulfilling the most demanding of all Chief Executive posts. For me at least he does. It's up to the US electorate to ultimately decide.

I don't know whether it's true or not, but let's say it is, that the darker an artist's palette becomes then the grimmer the eventual painting. Late period Goya being a good example, whilst some of the works coming from a similar point in the careers of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko are n't particularly comfortable either. I mean, you probably would n't want to decorate a newborn's bedroom with them.

So there's a possible grain of fact there; I admit it could n't support a thesis, but there's enough to lead me to this: the harder my day gets, the greater my need for chocolate.

I don't smoke, scarcely drink, take no under the counter, or online purchased medications, but comfort in hard times has to come from somewhere, and when there are no friendly arms to fall into, it's only going to come from one source - chocolate.

The relationship I have with chocolate is on the same lines as that between me and my fridge; long periods of benign ignorance, "oh, you're there then...forgotten all about you...", punctuated by short salvos of intense emotion when something has to happen. Like the fridge getting the old heave-ho (explained yesterday); or as tonight, it's me roaming through Liverpool St station, trying to find a shop that sells organic dark chocolate to take away the grime, muck, and misery of a hard day.

My forbidden fruit is n't even going to get me into the index of the Posh and Beck's book of hard living and I can forget all about Keith Richard's. I need something though. Clean living I may be 99% of the time, for that 1% when I'm not, there has to be an outlet. God bless Green and Blacks.

There comes a point in many relationships where the strain between partners is too much, the gulf is unbridgeable; better to be apart than remain unhappily together, wrestling with silent resentment.

I have, I'm sorry, to say reached that point. The elastic has snapped. Enough. Done. Finished. Me or it. As I pay the mortgage and all the bills, it's obvious who's going to be packing bags. The fridge has to go.

I wanted a fridge that stuck to the rules: kept things cool and fresh, with it's dainty little motor humming away contentedly. How straightforward can it get: I open the door, I put things in, take things out, close the door. Pretty reasonable, don't you think. Where's the challenge there? It can't get any more basic.

But it seems all too evident that I bought one of those very rare beasts - something from the Stephen King refrigerator catalogue. Not a full-blown piece of disturbia; I don't open the door to hear a chorus of shrieking souls or see it scuttle across the kitchen floor, and it's certainly not menaced me with the plastic ice cube mould.

In fact, the Stephen King allusion is probably a little unfair; let's refocus and say it's something one of the more mischievous, snarky Hogwarts pupils might own. They'd be made for each other: plenty of attitude, smarmy back chat, and an uneviable talent for low level torment.

And they could serenade each with endless whining, just as my fridge does to me the moment I step through the door. That's the bit that's driving me mad. The noise the damn thing makes.

We have to part company. Middle aged man seeks kindly fridge for long-term (quiet) relationship.

If it's only over the moment the Fat Lady sings, (and, how often is the 'it', a stand-in for full-blown crisis), then does it hold water that it's not really started -in earnest that is - until someone makes a light bulb joke out if it. You see, I've not heard - yet - a "how many investment bankers does it take to change a light bulb" wisecrack, and I work in the City.

Hank, Alistair, maybe it's not as bad as you think. Trust Archimedes here: no light bulb joke turning point reached...well, yet, anyway.

The only way to get to grips with London is to stand there and wonder: wonder why most nights when I leave the tube station I see a solitary unicyclist weaving through traffic with a street hockey stick balanced on one shoulder; why a sturdy looking middle aged woman in pearls and wearing a gilet would be walking a lamb on a lead through some of Kensington's most chi-chi streets; why every time I go to Shepherds Bush, I see a man who looks like GB Shaw; or why Chiswick has a disco-dancing street cleaner.

Tube pass, gritted teeth, sense of wonder, that's really it, everything you need to get to grips with London. Toolkit for London I suppose.

Still, not every question remains unanswered. Closure does happen. There's a solution to the puzzle of the keys on the bus shelter roof for example. May not be the answer, I admit; but it's plausible, and I like it.

