Someone said this evening I should "...embrace my inner eccentric..". I've no idea what to make of that; it seems like a compliment, or then again it could be faint praise as in damned with, or maybe it's something else altogether. What did they mean? I like to think of myself as normal with a capital N.

Thirty years too late, and now completely unwilling to pogo...not, by the way, that I'm too frail or weak to do it, I'm simply too self conscious. A balding middle-aged man leaping up and down is no pretty sight. But I'm finally getting to see the Sex Pistols in September. God knows it'll be like some punk rock cabaret. All I want is them to lunge on stage, play Never Mind in it's glorious entirety, then walk off. There's a rumour they're going to be debuting new work...the Sex Pistols difficult second album...no, not really.

I like the voiceover. I like the music. But I love the film clip...

Steven Pinker said something else I liked. "I've been...", he said "...a victim of Godwin's law. This states that as an internet discussion continues, the probability that someone will be compared to Hitler approaches certainty."

The sub law of this is that in business the probability of someone in a long, typically fraught, e-mail thread, cc'ing everyone in the company becomes a rock-hard certainty. It is an inescapable law as immutable as gravity. It will happen.

Fuck ! Shit ! Piss ! Twat ! I know, I know... Terrible.

I barely make fifteen or twenty minutes during the working day before I have to reach for one of these, either alone, or in some toxic permutation. Don't worry, I rarely say them out loud; under my breath usually, or flashed as ticker tape across whatever thought pattern is prevailing. I know it's best not to at all, but some days, you know...a trigger gets pulled...the red button pressed...and before you know it... the shock troops are over the parapet.

Swear words (general taboo words in fact), fascinate Steven Pinker, a cutting edge linguistics expert, I found out in today's 'Observer'. They are "...a window on to the domains of life that arouse the strongest emotions: bodily secretions, powerful deities, death, disease, hated people or groups and depraved sexual acts".

He's right; they are doorways to understanding our inability to spontaneously articulate a mood, or a frustration, or exasperation, clearly and plainly.

Verbal intensifiers with such power as these need sparing use and preferably only when alone, and absolutely, out of earshot of whoever the butt it is. Otherwise it's an armrace.

I'd told a friend with my usual flourish of hyperbole that my bank account had a very queasy look about it; that it was frail and tottering; and swirling above it all was an altogether unwholesome smell. Understand, please, that in my world you can never over-egg the pudding enough. Ever.

She replied, rightly: "why fret, after all you can't take it with you". True.

Except I'm a Capricorn, remember - we love and fear money. Even when we're down to our last million (I'd actually like my first, but for the purposes of this, I'm using this image very figuratively...), we're in panic mode.

I've been flicking through other blogs - I should n't have, all it's done is told me I can't be a blogger. I'm too dull. I don't reach any of the standards, meet any of the criteria.

It's virtually mandatory to have been born in a brothel like Richard Pryor and have a monumental drug habit, and be completely misunderstood by the outside world.

Where's my share of random, anonymous sexual encounters with all and sundry? That's the kind of stuff other bloggers seem to lay the table with. I've none of that. Worse still, I don't meet standard blogger criteria: I actually liked my parents. Imagine that. I'll say it again, my parents and I got on really well. Savour that. No friction. No slamming doors. No angst on either side. Nothing.

So small....so infinitesimally small...as if I'm looking at a distant star with the naked eye. I have reached the bottom of my current account barrel; there's nothing but dust and leavings. How did I spend so much by the first week of this month? Am I sponsoring a Bank employee's family and no one told me?

"You promised me Barbie...You gave me Chuckie!" I wonder how many people brought together by the machinations of online dating agencies have thought that gazing at their "perfectly matched by computer partner"

There's a series of ads on the Tube showing a very smug couple, and to be honest, if they're that good-looking then they're the last people to want dating agency alchemy, gazing cow like at each other with the strap line that this will be one pair who'll not be wanting their money back. The implication that the digitalised reconciliation exercise this particular agency puts everyone through ensures perfect soulmating, and if it did n't, oh the rare chance, then it's moneyback. That's the poetry; I think the painful prose needs showing...

