Two old men on the Tube this morning. One looked like Arthur Mullard. Swimmy old eyes, big double chin. They wanted to know if there was a way out of the Northern Line that didn't use escalators "My legs won't take 'em, y'see". I should have thought, of course I knew but they could never use the spiral staircase, surely, it's miles down.

I nearly choked last night. It was a piece of… I'm sort of chuckling at the absurdity of this, a piece of Quorn Sausage. I could acutely feel what it was going - acting like a flap, letting a tiny amount of air out, but if I tried to breathe in, it socked itself down and covered the whole tube. I know this because it appeared to happen in slow motion. From the moment I realised I couldn't breathe everything seemed to be strangely calm and slow, despite the fact that I was actually going puce in the face and trying to cough as hard as I possibly could.

Which is what I did, probably only after a few seconds, I'm not sure. I think it was about 30 maybe. Who knows. Anyway, out was flung this sliver of an object at what appeared to be supersonic speeds.

I'm so insufferably arrogant. Good god - look what I said here.
Of course the college can only write letters - the tutor in the singing class is deaf. Fucking hell. How stupid can you get. If it wasn't through complete unthinking dumbass stupidness that I had said that, I'd be the sort of person who would hate an arsehole that was that shocking.

The signing class was very interesting indeed. I now know the alphabet - that's not to say I can actually do it very fast, but I signed myself a paragraph of a book yesterday to practice - it must have taken at least half an hour! Ach well, from wee acorns, etc. Can I be bothered to talk to you about Ray Taylor? I suppose I should.

Ok.
Moderated Mailing lists. "UKNM" is a tedious list that seems to have a very low expectation of itself. "UK Net Marketing", which every marketeer subscribes to, but hardly anyone ever actually posts to - apart from a hard core. The hard core includes one "Ray Taylor" who is, as far as I can see, a freelance net blatherer-for-cash. Except, I can't see how the guy is making any money except from poor saps who don't know any better, because his pronouncements are unbelievably ill informed and trite. He had the, er, 'wit' to mail sneering postings suggesting things along the line of "I've never seen a good website", and "I sit on front of my computer for too long every day and I don't get inspired by anything I see" - which would lead any full blooded defender of the web to the obvious conclusion that the man is a tit. Which obviously, some full blooded members of the net community did indeed think. Those members specifically - 4 reasonably high status blokes and me. (Matt, Phil, Danny and Stef). Matt's replies to the guy were beautifully sneering. Anyway… I posted up something or other, then Danny built on it quite well… then Ray Taylor whinged back - specifically to my post, and came out with a similarly ill informed and stupid bunch of comments to which I quite sensibly replied "I cannot bring myself to reply to this nonsense".
Here is the mail I personally (aren't I special) received from Mr Taylor, and not surprisingly, Matt, Danny, Phil and Stef did not get - minus his e-mail address, sadly, but then you can always do a search on his name in yon alta Vistaish type thingy, can't you.

Good, because I find your comments offensive, unprofessional, and unnecessarily personal.

I am as entitled to express an opinion as everyone else and you should have the grace to understand that you are not the personal arbiter of good taste, regardless of however many other people may or may not share your personal views.

I shall continue to make whatever contribution I consider appropriate to the UKNM list, subject of course to the right of the list owner to determine comments off-topic.

Ray Taylor

The guy is so stupid, he talks about "the list owner" determining what comments should be listed, when he has just e-mailed me personally, and, might I add, the list-owner in question had obviously thought that comments were pertinent because - er, they'd been published? So needless to say, I passed his delightful comments on to anyone else who might find them interesting and oh - yes, I've published them publicly here, haven't I.
Talk about Alan Partridge.
So that all happened yesterday, hence no update.

I've been thinking about this whole thing. I mailed Stef the url the other day and he hasn't responded. Perhaps it's because I mentioned him without actually checking with him first or something - but that's kind of the point. Maybe I'm just being paranoid again and he hasn't had a chance to read it - Christ, I don't know. But… it's been on my mind a lot. Am I really doing the right thing here? Do I expect too much of people who are my friends - to assume that I am able to write about the aspect of their private lives that hits me - when it does? One solution is to go Geocities, re-design and call everyone a different name. Is that weak? Would it be too confusing? God only knows. Was this actually a mistake? Well - not so far, since literally only about ten people read it, which is hunky-dory by me since I don't have to deal with a whole truck load of mail. But it does beg the question - what is it actually there for? Yeah, yeah, I know it's an experiment, but should I really be doing this to myself? Am I simply doing this for effect? It started out as a good thing, but frankly it's beginning to feel like an uncomfortable weight on my shoulders. It's not so much the archive - I think possibly the archive is fine, but it's the - heh, "immediately now" that I find most uncomfortable.

So anyway - here's what I was thinking - carry on doing it in the way that I have been, but stop on May 21st, 1999. 1 year of diary. There in a time bubble for ever. Just some woman at the end of the century, That's all, but I still stand firm and say that the social documentary level of that is interesting.