Those keys were the fall-out from a stag-night. Groom de-bagged, ball and chain locked round an ankle, then house keys, car keys, and the keys to the leg-irons flung on top of the bus shelter. One hand cupped round his groin, the other vainly clutching a ball and chain, tottering along the High Street. I can see this. I actually can.

I have to thank an anonymous poster for this solution. It's perfect.

I wondered when it would happen: those bunches of keys I noticed on the top of the bus shelter outside St Charles House Tax Office have gone.

I don't doubt they're residing quietly on a shelf in the council lost property office before they go gently into that rusting goodnight all of us end up going to sooner or later.

That's the prosaic way of looking at it; keys swept off the top of the shelter by a long-handled council broom, some puzzlement as to why three bunches, then on to the next job, before heading back to the depot and logging them as lost property. That's the prosaic way of looking at it. Tame, and probably true.

If, of course, that's how it actually went.

What if, and we're allowed imagination, these orphaned keys were part of something else: for instance, a plot device in a piece of page-turning anxiety by Stephen King - 'possessed keys' - opening on to something dark and disturbing; then again, what if they had an Alice in Wonderland like role, unlocking a portal to a fantasy world of articulate top-hatted animals; or maybe they're the hinge in a wise cracking piece of Elmore Leonard criminalia, somewhere in the small fry demimonde, there's an incredulous conversation going on: "...what the fuck, Leo, ya did what....ya put the keys where...? Jesus H. You gotta get 'em down !"

I'm wildly speculating here...but how did those three bunches of keys get there and what do they mean? Answers anyone?

Capitalism is indestructible. It's like an eternal virus, hardier and far more resilient than we can ever imagine. It'll re-route itself around the roadkill of this week's endless fiscal car crashes. No doubt about that.

But why can't I be indestructible! What a week. I'm exhausted; it feels like the short sellers have done a number on my sleep. I've hardly had any since Monday.

I don't work in Finance; the office is in the City, just it's nothing to do with money. I've been through the wringer this week, all sorts of madness: bollockings, frantic travelling, anxious conference calls.

Tonight it must be: bed, pillow, sleep in that sequence, and uninterrupted for a bare minimum of eight hours. Body needs to repair.

Ten second nonsense conspiracy theory: large Hadron Collider turned on last week; this week, hurricanes sweep through the financial world. Coincidence...?

"Not sure I agree with your statement about an Aldi or Netto bag being fashionable though..." was the reply of a friend to something I wrote. But I think I'm might be proved right.

How long is it going to be before shopping at a value store becomes a 'fun thing' ? Be slumming for some; for others it'll be a middle class expression of discipline and frugality; but the hidden driver for many of the moody middle class is them simply struggling to keep a roof over their heads, and these stores sell cheap, value food.

Think about it. Not even a wounded Tiger is as desperate as someone clutching to their moody middle class lifestyle. They'll do anything to hide distress.

I'll put money on it - that is whatever there is left in my account after the shenanigans of the investment bankers have finished - that it'll be uber chic to be spotted on the high street with an Aldi or Netto carrier bag.

D Day plus two. No flies visible. Could it be that they've gone ? Can I stop walking the perimeter of my flat with a can of RAID in one hand and a rolled up newspaper in the other ?

I really don't want to go to sleep again in a cloud of RAID. Still carrying a punishing headache from Saturday when I went on the offensive, though that could be the result of an unpleasant day at work.

Humans 1, Flies 0. Hope this does n't become my 'Mission Accomplished' burden ....but it's been an awful lot quieter today after my blitzkrieg through my flat yesterday. Scarcely any flies around. Flat's reeking of chemicals - I used RAID in the manner you would defoliate a forest - and there's a film of bleach on virtually every uncovered surface. Noxious to them, and to be honest not that comfortable for me...but as long as these fuckers take the hint and drag their dead mates off to whatever Fly Valhalla is called and never come back, then that's all I want. And of course, when I do go away for extended periods I'll ensure no foodstuffs stay behind gently mouldering.

