As is the case whenever I return from abroad I high-tail it to the library and pick out whatever stock they have on the country or region I've just been to.

In the case of Milan, well, all the local libraries, here and in the City where I work, are pretty light on coverage, Naples and Sicily, on the other hand, are much richer seams; serious fiction, crime, travelogues, histories, memoirs abound. So it's these two parts of Italy that I've been reading about.

Earlier this evening, lazing on a bench in the same idle grandeur that an adult walrus basks on the beach, I came to the end of "Falling Palace", Dan Hofstadter's lyrical, often bittersweet, portrait of his extended stays in Naples.

It's a Naples of melancholy. Every corner seems shaded, occasionally with joy, more often languor, an odd sadness. It is compelling writing, to the degree that I could easily draw a sketch of it's tiny streets, abrupt dead ends, crumbling palazzi, it has a ghostly life shadow that fell over me as I read it.

His Naples is rueful, riddled with ambiguity, things are held at a distance, yet the other side of this peculiar coin, is a city that toil incessantly, everyone has another job, a sideline in something else; it's noisy, a blanket of noise that lulls people to sleep. the city is magical. I have to go.

This strange, haunting, what-if mood draws so much of it's odd potency from Hofstadter's elusive and quixotic relationship with the very complex Benedetta, his enigmatic, puzzling, gregarious, yearning, wonderfully gestural girlfriend.

I could see Benedetta very easily. I have met two women, one Italian, the other French, who have weaved spells over me, spun me into a similar webs to those that Hofstadter intimates Benedetta (is this really her name? There's more than echo of Dante's beloved Beatrice in it).

Ask me what colour mood this intimate recollection is and I say blue, the blue of wistfulness, gentle regret, sadness. Very much the way I feel when I think of each of these two women especially the one I could never properly commit to. You know who you are.

If it had n't have been for one of my Italian friends who has spent a long time on and off in the US, I would have in all probability gone to the end of my days, entirely ignorant of George Carlin. In the hour or so since I looked at the first Youtube link she sent me, I've taken the cool-aid. I'm a convert.

See what I mean: Ten Commandments and Modern Man

The things you hear that really matter not one whit and life would have passed on without them, but you heard nevertheless, and now they won't leave you.

Agree that's a complicated and infelicitous sentence in a way, yet that's what happened to me this afternoon.

I overheard a young woman say to her two friends at the table next to mine outside Sheffield's Millennium Gallery cafe, perhaps flippantly, perhaps even seriously - could after all be a nugget that she'd picked up from a magazine lifestyle quiz - that almost 60% of all couples who visit IKEA are quarrelling by the time they reach lamp section. Bloodbath by the bulbs? Interesting.

It's got to be anecdotal, and if there was any empirical data available, I'd be whizzing it straight off to Ben Acre's Bad Science column in the Guardian hoping he'd slice and dice it on the dissection table.

Of course, the next time I'm in an IKEA, I'll be on alert by the time I reach the Lamps.

A beautiful evening. Another hour or so lounging in Holland Park. But next year, I want to be in my own place with at least a balcony. Somewhere that I can walk to easily to bath in fresh air.

Something's happened to Holland Park's Parakeet population. They're not there. Vanished. They've been scratched off the canvas of the park.

Sitting in the Dutch Garden, I'd always glimpse a zap of lime green dash from tree to tree, or at least hear them squeaking and squawking.

And now, nada. So where are they? On holiday? Gone somewhere warmer? Pitched camp and headed for another part of town?

I'm going the other way to most of my friends and peer group; the older I get, the more liberal I become. However, this is in no way a binding statement, it ebbs and flows, flexes the way a muscle contracts and expands, depending on the situation, and my sense of natural justice, because it's in this area that my liberality is most tested.

Many wrong actions can be understood; some can even be excused in the specific sense that we know way some one did something, that the root cause was lack of education, or unintentional ignorance, or done in good faith, but then backfired.

The line in the sand - my line in the sand - beyond which people should not trespass, effectively the point where my liberality is replaced in a flash with the overwhelming understanding that punishment is called for and retribution demanded, was breached on Friday by the heinous, inexplicably evil and conceited (I'll explain what I mean by conceited in a sentence or two) Norwegian right wing extremist.

Can this man sleep at nights? Perhaps. There's probably a flush of toxic satisfaction coursing through him. But I don't want that, I don't like the notion this man may be at peace with himself, I want him to be haunted by this, tormented the way Lady Macbeth is, every moment, waking or otherwise, a nightmare.

Conceited? Yet again, the world has been set back and lives lost prematurely, savagely, through the arrogance of someone who feels he knows better. That they can sacrifice someone else for their illogical, paranoid aims. For them, we are but abstractions, nothing more.

How often have we seen this? Been made to suffer? The temerity is unspeakable. No empathy for others, not a shred. No sense, no feeling that others are not just flesh and bone, that they are, we are, each of us, a unique consciousness, and to be respected for that. That no one else can decide our fate, or sacrifice us on their mad altar.

I'd rather this man was pushed out of the police station, the door bolted behind him, and then made to walk into a shocked and bereaved Norwegian nation to face their anger.

How ironic, and probably predictable when you think about, that in all my travels to India, across Asia, throughout Central and South America, I was never bitten by a single mosquito. Other bitey things, yes, but never by anything from the Culicidae Family. Heard them countless times, seen them whine around other people, slapped the critters away whenever I've had to, but never has one dined on me.

So, to be bitten in Italy at the weekend, and bitten multiple times, in one of the world's most developed and civilised countries, has an ironic quality deeper than any echo sounder can probably pierce.

The Italian mosquitoes loved me; penny sized red weals all over, including to my embarassment, one on the tip of my schnoz. It's red enough to make me be seen in the dark.

Off for a week in Milan. I intend doing nothing apart from reading, writing, and thinking

Why has Rebekah Brooks hung on to her job and two hundred others have n't ? Answers on a postcard, please.

There's something nefarious going on. It's murky. Either she's acting as a firewall to protect James Murdoch from the toxicity that's billowing out because of this scandal - there's more than one suggestion going round that he knows more than he's letting on - or she has some hold over him, and so he dare n't get rid of her, or risk the whole house come down.

News International has been an intimidating, menacing presence for decades in Britain. The politicos, especially the Tories, have kow-towed to Murdoch abjectly, he's more or less had free reign to pull any levers he's wanted to; it's always the veiled threat whispered in the ear, that NI has some dubious story, or will concoct one, and then mobilise an army of outraged citizens on the back of that, and so they've all been too fearful to take him on, other than a few individuals and the Guardian.

That's been blown apart this week. There's no fear. It's liberation from media tyranny that's hobbled the British body politic for years. Nevertheless this man is too cunning, I can't see him being humbled by this.

I'm very proud of the Guardian's lone stand and tenacity in plugging way at this. I've been a Guardian reader since I was 18. It's the only principled paper in the UK

It's wonderful the NOTW has had the plug pulled. But it's little more than a human sacrifice; keeps the regulator appeased so Murdoch can absorb the remainder of BskyB. Money matters more than morality for News International. This is lip service.