Sheesh, I dunno. I think about this too much. But I know one thing though. I should never fucking let any friends know I'm doing it - wayyy too much stress.

I found it depressing how quickly I returned to normal after the weekend. You would have thought that such a lovely emotional experience would somehow permanently affect the user. Like fuck.

See you later.

Phew… where do I start.
Well, I usually don't do weekends as individual days but this is a bit of an exception. Scroll down to Friday (2nd) and work your way up.

What was left of it. The Divine Comedy. Do I think that "The Certainty Of Chance" is his most romantic song since "Your Daddy's Car"? Probably. Great, felt a bit too fuzzy… er, surprisingly… but still wonderful. Saw Graham again briefly with Arthur, hooray! First time I've seen him for way too long. Wayyyy too long.

Great though, with Cronin and a mate of his, and Phil again! It was confusing déjà vu time. Julie and a friend of hers from Oxford. Julie's ace.

Phil and I went to see Sparklehorse with Alistair, Chris and a few others. Saw Graham there but that's another story - long and would sound horrifyingly arsey if I told you about it. Anyway. Sparklehorse were …mediocre sadly (not always though, best believe it kiddies) but we're on our way to the party in the nursery where Stef's old flatmates live. I've got my 4 'E's with me for me and - whoever the hell wants one. We're walking down the road toward the party and I think, hell, I'll have one now, and by the time we get there, it should only be about half an hour before they start working. Right? Wrong. Two hours past - you think it's not working but it is, it's that strange pre-'on-one' tension where your anticipation outweighs what is actually happening, until we came in from the freezing cold garden where in a fit of irritation had a second (and exactly how qualified are you to make a reasonable drugs/effects assessment?) and almost immediately in the warm an upsurge of….

Luckily, you're hardly likely to start panicking on E are you. More like "Oh, wow, I'm really fucked… amazing" (dopey smile, eyes like pot holes of black, cheeks like rosy red tomatoes).

Excellent, excellent, excellent. Steve Coogan at the Lyceum - streets ahead of any other large scale comedy performance. I mean - he really understands the concept of , well - purely being entertained for an evening. A whole evening - not just an hour. And he did the most evil things to poor Simon Pegg - Simon was ostensibly doing "support" but rather than follow the usual pattern of having him on for a half hour, then an hour of Steve, you got Pauline Calf, then Simon being one of the floor manager types for a bit, leaving the character weeping with real misery at the end of his allotted ten minutes while Steve Coogan's pre-recorded voice boomed out of the the PA saying "Vacate the stage" in the most pitilessly merciless sneering fashion.

The second Simon bit, where he was a terribly decent drama schooly physical theatre "chap", all toothy grins, was - hehe, despicable. It turns out this poor guy has been forced to appear in low budget porn, has had all his belonging stolen, his girlfriend is in Amsterdam with his manager… "Yes, he has taught me a lot about pain… real pain. I'm in a lot of pain…" he starts sobbing - God, it was pure evil. Fucking funny - Steve Coogan's voice, booming across the house: "Vacate the stage". Brilliant.

Alan Partridge was beyond superb. Alan Partridge is real, every other character Coogan does is like a cartoon. There's only really Alan Partridge and Gareth Cheesman that bring out something in him that is already there - something about just letting that pettiness and vileness rip. Wonderful. We went for a meal afterwards which was… well, 'twas ok. But the Lyceum Theatre - beautiful. Extremely gorgeous. Golden cupids dripping from every available balcony space and amazing fiddly god knows what, paintings, gold leaf, dolphins.. you name it on the ceiling.

Oh, God… my head…. It hurts… I'm having one of those stress outs again, based on a sinus infection, which yesterday completely incapacitated me. I had to leave early after by about mid day, lights were bubbling in front of my eyes and the left-hand part of my left eye. Felt curious enough to just be mildly amusing for a while. Then the headache started.

(sob)

There was a wee boy on the tube this morning whose mother fed him nibbits of oaty, sugary biscuit. When he ran out of a bit, he would say "Ha! Ha!' and us one of his legs to push her knee. He looked like a real ape descendent. He also looked spoilt as hell. If Missus was late giving him a bit more biscuit, he started shaking and whinging. Cheeky wee beggar.

Owen's company, Mainframe, has gone live with the new groovetastic 3D ultra-violence mixed with Trek like sincerity. The USA folkees seem to be lapping it up. It still makes me sad to think that there'll be no more Dot, Bob, Enzo… I dunno. Strange. You get too involved, don't you.

Finished a load of stuff for work, so am now at a slight loose end until I can be bothered to sort out the next thing. The trouble is it takes so damn long to sort out anything, when you agree to start changing it, you can't really see any light at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, all the producers and content people are still in that "shock of the new" realisation that nothing they really want to do will ever get done. Yeah, well sorry guys but I think I kinda knew that long enough ago to realise what you have to do about circumvention.

I always forget you know. I forget how freaked out and emotional I get when I'm under the weather. It's a times like this when I remember the joys of smoking even more than usual.