Not a great day. Returned home after a week's house-sitting to find my flat semi infested with minute flies. I must have left some food waste in the bin, and they've sniffed the rot and invaded. Been a day of swatting, spraying, and cleaning. It's been a killing ground. These fuckers have got everywhere.

If there's anyone with advice on the best preventive action I can take - I've been thinking a couple of spiders or a bevy of pitcher plants as the best organic way (I'm reeling with a chemically induced migraine; I've sprayed RAID liberally everywhere), get in touch.

AP has a PQ - Panic Quotient. This is my contribution to the confused world of emotional and productivity indices.

Calibrated on a 1 - 10 scale: 1 being unresponsive to external stimuli aka stone; 10 equalling burnt out, stressed out, freaked out. Fried basically, little more than able to whimper at the end of the day.

The higher the PQ value, the harder you're believed to be working. PQ of six and above being a conference call multiplier; the greater the panic, the more the calls. A PQ of six or more confirms a tidal wave of e-mails will barrel through the internal network, nearly bringing it down. All of them out of synch, and, obviously, contradictory.

Note that a very high PQ of 8.5 and above, can lead to someone out there in corporateland wanting to make a ju-ju doll in your shape so they can jab it with needles and tear it's limbs off. Drop gears quickly if you find yourself bumping up to 8.5. You've been warned.

I've been averaging a 6.5 PQ for most of the day, peaking around 8 in the early part of the morning. Anyone out there want to say what's their's is?

The culture wars and the acrimony that fundamentalist beliefs can bring have clearly boosted McCain's Presidential campaign; mark that down to one thing - the 'Palin effect'.

How long before that slips into the general political lexicon alongside the '....gate' suffix that usually gets fastened on to the end of whatever scandal or humiliation some politico either side of the pond finds themselves in.

I am worried that this election, which looked Obama's to lose for months - he was (and still is to my European eyes) streets ahead of any other rival, Democrat or Republican - could actually be lost.

Shrewd in his thinking, magnificent in his diction, clear in his outlook, focused on what needs to be done, and alert to the pressing issues of the day: an obviously ailing economy; the looming threat of foreclosure or job loss, or both, that so many Americans wake up with and go sleep to; wars that no longer seem winnable, or certainly popular (if, of course, any war could ever be popular); widening inequalities of wealth and opportunity. Things that matter; they matter to me, remember the adage: "when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold".

And yet today, a scarce seven days since the Republican convention, everything has changed. It's an election now likely to be fought in the trenches, or as today's Guardian put it, 'the killing grounds', of abstract issues, of value judgements. America, as I've written earlier is an ideologically restless country - but right now it's the specifics of the moment (jobs, mortgages, the economy, war) that have to be fought over in the public domain and not lifestyle concepts.

The Republican Elephant is in the room; no longer ignored either, its very visible and busily being talked about. Democrats, remember James Carville's slogan ? "...it's the Economy..." You need to wrest attention back from the pachyderm and quickly.

I'm feeling very proprietorial about a construction site I walk past most days of the week. It's the site of where the Heron Tower will eventually stand.

There's a sense of almost impending parenthood within me whenever I walk by; when when will it happen, when will I catch myself turning the corner of Camomile Street and see the first nubs of foundation pillars poking their heads over the perimeter fence?

But today was like any other day, nothing but the steady peck-peck of diggers and the sound of pummelling drills. Surely the seed-bed must be ready by now. You've been labouring in the hole for months.

It's not that the UK is free of conviction based politics either. Here, it's the Market, or more exactly the heady drug known as Market Forces.

They're more efficient, more effective, more stringent, and clearly, more lucrative, than any other business modus operandi. Like the well-known commercial, Market Forces kills all known germs. Dead.

Or do they? What have Market Forces blessed us with ? A privatised Railway Service that is the envy of the World....oh sorry, mis-typed, meant the laughing stock of the world; price-gouging power companies; exam marking companies that can do everything except the very thing they're supposed to; and some uncomfortable tinkering with the Post Office. There are more candidates for the wall of shame, I just have n't the patience to list them all.