All the prejudice and bigotry, the kangaroo court manners, the menace and veiled threats, the tyrannical behaviour, which make up the NOTW's call-sign, I'm convinced will get recycled into a Sunday version of the Sun. This thing is hydra-headed.

Still there's something of a Tahrir square like mood of celebration in a certain part of West London right now.

And as a Guardianista, there's only one way to end: it's the Guardian wot done it...

The fault line between Mammon and Morality has been cruelly revealed this week.

Even for a newspaper as synonymous with scandal, skulduggery and controversy, hacking into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl, has to be the worst thing the News of the World has done. Ever.

Nor does it stop there, wicked enough as that it is. More is being exposed by the minute.

The desire, the madness in fact, for profit, for bylines, for that inch further than the competition can reach, has fanned this immorality.

Aided and abetted by vile self-regarding newsroom braggadocio - some of those responsible regarded themselves as "Princes of Darkness" completely untouchable, beholden to no one. Able to do whatever they wanted and to revel in it.

It is as amazing, as it hideous, as it is heartbreaking for the victims. How could they? Employee behaviour takes it's steer from the management in every company I've worked at. Don't tell me it was rogue individuals flying under the radar here. Impossible.

What compounds the horror is that the News of the World's tentacles have extended into the Police now. There's a sense to me of veiled threats left by this newspaper for anyone daring to say no to this monster. Don't think about it, or if you do, expect the banner headline equivalent of a severed horse's head on Sunday. This is mafia newpaper ethics.

Unforgivable. But will Cameron actually do anything, other than mouth outrage?

It's a little after nine on Sunday morning and dimly, I'm catching the sound of Fontella Bass singing "Rescue Me". Somewhere there's a party yet to finish. I don't imagine it'll be soon, Fontella's now been replaced by Curtis Mayfield's "People get ready"

My kind of music, just not my time of day.

These are dark economic times, but London seems, in some areas at least, to running very strongly against the tide.

There is an incredible surge in building across all points of the compass; Stratford has the Olympic site rising up like a giant mushroom after the morning rain; the City is almost in some form building extremis, it's either raising skywards like the Pinnacle and The Shard, with more skyscrapers in between those, or it's coming down to make way for another. Builder's dust in the City is now as ever-present as sand in the Sahara.

We have a brand rail line in process of being threaded like a shoe lace around, through, and mostly underground London. The streets are going to be open trenches for years.

I love the sense of living in an ever changing urban landscape. Nothing's static. An ancient city still marching forward, contours and skylines altering by the second. It's still the urban jungle feel; what's going to behind that next corner.

Yet, even inside this whirling ball of dust, steel beams, noise, closed off streets, diggers and cranes, nature seemingly thrives and if it's anything to go by what I saw yesterday by the Tower of London, making a comeback. In the evening sky, I saw a rolling, moiling vortex of Starlings pirouette for several minutes over the Minories. I love those birds.

There are still social dinosaurs roaming Britain. Read on and discover the Priggosaurus. My advice to this bride to be is don't marry into this family. Not unless you love being at loggerheads with your mother in law forever and a day.

Becoming the POTUS requires innate capabilities that are really only seen in a comic book superhero, and this which I've always known, but was re-emphasised in a Radio programme last night, an inextinguishable Midas touch. Money has to flow ceaselessly, or the campaign withers.

As with every thing, that's not the full list, there's a trinity of requirements needed; the two above, and ingredient X.

Pinning down exactly what it is might as well be like herding cats. Nigh impossible. You have it or you don't is about as a good as an explanation I can give.

Barack Obama has it, and if was an American I'd vote for him in a heartbeat; the full package, gravitas, intelligence, grace under pressure, splendid oratorical ability.

Maybe that's it just there, partly pinned down the fugitive ingredient X. Perhaps.

But I can't see anyone else amongst the gaggle of people flexing in the wings hoping for their turn in the Presidential lime light, who have anything near ingredient X. Bachman and Palin have charisma, Romney for his part has experience, but they're all sans ingredient X.

As far as I'm concerned the 2012 election has Barack Obama's name all over it. Finest candidate by far.

London has been a furnace this weekend. Two days of face to face encounters with great roaring blasts of hot air and a tormentingly hot overheard sun.

I've done things that metaphorically I would n't do, meaning I've forsaken the sunny side of the street for relative mint cool of the shade. Had to. I was baking like a brie yesterday particularly.

Even if it has been two days of walking on hot coals, I've made it to places I don't normally go to, including Tooting, which I only knew of in relation to a beloved French teacher I had who came from there, and from what I saw yesterday, it must be one of the most multi-cultural places on Earth.

After Tooting, came New Malden, London's Koreatown; it really is too, not a handful of shops and lonely restaurants lumped generically by the local media on one of their periodic ethnic safaris, it is as Korean as any place I've seen in Korea itself.

Somehow I then made it to Chelsea Bridge and ran into the Chelsea cruise, a slow drive-past of lovingly restored British cars of the sixties and seventies, Ford Anglias, Escorts, Granadas, Minis, and a static parade of iconic American cars: Chevy pick-ups, Moby Dick sized Lincolns, Impalas, Mustangs. All beautifully painted, all handsomely refurbished, and throaty enough when the engines kick to bring tears to any petrol head or Americophiliac like me.

Before my legs split like matchsticks carrying an elephant, I made it to Battersea Park. To my eternal shame this park is one I'd only visited once before, possibly in the late eighties or early nineties. The park is a dream: a magical Peace pagoda by the river, with resplendent Buddha figures serenely watching London at play and rest. and where last night and again this evening, I saw people in complex, probably painful lotus like positions, meditating.

As I left this evening ( I had to go again to confirm it was as entrancing as I remembered on Saturday - it is) there was sound of a tenor sax floating into the trees and over the Thames. It could have been a movie; the protagonist walks away under the spreading shade of the trees, content and at one with everything

Christopher Hitchin, who is fast catching up with Bellow as the writer whose books I feel compelled to press everyone I meet into to reading, or if they don't then take me off their Christmas card list, has an article in a recent Vanity Fair on losing his voice to the pernicious cancer that's stolen it's way into him.

But, as is the case with the Hitch, there's always much more; and this is an article on how to talk, how speech influences prose, and the utter joy of those deep, memorable conversations that happen between friends.

How do we realise the value of a transcendental conversation? When the likelihood of one occurring again fades, even jeopardised, or worst of all, recedes into an ever diminishing point, until there's nothing but darkness. That's when. Absence, not presence.

Hitchin's quotes a wonderful piece of verse to show this. It's from an adaptation of Heraclitus by the Victorian poet, William Cory

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me you were dead.
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed.
I wept when I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking, and sent him down the sky.

Is n't that great? I tired the sun when I was a student and still do thirty years on

It's twenty six years, almost to the day in fact, since I first saw the E Street Band break across a stage with the energy of a cavalry charge, the stamina of stream engines, and a joie de vivre that by rights ought to be bottled and handed out as tonic for the down-hearted. They were electric.

