I am disappointed that True Grit did n't register at the Oscars. Nothing, not even a heartbeat. Instead, everyone turned predictable, and opted for that safe old favourite: the unadventurous Limey costume drama - The King's Speech.

Yet another tired re-tread of someone's heart-breaking struggle with privilege. Where's the courage in choosing a film like that?

The reason I got robbed in Buenos Aires was that I stood out from the crowd. Every Porteno, every man jack of them were in denim; I was in chinos.

I could have passed as a citizen, quite easily in fact, B.A. is as multi-cultural as it gets, but it was the chinos, they gave me and my friend who was with me away, We might as well have been dressed in jesters motley and be carrying a pig's bladder on a stick.

Since then, (even before when I think about it), I dress to blend in, I camouflage myself, which these days, means the middle aged man's uniform of dark everything: jeans, coat, shirts, shoes. It's as standard as look as the furniture in a classroom, built for utility, designed for anonymity, hence why I wear it.

Only a handful of my male friends have the charisma to carry off a bold, bright palette of colour in the way they dress. My cousin, probably the boldest of this tiny bunch; he's a good eye for what matches, how to colour block and so on.

So when he and his wife brought me a bright red windcheater one Xmas, I inwardly died, bluffed a hearty thanks, and then stuck it on a hanger. A coat in exile.

But they knew more. No colour is an orphan. Everything goes with something. Something sat on my shoulder this morning, whispered in one ear, then fluttered over to the other and did the same: "That red coat? Try it, go on..."

I did, and it does. My little red windcheater and I got on pretty well today. Enough to make me want to take it out again.

That fleeting clip of Colonel Gaddafi as he makes his first public reaction to the growing Libyan revolution has echoes for me at least of another tragic, other worldly figure - Michael Jackson.

Even the umbrella Gaddafi's fidgeting with seems Jacksonesque. Strange clothes, that umbrella, the hint of darkness, it could be the Thriller video all over again. Except Gaddafi is an unmitigated grotesque monster; Jackson, on the other hand, merely a faun, lost in a mysterious, bewildering world.

Surprising to walk home this evening in the dark and yet smell freshly mown grass as I walked past a local park. This is February and it's cold.

Grass cutting is a late spring entrant. Not now.

What makes it even odder is that the snowdrops and crocuses - the early bird spring flowers - still have n't fully broken through the ground of another park I walk through daily. Man and Nature are both mixed up now.

I don't usually recommend book's to people - one person's meat is another's poison and so on - but this novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, I'm nearly evangelical about. Get a copy, lock the door, turn the phone off.

It's an absolutely charming late love story and a beautiful comedy of manners set in England. I can't get over it.

It will tell you more about the social frictions, difficulties, and nuttiness about modern England than I could do in a lifetime, with a wit ten times better than Jane Austen and it makes Martin Amis look like a cartoon scribbler.

Character lovers, this book is heaven. I've not come across such well dimensioned and lingeringly memorable characters as the eponymous Major or Mrs Ali. This is the level of writing I aspire to.

Why do people keeping abandoning fruit and veg in tube stations? A few years ago I noticed a solitary onion on the lip of the eastbound District Line platform at Monument.

Tonight, it was two avocados in the walkway leading to the lifts at Holland Park. Obviously they had fallen out of shopping bags, but they did look lonely, and to be honest they were far apart enough to seem like they had an argument, then spun on their tiny avocado heels and decided not to look at each other.

Someone wrote that one of my friends was n't awesome, he was 100 kinds of awesome. Surely that's crying to be the name of a book or a film. As for me, I'm seven shades of tired; been years since I've felt so worn to the bone as I do now.

Yeah, it's free, don't worry, sit there. Just let me move my stuff. Yes it is busy. Starts to get that way now. Be different later, the seams will be popping when the football starts. Need a shoe horn to fit people in then and it'll be an absolute madhouse to get to the bar.

Why am I laughing? ... I could n't help it...heard you muttering... what you said about warm beer. Every American, its the same thing; you were expecting cold, and you got a mouthful of unfiltered river bed instead.

And you're clearly not English, you've none of the warning signs: not fat, no tattoos or tongue piercings, you don't have the skin complexion of a cheese and onion crisp, and, of course, there's that full set of teeth. You stand out. Observe the contrast. Just look around...be discrete...see what I mean? The real population of this country should be about two million, not sixty...look at us, the ugliest nation afloat. No wonder we're an island. Quarantined to protect the global gene pool. Christ, I don't how we breed.

That's the thing with this pub, every conceivable mis-shape and some that are off the spectrum, are in here...it's like that bar in Star Wars with the wookies and God knows what else.

Ok, that's my little rant over. By the way, the pub is the spiritual home of the outburst. Take it as it comes. You'll hear all sorts of stuff in the pub. Usually low-level bitching but occasionally there's something worthwhile

So, how about you... why are you here? Studying ? Tourist? Ah..a pub experience, that's what you want. OK. Fair enough.

This place is n't too bad. Actually it's one of the better places. Food's good. Yes, that's correct, you heard right; the food in England is good now. Forget what ever you've read. It's edible, it has taste, it can be successfully digested. Look, see what's on the menu. This is a gastro pub. Gastro, that is, ending in onomy, not entitis. Incredibly, most people here, even those who look dead-eyed lumpfish standing on their flippers, can tell a raspberry coulis from a Bearnaise sauce, and a thyme infused lamb shank from a coq au vin. Put that all down to the relentless march of time and Jamie Oliver.