And when Market Forces fail as they do, (I've Metronet in mind amongst others), what happens, we seek the remedy in....more market competition.

Then there's the human angle. Market Forces inevitably scupper someone's job, or puncture their hard-earned pension. Misery bubbling away. The argument for making Market Forces a Class A drug writes itself.

The dreary steeples of divisive, passion wracked issues - Faith, Right to Life, Intelligent Design / Creationism - have, this week, punched their way in to the American Presidential campaign. How serious are the citizens of that innovative, ideologically restless, sincere Republic going to take these as meat and drink electoral issues? Surely, it's the economy that matters ? The daily affects of a see-sawing economy, the inching nearness of personal bankruptcy, job loss, involuntary mortgage default, homelessness: are n't these the things that truly matter?

I'm not an American (other side of the pond), but I am unashamedly an Amerophile; I've lived there, (briefly worked there too), visited all but six states; deep-dived repeatedly into it's compelling culture, it's history, and it's lively, never still political debates - I feel I have credentials. It's smacks of temerity, I realise, but I think I've a more developed understanding of the US that many, or even most, have. In a certain sense, I feel I have a stake, like a non-voting shareholder at the company annual general meeting.

The board needs a shake-up - it needs flatly, Barack Obama and Joe Biden as Chief Exec and Vice-Chairman of USA Inc. What matters (as it does here in UK Plc) is n't angry debates on abstractions or the promotion of ideological certainties - it's the economy, that's where everyone is feeling the pinch.

Yet, Sarah Palin's abrupt irruption into the presidential race has shifted attention away from that to, heart-felt no doubt, but bitterly contended and that's without a doubt, abstract issues. Certainty of the type she propounds fogs debate. Promoting fixed moral viewpoints and flamboyantly self-celebrating that one does are irreconcilable with the duties of Chief Executive, especially so in the heat, dust, and throbbing tension of the present economic climate.

I understand the concept of exemplar; that the president sets the tone for the nation; it's been said too that the President is more a High Priest sacredly tending the flame of American-ness, looking into the flames to divine the sentiments of the nation. The current economic and social landscape merits a moderate, deliberate, collaborative tone. Obama's methodology in a nutshell. No other way exists than that in order to harness the physical and intellectual energies of every US citizen to get to grips with the topic de nos jours - a tanking economy. The Democrats have read the runes. This is not the time for conviction based politics.

"Sarah Palin = Guns, Babies, Jesus" (Rush Limbaugh). Am I the only one who finds that an odd juxtaposition to celebrate ? Babies and Jesus works, but Guns, how they'd get in there...uh...? I'm missing something here

I'll never hear again after seeing the Sex Pistols tonight. I just know it. Ears should n't buzz and pop and the corollary to that is men in the mid-forties should give up gigging.

Only strength enough for a pithy Facebook style comment: totally zonked. Could sleep for a month.

If only he was British....if only...Hey, he's got Kenyan parentage, you never know. Oh I just wish he was.

I've watched Barack Obama's Denver acceptance speech in it's entirety: what a call to arms, so damn stirring. A bolt of energy. I'm invigorated and I'm a continent away. More crucially, I lack the citizenship to vote; if I could, however, then it would be for Barack. He's absolutely on the money. A speech as memorable as anything by Churchill or Kennedy or Lincoln, delivered with no ersatz folksiness, sans syrup, optimistic and realistic. Barack has tapped into Cicero's genes. The whole thing throbbed with humanity.

What a joy to hear a speech that was inclusive; that gathered people in; that celebrated and respected individuality, and that did n't erect some vile cordon sanitaire or mark some boundary beyond which those who lived there must be forever the object of scorn and vilification. An inclusive political speech. I'd vote for him just on that basis. Surely Barack's got a little bit of Brit in him somewhere ?