That concert was memorable for all the right reasons. I had never been to a stadium sized concert before, and this was at the old Wembley. The venue was brimming with thousands, all of us fizzing with eagerness the way champagne does in that nano-second before the cork's pulled.

I was very tired. I'd only had a few hours sleep that morning after finishing a Friday night shift at the restaurant I worked at; so too worn down to manage hours of standing, I persuaded the friend I was with ( a Canadian I think) to find somewhere we could sit.

Eventually we flopped on to a pair of seats, a few rows above the tunnel and one row below a slightly raised tier. This, we clicked moments before the gig opened up to Bruce counting the band in, was the Royal Box, and popping at the seams with Rock Royalty: in there was Sting, Ringo Starr, and George Michael, who was absolutely in the zone, head-banging and singing his heart out.

No doubt there were probably other members of the Rock Royal family in there, but it's just these I remember.

Next to me was a man on his own wearing a long, vibrant bandana, who I was initially sceptical of, too much the rock wannabe about him, I thought. Then I forgot all about him; the E Street experience does that to a person.

I only clocked him again when he moved from his seat and disappeared in the intermission between the band closing their set and the expected crescendo of encores to follow. I imagined he'd be heading out to Wembley Park station before the crowds poured out. Except I saw him again, this time striding on to the stage with the rest of the band for the encores. I'd been sat next to Steve Van Zandt.

That memory has n't gone, it's blurred a little around the edges, put that down to edge and distance from the event, but what I've never forgotten from that, or the other seven times I've seen the E-Street Band in full flight is that sense of utter exhilaration, every nerve intoxicated, every sense alive. Swashbuckling licks and riffs played by a band, never anything but at the top of the game, not their game, I mean the Game.

Today, I woke to hear the motor of the band, it's dynamo, Clarence Clemons had died. RIP. Those sax solos will never leave me.

I'm still dazed by the horror of the photo I saw in yesterday's Guardian. Something that I had n't spotted yesterday was that the man who had brought about this slaughter was actually taunting those around him, brandishing the victim's body parts like perverse trophies. What a nightmare world, we're in.

Up till the moment I began flicking through the Guardian magazine, I'd been toying with the idea of somehow exploring the notion of the epiphany.

A friend from my Saturday morning yoga class had got me thinking on these lines this after she'd said that the moment she realised she had to move - her epiphany in other words - came without warning in Holland Park. That same afternoon, she went to the estate agent and the ball started a-rolling.

Revelation to revolution in one day. So that was what I had in mind to write about; that sign, that moment, the flash of light. Then, I opened the Guardian magazine and stopped.

Inside was an incredible article, which even putting aside my true Guardian loyal reader's mantle I don't think any other newspaper would have the courage to publish, and certainly not without some gratuitous gesture to say how daring they were. A gesture I've seen too often which replaces any impact with basking self adulation of how brave which ever paper it is believes itself instead.

The Guardian is n't like that.

This article was numbing. Stupefying. Photos taken by front-line photojournalists, briefly captioned, of shattering scenes of horror from the wars that stain this planet. There's one I can't shake. A black and white shot of a glazed killer with a knife gripped between his teeth in the manner of a cartoon pirate, but this was diabolical, bandoliered with bullets, and taken in one of those traumatised West African countries, Liberia or Sierra Leone, which have been tortured and tormented by war and death. Riven with savagery. Bereft of mercy.

This man - this pure killer - has an unfathomable madness, something deeper and wilder than blood lust about him. Gripped in one of his hands he's holding a severed hand like a sportsman might hold a trophy; in the other, and I'm still horrified by this, he's clutching the genitalia of whoever it is he's slaughtered. It is unimaginable.

The rhetorical questions have to stop. There's no point any more in theorising emptily why people do this. It has to be fought. And this is where I've had my epiphany: I'm rejoining Amnesty International.

This must be THE website that every Brit has secretly dreamed of. You want to know where the rain is, then go here - Rain Today Perfect. Thanks to my Anglo-Swiss work mate for pointing it out to me this afternoon.

It's only a few weeks since I volunteered to be interviewed on a middle aged man's experience of well...middle age.

Sat in front of a softly spoken, occasionally questioning, American psycho-therapist, I talked for almost an hour about this life period I'm in travelling through.

Good for the person listening as he needed this for a research project; good for me to be able step out of the daily cacophony and put things into perspective. I've perhaps a more ordered and sequenced mind than many, but that's not to say the cataloguing does get out of order from time, and an opportunity like this can only help.

I had mixed reasons for putting myself forward: intellectual curiosity, what would I learn not just about me but from the situation itself; an actual psycho-therapist's study offers the chance to sink deeper into the world of leather couches, Freud and those nervy, worried characters that live in Saul Bellow's world. Call it empathy.

Then, there was a sense of altruism. The need to leave something, however momentary, behind something that another in years hence might draw from, maybe nourishment, even hope, or just weary recognition that the place they're in is the the place that so many of us have walked through.

The desire to leave a trace behind after I've gone is very powerful for me. I live on my own, have no kids, no immediate family so there's not the chance of a familial memory being passed along if only for a few generations.

But that's not one tenth of it for me. It is for me the need to leave footprints in the sand that hold their shape after the first wave has swept in, the one which traditionally sweeps away all evidence of who passed.

And it has to be a foot print that someone can benefit from, whether it be the sense I referred to in the last paragraph, or simply from someone reading this blog. Something lives on. Rumbles on if I take up the cue of the thunderstorm that's edging over West London right now.

Let's get the preliminaries over and answer any lingering questions that might be there since the Girl in Damascus furore broke. My blog. Is it really mine or is it a half baked vanity project and exercise in self love penned by a show off doctoral candidate with no sense of empathy ?

It's mine. Every word scraped out of the blank page of a laptop is brought to the surface by me. Wriggled into sentences by me. Spell-checked by me. All mine.

Plenty of late nights this week getting home late from various things: yesterday the baffling, yet compelling in meditative way, Italian film, Le Quattro Volte, that focused on the mundane and routine in a small Calabrian town, but transformed for me at least the art of charcoal making into something fascinating; then this evening an avant garde music concert, a soundscape as it was termed, and it was, a melange of indecipherable voices, running water, bird song and off time percussion, which took place in Covent Garden's Swiss Church.

So I've had my cultural vitamins this week along with this booster I found in a BBC online article on Carl Jung; "The afternoon of life must have a significance of it's own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of Life's morning"

I love the pithiness of that statement. Unforgettable and incontrovertible . So why have n't I seen it as a tee shirt slogan then?

Chiswick may be one of the most middle class areas in London, and possesed at times of it's own brand of ennui and sharp-faced moodiness - Arlington Park, the fictional suburb in Rachel Cusk's marvellous book of the same name, deftly sweeps up like leaves in a breeze the same deadening sense of frustration and inner terrors that throbs under the skin of this real-life suburb, but all that aside, Chiswick is a riot of nature. It's bursting with vitality.