You can't beat moaning. I love it; it's so cathartic to send out hot jets of righteous wrath. Cleans the pipe like nothing else I've ever come across. Yesterday, I had to, simply had to, tell a friend as we were driving to Welwyn Garden City that landing back in London is like stepping back at least a century. Nothing works, the trains are always broken or delayed, ticket machines don't work, and if the Gatwick Express is this slow and an Express, then what's a slow train like?

So that's London, the World's first regressive post-industrial city. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is the only city I know where you can go backwards and forwards in time, and still not leave your car: the car's a modern piece of high end bling, a virtually digitalised space ship, turn the car radio on and pick up the Classic rock of the late sixties. Amazing

David Davis's resignation...very odd; politicians doing things out of the blue even if they are self-avowedly maverick, is still surprising. Wonder if tomorrow's News of the World has an explanation...

I may be a follower of rational enlightenment, deduction, logical analysis, sober thoughts and so on but there's part of me forever irrational - I read my horoscope every day; most days it's so off beam it's laughable.

Mind you, there's a minority of occasions when it's nearer the mark than might be expected, like today. Do whatever you can, mine today asserted, to avoid being tetchy, but how can I not be after spending hours waiting in Inverness airport due to delayed flights, then an interminable crawl by train from Gatwick to home.

Then the straw breaking moment seeing the fence outside where I live still broken a full day after I'd been promised that carpenters would have been round to fix it. Tetchy does n't begin to get my mood

Setting goals. "It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some ambitious goal beyond it" - Arnold Toynbee.

I have to fly tomorrow. I love flying, except for turbulence when I'm sweatily clutching the seat and desperately telling myself that all that's actually happening is that this is the aerial equivalent of driving over cobblestones.

It's the preflight part that chafes. The airport I'm returning from on Friday delights in calling me out for a randomised bag check (how it can be random if I'm chosen every time I'm there defeats me). It's not yet reached the stage of me having to strip to my boxers (always clean...may live on my own, but this boy maintains standards) and lay on the convoyer belt as it takes me through the x-ray machine...but it can't be long.

...but maybe there is something, something personal for me that it is, in yesterday's flippancy that "anywhere with less than eight million inhabitants is a wilderness". It's about energy and confusion and the creative chaos of living in London; the ceaseless traffic, the utter busyness of everyone, and of course the walls of people everywhere you turn. Charging, racing, scuttling to and fro, barging, overtaking, driven. I like activity, I love being wrapped around with hubbub. I miss this transfusion when I'm away. Few places generate such turmoil: New York, obviously, our sister city; Paris and Berlin have patches; Hanoi and Saigon, Bangkok and Beijing, tiger cities of tiger economies, that's about it.

"Anywhere with less than eight million inhabitants is a wilderness"

I said that and wished I had n't. You know the pause before a conference call starts, the holding space where the early joiners circle and chat before everyone else joins, exactly where this piece of nonsense made it's debut. Fully formed, it just popped right out.

I have a sad talent for the unforgivably preposterous comment. And this one does n't only hit all those buttons, it's got an uncomfortable metropolitan sneer that, believe me, I'd not intended.

Engage brain, fit the words together, try the sound of them privately, weigh the sense, then broadcast. New mantra.

Surely Starbucks must have reached their elastic limit in London ? I said flippantly to someone yesterday as we were sat - guess where - that there has to be at least one Starbucks for every 1o Londoners.

That was flippancy; the dawning fact is that we might not actually be that far from seeing that ratio met. In a rough mile circumference from where I live there are, amazingly...wait for it...twenty ! Three just in Notting Hill Gate.