Gordon, admit it, it's a busted flush. Throw in the towel, guy, or turn them into a kebab shop chain. Do something. Anything. That's some scolding the latest Hardin's restaurant guide has on it's pages, served up tartly: "It is the disappointing standards at Ramsay's three most recent 'mass-market' openings which are most immediately concerning. Each of them - The Warrington, Devonshire House, and Foxtrot Oscar - is nominated in roughly one in every three of the survey reports they attract in the 'most disappointing meal of the year' category. These newcomers are so uninspired in concept and so erratic in performance that - if they were opened by independent operators - they would likely be closed within a year." Ouch...

The Devonshire I know pretty well; lived a street away from it for several months, eaten there plenty of times (o.k. when it was run by the last owner...). Not been there since it got Ramsified earlier this year, but know several who have. All been thumbs up reviews. I still occasionally roost around the corner and every time I've walked by it's always looked hale and hearty...though there was a lad yelling indecorously out of a first floor window early on Sunday morning. But who cares about that. It's the food that matters. Gordon still delivers a punch or so I've been told. When I can persuade a friend for a revisit, I'll be in a position to properly comment, but still I'd say The Devonshire has inspiration bubbling in and around. "So uninspired in concept..."? Where did that come from?

Procrastinate me? Of course. Fun today, fret tomorrow. Live by that. Carved a completely flat career out of it. Nevertheless, every rule has it's exception; the matter simply so pressing,even I have to get my buns a-rollin. Saturday night for instance.

I'd found out that an American friend of mine had had a baby on Friday. I had to get in there fast; obviously with the congratulations, but also to stake a claim on which Soccer team this bonny young man might end up supporting should he get an eye for the game. That's my team, the band of brothers I've followed through thick but mostly thin for all of my life. Unfashionable, dogged, plain old Sheffield United.

Get in there quick before the snake charmers start weaving their spells and chanting their incantations about Man Utd or Chelsea. My friend, you see, knows a lot of Brits and I can't run the risk of them seeding this young man's head with thoughts of glamorous, aristocratic, boutique sides like the ones just mentioned. My team needs supporters, deserves them. We do, we do...

And I did it, I got in there before anyone else. So when his youngest young 'un is eighteen, seeing the UK for the first time, and me in my sixties,we'll catch a game together. The old order showing the new. I feel like Obi Wan Kenobi passing on immortal, immutable truths. Or as I really hope, I'll have a body like Iggy Pop does at sixty one, ripped and muscular, and be out on the town with him instead.

Homesickness is something I've never had; I'm different - sick at having to come home that's what I get.

I've been away in West Wales on a part bird-watching, part hiking, part general culture vulture trip. I know there's only a few of you out there grazing this blog, by now you're be dab hands at sensing just when I'm about to launch into eulogy.

Your antennae working? Good, because here I go: if you've not been to West Wales then put it high up on the list of places to visit. Specifically St Davids, the spiritual capital of the area. It's the UK's smallest city, and small cannot be over-emphasised, scarcely more than 1800 inhabitants.

It's joyous yet elusive, mysterious yet real, utterly bewitching, there's magic around every corner. St Davids sits there spinning it's beguiling web on the unwary so subtly and yet so tightly, it's almost impossible to break free. The only way I can begin to describe it is imagine a combination of a Celtic Middle Earth, the hippier quarters of Northern California, the sensibility of Hay on Wye and St Ives, and a soupcon of Portobello Road. It's the place where a Unicorn could appear fleetingly in the rolling sea fog and still seem natural. Fantastic

I'm having a mid-summer break, so trusting that the British weather holds (I'm being fashionable or demonstrating the realities of a credit crunch economy, depends how you look at it, by holidaying in Blighty), and I am not forced back to my pint-sized flat by driving squalls, then normal service resumes next Friday.

"Teenagers think they can still work for a future. We know there's no point". A friend sent that to me. So true once you reach your forties. There is no point. None. Zilch. Nada. Slacking, that's the name of the game now. We're Generation Z, baby and proud. Proud to give up. Proud to quit. Proud to shirk. Proud to throw in the towel. Comrades, fellow travellers, hear our call, join us. Always a seat free on the Generation Z sofa

The North is beyond hope say the Tories and should be abandoned.