It's been a cavalcade of sphinx-like foxes on the lawns of Chiswick House; fist-sized insects whirring through mid-evening skies; swallows darting and weaving, before tucking themselves under house eaves; the ubiquitious legions of squawking, charging parakeets; then a dainty pair of married Goldfinches skittering from bush to bush down the street; and Swifts cavorting and tumbling in endless arabesques; a fat, round water vole hurtling as fast as it's tiny piston like legs could take it into the undergrowth by Chiswck House lake; even a timid mouse popping it's head in and out of a piece of tubing. I have been dazzled.

Not a corner turned without something unexpected. Urban safari on my doorstep. Beat that.

Think I need to row back a little on the amount of Frasier episodes I'm watching on Youtube; a few nights ago, I was dreaming I was a psychiatrist.

If I was asked what I'd actually like to be right now, at this very second in fact, then it'd be that worthy profession of epigramist. I saw this diamond in The Guardian's Education supplement today, and I can't stop thinking of how irreducibly precise it is a description of today's webbed up and wireless world: "To the digital native, the analogue becomes wondrous".

Hole in one. Those words sum it up.

Playing in the background as I'm writing is "The Bottle", Gil Scott-Heron's incantatory prose poem and his warning to Black America, to the wider America in fact, of the easy danger of drinking.

Without hypno-therapy, or whatever it is that allegedly resurfaces memories, I'll never be able to say how I first heard of him. Perhaps, it was Charlie Gillett's world music show on Capital that opened the door. I don't know, I can't remember,

But that loping jazz, that piercing flute, those soft, delicate, perfectly weighted keyboards, that honeyed voice, every beat balanced, stories half sung, half spoken, took me by the shoulders, swept into my soul, into deep places, into thinking.

This is night-time music of intelligence and caught me a scant few years after I'd graduated in American Literature, and every note, every line, every mood chimed.

I saw Gil twice, and on consecutive days, in mid 1986. First occasion was at Hammersmith Odeon, where I was so obviously smitten that the next day when I should have been working, I pleaded a bad back - a back spasm I think - and skived off to see him again at a free concert in Clapham Common, where yet again, his magic threaded through me. Still there twenty five years on as well. The bonds are like steel hawsers.

A syllogism based on a news article doing all the rounds today: Denmark does n't like Marmite, I love Marmite, therefore I no longer like Denmark. Something's rotten there.

Here's the article in question for any completists

"I'm interested in everything and nothing else". Umberto Eco, that's me as well. Absolutely everything.

The desire to want to write will only ever be that if the hard work of actually sitting down and doing it remains a luxuriant thought - the do tomorrow syndrome, the manana school of writing in other words. The thought, not the deed is top dog, instead of the other way round, or as my comprehensive school motto more classically put it - Res non verba.

As I've done in several recent articles I'm taking yet another cue from El Hitch; you have to put the hours in, pay the necessary dues. On average he produces 1,000 words of serviceable copy per day.

Writing at such a velocity and of such clarity as Hitchen's generates does n't just occur; the furnace requires more than simple input of raw materials, nothing's going to spontaneously combust into life, without the careful hand of the creator writer stirring the pot, and the culmination of what I've been building up to is: exercise that writing muscle, every day a little ink has to hit the page. Or writing remains an idle dream. Keep supple, stay toned.

In a strange, albeit pleasant way, and for anyone who knows me, you'll realise this is something I would never normally say, but I'm pleased...oh go on...even a little proud of the way the Queen's visit to Ireland has gone.

It's the smokes and cocktails that have done for him, says Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm settling into whenever there's a moment free.

Like Dylan's never ending tour, I get the sense that the Hitch has been on an extended run of long days, late nights, (later nights in all likelihood) snatched sleep, rumbustious conversation melded with the volcanic need to know more, question more, and learn more than your mainstream homo sapien either wants to, or can handle. He drinks heady, deep unfiltered draughts straight from the intellectual fire hose.

The Hitch, whom I saw once at the Hay Festival, hurrying along the town's main street, with a focused look that I could only imagine a Zen Grand Master capable of, but sans the ineffable sweetness and serenity of the former, and replaced instead with a shimmering, crackling area of concentration that could probably cut through steel, is up there in my pantheon of socio-cultural greats.

Combative yet principled; confrontational but in the same breath, gracious; the most forensic pen with delicious, scrupulous prose; a living, breathing wikipaedia before the notion was even thought of; slayer of intellectual mis-truth merchants, purveyors of single truth nonsense and charlatans in general. The Hitch rings all my bells. Our modern times Thomas Paine.

Furthermore, he's that rara avis: the public intellectual.

Exotic bird indeed, so alien to the British cultural / intellectual body politic in fact that he had to skip that nest or risk being pushed out, and made the long migration to the US. A warmer, more intellectually stimulating environment, bursting like an over-ripe melon with possibilities. So now he nests round the clock there and we Brits for our pleasure are left with a cultural landscape that regards Jeremy Clarkson as a savant.

The smokes and the cocktails? Hitch is gravely ill; it's his partiality for these temptations, freely and openly acknowledged by him, that he wryly said are what have done for him.

Christopher Hitchens, whose memoirs I'm steadily working through, gently chastises his friend, the poet James Fenton, for " awakening (Hitchen's)...buried and dangerous lust for alcohol and nicotine". I like neither stimulant, never have, never will; but chocolate serves the purpose as strongly as either of Hitchen's companion vices, maybe as strong as the two combined.

I'm in thrall to Theobroma. The cocoa bean, that stubby, green pod, leads me by the nose, the prod in the back; it leads, I follow. I always have been, and it looks like I always will.

And in the times when the sullen, stickiness of work pressure has it's baleful shadow over me as is the case right now where I don't know whether I'm coming or going, my appetite for chocolate is gargantuan. Truly massive.

As is usual after any outburst, I've calmed down since Sunday's chest-baring jeremiad; the molten metal cooled in the water of several days reflection, steam, froth, then tempering. Nevertheless, I still don't want to see the heart and guts of this nation torn in different directions. Let's stay together.

A fine mess is what we're in since the Lib-Dems slept with the enemy. That one night stand has left the UK in a perilous state constitutionally.

Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Scottish voters voted en masse for the SNP, to such a degree that they can now hold a referendum on Independence and ace it. As an ardent believer in the Union (in itself, somewhat of a curious, paradoxical statement, since I don't hold any particular love for the English; the paradox is that I was born and still live in England), this saddens me immeasurably, so much that I've been finding it difficult to sleep. I love the idea that we are a United Island, that we can live equitably and satisfactorily; that we are an exception to the rule, and yet it could all founder, this glorious, wonderful idea. I write here as someone who is a true Brit: English, Irish, Scotch and Welsh blood powers this heart.

The outcome should this happen frightens me in exactly the same way as it saddens me: the nation collapses, Scotland ends up a peripheral North Atlantic state, whilst England slips into the default state I've always felt exists at dangerously shallow depth: sullenness, grievance, inwardness, begrudgery, tribalism, and xenophobia.

