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.