It cannot be saved, it's beyond redemption; the only remedy is to effectively close it down and move everyone South, that's what Policy Exchange - a key Tory think-tank - are proclaiming in their latest report. Tells you all you need to know about today's Tories; they've not changed a whit since the Eighties: still full of malice, still vindictive.

I'm still full of ambitions, and this is at the time of my life, when if the books and psycho-therapists are to be believed, I should be tacking my sails and accommodating to reality. Clearly, I'm bucking that.

I admit that a lot of what I hope for, frankly ain't going to happen, well not in this life, or even at the time when it could have, had all the arrows pointed in the same direction. How ever hard I wish, I'm never going to be playing "Safe European Home" with the Clash. For one thing, Joe's not around anymore and there's another fly in the ointment, I can plod through chords slowly but I really can't play the damn guitar.

Much as I'd like to be paparazzi fodder, photo-lens candy, struggling out of some night club in the wee small hours with the obligatory mystery blonde. I know that's dead on the starting blocks. Waiting to pay for a large doner outside the mobile kebab shop at two a.m. is the level of nightlife action I see.

Nevertheless, you simply have to hope, without that what is there. Hope keeps you going. Even now, and I'm getting close to veteran status, I'd like to be that man all mothers beg their daughters never to see because he's got a 'rep', an outlaw, trouble with a capital T. Plead, cajole, threaten as much as they want, mothers know, just know, their daughters will be fascinated by these snake charmers.

The reality, and to be honest, I'm not even sure if I've even featured in one of these entreaties, is that mothers will have pointed as an example of man their daughters should go out with, because...because he's nice. Nice is vanilla, it's beige, it's taupe. Great.

"Most people will actually feel climate change delivered to them by the postman...it will come in the form of higher water bills, because of increased droughts in some areas; higher energy bills, because the use of fossil fuels becomes prohibitive; and higher insurance and mortage rates, because of much more violently unpredicatble weather...remember climate change means 'global weirding' not just global warming"

Minik Thorleif Rosing. Geologist at the Danish Natural History Museum.

My internal camera took a photograph of something that I never want to fade, but I do, as the years tick by, want it's timbre to deepen and warm. It's a memory that I must never forget. It's almost a sepia glow even now.

I was at a Sunday lunch last week, a mostly family event, but a few friends were there too; one of whom I've had a quiet crush on for years, going back to the evening I first met her.

I'm sure she knows, in fact I know she knows - she mentioned it once at some one's birthday party. The heat of that particular moment has never faded, nor, indeed, have any of those my internal camera has caught either. Still strong, still clear. Everyday moments, like seeing her brush her hair, but moments nevertheless, that for some reason are imbued with something I can't properly put into words. They're profound, they move me, and that's all I know.

As last week's lunch came to an end and we broke up to leave, I saw her stroke the arm of a young baby, a delightful, charming four month old - there was something so ineffably kind, a radiancy in such a simple gesture, that I've scarcely been able to stop thinking about since I silently witnessed it. A wonderfully fugitive moment - impossible to capture and place into a coherent sentence that does n't include blissful or good-hearted or gracious. The little boy beamed. I did too.

I don't want that image to ever leave me.

I wait for the day to arrive when the Tories and their howling partner in hysteria, the Daily Mail, thanks the NHS. Congratulates them, it'll be between gritted teeth obviously, but even offering a grudging compliment would be something. Takes the barb out of the usual diatribe and says "job well done". I'm dreaming, I know. It's the downside of my eternal idealism.

If only either of them would refer themselves into the nearest hospital and admit they need help in stopping their obsessive compulsive disorder to harry, decry and abuse the NHS at every opportunity. It's for political reasons obviously, but how much do they expect to gain from attacking the efforts of the thousands who work in the NHS. Continually dissing the dedication of several hundred thousand employees must be counter-productive.

The thought of a Tory administered NHS jerking to the rabid beat of the Daily Mail's drum...well come on, how would you feel anything but terrified. It'll be back to the time before Florence Nightingale.