You've already had something here? The nuts on the bar ! No, you did n't...tell me you did n't...That's stomach pump stuff. People go to the gents, the ladies, they don't wash their hands...back to the bar...order a drink... grab a handful of nuts out the basket on the bar and ingest the urine and fecal samples of their great unwashed compatriots. Don't. Do not. You've been warned. If you want to eat, order from the menu, or get something that comes in a sealed bag.

I'm not exaggerating; I know it might sound like it, but I'm not. Just being candid on the subject of good and bad pub food. Nuts are bad. And if you're thinking of taking some nuts home from here that have feet on them, then make sure they're condom-wrapped for freshness.

Too direct. I'm sorry.

They'll be putting the football on in a minute. Be an absolute bear pit then. Pubs are tribal homes for football fans. It's like dogs and scent markings; this pub for one team, that pub for another. You'll see more pacing around when that match starts then you will in a year in the corridors of a maternity hospital. Every shade of emotion, every delicate nuance, from uber-euphoria to the darkest, meanest.

Forget the David Niven stiff upper lip, Ice cold in Alex thing, this will be pure madness. Several hundred overweight, gap-toothed men with enough hair between them to thatch the roof of a dog kennel, baying at the moon. Don't even ask what the women are going to be like either. There'll be so much shrieking it'll break every glass in the pub and the windows will probably shatter.

No, it's not every night. They do discos and bloody karaoke other nights. The speciality here is an '80s disco; crappy synth bands and power shouldered shouters with asymmetric haircuts. I loathed it then, I loath it now. Plus there's always some prat who comes along in his Flock of Seagulls gear with his over-ripe, flesh bulging in all the wrong places, Like A Virgin era Madonna wannabe partner. I never come on those days. My heart can't take it. It just can't. I'd blow a ventricle, I'm sure of it.

Karaoke...yes I have. I have tortured songs thinking I'm Mick Jagger or John Lennon. Lessons learned. That's all I'm going to say. Other nights, they might do a pub quiz. I used to be in a team that my cousin captained, but that all fall apart; I was so desperate to impress a woman on the same team how quick off the buzzer I was that I answered every question wrong. The moral from this part of my sermon is: don't take part in teams with family members who play to win and for whom defeat is unthinkable, and certainly don't think that sexy looking women are going to get turned on by a man whose only claim to fame is his advanced general knowledge skill. I have laid to rest that little notion single-handedly

The Ladies room? Where those people are going out to smoke, just before there...see the signs? You want the one that says Bitches, Bastards is the men's room. I'm joking, I'm joking...

I'll look after your stuff. Do you want another beer when you come back?

A moment ago I heard the most incredible story I've come across in days: a radio DJ read out a message from a listener, who was feeling light headed after blowing up a double air bed by mouth. The pump had broken. No wonder he's feeling gaga and woozy. Any one would

But to have that lung capacity though; I can scarcely inflate a balloon without keeling over.

It's looking like the UK will be one long stretch of concrete and Keep Out signs if the Tories push to sell off the country's woodland and forests comes off. I've signed petitions against it, so you have to hope that people power works, but the Tories are cunning as well as being the only people who can speak with forked tongues, so it's not over by any means.

Should they be wielding the auctioneer's gavel, then God helps us. We'll be crowded round the gates peering in watching the Tories and their well-heeled chums enjoying themselves in what was once public domain; or having to traipse to a Tree Museum to remind ourselves what a tree used to look like

There was a witty, but depressing comment from Simon Hoggart in yesterday's Guardian about the woodland horrors the Tories could trigger if they get this through Parliament.

The Tories' crazed plans to sell our forests and woodland will, in spite of their claims, change the British countryside forever.

I suspect they will have to drop the scheme. But imagine the loss to our literature if the best-loved parts of the countryside are privatised.

"Out of the Hundred Acre wood came a sad procession. There was Pooh Bear with his last jar of honey, Piglet, Kanga, Tigger, and Eeyore, mournfully waving his tail from side to side. Behind them a man with a roll of barbed wire was planting a placard in the Heffalump Trap. 'Keep out! Property of Globex Holdings Inc. Trespass at your peril.'"

Or "Mellors cradled Constance softly in his arms as they lay on the blanket in his hut. 'Thart a good lass, with a gradely backside,' he said with spurting tenderness. Suddenly they heard a hammering at the door. "We're bailiffs, and you're evicted!" said a rough, unlettered voice. "Injunction from Van Hoogstraten Properties! Out in 10 minutes!"

Robert Frost's best-loved poem would start:

"Whose woods these are I think I know,

Entailed to the Halliburton Co."

And the Gruffalo wouldn't have a chance, gunned down by paramilitary gamekeepers employed by some vast multinational which wants to raze the copse to build a luxury spa.

Neologism in the making: Superbole. Noun; over-exaggeration particularly during a sports event. First usage recorded during the frenzied build-up to the 2011 Superbowl. Let's see how viral this becomes.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, it was n't coined by me. Freshly minted by a US friend of mine today.

It's not an iron rule that the pen is mightier than the sword. Not at all.

Yesterday the father of one of my dearest friends passed away. I did n't know what to say when I heard and hours later, I still don't know what to say. Words have no power at times like this; flaccid, thin, feeble, all of them.

There's nothing in the vocabulary that can help. All the condolences are trite, they're too matter of fact, and they reek of routine. I'm left gasping, a fish beached.

Where are the words when I need them? I know the sentiment I want to say, but I can't dress it, the words are n't there.

V, my love, my deepest, dearest love is with you tonight.