To flame this miserable bonfire, not only will the nation crumble, the shared values incinerated, the English will end up being under the almost perpetual yoke of the Tories due to the absence of Scottish Labour MPs and the boundary changes the Tories are pushing through.

Tory dominance in perpetuity of a rump Serbia like England, the UK broken into bits, Scotland a minor player. This is the most disillusioned I've ever felt. I can't believe we could be but a few years away from this.

If only Clegg had n't been such a patsy, a wimp, a Trojan Horse for the Tories and fought the tories tooth and nail, and Ed Milliband too, why did n't he carry the cudgel into the Tories ? We would n't be left like this. A nation about to split apart.

What never fails to impress about the US President is that he is a natural statesman and modern day Cicero, who to my British eyes never fails to display anything other than grace under pressure. Almost a Hemingway hero made flesh.

The US is blessed to have him; whereas we for our sins have a Tory reactionary aristocrat as PM. Are we absolutely certain that Obama is n't British? Is there no genetic pull towards bacon and eggs or fish and chips? Nothing ? What about the weather, does he talk about the weather? Now that would make him a Brit.

If only he was, I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

Some headlines you wonder if you'll ever see, and this was one: the death of Bin Laden. Well, I have, and I can only express my complete appreciation of the extraordinary heroism and courage of the US Special Forces personnel who entered his compound deep in the heart of Pakistan.

I have equal admiration for the steadiness, the eloquence, and care in which Barack Obama announced the news; no triumphalism, no fanfares, no crowing, just the Presidential, timeless, Cicero like prose he's so blessed with.

If only we had an Obama figure in the UK.

I like the idea of the Royal Wedding so much I'm going to celebrate by going to another country.

The crowds, the nonsense, the tabloids in frothy nuptial overdrive, the fear of the street being taken over by a street party (there's already a flag pole with the English flag in a back garden a few doors away from where I'm staying). The lachrymosity, the dreary sentimentalism, the spurious nostalgia. All of it makes my heart sink like a stone. I could n't, I can't face any of it.

Hello Dublin, see you on Thursday...

What makes a translated classic shine even more than the plot or the themes is the quality of the translation itself. That, I'm convinced, strips away the intimidating sense that we have about any classic, and especially any foreign classic. Remember, authors' in the main write because they want to be read, it's about accessibility, and not deterrence; your name is on the list, and you can come in.

I've bailed out of innumerable classics simply because the translation was opaque or fussy; impenetrable, even impossible to understand; or just dry, bone dry, starved of any love, the writer's intent sucked off the bone, indigestible.

However, when the translation is light, modern, but not estuary English, and stream-lined, then a foreign classic is pure joy, as it is right now, with this superb translation of Dostoyevsky's "The House of the Dead" I'm reading, or more to the point doling myself a portion every day to prolong the joy.

It's a fabulous - so starkly illuminating it's as if someone has flipped a switch and turned on the purest strip lighting - lightly fictionalised account of the author's four years in a Siberian prison camp in the early 1850s. Contemporaneous and yet universal, I've not come across anything that depicts the existential drudgery of imprisonment better than this.

Last night's apprehensions that I'd be kept awake by the carousing kiwis next door came to naught; I slept like a top and woke up bouncing, they clearly slept, but bounced awake? No, I'd say no.

The drunker you are, the deeper the trough the following morning, so saith Doctor Archimedes.

But I know simply from experience that I'll not have been alone fretting about the hullabooloo that the first faint of breath of barbeque smoke seems to evoke. Across London, across the South-east, it'll have been the same.

This mad, crazy, complicated city state that I live in and love immeasurably has a toll to pay sometimes. I accept it. I could n't live anywhere else.

I'm at my unofficial second home, listening to the Kiwi neighbours having a barbie; they're young, they're drinking, they're right outside my window...

Is it bad if I hope there's a repeat of last night's near monsoon?

Someone I know let out a metaphorical cheer on Facebook in celebration that they were able to slide in to a dress they'd dreamed of wearing for several months.

It's obvious they're delighted; every word they've written is starburst of joy. A plan, when it comes off is an intoxicant all of it's own that defies proper articulation. It's a sense thing, an intangible asset of indefinable value.

I've been in a similar frame of mind. Something inexplicable prompted me to listen to a Roxy Music's Greatest Hits album that I'd stumbled on when I was fishing around for background music to cook lunch to.

How to tumble backwards through time. Just the faintest breath of a melody, the murmur of a line, and it's sometime in the small hours of a Winter's day in the early '80s, and I'm laying in bed with Julia, the two of us talking softly, or perhaps not at all, wrapped up in our private cocoon, Roxy humming quietly around us.

I might have forgotten I'd ever had that life if not for randomly excavating Roxy Music today.

One of my early adopter friends gave me a tour of his iPad 2. It is a design masterpiece, nothing more, nothing less; an utterly beautiful union of elegance, sophistication, simplicity, and no more weight than that of a snowflake. I am in awe. Yes, don't ask, I do want one...

My unconscious is unruly from time to time. Always been that way. I've had some extraordinary memorable dreams over the years. Nothing surprising there, we're all like that, if, of course, we remember the bizarre, baffling film strips that run through our sleep.

Mine usually have some sort of soundtrack accompaniment, and always in colour. Editing, well that's another matter, there is n't any. It's jumpcuts, time lapses, slow-mo, sometimes auteur led, sometimes I'm not featuring, but still there watching.

All of this though is another story. What's the very unexpected fallout from my nocturnal cinema is that I'm literally dreaming up new words.

Happened to me once, and I thought nothing more, other than the sheer randomness of the unconscious, after all why would a word that sounds like a French verb - Rorgner - come to me in a dream and refuse to leave?

No idea. And by the way, there is no such verb, no such word in fact.

Is twice a developing a pattern, or just coincidence? Because the new word coining machine stamped something else out last night - hyperkinaesthetics. Again. no such word exists (or not in Google at least)

I know broadly where the origins of this lie, or probably, you never can be too sure what's going on whilst you're supposedly asleep. It must be related to the talk on David Foster Wallace I went to last night at Foyles with a friend.

David Foster Wallace's was an unknown force to me until yesterday. I left the talk with the intention to read whatever I could get hold of. It's his style that rugby tackled me: fast, meticulous, highly, highly detailed, frantic, tumultuous , baroque, flamboyant, up to the minute. The style that looks as easy as it is magnetic to readers and tyro writers, but deep down, it only comes with monumental effort, discipline, and patience.

That, all of it, every vowel, consonant, verb, noun, soaked into me and the reward bizarrely: hyperkinaesthetics. My mind must have been slaving in it's workshop all night to come up with something to encompass the effect Wallace has had on me.

The unconscious. Got to love it.

It's the weather. Consecutive days of sheer sun and soft blue skies, how can anyone stay in? I can't and don't. All my non working time has been with my rear firmly parked on a seat in Holland Park, nose down in Oblomov, a fabulous nineteenth century Russian novel, which I can't get enough of.

Someone was telling me they worry they put things off. Don't. Embrace it. I do, with the tenderness of an orchid grower, slow, nurturing, no rush. Let it breath. Always have, always will.