It's Hammersmith Mall where the true pressure is. They're planning to open a new store less than fifty yards from one that's been bashing out lattes and espressos for years. How does this work? How will this work? It'll be like having two carnivorous fish in a goldfish bowl, they'll end up cannibalising each other's market, after all there's only so much passing footfall traffic to draw in through the doors.

I wish our political coronations had the drama and grandeur of those in the US, especially the old order passeth to the new event of today: Hillary handing the baton and her blessings on to Barack. I cannot however hard I try, and I'm squinting, ever see that happening here. The UK political stage is too bare, the personalities too flat, too limp.

Nor are they are as inspirational as the Americans. Putting aside the different cultural contexts, I could be, I am in fact, energised by Hillary Clinton and uplifted by Barack Obama. Forces for positive change. Where are our equivalents. Inspired by Thatcher ? Called to arms by Hague ? No.

I think Barack will do it. It's a great package, every thing's there: charisma, rousing speeches, and from what I've been able to glean from the newspapers and online (I'm based in the UK remember), reasonable, common-sense ideas and proposals too.

Winning will be straightforward. It's what comes after that - the actual governing - which will be the mark of the man. It's at this point where the nobility of electioneering dreams face reconciliation with the hard realities and necessary compromises of governing.

It's a universal, immutable political law. I voted three times for Tony Blair. With almost delirium the first time in 1997. How could anyone not withhold that emotion after almost twenty years of stultifying Tory rule ?

In 2001, I voted again, still a believer, still eager; four years on, it was me voting out of a weary sense of duty, more keep the Tories at bay than anything else. Tony's allure had faded. No more golden touch.

And that I suppose is the political law of gravity: soar like a rocket, then drift like a balloon pushed along haphazardly by competing winds, until the inevitable dropping like a stone.

The Barack Obama phenomena is making waves even in Arnos Grove. Someone I know who lives there does n't want Hillary to throw in the towel until Barack agrees to meet his bookie's debt of £10 that he placed on her to be President. As if that's going to happen....

I'm a Limey with a long time interest in all aspects of Americana and it's Barack for me. He's got what it takes.

What have I got that Women welcome ? Yeah, I got a little something hidden away. It's true, I do. A bit of an Ace tucked up my sleeve. Does the business apparently, reaches those parts other men can't, or so I've had enthusiastically whispered in my ear.

My strong point? Putting the toilet seat down? No, have always done that. Know how to load the dishwasher on, switch it on, and unload? Instinctive, do it all the time. Can make a bed? Of course. No, I got something unusual, rare even.

I have patience. I can wait.

Let me explain. This is n't waiting for something to happen, this is waiting for someone to turn up. You know as a fully paid up, right on Guardianista, I don't aim - ever - to play the lazy game of gender stereotypes. Still...I've noticed something. Maybe it says more about how women view me, as the dependable puppy dog forever on his hind legs, looking upwards wide-eyed whatever the weather. He'll be there. I'll be there,

There's no self-pity intended here, by the way. It's that I'm good at waiting and every woman I know is habitually late. Chronically. Perhaps it's the type of woman I know. Inevitably ten minutes before any kind of rendezvous, there'll be a text message:"Sorry running late...be there in about an hour...do you mind ?...you're sure ?..." I could arrive later than the time we've agreed to meet and still be early.

I'm all terrain as well: shoe-shop, I can wait, got a serene look on my face; clothes-shop, same thing; the long mobile phone call with one of your girlfriends you spent most of the day with and only left twenty minutes ago, Zen-like detachment on my beano.

Not complaining. You're worth the wait...but just once or twice can you make it on time?

If I ever had a Rip Van Winkle like incident, and slumbered away quietly for months, and then effortlessly woke up, I could tell without looking at the calendar more or less whether I'd popped out of hibernation on a working day or a weekend. Could n't be easier. Simply have to wait for the low, throaty rumble of the Harley Davidson chugging through town and it's a giveaway that it's a Saturday or Sunday. Like today, I've seen three of these low slung carburettor heavy monsters cruising the streets...and yes it's a Sunday. Who needs calendars.