A cheese for every day of the year; nearly fifty ways to knot a scarf; and a lusty old debate raging over exactly how many social kisses are de riguer, or indeed, de trop, makes it plain that being French is a mite bit harder than we pallid, cardigan wearing Brits might think, or certainly fetish about.

Combiendebises received an honourable mention in dispatches in this morning's Guardian. If anyone of my hardy band of readers is French, then let me know what the state of bise play is in your department.

Those damn keys lying on the roof of the bus shelter outside St Charles House tax office are still bugging me. Why are they there? Act of malice probably. But who did it, whose are they, and what went on before? Paul Auster phone me, this is your kind of material. Mystery keys just the thing I expect to see in one of your novels. Talking dogs, people with the same names, these are the kind of devices that drive your novels, so why not a couple of sets of keys tossed on to a bus shelter roof.

And this is not the only thing that's got my mind twisting and turning: a friend of mine - a scriptwriter I know - mused about the "deep humiliation of Hollywood" on his Facebook site. What you put up with basically in order to see an idea realised. or more likely, bastardised out of all recognition. The antidote is obscene remuneration. Throw it my way, please. I'm cheap, I'm spineless, I'm compliant.

Gas prices going up, electricity the same. Foodstuffs dearer by the minute. Value of my tiny flat eroding quicker than an iceberg in the equatorial sun. Company share price nose-diving. What would make me happy though is an actual live reader leaving a bona fide comment. Someone out there prove to me you're reading what I write. A sign, a visible sign.

My mood has n't been helped either finding out that Kate Bush turned fifty this week. What happened to my youth ? Where'd it go ?

"Greece saved from plague...", says Ioannis Latrides, Mayor of Faliraki, "Mercifully our clientele this Summer is a wonderful mix of peoples from all over Europe...far fewer Britons, which means no rapes, no accidents, no drunken debauchery, no going on the rampage. I'm so relieved..." I can hear it, Ioannis, but think of us who have to live cheek by jowl with these people.

Surely, Churchill did n't have this in mind when he dramatically uttered: "...whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender..." He can't have been that far-sighted.

On the top of the bus shelter outside St Charles House tax office on Kensington High St, there are three sets of keys. I saw them from the top deck of the bus when it stopped to drop off some passengers. I've been thinking about them ever since.

Malice probably put them up there; the detritus of a handful of street robberies, contents shoveled out, money, cards kept, everything else dumped. Except throwing three sets of keys on to the roof of a bus shelter implies premeditation of a type. Bag snatches are usually opportunistic, frantic, the bag gutted on the run, contents tossed out confetti like, as the snatcher legs it (I know by the way, my briefcase got lifted magnificently last September).

This is different: someone has consciously decided to dump three sets of keys - from what I could make out they look like two sets of house keys and a set of car keys - in an almost inaccessible, and certainly not where you'd expect, area of a piece of very public street furniture. Who were they mad at and why? I'm so intrigued.

"Geez, wish I had that Matisse poster today..."

"You don't hoard then...? I'm compulsive, got stuff going back to the seventies...tee-shirts from the early eighties that I can still slip into...all kinds of things, clothes, books, newspapers, wedged in boxes, packed into cupboards, under the bed... the seams are popping on the walls of my flat...and yes, I've got a storage unit as well.

It's like I'm laying down the sedimentary layers of my life. This is geology in action"

Shakespeare does n't mention it anywhere in "The Seven Ages of Man" - the age my friends and are find ourselves in now: that of ageing parents, of job worries, of relationship anxieties, of sudden illness, of increasingly difficult moments with children.

It's a deeply uncomfortable stage in life; as a participant, it goes without saying; and if honesty is still a worthy currency, then it's bloody troubling as a nervous spectator, literally fingering the worry beads, wondering when...if...

The only reference I can pluck out of Shakespeare's evocative prose poem that fits this stage we're all navigating through is that it is a "...strange eventful history...". It does worry me.

My first real broadband scare; I lost my connection. My fault too, not the providers. Nevertheless, I'm back online, and happily wirelessed up this time.