Doing tomorrow what should be really done today, is that such an existential threat as some claim? In my eyes, no.

Viva procrastination!

Amazing, eleven years in the internet business, and until about 15 minutes ago, I was a coffee shop, internet surfing virgin.

Today is the first time I've ever taken my laptop outside and let it play in the open air, and see what the other wi-fi networks are up to.

So far, so good. Connection's a good 'un

Even though I'm pretty au fait with most American sporting metaphors, step up to the plate, out of the park, slam dunk, and so on, there's understandably many more I'm unaware of, like Full Court Press.

At first glance I reckoned it to be some sort of wrestling hold, when someone's thrown to the floor, then pinned down by the shoulders; it's not, it's actually a basketball defensive style, but that's by the by, it's where I've seen it and the context it's been used in that interests me.

For the past couple of weeks, someone I know, a funny, cheerful and very charming American woman, has used it to illustrate how she's handling a break-up. Closing down the expected grief, boxing it in, and then rebounding with a spirited counter attack.

I like that: it's the mark I think of a well adjusted person to have access to a metaphorical tool-kit, twist the lid off a seemingly insoluble issue, pop a bent nail out of a difficult situation, you can see where I'm going.

Metaphors make things understandable, the formless gets a shape, gas turns to liquid. Once you're at this stage, you're closer to making probably the most legendary of all American sports metaphors - the home run

I don't like not feeling well. I don't know anyone who does, though I am aware there are some who relish the status of invalid. I don't. I like feeling well. Unfortunately, I don't right now, which is why I've beaten back the male instinct to deny or ignore, and gone instead to the doctor. Some tests ahead of me and a week signed off. Glad I've done this. Ignorance is not always bliss.

Perhaps I should have been born a woman, or putting it less dramatically - I'm making a point and not an admission about gender uncertainty, after all - had a better smattering of the common sense and practicality that most ( not all, there are exceptions) of my women friends seem to have.

There's a resolution in so many of my women friends that I admire. They set a plan, and kick start it into action, steering it through all weathers until it's done.

I thought about this last night during a dinner with the woman who I've chased after like an eager young pup and pined over for almost a decade.

She has paid off her mortgage. Ground-breaking? Probably not, these things happen all the time, but to do so in half the time required, well that's something else.

I saw a face of quiet satisfaction, something of the job well done look, as she told me. It had been hard, she said, especially in the early years, with many things sacrificed, but she had steadily chipped away at mortgage, using any spare money she had, along with an adroit eye to making the most of whatever mortgage deals were available.

Then one day, there was nothing left to pay, nothing left to do, other than wonder where to store the mortgage deeds.

I've known for a long time that she's been disappointed by me; that's the wrong term in fact, there's something temporary about disappointment, it goes eventually, it's a state, not a permanent condition, you can return to favour.

Her view of me, on the other hand, has changed, likely irrevocably.

Of course, saying I disappointed her presupposes the question that I ever was in her thoughts, however I suspect I was, less from things said and more from how they were expressed

That's the felt evidence, there's also the concrete and undeniable evidence: I heard her say to her best friend that I was: " A typical man. Can't commit"

I'm staying in the same house where she said that. The area of the room where she said that is still radioactive for me. I can see it, how we were stood, the three of us. The image is seared into my mind. It will not go.

I'm sure I must have looked gormless, and perhaps a little shocked too. I had always secretly hoped she would extend some sign, I'm perpetually timid, a shy woodland animal in these areas, lacking the confidence to say how I feel, so a sign, like a dropped handkerchief in some 16th century chivalric poem was what I always hoped for. And I got one: the crystallised realisation that in her eyes I was no more than the common herd of men. Homo non-commiticus.

Superb weather today: the slightest of breezes, mirror-ball sky, thin, feathery clouds. Perfect for what I am about to do, which is haul my rear over to Chiswick House, commandeer a table outside the cafe, order a cup of coffee, and read.

Because I've got family in the US I've always been enamoured with Americana. Like the Queen, it's been one of the constants in my life, add reading, writing and travelling, and you've got the essence of me. What makes me tick. The stuff that powers the green fuse. I need another trip out there. I can feel the itch again

I state the obvious here, but it's always I think, worth repeating; major cities such as London, NYC, LA, Paris and every other megalopolis, are not worlds entire of themselves. World is too small a term, something far greater is required: they are individual galaxies, a confusion of whirling nebulae, of randomness and chaos, of ceaseless collisions of different and infinitely varied lifestyles.

It is this permanent state of happenstance, never quite knowing what's just around the corner, that makes London and it's sister cities, intoxicating. Why live anywhere else, when as in the instance of yesterday, within the compressed space of perhaps a mile, a friend and I stumbled into a Hare Krishna street festival hard by the northern fringe of Soho Square and into a tight funnel of ash-marked and finger cymbal clicking devotees

A scant half mile from that we wandered into St Martin's in the Field, which until Saturday I had never been and this is in spite of living in London for nearly thirty years, but that's the untold confession of so many Londoners, what we have n't seen but virtually everyone from out of town has. Something made very obvious for me the day I went on a fact-finding mission for an American script writer friend to the British Library, who wanted some background on the King's Library. I'd never heard of it until he mentioned it.

The King's Library, if you're interested is a beautiful six floor glass chimney of rare books and a commanding presence as you enter the British Library. How I had missed it on the umpteen occasions I've been to the BL is a mystery to me, other than referring back to the point I made a little earlier - you live here, but you don't see the obvious things. On the other hand, ask me where the best coffee shop, indie bookshop or humus bar is in London, then I'm your man.

There was a mixed Anglo-Chinese choir running through their pieces when we walked into St Martin's, stopping and starting at the baton swing of the choir master. Everything they sang sounded good to me, but clearly not good enough him. We sat on one the side pews, and through my film-goer's inner eye, it could have been a shot from a gangster movie, where the the two warring Dons sort out their temporal differences against a spiritual background of a choir rehearsing.

Finally, we washed up on the Southbank. An area of London that has been transformed since I first arrived here; for years a no-no area, the tumble weed blowing down the streets, bleakness of an abandoned gold rush town in the eighties to true bon-ton, arty middle-class, boutique bohemianism today.

Threading through long tables of second hand books for sale and the crowds wandering to and fro from the NFT, we bumped up literally into a group of free runners, backflipping and somersaulting by the the National Theatre. It looked exhilarating. The suppleness and daring of urban gymanstics, side flips, twists, turns on hard concrete surfaces. All of the free runners were unself-conscious. This was their area. Nothing else to consider but the easy agility of the next move.

And this is the thing about London: it's a city of parallel events which never meet in time or space, they exist on their own, self-contained; it's the casual strollers like my friend and I yesterday, who accidentally link it all together without ever thinking about it.

I'm not saying anything that has n't already been declared in countless newspaper articles and innumerable radio and TV programmes, but so many of us have become accidentally too familiar with the cooling systems of nuclear power stations since the terrible earthquake last week in Japan.

It's those anonymous, unknown technicians who are doing what ever they can to dampen the boiling hearts of those wrecked reactors - the Fukushima Fifty - as they've been dubbed, who have captivated me with their almost sacrificial heroism. No medal big enough. No honour large enough

This is one of those occasions when however hard I try, I can find nothing to populate the screen with. Neurons are n't firing or popping.

I can't inject life into any these of 26 letters. In the Frankenstein movies, there'd be mysterious smoke frothing in vials, random bolts of electricity, something twitching, before the creature breaks it's bonds and walks. None of this is happening in the laboratory of my mind. It's more numbness along with a sense that I have to put something down to maintain some mysterious momentuum.

Tomorrow: will the creature walk?

I don't know whether this is an extreme example of environmental determinism, or simply, a very confused bird, but whilst I was walking to Holland Park station this morning, I saw a Great Spotted Woodpecker pounding it's beak into the top of a metal utility pole.

That must have hurt. It has to have. Think about it. You're smashing your head against a very resistant surface. It hurts for days whenever I bang my head (always accidentally).

This is not what these birds are supposed to be doing; that jack-hammer beak is meant to break open pliable wood, grind into tree trunks, but attack metal, where did that come from?

Nor did it look like this was something they had just blundered into accidentally, I had the impression this had been going on for some time.

And then, even more bizarrely, I heard another woodpecker doing the same thing. Almost as if they were talking to each other, or more probably courting - we're getting close and closer to Spring after all.

What's going on? Is there a flock of woodpeckers with armour plated beaks on the loose in Holland Park?

The Daily Mail Song. Worth a post all on it's own. Just who buys this racist, scaremongering, misogynistic, phobic, little Englander piece of crap?
The Daily Mail Song

An image that coaxed itself out of my imagination yesterday, looks like its on the money today when I think about it.

During a light-hearted conversation with someone about the oddities of the areas we live in - me, the inner city, and her, a dormitory village on the outskirts of London - I found myself saying that there's a total difference between where I spend most of my time, the tough, edgy end of Notting Hill (you read that right, there is one. I live there) and Chiswick, another part of London where I stay for long periods.

So fine grained a contrast is it that it extends even as far as the local dog population, or so I flippantly remarked. The dogs du jour where I live are pit bulls, Staffordshires, Dobermans; things that strain at the leash and if there are steroids for dogs they're on them. Bull-necked, twitching, eyes popping. Whereas Chiswick it's chic women walking around with pint sized dogs snuffled in expensive handbags and every mutt lovingly hand fed on something organic.

All said lightly and nearly forgotten. Yet I realised this evening walking home, it's actually true: the social world is utterly different between these two parts of London, and so is the corresponding Dog world.

If there is ever a call for a Poet Laureate of commuting, I will have no hesitation in putting forward T.S. Eliot. A lanky, cerebral Mid-westerner from St Louis, who made London his home, rubbed his lamp, and out came two of the finest, most evocative, and certainly accurate pictures of commuting I've come across.

The first is from The Four Quartets: "When an underground train, in the tube stops too long between stations. And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence. And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen. Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about"

That's exactly what happens when a train pauses between stations; everything gradually winds down, the hubbub dwindles, whatever chatter there's been drops away, and we sit or stand, and think.

The other piece I have in mind is from his most well known work - The Wasteland. "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street".

This is how we are every morning, wrapped in our personal shroud of fog, flowing the way termites do out of the mound. Automatic footsteps, grey faced, robotic. The un-dead.

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.

I've loosely refuted a home made theory of mine that it's difficult to revisit a novel and expect to be flushed once more with the satisfaction of that first ever read; Crime and Punishment proved that.

I remember the pleasure, and sometimes the sense of perplexity, (it is that type of book in places), when I first read it, which seemed mostly to be on northbound Piccadilly line trains by the way taking me between Manor House and Leicester Square.

A state of mind recaptured this time round. I have been unable to put it down. It's unlikely therefore that I'll leave it decades before I re-read it.

There's no noise but the sound of the clock near my sofa and the endless swell of the traffic on the nearby Westway. Ripe time for writing, yet I can't; my imagination will not tick over. I hate times like this.

But I have been laughing my head off at a Facebook thread that's free-wheeling around a friend's on / off jury duty in LA. Umpteen theories on how to get yourself released from jury duty (not sure I would in my case; it's a public duty, there are rights, there are obligations too); nevertheless, this is my favourite so far: tell the authorities you can recognise the guilty by the distance between their eyes, then take a ruler and measure it on the judge.

Something really quite special. Another exceptional American photographer. Unknown and only discovered by chance - Vivian Maier

Shot after shot of simple beauty and immeasurable clarity; black and white photos, each one with limitless depth. No mediation between the lens and the subject either. There's nothing trespassing, no artifice, no overt signature, it's completely unadorned.

These are unwritten stories open to endless interpretations, which for me should always be the hallmark of any artwork, be it film, literature, drama, photography. It is at that point where I feel that the work has begun to inhabit me; it's not a promiscuous, fly by night relationship, it's far deeper, we grow together, I want to go back to learn more, experience more.

There's a Walker Evans echo here - a transcedence and a similar boldness, but whether that's due to coincidence or loose homage, we'll never know. But frankly, we should n't care. Maier's work stand up perfectly, with an integrity of it's own, that's probably more profound for such an, until latterly, unrecognised and uncelebrated artist.

An intensely private person, with a blessed eye for photographs, I'm awed by her. She should be a rush candidate for the pantheon of great American photographers. It will be a crime against photography if she's not ranked alongside Evans, Wee-gee, Ansel Adams, and Annie Leibovitz as an artist of especial vision and dedication.

I'm re-reading novels that I last looked at decades ago. For no especial reason other than I've found them on my bookshelves when I've been looking for something else. So it's serendipity at play instead of deliberate choice.

And that has it's benefits; deflation is n't just reserved for economics, I've had that happen to me with books - intentionally sought out something expecting it be good, or to recapture the potentency it seemed to have the first time I read it - and nothing, the bubbles have gone flat, it's curdled.

Happenstance, accidental discovery in other words, is absolutely free from any expectations. You pick whatever it is that's caught your eye off the shelves and you read. That's it. No echoes from the past, no predictions what it might be like. No, the book stands on it's own two feet. You and it, nothing else.

At the moment, I'm steadily trotting through Crime and Punishment. It's an old copy that must have sat on my bookshelves for decades. It's obvious I've read it before, there are occasional margin scribbles and underlined sentences, but I can't remember a thing about the work itself, except for the name of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, who is accepted literary shorthand for a certain character type, and it's the latter that's the reason I remember even that fragment.

So, it's effectively a novel I'm reading for the first time, which as every reader knows, carries the same trepidation as a first date. All that "What are they going to be like? Am I coming on too quickly? Are we going to make something out of this?

It's that utter sense of nervousness that's too foggy to properly pin down, let alone explain, the words simply slide around too much to form proper sentences, but whatever it is, it drives you forward. That's where I am now, turning each page with ever growing curiousity and more than a pinch of excitement.