Head hoovered clean however of any bon mots, pensees, meditations, or judgments, that could find a life on my blog. Maybe tomorrow something will surface out of my unconscious.

"The bestiary of power" was the metaphor Roland Barthes used to capture the symbolic power, and more often than not, the awesome power, we assign to particular items, and in so doing, move them from mere commodity to icon. An example might be the Porsche, it's just a car, when all is said and done, except it's not, there's so much in there, beyond the tangible. Mont Blanc pens are another. Again, nothing more than a pen...but it is. Picture a huge business deal being signed off with a humble bic, or a pen picked off the bookie's counter. Does n't work, really, does it. That's Mont Blanc territory. They own it.

Porsches and Mont Blancs are, in Barthes's terms, full-blooded examples of "...the supreme creation of an era conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object". Barthes's words...I wish they were mine since they are so apposite.

I read them today on the tube home and I had to stop, and gaze out of the window for a moment, to properly absorb their weight; it seemed churlish to have read on without pausing.

What fascinates me is that we are so capricious in what we symbolically confer on some items. Diamonds are forever. They live on. But brands ? Goldman Sachs has heft to it, there's an oaky, mature, collegiate sense; it evokes discipline, an informed, elegant, understated body of people. Reputable.

Then there's Starbucks; when that pioneering latte stumbled ashore, life felt bohemian, creative, zany. Without being consciously aware I, no doubt alongside thousands of others, charged it with that power. A life changing power,

Today the battery's flat. Starbucks has extended itself so much that I no longer seek it out; it's everywhere. The charge has dissipated. Barthes's "...magical objects..." can, and do, have shelf lifes.

Where is it ? Where's it gone ? My book. The one I'm supposed to have in inside me. The one we're all supposed to have. It's not there. Nothing. I've been prodded, poked, measured, weighed, tested and the library doctors can't find anything. Not even a three line haiku. There are people out there carrying not just books, but entire libraries, Smithsonian, Library of Alexandria, municipal libraries, inside them, and there's not enough in me to write a "disgusted of Tonbridge Wells" letter...

I'm really taken with this idea of pocket urban gardens and growing your own stuff. Not just for the economics of it, or the reclamation of abandoned land, but for the joy of doing something I've never properly done.

We had a garden when I was a kid, mostly grass, with a roughly laid flagstone foot path bisecting it. I made a few lukewarm attempts to grow the occasional carrot or solitary onion. Now I'm in the mood to really give it a go.

Need some land though. Living in a mid-level flat (no balcony) reduces the opportunity to growing anything edible to mustard and cress by the window sill and we have a team of very acrobatic squirrels round here to boot. They'll view that as an easy challenge. I know those critters; I watch them most mornings swing through the neighbouring tree.

I'm an index finger typist. From daybreak to sunset, these two fingers crash down on the keyboard the way Jerry Lee Lewis thrashes a piano keyboard. Constant salvos all day long.

Index fingered typing has a very distinct rhythm, like pneumatic drills tearing a road up, gouging, pummelling, not the flitting poetry of every finger fully stretched and caressing the keys like eagles riding the thermals. No, not all. It's industrial. Two drop hammers pounding the dust out of my laptop. The desk shivering. Pens and coffee cups hopping across the desk top. It's that kind of effort I put in.

But the rhythm can't continue...my fingers can't stand it any more. They starting to rebel. They hurt. Imagine two fingers sore and crucified, especially my right one, it's numb nearly.

I lose all power in these two then that's it. Doomed. Industrially unfit for work.

Too much time on line has wiped my memory completely of what I did before I ever went on line. Maybe I read books, had a social life, dunno, it's all conjecture. Once a dynamically assigned IP address has wiped itself round your neo-cortex tighter than ivy strangling an Oak tree, then that's it you're gone. Lost.

And I've only realised that after two days of enforced cyber idleness. My ADSL connection popped a seam and fell apart on me. But baby, it's back, and I'm so happy I'm even replying to the spammers.