Will it be a made in heaven thing? Let's see.

I was thinking this afternoon what musical genre my style of work might be. Looking at all the evidence - my work day modus operandi in effect -and then weighing it fairly, I settled on Jazz.

My M.O. has all the recognisable jazz signs. It's free-form. Reliant on improvisation. Full of random tootlings, then sudden pauses. Lots of shrieking horns. Odd drum patterns. A moody double bass somewhere in the background.

It's often atonal. Plenty of blue notes. A different relationship to time. Loosely structured. Sometimes the chord progressions don't follow in an exact sequence. It's all in there.

Still I could have had a heavy metal style, thrashing through work, amp up to 11, or maybe it might have been pure country, kicking back on the rocking chair and drinking the afternoon away

Two days ago, I mourned; today I praise. This is one of the best interviews I've ever read on what it is to be a writer. The joys, the perils, the excitement, the struggles, they're are all here.

Then after you've read the interview, explore the blog itself, it's perfect. An utter love affair with writing and words that I know will never end because I've carried the same fever for over thirty years.

I'm a friend of the author who's the subject of the interview. I personally attest to his commitment and discipline; he walks it, he talks it, and of course, he writes it

The Writing Nut interview.

Kensington Central Library has less and less books every time I go. It's like the ruins of Pompeii; evidence of civilisation, you can see the walls, the layout of the rooms, the street patterns but the people, the artifacts, they're gone.

There are now so few books on the shelves, I almost imagine them huddling together for warmth when the lights have been switched off and the last librarian has left for the day.

This is desertification of the library - it's not restricted to Central Library either, the other branches are withering on the vine too - and it's happening because of budgetary pressures.

I do worry that this might lead to branches actually being closed. Losing a library does n't generate the emotional ripples of a hospital being closed, but they are therapies in their own right, valuable and inspiring, places of education, of hope, of simple enjoyment, and we need to protect them for that.

This is where I broke soil and dug myself firmly into the world of work. My first place of salaried employment - Wendy's Restaurant, Cambridge Circus - in what seems now to be the dim, distant past of 1984.

The building has n't changed, other than the lurid fascia has gone, and the chief business is now Pizza Hut; Wendy's limped on for a few more years after I took this photo, until the US owners could stand it no longer and closed the UK arm down completely.

I saw the West End peering through those large plate glass windows; zonked clubbers and daintily dressed theatre goers, brawling football fans, call-girls being picked up, pickpockets rugby tackled by plain clothes police, people falling out of buses, the homeless trudging past.

And if I was n't peering, then I was without doubt panicking. Always something to over-rev my heart. No staff and we have to open in an hour! Where's the front door key? In the trash ! How come and why? The evening the back door was on fire and all the extinguishers empty.

Completely running out of all carbonated drinks on the hottest day of the summer: "...coffee? That's all you've got?... 'fraid so". A half eaten burger given to one customer and a stale bun to a visiting director, and both sold by me.

How did I survive? Somehow I did but I'll never understand why.

This was where I learnt how to think on my feet. My apprenticeship in expediency. Gruelling, but when I look back, oddly worthwhile.

Even though it was only 1984; the period of Boy George, the Joboxers, the Miners strike, the Limelight Club, slogan tee-shirts on the Frankie says theme. It still seems of a time before time.

I feel I took these photos when I lived in some remote antiquity.

I've been hoarding every page of Saul Bellow's Collected Letters the same way a great chef might with a cupboard full of the finest ingredients available: relishing each pleasurable drop, wringing out every joy, and milking every single dollop of goodness, until this afternoon when I read his final letter and sadly had to close the book.

Bellow reaches places in me no other author has ever come close to. A light bulb turned on in my head almost thirty years ago when I first began to read him and it's never gone off.

Why my enthusiasm has lost none of it's fierceness is something I can't adequately answer; perhaps I should n't try either, after all we can kill the thing we love with over analysis.

Press me, and I'll say something about the strength of the writing; every sentence of Bellow reminds me of one those Inca walls, huge blocks fitted together without a gap between them them, not a word out of place, everything fits; his imagery is delicious, in one of his letters, Bellow tells the recipient that he is like an Anaconda slowly digesting an idea. I love that, the notion of intellectual enzymes slowly breaking down a stodgy concept into something eventually nutritious.

His opening lines always sizzle and sing. The Victim begins "On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok"; I was in New York on such a night almost thirty years ago reading that book for the first time, when the night time air was steamy, dank, tropical, every street a throbbing sauna.

Bellow's characters are extraordinary in their philosophical and intellectual reach, and at the same time as conflicted and complicated as anyone else. Herzog, the metaphysically wounded scholar cum frenzied letter writer of the eponymous novel is as confused about ordinary life as anyone else, maybe even more so at times, but someone who begets empathy.

I have had so many warm nights of the soul reading Bellow, heartened and encouraged by his words, the ardour of his writing, the passion for life and of life that his characters radiate like mini-furnaces, their dilemmas, which are private to them but nevertheless universal to us all. I should have written him a letter to thank him. I have now.

The dancing in this video - Wonderful Life- is utterly mesmerising. So atmospheric, so moody, so simple.

I'm fascinated by the impassivity of the dancer. No emotion on her face. Almost like she has a mask on. Kabuki like in a way. She's so loose limbed and enviably supple. Flexing and bowing the way a tree does in a breeze, from side to side but never losing equilibrium. Always in command of her pose; never it's prisoner.

There are strong echoes of Spain too, where the dancers typically dance authoritatively and without any obvious facial emotion, indeed without any expression. Her eyebrows furthermore have an Iberian flavour, dark, thick, and arched.

Be fascinating to find out exactly where she hails from.

Met one of my oldest friends for coffee yesterday. His New Year's resolution ? Stop sighing. Worthy. Different. Better than the usual fare of cutting back on booze, going back to the gym and so on.

Wonder what became of that man in a suit wandering through Bond Street station at two in the morning on New's Year Eve with a papier mache Rubik's Cube on his head? All the colours were lined up properly, so no one was going to play with his head, but did someone anyway?

Was that eager, frisky Big Issue salesman lucky enough to sell a couple of copies to those sozzled black tied and evening dressed haute bourgeoisie slithering out of a restaurant near Grosvenor Square at round about the same time? Or did they mock him as I miserably suspected they probably did.

Did Shepherd's Bush become in the end as Romanesque as it was threatening to be when a friend and I walked past the Green thirty minutes later? Romanesque as in the last days of.

And how come I felt so perky after less than five hours sleep?

Cinderella, you will go to the ball ! I know, hyperbole and Archimedes go hand in glove. We're like Siamese twins. The pudding can never be under-egged where I'm concerned. But, I do feel pretty good.

Today, I was expecting a long night at home, listening to New Year sounds off-stage; the traditional barrage of fireworks, singing, shouting, exuberance (mostly irrational), and occasional fighting.

That's all changed. Been invited to a party. How moods can change on the spin of a text message.

To the small, hardy band of people who visit my blog, here's wishing you a great 2011.

Archimedes.